A Spark of Death

by Bernadette Pajer

  “Both of you participate in the debate clubs here at the university?”

  Reeves turned around. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Professor Oglethorpe led a number of debates. I thought you might recall a student who often took the side of labor, unions, or socialism.”

  “You mean someone who really believed in those things? Someone who would take a debate with Oglethorpe seriously?” Mr. Reeves asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Professor, we all took debates with Oglethorpe seriously. It was impossible not to, the way he was so demeaning. He attacked his foe personally. Really, there was no sport in it, the way he cut you down.”

  “But was there someone who fought him more fiercely, with more skill, on the subject of labor rights or imperialist expansion?”

  “Artimus Lowe,” Miss Trout piped up, her eyes sparkling with an admiration that was absent when she looked upon Mr. Reeves. “A law student, Artimus Lowe,” she said repeating the name as if the sound of it pleased her. “He was brilliant in debating Oglethorpe. Do you remember that debate last month, Glen? When the subject was ‘Manifest Destiny and the War with Spain’? Oglethorpe led a team of pro-imperialist debaters, and Artimus Lowe led a team against them.”

  Mr. Reeves came away from the window to sit again, this time less precariously, on the center of the sofa. “Not much of a team on Lowe’s side. Who’d he have? Trager, Lease, and Daulton? Trager and Lease weren’t too bad, but Daulton, what a ninny.” He shook his head and said under his breath, “Dormer.”

  Miss Trout gasped. “Dormer? Did you mean that as an insult? Have you forgotten I’m a dormer, Glen?”

  A mischievous fire came into the fraternity lad’s eyes and Bradshaw surmised he was imagining that tug-of-war rematch scheduled for tomorrow and seeing himself pull Assistant Professor Hill and all the dormers into the mud. But wisely he said, “I’ve got nothing against dormers in general, Sara, just Daulton. He got so tongue-tied, he nearly started crying. It was painful to watch.”

  “Poor Oscar.” Miss Trout’s face softened. “It was bad. I think he might have been convincing if he’d had a bit more composure. Oglethorpe attacked him with ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and all Oscar could do was mutter ‘but you weren’t there, you didn’t see the blood.’”

  Bradshaw could very well imagine the scene, with Daulton’s hair falling over his eyes as he crumbled before his opponent. If only his confidence matched his intelligence.

  “He got sick, you know.” Reeves gave a disdainful shake of his head. “In the Philippines. Dysentery. They sent him home.”

  Bradshaw let a silence hang in the air until Mr. Reeves swallowed nervously.

  “I don’t know the death toll so far in the Philippines, Mr. Reeves, but this morning’s paper gave the total in Cuba. Nearly four hundred young men died in action. Over two thousand died of disease. Every one of them lost their lives serving his country. Each soldier that returns alive deserves respect.”

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t mean—yes, sir.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Miss Trout, with a you-don’t-fool-me expression. She turned to Bradshaw. “After Oscar, Artimus Lowe got up and was brilliant. You should have heard the cheers when he tromped all of Oglethorpe’s arguments into the dust. It was magnificent to see someone get the best of him.”

  “Does Mr. Lowe always take the side against imperialism?”

  “Oh, no,” said Reeves. “I’ve heard him argue for imperialism just as convincingly. I tell you, if I ever need a lawyer, I’ll hire Lowe.”

  Artimus Lowe was a talented debater and had triumphed even against Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe must have been infuriated, but did Lowe have any reason to be angry with Oglethorpe?

  “Well,” said Bradshaw after a moment’s silence during which the young couple on the slippery couch looked everywhere but at each other. There was no more to ask.

  He left the women’s dorm and followed the footpath to the edge of the playing field. The cadets marched smartly in their regulation gray, the sun on their young faces. The admiring co-eds with their parasols had spread out a blanket to watch while they picnicked. All first and second year male undergraduates were required to enroll in Military Science and Tactics training. Bradshaw spied Oscar Daulton among the troops, looking almost heroic with his chin up and shoulders back. What a difference that uniform made. Out there with his head held high, his appearance matched his keen intelligence. He was one of a handful of cadets who’d spent last year in Cuba or the Philippines as regular army volunteers. They’d all survived, thank heavens, to return to the idyll of campus life and hopeful futures.

  For a moment, Bradshaw’s thoughts turned inward, to a blurry future when his precious son was grown. Would Justin be called to war when he became a young man? Would he volunteer to wear a uniform and go forth in battle? Bradshaw closed his eyes briefly. He didn’t think he could bear it. How did the parents of any of these young men bear it? He said a silent, desperate prayer for everlasting peace, then turned away from the field, toward home.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bradshaw needed to get organized. He rolled up his sleeves and sat at his drop-leaf desk in the parlor, his notes in a neat pile to his left, a blank sheet of drafting paper center, and a steaming mug of Postum, a drink he found uplifting without making him nervous, to his right. The mantel clock ticked steadily, and the fire shifted in the hearth taking the chill out of the evening air. Otherwise, all was quiet.

  He glanced up at his daily calendar. He had scheduled himself nothing for this evening other than grading exams. How stale and pathetic the entry looked, as did all the entries in their neat white boxes. Study this text, write that exam, repair something about the house.

  How had his life become so dull? It was no wonder he’d been enjoying another man’s demise. Until now, he’d been sleepwalking. Oglethorpe’s death had shaken him from this tightly structured existence that had been both his salvation and prison since his wife’s death eight years ago. And yet, he still found the calendar, with his life tidily arranged in clean white boxes, comforting. Dull, but comforting.

  He picked up a pencil and began. A half hour later, he had a graph of the day of Oglethorpe’s death. As expected, the names of students, faculty, and staff and their corresponding activities for the crucial times checked off rapidly. When he finished, two names remained unchecked. One was his own because he still had no proof of his alibi for the approximate time of Oglethorpe’s death, and if he had no proof, neither did the police. The other was Artimus Lowe. With his expensive clothes and lofty manner, Lowe hardly fit the anarchist profile, and he was far too familiar with the law and forensics to have moved Oglethorpe’s body, but Bradshaw had seen Lowe leaving the building rather hurriedly immediately after the lights faltered. What had he been doing in the building? Where had he been two hours prior?

  He studied Lowe’s name and was unenthused. The back of his neck didn’t tingle, nor did his arms feel the slightest bit goose bumpy. Maybe these weren’t signs of imminent discovery after all, and this afternoon he’d merely been experiencing the excitement of the investigation. Maybe. But in the past, when tinkering in his basement he’d been on the verge of inventing a new type of motor gear, hadn’t he felt that same prickling of anticipation? Hadn’t it happened in other situations? Hadn’t he felt it more powerfully than he ever hoped to again when Rachel had risen from the dinner table on the night of her death?

  Sitting back with his Postum, Bradshaw scowled at the unchecked Artimus Lowe and felt not one iota of inspiration. Surely, when observing the name of a killer, he should feel some sort of emotion.

  Bradshaw inhaled deeply and turned his mind to Oglethorpe himself. To that big new house and the two children who looked so much like their mother, to the other child on the way that would never know his father. Mrs. Oglethorpe’s comments came back to him clearly. I’m
sure what I do here isn’t nearly as important, at least Wesley doesn’t feel it’s as important. Oglethorpe was belittling, even to his wife.

  What if Oglethorpe had been the intended victim? Was Bradshaw missing something by attempting to link McKinley and the theory of an assassin?

  Who else had Oglethorpe offended or angered? Did he have other family members in Seattle? Associates outside of the university? What of his clubs? Had he a jealous rival? Any member of the professional organization of electrical engineers would have the ability to stage Oglethorpe’s death. Goodness, Bradshaw couldn’t go about nosing into the lives of Seattle’s engineers. And as far as he knew, no engineer or inventor in Seattle rivaled Oglethorpe. Anyone even close to his caliber was back east, and they were the sort to make their attacks through strategic filings at the patent office.

  Still, who else did Oglethorpe know who might have confronted him at the university? Who might have lured him to the lab with that note? Oglethorpe often bragged of his financial prowess. Had he angered an investment associate? It would have to be someone who also knew a goodly amount about electricity and the Machine. Bradshaw didn’t know of any—wait a moment, yes, he did.

  Good heavens, he did.

  He knew Henry Pratt, friend, boarder, Alaska-bound gold-seeker. Henry! Bradshaw himself had shown Henry the Electric Machine. And Henry had picked up a basic understanding of electricity after so many years association with Bradshaw. And then there was the investment.

  A year ago Henry had gotten himself unhappily involved in an investment scheme with Professor Wesley Oglethorpe. Henry, always between jobs, was one to dive in without thinking when a whiff of fast money was in the air. Bradshaw had brought home a printed flyer Oglethorpe had passed round to the faculty about some oil drilling company that was looking for investors. Bradshaw had tossed the flyer in the kindling pile near the fireplace. That’s all he thought it was good for. But Henry had seen the words “Triple Your Investment—Guaranteed!” in bold black letters and rescued it from the fate of fire. He’d used the nest egg he’d been saving to go north again to buy into the scheme. Henry and Oglethorpe—Bradshaw still could not imagine the two men in the same room, let alone speaking. But a meeting had been arranged. Henry handed over his nest egg, and Oglethorpe promised big returns in three months.

  But after a few weeks, Oglethorpe began to report setbacks. The drilling had run into trouble. Machinery broke, the ground was impenetrable. Six months passed without a penny payoff.

  Henry had flown into a rage, wanting his investment back so he could try again up in the gold fields. Oglethorpe had guaranteed a profit! At Christmas time, Oglethorpe had bought out Henry’s share of the investment, at half its original value, and Henry hadn’t mentioned the deal again. But that returned half nest-egg wasn’t near enough to finance a trip north, and Henry’s wages weren’t enough to make up for the deficit in a few months.

  So where had Henry gotten the money to finance his Alaska expedition kit?

  And why had Henry left on the very day Oglethorpe was killed?

  Bradshaw had been so intensely pondering his old friend, he failed at first to realize he was vigorously rubbing his arms. He glanced down now to see goose bumps prickling his skin.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. He rolled down his sleeves.

  Had Henry typed that note? Henry’s spelling was poor at best. He certainly was capable of writing “thare” instead of “there.” Had he stormed up to the university and found some stern matron to deliver the note during Oglethorpe’s Electrical Design class? For what purpose? He surely wasn’t still angry over the lost investment. And what typewriter would Henry have used? Henry didn’t possess one, neither did Bradshaw. He tried to imagine how such a scene would have unfolded. Had Henry, once he’d gotten Oglethorpe to the lab, forced him to sit in the chair before the Machine, holding McKinley’s bulb aloft? And then what? Had Oglethorpe meekly sat there holding the bulb aloft while Henry concocted some method of electrocuting him?

  Ridiculous.

  Still, Bradshaw’s skin tingled.

  He got up from his desk and paced. Insane scenarios of Henry and Oglethorpe danced through his head. It couldn’t be. It simply could not be.

  Yet why had Henry gone so abruptly? Why on the day of Oglethorpe’s death? And where had he gotten enough money to finance the trip?

  “Henry, you fool!” Bradshaw growled, not because he believed the scenarios playing out in his mind but because Henry was not here to defend himself, to laugh at Bradshaw with that deep rolling laughter that could be heard at the end of the block. Well, he would prove his goose bumps wrong. He marched upstairs and into Henry’s room. With dismay he took in the pristine space, the gleaming floor. The blue quilt on the bed and the white curtains on the window gave the room a clean, fresh fragrance. Every surface of the room gleamed. Mrs. Prouty had outdone herself.

  The bedside table, the dresser drawers, even the large walk-in closet, held no clues to Henry’s life other than the fact that he was not a man of material possessions. He lusted after fortune and fame, but what he would do if he ever attained them was unexplored territory. He’d taken all he owned with him. Bradshaw returned to the parlor.

  So now what? Tell the police?

  No. He couldn’t. But if Henry were guilty, and the police didn’t know to even suspect him—they would continue to focus their attention on Bradshaw. And he would be put on trial. He cast his gaze upwards toward his son’s room.

  A surge of love and of fear gripped his heart, pounding blood in his ears. If saving Henry meant condemning himself—did he truly have a choice? Standing trial, possibly hanging, for Henry’s actions, for anybody’s actions, would be suicidal. It would be like abandoning Justin the way his mother had.

  Bradshaw sat again and with an unsteady hand entered Henry Pratt’s name in the suspect column. He would prove Henry’s innocence and then erase his friend’s name from the chart.

  “Daddy?”

  Startled, Bradshaw jumped to his feet as Justin traipsed into the parlor, dressed as if from a discard table at a rummage sale in a striped nightshirt and a wool pullover sweater. His toes were bare, but his head was covered with a stocking cap.

  Bradshaw moved away from his desk and stood by the hearth. Justin followed him. He was tall for his age and had pale blue eyes. Like Rachel’s. Only Rachel’s eyes had been shallow and cold. Like marbles. And the boy’s were deep. The boy’s eyes were full of love and trust, so full of belief in his father that it nearly broke his heart to look into them. He didn’t fear seeing Rachel in his son, he feared the unknown, his son’s future. He feared Justin ever finding out the truth of his mother’s death.

  “There’s someone at the door,” the boy said earnestly.

  A steady knock verified this. Bradshaw raised an eyebrow. “Expecting company? Is that why you’ve put on your best attire?” How could he close up his desk without attracting his son’s curiosity?

  “No.” The boy beamed up at him. So easily delighted

  “Well, who could it be?”

  The knock came again, and he had a dread feeling it was the police at the door come to arrest him again, or come to inquire about Henry Pratt.

  Justin was giggling now. “Open the door and see, Daddy.”

  “Do you think we should?” He was hoping against hope that whoever was there would go away. He tried not to panic. If only Mrs. Prouty were home to take charge of Justin.

  “Yes.” Justin laughed. “Don’t keep them waiting.”

  “Not polite, is it?”

  “Daddy!”

  “Oh, you want me to answer it. Where is that butler?” He looked about the room.

  “We don’t have a butler.”

  “The maid?”

  “We just have Mrs. Prouty, and it’s her night off.”

  “Oh, I see. Then who is
to get the door?”

  “You!”

  Bradshaw allowed himself to be pushed, cussing the ineptitude of servants under his breath, drawing a string of wonderful childish giggles from Justin. With a flourish, he threw open the door, inwardly bracing to find the men in blue. How wrong could he be?

  Chapter Thirteen

  It had never occurred to Professor Bradshaw that he would find an apparition on his porch. But before him in a flat straw hat and thin summer suit stood a slender ghostly young woman, trembling as if the chilly spring evening were much too harsh for her.

  The young woman spoke, and her words made no sense at all. “Mr. Bradshaw? It’s me, Missouri Fremont.”

  Bradshaw opened his mouth to speak but merely managed to stammer incoherently. It wasn’t possible that Henry’s niece, the author of the letter on the mantelpiece, was standing before him, on his very own porch in Seattle.

  At last he got out, “But you’re in Pittsburgh.”

  “Oh dear, Uncle Henry didn’t get my letter?”

  “It—” He pointed over his shoulder, as well as over his son, in the general direction of the letter on the mantel, unable to explain that Henry had fled for Alaska, that the timing of his fleeing was unnerving because of the recent death of Wesley Oglethorpe.

  He stared at her while his mind raced. She had been a child of three when the letters first began to arrive for her Uncle Henry back in their college years (mere scribbles addressed by her mother). That had been eighteen years ago. Somehow, despite the growing maturity of her letters, Bradshaw had never thought of Henry’s niece as being grown up.

  Underneath that straw sailor hat, Missouri Fremont’s hair was cut short like Justin’s, and it was straight and dark, the color of mahogany. She trembled. Her eyes were an unusual amber color, and they glistened with unshed tears. Why was she in tears? He scrutinized her other features more closely. The straight brows, the long nose, the narrow chin, the wide mouth and full lips. Not a pretty face. A plain unremarkable face beyond the distinctive long nose, were it not for color. The amber of her eyes, the mahogany of her hair, the paleness of her skin, these colors transformed her plainness into something, while not exactly beautiful, quite distinctive.