“John, look at this.”
Sabina was at the sideboard, fingering a small bottle. When he’d set the guitar down and joined her he saw that she had removed the bottle’s glass stopper. “This was among the others on the tray,” she told him, and held it up for him to sniff its contents.
“Ah,” he said. “Almond oil.”
“Mixed with white phosphorous, surely.”
He nodded. “The contents of the other bottles?”
“Liquor and incense oils. Nothing more than window dressing.”
Quincannon stood looking at the sideboard. At length he knelt and ran his hands over its smooth front, its fancily inlayed center top. There seemed to be neither doors nor a way to lift open the top, as if the sideboard might be a sealed wooden box. This proved not to be the case, however. It took him several minutes to locate the secret spring catch, cleverly concealed as it was among the dark-squared inlays. As soon as he pressed it, the catch released noiselessly and the entire top slid up and back on oiled hinges.
The interior was a narrow, hollow space — a box, in fact, that seemed more like a child’s toy chest than a sideboard. A clutch of items were pushed into one corner. Quincannon lifted them out one by one.
A yard or two of white silk.
Another yard of fine white netting, so fine that it could be wadded into a ball no larger than a walnut.
A two-foot-square piece of black cloth.
A small container of safety matches.
A theatrical mask.
And a pair of rubber gloves almost but not quite identical, both of which had been stuffed with cotton and dipped in melted paraffin.
He returned each item to the sideboard, finally closed the lid. He said with satisfaction, “That leaves only the writing on the slates. And we know now how that was done, don’t we, my dear?”
“And how Professor Vargas was murdered.”
“And by whom.”
They smiled at each other. Smiles that gleamed wolfishly in the trembling gaslight.
Neither the Buckleys nor the Cobbs took kindly to being ushered back into the séance room, even though Quincannon had moved both Vargas’s body and chair away from the table and draped them with a cloth Sabina had found in another room. There was some grumbling when he asked them to assume their former positions around the table, but they all complied. A seventh chair had been added at Vargas’s place; he invited Annabelle to sit there. She, too, complied, maintaining a stoic silence.
Buckley asked, “Will this take long, Quincannon? My wife has borne the worst of this ordeal. She isn’t well.”
“Not long, Mr. Buckley, I assure you.”
“Is it absolutely necessary for us to be in here?”
“It is.” Quincannon looked around at the others. “We have nothing to fear from the dead, past or present. The spirits were not responsible for what took place here tonight. Not any of it.”
Grace Cobb: “Are you saying one of us stabbed Professor Vargas?”
Annabelle: “No. It was Angkar. You mustn’t deny the spirits. The penalties—”
“A pox on the penalties,” Quincannon said. “Professor Vargas was murdered by a living, flesh-and-blood individual.”
Dr. Cobb: “Who? If you’re so all-fired certain it was one of us, name him.”
“Perhaps it was you, Doctor.”
“See here—! What motive could I possibly have?”
“Any one of several. Such as a discovery prior to tonight that Vargas was a fake—”
“A fake!”
“— and you were so enraged by his duplicity that you determined to put a stop to it once and for all.”
“Preposterous.”
Quincannon was enjoying himself now. Dramatic situations appealed to his nature; he was, as Sabina had more than once pointed out, a bit of a ham. He turned his gaze on Grace Cobb. “Or you, Mrs. Cobb. Perhaps you’re the guilty party.”
She regarded him haughtily. “If that is an accusation—”
“Not at all. Merely a suggestion of possibility, of hidden motives of your own.” Such as an interest in the medium that had gone beyond the spiritual and ended in a spurned lover’s — or even a blackmail victim’s — murderous rage.
“Or it could be you, Mr. Buckley, and your hiring of Carpenter and Quincannon but a smokescreen to hide your lethal intentions for this evening.”
The financier’s eyes glittered with anger. Sabina said warningly, “That’ll do, John.”
“It had better do,” Buckley said, “if you entertain any hope of receiving the balance of your fee. You know full well neither I nor my wife ended that scoundrel’s life.”
Dr. Cobb: “I don’t see how it could have been any of us. We were all seated here — all except Annabelle, and she was on the other side of the locked door. And none of us broke the circle.”
“Are you certain of that, Doctor?” Quincannon asked.
“Of course I’m certain.”
“But you’re wrong. Vargas himself broke it.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not at all. Neither impossible nor difficult to manage.”
“Why would he do such a thing? For a medium to break the mystic circle is to risk the wrath of the spirits, endanger his own life. He told us so himself.”
“He had already incurred the wrath of the Auras,” Annabelle said fervidly. “It was Angkar, I tell you. Angkar who plunged the dagger into his body—”
Quincannon ignored her. He said to no one in particular, “You don’t seem to have grasped my words to you a minute ago. Professor Vargas was a fake. The Unified College of the Attuned Impulses is a fake. He was no more sensitive to the spirit world than you or I or President Cleveland.”
“That... that can’t be true!” Margaret Buckley’s face was strained, her eyes feverish. “Everything we saw and heard tonight... the visitations... my daughter...”
“Sham and illusion, the lot of it,” Sabina said gently. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Buckley.”
“But... but how...”
“We’ll explain,” Quincannon told her, “all of Vargas’s tricks during the séance. To begin with, the way in which he freed his left hand while seeming to maintain an unbroken clasp of hands.
“The essence of that trick lies in the fact that the hand consists of both a wrist and fingers and the wrist is able to bend in different directions. The fingers of Vargas’s left hand, you remember, were holding Mrs. Carpenter’s wrist, while Mrs. Cobb’s fingers were gripping his right wrist. By maneuvering his hands closer and closer together as he talked, in a series of small spasmodic movements, he also brought the ladies’ hands closer together. When they were near enough for his own thumbs to touch, he freed his left hand in one quick movement and immediately reestablished control with his right — the same hand’s fingers holding Mrs. Carpenter while its wrist was being gripped by Mrs. Cobb.”
Buckley: “But how could he manage that when we were all concentrating on tight control?”
“He coughed once, rather loudly, if you recall. The sound was a calculated aural distraction. In that instant — and an instant was all it took — he completed the maneuver. He also relied on the fact that a person’s senses become unreliable after a protracted period of sitting in total darkness. What you think you see, hear, feel at any given moment may in fact be partly or completely erroneous.”
There was a brief silence while the others digested this. Dr. Cobb said then, “Even with one hand free, how could he have rung the spirit bell? I bound him myself, Quincannon, and I am morally certain the loops and knots were tight.”
“You may be certain in your own mind, Doctor, but the facts are otherwise. It is a near impossibility for anyone, even a professional detective, to securely tie a man to a chair with a single length of rope. And you were flurried, self-conscious, anxious to acquit yourself well of the business, and you are a gentleman besides. You would hardly bind a man such as Professor Vargas, whom you admired and respected, with enough constriction of the rope to cut into his flesh. A fraction of an inch of slack is all a man who has been tied many times before, who is skilled in muscular control, requires in order to free one hand.”