The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective MEGAPACK ®. Brander Matthews
given her no idea yet about the nature of the trouble.”
Kennedy thought a moment. “Of course,” he said, “your mother has had no such relative amount of the poison as Buster has had. I think that undoubtedly she will recover by purely natural means. I hope so. But if not, here is the apparatus,” and he patted the vividiffusion tubes in their glass case, “that will save her, too.”
As well as I could I explained to Reginald the nature of the toxin that Kennedy had discovered. Duncan listened, putting in a question now and then. But it was evident that his thoughts were on something else, and now and then Reginald, breaking into his old humor, rallied him about thinking of Betty.
A low exclamation from both Kennedy and the surgeon attracted us.
Dora Sears had moved.
The operation of the apparatus was stopped, the artery and vein had been joined up, and she was slowly coming out from under the effects of the anesthetic.
As we gathered about her, at a little distance, we heard her cry in her delirium, “I—I would have—done—anything—for him.”
We strained our ears. Was she talking of the blackmailer, Dr. Hopf?
“Who?” asked Craig, bending over close to her ear.
“I—I would—have done anything,” she repeated as if someone had contradicted her. She went on, dreamily, ramblingly, “He—is—is—my brother. I—”
She stopped through weakness.
“Where is Dr. Hopf?” asked Kennedy, trying to recall her fleeting attention.
“Dr. Hopf? Dr. Hopf?” she repeated, then smiling to herself as people will when they are leaving the borderline of anesthesia, she repeated the name, “Hopf?”
“Yes,” persisted Kennedy.
“There is no Dr. Hopf,” she added. “Tell me—did—did they—”
“No Dr. Hopf?” Kennedy insisted.
She had lapsed again into half insensibility.
He rose and faced us, speaking rapidly.
“New York seems to have a mysterious and uncanny attraction for odds and ends of humanity, among them the great army of adventuresses. In fact there often seems to be something decidedly adventurous about the nursing profession. This is a girl of unusual education in medicine. Evidently she has traveled—her letters show it. Many of them show that she has been in Italy. Perhaps it was there that she heard of the drug that has been used in this case. It was she who injected the germ-free toxin, first into the dog, then into Mrs. Blake, she who wrote the blackmail letter which was to have explained the death.”
He paused. Evidently she had heard dimly, was straining every effort to hear. In her effort she caught sight of our faces.
Suddenly, as if she had seen an apparition, she raised herself with almost superhuman strength.
“Duncan!” she cried. “Duncan! Why—didn’t you—get away—while there was time—after you warned me?”
Kennedy had wheeled about and was facing us. He was holding in his hand some of the letters he had taken from the trunk. Among others was a folded piece of parchment that looked like a diploma. He unfolded it and we bent over to read.
It was a diploma from the Central Western College of Nursing. As I read the name written in, it was with a shock. It was not Dora Sears, but Dora Baldwin.
“A very clever plot,” he ground out, taking a step nearer us. “With the aid of your sister and a disreputable gang of chauffeurs you planned to hasten the death of Mrs. Blake, to hasten the inheritance of the Blake fortune by your future wife. I think your creditors will have less chance of collecting now than ever, Duncan Baldwin.”
CHAPTER XXII
THE DEVIL WORSHIPERS
Tragic though the end of the young nurse, Dora Baldwin, had been, the scheme of her brother, in which she had become fatally involved, was by no means as diabolical as that in the case that confronted us a short time after that.
I recall this case particularly not only because it was so weird but also because of the unique manner in which it began.
“I am damned—Professor Kennedy—damned!”
The words rang out as the cry of a lost soul. A terrible look of inexpressible anguish and fear was written on the face of Craig’s visitor, as she uttered them and sank back, trembling, in the easy chair, mentally and physically convulsed.
As nearly as I had been able to follow, Mrs. Veda Blair’s story had dealt mostly with a Professor and Madame Rapport and something she called the “Red Lodge” of the “Temple of the Occult.”
She was not exactly a young woman, although she was a very attractive one. She was of an age that is, perhaps, even more interesting than youth.
Veda Blair, I knew, had been, before her recent marriage to Seward Blair, a Treacy, of an old, though somewhat unfortunate, family. Both the Blairs and the Treacys had been intimate and old Seward Blair, when he died about a year before, had left his fortune to his son on the condition that he marry Veda Treacy.
“Sometimes,” faltered Mrs. Blair, “it is as though I had two souls. One of them is dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs and is frantic at the sight of the other that has crept in.”
She ended her rambling story, sobbing the terrible words, “Oh—I have committed the unpardonable sin—I am anathema—I am damned—damned!”
She said nothing of what terrible thing she had done and Kennedy, for the present, did not try to lead the conversation. But of all the stories that I have heard poured forth in the confessional of the detective’s office, hers, I think, was the wildest.
Was she insane? At least I felt that she was sincere. Still, I wondered what sort of hallucination Craig had to deal with, as Veda Blair repeated the incoherent tale of her spiritual vagaries.
Almost, I had begun to fancy that this was a case for a doctor, not for a detective, when suddenly she asked a most peculiar question.
“Can people affect you for good or evil, merely by thinking about you?” she queried. Then a shudder passed over her. “They may be thinking about me now!” she murmured in terror.
Her fear was so real and her physical distress so evident that Kennedy, who had been listening silently for the most part, rose and hastened to reassure her.
“Not unless you make your own fears affect yourself and so play into their hands,” he said earnestly.
Veda looked at him a moment, then shook her head mournfully. “I have seen Dr. Vaughn,” she said slowly.
Dr. Gilbert Vaughn, I recollected, was a well-known alienist in the city.
“He tried to tell me the same thing,” she resumed doubtfully. “But—oh—I know what I know! I have felt the death thought—and he knows it!”
“What do you mean?” inquired Kennedy, leaning forward keenly.
“The death thought,” she repeated, “a malicious psychic attack. Some one is driving me to death by it. I thought I could fight it off. I went away to escape it. Now I have come back—and I have not escaped. There is always that disturbing influence—always—directed against me. I know it will—kill me!”
I listened, startled. The death thought! What did it mean? What terrible power was it? Was it hypnotism? What was this fearsome, cruel belief, this modern witchcraft that could unnerve a rich and educated woman? Surely, after all, I felt that this was not a case for a doctor alone; it called for a detective.
“You see,” she went on, heroically trying to control herself, “I have always been interested in the mysterious, the strange, the occult. In fact my father and my husband’s father met throughtheir common interest.