The Flimflam Affair

16 Sabina

Neither Winthrop Buckley nor the Cobbs took kindly to being ushered back into the séance room, even though John had moved Vargas’s body and chair away from the table and covered them with one of the window drapes. There was some grumbling when he asked the couples to assume their former positions around the table, but they all complied. A seventh chair had been added at Vargas’s place; he invited Annabelle to sit there. She, too, complied, maintaining a stoic silence.

Buckley appealed to Sabina. “Will this take long? My wife has borne the worst of this ordeal. She isn’t well.”

This was evident from Margaret Buckley’s talcumlike pallor, the slump of her shoulders, and her somewhat blank stare — the tragic look of a woman suffering from the shattering of hopes and beliefs. Sabina said, “Not long, Mr. Buckley, I assure you.”

“Is it absolutely necessary for us to be in here?”

“It is, for reasons which will become apparent.”

John looked around at the others. “We have nothing to fear from the dead, past or present,” he said. “Spirits were not responsible for what took place during the séance. Not any of it.”

Grace Cobb: “Are you implying one of us stabbed poor Professor Vargas?”

“I am.”

Annabelle: “No, you’re wrong. It was Angkar, just as he wrote on the slate. You must not deny the spirits. The penalties—”

“A pox on the penalties,” John said. “Vargas was murdered by a living, flesh-and-blood person.”

Dr. Cobb: “Who? If you’re so all-fired certain it was one of us, name him.”

“Perhaps it was you, Doctor.”

“See here—! What motive could I possibly have?”

“Any one of several. Such as discovery prior to tonight that your trusted medium was a fake—”

“A fake!”

“—and you were so enraged that you sought to put a permanent end to his nefarious activities.”

“Preposterous.”

John’s flair for the dramatic was at the fore now. That was apparent to Sabina from the glint in his eye and the swell of his breast. She would put up with it for a time, but not throughout this interrogation. It was she whom Winthrop Buckley had hired, her investigative work that had confirmed Vargas’s charlatanism, her deductions about the murder the equal of his, and she was not about to allow him to claim all the credit for himself.

He had turned his gaze on Grace Cobb. “The same could be true of you, Mrs. Cobb. Perhaps you’re the guilty party.”

She regarded him haughtily. “If that is an accusation—”

“Not at all. Merely a suggestion of possibility, of hidden motives of your own regarding your relationship with the deceased.”

“I had no relationship with Professor Vargas. None whatsoever!” Which may or may not have been the truth, though the faint flush on Grace Cobb’s cheeks indicated that it wasn’t.

“Or it could be you, Mr. Buckley,” John said, “and your having engaged the services of our agency a smokescreen to hide your lethal intentions for the evening.”

The investor’s eyes, magnified by his spectacles, glittered with anger. And rightly so. Sabina said warningly, “That’ll do, John.”

“It had better do,” the investor said, “if you entertain any hope of receiving the balance of your fee. You know full well neither I nor my wife ended that scoundrel’s life.”

Dr. Cobb: “I don’t see how it could possibly have been any of us. We were all seated here — all except Annabelle who was on the other side of the locked door. And none of us broke the mystic circle.”

“Are you certain of that, Doctor?”

“Of course I’m certain.”

“But you’re wrong. Vargas himself broke it.”

“He couldn’t have, it wasn’t possible—”

“Not only possible, but relatively easy to manage.”

“Why would he do such a thing? For an entranced medium to break the mystic circle is to risk the wrath of the spirits, endanger his own life. He told us so himself.”

“He had already incurred the wrath of the all-powerful Auras,” Annabelle said fervidly. “It was Angkar, I tell you. Angkar who plunged the dagger into his body.”

John ignored her. He said to no one in particular, “You don’t seem to have grasped my words to you a minute ago. Professor Vargas was a fake. The Unified College of the Attuned Impulses is a fake. He was no more sensitive to the spirit world than you or I or President Cleveland.”

Margaret Buckley emitted a whimpering sound. Her face was strained, her eyes feverish. “That... that can’t be true! Everything we saw and heard tonight... the visitations... my daughter...”

“Sham and illusion, the lot of it,” Sabina said gently. “I am very sorry, Mrs. Buckley.”

“I don’t believe it, it couldn’t be...”

“Mrs. Carpenter and I will prove it to you, madam,” John said, “by explaining all of Vargas’s tricks during the séance. To begin with, the way in which he freed his right hand while seeming to maintain an unbroken clasp with Mrs. Carpenter’s.” He fluffed his beard and drew a long, slow breath, preparatory to beginning to orate.

Sabina was not about to allow him to hog center stage. She spoke quickly before he could. “The essence of that trick lies in the fact that the hand consists of both a wrist and fingers and the wrist is able to bend in different directions. The fingers of Vargas’s right hand were gripping my wrist, Mrs. Cobb’s fingers gripping his left wrist. By maneuvering his hands closer and closer together as he talked, in a series of tiny movements, he also brought our hands closer together. When they were near enough for his thumbs to touch, he freed his right hand in one quick movement and immediately reestablished control of my wrist with his other hand, the one whose wrist was being held by Mrs. Cobb.”

Mr. Buckley: “But how could he manage that when we were all concentrating on tight control?”

“He coughed once, rather loudly, if you recall. The sound was a calculated aural distraction. In that instant — and an instant was all it took — he completed the maneuver. He also relied on the fact that a person’s senses become unreliable after a protracted period of sitting in total darkness. What you think you see, hear, feel at any given moment may in fact be partly or completely erroneous.”

During a brief silence while the others digested this, John cast a frowning look at Sabina. She wrinkled her nose at him.

Dr. Cobb said, “Even with one hand free, how could he have rung the spirit bell? I bound him myself, as you saw, and I am morally certain the loops and knots were tight.”

“You may be certain in your own mind, Doctor,” Sabina told him, “but the facts are otherwise. It is a virtual impossibility for anyone to securely bind a person to a chair with a single length of rope. And you were flurried, self-conscious, anxious to acquit yourself well of the business, and you are a gentleman besides. You would hardly bind a man such as Professor Vargas, whom you admired and respected, with enough constriction of the rope to cut into his flesh and affect his circulation. A fraction of an inch of slack is all a man who has been tied many times before, who is skilled in muscular control, requires in order to free one hand.”

Dr. Cobb was unable to refute the logic of this. He lapsed into a somewhat daunted silence as Sabina went on to explain and demonstrate the bell-ringing trick.

“Next,” she said when she’d finished, “we have the table tipping and levitation. Vargas accomplished this phenomenon with but one hand and one foot, the left lower extremity having been freed with the aid of the upper right. He—”

John interrupted her by holding up the Egyptian talisman ring, which he had removed from Vargas’s finger, and releasing the fingernail catch to reveal the hook within. “He attached this hook to a small eye screwed beneath the table, after which he gave a sharp upward tug. The table legs on his end were lifted off the carpet just far enough for him to slip the toe of his shoe under one leg, thus creating a ‘human clamp’ which gave him full control of the table. By lifting his ring and elevating his toe while the heel remained on the carpet, he was able to make the table tilt, rock, gyrate at will.”

Sabina added quickly, before John could continue, “And when he was ready for the table to appear to levitate, he simply unhooked his ring and thrust upward with his foot, withdrawing it immediately afterward. The illusion of the table seeming to float under our hands for a second or two before it fell was enhanced by the circumstances and the darkness.”

Buckley, with some bitterness: “It all seems so blasted obvious when explained.”

“Such flummery always is, Mr. Buckley. It is the trappings and manipulation that make it mystifying. The so-called spirit lights are another example.” Sabina placed the stoppered glass bottle on the table and described where she’d found it and what it contained. “Mix white phosphorous with any fatty oil, and the result is a bottle filled with hidden light. As long as the bottle remains stoppered the phosphorous gives off no glow, but as soon as the cork is removed and air is permitted to reach the mixture, a faint unearthly shine results. Wave the bottle in the air and the light seems to dart about. Replace the stopper and the light fades away as the air inside is used up.”

“The little winking lights were more of the same, I suppose?”

“Not quite,” John said. “Match heads were their source. Hold a match head between the moistened forefinger and thumb of each hand, wiggle the forefinger enough to expose and then once more quickly conceal the match head, and you have flitting fireflies.”

Grace Cobb asked, “The guitar that seemed to dance and play itself — how was that done?”

John fetched the guitar, brought it back to the table. Beside it he set the reaching rod from Vargas’s sleeve. The rod was only a few inches in length when closed, but when he opened out each of its sections after the fashion of a telescope, it extended the full length of the table and beyond — more than six feet overall.

“Vargas extended this rod in his left hand,” he said, “inserted it in the hole in the neck of the guitar, raised and slowly turned the instrument this way and that to create the illusion of air-dancing. As for the music...”

He reached into the oval sound hole under the strings, gave a quick twist. The weird strumming they had heard during the séance began to emanate from within.

Mrs. Cobb: “A music box!”

“A one-tune music box, to be precise,” Sabina said, “affixed to the wood inside with gum adhesive.”

Mr. Buckley: “The hand that touched Mrs. Cobb’s cheek? The manifestations? The spirit writing on the slate?”

“All part and parcel of the same trickery,” John told him. Again he went to the cabinet, where he pressed the hidden release to raise its top. From inside he took out the two stuffed and wax-coated rubber gloves, held them up. “These are the ghostly ‘fingers’ that touched Mrs. Cobb and Mrs. Carpenter. The smoothness of the paraffin gives them the feel of human flesh. One ‘hand’ has been treated with luminous paint; it was kept covered under this” — he showed them the black cloth — “until the time came to reveal it as a glowing disembodied entity.”

He lifted out the silk drapery and theatrical mask. “The mask has been treated in the same fashion. It was the combination of these two items that created the manifestation alleged to be Dr. Cobb’s mother.”

He raised the fine white netting. “Likewise made phosphorescent and draped over the head to create the ‘spirit’ purported to be the Buckleys’ daughter.”

“But... I heard Bernice speak,” Margaret Buckley said weakly. “It was her voice, I’m sure it was...”

Her husband took her hand in both of us. “No, my dear, it wasn’t. You only imagined it to be.”

“An imitation of a child’s voice,” Sabina said, “just as the other voice was an imitation of a man’s deep articulation.”

John picked up the two slates, which bore the “spirit message” under his false signatures. “I Angkar destroyed the evil one. The actual murderer wrote those words, in sequence on one slate and upside down and backward on the other to heighten the illusion of spirit writing. Before the crime was committed, in anticipation of it.”

“Who?” Dr. Cobb demanded. “Name the person, sir.”

“Professor Vargas’s accomplice, of course.”

“Accomplice?”

Once again Sabina spoke before John could. “No one individual, no matter how skilled in supernatural fakery, could have arranged and carried out all the tricks we were subjected to even if he hadn’t been roped to his chair. Someone else had to direct the reaching rod to the guitar and then turn the spring on the music box. Someone else had to jangle the tambourine, make the wailing noises, carry the phosphorous bottle to different parts of the room and up onto the love seat there so as to make the light seem to float near the ceiling. Someone else had to manipulate the waxed gloves, don the mask and drapery and netting, imitate the spirit voices.”

“Annabelle? Are you saying it was Annabelle?”

“None other.”

They all stared at the silent, black-robed woman at the head of the table. Her expression remained frozen, but her eyes burned with a zealot’s fire.

Dr. Cobb said, “But she wasn’t in the room with us...”

“Ah, but she was,” John said quickly. “At first it seemed to me that she must be in another part of the house—”

“Seemed to us,” Sabina corrected him with a touch of asperity. Then to the others, “Not because of the locked door but because of the way in which the lights dimmed and then extinguished to begin the séance. As though she turned off the gas at a prearranged time. But that wasn’t the case. Some type of automatic timing mechanism was used for that purpose. Annabelle, you see, was already present in this room before the rest of us entered and Vargas locked the door.”

Mr. Buckley: “Before, you say?”

“She disappeared from the parlor, you’ll recall, as soon as she announced that all was in readiness. While Vargas detained us with his call for ‘donations,’ Annabelle shed her robe and slipped in here—”

Dr. Cobb: “Shed her robe?”

“Yes, certainly. It would have been too cumbersome for the performance of all the necessary tricks in the dark, might possibly have made rustling sounds that would have given her away. Whereas dressed only in some sort of close-fitting, black undergarment she had complete freedom of movement. Such also made it easier for her to conceal herself before and after the commission of her crime.”

“Conceal herself where? There are no hiding places... unless you expect us to believe she crawled up inside the fireplace chimney.”

“Not there, no. Nor are there any secret closets or the like. She was hidden in the same place as her spirit props, within the cabinet. The interior is hollow, and she is both tiny and enough of a practiced contortionist to fold her body into such a short, narrow space.”

“The catch that releases the hinged top,” John said, reclaiming the narrative, “can be operated from within as well. Once the room was in total darkness and Vargas began invoking the spirits, she climbed out to commence her preparations. Gloves and a mask to cover her white face completed her all-black costume. And her familiarity with the room allowed her to move about in silence.”

“All well and good,” Mr. Buckley said, “but the woman was outside the locked door, pounding on it, less than a minute after Vargas was stabbed. Explain that.”

“Simple misdirection, sir. Before the stabbing she replaced all props inside the cabinet and closed the top, then unlocked the door; the key, despite careful oiling of the keyhole, made a faint scraping and the bolt likewise clicked slightly as it released — sounds which I... which Mrs. Carpenter and I both heard. Annabelle then crossed the room, plunged her dagger into Vargas’s back and neck, recrossed the room after the second thrust, let herself out into the darkened hallway, and relocked the door from that side. Not with Vargas’s key, which remained on the cabinet, but with a duplicate key of her own.”

No one spoke for a cluster of seconds. In hushed tones, then, Margaret Buckley asked, “Why, Annabelle? Why did you do it?”

The woman’s mouth twisted. Her voice, when it came, was fiery with passion and more than a hint of madness. “He was evil, an unbeliever, a fornicator. He mocked the spirits with his schemes, laughed and derided them and those of us who truly believe. I did his bidding because I loved him, I obeyed him and overlooked his wantonness until two nights ago when the spirits came to me and whispered that I must obey and overlook no longer. They told me I must destroy him, and to do so during one of his false séances. A powerful spirit from the highest plane in the Afterworld, not the pretend one called Angkar, guided my hand tonight. It showed me the path to the truth and light of the Auras...”

Her words trailed off; she sat staring fixedly. Her blazing eyes looked at no one in this room, Sabina thought, but at whatever she believed waited for her beyond the veil.