Other Worlds (11 page)

I have no doubt that a strong strain of mediumistic sensitivity ran in the Bell family, inherited, no doubt, from Mrs. Bell. Once aroused this continued to function, and displayed itself in its highest form in John Bell Junior. This man was no ignorant farmer, he was an officer and a magistrate. His son was a physician, his grandson a specialist in mental disorders and a trained scientist. Houdini's sneers at these witnesses display his prejudice, as does his suggestion that Dr. Charles was suffering from senility when he wrote his book. Sixty-four, my friends, is not so great an age as that.

In the communications given to John Bell Junior the Spirit demonstrated the highest qualities. I have no doubt that the entity of 1828 was the first visitor, now wiser and more advanced in the spiritual realm. The jeering tricksters did not intrude, in part because the Spirit was in firmer control and in part because John Junior was more competent than his young sister. You complain of the vague predictions made by this Spirit; I do not see how predictions can be more precise. The War Between the States, the first Great War and the portents of the second—all were mentioned and described.

Gentlemen, you have been quick to accuse the dead, who are mute and defenseless and cannot speak for themselves. How can you be so complacent? However much our tiny human brains may try to classify such extraordinary matters, there still remain so many unknown causes and unexplained conditions that our best efforts can only be regarded as well-meant approximations to the truth.

Conan Doyle's voice trembled with emotion. After a moment Fodor said quietly, "You do well to remind us of our limitations, Sir Arthur. It is only a game we play tonight; none of us would have the effrontery to pretend we have offered the ultimate solution. But we have yet to hear from our guest. Inspector Ryan, you are a practical man, with years of experience in a large city police department. What is your solution?"

"I don't want to offend Sir Arthur," the guest began. "But if he were to consider the case as Mr. Sherlock Holmes might have done—"

"You will never win his support by referring to that personage," Houdini said dryly. "He tried to murder him, you know."

"And I only regret that I failed." Doyle's eyes twinkled. "Never mind my feelings, Inspector, my curiosity is as keen as anyone's. Which of our interpretations do you prefer?"

"Why, sir," said Ryan calmly, "none, sir. None of you has come near the truth."

18

Inspector Ryan:

Malice Domestic

First
I
want
to thank you for inviting me here tonight, gentlemen. You have sure given me a lot of new ideas. I hope I can return the favor. Frankly, I am amazed none of you has seen what is, in my humble opinion, the most significant aspect of this unusual case.

It is a case of murder.

Sir Arthur hit the nail on the head when he said you all throw out the facts that don't fit your theory. Dr. Fodor is the only one of you who has come to grips with John Bell's death, and he hasn't considered the evidence. Why, gentlemen, no responsible physician would sign the death certificate of a man who died under such circumstances. John Bell was not a young man, but he was in excellent health till the trouble began; some of his contemporaries lived to be over ninety. John Bell was deliberately done to death—poisoned—and there is only one person who could have killed him. That person wasn't Miss Betsy. That person was his wife.

One rule of police theory is that in cases of domestic murder the primary suspect is always the husband or wife. So I started my mental investigation with Mrs. Bell. But I admit I was dumbfounded when I realized that every single bit of evidence pointed straight to her. She is not only the principal suspect, she is the only person who could have committed the crime.

John Bell was gravely ill but still conscious on December eighteenth. On the morning of the nineteenth his son found him in a deep coma from which he never awoke. Clearly the murderous potion was administered to him on the night of the eighteenth. And who was with him the whole night? Why, Mrs. Bell. Did you note that revealing sentence in her son's narrative— "Mother slipped away from the bedside where she had sat all night long"? Even without that I would have assumed Mrs. Bell had been with her husband; where else would a devoted wife be when her husband lay mortally ill?

This fact in itself is almost enough to condemn Mrs. Bell. There is one other suspect. By his own statement, John Junior was in charge of his father's medicine. He could have given Mr. Bell the fatal dose without comment or suspicion from his mother. But John Junior could not have committed the other acts that led up to the murder.

Mrs. Bell must have been poisoning her husband for several years. The numbness and swelling of his tongue suggest some kind of vegetable poison, administered by mouth. Mrs. Bell isn't the only person who could have slipped a pinch of poison into his hot toddy or his glass of whiskey, but the individual who had constant access to what he ate and drank was his wife, the supervisor of the kitchen.

So much for opportunity. Let us now consider the means by which Mrs. Bell might have obtained poison.

The fields and forests of our beautiful country contain enough
poisonous substances to wipe out half the population. The pretty foxglove, the common pokeberry—the berries of a dozen different shrubs—why, gentlemen, nature is a poisoner! In that pioneer society the lady of the house had to be an amateur doctor; she took care of her family and servants in cases of minor illness. If her medicine chest didn't hold what she needed to kill her husband, she could gather a few leaves and brew up gallons of noxious liquids without anyone asking what she was doing. Finding that the old gentleman was too tough to succumb to the first concoction, she got impatient and tried something else. John Bell's deep coma could have resulted from an overdose of a narcotic, such as opium. Laudanum—a mixture of opium and alcohol— was part of every housewife's pharmacopoeia in the nineteenth century. The cat's reaction to the mysterious liquid is susceptible to several explanations. Maybe the bottle John found wasn't the laudanum, but one of Mrs. Bell's other brews. The cat's convulsions sound like the same tetanic seizures John Bell suffered in the last few months of his life. His wife may have tried a dozen different substances before one finally finished him.

Why would a good, virtuous lady like that want to kill her good, virtuous husband? I ask you, gentlemen—who knows the hidden angers and secret resentments felt by married people? But I know one thing—if Mrs. Bell wanted to be free of Mr. Bell, murder was the only way out for a woman of her temperament and station in life. And it was beginning to look as if the old man would live forever. I can't talk about motive, it is buried in the grave. I don't need to. The other facts are damning enough. Mrs. Bell had the best opportunity to kill her husband, and she is the only one who could have created the Spirit.

Take almost every one of the weird tricks it performed, including some of those you've eliminated as too preposterous to be true, and you'll find that Mrs. Bell could have done them.

The voice of the Spirit, for instance. You talk about misdirection—it never occurred to anyone to suspect the pious housewife. She could howl like a banshee and the audience wouldn't even look in her direction. The believers would exclaim in wonder and the skeptics would be watching Betsy.

Mrs. Bell could be out of her bed all night long, and if anybody caught her wandering around she had a dozen excuses. She forgot to put the milk away, or she thought she heard one of the kiddies crying . . . Her hard-working husband probably slept like the dead—even assuming he hadn't been drugged by his loving spouse. As soon as he was snoring off went Lucy, tiptoeing into the children's rooms to scratch and slap, visiting the neighbors to eavesdrop on their private conversations. When Mrs. Bell was sick, the Spirit shut its mouth while she was sleeping. It started to talk when she woke up.

Remember the sermons that were quoted so accurately? That was a cute trick, and I'm surprised Mr. Houdini hasn't spotted how it could have been worked. Mrs. Bell had undoubtedly heard one of the sermons. She was a regular churchgoer. She had heard the other preacher, too, dozens of times, she was acquainted with his style of talking, and one of her friends might have mentioned the subject of his sermon that Sunday—even given her a synopsis of the talk. Why, that was what they discussed at those Sunday night prayer meetings, wasn't it? She wouldn't have had to repeat the sermons word for word; a reasonably accurate imitation would have been accepted as miraculous by her superstitious audience.

And take the decision to send for the witch doctor, a decision known only to Mr. Bell and the two messengers. At first the "all-knowing" Spirit was baffled by this, but by evening it had learned the truth. Now, gentlemen, wouldn't Mr. Bell finally yield to the pleas of his wife and confide in her? Ladies have a lot
of little tricks for wheedling information out of their husbands. The "phantom" hand held for an instant by Calvin Johnson was a woman's hand. The voices were all female, even those of the four members of the witch family.

Mrs. Bell created the Spirit, but it wasn't long before other people took a hand. Miss Betsy, and perhaps some of the others, played tricks on their own account. There's your naughty little girl, Mr. Podmore. She became the center of attention—the sweet child martyr. Few kiddies could resist that role. Besides, it must have been useful for getting her out of chores she didn't want to do. You can't ask a girl who has been beaten by a witch to wash the dishes.

From the start the Spirit doted on Mrs. Bell. "Luce, poor Luce—the best woman alive." That's a dead giveaway right there. As for the way the others were treated, the only one who really suffered was the husband. The children didn't get anything worse than the tweaks and smacks any exasperated parent may be moved to bestow on them. It isn't unusual for a mother to prefer her sons—or one particular son—to her daughters, and fathers often spoil their little girls. I don't buy your notion that Mr. Bell molested his daughter, Doctor—not because it shocks me, the Good Lord knows I've encountered too many such cases—but because there's no evidence to support it. Mr. Bell could have been innocently fond of his pretty golden-haired daughter, and his wife could have been jealous. But I think it's more likely that Betsy pulled her own hair and fell into fake fits to get attention.

Dr. Fodor, I don't hold with your idea that sex is at the bottom of everything, but your talk about split personalities gave me some new insights. I've heard about such cases, but don't you see that the things you said about little Betsy apply even more neatly to her mother? Here's a lady at a certain time of life,
a lady known for her piety and kindness. By George, she must have had a good-sized bundle of repressions built up. I guess Dr. Fodor would say Mrs. Bell's repressed hostility and frustration split off into a separate personality—a Mrs. Hyde, so to speak. That would explain why the Spirits first remarks were so pious and mealy-mouthed. It was testing, making sure its little game was going to work. Once it was accepted as an outside agent, it could let itself go and say all the nasty things Mrs. Bell had never allowed herself to say. I'm told that some of the most delicate, refined ladies cut loose with language that would make a muleskinner blush when they are under anaesthesia. They know the words. Mrs. Bell knew them too, just as she knew a lot of neighborhood gossip she wouldn't repeat when she was herself.

The conclusive piece of evidence is the second visit of the Spirit. Betsy is cleared by that, if by nothing else; she wasn't even living at home in 1828. Neither was John Junior. But his house wasn't far away; did his mother take long walks on those spring evenings, or were the conversations about future wars and the martyrdom of our Saviour the product of John Junior's restless imagination? It doesn't matter. Mrs. Bell was living in the old homestead when the rappings returned for the second time. By 1935, when the Spirit was due to return for its third visit, she had been in her grave for almost a century. Poor woman! Once I might have called her something else, but I've learned a thing or two tonight. I believe it was not Mrs. Bell but Mrs. Hyde— Lucy II, as Dr. Fodor would call her—who committed the murder. God knows what drove her to it. May she rest in peace.

Houdini struck his hands together. His gray eyes shone. "I like it. I like it! Inspector, you put us to shame. I think you've got it."

Fodor stroked his chin. "A most convincing argument."

"Horrible," Doyle cried. "Unjust and unfair. I don't believe it for a moment."

"Neither do I," Podmore said. "Your arguments are ingenious, Inspector. But my explanation also covers all the facts, and child poltergeists are the common rule. Miss Betsy fits the pattern too well."

"Your child poltergeist is only one of the possible patterns," Fodor objected. "Of all the theories put forth this evening—"