“You’ll have to be more convincing than that.”
“I’m innocent. Why should I need to convince you of anything?”
“Would you like an attorney present, or will you give me your statement now?”
The detective’s smiling eyes faded into cold stones. He stared long and hard, and Bradshaw returned the stare with what he hoped appeared equal nerve. He would not be drawn into some manipulative conversation by this professional interrogator. Any moment now, O’Brien would claim that one plus one equaled three. Bradshaw’s unnatural desire to speak fled, and he clamped his jaw tight in silence.
“You’re either innocent or the most cold-blooded killer I’ve yet encountered.”
Let the detective say what he will, Bradshaw was through communicating.
The detective gave a huge sigh. “It’s too easy, though. That’s what I don’t like. A man of your intelligence would surely go about murder with more caution. Or is that part of your scheme? Make yourself so obvious a suspect we don’t suspect you at all?”
Bradshaw rose, clasping his notes firmly, knowing it a futile gesture made foolish by the jangle of the cuffs. He craved fresh air.
“What’s your hurry, Professor? Your cell is being hosed down—the last occupant made a bit of a mess of it. But drunks will do that. We have time, anyway. Sit. Tell me about your day. Begin at the beginning. What did you have for breakfast?”
Chapter Five
O’Brien had told the truth—someone had been sick inside Bradshaw’s dank stone cell. The lye soap and cold water splashed upon the mess had done nothing to dissipate the smell. For four hours, Bradshaw stood with his nose lifted to the tiny window high in the cell wall, breathing in wafts of hay and tar and dung. For another four, he lay stiffly upon the sagging cot, immune to all smells, but his hearing attuned to every drip, neigh, shout, and scuttle.
He’d refused to tell O’Brien about his breakfast—a mound of rashers and kippers Mrs. Prouty had served to him as she prattled on about how his mornings lacked protein. He refused to speak at all.
At six a.m., without explanation—innocent men did not summon attorneys, he believed—a key was slid into the lock of his door and he was set free. As he exited the jail, he was handed a thick document that turned out to be a summons to appear at Oglethorpe’s inquest the following day.
He walked home through a thin drizzle that both restored his sense of smell and magnified the odor wafting from the wool of his suit. He skirted his house, entering the backyard gate from the alley. Standing before the charred remains of the burn pile beside Mrs. Prouty’s compost bin, he stripped off his jacket and tie and shoes and socks and threw them onto the pile. For a moment, he stood in the drizzle, his face tilted up, letting the drops wash over him. Then he stepped gingerly across the wet lawn, up the steps and to the back door.
He found the kitchen deserted, the stove warm, water gently steaming from the kettle, the smell of something cooking—oats? Had Mrs. Prouty given up forcing kippers? The day was looking better. The hallway was deserted, as was the parlor where he placed the summons and his notes. But his luck ran out on the stairs.
Mrs. Prouty waited on the landing for him, her brows lifted at the sight of his bare toes. She leaned sideways to cast aspersions upon the damp footprints he’d left on the stairs.
“Good morning, Mrs. Prouty.”
“You look a fright, Professor.”
“How’s Justin?”
“Won’t come out from under the covers.”
In his room, Bradshaw stripped off his shirt and trousers and tossed them out his window. The trousers hit the burn pile, but the shirt fluttered onto the compost. Only a deep-rooted sense of decency kept his underwear from a flight out the window. He took a scalding bath, using fully half a bar of Ivory soap, and emerged from the bathroom wrapped in an oversized white towel to find Justin, still in pajamas, sitting on the floor, Cloppy on his lap. Cloppy was a plump grey horse made from woolen socks and yarn. Mrs. Prouty had made it for Justin when he was a baby. Cloppy’s appearance now indicated how troubled Justin was feeling. Bradshaw’s heart tightened, but he forced his voice to be light.
“Well, well. We must stop meeting like this.”
“Like what?”
“Never mind. Is your bed made? Had your breakfast yet?”
“Why did the police take you?”
“Because I was first on the scene. Did Mrs. Prouty explain to you about the accident and Professor Oglethorpe?”
“Did you kill him?”
Bradshaw looked gently into his son’s eyes. “No, son. I did not kill Professor Oglethorpe.”
“Then why did they put cuffs on you? Why did they take you away?”
“Electricity is a relatively new science, Justin. Most people don’t understand it. I found poor Professor Oglethorpe dead from an accident with the Electric Machine. I understood that something must have gone wrong, but the police have never been educated on the subject. People are often afraid of things they don’t understand.”
“They’re afraid of you?” Justin’s eyes lit up, as if this were something wonderful.
“Well, I suppose they were a little bit last night. But I explained the circumstances, and now I’m home.”
Bradshaw began down the hall to his room, and he heard Justin get up to follow.
“What was the jail like?”
“Cold and stinking.”
“Stinking?”
“Yes, like vomit and horse manure.”
Justin laughed. “Yuck!” And the tightness in Bradshaw’s chest eased a bit.
Chapter Six
“Not an accident, Bradshaw?” President Graves pulled on Bradshaw’s coat sleeve and drew him away from the open doors of Denny Hall. The murmur of students drifted out to them. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the police don’t believe Oglethorpe’s death to be an accident.”
“You mean—murder?”
Before Bradshaw could reply, a cluster of hesitant parents in their Sunday best approached. One of the fathers spoke up. “Is this the Electric Show?”
Graves covered his anxiety with an official smile and an extended hand. “Yes, welcome. We decided to allow the students to briefly show their work to their families, but the exhibition has been canceled, so I must ask you to keep your visit short.”
Many other parents were already in the hall, admiring their children’s work as were curious members of the public who had ignored the cancellation signs posted on the doors, and newspaper reporters, who kept trying to sneak down to the basement labs and were blocked by a strategically positioned cadet officer in full uniform.
“This is getting out of hand,” Graves said as they entered the hall behind the parents.
Bradshaw wasn’t sure if he was referring to Oglethorpe’s puzzling death or the growing crowd. Or both.
Graves had come to tell the students it was time to dismantle their projects, and Bradshaw had come to take the sting out of the request. Together, they moved from one table to the next. The students attempted to subdue their enthusiasm, but pride in a year’s hard work was difficult to smother. Third year engineering student Glen Reeves failed entirely.
A square-jawed and popular fellow, Reeves had boundless energy, able to balance the demands of his studies with athletics, football and baseball, numerous debate clubs, and the social shenanigans of his fraternity. He manned a printing telegraph with a piano keyboard transmitter that sent messages to a receiver on the far side of the room. Each key corresponded with a letter of the alphabet. Reeves explained that he’d scrambled the letters and assigned them a musical note so that when a song was played, only a trained listener could decode the message.
“Nice work.” Bradshaw shook Reeve’s hand. It was a solid job of assembling components, but not the least bit
innovative. Similar devices had been around for decades, although to be fair to Mr. Reeves, he had built a first-class modern version.
The miniature electric cars circling a miniature track had required more work and the application of both mechanical and electrical engineering lessons. The student trio responsible for it beamed at Bradshaw’s praise.
The smell of bacon brought Bradshaw to an electric burner and Miss Sara Trout, a flirtatious junior with a fresh complexion, gleaming black hair, and mathematical mind.
She greeted President Graves politely, then turned to Bradshaw with a questioning expression that implied more than her teasing words. “Professor, I ask you, is it fair I’m forced to do the cooking because I’m a female?” The fact that she’d worn a frilled white apron and held a fork daintily over the sizzling pan countered her objection.
“Miss Trout, you chose the project yourself. How is the heat regulation?”
“Oh, it’s troublesome, there is no middle heat where most cooking occurs. I triple-checked my calculations, and at the low and high current settings, the resistor coils are functioning correctly, giving me predicted temperatures, so the problem must lie in the current delivery.”
“Don’t discount the value of trial and error, Miss Trout. Continue your investigation and you might make an unexpected discovery.”
She thanked him for his encouragement with a smile that lit her eyes. She attempted to hold his gaze longer than was necessary, or comfortable. He ushered Graves quickly to the final display.
Oscar Daulton stood alone at his table. He tucked his hair behind his ears at their approach, and with fumbling fingers, connected a bank of glass battery jars to screw terminals projecting from a handsome large wooden cigar box. A pair of short metal rods were attached to another set of terminals on the opposite end of the box. Daulton closed a switch, and a small flaming arc leaped between the two metal rods.
Bradshaw was intrigued. The flame was silent. Both the batteries and the absence of a noisy buzz told him the leaping flame was powered by direct current. But such a flame should not have been possible from the voltage provided by the batteries. “What have we here, Mr. Daulton?”
“My invention, sir. It steps up D.C. voltage.” Daulton blushed nearly as much as Miss Trout.
Bradshaw was delightedly puzzled. “Impossible.” He placed a hand over the cigar box, expecting heat. He felt none. Direct current couldn’t be transformed like alternating current. Even if it could, surely the components necessary to do the job could not fit into such a small space. Yet there was that flame, defying reality.
“Is it a trick?”
Oscar shook his head. “No sir, it’s my invention.”
Bradshaw met the young man’s eye and saw he was serious.
“Good heavens, Daulton. Have you gone and done something revolutionary?”
Daulton beamed.
“What about input, is polarity limited?”
“No, it will run from a standard A.C. outlet.”
“Will you tell me what’s in the box, or are you keeping it a secret until the patent’s filed?”
Bradshaw had been half-teasing, but Daulton’s shining eyes and tightly clamped mouth told him he wasn’t far from the truth.
President Graves put a hand on Bradshaw’s shoulder. “That’s it then, time to go.” He clearly did not understand that this humble electrical engineering student might have joined scientific history with his mysterious cigar box. Graves was still properly concerned with Oglethorpe’s death. All else would have to wait.
Bradshaw shook Daulton’s hand. “We’ll talk later.”
He followed Graves out the door, down the main stairwell, past the guarding cadet, and into the electrical engineering lab.
Bradshaw shut the door, closing them into an eerie silence. A faint residue of burnt rubber wafted from the charred welcome sign dangling from the ceiling. The Electric Machine, rendered harmless and impotent by the removal of the Leyden jars, had been dismantled. The individual components sat in a neat row along the back wall. Bradshaw crossed the room to examine them again.
“Murder,” Graves whispered. His strength had vanished with the closing of the door. He ran a distracted hand through his thinning, frizzy hair, unwittingly mussing it. Odd strands fanned about his prominent ears, giving him a very youthful aspect. He was as yet, Bradshaw realized, untouched by deep tragedy in his life. This was his first encounter with senseless death.
“That’s what the police suspect, sir.”
The Faraday Cage was still intact. Bradshaw climbed the wooden steps and entered it, placing his index finger where the curved finger of Oglethorpe’s right hand had been. With his finger still resting on the metal, he turned his face up to the roof of the cage, but found no dangling wires, no misplaced or broken bars, nothing that could have somehow come in contact with Oglethorpe. Nothing that could have brought dangerous current into the safety of the cage.
“I should have done something about him.” Graves spoke quietly.
“Sir?”
“Oglethorpe, I mean.” Graves shuddered. “Come out of there, will you, Bradshaw. I know it’s unhooked, but you’re giving me the willies, posing like that.”
Bradshaw stepped out of the cage. “What should you have done about Oglethorpe?”
“I had a desk full of complaints about him from students, the faculty. And you, Bradshaw. I tried to steer Oglethorpe toward a more approachable teaching style, but he was not a man to accept direction. He was so brilliant.”
“Brilliance is highly over-rated.”
“Is it?” Graves wasn’t really listening. “He studied abroad you know, after graduating from Columbia. In both England and Germany, with the most brilliant minds of the day. His research was so valuable to the university’s reputation, I suppose I gave him too much latitude in his classes. I thought he’d eventually settle down to a more comprehensible teaching style.”
“In the meantime, students were in danger of failing.” Bradshaw thought for a moment that Graves would be offended, but he underestimated the man.
“Indeed, Professor Bradshaw,” Graves said somberly. “Indeed.”
Dr. Graves could not truly be faulted for his soft approach toward Oglethorpe. It was a difficult task, balancing the needs of the students with the requirements of the Board of Regents. His vision must be both immediate and long-sighted. It was thanks to Dr. Graves that the two new dormitories had been built and the faculty and enrollment of the university increased. Because of Dr. Graves, the ground would break for a new science hall in October and a new powerhouse would soon generate enough power to see the engineering department well into this new century. Inviting and keeping Oglethorpe, who’d been wooed by universities all across the country, was a clever chess move, designed for current prestige and future glory.
Dr. Graves sighed. “What happened, do you suppose? How did he get himself killed?”
Bradshaw strode along the line of disassembled components, eyeing them critically. “He could have come in contact with the primary coil, the Leyden jars, or the secondary coil. All are capable of discharging a fatal shock while the Machine is energized.”
“Can any of those components be reached from inside the cage?”
Bradshaw paused before saying quietly, “No.” He saw understanding in Graves’ intense expression, in the way his mouth opened slightly. “Was it the students who took the Machine apart?”
“Yes, under Professor Kelly’s supervision and with someone from the coroner’s office and that hulking policeman watching.”
Bradshaw hunkered down and studied the thick copper turns of the primary coil. He could think of no way for Oglethorpe to come in contact with lethal levels of current while inside the cage unless he’d made some ludicrous modification. Bradshaw didn’t put it past him—Oglethorpe had actually once said
he believed himself closer to God than the average man because he understood how God’s greatest creations worked—but Bradshaw would have spotted any such modification when he studied the Machine yesterday and gave that brief demonstration of its power. Nothing had been altered, he was sure of it.
Graves’ shoulders lifted as he shook a troubled head. “Someone must have been here when Oglethorpe died.”
“I can think of no other explanation.” And he would bet that Oglethorpe’s body had been moved, but he didn’t say so aloud. His speculations would not comfort Dr. Graves. Why move a body, unless to cover up a crime?
To cover up a fatal blunder? Was someone too afraid to come forward?
“I saw Mrs. Oglethorpe about an hour ago. She said you were very kind when delivering the news.”
Bradshaw’s throat tightened.
Graves said, “She’s was bearing up quite well. Pale, but chin up. The children looked stunned. I’m not sure they understand, really, that their father won’t be home.”
Bradshaw tried not to imagine his own son in a similar circumstance.
They stood for a moment in silence, the weight of the situation a physical heaviness that made movement and thought as sluggish as running through mud. The scent of the burnt rubber sign made Bradshaw’s nose itch. He rubbed it with the back of his hand and discovered an even more unpleasant scent on his skin. He’d touched so many electric components in the past half hour, the residue of chemicals must have unpleasantly combined. He washed his hands at the lab sink with pine tar soap.
Graves was silent until Bradshaw shut off the water and dried his hands on a clean lab towel. “I wired Dean Wilson about Oglethorpe’s classes.”
Wilson, the Dean of Engineering, was absent on leave with Northwest Engineering, a bridge-building company in Spokane. A sharp and very likable fellow. Bradshaw had missed his presence in the halls this past school year. He was one of the few people with whom Bradshaw enjoyed conversing.
“I thought it best to inform him at once. He sends his condolences, as well as his regards. He suggested you assume Oglethorpe’s physics class until the end of term.”
A Spark of Death Page 4