The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (11 page)

Was Gideon Wyck hiding there, in the ruined cellar? Or was it his corpse, guarded by his murderer, who, to protect himself, would do murder again? The boy Ted advanced to the edge of the path, hardly ten yards from where I was crouching in a little hollow. Mike must have disappeared, for Ted went farther, peering, shifting from side to side for a better view. I lay in a cold sweat for fear he would begin to beat the bushes.

Then, to my amazement, Mike reappeared in the path, and walked stealthily toward the lilac bushes again. He must have hidden to let the boy pass by. Seeing him disappear into the ruined cellar, I waited tensely, trying to peer both ways at once.

A hollow, agonized scream came faintly, as if out of a deep place. Mike emerged from the cellar, white as a shroud, gripping an axe in his hand. He stared at the blade of it, turned to throw it back into the cellar, and tottered to the edge of the woods. Then I saw him try to support himself against a tree with his missing hand. Of course he fell. The stump struck hard against the tree roots. It was bandaged and padded, but the shock must have been painful. He did not utter a sound, however, which made me wonder whether it was he who had shrieked in the cellar.

As he lay there, apparently resting, the boy reappeared. “Trying to get smart, are you?” he said gruffly. “Well, you better not try it again. Go on, now, and don’t you ever come back, if you know what’s good for you.”

Aroused by the prodding gun barrel, Mike wandered dreamily back toward town. The boy followed a little way, then returned and stood by the lilacs, still watching. I carefully crept into the woods, parallel to the path. Mike frequently stopped to rest, so I had time to choose my footing. I expected him to collapse at any moment, and he was tottering as if drunk when we reached the Wycks’. In the deepening dusk I had almost caught up. Once more he paused to listen by the barberry hedge before proceeding.

As we approached the hospital gates Muriel Finch appeared from the other direction. It was my first glimpse of her in two weeks, and I was determined to intercept her, despite Mike; but as I started I heard a queer, strangled noise in his throat. “Ah!” he cried, “ ’twas ye that helped him take it, the divil.” With a ghastly kind of snarl he jumped forward, clutching her shoulder, and tried to sink his teeth in her neck.

I knew his mad strength too well to trust half measures. With a quick leap I knocked them both down, getting his throat in the curve of my right elbow, holding his head back with all the power of both my arms. Again the seeming reality of his missing hand betrayed him. He moved the stump as if to grasp Muriel with the fingers that were not there, and at the same time relaxed his real grip on her to claw over his shoulder at my neck. She rolled free and ran screaming into the hospital. I clung on only just long enough for help to arrive. But, as they were getting him into a strait jacket, he fainted, and for a long time thereafter was as weak as a child. The devil of his strength seemed to enter his body and to make use of it only in moments when something definite could be accomplished. When the devil was in him, he was more than human, but its going left him an invalid again.

The experience I have just described seemed to alter my own position profoundly. Formerly I had been unable to reveal my information concerning the hillside without implicating myself as a suspect, and perhaps Muriel, too. But I had been fulfilling an appointed duty in following Mike up the old road, a face which gave me adequate excuse for directing others to investigate the ruined farm. The conversation between Ted and Mike gave adequate proof that Wyck had used the tumble-down farmhouse for illicit practices. Blood transfusions might have been a necessary part of them.

While getting a bite to eat at the lunch wagon by the gas station, I pondered these matters, resolved to go at once and report to Prexy. Muriel would no longer have to be brought into my story, nor would I have to mention the night of Wyck’s disappearance at all. But it did seem urgently necessary that the place on the hill be investigated at once. The boy Ted was guarding something, with his rifle and his truculent language. Mikes appearance might decide him to destroy or remove whatever it was that he was guarding.

I thought it would be best to confess that I had seem him leaving the Wycks’ house in anger, not many hours before the doctor himself disappeared. That fact, and a description of his conduct toward Mike, seemed sufficient reason for a prompt search, and for taking him into custody. He then, of course, might implicate Muriel; but I was unable to feel much responsibility for the result of her own deliberate avoidance of me. At any rate, promptness was imperative this time.

The need for haste made itself known all too soon. I was about to pull back the sliding door of the lunch wagon, when someone passed, half crouching, under its row of windows. I quickly walked to the back entrance, which led down to the rear of the gas station. As I reached the steps, I heard a voice say, “Stalled up the road a piece. Give us a gallon in this can.”

The speaker went away as he had come, slouching to keep his face form showing in the light from the row of windows. The voice had not sounded like that I had heard before, either on the hilltop or in the hospital. Bit I cold not quite rid myself of a notion that it might be Ted. Just to make sure, I strolled up the street after the dark figure, which turned northward onto the Bottom Road. Soon the stalled car loomed in the darkness, some distance past the Wycks’, pointing toward town. I could half see, half hear that he was lifting the front seat to pour in the gas, proving it to be an ancient Ford.

Convinced that it probably was Ted, I turned and hastened back, asking myself how he could best be intercepted. The lights glared before I had reached the Wycks’, and I dived into the shrubbery on the other side of the road, by the corner of the hospital fence, in a foolish panic.

The car stopped in front of the Wycks’. The driver climbed to the porch and tapped, as if by prearranged signal, on one of the porch windows. When the door opened to admit him, I ran quickly across to the car. The trunk was full of such miscellaneous duffle as a camper might carry: blanket roll, Sterno stove, a large bundle wrapped in a tent. As I wondered with a shiver what might be inside that bundle, the porch door opened and the boy murmured, “Well, I’m not staying any longer. I guess you know what’s best for yourself.”

As he came quickly down the steps, I shrank into the uncomfortable shelter of the barberry hedge, behind the car. He was carrying his rifle, which he leaned against the fender as he cranked the car. A few moments later he was bowling off southward, and I realized that I had not even had the wit to get his license number. He proceeded to the extreme end of the hospital fence, paused for a few seconds, and went whizzing around a corner that would take him to Alton Plain. My first impulse was to rush in and ask Marjorie if I could use her phone. But that was canceled by the realization that he had spoken to her as if they were familiars. His words made it seem that she also might be implicated, and that I would do well not to let her know what I had witnessed. I moved cautiously across the road, ducked around the hospital gates, and made for home. There, to my consternation, I found Daisy Towers, who had stopped in after supper to console poor Biddy. Biddy cried, when she saw me, “What are they goin’ to do to my Mike?” She grasped my arms in her sturdy washlady hands, and began to shake an answer out of me. It took an appreciable while to get free of the genuinely distracted woman. I took up the phone and called Prexy’s number.

“No use,” Daisy said. “He drove out of town about five o’clock.”

I was nonplused, for it seemed imperative to relay my information through Prexy. As if reading my thoughts, Daisy said, “Sheriff Palmer went with him.”

I was startled by Daisy’s assumption that my news was for the police. I had expected to give the facts to Prexy, letting him take the responsibility for acting upon them. Also, I had been confident that an investigation of Ted’s hiding place would reveal good reasons for detaining him.

“When’s the boss coming back?” I inquired of Daisy.

“Tomorrow morning.”

I admitted to myself that it would be best to away Prexy’s return. The flivver was old enough to be easy to spot even after it was hundreds of miles away. My watch now read 8:20, so I left Daisy with her curiosity unsatisfied and proceeded to the hospital, where I put in a call for Nurse Finch, who, as usual, was reported as being out. On a sudden impulse I asked for an envelope, scribbled a half-threatening note saying I must see her at once for her own good, sealed it, and left it to be given her when she came in. I also asked the phone girl to call me when it was delivered, saying I would be up till midnight. Back at the Connells’, I found that Biddy had been put to bed by Daisy, who had gone home shortly before my return.

At midnight precisely my newly installed special phone rang, and a voice said, “This is the head nurse. The switchboard operator says you left a note for Nurse Finch. Did you happen to come across her somewhere else this evening?”

I said that I had not, and the suspicious old harridan answered, “Well, she’s supposed to be on duty right now, and if she knows what’s good for her, she’ll be back here inside of five minutes. Goodbye.”

I was less worried by the inference that Muriel was suspected of being in my rooms than by memory of the brief stop made by the boy’s car at the far corner of the hospital grounds. I had heard him inviting Marjorie Wyck to go with him. Had he also invited Muriel Finch, and picked her up there by prearrangement?

I lay down for a night of uneasy and fitful sleep. Suddenly, toward dawn, it occurred to me that if Muriel had disappeared, that face would surely be ascribed by most people to her terrifying experience with Mike.

After breakfast I approached the reception window, and inquired whether a note which I had left the previous evening had been delivered. Daisy Towers drew it from he bosom of her dress, smiled archly, and said, “The head nurse came looking for it ten minutes ago, but I told her I’d already returned it to the writer. What do I get for being so good to you?”

“Loads of affection, collectible after seven any evening.”

“Don’t I even get a look at the note?”

“Not this one, Daisy.”

“Then,” she said coolly, “it’s lucky I took the precaution of reading it through the envelope against the electric light.” Seeing my wordless resentment, she added, “How else would I have known enough not to give it to the head nurse, Davy? Besides, what do you expect me to do with a note addressed to a nurse who’s dropped all her baggage out the window with a string and beat it?”

“Daisy,” I said as if changing the subject, “you know that fellow we thought might have been in love with Sarah Mullin? Have you remembered yet who he was?”

“No. What’s that got to do with present cases?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you really think so, or are you just saying it?”

That startled me, and I was somewhat more surprised when she added, “I think I’ll collect those loads of affection after seven this evening, Davy. Mother’s going to a club meeting tonight. Why not drop in for supper, around seven-fifteen?”

“Come clean, Daisy, what’s up?”

She looked more steadily at me and said, “That’s just exactly what we’ve got to figure out, isn’t it? And neither of us knows enough, alone.”

I took a long breath, and then a long chance. “All right. Do you still keep a record of all phone calls?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Then bring a transcript with you of any calls to the nurses’ dormitory for the hour after you left the switchboard last night. It may help,” I said, and set out for Dr. Alling’s house.

On the way I decided that it would be a relief to share the problem with Daisy. Her job at the switchboard gave her a strategic knowledge of the whereabouts and conversations of all the persons connected with the medical school or the hospital. Having grown up in Altonville, she probably knew many old facts that might in some way be significant. Moreover, the abrupt vanishing of Muriel Finch shifted the focus of the possible suspicion from me to someone else. I expected Dr. Alling to say something about it, and when he did not, I made a starter by mentioning the facts that were already known at the hospital about this case of French leave. So far as I could judge, he really had not been notified. This should have seemed reasonable enough, as her disappearance had not been definitely known until well after midnight; and when I told him, he had not been back in town for more than half an hour; but something about his attitude made me decide to have my talk with Daisy before saying anything further to him. And that afternoon, to aid toward whatever synthesis the evening might produce, I resolved to revise the cellar in the hills.

The trip was a kind of reassuring disappointment. There now seemed nothing at all unusual about the place, except traces of someone having camped there. There was a worn oblong under the shelter o the north wall to show where a tent had been pitched. Six little holes betrayed the location of the legs of a folding army cot. The foundations, made of huge field stones, had nothing strange about them.

Adjoining the cellar I could trace the vestigial remains of a barn. But the grass grew where its floor had been. Only the fieldstone foundations, and the bushes growing thickly around them in a rectangle, remained. I returned to town relieved, if doubly baffled; and my awful imaginings began to quite down for a few short hours, before taking on another form.

Daisy Towers herself answered my ring. “Mother had dinner all cooking at seven when she left,” she said. “Come on in before it burns up.”

She was wearing a black coolie coat with blue designs and loose blue satin trousers. I was pleasantly impressed by the fact that she was considerably more than good-looking. At the switchboard she always had a crispy and businesslike air which now was not apparent.

“You heard about Mike?” she asked, and I nodded. He had been sent to the state asylum for an indefinite period.

As I swallowed the last bite of Washington pie, she said, “I was waiting for you to get that down before giving you the latest tidbits. We’ve got another monster on our hands, born at six o’clock this afternoon.”