Chapter 19

“Thank God for telautomatics,” I murmured, as the thought swept over me of what we had escaped. “No one was aboard her, at least.”

Chlorine was escaping rapidly from the overturned storage batteries, for a grave danger lurks in the presence of sea water, in a submarine, in combination with any of the sulphuric acid. Salt water and sulphuric acid produce chlorine gas, and a pint of it inside a good-sized submarine would be sufficient to render unconscious the crew of a boat. I began to realise the risks we had run, which my confidence in Captain Shirley had minimised. I wondered whether hydrogen in dangerous quantities might not be given off, and with the short-circuiting of the batteries perhaps explode. Nothing more happened, however. All kinds of theories suggested themselves. Perhaps in some way the gasoline motor had been started while the boat was depressed, the “gas” had escaped, combined with air, and a spark had caused an explosion. There were so many possibilities that it staggered me. Captain Shirley sat stunned.

Yet here was the one great question, Whence had come the impulse that had sent the famous Z99 to her fate?

“Could it have been through something internal?” I asked. “Could a current from one of the batteries have influenced the receiving apparatus?”

“No,” replied the captain mechanically. “I have a secret method of protecting my receiving instruments from such impulses within the hull.”

Kennedy was sitting silently in the corner, oblivious to us up to this point.

“But not to impulses from outside the hull,” he broke in.

Unobserved, he had been bending over one of the little instruments which had kept us up all night and bad cost a tedious trip to New York and back.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“This? This is a little instrument known as the audion, a wireless electric-wave detector.”

“Outside the hull?” repeated Shirley, still dazed.

“Yes,” cried Kennedy excitedly. “I got my first clue from that flickering Welsbach mantle last night. Of course it flickered from the wireless we were using, but it kept on. You know in the gas-mantle there is matter in a most mobile and tenuous state, very sensitive to heat and sound vibrations.

“Now, the audion, as you see, consists of two platinum wings, parallel to the plane of a bowed filament of an incandescent light in a vacuum. It was invented by Dr. Lee DeForest to detect wireless. When the light is turned on and the little tantalum filament glows, it is ready for business.

“It can be used for all systems of wireless—singing spark, quenched spark, arc sets, telephone sets; in fact, it will detect a wireless wave from whatever source it is sent. It is so susceptible that a man with one attached to an ordinary steel-rod umbrella on a rainy night can pick up wireless messages that are being transmitted within some hundreds of miles radius.”

The audion buzzed.

“There—see? Our wireless is not working. But with the audion you can see that some wireless is, and a fairly near and powerful source it is, too.”

Kennedy was absorbed in watching the audion.

Suddenly he turned and faced us. He had evidently reached a conclusion. “Captain,” he cried, “can you send a wireless message? Yes? Well, this is to Burke. He is over there back of the hotel on the hill with some of his men. He has one there who understands wireless, and to whom I have given another audion. Quick, before this other wireless cuts in on us again. I want others to get the message as well as Burke. Send this: ‘Have your men watch the railroad station and every road to it. Surround the Stamford cottage. There is some wireless interference from that direction.’”

As Shirley, with a half-insane light in his eyes, flashed the message mechanically through space, Craig rose and signalled to the house. Under the portecochere I saw a waiting automobile, which an instant later tore up the broken-stone path and whirled around almost on two wheels near the edge of the cliff. Glowing with health and excitement, Gladys Shirley was at the wheel herself. In spite of the tenseness of the situation, I could not help stopping to admire the change in the graceful, girlish figure of the night before, which was now all lithe energy and alertness in her eager devotion to carrying out the minutest detail of Kennedy’s plan to aid her father.

“Excellent, Miss Shirley,” exclaimed Kennedy, “but when I asked Burke to have you keep a car in readiness, I had no idea you would drive it yourself.”

“I like it,” she remonstrated, as he offered to take the wheel. “Please—please—let me drive. I shall go crazy if I’m not doing something. I saw the Z99 go down. What was it? Who—”

“Captain,” called Craig. “Quick—into the car. We must hurry. To the Stamford house, Miss Shirley. No one can get away from it before we arrive. It is surrounded.”

Everything was quiet, apparently, about the house as our wild ride around the edge of the harbour ended under the deft guidance of Gladys Shirley. Here and there, behind a hedge or tree, I could see a lurking secret-service man. Burke joined us from behind a barn next door.

“Not a soul has gone in or out,” he whispered. “There does not seem to be a sign of life there.”

Craig and Burke had by this time reached the broad veranda. They did not wait to ring the bell, but carried the door down literally off its hinges. We followed closely.

A scream from the drawing-room brought us to a halt. It was Mrs. Brainard, tall, almost imperial in her loose morning gown, her dark eyes snapping fire at the sudden intrusion. I could not tell whether she had really noticed that the house was watched or was acting a part.

“What does this mean?” she demanded. “What—Gladys—you—”

“Florence—tell them—it isn’t so—is it? You don’t know a thing about those plans of father’s that were—stolen—that night.”

“Where is Nordheim?” interjected Burke quickly, a little of his “third degree” training getting the upper hand.

“Nordheim?”

“Yes—you know. Tell me. Is he here?”

“Here? Isn’t it bad enough to hound him, without hounding me, too? Will you merciless detectives drive us all from, place to place with your brutal suspicions?”

“Merciless?” inquired Burke, smiling with sarcasm. “Who has been hounding him?”

“You know very well what I mean,” she repeated, drawing herself up to her full height and patting Gladys’s hand to reassure her. “Read that message on the table.”

Burke picked up a yellow telegram dated New York, two days before.

It was as I feared when I left you. The secret service must have rummaged my baggage both here and at the hotel. They have taken some very valuable papers of mine.

“Secret service—rummage baggage?” repeated Burke, himself now in perplexity. “That is news to me. We have rummaged no trunks or bags, least of all Nordheim’s. In fact, we have never been able to find them at all.”

“Upstairs, Burke—the servants’ quarters,” interrupted Craig impatiently. “We are wasting time here.”

Mrs. Brainard offered no protest. I began to think that the whole thing was indeed a surprise to her, and that she had, in fact, been reading, instead of making a studied effort to appear surprised at our intrusion.

Room after room was flung open without finding any one, until we reached the attic, which had been finished off into several rooms. One door was closed. Craig opened it cautiously. It was pitch dark in spite of the broad daylight outside. We entered gingerly.

On the floor lay two dark piles of something. My foot touched one of them. I drew back in horror at the feeling. It was the body of a man.

Kennedy struck a light, and as he bent over in its little circle of radiance, he disclosed a ghastly scene.

“Hari-kiri!” he ejaculated. “They must have got my message to Burke and have seen that the house was surrounded.”

The two Japanese servants had committed suicide.

“Wh-what does it all mean?” gasped Mrs. Brainard, who had followed us upstairs with Gladys.

Burke’s lip curled slightly and he was about to speak.

“It means,” hastened Kennedy, “that you have been double crossed, Mrs. Brainard. Nordheim stole those plans of Captain Shirley’s submarine for his Titan Iron Works. Then the Japs stole them from his baggage at the hotel. He thought the secret service had them. The Japs waited here just long enough to try the plans against the Z99 herself—to destroy Captain Shirley’s work by his own method of destruction. It was clever, clever. It would make his labours seem like a failure and would discourage others from keeping up the experiments. They had planned to steal a march on the world. Every time the Z99 was out they worked up here with their improvised wireless until they found the wave-length Shirley was using. It took fifteen or twenty minutes, but they managed, finally, to interfere so that they sent the submarine to the bottom of the harbour. Instead of being the criminal, Burke, Mrs. Brainard is the victim, the victim both of Nordheim and of her servants.”

Craig had thrown open a window and had dropped down on his knees before a little stove by which the room was heated. He was poking eagerly in a pile of charred paper and linen.

“Shirley,” he cried, “your secret is safe, even though the duplicate plans were stolen. There will be no more interference.”

The Captain seized Craig by both hands and wrung them like the handle of a pump.

“Oh, thank you—thank you—thank you,” cried Gladys, running up and almost dancing with joy at the change in her father. “I—I could almost—kiss you!”

“I could let you,” twinkled Craig, promptly, as she blushed deeply. “Thank you, too, Mrs. Brainard,” he added, turning to acknowledge her congratulations also. “I am glad I have been able to be of service to you.”

“Won’t you come back to the house for dinner?” urged the Captain.

Kennedy looked at me and smiled. “Walter,” he said, “this is no place for two old bachelors like us.”

Then turning, he added, “Many thanks, sir,—but, seriously, last night we slept principally in day coaches. Really I must turn the case over to Burke now and get back to the city to-night early.”

They insisted on accompanying us to the station, and there the congratulations were done all over again.

“Why,” exclaimed Kennedy, as we settled ourselves in the Pullman after waving a final good-bye, “I shall be afraid to go back to that town again. I—I almost did kiss her!”

Then his face settled into its usual stern lines, although softened, I thought. I am sure that it was not the New England landscape, with its quaint stone fences, that he looked at out of the window, but the recollection of the bright dashing figure of Gladys Shirley.

It was seldom that a girl made so forcible an impression on Kennedy, I know, for on our return he fairly dived into work, like the Z99 herself, and I did not see him all the next day until just before dinner time. Then he came in and spent half an hour restoring his acid-stained fingers to something like human semblance.

He said nothing about his research work of the day, and I was just about to remark that a day had passed without its usual fresh alarum and excursion, when a tap on the door buzzer was followed by the entrance of our old friend Andrews, head of the Great Eastern Life Insurance Company’s own detective service.

“Kennedy,” he began, “I have a startling case for you. Can you help me out with it?”

As he sat down heavily, he pulled from his immense black wallet some scraps of paper and newspaper cuttings.

“You recall, I suppose,” he went on, unfolding the papers without waiting for an answer, “the recent death of young Montague Phelps, at Woodbine, just outside the city?”

Kennedy nodded. The death of Phelps, about ten days before, had attracted nation-wide attention because of the heroic fight for life he had made against what the doctors admitted had puzzled them—a new and baffling manifestation of coma. They had laboured hard to keep him awake, but had not succeeded, and after several days of lying in a comatose state he had finally succumbed. It was one of those strange but rather frequent cases of long sleeps reported in the newspapers, although it was by no means one which might be classed as record-breaking.

The interest in Phelps lay, a great deal, in the fact that the young man had married the popular dancer, Anginette Petrovska, a few months previously. His honeymoon trip around the world had suddenly been interrupted, while the couple were crossing Siberia, by the news of the failure of the Phelps banking-house in Wall Street and the practical wiping-out of his fortune. He had returned, only to fall a victim to a greater misfortune.

“A few days before his death,” continued Andrews, measuring his words carefully, “I, or rather the Great Eastern, which had been secretly investigating the case, received this letter. What do you think of it?”

He spread out on the table a crumpled note in a palpably disguised handwriting:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

You would do well to look Into the death of Montague Phelps, Jr. I accuse no one, assert nothing. But when a young man apparently in the best of health, drops off so mysteriously and even the physician in the case can give no very convincing information, that case warrants attention. I know what I know.

AN OUTSIDER.

XXI

THE GHOULS

“H-M,” mused Kennedy, weighing the contents of the note carefully, “one of the family, I’ll be bound—unless the whole thing is a hoax. By the way, who else is there in the immediate family?”

“Only a brother, Dana Phelps, younger and somewhat inclined to wildness, I believe. At least, his father did not trust him with a large inheritance, but left most of his money in trust. But before we go any further, read that.”

Andrews pulled from the papers a newspaper cutting on which he had drawn a circle about the following item. As we read, he eyed us sharply.

PHELPS TOMB DESECRATED

Last night, John Shaughnessy, a night watchman employed by the town of Woodbine, while on his rounds, was attracted by noises as of a violent struggle near the back road in the Woodbine Cemetery, on the outskirts of the town. He had varied his regular rounds because of the recent depredations of motor-car yeggmen who had timed him in pulling off several jobs lately. As he hurried toward the large mausoleum of the Phelps family, he saw two figures slink away in opposite directions in the darkness. One of them, he asserts positively, seemed to be a woman in black, the other a man whom he could not see clearly. They readily eluded pursuit in the shadows, and a moment later he heard the whir of a high-powered car, apparently bearing them away.

At the tomb there was every evidence of a struggle. Things had been thrown about; the casket had been broken open, but the body of Montague Phelps, Jr., which had been interred there about ten days ago, was not touched or mutilated.

It was a shocking and extraordinary violation. Shaughnessy believes that some personal jewels may have been buried with Phelps and that the thieves were after them, that they fought over the loot, and in the midst of the fight were scared away.

The vault is of peculiar construction, a costly tomb in which repose the bodies of the late Montague Phelps, Sr., of his wife, and now of his eldest son. The raid had evidently been carefully planned to coincide with a time when Shaughnessy would ordinarily have been on the other side of the town. The entrance to the tomb had been barred, but during the commotion the ghouls were surprised and managed to escape without accomplishing their object and leaving no trace.

Mrs. Phelps, when informed of the vandalism, was shocked, and has been in a very nervous state since the tomb was forced open. The local authorities seem extremely anxious that every precaution should be taken to prevent a repetition of the ghoulish visit to the tomb, but as yet the Phelps family has taken no steps.

“Are you aware of any scandal, any skeleton in the closet in the family?” asked Craig, looking up.

“No—not yet,” considered Andrews. “As soon as I heard of the vandalism, I began to wonder what could have happened in the Phelps tomb, as far as our company’s interests were concerned. You see, that was yesterday. To-day this letter came along,” he added, laying down a second very dirty and wrinkled note beside the first. It was quite patently written by a different person from the first; its purport was different, indeed quite the opposite of the other. “It was sent to Mrs. Phelps,” explained Andrews, “and she gave it out herself to the police.”

Do not show this to the police. Unless you leave $5000 in gold in the old stump in the swamp across from the cemetery, you will have reason to regret it. If you respect the memory of the dead, do this, and do it quietly.

BLACK HAND.

“Well,” I ejaculated, “that’s cool. What threat would be used to back this demand on the Phelpses?”

“Here’s the situation,” resumed Andrews, puffing violently on his inevitable cigar and toying with the letters and clippings. “We have already held up payment of the half-million dollars of insurance to the widow as long as we can consistently do so. But we must pay soon, scandal or not, unless we can get something more than mere conjecture.”

“You are already holding it up?” queried Craig.

“Yes. You see, we investigate thoroughly every suspicious death. In most cases, no body is found. This case is different in that respect. There is a body, and it is the body of the insured, apparently. But a death like this, involving the least mystery, receives careful examination, especially if, as in this case, it has recently been covered by heavy policies. My work has often served to reverse the decision of doctors and coroners’ juries.

“An insurance detective, as you can readily appreciate, Kennedy, soon comes to recognise the characteristics in the crimes with which he deals. For example, writing of the insurance plotted for rarely precedes the conspiracy to defraud. That is, I know of few cases in which a policy originally taken out in good faith has subsequently become the means of a swindle.

“In outright-murder cases, the assassin induces the victim to take out insurance in his favour. In suicide cases, the insured does so himself. Just after his return home, young Phelps, who carried fifty thousand dollars already, applied for and was granted one of the largest policies we have ever written—half a million.”

“Was it incontestible without the suicide clause?” asked Kennedy.

“Yes,” replied Andrews, “and suicide is the first and easiest theory. Why, you have no idea how common the crime of suicide for the sake of the life insurance is becoming. Nowadays, we insurance men almost believe that every one who contemplates ending his existence takes out a policy so as to make his life, which is useless to him, a benefit, at least, to some one—and a nightmare to the insurance detective.”

“I know,” I cut in, for I recalled having been rather interested in the Phelps case at the time, “but I thought the doctors said finally that death was due to heart failure.”

“Doctor Forden who signed the papers said so,” corrected Andrews. “Heart failure—what does that mean? As well say breath failure, or nerve failure. I’ll tell you what kind of failure I think it was. It was money failure. Hard times and poor investments struck Phelps before he really knew how to handle his small fortune. It called him home and—pouf!—he is off—to leave to his family a cool half-million by his death. But did he do it himself or did some one else do it? That’s the question.”

“What is your theory,” inquired Kennedy absently, “assuming there is no scandal hidden in the life of Phelps before or after he married the Russian dancer?”

“I don’t know, Kennedy,” confessed Andrews. “I have had so many theories and have changed them so rapidly that all I lay claim to believing, outside of the bald facts that I have stated, is that there must have been some poison. I rather sense it, feel that there is no doubt of it, in fact. That is why I have come to you. I want you to clear it up, one way or another. The company has no interest except in getting at the truth.”

“The body is really there?” asked Kennedy. “You saw it?”

“It was there no later than this afternoon, and in an almost perfect state of preservation, too.”

Kennedy seemed to be looking at and through Andrews as if he would hypnotise the truth out of him. “Let me see,” he said quickly. “It is not very late now. Can we visit the mausoleum to-night?”

“Easily. My car is down-stairs. Woodbine is not far, and you’ll find it a very attractive suburb, aside from this mystery.”

Andrews lost no time in getting us out to Woodbine, and on the fringe of the little town, one of the wealthiest around the city, he deposited us at the least likely place of all, the cemetery. A visit to a cemetery is none too enjoyable even on a bright day. In the early night it is positively uncanny. What was gruesome in the daylight became doubly so under the shroud of darkness.

We made our way into the grounds through a gate, and I, at least, even with all the enlightenment of modern science, could not restrain a weird and creepy sensation.

“Here is the Phelps tomb,” directed Andrews, pausing beside a marble structure of Grecian lines and pulling out a duplicate key of a new lock which had been placed on the heavy door of grated iron. As we entered, it was with a shudder at the damp odour of decay. Kennedy had brought his little electric bull’s-eye, and, as he flashed it about, we could see at a glance that the reports had not been exaggerated. Everything showed marks of a struggle. Some of the ornaments had been broken, and the coffin itself had been forced open.

“I have had things kept just as we found them,” explained Andrews.

Kennedy peered into the broken coffin long and attentively. With a little effort I, too, followed the course of the circle of light. The body was, as Andrews had said, in an excellent, indeed a perfect, state of preservation. There were, strange to say, no marks of decay.

“Strange, very strange,” muttered Kennedy to himself.

“Could it have been some medical students, body-snatchers?” I asked musingly. “Or was it simply a piece of vandalism? I wonder if there could have been any jewels buried with him, as Shaughnessy said? That would make the motive plain robbery.”

“There were no jewels,” said Andrews, his mind not on the first part of my question, but watching Kennedy intently.

Craig had dropped on his knees on the damp, mildewed floor, and bringing his bull’s-eye close to the stones, was examining some spots here and there.

“There could not have been any substitution?” I whispered, with, my mind still on the broken coffin. “That would cover up the evidence of a poisoning, you know.”

“No,” replied Andrews positively, “although bodies can be obtained cheaply enough from a morgue, ostensibly for medical purposes. No, that is Phelps, all right.”

“Well, then,” I persisted, “body-snatchers, medical students?”

“Not likely, for the same reason,” he rejected.

We bent over closer to watch Kennedy. Apparently he had found a number of round, flat spots with little spatters beside them. He was carefully trying to scrape them up with as little of the surrounding mould as possible.

Suddenly, without warning, there was a noise outside, as if a person were moving through the underbrush. It was fearsome in its suddenness. Was it human or wraith? Kennedy darted to the door in time to see a shadow glide silently away, lost in the darkness of the fine old willows. Some one had approached the mausoleum for a second time, not knowing we were there, and had escaped. Down the road we could hear the purr of an almost silent motor.

“Somebody is trying to get in to conceal something here,” muttered Kennedy, stifling his disappointment at not getting a closer view of the intruder.