The anatomists, p.23
The Anatomists, page 23
“But, my irregular life having taught me resilience among many other things, I soon shook off these dark thoughts, and began to search about me for some remedy to the predicament in which I found myself. When my eyes—those both literal and metaphorical—lighted upon Robert, the tiniest seed of a solution began to germinate in my mind. I had never before noticed, but Robert bore a striking physical resemblance to Sam—looking back upon the succession of men in my life, I now realize it’s a type to which I have been rather routinely attracted. But so similar was Robert’s physical appearance to that of Sam that he could, without effort, pass as Sam’s brother. With a little effort, however, along with some assistance from me, I thought it might just be possible for him to pass as Sam himself, at least long enough to inherit his dead sister’s Oriental collection, complete the trade with the Viennese baron, then disappear forever, before anyone caught so much as a whiff of anything amiss. Sam’s dealings with the baron’s agents having been somewhat extensive, I realized from the start that Robert would need to keep a prudent distance from these men, but figured that a distraction of some kind would answer that purpose nicely. And what more powerful distraction than the charms of a beautiful, worldly woman—say, a sister of the deceased Abigail Darcy, for example? Three days later, Madeline Worthington arrived in London, in response to a number of disquieting dreams she had experienced recently, regarding her dear sister’s well-being.
“‘And did it work?’ you’re no doubt asking yourselves. ‘Were they actually able to get away with their diabolical deception?’ Considering the circumstance in which you find yourselves right now, I’m sure you’d have to lay better than even odds on our success. And had you the luxury of another forty-eight hours of life in which to wait, and watch, you’d find that your bet was a sound one, for the baron is scheduled to arrive with his men at Darcy first thing tomorrow morning, to begin packing up and hauling away Alfred Darcy’s unparalleled collection of rare Oriental artifacts. The baron himself will place a large sum of money directly into our hands upon his departure, and deposit an even larger sum under our names in a somewhat obscure Parisian bank with which I once conducted some business, in my younger days. After having given life in England another try, I’ve concluded that the Continent is far more suited to my temperament, and Robert here agrees with me. We’ll ship out as soon as the money is in our hands, and Madeline and Peter Worthington will disappear into the European sunset, never to be heard from again. Robert Hunt and Cathleen Smithson, on the other hand, will live happily, and comfortably, ever after.”
She looked out the window into the darkness, then turned back to face us. “Please forgive me for going on and on like that, gentlemen. I tend to get carried away sometimes—my theatrical bent, you know.” She narrowed her eyes at us, reflectively, then addressed Robert. “Go and check the gentlemen for me, Robert, there’s a good lad. I fear my lengthy narrative may very well have bored them to death.” Robert walked over and placed the back of his hand in front of our noses, feeling for breath. Then, holding the palm of a hand upon each of our two chests, he pursed his lips and shook his head, clearly very much annoyed. “They’re still alive, Cathleen,” he said, irritably. “Whatever shall we do?”
“There’s no need to whine about it, Robert,” she huffed. “It’s not manly. We shall just have to wait them out. It can’t be much longer, as much powder as I put in those biscuits.” She paused and tapped the tip of her index finger upon her cheek, obviously considering something. “And what if we don’t wait them out? Just look at them. They shan’t be any more difficult to move like this than they will be once they finally decide to give up the ghost. Perhaps we should just go ahead and bury them now, so they’ll have some quiet time underground to consider all the bother they’ve caused us.”
“And perhaps you shall not bury us now, Madame,” said Jean-Claude sharply, sitting bolt upright in his chair, with an expression of triumphant annoyance on his face. “I, for one, am not nearly ready for the grave yet. And what about you, mon ami?” he asked, turning toward me. “Do you believe that you have some good years of life remaining ahead of you?”
“As a matter of fact, I believe I do,” I replied, sitting upright, then wincing at a sharp pain in my lower back. “For now, though, I have a few kinks to work out of my body. I’ve been in a damnably awkward position. It was all I could do just to remain still.”
“And yet, you did not move a muscle,” he said, in a congratulatory tone. “Your performance was absolutely splendid. You have become quite the actor since we first came out here, a week ago.”
Throughout our mutual exchange of congratulations, Cathleen and Robert stood utterly transfixed to their spots, wearing such blank expressions on their faces that one might very easily conclude that they had just consumed a large dose of the poison that had been intended for us. “Surely you did not really believe we would be so foolish as to eat anything prepared by your hand,” Jean-Claude addressed Cathleen, raising an incredulous eyebrow. “And speaking of food…” He turned his attention once more to me. “…you must take great care in handling those biscuits you slipped into your coat pocket, my friend. As our hostess kindly informed us, there is enough poison in each of them to—how was it?—‘kill a small army.’ And we are one small army I would prefer not to see killed.”
While Jean-Claude spoke, Cathleen—resilient as ever—began to take small, discreet steps toward a corner desk, upon whose surface a pair of scissors glinted in the firelight, and Robert, responding to a silent command from Cathleen’s eyes, reached toward the fireplace for a poker. “Come now, Madame,” Jean-Claude said, with that familiar, supercilious clucking of his tongue. “…further violence will avail you nothing.”
“If it will avail me of getting rid you two meddlesome creatures,” she veritably hissed, “I shall consider it worth whatever effort it costs me.” Then suddenly, clutching the scissors in her hand, she lunged for Jean-Claude. Simultaneously, Robert came toward me with the poker raised above his head. Before either weapon reached its intended target, however, both Cathleen and Robert stopped dead in their tracks, and stared dumbly at the doorway behind our chairs.
“I am guessing, Madame,” Jean-Claude said calmly, “that you have discovered we did not venture out here alone this afternoon. I hope you do not very much mind the imposition, but we invited a few acquaintances to accompany us on our journey.” Looking behind me, I saw with great relief the sight that had produced such consternation in both of our “hosts.” Standing just inside the doorway were five officers of the law, and our young friend Jimmy, who had escorted the gentlemen quietly through the house to a covert location from which, he knew from personal experience, one could hear every word that was uttered in the parlor.
“I believe…” Jean-Claude began, but before he could finish, I interrupted him, unable to resist the simile that had just sprung into my mind.
“I believe, sir and Madame, that this is checkmate,” I said, with enormous satisfaction.
“Touché,” Jean-Claude agreed.
EPILOGUE
“Care for a game of chess, Jean-Claude?” I asked, next afternoon in the apartment.
“As a matter of fact,” he replied, “I would most decidedly not care for a game of chess. For the first time in my life, I find my poor brain to be quite weary from games of ratiocination. Why do we not play something a little less complex—a nice game of draughts, perhaps.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, walking to the bookcase to retrieve the pieces. “I’m delighted simply to be in a position to play any game at all today, never mind what.” I scattered the disks upon the board, and we sorted black from brown. “And it’s all thanks to you, I must admit. As difficult as it was for me to swallow your unlikely theory of that woman’s malign intentions toward us, it certainly was a great deal easier on the digestion than those biscuits would have been, had I not listened. It’s no exaggeration to say that I owe my very life to you.”
“You flatter me, mon ami, but it was all quite simple really.” Jean-Claude arranged his pieces on the board, and made the first move. “I was contemplating the possibility of something of that sort ever since Jimmy mentioned the strange fish that could blow himself up like a balloon. Most peculiar, did you not think?”
“Yes,” I replied, moving my first piece, “…but I never gave it a great deal of thought afterward. The lad does have a tendency toward hyperbole.”
“Indeed, but in this case, the seeming exaggeration matched exactly the features of a preserved specimen I once saw in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. I was only a child when I saw it, but it made a very distinct impression upon my youthful imagination, especially when the director of the exhibit explained to me that the creature contained a deadly poison. I thus filed it away in my memory under the general category of ‘dangerous creatures of the ocean’—along with stingrays, electric eels, and other such exotic species. Even though I remembered the blowfish, however, I may very well not have foreseen the danger this creature would pose to our own persons, had I not read an article—written by Alfred Darcy himself—on the rare and perilous Japanese delicacy fugu. While you were sleeping off the effects of your brandy, the night before last, I was perusing Sir Alfred’s landmark Cyclopedia of Oriental History and Culture, and read the ‘fugu’ entry in the chapter on ‘Indigenous Cuisine.’
“Even having read about fugu, however,” he continued, jumping four of my pieces with one move, “…I still might not have perceived any relation to our personal circumstances, had it not been for the mysteriously compliant cat whose tail I stepped upon in the Darcy garden. When I saw the cat—whose curiosity unfortunately, if rather tritely, did him in—I knew immediately what species of fish was swimming in that indoor pond and began to develop some nagging suspicions regarding Sir Alfred’s death. The close conjunction of my encounter with the cat and the sudden appearance of George upon the garden path, established in my mind a connection, albeit a tenuous one, between these events and the murdered man who turned up on our dissecting table.”
“Samuel Hallam, yes,” I interrupted. “I suppose the poor fellow, or what’s left of him at least, has been returned to his family and given a Christian burial by now.”
“Undoubtedly,” he replied, then continued, unfazed by my interruption. “I recognized him at once, of course—George, that is—and I assumed he remembered me as well and would report my intrusion to his master and mistress. If Mlle. ‘Worthington’ were not somehow involved with the murder, I knew, her discovery of my association with St. Alban’s would lead her to suspect me of a fraud, but nothing more. Her most probable, and understandable, reaction in this case would be a complete cessation of communication with the two of us. She would never wish to see us again.” I captured three of his pieces, evening the game. “But when she sent ’round an invitation to tea,” he went on, “…the very next morning after I was caught trespassing on her property, I knew her motives could not be entirely hospitable.” In a series of six jumps, he cleared the board of my pieces.
“Really, Jean-Claude,” I protested, then collected my pieces to begin another game. We played silently for a moment, and the events of the past several days flitted in an out of my head like moths around a lantern. “I must hand it to you, Jean-Claude,” I said, in a tone of the deepest sincerity. “Your powers of reasoning are most extraordinary. You saw your way clear through this labyrinth of deductive reasoning while I was wandering aimlessly down the primrose path after ‘Madeline.’”
“Do not be so hard on yourself, my friend,” he consoled me. “This pursuit of ours presented us with a number of crossroads and blind alleys, it is true. But in following your heart as you did, you took a straighter path toward the truth than I did in thus following reason. It was, after all, an affaire du coeur that precipitated Samuel Hallam’s desperate attempt upon the life of Cathleen Smithson. And as for the lady’s violent reaction to this attempt, it was merely the age-old story of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. He tries to kill her, so she kills him in retaliation.” He pursed his lips in concentration, surveying the board, then moved a single space. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “The path we followed was a convoluted one at times. But the murder that first set us onto this path…It was but a simple case of revenge.”
About the Author
HAL MCDONALD is a professor of English at Mars Hill College. He teaches and writes on a variety of subjects including literature, linguistics, science, and sports. The Anatomists is his first foray into crime fiction. An avid outdoorsman, he takes full advantage of the beautiful mountains around Asheville, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Nancy, and their children, Hillary, Lawson, and Eleanor.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank truTV, whose “Search for the Next Great Crime Writer” contest got me to start writing The Anatomists; HarperCollins Publishers, whose interest in the book spurred me to finish it; and my daughter Hillary, whose intriguing question during a leisurely ten-mile run gave me the idea that set the whole thing into motion.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE ANATOMISTS. Copyright © 2008 by Harold McDonald. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition FEBRUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780061734168
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Hal McDonald, The Anatomists
