Beneath the cash lay a dirty white envelope, stained by grimy fingerprints and spilled drink. Inside Bradshaw found only a floral-scented square of card stock embossed with La France Rose Perfume, such as department stores regularly handed out. He slipped the envelope in his pocket and returned the unlocked box to the drawer.
The second lower drawer clinked when he pulled it open as whiskey bottles rocked and tipped. A slight whiff of alcohol drifted up to him. All the bottles were corked. All the bottles were empty. Except one. It was shorter than the others, and made of dark glass. Bradshaw pulled it out to see the label. “Electrozone. It will cure you of cancer, female complaints, scrofula, diphtheria, consumption, asthma, and compulsions.”
He uncorked the nearly full bottle and gave it a whiff, wincing at the sharp odor of chlorine. Made through electrolysis with sea water, Electrozone was an expensive sanitizer and effective antiseptic. While the United States military trusted it to rid Havana, Cuba, of yellow fever, Bradshaw was skeptical of its ability to cure all, especially the compulsion to drink. It certainly had not helped Vernon Doyle.
The smell of coffee wafted up to him. He returned the Electrozone to the drawer and met Mrs. Doyle downstairs in the parlor, where she’d carried a tray with the coffee and an assortment of fruit cookies brought to her by friends.
She poured for him, and pressed him to eat, but she took nothing herself, sitting upright, looking everywhere but at him.
“I discovered nothing I didn’t already know or suspect, Mrs. Doyle.”
“Oh.” She picked at her dress. “Thank you.”
“There’s cash in the desk. Enough that you shouldn’t have to worry about finding work right away. And a savings pass book, but if the entries are correct, little money on account.”
She nodded and said thank you again, but so softly the sound didn’t carry.
“Did your husband have a home workshop?”
“A workshop?”
“A place he kept his tools, built things. In the basement? Or a shed?”
“Oh, no. We have no basement, and the shed has only gardening tools. There’s a drawer in the kitchen where we keep a hammer and nails and a few other things.”
“May I see?”
She showed him the drawer, which was similar to the one in Mrs. Prouty’s kitchen, with basic household tools for hanging pictures and making simple repairs. “He kept his electrician tools at work, so that he didn’t have to cart them back and forth each day.”
The evidence upstairs and the lack of home tinkering space told Bradshaw that to Vernon Doyle, electricity was a job, not a passion. A job that earned him respect and a good salary, a job he boasted of, but it went no deeper. He was no inventor. His drawings represented a desire for fame and glory. Discoveries came not from a desire to impress, but from the obsession to express an idea born of inspiration. And Vernon Doyle had not been inspired.
They returned to the parlor, and for the next twenty minutes as they drank, he gently asked questions of Vernon Doyle’s habits and acquaintances, but he learned only that Doyle had treated his wife like a poorly paid housekeeper. She did everything, from the yard work to bill paying, and had done so even when their children were small. She handled all the chores typically done by the man of the house, as well as her own. This information was given him without complaint, but with plenty of excuses. Vernon worked so hard, she said, or their yard was so small it was no work at all to keep it up, or she enjoyed working with numbers, and then back to Vernon being such a hard worker she didn’t like for him to have to worry about the household.
She had no life outside this, as far as he could see, other than her temperance activities. And Vernon’s life outside the home was a mystery to her. When Vernon had left the house, on a workday or otherwise, he’d never told her where he was going.
“And you didn’t ask?”
“Oh, no. It made him feel pestered. If he was asked to work a night shift on his off day, he would tell me, or send word home. He was good about that.”
“I’m sure he was.” Billy claimed to have witnessed Vernon Doyle arranging for his wife to be told he would be working late on a night he’d met his mistress.
He got to his feet, encouraging her to wire her sons, and he prayed they would return home to support her even if they despised their father.
He stepped from the warm, tidy coziness of the Doyle home into the cold mess of Republican Street and reclaimed his bicycle. He’d just begun to pedal when an elderly woman in a wool coat and hat, standing on the porch of a house across the street, waved him over. He waited for several wagons to pass before pedaling over to her.
“You’ve been at the Doyle house?” the neighbor asked. Her face was thin and wrinkled, with a hardness that spoke of a difficult life. Her small dark eyes were sharp and clear.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you with the police?”
“No, but I am assisting them.”
“Is it true someone killed Vernon?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I never liked the man. She’s better off without him.” The old woman nodded her chin toward the other side of the street.
“You see what goes on in your neighborhood?”
“Am I a snoop, do you mean? Funny how the habit of keeping an eye out is disparaged until something like this happens. Then everyone’s glad you were paying attention.”
“Indeed, Mrs.—?”
“Carter. And you are?”
“Professor Bradshaw.”
“You don’t say. Well, take it from me, Professor, Mrs. Doyle has been given an early Christmas present.”
“Any possibility she gave the gift to herself?”
“She hasn’t the guts.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Haven’t a clue. But I can tell you who liked him. No one. No one in that house anyway. There was a time,” she said, “before the boys left, when Vernon Doyle took to the bottle, and they all suffered for it.”
“Some men become mean with alcohol.”
“Oh, it wasn’t like that. Just the opposite. He was mean when sober. He was much nicer to the boys when he was in his cups. Goodness knows what that taught them. There she was, preaching about the evils of drink, and there was Vernon, singing and carrying on, slobbering on his wife like she was a dance hall girl looking for a customer.”
“Are you friends with Mrs. Doyle?”
“I see what I see. The boys had him figured out. Even snuck him alcohol. It’d make things better for them for a time, but worse for her. She hated his slobbery attention. She joined the Temperance folks, tried to stand up to him.”
“Tried?”
“He sobered up at home. Made it hard on the boys. Never gave it up completely, if you ask me. Just got good at fooling his wife and kept his drunkenness out of sight. Well, she knows, I’d bet the house. Only she doesn’t want to admit it. She was that glad when he stopped slobbering on her.”
***
A benefit of cycling, especially in a city built upon hills, was mental clearing through physical exertion. Far more reliable than Electrozone for the treatment of most disorders, in Bradshaw’s view. Doyle’s marriage might have been happier, and his desire for drink more resistible, had he pedaled more and rode the cars less.
Bradshaw arrived at home tired but refreshed, ready to analyze his notes, but the moment he arrived at his back gate, he knew something was amiss.
The gate stood open to the alley, and he knew with certainty he’d not left it that way. Mrs. Prouty was a stickler for closed gates and doors and windows, unless she was airing the house, so he entered the kitchen door prepared for some sort of emergency. He found the kitchen and dining room empty, so he went down the hall to the parlor, calling to Mrs. Prouty, his anxiety growing with each step.
He received no answer, but understood wha
t was wrong as soon as he entered the parlor. His desk drawers were open, his calendar and papers and books scattered on the floor.
“Mrs. Prouty!” He ran upstairs, calling for her, finding all three bedrooms in disarray, Justin’s the least, his own the worst. He turned on his heel and flew down to Mrs. Prouty’s room, a Victorian haven of rose wallpaper off the kitchen—it was empty and untouched—and then down to the basement, where the greatest damage had been done.
His workbench had been thoroughly ransacked, tools and materials dumped from their sorting boxes. His microphones and wire recorders and various gadgets lay scattered. It was impossible to know all that was missing, but one object’s absence did strike him: the cigar box filled with melted sulfur he’d experimented with two years ago when he realized Oscar Daulton might have used that element as an insulator in his invention.
The rest of the basement had suffered less damage. Mrs. Prouty’s jars of this summer’s fruits and vegetables had been spared and winked colorfully in the electric light. But in the corner, the storage trunks had been forced open, and their contents flung to the cement floor. They were items of little value—old clothes, rarely used odds and ends. One trunk, however, didn’t belong to Bradshaw. Or rather, it did, but he didn’t feel it was his possession. It was Oscar Daulton’s, and its few meager possessions—Daulton’s army uniform, a cheap suit, a few books of poetry—were now heaped upon the floor. It took only a moment for Bradshaw to search through the items to see that just one of Daulton’s possessions was missing. His journal.
From upstairs came the sound of the kitchen door shutting, and Mrs. Prouty’s sturdy steps marching inside. Bradshaw flew up the stairs to prepare her for the state of the rest of the house.
Bundled still in her dark coat and hat, she held clutched in her hand the advertisement that had sent her so eagerly from the house this morning. He could see the Bon Marché letterhead, for she waved it before his face.
“I will never shop at that department store again!” she bellowed. “I felt like a fool, standing there with my arms full, waiting for a sales woman to say to me, ‘Today’s your lucky day.’ Do you know how many approached me to ask if they could help me while I stood there, silently pleading for them to tell me it was my lucky day?”
“Let me see it.”
She unloosed her grip, and he plucked it from her.
“None. Not a one! I didn’t hear them say the words to nobody. Why, I don’t believe the Bon gave a thing away all the morning long! It was a ruse to get us down there. A dirty trick!”
He examined the ad with a swift glance, taking in key details. “It’s a fake,” he said, and her outrage was ignited anew.
Chapter Eleven
The neighbors, the few that had been home, had seen nothing. No suspect conveyances in the street or alley, no person lurking about, no one entering or leaving the Bradshaw residence. The intruder had come at a time when many were out at work, or running errands, and when neighborhood sounds raised little curiosity. No doors or windows had been forced, and it was quite likely the front door had not been locked. Daytime burglaries were almost unheard of outside of the seedier parts of the city, and like many other homes, the Bradshaws’ was rarely locked except at night.
As Mrs. Prouty set about straightening the house, Bradshaw installed his burglar alarms. They were simple devices. The opening of a door or window closed a switch and sent an electric current to an alarm bell. They were essentially the same as the one first patented a half century ago by a man named Pope. Bradshaw had tinkered with improvements and various signaling methods over the years, installing them throughout the house, but he’d never left them up long because accidental triggering of the alarms put Mrs. Prouty in an unpleasant mood. But she made no protest now as he worked.
Once done, he helped Mrs. Prouty restore order. Nothing was broken. It appeared as if the intruder had not come to steal valuables. The silver hadn’t been touched, although what little cash there’d been in the house had been taken. The intruder had been searching for something and found what he sought in the basement. They’d just completed putting Henry’s rarely used bedroom to rights when Justin arrived home from school, bringing a blast of cold air, exuberant energy, and a ravenous hunger.
At the kitchen table, over hot cocoa and slices of Mrs. Prouty’s sourdough slathered in butter, Bradshaw explained about the break-in. He’d considered not telling Justin, but decided keeping the boy safe meant he needed to be aware of potential dangers. If he could not make the world a safe place, he could at least try to give his son the skills needed to protect himself.
“He was even in my room?”
The look of apprehension on his son’s face, and the way his blue eyes begged to be told otherwise, sent a protective pang through Bradshaw, but there was no way of hiding the truth. It was likely he’d not put everything back the way Justin had them, and the boy would see, and know he’d been lied to. “Yes, but the intruder was interested in finding papers of mine, not anything of yours.”
“What if we’d been home?”
“The intruder knew we weren’t. That’s why he came when he did. Burglars want to meet you even less than you want to meet them. But what if we had been home? Or if you’d been home alone? What would you have done?”
“Hide?”
“Possibly. What else?”
“Run for the police?”
“That’s what I’d do. Run to the nearest neighbor at home and have them fetch the police.”
“I could run to Broadway. There’s always a policeman there, and I bet I can get there in under a minute running.”
“Yes, you are fast.”
“Could I set a trap?”
“What sort of trap?”
“With a trip wire and rope and a bucket to fall on his head.”
“Hmm, there might not be time for that. But if you can’t run away, or hide, making a lot of noise might frighten him away.”
“What sort of noise?”
“Scream at the top of your lungs and pound the walls with whatever’s handy.”
“Really? Can I practice?”
“No. You are already expert at those skills.”
Permission to scream and pound the walls, if necessary, eased some of Justin’s anxiety, but still he glanced up at the ceiling uncertainly.
“Come upstairs with me, and I’ll show you that all is well and protected.”
***
It was with focused determination that Bradshaw later returned to his basement workshop, found a well-thumbed issue of the Western Electrician and turned to a familiar article. He located a crate of odd electrical parts, a clock mainspring, and a box of his patented microphones. He chose an empty cigar box from the many he’d collected over the years for various uses, three dry-cell telegraph batteries, and a can of shiny white enamel paint.
Then he set to work.
When he had first moved into this house, it had been new, smelling of fresh wood and plaster and paint. The basement, too, had smelled new and fresh. But now, a decade later, the house was beginning to age nicely and to settle, the wood to mellow under layers of Mrs. Prouty’s polish and wax, and the basement had begun to smell like a basement should, like metals and oils and rubber and a hint of mustiness that never fully developed, thanks to Mrs. Prouty’s diligence.
He wanted to grow old in this house. Modest, though it was in a neighborhood that was increasingly opulent, it was his castle. His sanctuary. Perfectly sized for a small family, with a small yard and garden, within walking distance of the streetcar, Justin’s school, their church. He was comfortable in it the way he was comfortable in his old clothes. It was part of him.
And it had been invaded.
The clanging of his burglar alarm sounded upstairs, was quickly silenced, and then Detective O’Brien clamored down the stairs.
“A bit like locking the barn d
oor, Ben. You don’t think the thief will return, do you?”
“You miss the purpose of the alarms entirely.”
“No, I don’t. Did you rig Justin’s window?”
“His was the first. And the opening of his door turns on the wall lamp.”
“Is this the ad?” O’Brien picked up Mrs. Prouty’s false advertisement from the workbench.
Bradshaw said, “It was designed to lure Mrs. Prouty out of the house at a time when I was scheduled to be at the university and Justin was at school. It would have been easy for anyone to arrange.”
“Anything missing?”
“In the rest of the house, a couple dollars in change. Down here, two cigar boxes, one filled with hardened melted sulfur. The other had a recording device I was working on. And Oscar Daulton’s journal.”
O’Brien whistled.
“There’s nothing in it that reveals his invention, but whoever stole it wouldn’t have known that.”
“What did he write about?”
“Frustration with the world. Peace. Silence. Mostly anger. He copied down his favorite poems. In jail, he was obsessed with one in particular, by Emily Dickinson. He must have written it a dozen times.” Bradshaw’s hands stilled and his thoughts turned inward as he recited the poem:
I took my power in my hand
And went against the world
’Twas not so much as David had
But I was twice as bold
Edison Effect, The: A Professor Bradshaw Mystery (The Edison Effect) Page 11