QED (25 page)

“That's what he said, Mr. Queen. I wish I had the book here to show you—that beautifully handwritten
Edgar Allan Poe
on the flyleaf, and under Poe's signature the signature
Abraham Lincoln
.”

“Poe's own copy, once owned, signed, and read by Lincoln,” Ellery said slowly. “Yes, that would be a collector's item for the ages. By the way, Miss DiCampo, what's the story behind the other piece—the Lincoln document?”

Bianca told him what her father had told her.

One morning in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln opened the rosewood door of his bedroom in the southwest corner of the second floor of the White House and stepped out into the red-carpeted hall at the unusually late hour—for him—of 7:00
A
.
M
.; he was more accustomed to beginning his work day at six.

But (as Lorenzo DiCampo had reconstructed events) Mr. Lincoln that morning had lingered in his bedchamber. He had awakened at his usual hour but, instead of leaving immediately on dressing for his office, he had pulled one of the cane chairs over to the round table, with its gas-fed reading lamp, and sat down to reread Poe's
The Purloined Letter
in his copy of the 1845 annual; it was a dreary morning, and the natural light was poor. The President was alone; the folding doors to Mrs. Lincoln's bedroom remained closed.

Impressed as always with Poe's tale, Mr. Lincoln on this occasion was struck by a whimsical thought; and, apparently finding no paper handy, he took an envelope from his pocket, discarded its enclosure, slit the two short edges so that the envelope opened out into a single sheet, and began to write on the blank side.

“Describe it to me, please.”

“It's a long envelope, one that must have contained a bulky letter. It is addressed to the White House, but there is no return address, and father was never able to identify the sender from the handwriting. We do know that the letter came through the regular mails, because there are two Lincoln stamps on it, lightly but unmistakably canceled.”

“May I see your father's transcript of what Lincoln wrote out that morning on the inside of the envelope?”

Bianca handed him a typewritten copy and, in spite of himself, Ellery felt goose flesh rise as he read:

Apr. 14, 1865

Mr. Poe's The Purloined Letter is a work of singular originality. Its simplicity is a master-stroke of cunning, which never fails to arouse my wonder.

Reading the tale over this morning has given me a “notion.” Suppose I wished to hide a book, this very book, perhaps? Where best to do so? Well, as Mr. Poe in his tale hid a letter
among letters
, might not a book be hidden
among books?
Why, if this very copy of the tale were to be deposited in a library and on purpose not recorded—would not the Library of Congress make a prime depository!—well might it repose there, undiscovered, for a generation.

On the other hand, let us regard Mr. Poe's “notion” turn-about: Suppose the book were to be placed, not amongst other books, but
where no book would reasonably be expected?
(I may follow the example of Mr. Poe, and, myself, compose a tale of “ratiocination”!)

The “notion” beguiles me, it is nearly seven o'clock. Later to-day, if the vultures and my appointments leave me a few moments of leisure, I may write further of my imagined hiding-place.

In self-reminder: The hiding-place of the book is in 30d, which

Ellery looked up. “The document ends there?” “Father said that Mr. Lincoln must have glanced again at his watch, and shamefacedly jumped up to go to his office, leaving the sentence unfinished. Evidently he never found the time to get back to it.”

Ellery brooded. Evidently indeed. From the moment when Abraham Lincoln stepped out of his bedroom that Good Friday morning, fingering his thick gold watch on its vest chain, to bid the still-unrelieved night guard his customary courteous “Good morning” and make for his office at the other end of the hall, his day was spoken for. The usual patient push through the clutching crowd of favor-seekers, many of whom had bedded down all night on the hall carpet; sanctuary in his sprawling office, where he read official correspondence; by 8:00
A
.
M
. having breakfast with his family—Mrs. Lincoln chattering away about plans for the evening, 12-year-old Tad of the cleft palate lisping a complaint that “nobody asked me to go,” and young Robert Lincoln, just returned from duty, bubbling with stories about his hero Ulysses Grant and the last days of the war; then back to the presidential office to look over the morning newspapers (which Lincoln had once remarked he “never” read, but these were happy days, with good news everywhere), sign two documents, and signal the soldier at the door to admit the morning's first caller, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax (who was angling for a Cabinet post and had to be tactfully handled); and so on throughout the day—the historic Cabinet meeting at 11:00
A
.
M
., attended by General Grant himself, that stretched well into the afternoon; a hurried lunch at almost half-past two with Mrs. Lincoln (had this 45-pounds-underweight man eaten his usual midday meal of a biscuit, a glass of milk, and an apple?); more visitors to see in his office (including the unscheduled Mrs. Nancy Bushrod, escaped slave and wife of an escaped slave and mother of three small children, weeping that Tom, a soldier in the Army of the Potomac, was no longer getting his pay: “You are entitled to your husband's pay. Come this time tomorrow,” and the tall President escorted her to the door, bowing her out “like I was a natural-born lady”); the late afternoon drive in the barouche to the Navy Yard and back with Mrs. Lincoln; more work, more visitors, into the evening … until finally, at five minutes past 8:00
P
.
M
., Abraham Lincoln stepped into the White House formal coach after his wife, waved, and sank back to be driven off to see a play he did not much want to see,
Our American Cousin
, at Ford's Theatre …

Ellery mused over that black day in silence. And, like a relative hanging on the specialist's yet undelivered diagnosis, Bianca DiCampo sat watching him with anxiety.

Harbidger and Tungston arrived in a taxi to greet Ellery with the fervor of castaways grasping at a smudge of smoke on the horizon.

“As I understand it, gentlemen,” Ellery said when he had calmed them down, “neither of you has been able to solve Mr. DiCampo's interpretation of the Lincoln clue. If I succeed in finding the book and paper where DiCampo hid them, which of you gets them?”

“We intend to split the $65,000 payment to Miss DiCampo,” said Harbidger, “and take joint ownership of the two pieces.”

“An arrangement,” growled old Tungston, “I'm against on principle, in practice, and by plain horse sense.”

“So am I,” sighed the Lincoln collector, “but what else can we do?”

“Well,” and the Poe man regarded Bianca DiCampo with the icy intimacy of the cat that long ago marked the bird as its prey, “Miss DiCampo, who now owns the two pieces, is quite free to renegotiate a sale on her own terms.”

“Miss DiCampo,” said Miss DiCampo, giving Tungston stare for stare, “considers herself bound by her father's wishes. His terms stand.”

“In all likelihood, then,” said the other millionaire, “one of us will retain the book, the other the document, and we'll exchange them every year, or some such thing.” Harbidger sounded unhappy.

“Only practical arrangement under the circumstances,” grunted Tungston, and
he
sounded unhappy. “But all this is academic, Queen, unless and until the book and document are found.”

Ellery nodded. “The problem, then, is to fathom DiCampo's interpretation of that
30d
in the document. 30d … I notice, Miss DiCampo—or, may I? Bianca?—that your father's typewritten copy of the Lincoln holograph text runs the
3
and
o
and
d
together—no spacing in between. Is that the way it occurs in the longhand?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Still … 30d … Could
d
stand for
days
… or the British
pence
… or
died
, as used in obituaries? Does any of these make sense to you, Bianca?”

“No.”

“Did your father have any special interest in, say, pharmacology? chemistry? physics? algebra? electricity? Small
d
is an abbreviation used in all those.” But Bianca shook her splendid head. “Banking? Small
d
for
dollars, dividends?
”

“Hardly,” the girl said with a sad smile.

“How about theatricals? Was your father ever involved in a play production? Small
d
stands for
door
in playscript stage directions.”

“Mr. Queen, I've gone through every darned abbreviation my dictionary lists, and I haven't found one that has a point of contact with any interest of my father's.”

Ellery scowled. “At that—I assume the typewritten copy is accurate—the manuscript shows no period after the
d
, making an abbreviation unlikely. 30d … let's concentrate on the number. Does the number 30 have any significance for you?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Bianca, making all three men sit up. But then they sank back. “In a few years it will represent my age, and that has enormous significance. But only for me, I'm afraid.”

“You'll be drawing wolf whistles at twice thirty,” quoth Ellery warmly. “However! Could the number have cross-referred to anything in your father's life or habits?”

“None that I can think of, Mr. Queen. And,” Bianca said, having grown roses in her cheeks, “thank you.”

“I think,” said old Tungston testily, “we had better stick to the subject.”

“Just the same, Bianca, let me run over some ‘thirty' associations as they come to mind. Stop me if one of them hits a nerve. The Thirty Tyrants—was your father interested in classical Athens? Thirty Years' War—in Seventeenth Century European history? Thirty all—did he play or follow tennis? Or … did he ever live at an address that included the number 30?”

Ellery went on and on, but to each suggestion Bianca DiCampo could only shake her head.

“The lack of spacing, come to think of it, doesn't necessarily mean that Mr. DiCampo chose to view the clue that way,” said Ellery thoughtfully. “He might have interpreted it arbitrarily as
3
-space-
o
-
d
.”

“Three od?” echoed old Tungston. “What the devil could that mean?”

“Od? Od is the hypothetical force or power claimed by Baron von Reichenbach—in 1850, wasn't it?—to pervade the whole of nature. Manifests itself in magnets, crystals, and such, which according to the excited Baron explained animal magnetism and mesmerism. Was your father by any chance interested in hypnosis, Bianca? Or the occult?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Mr. Queen,” exclaimed Harbidger, “are you serious about all this—this semantic sludge?”

“Why, I don't know,” said Ellery. “I never know till I stumble over something. Od … the word was used with prefixes, too—
biod
, the force of animal life;
elod
, the force of electricity; and so forth.
Three
od … or
triod
, the triune force—it's all right, Mr. Harbidger, it's not ignorance on your part, I just coined the word. But it does rather suggest the Trinity, doesn't it? Bianca, did your father tie up to the Church in a personal, scholarly, or any other way? No? That's too bad, really, because Od—capitalized—has been a minced form of the word God since the Sixteenth Century. Or … you wouldn't happen to have three Bibles on the premises, would you? Because—”

Ellery stopped with the smashing abruptness of an ordinary force meeting an absolutely immovable object. The girl and the two collectors gawped. Bianca had idly picked up the typewritten copy of the Lincoln document. She was not reading it, she was simply holding it on her knees; but Ellery, sitting opposite her, had shot forward in a crouch, rather like a pointer, and he was regarding the paper in her lap with a glare of pure discovery.

“That's it!” he cried.

“What's it, Mr. Queen?” the girl asked, bewildered.

“Please—the transcript!” He plucked the paper from her. “Of course. Hear this: ‘On the other hand, let us regard Mr. Poe's “notion” turn-about.'
Turn-about
. Look at the 30d ‘turn-about'—as I just saw it!”

He turned the Lincoln message upside down for their inspection. In that position the 30d became:

po

“
Poe!
” exploded Tungston.

“Yes, crude but recognizable,” Ellery said swiftly. “So now we read the Lincoln clue as: ‘The hiding-place of the book is in
Poe
'!”

There was a silence.

“In Poe,” said Harbidger blankly.

“In Poe?” muttered Tungston. “There are only a couple of trade editions of Poe in DiCampo's library, Harbidger, and we went through those. We looked in every book here.”