A Study in Revenge (44 page)

“The truth wouldn’t have made for much of a story. You wanted the newspaper to get everyone talking,” Lean said.

“Seems so petty now. But then I hated that man more than anything in the world. I relished the anger he’d feel when the whole world knew about his strange little secret. It must have worked, too. I came back here two weeks later and saw that Horace’s father had put up signs and hired a couple of rough hands to keep trespassers away. It was a very small victory in comparison to what he’d done.”

“Not the
only
victory, though, was it?” Helen was remembering the anger she’d felt the prior Fourth of July, when she’d seen dismay in her uncle’s face at the idea of Perceval Grey, an Indian, escorting her to the very public fireworks gala. “The paper reported that you found the marks while out for a romantic stroll with your beau.”

Dastine smiled. “I wanted to stick that right under his nose. Say it out loud so he’d know right enough that me and Horace loved each other. And it was there on the page in black and white. Nothing he could do about it.”

Lean couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t diminish the old woman’s declaration of her small and long-hidden claim of retribution against the man who’d so horribly wronged her. He could only nod and turn his attention back to the stone ledge. The author of the news story was the only one who’d definitely seen the markings and bothered to record them. His charcoal rubbings must have stayed in the files at the paper for years after. They remained stashed away for decades until Professor Horsford dug up the story and unearthed the drawings for his last, unpublished book.

Lean studied the circle of worn-down cuts. Horsford had presented the symbols in a linear series. He’d had to break the circle and select an arbitrary starting point to put the symbols in the order he’d selected for his book. Horsford had opted to commence with the symbol that looked like the first letter in the Norse runic alphabet. Lean wondered whether Horsford’s book preserved the proper order. Did Horsford’s order match the original, now-obliterated pattern?

“Have you ever shown anyone else this ledge since then?” Lean asked. “An old professor from Harvard, perhaps?”

Dastine shook her head.

“The newspaperman, you said you helped him make his charcoal rubbings to copy the marks. Did he do them in a row one after the other, as they were on the ledge, or did he just trace them out in random order?”

“He kept the order,” Dastine said. “He was very particular. He thought if he could find out what they meant, they might spell out some message from whoever had written them so long ago.”

“Maybe he was partially right after all,” Lean said.

Dastine gave him a doubtful look.

Lean clasped his hands together and gave her a pleading smile. “I know I’m likely trying your patience, but please take my word for it. I’m neither as gullible as your reporter nor as mad as Old Tom Webster for putting these marks here in the first place. But I do believe that in some unknown manner these marks were left as a message of sorts.”

Dastine shrugged, still unconvinced.

“Tell me, did you ever see any identical kind of markings at the Websters’ residence that might have given Old Tom the idea for these ones? Perhaps on some strange stone they kept about.”

“You mean that thunderstone?” Dastine asked.

Lean nodded. “I’ve heard that Old Tom Webster dug that stone up when he was clearing out earth for a cellar.”

“And you think that maybe the marks on that old stone are what he was copying down here on the ledge?”

Dastine gave a shake of her head.

“Not the case?” Lean asked.

“
Pépère
told me Old Tom had found the stone, true enough. They couldn’t believe how smooth it was. But the carvings on that, no.
Pépère
made them, too.”

Lean gave a cautious smile.

“Is that good news?” she asked.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. But it may be good news to somebody I know.”

Y
OU KNOW
I’
M A SOMEWHAT RESPECTED DEPUTY OF THE
city police, not a delivery boy,” Lean said as he entered Grey’s study and hung his hat.

Grey hadn’t greeted him yet, and as Lean took in the room, he understood why. Grey sat cross-legged in front of his large chalkboard. At the center of the board were the chalk outlines of two dozen small rectangles arranged in a circle. These were labeled 1 through 24, and they bore evidence of various entries’ having been crossed out and erased. Grey himself sat surrounded by a circle of twenty-four white paper rectangles. Lean instantly recognized those two dozen sheets of paper.

He’d received the special delivery the prior afternoon, marked from Boston but with no return address. Inside had been twenty-three small sheets of paper, each bearing a hand-drawn copy of a symbol from Professor Horsford’s book. Grey already had the final page from their first visit to the Athenaeum.

“You got the envelope I left with Mrs. Philbrick last night, I take it. You were out.” Lean waited for Grey to offer an explanation of his whereabouts, but none was forthcoming.

“So you’ve got the full set of twenty-four symbols from Horsford’s Viking book. What do you make of them?”

The quick, unamused look from Grey confirmed that he hadn’t made much progress in his attempt to uncover some sort of hidden pattern in the sets of markings from the book and the thunderstone. Lean decided to change the subject to one that he found more important and distressing. Grey had broken his own silence yesterday, arranging a clandestine meeting with Lean where each provided updates to the case, including
Dastine’s memories and Father Leadbetter’s sad fate on the train two nights earlier.

“On a much more distressing matter, I haven’t seen any mention of Leadbetter in the Boston papers,” Lean said.

“Nor has McCutcheon made contact. He’ll alert me as soon as word reaches the Boston police. If Leadbetter’s body was cast off the train, it will turn up sooner or later along the B&M line. If it doesn’t happen today, McCutcheon’s agreed to take the train himself. He’ll man the rear platform so he can spot Leadbetter and have the poor man’s body recovered.”

A grumbling sound rattled around in Lean’s throat for a few seconds before he finally put his annoyance into words. “That harmless old man gunned down. I can’t stand the notion of doing nothing about it. I could arrest Marsh on your word.”

“He’s already bought off the conductor once. Essentially making that man an unwitting accomplice to murder. He’ll have no trouble paying the conductor to say that Leadbetter was alone in the last car with me before he was killed, and he never saw Marsh on board. Then it’s me who ends up facing murder charges.”

“So I get to the conductor first, force the truth out of him. Have him identify Marsh.”

Grey shook his head. “He wouldn’t be careless enough to let the conductor see his face. I’m sure he had his crony handle the details and the payment. Besides, he’s probably already got a dozen witnesses who’ll swear they were with Marsh the entire night.”

“Maybe, but what about Cosgrove’s murder? You said he all but confessed to it,” Lean protested.

“True, but there’s even less evidence to convict him of that crime. Sorry, Lean, justice for Dr. Jotham Marsh will have to wait until I can find ironclad proof against him.”

“Or die trying,” Lean said.

“Your confidence in me is heartwarming. As for Leadbetter, I share your frustration, believe me. But there is nothing we can do on that front. For now.”

“Then when? Sooner or later Marsh has to answer for this.”

Grey nodded his agreement. “Among his many other crimes. The best I can do for Father Leadbetter at the moment is to see his dying wish come to fruition. And that means preventing Marsh from solving this riddle of Old Tom Webster’s and finding this supposed alchemical artifact.”

“That’s what you’re choosing to focus on?” Lean asked. “Not the real-life murders of two men but finding some mystical artifact that you’ve assured me doesn’t actually exist.”

“Correction, I’ve assured you that no actual alchemical device that creates gold and grants eternal life exists anywhere, least of all buried somewhere beneath the ground of Portland, Maine. However, it does seem quite probable that if Tom Webster went through all the trouble to create the thunderstone and this convoluted code of twenty-four symbols, then he would have completed his hoax. As you told me, Dastine LaVallee’s grandmother told of Old Tom’s having some golden item he guarded jealously. He obviously had faith in its hidden alchemical powers, and I suspect he did indeed bury it somewhere for safekeeping.”

“If it’s not real, why bother trying to find it at all?” Lean asked. “I think you’ve lost sight of the real crimes that have been committed.”

“On the contrary, the fact that Marsh is willing to kill for the artifact makes it worth pursuing. I might be able to use his desperation to obtain the item against him. Cause him to make a fatal misstep. At the very least, we’d have the item in hand, the motive for these murders he’s orchestrated.”

“You confident that you can do that? Find it before Marsh, I mean. Judging by the sorry state of that chalkboard, I’d wager you haven’t made great progress.”

“It’s true that I haven’t yet had much success. But I take some degree of comfort in the knowledge that Marsh is having a harder go of it than I am. His set is missing the mercury symbol that I originally recovered at the scene of Chester Sears’s fatal jump. In addition, once my suspicions were aroused that Father Leadbetter was under duress in Boston, I took the precaution of making duplicates of my drawings. I sent this set to you, in case I met some harm. I kept the second set of pages on my person, after I shuffled them. So now Marsh is attempting to decode a series of symbols that have been randomly reordered. His task will be almost infinitely more difficult than my own.”

“So let’s have it, then. What have you figured so far?” Lean made a show of studying the chalkboard.

“The twenty-four symbols are those carved into the ledge along the Presumpscot. Those are the symbols in Horsford’s book. According to Dastine, the original news reporter accurately recorded the order in which the symbols appeared. But since they were carved in a circular pattern on the ledge, we don’t know in what order Tom Webster meant them to be read.”

“But you got from Leadbetter the proper order in which to read the seven on the thunderstone?”

“Yes, and if the thunderstone’s intended as a code, as I believe it is, that order is vital. Those seven figures are the specific message that Old Tom Webster has drawn out of the code of the twenty-four.”

“So it’s down to a matter of deciphering what the twenty-four are meant to represent.” Lean cracked his knuckles. “Two shy of the alphabet. I suppose that would have been too obvious.”

“I’ve tried certain variations omitting pairs of letters, but to no use. The Greek alphabet has only twenty-four letters, but I could discern no obvious code.”

“Might not be letters. Twenty-four hours in the day?”

“I considered that, a numeric code instead of an alphabetical one, but I feel confident that’s a false trail.”

Lean stared at the chalkboard, then began a slow walk around the circular formation of pages arrayed on the floor.

“It could be anything. Stare at it all long enough and you’re likely to see anything you can imagine—or nothing at all. This is just grasping at straws.”

“Yes, without knowing the key to the code, it would be next to impossible to ever decipher Tom Webster’s riddle,” Grey admitted.

“A key?” Lean asked. “Like what? Something common that anyone might know?”

“Unlikely. He’s made efforts at concealment elsewhere. The key is apt to be something private. Something only his family would have access to. I was hoping it might be in the only other document actually handed down from Old Tom.” Grey motioned toward the desk. “It took all manner of promises and veiled threats to get it out of the attorney’s
hands, but I did manage to take temporary possession of Thomas Webster’s original bequest of the thunderstone.”

“Well, that sounds promising.” Lean moved to the desk and glanced down at the old paper.

“So I hoped,” Grey said. “But I’ve read it two dozen times, and while I spy certain hints and references, I haven’t yet grasped any overarching pattern for the code.” Grey regarded Lean with a quizzical look and added, “Why don’t you give it a read?”

Lean shrugged and sat down at the desk to get a closer look at the old page without having to touch it. The thunderstone sat beside it. He began to read the handwritten words.

Grey said, “Tom Webster stuck a line in there about heeding his voice. I think he meant it to be read aloud.”

“Fair enough.” Lean cleared his throat and glanced at Grey, who was still peering at him. Lean couldn’t help feeling like a caged animal on display, being studied. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Sorry, like what?”

“Like you’re waiting for me to say something off the mark. I’m only going to read what’s written,” Lean said.

“Of course, go on,” Grey said.

Lean couldn’t shake his feeling but went on with the reading anyway.