Buckley appealed to Sabina. “Will this take long? My wife has borne the worst of this ordeal. She isn’t well.”
This was evident from Margaret Buckley’s talcumlike pallor, the slump of her shoulders, and her somewhat blank stare — the tragic look of a woman suffering from the shattering of hopes and beliefs. Sabina said, “Not long, Mr. Buckley, I assure you.”
“Is it absolutely necessary for us to be in here?”
“It is, for reasons which will become apparent.”
John looked around at the others. “We have nothing to fear from the dead, past or present,” he said. “Spirits were not responsible for what took place during the séance. Not any of it.”
Grace Cobb: “Are you implying one of us stabbed poor Professor Vargas?”
“I am.”
Annabelle: “No, you’re wrong. It was Angkar, just as he wrote on the slate. You must not deny the spirits. The penalties—”
“A pox on the penalties,” John said. “Vargas was murdered by a living, flesh-and-blood person.”
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 discovery prior to tonight that your trusted medium was a fake—”
“A fake!”
“—and you were so enraged that you sought to put a permanent end to his nefarious activities.”
“Preposterous.”
John’s flair for the dramatic was at the fore now. That was apparent to Sabina from the glint in his eye and the swell of his breast. She would put up with it for a time, but not throughout this interrogation. It was she whom Winthrop Buckley had hired, her investigative work that had confirmed Vargas’s charlatanism, her deductions about the murder the equal of his, and she was not about to allow him to claim all the credit for himself.
He had turned his gaze on Grace Cobb. “The same could be true of 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 regarding your relationship with the deceased.”
“I had no relationship with Professor Vargas. None whatsoever!” Which may or may not have been the truth, though the faint flush on Grace Cobb’s cheeks indicated that it wasn’t.
“Or it could be you, Mr. Buckley,” John said, “and your having engaged the services of our agency a smokescreen to hide your lethal intentions for the evening.”
The investor’s eyes, magnified by his spectacles, glittered with anger. And rightly so. Sabina said warningly, “That’ll do, John.”
“It had better do,” the investor 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 possibly have been any of us. We were all seated here — all except Annabelle who was on the other side of the locked door. And none of us broke the mystic circle.”
“Are you certain of that, Doctor?”
“Of course I’m certain.”
“But you’re wrong. Vargas himself broke it.”
“He couldn’t have, it wasn’t possible—”
“Not only possible, but relatively easy to manage.”
“Why would he do such a thing? For an entranced 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 all-powerful Auras,” Annabelle said fervidly. “It was Angkar, I tell you. Angkar who plunged the dagger into his body.”
John 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.”
Margaret Buckley emitted a whimpering sound. Her face was strained, her eyes feverish. “That... that can’t be true! Everything we saw and heard tonight... the visitations... my daughter...”
“Sham and illusion, the lot of it,” Sabina said gently. “I am very sorry, Mrs. Buckley.”
“I don’t believe it, it couldn’t be...”
“Mrs. Carpenter and I will prove it to you, madam,” John said, “by explaining all of Vargas’s tricks during the séance. To begin with, the way in which he freed his right hand while seeming to maintain an unbroken clasp with Mrs. Carpenter’s.” He fluffed his beard and drew a long, slow breath, preparatory to beginning to orate.
Sabina was not about to allow him to hog center stage. She spoke quickly before he could. “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 right hand were gripping my wrist, Mrs. Cobb’s fingers gripping his left wrist. By maneuvering his hands closer and closer together as he talked, in a series of tiny movements, he also brought our hands closer together. When they were near enough for his thumbs to touch, he freed his right hand in one quick movement and immediately reestablished control of my wrist with his other hand, the one whose wrist was being held by Mrs. Cobb.”
Mr. 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.”
During a brief silence while the others digested this, John cast a frowning look at Sabina. She wrinkled her nose at him.
Dr. Cobb said, “Even with one hand free, how could he have rung the spirit bell? I bound him myself, as you saw, and I am morally certain the loops and knots were tight.”
“You may be certain in your own mind, Doctor,” Sabina told him, “but the facts are otherwise. It is a virtual impossibility for anyone to securely bind a person 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 and affect his circulation. 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.”
Dr. Cobb was unable to refute the logic of this. He lapsed into a somewhat daunted silence as Sabina went on to explain and demonstrate the bell-ringing trick.
“Next,” she said when she’d finished, “we have the table tipping and levitation. Vargas accomplished this phenomenon with but one hand and one foot, the left lower extremity having been freed with the aid of the upper right. He—”
John interrupted her by holding up the Egyptian talisman ring, which he had removed from Vargas’s finger, and releasing the fingernail catch to reveal the hook within. “He attached this hook to a small eye screwed beneath the table, after which he gave a sharp upward tug. The table legs on his end were lifted off the carpet just far enough for him to slip the toe of his shoe under one leg, thus creating a ‘human clamp’ which gave him full control of the table. By lifting his ring and elevating his toe while the heel remained on the carpet, he was able to make the table tilt, rock, gyrate at will.”