Edison Effect, The: A Professor Bradshaw Mystery (The Edison Effect) (10 page)

“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 what 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 door, 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

I aimed my pebble, but myself

Was all the one that fell

Was it Goliath was too large

Or was myself too small?

“That’s uncanny.” O’Brien rubbed his arms. “And untrue. Three men were felled by his pebble. All of Seattle, I suppose, knows that you were the only friend Oscar Daulton had in the end, and that you inherited his possessions.”

“I don’t know about all of Seattle, but anyone following the newspaper stories knew it.”

“Why didn’t you put a lock on his things?”

“Because there was nothing worth stealing. No one was interested in him as a human being, only as an inventor and assassin.”

“If Oglethorpe hadn’t been such an ass—”

“He might have lived, and he might have discovered the secret of Daulton’s box. But he tried to steal Daulton’s invention and thereby provoked his own death, which eventually led to the damn thing landing in Elliott Bay. What’s your point?”

“No point. So what’s this?” O’Brien peered at the assortment of parts Bradshaw had spread before him.

“The secret of Daulton’s device has done enough damage. If it’s no longer a secret, maybe the madness will stop.” He pointed at the article in the open journal.

“The Submarine Signal Company,” read O’Brien. “And how will a fog signal help you learn the secret?” He continued to read as Bradshaw assembled. “Hydrophone? An underwater microphone?”

“A standard carbon microphone in a watertight container. My detective microphone ought to work as well or better.”

“But what do you want to hear?”

“This.” He indicated the cigar box and explained about the clockworks he would mount inside, powered by an eight-day mainspring. He needed something rugged, something that would work no matter what its orientation, and it had to be small enough to fit into the cigar box so that it could mimic the approximate size and shape of Daulton’s invention. The clock was now resting inside the cigar box. He picked up the box and released the pin that set the gears in motion. A ticking sound immediately issued. He handed it to O’Brien, who examined it curiously.

“You’re going to throw it overboard?”

“That’s the plan. Professor Taylor’s going with me. We’ll hire one of the wrecking outfits to follow it, and they’ll send down a dive crew.”

“Pardon my saying so, but won’t it be hard to hear the ticking underwater?”

“Set it on the workbench.”

O’Brien did so, and the ticking grew louder.

“Sound carries far better through liquids and solids than air, although it does take more energy to generate a sound wave. I’ve placed the clock flush against the box, to maximize the resonance of the ticking, and—”

A deep gong rang from the clock in the box.

Bradshaw grinned, pleased with the volume. “It’s the hour gong from a parlor clock. It’s set to strike every thirty seconds. The mainspring will run a clock for eight days, and I calculated the additional bell will bring that down to six. The biggest trouble will be attempting to hear the ticking through the other noises in the sea, especially the ships.”

“You know, it’s sometimes quite fun being friends with an inventor. You have an ingenious solution for everything.”

“I wish that were so. I haven’t any solutions at all for our current case or the break-in.”

“Do you think it’s related to Doyle’s death? Mrs. Prouty being lured away and your house searched?”

“Don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but I’m not you. I go for the obvious. Isn’t this too obvious for you?”

“Sometimes it is what it appears to be. Doyle was killed and my home was searched because someone is desperate to learn the secret of Oscar Daulton’s invention.” But even as he said it, he knew he wasn’t certain. His fear had spoken, not his logic. “I don’t know, Jim. It could be that they are only tangentially related. Doyle’s boasting could have drawn attention, and then his death, no matter how it came about, brought me to the scene investigating and the newspapers keep spreading speculation and gossip. Someone may have thought I learned something about Daulton, taken something from the scene. I don’t know. Doyle’s death might be completely unrelated to Daulton. Henry is finding out what he can at the Bon, and I’ll send him to the Tenderloin again tonight. And I don’t believe Maddock is above burglary to get what he wants, just like he’s not above using our legal system to bully for Edison. It’s the sort of behavior Edison encourages. The window dresser is sweet on a girl he can’t afford, and I’ve seen men do stupid things when they’re desperate over a girl. That said, the fact remains my home was invaded and searched, and that puts my family in jeopardy, and I won’t have it.”

O’Brien picked up the false advertisement again. “Looks real enough. The letterhead, anyway.”

“Mrs. Prouty tells me that letterhead is available free of charge in the Bon’s new women’s waiting room. Anyone could have helped himself to the paper. The wording mimics their ad copy, with the exception of the secret sale. A comma is missing from the third sentence. Otherwise, the spelling and grammar are correct, and the layout of the paragraphs and select use of capital letters reflects an eye for design and an understanding of the psychology of ads. The ink is faded and irregular, suggesting the ribbon in the typewriter had been well used, and the precision of the return and centering of the body of the letter tells of an expert hand at the keys. The letter arrived at my door in an envelope addressed to ‘Preferred Loyal Customer,’ and my house number. The postage is first class, two cents, and the postmark is this morning, the earliest post, the main post office in Seattle.”

“You figured out everything but who typed it.”

“I’m working on that.”

O’Brien said, “The Bon’s owners returned today, and I filled them in. Mrs. McDermott speaks Chinook jargon. Did you know?”

“Is that relevant in some way?”

“No, just interesting. An admirable woman with good business sense. Both she and her new husband spoke well of Mr. Olafson. They trust him, as did the late Mr. Nordhoff. I asked in a general way if she’d ever heard anything untoward about Olafson, and she said he was highly regarded and respected. They consider themselves lucky to have him. I haven’t spoken to Billy about this yet. I thought he might find it easier to confide in you.”

“I’ll talk to him again tomorrow.”

“The Nordhoffs brought the penny to Seattle when they opened their first store.”

“Pardon?”

“Before they set up shop, no one had bothered to bring enough pennies to Seattle to make it a commercially viable coin. Nordhoff brought bags of them so he could entice shoppers with penny goods, and other stores had to follow suit to compete. I remember when it happened.”

“Relevant?”

“Interesting.”