The Jacques Futrelle Megapack. Jacques Futrelle
right,” commented the scientist, “but we don’t know how many victims Singh had. Of course any ‘vision’ was possible with a change of scene in the basement. I imagine it was a profitable investment because there are many fools in this world.”
“What did the girl have to do with it?” asked Hatch.
“That I don’t know,” replied the scientist. “She was pretty. Perhaps she was used as a sort of bait to attract a certain class of men. She was really Singh’s wife I imagine, not his sister. She was a prominent figure in the mummery with Varick of course. With her aid Singh was able to lend great effectiveness to the general scheme.”
A couple of days later Howard Varick returned to the city in tow of Philip Byrne. The Thinking Machine asked Mr. Varick only one question of consequence.
“How much money did you intend to leave Singh?”
“About two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” was the reply. “It was to be used under his direction in furthering an investigation into the psychic. He and I had planned just how it was to be spent.”
Personally Mr. Varick is no longer interested in the occult.
THE FATAL CIPHER
I
For the third time Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen—so-called The Thinking Machine—read the letter. It was spread out in front of him on the table, and his blue eyes were narrowed to mere slits as he studied it through his heavy eyeglasses. The young woman who had placed the letter in his hands, Miss Elizabeth Devan, sat waiting patiently on the sofa in the little reception room of The Thinking Machine’s house. Her blue eyes were opened wide and she stared as if fascinated at this man who had become so potent a factor in the solution of intangible mysteries.
Here is the letter:
To Those Concerned:
Tired of it all I seek the end, and am content. Ambition now is dead; the grave yawns greedily at my feet, and with the labor of my own hands lost I greet death of my own will, by my own act.
To my son I leave all, and you who maligned me, you who discouraged me, you may read this and know I punish you thus. It’s for him, my son, to forgive.
I dared in life and dare dead your everlasting anger, not alone that you didn’t speak but that you cherished secret, and my ears are locked forever against you. My vault is my resting place.
On the brightest and dearest page of life (7) I wrote my love for him. Family ties, binding as the Bible itself, bade me give all to my son.
Good-bye. I die.
Pomeroy Stockton
“Under just what circumstances did this letter come into your possession, Miss Devan?” The Thinking Machine asked. “Tell me the full story; omit nothing.”
The scientist sank back into his chair with his enormous yellow head pillowed comfortably against the cushion and his long, steady fingers pressed tip to tip. He didn’t even look at his pretty visitor. She had come to ask for information; he was willing to give it, because it offered another of those abstract problems which he always found interesting. In his own field—the sciences—his fame was worldwide. This concentration of a brain which had achieved so much on more material things was perhaps a sort of relaxation.
Miss Devan had a soft, soothing voice, and as she talked it was broken at times by what seemed to be a sob. Her face was flushed a little, and she emphasized her points by a quick clasping and unclasping of her daintily gloved hands.
“My father, or rather my adopted father, Pomeroy Stockton, was an inventor,” she began. “We lived in a great, old-fashioned house in Dorchester. We have lived there since I was a child. When I was only five or six years old, I was left an orphan and was adopted by Mr. Stockton, then a man of forty years. I am now twenty-three. I was raised and cared for by Mr. Stockton, who always treated me as a daughter. His death, therefore, was a great blow to me.
“Mr. Stockton was a widower with only one child of his own, a son, John Stockton, who is now about thirty-one years old. He is a man of irreproachable character, and has always, since I first knew him, been religiously inclined. He is the junior partner in a great commercial company, Dutton & Stockton, leather men. I suppose he has an immense fortune, for he gives largely to charity, and is, too, the active head of a large Sunday school.
“Pomeroy Stockton, my adopted father, almost idolized this son, although there was in his manner toward him something akin to fear. Close work had made my father querulous and irritable. Yet I don’t believe a better hearted man ever lived. He worked most of the time in a little shop, which he had installed in a large back room on the ground floor of the house. He always worked with the door locked. There were furnaces, moulds, and many things that I didn’t know the use of.”
“I know who he was,” said The Thinking Machine. “He was working to re-discover the secret of hardened copper—a secret which was lost in Egypt. I knew Mr. Stockton very well by reputation. Go on.”
“Whatever it was he worked on,” Miss Devan resumed, “he guarded it very carefully. He would permit no one at all to enter the room. I have never seen more than a glimpse of what was in it. His son particularly I have seen barred out of the shop a dozen times and every time there was a quarrel to follow.
“Those were the conditions at the time Mr. Stockton first became ill, six or seven months ago. At that time he double-locked the doors of his shop, retired to his rooms on the second floor, and remained there in practical seclusion for two weeks or more. These rooms adjoined mine, and twice during that time I heard the son and the father talking loudly, as if quarreling. At the end of the two weeks, Mr. Stockton returned to work in the shop and shortly afterward the son, who had also lived in the house, took apartments in Beacon Street and removed his belongings from the house.
“From that time up to last Monday—this is Thursday—I never saw the son in the house. On Monday the father was at work as usual in the shop. He had previously told me that the work he was engaged in was practically ended and he expected a great fortune to result from it. About 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Monday the son came to the house. No one knows when he went out. It is a fact, however, that Father did not have dinner at the usual time, 6:30. I presumed he was at work, and did not take time for his dinner. I have known him to do this many times.”
For a moment the girl was silent and seemed to be struggling with some deep grief which she could not control.
“And next morning?” asked The Thinking Machine gently.
“Next morning,” the girl went on, “Father was found dead in the workshop. There were no marks on his body, nothing to indicate at first the manner of death. It was as if he had sat in his chair beside one of the furnaces and had taken poison and died at once. A small bottle of what I presume to be prussic acid was smashed on the floor, almost beside his chair. We discovered him dead after we had rapped on the door several times and got no answer. Then Montgomery, our butler, smashed in the door, at my request. There we found Father.
“I immediately telephoned the son, John Stockton, and he came to the house. The letter you now have was found in my father’s pocket. It was just as you see it. Mr. Stockton seemed greatly agitated and started to destroy the letter. I induced him to give it to me, because instantly it occurred to me that there was something wrong about all of it. My father had talked too often to me about the future, what he intended to do and his plans for me. There may not be anything wrong. The letter may be just what it purports to be. I hope it is—oh—I hope it is. Yet everything considered—”
“Was there an autopsy?” asked The Thinking Machine.
“No. John Stockton’s actions seemed to be directed against any investigation. He told me he thought he could do certain things which would prevent the matter coming to the attention of the police. My father was buried on a death certificate issued by a Dr. Benton, who has been a friend of John Stockton since their college days. In that way the appearance of suicide or anything else was covered up completely.
“Both