The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (24 page)

She gave a splitting shriek, terrible in the small, stone-walled room. “Oh, he’s come back from hell! Don’t put me to sleep. Don’t do that again.”

She arose and rushed for the tunnel. I heard her stumble against the iron plate, and then utter another last awful scream.

Daisy sat up. “Fine one I am,” she muttered, “fainting at a time like that. Did you see who she was, Dave? It was Lucy Bennett, mother of that second symmelus. Oh, let’s get out of this ghastly place.”

As we emerged from the tunnel, a blast of snowflakes swirled in our faces. I replaced the iron plate and tumbled stones back into the hole again. Then we set off briskly through the woods. The snow aided us in finding our way through what would have been inky darkness. Several times we got lost, but not for long. When we reached Altonville it was nine o’clock.

“Good land, David Saunders, I thought you had more sense,” Mrs. Towers exclaimed cuttingly. “I was so worried, I’ve just done phoning the sheriff.”

“Oh, mother, you’re a jewel!” Daisy cried, collapsing on a sofa. “Don’t you know that I’m old enough to take care of David without help from the sheriff?”

“Take care of David? What you need’s somebody to take care of you. And he certainly doesn’t seem to be very good at it.”

I made an apologetic exit, into the sheriff’s very arms.

“Go back, did ye? Hmm. I was jest about to unleash the bloodhounds. Now, we’ll jest take a nice little friendly stroll back to the station house and have a little talk about what you two’ve been up to.”

“Why, sheriff,” I said, “how could you be interested in what a young lady and I were doing—on a night as dark as this?”

“Well,” said the sheriff, “mebbe you’re crawfishin’ and mebbe you ain’t. I think I’ll jest make a date with Miss Daisy myself. And if she’s jest as nice to me, as you
say
 she was to you, I’ll take yer word for it.”

We walked together to Atlantic Street. I then sauntered off toward Connells’ unmolested. As soon as the sheriff was out of sight I doubled back to Prexy’s to give him a full description of what had happened. But first I asked him to do something to make sure that Lucy Bennett had got home safely. She had no phone, but the operator got him a near-by farmhouse from which a messenger was sent to find out about her.

I had nearly finished my story before the messenger phoned to say that Mrs. Bennett was at home, sick, and that her husband, the old skinflint, did not think it bad enough to summon a doctor. Prexy replied that he would send one out anyway, next day, to make sure.

1. Monsters are frequently produced among invertebrates by exposing larvae to abnormal salt solutions. See Morgan,
   Experimental Embryology.
    New York: Columbia University Press, 1927. Mavor and Muller have both obtained genetic variations in the fruit fly by exposing the female parent to action of X-rays. Little and McPheters have observed genetic abnormalities in descendants of X-rayed mice. See
   Genetics,
    vol. 17, 1932. Goldschmidt and others have produced variations by use of high temperatures.—Ed.
   

At this point it should have become apparent why Daisy, Dr. Alling, and I, all have continued to refrain from cooperating fully with the authorities. If any one of us had sensed the structure of duplicity which it would be necessary to maintain we probably never would have entered into this secretive investigation at all. Prexy has made it plain that it has been his hope to discover Wyck’s murderer in such a fashion as to make it unnecessary to reveal the grim history of the human monsters. If he does some day request it, I may destroy this record, for the good of the school.

It should still be born in mind that for five months after Dr. Wyck’s disappearance no one could say whether he was alive or dead—no one except the still undiscovered murderer or murderers. During those five months, the three of us had committed ourselves to a course of conduct which was not essentially improper so long as the nature, the reality even, of the crime was unknown. The sudden discovery of the cadaver caught us all too deeply imbedded in the consequences of our secrecy to make it possible to withdraw.

We are accepting, of course, a larger responsibility. Certain fields of investigation have been left untouched. Nothing has been done to get information from Wyck’s female victims. The likelihood that any of these women could have committed such a murder is very remote, but the surviving ones may possess, perhaps unknowingly, the vital link in the chain of evidence. The reasons for their own silence are apparent enough. All the mothers of symmeli probably were guilty of adultery or fornication with Wyck himself, or with his bastard—a disclosure which none of them would care to have publicly revealed. That Wyck resorted to therapeutic hypnosis makes it likely that some of the women did not have any real comprehension of what had been done to them.

Lucy Bennett’s intrusion into the underground room proved that she had had a partial knowledge of the meaning of Wyck’s experiments. Dr. Alling was worried by this. Then he brightened, asking me to convey his thanks to Daisy for our successful Sunday afternoon of sleuthing.

“She’s the one to thank,” I said. “She found the pipe that gave us the first clue, and noticed the tin cans under the stones that had blocked the entrance.”

“I told you long ago she was a very smart young woman, didn’t I?” he observed. “I wish though that there were some better job for her than that switchboard. But what would we do without her there? I guess we’ll just have to raise her wages. And that reminds me—”

He went to his desk and wrote two checks, both drawn to “Cash”: one covering my expenses on the trip to New York, the other for one hundred dollars which he had promised us if we should find the hidden laboratory. It was more money than I had ever had in my possession, all at once, in my life. I resolved to suggest to Daisy that we put it in an account with both our names on the book, as a nest egg. That would be something to build on.

And that is what we’ve done.

Early in November the fall term of the court ended. None of us could find out what Charlie’s alibi had been, obviously it had satisfied the grand jurors, who had twice refused to indict him.

Only Sheriff Palmer carried on, confident that the fingerprints on the light bulb would eventually reveal the culprit. His efforts became a standing joke in the school.

One of my early jobs, just after school opened, was to prepare a letter of inquiry about Joe Baker—the recipient of some of Mike’s blood. When last heard from, shortly before Wyck’s disappearance, Joe had been convalescing satisfactorily from his accident, but was not planning to reenter school until the fall. When he did not appear, Prexy asked me to inquire about him, but the letter was returned. I had thought that the check mark was opposite the line reading “Present address unknown.” But it probably was intended to indicate the line above, which read “Addressee deceased.” This is how we found out:

I was taking dictation on another matter when the sheriff drove up to Prexy’s house and delivered a letter.

“Coroner’s out o’ town,” he said. “You better decide whether this thing belongs out o’ the waste bin.”

As he handed it to Prexy, he looked sourly at me, as if expecting a guffaw.

Little Otter Lake
Nov. 12, 1932

Dear Chief of Police:

I have finally decided I will give up to the law if you will send someone to the Little Otter House. Dr. Wyck committed suicide and it was on account of me, and I want to get it off my conscience and to be at peace with my Savior again.

I didn’t know what the result had been till the middle of the summer. But somebody (a Mr. Bostwick) told me in July about Dr. Wyck disappearing, he remembering that he thought that was the doctor my poor son had been attended by.

Two months ago when I read of the body being discovered I knew only too well what had happened. He committed suicide, and it was all my fault. But it was really only a mother’s broken heart that did it.

My boy Joseph, you see, died suddenly on last April third. I called a doctor, and he said it was heart failure. Well, Joseph never had any heart trouble, and of course I was distracted, and I insisted that it must have been foul play. So they said an immediate examination was the only way to decide that, and the doctor called up Dr. Wyck in Altonville and asked him questions and got madder and madded and finally hung up and said that the man must be out of his mind, but he wouldn’t say anything else. That’s what they call professional etiquette.

Well, they made the examination and they said there was a clot of blood that traveled to the heart and stopped it beating. And my son being a medical student I knew something about such things so I asked if it was because the blood transfusion they gave Joseph wasn’t done right, and the doctor looked startled as if I’d guessed something.

I was prostrate with grief, and after the doctor went I called up Dr. Wyck, and told him he had murdered my son with his criminal carelessness, and that I would have his right to practice medicine revoked.

He spoke very strange over the telephone to me, and didn’t seem to care what I was saying but only wanted to know the exact time Joseph died. I told him I knew it was between ten and eleven o’clock.

Well, then he said, “Madam, it won’t be necessary for you to do anything. I have performed my last operation. Goodbye.”

But when I learned he had taken poison and shut himself up in that room full of poison gas, because that’s my opinion of what must have happened, in spite of what the papers say, why, I felt like a murderer myself. I went away without telling even the post office. And I’ve been living here trying to make peace with my conscience and my Savior, and now I know I can never do it while I carry this secret burden in my breast. So I will give up if you will send for me.

Yours sincerely,      
Maude Baker.

Prexy read this letter, of course before I had seen it, and said to the sheriff, “Mr. Palmer, I should like you to sign and date this, and you, Saudners, I should like you to witness its receipt.”

That gave me the chance to read it, as I refused to put my signature on it without knowing enough to be able to identify it again. Prexy then handed it back to the sheriff and said, “Please file this as important evidence in the Wyck case. You are responsible for the decision of whether you should bring the woman in for questioning.”

The sheriff asked Prexy’s private opinion, which of course was that there could be no possible charge in law against the woman, but that the presumption of attempted suicide was greatly strengthened by her confession.

“Yeah,” said Sheriff Palmer, “that’s right enough. Mebbe he committed suicide, and there’s just a chance he did it by figgerin’ out some invention to stab himself in the back of his own neck. But this woman don’t seem to realize he was embalmed—and what we’ve got to find is the guy that embalmed him.”

He stared at me long an suspiciously, then tramped out to his car. When he had gone I looked at Prexy with growing excitement. “You’re thinking—what?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “But long ago I had the weird notion that there might be some connection between that first terrible seizure of Mike’s and the fact that the Tompkins boy had died at almost the same time, with some of Mike’s blood in him.”

Prexy nodded slowly, “And so?”

“Well, sir, Mike’s second seizure came between ten and eleven o’clock, at about the time that Joe Baker died—with some of Mike’s blood in him.”

He sank back in his chair, lips pursed. “Yes,” he said. “And the records showed that each of those two had received only 250 cc. of Mike’s blood. What would have happened in the case of someone who had practically been living on the blood of that same donor?”

We both stared at each other, I with the sensation of standing on the sill of some utterly new and perhaps terrible storehouse of knowledge, pausing for a reassuring glance from the guide.

“Now you see, Saunders,” he went on, “why I never bothered to question you about your alibi, when you found me at Mike’s bedside. At the moment of that third and worse seizure, I had a conviction that Gideon Wyck had just died. Before his death he communicated to me the news which you later confirmed by intelligent research—that he had transfused into his own veins, in the course of eight months, several thousand cubic centimeters of Mike’s blood. This letter completes that evidence.

“For a long time I have had means of knowing that Wyck himself was aware of the seeming coincidence of the death of young Tompkins and Mike’s first seizure. But I did not know that he himself was aware of the second coincidence. You gave me some time ago the necessary hint for dunning it down, when you showed me the full record of Mike’s blood donations, both the known and the secret ones.”

I racked my memory and then asked, “If Wyck was aware of that first coincidence, how do you account for the way he acted when Biddy called him to attend Mike the second time? He just refused to be bothered. Don’t you remember?”

“Certainly, and that’s what is explained by this letter. It was the two telephone calls from the Bakers’ doctor and from Mrs. Baker herself that made Wyck perceive the significance of the first conincidence by providing him with a second one of like nature. I have reasons, which I prefer not to tell even you, for feeling sure that Wyck did commit suicide. That is, he did, so far as his own volition was concerned. But someone else, before death actually occurred, inflicted that knife wound.”