"B--A--T--Bat!" she murmured. Thought-transference--
warning--accident? Whatever it was, it was--nerve-shaking. She
put the ouija-board aside. Accident or not, she was done with it
for the evening. But she could not so easily dispose of the Bat.
Sending a protesting Lizzie off for her reading glasses, Miss
Cornelia got the evening paper and settled down to what by now had
become her obsession. She had not far to search for a long black
streamer ran across the front page--"Bat Baffles Police Again."
She skimmed through the article with eerie fascination, reading
bits of it aloud for Lizzie's benefit.
"'Unique criminal--long baffled the police--record of his crimes
shows him to be endowed with an almost diabolical ingenuity--so
far there is no clue to his identity--'" Pleasant reading for
an old woman who's just received a threatening letter, she thought
ironically--ah, here was something new in a black-bordered box
on the front page--a statement by the paper.
She read it aloud. "'We must cease combing the criminal world for
the Bat and look higher. He may be a merchant--a lawyer--a Doctor
--honored in his community by day and at night a bloodthirsty
assassin--'" The print blurred before her eyes, she could read no
more for the moment. She thought of the revolver in the drawer of
the table close at hand and felt glad that it was there, loaded.
"I'm going to take the butcher knife to bed with me!" Lizzie was
saying.
Miss Cornelia touched the ouija-board.
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