Winds of terror by Patricia Hagan Page B

plantation was well-kept and prosperous. Now cobwebs covered the partitions, and everything seemed to be dying and rotting.
    The smell of hay and animal odors filled her nose as she wandered about, pointing the beam in front of her. She was very careful not to look up—she did not want to know which beam had held her cousin's hanging body.
    She began to move through the stalls. And then she saw it—and the scream that empted from the very depths

    of her soul seemed to stick in her throat and choke her before it gushed forth. Dear God! There! There, in the comer lay Butch—dead. His legs were bent beneath him, matted with blood and dirt, as though for a few agonizing seconds, he had pawed and dug into the ground in an attempt to free himself.
    Her eyes froze on the head—^that horrible, ghastly head—as she screamed again and again in heartrending terror at the hideous sight. A large trap—the kind used for hunting small animals like beaver or possum or mink —had slammed down upon Butch's head. The steel jaw of the trap had severed his head almost completely. That head! She swayed, desperately trying not to faint as she looked at the bulging eyes, and the gaping mouth smeared with thick, dried blood.
    The field hands who found her, huddled on the floor, sobbing wildly, carried her to the house. They met Mark Beecher running towards the bam; he had heard the sounds of her screaming.
    Cale was at the back door and he told them to place the sobbing young woman on the sofa. Then he wheeled himself to the downstairs phone and placed a call to Dr. Ambrose. That done, Cale dismissed the workers, rolled himself over to sit beside Melanie. He tried to calm her, but Melanie kept weeping hysterically. It had been too much, too much, seeing her beloved pet that way, his head almost completely severed! And to know that he had died suffering untold agonies! Why? How could it have happened?
    Dr. Ambrose arrived in a few minutes. He gave Melanie two little white pills, and had her sip a glass of water while Cale told him what little he knew about what had happened.
    From far away, they heard a bell tinkling. Melanie stmggled to sit up, tears trickling down her cheeks.
    "I have to go to her," she said, as Cale moved to push her back down on the sofa. "She's probably heard me screaming and she'll be frightened if I don't go to her."
    Dr. Ambrose nodded to Cale. "Let her go. It may be good for her to get her mind on something else."
    Melanie hurried up the steps. She went into Aunt Addie's room and found the old lady sitting up in bed.
    "Just what is going on around here?" she snapped. "First I hear this Godawful screaming, and then people

    are coming and going in the house. What's happened? And look at you! Why have you been crying and carrying on?"
    Melanie broke down and began sobbing once again. She told the old woman about finding Butch dead, his head caught in a steel trap. "I can't believe it!" she cried. "Butch just can't be dead! He was all I had left of Robert . . . Robert gave him to me . . ." She closed her eyes and lay her head on the edge of the bed and wept quietly, her heart broken.
    Then, slowly, as if some secret message had penetrated into the turmoil of her brain, she lifted her head and looked at Aunt Addie incredulously. '*You don't even act as though you care," she said accusingly. "You don't care at all.. ."
    "Oh yes, I care, Melanie.** Addie moved to touch the distressed girl's cheek. "I'm just surprised that the trap was in the barn, you see. I remember quite clearly that only a few weeks before Bartley became ill and died, he collected all the steel traps about the farm and put them into his room."
    Melanie looked at her, not quite understanding.
    "You see," Addie went on, "Bartley used to trap a little bit in the old days. But then, a few weeks before he got sick, Todd set one of the traps. He started killing everything in sight that had four legs—dogs, cats, rabbits, anything—and he didn't care how the