When she straightened again her own face was as white as milk. She said tremulously, “One of you did this?”
“No,” Dr. Cobb told her. “It couldn’t have been one of us. No one broke the circle until after the professor was stabbed.”
“Then... it was the spirits.”
“He did perceive antagonistic waves tonight. But why would a malevolent spirit—”
“He made all the Auras angry. I warned him but he didn’t listen.”
Sabina said, “How did he make the Auras angry, Annabelle?”
The woman shuddered and shook her head. Then her eyes shifted into a long stare across the room. “The slates,” she said.
“What about the slates?”
“Did the spirits leave a message? Have you looked?”
Quincannon swung around to the sideboard; the others, except for Margaret Buckley, crowded close behind him. The tied slates were in the center of the stack where Vargas had placed them. He pulled those two out, undid the knot in his handkerchief, parted them for his eyes and the eyes of the others.
Murmurs and a mildly blasphemous exclamation from Buckley.
In a ghostlike hand beneath the “John Quinn” signatures on each, one message upside down and backwards as if it were a mirror image of the other, was written: I Angkar destroyed the evil one.
“Angkar!” Dr. Cobb said. “Why would the professor’s guide and guardian turn on him that way?”
“The spirits are not mocked,” Annabelle said. “They know evil when it is done in their name and guardian becomes avenger.”
“Madam, what are you saying?”
“I warned him,” she said again. “He would not listen and now he has paid the price. His torment will continue on the Other Side, until his essence has been cleansed of wickedness.”
Quincannon said, “Enough talk and speculation,” in authoritarian tones that swiveled all heads in his direction. “There’ll be time for that later. Now there’s work to be done.”
“Quite right,” Cobb agreed. “The police—”
“Not the police, Doctor. Not yet.”
“Here Quinn, who are you to take charge?”
“The name isn’t Quinn, it’s Quincannon. John Quincannon. Of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services.”
Cobb gaped at him. “A detective? You?”
“Two detectives.” He gestured to Sabina. “My partner, Mrs. Carpenter.”
“A woman?” Grace Cobb said. She sounded as shocked as if Sabina had been revealed as a soiled dove.
Sabina, testily: “And why not, pray tell?”
Dr. Cobb: “Who hired you? Who brought you here under false pretenses?”
Quincannon and Sabina both looked at Buckley. To his credit, the financier wasted no time in admitting he was their client.
“You, Cyrus?” Margaret Buckley had revived and was regarding them dazedly. “I don’t understand. Why would you engage detectives?”
Before her husband could reply, Quincannon said, “Mr. Buckley will explain in the parlor. Be so good, all of you, as to go there and wait.”
“For what?” Cobb demanded.
“For Mrs. Carpenter and me to do what no other detective, police officer, or private citizen can do half so well.” False modesty was not one of Quincannon’s character flaws, despite Sabina’s occasional attempts to convince him otherwise. “Solve a baffling crime.”
No one protested, although Dr. Cobb wore an expression of disapproval and Annabelle said, “What good are earthly detectives when it is the spirits who have taken vengeance?” as they left the room. Within a minute Quincannon and Sabina were alone with the dead man.
Quincannon turned the key in the lock to ensure their privacy. He said then, “Well, my dear, a pretty puzzle, eh?”
Instead of answering, Sabina fetched him a stinging slap that rattled his eyelids. “That,” she said, “is for the rude remark about sharing your bed.”
For once, he was speechless. He might have argued that she had precipitated the remark with her own sly comments, but this was neither the time nor the place. Besides, he could not recall ever having won an argument with Sabina over anything of consequence. There had been numerous draws, yes, but never a clear-cut victory. At times he felt downright impotent in her presence. Impotent in the figurative sense of the word, of course.
“Now then,” she said briskly, “shall we see if we can make good on your boast?”
They proceeded first to extinguish the incense burner and to open a window so that cold night air could refresh the room, and then with an examination of the walls, fireplace, and floor. All were solid; there were no secret openings, crawlspaces, hidey holes, or trapdoors. Quincannon then went to inspect the corpse, while Sabina examined the jar-encased bell on the table.
The first thing he noticed was that although the rope still bound Professor Vargas to his chair, it was somewhat loose across forearms and sternum. When he lifted the limp left hand he found that it had been freed of the bonds. Vargas’s right foot had also been freed. Confirmation of his suspicions in both cases. He had also more or less expected his next discovery, the two items concealed inside the sleeve of the medium’s robe.
He was studying the items when Sabina said, “Just as I thought. The jar was fastened to the table with gum adhesive.”
“Can you pry it loose?”
“I already have. The clapper on the bell—”
“— is either missing or frozen. Eh?”
“Frozen. Vargas used another bell to produce his spirit rings, obviously.”
“This one.” Quincannon held up the tiny hand bell with its gauze-muffled clapper. “Made and struck so as to produce a hollow ring, as if it were coming from the bell inside the jar. The directionless quality of sounds in total darkness, and the power of suggestion, completed the deception.”
“What else have you got there?”
He showed her the second item from Vargas’s sleeve.
“A reaching rod,” she said. “Mmm, yes.”
Quincannon said, “His left hand was holding yours on the table. Could you tell when he freed it?”
“No, and I was waiting for just that. I think he may have done it when he coughed. You recall?”
“I do.”
“He was really quite cunning,” Sabina said. “A charlatan among charlatans, to paraphrase Mr. Buckley.”
Medium rare, Quincannon thought again, and now medium dead. Plucked and done to a turn, for a fact, though not at all in the way anticipated. “Have you a suggestion as to who stabbed him?”
“None yet, except that it wasn’t Angkar or any other supernatural agency. Annabelle may believe in spirits who wield daggers, but I don’t.”
“Nor I.”
“One of the others at the table. A person clever enough to break the circle in the same way Vargas did and then to stand up, commit the deed, and return to his chair — all in utter darkness.”
“Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
“No more impossible than any of the other humbug we witnessed tonight. We’ve encountered such enigmas before, John.”
“Too often for my liking. Well, we already have some of the answers to the evening’s queer show. Find the rest and we’ll solve the riddle of Vargas’s death as well.”
One of the missing answers came from an examination of the professor’s mystic rings. The one on his left hand that he had referred to as an Egyptian Signet and Seal Talisman Ring had a hidden fingernail catch; when it was flipped, the entire top hinged upward to reveal a small sturdy hook within. Quincannon had no doubt that were he to get down on all fours and peer under the table where the medium sat, he would find a tiny metal eye screwed to the wood.
The miraculous self-playing guitar, which of course was nothing of the kind, drew him next. He already knew how its dancing levitation had been managed; a close scrutiny of the instrument revealed the rest of the gaff.