Capacity for Murder (Professor Bradshaw Mysteries) (28 page)

Bradshaw backed out, nearly knocking Henry over and swung the door shut.

They staggered up the steps, through the kitchen, and out into the yard. Henry coughed until he almost vomited, but then finally got in a good breath and let out a deep rumbling belch. They sat far across the yard from the house in the fresh air.

“Ben—that wasn’t gold buried in there.”

“Not unless gold can grow feet.”

Chapter Thirty-six

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know. Henry, I need you to get Captain Bell.”

“Hell, we need the whole damn army.”

“No, just Bell and a few of his men. Plain clothes. Don’t be followed.”

“You don’t expect him to ride a bicycle here, do you?”

“However he wants to come. Don’t be followed.”

“You already said that.”

“It bears repeating. Everyone is looking for Ingrid Thompson and the gold. The doctor and the neighbor know we’re asking questions about Marion. It’s only a matter of time before they make the connection. If word gets out, the gold-diggers will be swarming the house and woods. I want every scrap of evidence I can find.”

“How much evidence you need? You got four corpses!”

“Evidence she’s responsible for the deaths at Healing Sands.”

“You going back in there?”

“Not the cellar. But I still need to inspect the rest of the house.”

Henry got up, coughing again and clearing his throat. He screwed up his face, shaking his head. “I don’t get it, Ben. She hides the gold in her underthings but leaves the evidence out in plain sight.”

“I think she feels safe here. No one knows she’s Mrs. Thompson, wife, now widow, of a gold thief. If we didn’t know about her connection with stolen gold, we wouldn’t have guessed by simply finding the scraps of cloth and jars. I find it far more troubling that she can set up a worktable just outside the room where four bodies are rotting.”

“Something wrong with that woman.”

“She has no conscience.”

“I’ll vote for that.”

“Leave me my tools and the food.”

Once Henry had gone on the motorbike, Bradshaw reentered the house. He moved through the rooms systematically, startling a few mice back to their nests. Spiders occupied every corner and he hoped they stayed there.

Upstairs, he found Ingrid’s room. There was no mistaking it. The room was a filthy shrine to her obsession for riches. Advertising posters of foreign castles and pages of fashion magazines covered the walls. The floor was strewn with discarded garments and mouse-nibbled magazines. In a jewelry box he found three men’s pocket watches, a pair of gold cuff links, and a pocket knife. He picked through the mess and found a writing desk with several years’ worth of correspondence, receipts, telegrams, and letters.

There was no order to any of it, and for an hour he sorted, pausing to read the personal letters completely. The most telling, the most damning, was dated three years ago.

Dear Miss Vogler,

I received your letter and am happy to provide all you ask. Yes, it was in response to your classified advertisement that I first wrote. A woman in your position must of course go about seeking a farm manager and prospective husband with the utmost care. I assure you my intentions are noble, and should I satisfy you as to the former and not the latter, I shall gladly serve in that capacity as long as needed.

I am thirty years of age, in the best of health, and have been employed in farm management for the past ten years. I have no close kin and very much would like to marry and have children. I am a man of frugal nature and have saved a tidy sum in hopes of one day buying a small farm of my own. Your situation near the coast of Washington State appeals to me greatly. I am prepared to make a down payment on the purchase of your property to show you I am earnest in my desire to ease you of the burden of responsibility. If you will let me know where to have the funds sent, I will do so immediately via Western Union.

I look forward to meeting you next month,

Sincerely,

Reginald R. Fowler

Reginald R. Fowler.

Bradshaw closed his eyes and whispered a prayer for everlasting peace for Reginald Fowler and the others whose letters revealed a similar pattern and whose bodies, he was almost certain, now lay buried in the cellar.

Had she tired of the game? Of luring men here, taking their money and lives? She must have thought in a big city like Seattle, she’d find wealthier men. Had she been unable to get their attention? Come up with a new plan? Met Freddie Thompson of the Seattle Assay Office and decided he would steal gold for her? Had it been her idea?

She must have realized that getting rid of a husband with a public job in a big city was far more difficult than getting rid of a farm manager no one knew in a remote location. She couldn’t simply bury his body in the cellar and hope no one asked where he’d gone. No, his death had to be as public as his life.

And homely Zebediah Moss? Where did he fit in? As a pack mule for the gold? A way to disguise the stolen dust? But if Ingrid had been hiding the gold somewhere here in jars, then Moss hadn’t been passing it through his accounts for Freddie. Ingrid had wanted Moss for herself, not to help disguise the gold, but to get his gold once she got rid of Freddie. Bradshaw imagined what that moment might have been like when she opened the door of her Lincoln Hotel apartment to Zeb Moss, the millionaire miner who came to accuse her husband of theft. It must have been a dream come true for her. A millionaire—uneducated, illiterate, inexperienced with women—knocking on her door.

He set the letters aside to go in search of the gold. He began in the attic and worked his way down to the kitchen without finding a glint. But he found lucifer matches. Dozens of boxes, some of them empty, some full, piled haphazardly in the bottom of a linen closet.

He recalled what Ingrid Thompson said on the porch of Healing Sands about the phenomenon of the glowing water, or rather, about Freddie being made sick by it. She said he couldn’t have swallowed much because he didn’t glow. She must not have known that by soaking the match tips in the tincture of gentian she would negate the glow of phosphorus. She had simply chosen it because Doctor Hornsby had been dosing her husband with it. What had happened that night of the glowing sand?

He was convinced she’d poisoned Freddie. But had she been the one to kill David Hollister? He now knew her motive, but was she capable of it?

One scenario played in Bradshaw’s mind. While her husband, Loomis, and Moss were occupied changing into dry clothes that evening after she’d playfully dunked them, and Doctor Hornsby and the others were still on the beach, she could have slipped upstairs to the electrotherapy room and placed the cheese foil across the Leyden jars. This she must have been planning for several days. Her intention was to kill David Hollister because he’d recognized her.

She killed him to keep secret what was in the cellar of this house. How had she known about his electrotherapy sessions? It seemed reasonable she feared being unmasked and so had watched David, followed him, eavesdropped on his conversations in case he told others about the Voglers. She could easily have seen him enter Doctor Hornsby’s office each morning before her husband’s treatments. She could have listened at the door and heard a treatment in progress. Would she have cared if her timing was off and Freddie took the fatal current? No. So much the better for her.

How had she known how to make the machine fatal? Loomis. Loomis and his parlor trick. Had Loomis shown her more than that trick? Had he been playing some sort of perverse seductive game with her? Had she asked him questions about the machine, asked for a private viewing of the working components, even hinted at the dangers to her husband? Is that what he meant when he said with his dying breath that he didn’t mean to?

And had the glowing sand that same evening given her another lethal idea? An idea that had pleased her so much, she’d been uncharacteristically giddy and playful on the beach. Had she planned to kill Freddie at Healing Sands before the evening of the glowing sand? With Freddie’s health declining because of nerves, his body perhaps even weakened from lead poisoning as Hornsby diagnosed, and Moss waiting in the wings, she must have been watching for the perfect time to get rid of one in order to snatch the other. And here was an ocean she mistakenly believed was filled with glowing phosphorus. She must have seen that nobody feared touching the glowing water, must have heard Doctor Hornsby and David and Moss mention they’d seen the phenomenon before. So she deduced it was not enough for Freddie to get wet: it had to appear he’d swallowed some glowing sea water. So she’d pushed him, dunked him, to get her alibi.

After rigging the electrotherapy machine, she’d spied the colorful jars of ethereal oils and tinctures in Hornsby’s office. She’d likely seen them before. She grabbed the bottle of gentian, knowing Freddie had been given doses of it. And then what? She searched for matches, finding a box in the library. She broke off the tips, slipped them in her pocket or handkerchief, and tossed the sticks into the hearth.

What had she done next? Convinced her husband to take a dose of gentian? It would have been so very easy. What had she done with the evidence? The tincture and soaked match tips? Freddie had been sick in the night, but as she said, he hadn’t glowed. She must have thought he hadn’t swallowed enough poison to glow or die. Did she think she hadn’t soaked the match tips long enough? If she’d prepared the tainted gentian that evening, she couldn’t have let the tips soak long.

But her electric trick had worked. In the chaos of David’s death, had she removed the cheese foil, balled it up, and shoved it under Loomis’ mattress to frame him? Bradshaw’s thoughts stalled. Something felt wrong about that part of his scenario. If she’d wanted to frame Loomis, she only had to leave the cheese wrapper in the machine. So why place it under Loomis’ mattress?

Had she removed it from the machine after David’s death so that his death would appear to be an accident? And then when she learned there was to be an investigation, did she fear someone would figure out the machine had been tampered with and hide the foil in Loomis’ room in case a scapegoat was needed?

Or was he forcing David’s death onto Ingrid Thompson?

Had it been Loomis after all who killed David? But why would Loomis put the wrapper under his own mattress? Bell hadn’t thought it hard to believe, and considering the stupid things he’d witnessed criminals doing over the years, it was no wonder. But Bradshaw found it hard to believe Loomis had either intentionally or unintentionally killed David and then kept the foil in his possession. There was an entire ocean in which to lose it.

With David Hollister, Freddie Thompson, and Arnold Loomis dead, would the full truth ever be known?

Bradshaw found himself standing before the cellar door but couldn’t make himself go down. He turned away and attempted a deep breath, but the oppressive air of the house was claustrophobic. He went outside, pried a few boards off the windows in the parlor and kitchen to let in sunlight, then returned indoors to open a few windows to let in the fresh air. In the brighter kitchen, he studied the water pump at the sink. The water he’d brought wouldn’t last long. He lifted the pump handle, but pumping produced only the hiss of air. He headed outside and found running beside the field a small, swiftly flowing creek. He could well imagine what Henry would say about the creek.
Ha! Water for horses, Ben. Told you so.
He scooped up a bucketful of water and carried it back to the house, pouring it carefully into the pump to prime it. When he pumped, he now felt resistance and heard gurgling. He kept pumping until the water flowed cold and clear, then held his palm under the stream to drink.

A movement outside the window caught his attention. It was far too soon for Henry to be back. He opened the kitchen door expecting it was perhaps the deer wandering into the yard, but it was a man stumbling out of the tangled garden.

The man was covered in briars and twigs and scratches, wearing a backpack and cursing up a storm. A bee buzzed around his face, and he swatted at it with a crumpled piece of paper. When he saw Bradshaw, he stopped in his tracks and gave a final cuss.

Bradshaw said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Moss.”

Chapter Thirty-seven

Moss stared at him. “You gonna tell me where the hell I am and what in tarnation you’re doing here?”

“This is Mrs. Thompson’s house.”

Moss’ scowl deepened as he ran his eye over the decrepit house and then down at the crumpled paper in his hand.

He gave a snort of acceptance. “Any water in the place?”

“Inside.”

Moss marched in and accepted a glass of cool water, drinking it down in one breath. He presented the glass for a refill, then refused a third.

“You look confused, Mr. Moss.”

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

“If you tell me how you came to be here, I might be able to sort it out.”

“I was told to come. Told not tell anyone and not be followed. She didn’t say you’d be here.”

“She? Mrs. Thompson sent you?”