A Study in Revenge (45 page)

Lean stood up and gave a shrug. “Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

“At first I attributed that to outdated speech and an exaggerated need to sound official. But I’ve begun to think that there’s a method to his madly ineloquent phrasing.” Grey approached and pointed toward the latter part of the document. “He says to ignore letters or words other than those of the thunderstone. That verifies the thunderstone’s seven symbols as the specific words or letters he’s trying to convey.”

“He says that earlier as well, don’t you think?” Lean asked, and pointed to the middle of the long paragraph. ‘My meaning is not to enumerate for you.’ He’s stressing it’s not numbers he’s after.”

“Agreed. I was also struck by that sentence. ‘I alone should appear true and clear to you …’ Then the bit about not enumerating anything. Followed by ‘each time I am seen among other fallacies.’ ”

“What’s he mean? When would Tom Webster appear among fallacies?” Lean asked.

“I don’t believe he’s referring to himself. Look at the phrasing he chooses. ‘I alone should appear clear and true … each time
I
am seen among other fallacies.’ ”

Lean looked at Grey, trying to guess his meaning. Grey nodded in
the direction of the floor, where his twenty-four pages of copied symbols still lay arranged in a circle. At first Lean’s eyes were drawn to the most familiar sketch of mercury’s symbol. But after a moment his gaze moved over the other symbols and came to rest upon the only pair that was not unique. Two “I” symbols located adjacent to each other now leaped out, demanding his attention.

“The ‘I’ symbols,” Lean said. “They’re not to enumerate, not Roman numerals—he’s using them in the sense of a pronoun. They’re the true ones, and the others are the fallacies?”

“The twenty-four symbols are the code hiding the meaning of the thunderstone’s seven, and yes, the ‘I’ symbols are meant to be the key. Exactly how remains a mystery.”

Lean read the bequest again, this time to himself.

“It’d be a hell of a lot easier if the crazy old bastard just came out and talked straight. He can’t even get half his words right.” He noticed that Grey was staring at him again and had reverted back to his earlier quizzical look.

“What? It’s true,” Lean said. “He mentions the earth’s ‘revelation about the Sun’ and not to be ‘verse to the teachings’ and all that.”

“Obviously he means ‘revolution’ and ‘averse,’ not ‘verse.’ He, for one”—Grey stared at Lean—“has the good sense not to be distracted by poetry.”

“Thank God,” Lean declared. “With prose that bad, I’d hate the thought of him writing in verse. I can only imagine …” Lean’s voice trailed off as the look on Grey’s face went from amused to intensely focused. “It’s happened, hasn’t it? What you were expecting before, when you asked me to read. I said something—”

“Brilliantly asinine,” Grey completed the sentence for him.

“Off the mark, is how I was going to say it.” Lean’s tone was offended, but he couldn’t completely stifle a smirk.

“Poetry indeed!” Grey grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil from the desktop. “We may just have it! Look on the page: Find all the instances where he misused a word.”

Lean stood shoulder to shoulder with Grey and scanned the page. “Well, he says ‘revelation’ instead of ‘revolution.’ ”

Grey finished jotting down that first word even as Lean spoke. He pointed ahead on the page. “He uses ‘won’ when he meant ‘win.’ ”

“There’s ‘verse’ instead of ‘averse,’ ” Lean said as he watched Grey slide his finger back and forth across the lines of the yellowed page.

“He says ‘drink and ate’ when he should have said ‘eat.’ ”

“That looks like all the mistakes.” Lean rolled his hand, almost as if he were working a fishing reel, urging Grey to hurry on. “Read them back.”

“Revelation, won, verse, ate,” Grey recited with a grin.

Understanding slapped Lean in the face. “Your Bible! Where’s your Bible?”

Grey spun half around on the spot, taking in his wide shelves of books all at once. “Not here. I left it at my grandfather’s.”

“What? The clue you’ve been waiting for—‘Don’t be verse to the Lord’s teachings’—and you don’t have a stinking copy of the Bible?”

Grey snapped his fingers, the look of defeat on his face giving way to hope. “Mrs. Philbrick.”

The two men practically tripped over each other racing out of the room and down the stairs, arriving in a crescendo of thumps at the landlady’s threshold. Grey pounded on the door, and they burst in as soon as she turned the knob. Lean managed an apology as both men stormed through the room, looking high and low for anything resembling a book.

“Your copy of the Bible, Mrs. Philbrick?” Grey demanded.

The landlady stood in the center of the front room wearing a troubled expression, very much confused by this turn of events.

“Please,” Lean said in as calm a tone as he could, “we’re really quite desperate to get our hands on a Bible.”

She retreated back to what Lean guessed was her bedroom and emerged with the black-covered book outstretched. She eyed the two detectives with a hint of disapproval. “Can’t say I’m surprised it’s come to this.”

Grey snatched the book from her and mumbled something that might have been appreciative in nature. He flipped it open toward the rear and began turning pages with more care as he neared this goal.

“Book of Revelation, chapter one, verse eight.” He was silent a moment, handed the Good Book to Lean, and strode to the exit

“ ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega …’ ” Lean read.

He gently handed the book back to Mrs. Philbrick, smiled, and apologized for the inconvenience. He eased her door closed behind him and then pounded up the stairs.

Grey was already kneeling on the floor near the chalkboard, frantically rotating his circle of symbol-covered pages. Lean approached and saw that when facing the chalkboard and looking down at the circle, one of the “I” symbols now sat in the twelve-o’clock position.

Grey seized the thunderstone from his desk and handed it to Lean, whom he directed to the center of the circle of symbols arrayed on the floor.

“The code is in the Greek alphabet after all. The two ‘I’ symbols are the alpha and omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The one on the right represents the alpha. The next symbol is the letter beta and so on until the circle is complete and the last symbol, the other ‘I,’ stands for omega. So start with the first symbol on the thunderstone, which according to Leadbetter should be the element lead.” Grey pointed out the figure. “Match it to the position of the identical lead symbol in our circle of twenty-four.”

“Done,” Lean said as he rotated slightly to his right and counted off. “If ‘I’ is the first spot, then lead is the symbol located in the ninth spot in the circle.”

“The ninth letter of the Greek alphabet is iota. Next.”

Lean turned the thunderstone in his hand to the second marking, found the corresponding symbol for tin among the papers on the floor, and counted off its numerical position.

“The second symbol, tin, is located in the thirteenth spot.”

Grey ran the Greek alphabet through his head, announced it as nu, and wrote that letter down on the chalkboard. They repeated the process until all seven of the thunderstone’s symbols were compared to the positions of the twenty-four symbols in the circle and the corresponding Greek letters determined, falling in spots nine, thirteen, five, twenty-one, fifteen, three, and seven.

“Iota, nu, epsilon, phi, omicron, gamma, eta.” Lean read the board, nodded thoughtfully, then declared, “I don’t mean to sound, as you said, asinine—”

“Brilliantly asinine,” Grey corrected him.

“Thank you. But I’m not getting whatever is meant to be understood here. Am I mispronouncing something?”

“You named the letters correctly.” Grey set the chalk down and stepped back. “Greek was never my favorite. Put together, the letters would be read something like ‘Een-eff-ogg-ay.’ ”

The room fell silent for a long moment, and then Lean said, “Well, there it is. Case closed.”

“ ‘Ine-eff-ogg-ey’?” After another moment of reflection, Grey said, “I suppose I shall need a trip to the library for a book on Greek. A native speaker would be better. It may be a name or some colloquialism.”

He stood there, transfixed by the Greek letters on the board.

“Sorry, Grey. It’s a disappointment to be sure. But it’s not the end of the world. Remember where we started in all this? Me trying to figure who shot Cosgrove and then defiled his grave? We know that was Marsh’s doing. And you were looking for that missing Webster girl. She’s still out there. We both have real tasks left to do. Getting Marsh and finding the girl. Real live problems to work on. Forget this old crank Webster and his wild hoax. Let him keep his riddle. Time for each of us to let go and move forward.”

Lean went to the hooks by the door and retrieved his hat. He felt bad leaving Grey there at a loss. But the man was nothing if not practical; he would soon move on to items that actually mattered.

“After all, some secrets are meant to be carried to the grave,” Lean said, and glanced back. Grey was no longer staring at the board. He was watching Lean, and his quizzical look had returned.

“Again—brilliantly asinine,” Grey declared. Then, enunciating the sounds carefully, he added, “ ‘In-eff-oj-ee.’ ”

“Come again?” Lean said.

“ ‘In effigy.’ I think Old Tom Webster meant to spell out the words ‘in effigy.’ ” A strained smile showed on Grey’s face.

“Wonderful. You’ve solved the riddle and proved it’s all a fake. ‘In effigy.’ Just a symbol, a parody. All a hoax. Now can we agree it’s time to move on to catching a murderer?”

“Where are you going?” Grey asked.

“To see Marsh.”

“I don’t think that’s wise.”

“Maybe not, but the man’s guilty of murder,” Lean said. “I can’t just leave it.”

L
EAN WAS TOO RESTLESS TO SIT, SO HE WALKED THE FOUR
blocks west from High Street over to Marsh’s mystical thaumaturgic society on Winter Street. The quick pace as he crisscrossed the semifashionable neighborhoods made him feel that he was accomplishing something, or at least moving in the right direction. As he turned the final corner, the sprawling, peaked, three-story brick building came into view. A coupé-style landau sat out front with the rear cover down and a driver at the ready.

He waited at the corner a minute until an available hansom cab passed. The driver gave a queer look when Lean climbed aboard but only ordered him to pull around onto Winter Street and wait.

“Just sitting ain’t free, you know,” the squirrelly-faced driver said.

“Does it cost any extra to sit in silence?” Lean replied.

Five minutes passed. It felt longer as Lean’s mind coiled itself ever more tightly around the idea of Dr. Jotham Marsh and whatever unknown, despicable ideas he was spreading within the innocent-looking structure. The man was directly responsible for two killings at least. Lean knew he shouldn’t feel any more or less outrage about either one—murder was murder. But Frank “the Foot” Cosgrove was a career thief; he’d chosen a potentially deadly calling. Father Leadbetter, on the other hand, had chosen a life in which he’d tried to help people. And even after his ouster from the ministry, the man had lived a harmless life in a basement apartment surrounded by books and a decrepit dog. The old man hadn’t deserved a violent death, followed undoubtedly by the loathsome tossing of his dead body off a moving train.

Marsh’s actions in this case made Lean reconsider his thoughts from the series of murders a year before. Jack Whitten was clearly disturbed even from his youth, but how much had Marsh’s occult teachings pushed
the violent young man over the edge, past whatever grip on reason he’d ever had, into the realm of his depraved killings? He wondered how much Marsh was to blame for those innocent lives, and for the attempts on Helen Prescott and her young daughter, Delia. And apart from Whitten, what other fragile minds was he corrupting?

The image of the madly venomous woman on Cushing’s Island, firebrand in her hand and spewing delirious threats, leaped into Lean’s mind. He tried to banish her from his thoughts before she touched the torch to her dress. Her shriek echoed through Lean’s head, and he imagined the smell of gasoline and burning flesh creeping through his nostrils. He forced an angry cough and spit over the side of the carriage.

A hundred yards away, Jotham Marsh came out the front door in a full-evening-dress suit of black broadcloth with a top hat. Behind him stepped a dark-haired woman in a brocaded silk evening dress of dark crimson with elbow-length black gloves. Last out the door was a younger man whom Lean recognized as Jerome Morse, Marsh’s sniveling bootlick.

Lean had his driver follow Marsh’s vehicle as it turned onto Pine and then entered Congress Street at Longfellow Square. Though intent on the man he was following, Lean couldn’t ignore the sight of his favorite poet immortalized in cast bronze, comfortably seated, atop a short but broad granite block. Several blocks on, Marsh’s landau pulled over in front of the Mechanics’ Hall. This was home to Portland’s Haydn Association, conducted by the city’s resident musical genius, Hermann Kotzschmar.