The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (26 page)

My special reason for mentioning these parties is that Dick Prendergast staged the first March party of the spring. He had never thrown one before, and had never attended anyone else’s.

All year I had taken it pretty well for granted that his satisfactory grades had been dictated from Prexy’s office, and that it was a matter of general policy to get him through the year, give him his degree, and cry good riddance, not matter how badly he did his work. At the March parties, however, he knew his stuff about as well as anyone else. It was easier for a student to bluff in class, or on an examination, than at a March party. We soon found out that Dick was not bluffing. It may have been the doing of the psychoanalyst with whom he had gone to Europe after his expulsion from school. But, whatever the explanation, a mind which had always been brilliant and lazy had been applying itself.

Since Prexy’s trip to check Dick’s alibi for the night on which Wyck had been killed, I had been inclined to drop him altogether from consideration as a suspect, except for two considerations: the first was that he continued most diligent in refusing to allow the sheriff to take his fingerprints, even by accident; and the second was that the missing blue books—the only articles known to have been on Wyck’s person when he disappeared that were not returned in the bundle—had never since been discovered.

I had one additional quick shock of suspicion when Tommy Jarvis was found dead, as I remembered that he had been chief witness for Wyck, in the proceedings that had let to Prendergast’s undoing; but the presumption of suicide in Jarvis’s case was nearly absolute. It later turned out that Dick had been in attendance in the maternity ward during the entire time between the beginning of the post-mortem and the finding of Jarvis’s body.

Daisy was not quite so willing to drop him entirely out of consideration. But she had recently been concentrating her attention on a sly job of duplicity. After out adventure in the old creamery, she had vowed to devote more time to the possible double life of Marjorie Wyck; and my sweetheart had slowly and deliberately insinuated herself into that baffling young lady’s good graces. At last, in the middle of March, she called me up in great excitement and asked me to drop around for news.

It proved to be this: she had stopped in to see Marjorie in the afternoon and had found her spring cleaning. In the main hall was a closet which Marjorie herself had never used, but in which her father had kept his outer garments—raincoat, overcoat, topcoat, and ulster, together with an incredible variety of rakish hats. The overcoat had been included in the bundle of garments mailed from Boston and still was in the sheriff’s office. The other coats, of course, had been examined for clues after his disappearance, and had since been hanging there in the hall closet.

Marjorie turned the pockets inside out and brushed them, and then took each garment out on the porch for a thorough shaking. When she was shaking the topcoat, the two missing blue books suddenly went tumbling down the front steps. Folded longitudinally, they had been in an inside, breast-high pocket, such as is to be found in most coats, but of which no one, to the best of my knowledge, ever makes use except by mistake.

“He must have realized it wasn’t good business to carry them around,” I reflected aloud, “and so he tucked them in there while he was in the house, before he went out again with Muriel.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Daisy answered. “He’d have locked them in his desk if he was nervous about them. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he even cared.”

“You mean they were planted there? By whom?”

“By Marjorie, of course. Why else would she have them so conveniently tumble out when I was around?”

“Say, wait a minute, Daisy,” I said. “They called the coat that came back in the mail an /overcoat,/ didn’t they?”

“Yes. It was a blue Chesterfield overcoat.”

“Well, he was wearing a light gray topcoat at the meeting. He kept it on in the faculty room as if he had a chill. It never occurred to me to suspect that the one in the bundle wasn’t that same coat. And now I think of it, he had it on and buttoned when I handed the blue books back to him. I’ll bet anything he just put them in the topcoat pocket by mistake, instead of into his jacket pocket. When he went home, he changed to a Chesterfield because he knew he was going up that cold hillside. And the blue books have been there ever since, in a pocket that nobody would ever think to look for.”

‘D you want me to believe that men don’t use all their pockets? Their clothes certainly do bulge out of shape in enough places to make you think they do.”

“Well, how many pockets have I got in this suit?” I challenged.

She studied it. “Good gracious, there must be twelve.

“You’re three short,” I answered. “There are fifteen, which is the usual number; and with two extra outside ones in an overcoat or topcoat, you never have any use for the eighteenth.”

“Eighteen pockets? Whew! No wonder men bulge. All right, you win. No doubt the books were there all the time. Perhaps Marjorie isn’t trying to shield her friend Prendergast. Just the same, I still have my suspicions of dear little Marjorie.”

“Her friend Prendergast? Are they friends?”

“Not that I know of,” Daisy admitted, “but it seemed a swell solution of awhile. But I’m going to be Marjorie’s bosom friend for awhile longer, just the same. That young lady interests me a lot.”

At about this time the sheriff himself got wind, belatedly, of the real reason for Jarvis’s suicide. At once he resumed his fingerprinting activities. During the Christmas vacation he had extended his attention to the faculty, and, before mid-March, could boast that he had checked the prints of every student but Prendergast and every member of the faculty except Coroner Kent. On March 16, 1933, Sheriff Palmer had, but his own admission, only five logical suspects left to pursue: Kent, Prendergast, and three of last year’s graduates who had moved into other states.

One day I asked him, in a bantering fashion, whether he had fingerprinted all the wives and children of the faculty. Winking shrewdly, he opened the notebook that contained his lists of suspects, and showed me the names of a number of nurses and faculty wives, all crossed off. There also, with lies drawn through them, stood the names of Daisy and Marjorie Wyck.

One reassuring feature of the lessening tension of his period was a resumption of work on the /Short Sketch for a History of Concomitant Variations in Morphogenesis and Psychogenesis./ Dr. Allling, somewhat to my surprise, had not seemed at all interested in getting the records of Dr. Wyck’s experiments from the old creamery. When first I offered to guide him there, he declined—which probably was wise. And when I said that I would bring him the book which recorded the experiments, he said that he would prefer to leave it there until spring. The experience of the unfortunate Mrs. Bennett would probably keep her from returning there, and it was not likely that anyone else would attempt to get into it in the wintertime. She, incidentally, had proved completely uncommunicative during our two attempts to get information from her.

One morning in March, however, I got a hint that my boss soon might want all of Wyck’s records, when, characteristically, he greeted me with the statement, “I’ve at last got the right lead for that teratology[
1
] chapter—or, rather, section it will be now. Please take this before we go on with what we were doing yesterday:

“The subject of prenatal influence, like that of demonic possession, has for many years been relegated to the limbo of unmitigated superstitions; but, unlike the case of demonic possession, prenatal influence has not been blessed with a new set of names laved clean of the old awful implications; for here again we find the medical scientist refusing to consider the possibility of a fact that has been attested in many instances, from the earliest times to the present, on evidence categorically no worse than that readily accepted to substantiate less embarrassing phenomena. I refer to prenatal influence as a fact, which I have not made bold to do in the case of demonic possession.

“The subject of the present chapter was early taken up by the Royal Society. It was worthy of scientific investigation for nearly 150 years. Then something happened which has never to my knowledge occurred in any other field of free inquiry. A generation of physicians and surgeons, the same generation that taught medicine to the poet Keats, deliberately conspired to ridicule a moot scientific point out of consideration.

“They themselves knew that the evidence for prenatal influence was strong; they knew that it was universally believed in by all classes of society; and, it being a mental causation of a physical effect, they knew that widespread belief in it caused a presumption of maximum occurrence. Therefore they concertedly instituted a campaign of ridicule so markedly successful that the next generation of the medical profession was deprived of the right to think fairly on a question theretofore honestly listed as possible, and, because of recent researches, now classifiable among the proved facts of science.”

* * *

Prexy was going well when he dictated that. He smacked his lips over it, and enjoyed it. But we did not proceed with the chapter at that time.

1. The science of inquire into the causes of physical abnormalities in growth.—Ed.
   

On the last day of March, I had the experience which told me that I must make a coherent written account of events of the past year. Otherwise, with two homicidal maniacs at large, Daisy and I might not survive to tell it. I was at home studying, when I heard the knob of the front door turn. Thinking it was Biddy, I took no notice, until I heard a mumbling voice saying, “They killed him, the old divil. But I’ll get it out of his daughter. Blood’s blood. It’d be the same. Biddy! Biddy! Ye got to help me. Ye got to hold her still, so I won’t spill it.”

I remained rigid, trying to think. After a few seconds Mike went out. I came hastily down the stairs to see where he had gone, before phoning the authorities. The door came open again and he sprang in, cornering me in the back of the hall.

“There,” he crooned. “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, if I felt right. I ain’t been right, Davy. I love ye. But I’ll kill ye just the same, unless ye help me. Come now.”

He grabbed my wrist in his iron fingers and pulled me toward the back door. I tried to cajole him into freeing me, but it did no good. He was used now to the fact that his hand was missing.

“Hey, you’re hurting me,” I said, when were outside. “Ow!” I let out a yell to attract attention. Instead of help I got for my pains a numbing blow of his stump across my mouth.

“Another sound out o’ ye and I drag ye by the neck. Quiet now,” he admonished. “I love ye Davy, but I’ll pinch ye by the neck so ye can’t yell.”

The shrewd madman waited his chances and crossed the road with me when no one was in sight. He dragged me directly on into the pine grove that extended to the read of Wyck’s property. Fear for myself and of what he might to do Marjorie turned into a different, more intense kind of torment when I saw through the side windows of the living room that Daisy was with her so-called friend.

Mike led me to the back porch, opened the kitchen door, and was about to enter. I quickly cried, “Run, Daisy, Mike’s here!” I grabbed his wrist with both my hands, but it was like trying to bend a baseball bat. My shriek was cut off when his fingers closed inexorably on my gullet. The last thing I saw was Daisy, suddenly silhouetted in a doorway. Then my lungs and brain both seemed to be bursting.

When I came to, Daisy was knelling over me. My throat was so sore I could not speak, but I managed to whisper, “Where’d he go?”

“Out the front way. You’d better lie still a little longer.”

“Have you phoned for help?” I asked hoarsely.

“No. He took the phone with him. Tore it off the wall, but we’ve locked the doors.”

Daisy’s coolness shamed me into a quick recovery. “Where’s Marjorie?” I whispered.

“She ran upstairs. Come on. Let’s go see.”

I picked up a rolling pin from the kitchen cabinet. We went softly into the front hall toward the bottom of the stairs, and were about to ascend when there was a crash of glass. The stained glass window at the turn of the stairs bulged and shivered. Mike was on the porch roof. I tried to herd Daisy back toward the kitchen, but she said, “Wait. See where he goes.”

Gripping my rolling pin, I waited. The whole frame of the window came out all at once. Mike stepped in, paused, and then slowly ascended the remaining stairs. If I had been alone, I think I would have been ab abysmal coward. But, with Daisy beside me, there was nothing to do but whisper, “I’ve got to try to stop him.”

At that moment Marjorie Wyck slipped into view. Mike crouched as if about to spring at her. Then she did something hard to explain. With spread fingers she tossed her hair into a bush on top of her head, which she seemed to shake at him as an animal might its bristling mane. Her faced showed neither the horror nor the fear that one would have expected—only fury. I was struck with amazement at its likeness to the remembered face of Ted Gideon, her half-brother, when he was killing Muriel Finch.