The late Mrs. Clay’s sister was here as well, but her questions had not been answered. Caroline had heard the woman’s voice choked with tears as she put her queries to Roland, but for some reason Mrs. Clay’s spirit had chosen not to respond.
Despite that disappointment as well as her own, Caroline had to admit that it had been a successful—amazingly successful—afternoon. Whoever Roland was, he was very knowledgeable. He transmitted information that Mrs. Sidgwick herself could not possibly have known. She could never have studied up on the family histories of everyone here today to prepare herself, as some mediums—fraudulent ones—were reputed to do.
That Mr. Jones, for instance, sitting on Mr. Clay’s other side. He was a small, nondescript-looking man who had mumbled his queries as if he had a speech impediment. But Roland had understood him well enough and had answered him promptly. Perhaps Roland had mind-reading capabilities, and didn’t even need to hear the questions spoken out loud.
No, thought Caroline, despite Addington’s scoffing at mediums and séances and making contact with the “other side,” this exhibition today was genuine enough to make a believer out of anyone.
She tensed. Mr. Clay’s daughter was asking another question.
“Is Grandmama with you in Heaven, Mother?”
“Yes.” Roland’s voice, coming through Mrs. Sidgwick, was deep and rasping, very different from the medium’s own.
“Is Grandmama there with you now?”
“Yes.”
“Might I speak with her?”
“I am here.” A different voice, higher. The voice of an older woman? A grandmama, in fact?
“Oh, Grandmama, I am so glad to speak to you!” cried Clay’s daughter.
“Good works.”
“You mean—what Papa does?”
“Laying up his treasures for Heaven.”
Caroline heard Mr. Clay clear his throat as if he were embarrassed at this praise. Was “Grandmama” his mother or his late wife’s?
“Oh, Grandmama! How we miss you!”
Clay’s daughter had married a young-man-about-town, dashing and handsome—a bit of a rake, some people thought. She and her husband were among the young fashionables, with a magnificent new mansion on upper Commonwealth Avenue and a lavish lifestyle that was looked down on, Caroline knew, by some of the older, less affluent Boston families. But the girl was Clay’s only child, and he had always indulged her freely. Her coming-out had been the most extravagant that Boston had ever seen, and now she and her husband entertained regularly and expensively and traveled widely, with apparently none of Clay’s concern for doing good.
“Grandmama! Are you there?”
No answer.
“Mama! Mama! Don’t go yet!”
Caroline heard the girl’s voice break. For a moment there was silence in the room as they all strained to hear, but Roland apparently had nothing more to transmit.
Then she heard a new sound, like a pencil scribbling and scratching, papers shuffling. She looked in the direction of the sound, toward the medium, but in the darkness she couldn’t see anything. Amazing, how on a bright, sunny May afternoon this room was as black as a moonless midnight.
They make the room dark so as to deceive their credulous clients, Addington had said, his long, lean face drawn down into an expression of disdain. If you go there, you can expect to see a glowing phantom appear. It will be the medium’s accomplice, shrouded in a sheet covered in luminescent paint. You can expect to hear weird music coming from afar. It will be another accomplice, hidden away in the medium’s cabinet, playing a harmonica. It is all a cheap carnival trick, Caroline.
Well, he didn’t need to know she’d come. This would be her secret—hers and Dr. MacKenzie’s, whom she knew she could trust. And in any case, none of those things Addington predicted had happened. There had been no glowing phantom, no music. Too bad she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of telling him that.
The scratching stopped. Her neighbor on her left, Theophilus Clay, started and made a sound like a grunt, as if something had bumped into him. He kept hold of her hand, however, so she assumed he was all right.
From the place where Mrs. Sidgwick sat, Caroline heard a low moan, as if the medium were in pain. And perhaps she was, Caroline thought; who knew how these mental voyages into the beyond strained the physical body?
Another moan, louder. Then the door opened and the maid appeared, as if that sound had been a signal. Moving briskly around the room, she turned up the gas and twitched back the heavy draperies. Caroline blinked as her eyes became accustomed to the light. All around the table people were shaking their heads, clasping each others’ hands.
With a small, final pressure, Dr. MacKenzie removed his hand from hers.
“Are you all right?” he said in a low voice, smiling at her. She’d been disappointed not to contact her mother, he knew; he hoped she wouldn’t take it too hard.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
As she spoke, turning toward him, she flexed her left hand to release it from Mr. Clay’s grasp.
Mr. Clay’s hand didn’t move.
She turned to look at him as she pulled hers away, shaking it a little. Mr. Clay’s arm dropped and fell straight at his side.
And then, to her horror, he began to tilt toward her, his rather heavy torso threatening to fall onto her, and it would have done so if Dr. MacKenzie hadn’t quickly risen and stepped around to straighten him.
“What is it, Doctor?” said Caroline, not caring if anyone overheard her. “Is he—what’s wrong?”
MacKenzie was grappling with Mr. Clay, fumbling with his cuff to get at his pulse, with his shirt-studs to reach his heart.
Across the table, Clay’s daughter sprang to her feet.
“Papa!” she cried. “What is it? What is wrong?”
Dashing to her father’s side, she pushed MacKenzie away as she slapped at Clay’s face and squeezed his hands. The other people in the room, not realizing what had happened, stared at her in amazement.
“Papa!” She was screaming now, shrieking and sobbing. “Speak to me! Papa! Papa!”
But she was too late. Theophilus Clay, who had apparently been too greatly excited at contacting the spirit of his late wife, had gone over to the other side to join her.
“He was dead, Addington! And I—I was holding his hand, and I never knew!”
It was evening, after a dinner Caroline had been unable to eat. She hadn’t minded not eating; she was too plump as it was, and if she’d had the willpower, she would have fasted often. She reclined now in the parlor at No. 16½ Louisburg Square, her sweet, pretty face, ordinarily rosy with good health, still pale and drawn, her fair, curly hair escaping a little from its Psyche knot. Her feet were propped on the cricket before the fire. Ordinarily the Ameses stopped their hearth fires on the first of May every year, not starting them again until the end of September, but on this chilly night Ames had ordered that sea coal be brought and the parlor fire lit, as well as one in Caroline’s bedroom.
Caroline had told him what happened at Mrs. Sidgwick’s séance. She couldn’t seem to stop telling it. Dr. MacKenzie hovered by her side, his broad, honest face a study in worry and concern. He was twisting the ends of his mustache—always, for him, a sign of distress. He longed to help her, but he didn’t know how. Although he was a medical man, his entire experience had been with the army on the western plains; he knew very little about women, and nothing at all about their often mysterious vapors and swoons. And so now he could only stay by her, ready to offer brandy or sal volatile in case she fainted.
But to her credit she had not fainted—not here at home, nor at Mrs. Sidgwick’s either. What a to-do that had been! In the immediate aftermath of the discovery that Theophilus Clay had died, old Mrs. Ellis had uttered a loud cry and had toppled from her chair, causing a little sideshow. Clay’s daughter had carried on with her hysterics, shrieking and sobbing like a madwoman. But Caroline had been cool and clear-headed. She had gone at once to Mrs. Sidgwick,
who, still weak from her exertions, had not at first understood what was happening. An ambulance, Caroline had said; we must send at once to the hospital.
Dr. MacKenzie had gently reminded her that the unfortunate Clay was beyond medical help; the police, he said, were surely the ones needed now?
Mrs. Sidgwick had a telephone. MacKenzie himself had placed the call; Caroline had heard him shouting in the front hall below. Clay’s daughter had collapsed at her father’s side while her aunt, Mrs. Briggs, tried to calm her. Mrs. Ellis had been cared for by Miss Price. Jones, the small, quiet man who mumbled, had moved from the table to sit by himself in a corner, his lips moving as if he were caught up in prayer.
Mrs. Sidgwick, after her first horrified reaction, had sat quite still, allowing Caroline to hold her hand but uttering no word. The maid who came in to open the curtains had retreated to the hall, where they could hear her sobbing.
“And then the police came?” Ames said now. He spoke gently, prompting her to go on because he understood that talking about it was helpful to her.
“Yes.”
“But not Crippen?”
They were well acquainted with Deputy Chief Inspector Elwood Crippen, a fussy, officious little personage who got some things right but many wrong.
“No. Thank heaven.”
Ames tolerated Crippen; Caroline disliked him; MacKenzie loathed him.
“And they went through some kind of pro forma interrogation?”
“Yes. Well, there wasn’t much they could ask, after all. I mean, what could we tell them?”
“Heart attack, Doctor?” Ames asked MacKenzie.
“As far as I could tell, yes. I thought when I met him, before the séance, that he looked unhealthy.”
“Poor fellow,” Ames replied. “I hope he had his affairs in order.”
“Did you know him, Addington?” Caroline asked.
“Not well. I’ve seen him occasionally at the Somerset.”
That was one of Ames’s clubs, a handsome granite neoclassical building on the rise of Beacon Street across from the Common.
“He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would go in for séances,” Ames added. He gave his sister a look.
“I know you don’t approve, Addington.” She bit her lip; she was not in the habit of apologizing to him, and doing so came hard to her now. “And perhaps I was wrong to deceive you, but I so wanted to see if I could contact Mama.” Her voice broke, and she turned away.
“I understand what you wanted, my dear.” He didn’t wish to bully her; she’d had a scare, and perhaps it had taught her a rough lesson. “And I was perhaps too harsh in my judgment of Mrs. Sidgwick,” he added kindly. “If it gives you some comfort to—but you didn’t, did you?”
“Make contact with Mama? No.” Suddenly she was very tired. “I tried, but she didn’t—couldn’t—come through. Although—”
“What, Caro?”
“That’s odd. I’d forgotten all about it. Dr. MacKenzie, do you remember, just at the end, Mrs. Sidgwick seemed to be doing some kind of writing. And in fact I saw it afterward, when the lights came on—sheets of paper on the table.”
“Writing?” Ames asked. “About what?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t examine it. Just scrawls. It looked illegible.”
“Perhaps she was taking dictation from her control,” MacKenzie offered.
“Yes. I’m sure that’s exactly what she was doing. What are you smiling at, Addington?”
“I was thinking of the Oracle at Delphi. It is a wondrous place, Delphi, high in the mountains—a fitting place, near the gods, to receive a message from the beyond.”
Ames was an amateur of archaeology, among other things. Several times he’d accompanied expeditions led by his former professors at Harvard. He’d traveled to Italy, to Greece, to Persia.
“The Oracle was always a poor girl from the village,” Ames went on. “The priests would give her laurel leaves to chew, to intoxicate her. Then they would take down her babblings and transmit them, always suitably ambiguous, in perfect dactylic hexameter—Homer’s meter.”
“Are you saying that Mrs. Sidgwick may have been intoxicated, Addington? I can assure you—”
“No, my dear, I am not saying that. I am saying that like the Oracle at Delphi, Mrs. Sidgwick may—wittingly or not—have been transmitting nonsense. Although not, I imagine, in dactylic hexameter. And if people want to deceive themselves by patronizing her, it is none of my affair. Poor old Clay got his money’s worth, though, didn’t he? He reached the other side with a vengeance.” He just managed to keep from smiling; sometimes he had a rather mordant sense of humor, which he knew his sister did not appreciate.
“She is a private medium, Addington. She does not advertise, nor does she charge a fee.”
“Hmmm. Then I wonder where she gets her living?”
“I so wanted you to be with us,” Caroline added plaintively. “Not for the séance—of course not—but afterward, when the—when we found him. If I could have telephoned to you—”
She broke off. They had occasionally discussed—had argued about it, even—subscribing to the telephone, and although Caroline thought it a splendid idea, her brother had always said No. This was not the moment to take up the issue once more.
“I could have done nothing,” he said. In an unaccustomed gesture of sympathy, he patted her hand. “You know that. And now—” The grandmother clock in the hall had begun to strike the hour: ten o’clock. “I suggest that you retire. You have had a shock, and you need a good night’s rest. In the morning, all this will seem nothing more than a bad dream.”
MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER Page 31