# Unseen Hands/Chapter 18
### CHAPTER XVIII
#### "READY TO ANYONE'S HAND"

ODELL waited until the young man's emotion had spent itself and then he asked gently:
"Have you told your stepfather?"
"Not yet. He's been mighty square and patient with me; and I cannot forget how he loved my mother. Now that he is injured and grief-stricken, and has all this hideous affair on his hands besides, I can't bear to add to his suffering by having him know that there is a criminal in the family. Don't think that I am trying to hedge, Sergeant," Gene added. "I am only too anxious to get the burden of what I've done off my shoulders; but—but it seems like hitting a man when he is down to go to him with such a confession now."
"Then if you will accept a word of advice, if I were you I would go to Mr. Titheredge, and tell him everything at the earliest possible moment. You cannot tell when Drew may make up his mind to strike; and you must be prepared," Odell said gravely. "You are right not to disturb your stepfather with the story now: he does seem to be very much broken up by your mother's death; and Mr. Titheredge tells me that their married life was ideal."
He had added this boldly mendacious statement as a feeler, and Gene responded to it.
​"Dad loved mother to distraction, and she was just as crazy about him; but they were forever quarreling. A lot old Titheredge knows about it!" he smiled faintly. "Their quarrels didn't amount to anything, though: you'd think they were going to kill each other one minute, and the next they'd be as happy as ever! Dad has a high temper, but mother—! She was as quick as lightning to flare out, and just as quick to forgive and take a fellow to her heart again.
"That was why I was sure that, although she would be simply wild of course, when she found out about the check, she would cover it up and protect me from the consequences. I don't care now; nothing matters except that I'd like to see Farley Drew get what is coming to him."
"But you will take my advice?"
"Yes, Sergeant, and I cannot thank you enough for the consideration you have shown me; I don't deserve it, but I can tell you that this whole awful affair has taught me a lesson." Gene looked straight into Odell's eyes. "I told you at our first meeting that you could count on me to do anything I could to help you find out who is back of this conspiracy to kill us all, and you can. I haven't an idea who it is; I can scarcely bring myself to think of it, the possibilities are so horrible. One thing is certain: God knows I hate Farley Drew; but he could have had nothing whatever to do with it. I would stake my life on that. May I go to Titheredge now? I'll take Porter along with me; he is too good company to leave trailing behind."
Odell smiled and held out his hand.
"Go along if you like, Mr. Chalmers. I'm glad that we have had this understanding, and I may call upon you for help sooner than you think. Tell Mr. Titheredge that you ​came to him on my advice, and that I want everything about the affair kept as quiet as possible in the interests of the case upon which I am at work."
The younger man flushed as they shook hands.
"Thank you, Sergeant Odell. You can trust me now."
As he made his way down to the second floor the detective congratulated himself that his supposition in regard to the forgery had been verified and some headway had been gained at last in the process of elimination. Gene and Farley Drew were definitely erased from his list of suspects, and the motive for Lorne's possible guilt loomed large.
Another factor, minor but significant, presented itself for his consideration. Kenny, the boss carpenter who had received that mysterious telephone summons to rehang the portrait, said that the voice which spoke to him was "gruff-like and rasping but not real deep." Lorne's tones were hoarse, but throaty rather than low and heavy. It seemed the wildest improbability that he would telephone such a message knowing the comment it would arouse in the household when the men appeared to do their work; but this was merely another of the irreconcilable inconsistencies which Odell had encountered at every turn and which must be left for explanation until the final solution.
He had intended to pay a second visit to Lorne; but as he passed Rannie's door he hesitated, and then turned back and knocked.
The familiar high, querulous tones bade him enter, and he found the hunchback seated by the window with a huge leather-bound volume in his shrunken, clawlike hands.
"Well, Sergeant, are you hot on the trail?" There was a trace of the habitual sneer in the boy's voice; but Odell ob​served that he laid aside the book as if not ill-pleased with the interruption. "Have you come to tell me that you have discovered the family Nemesis?"
"Scarcely that. I want to ask you precisely the same question which you put to me at our last interview." The detective smiled pleasantly. "What do you think of the maid, Gerda?"
Rannie's eyes narrowed.
"I thought we had dismissed Gerda from further discussion, but my opinion of her coincides with your own: I think she is a very superior sort of maid."
"You know as well as I do that she is far above the position which she has voluntarily assumed here." Odell was still smiling, but a peremptory note had crept into his tones. "But you know more than I; you know what her game is in this house."
Rannie threw back his head with a burst of ironic laughter.
"So one of your zealous sleuths was on the job this morning when I was kidding her, was he? I'm sorry to disappoint you, Sergeant; but I don't know any more than you do about her. She's just one of the army of reduced gentlewomen forced to earn their own living, unfitted for anything but a position of this sort, and too proud to play the game like a sport. It amuses me to take her down a peg now and then; that is all."
The detective advanced to the chair upon which Rannie had placed the book, and picking it up he seated himself and laid it carelessly on his knee.
"You told her that you would not give her away because you did not want the 'fun' spoiled; and you warned her ​that I was no fool and she had better copy Jane's speech the next time I interviewed her. It won't do, my boy. I've got to have the truth."
"Then ask her." Rannie shrugged. "Granted that she may have an ulterior motive, and that I have an inkling of it; you will be making the mistake of your budding career if you try to connect her with our trouble. She is not after our lives, nor the family plate, I can assure you; but further than that, Sergeant, I have nothing to say. Her little game won't hurt any of us, and it is the only oasis of diversion in the desert in which I live. Let her play it out and stick to your own side of the court. I guess you know already that you'll have your hands full."
"Perhaps," Odell conceded good-naturedly. "If the woman isn't up to the sort of mischief that would bring her officially under our notice, the authorities aren't interested in her. There are a few other points I would like to settle in my own mind. Hello, what is this? A medical book?"
He had glanced down as if inadvertently at the volume which he held on his knee, and read the title: "Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences."
The boy's dark, saturnine face flushed, and he thrust out an imperious hand.
"Give it to me!" he demanded.
You are interested in this sort of thing?" the detective asked as he complied. He had darted a swift glance at the delicate, pointed thumb of the extended hand, and then his eyes traveled to the bookcases which lined the wall. "You have quite a young library here on medicine, haven't you?"
​"I like it. You'd think I would have had enough of surgery and braces and nostrums since I've been the happy hunting-ground for so many futile experiments, but ever since I was a kid I've wanted to be a doctor," Rannie explained; adding with a bitter curl of his thin lips: "Fine ambition, isn't it, for a fellow with a back like a dromedary! It would be a case of 'Physician, heal thyself,' and I wouldn't have a comeback!"
"You might make a big success of it if you went in seriously for the study of medicine," Odell remarked, rising and sauntering over to the bookcase which held the little volume he had examined a few hours previously. "Your accident has not impaired the keenness of your brain nor the strength of your hands. One of the greatest physicians I know is under a far worse handicap; he is blind. … Mind if I have a look at one or two of these? There is something that has puzzled me—Ah, I think this will give me what I want."
He took the little volume from its place, and Rannie rose and crossed to his side.
"Oh, that," he said indifferently. "I think I know what you are driving at, Sergeant; and that won't help you. If the cause of my mother's last illness puzzled you, it puzzled Adams and the specialists a lot more, although they looked wise and called it blood-poisoning."
"Still, here is a chapter on septicemia"—Odell opened the book and carefully placed his own thumb over the telltale imprint on the margin.
"Merely superficial; and it has no business, properly speaking, in a treatise on diseases of the blood." Rannie clawed over the heap of books stacked upon the floor, and ​unearthed a ponderous tome. "Here is what you want: 'Pathogenic Bacteria.' That covers the whole field. Take it along if you want to; but I don't believe you will find the cause of my mother's death lurking in any vegetable organisms."
"I'd like to take them both, if I may." Odell tucked them under his arm. "I don't know much about septicemia, or what poisons would produce it or its counterfeit. That was one of the points in which I fancy you could be of assistance to me."
"I?" The boy laughed again. "So that is how the wind blows, is it? I told you at our last interview that I wouldn't take the trouble to put any of the family out of the way; but I was evidently not convincing. I'll give you all the rope you want, Sergeant. As a matter of fact, I have been reading up and experimenting quite a bit lately on pathogenic bacteria; the bugs, you know, which produce, among other things, blood-poisoning. Damaging, isn't it, especially when I admit that I turned my attention to the subject some months before my mother's death?"
"Experimenting?" Odell repeated sharply. "Do you mean that you had the living specimens here?"
Rannie nodded coolly; but the detective noted a sudden quiver of his distorted face.
"Yes. I got them a month before my mother was taken ill. I have a friend, Phil Hampton, a young bacteriologist, who lets me fool around his laboratory when I feel able; and he taught me a lot. Lent me an incubator and gave me various forms of cocci to develop and experiment with from time to time."
"Did you have in your possession at the time of your ​mother's illness the actual type of bacteria which would produce blood-poisoning?"
"I did. I had had them for two or three days. That was why, when my mother died and the specialists were still quarreling about why she had not responded to the treatment, I began to wonder if my incubator had been tampered with. But you will scarcely credit that, of course. What I am telling you must amount to a practical confession in your eyes."
"You are telling me this of your own free will, and I am accepting your statement in good faith," Odell replied slowly. "If you were guilty, why should you tell me so much and halt at an actual confession? You kept the incubator here in this room?"
"Yes. It had only to be kept at thirty-eight degrees centigrade—body temperature, you know—and I found the bacteria a fascinating study. They were a protection, too, from boredom; neither of the girls would venture into the room for fear something would escape and bite them. You would think I had an embryo menagerie here!"
"Did anyone else in the household evince the slightest interest in your experiments?"
"Lord, no! The servants didn't know anything about them; they merely had instructions not to touch the incubator. Gene never comes in here, and Dad would not even let me show them to him; said I was a fool to monkey with such things, and that there were enough nuisances in the world without bothering with trouble-makers which were so small you couldn't see them. As for Aunt Effie, I insisted upon talking to her about them just to tease her; but it distressed her so that I quit finally. I believe she thinks ​that modern medical science is an invention of the devil to cheat the Divine Will of its prey. You see, Sergeant, we are up against a stone wall every way we turn."
"Tell me more about these bacteria," Odell urged. "You installed this incubator a month before your mother was taken ill, you say?"
"Approximately. I used agar-agar, the usual sterile culture medium; and the first bacteria that Hampton let me have were called streptococcus viridans, if it means anything to you. They produce blood-poison of the most virulent kind, and had my mother been infected with any of them death would have resulted almost immediately. Next I got from Hampton some staphylococcus aureus; and finally, two or three days before my mother pierced her finger with that needle, he told me to try some staphylococcus albus. They are the bacteria which would have produced the mild case of septicemia from which my mother seemed at first to be suffering, if the needle had been infected with them."
"Could that have been done practically?"
"By simply dipping the needle in the tube containing the culture-medium on the surface of which the bacteria were floating," Rannie replied. "They would remain alive for several hours at least; and the fact that the needle had been drawn repeatedly through the material on which my mother was embroidering would make no difference. Sterilization alone would have destroyed their effectiveness."
"Did your friend Hampton teach you all this?" asked the detective.
"No. He only showed me how to go about experimenting with them. I learned what I know about them from those books you have and a lot more of them over there." He ​nodded toward the collection. Anyone in the house could have had as easy access to them as to the incubator."
"Where is the incubator now?"
"I returned it to Hampton." Rannie flushed once more. "It makes the whole thing look pretty black against me, doesn't it? The fact is that after mother's death and I got brooding about it and wondering why she hadn't responded to the treatment I got a sort of horror of those wretched, infinitesimal things which could so easily have been the cause of it all. I threw out the bacteria, and sent the incubator back to Hampton; but I couldn't get the thought of them out of my mind.
"I know it was madness to even consider it; but, Sergeant, if anyone got at the incubator and infected that needle, they could as easily have gained access to it at any time during my mother's subsequent illness and reinfected her over and over again by a mere pin-prick." The boy's thin hands clenched. "That is the only possible way to account for her failure to rally under the treatment."
"Doctor McCutchen suggested that the incision made for drainage near the infected spot might have been reinfected by serum"—Odell was beginning, but the boy waved him to silence.
"That form of treatment is a special fad of his, but I know Doctor Adams doesn't subscribe to it. He knows of my interest in medical science, and he kept me informed of every detail of the case. An abscess did form near the puncture of the needle, but it was not necessary for him to lance it, and I know that no incision was made. As to the puncture itself, it would have been impossible to reinfect the blood through it because of the dead cells which the ​poison itself had erected all about it, like a barricade; the blood could not circulate near it."
"You mean then that Mrs. Lorne could have been constantly reinfected by any sharp instrument that would pierce the skin anywhere on the body and convey the bacteria to the blood, just as she had been first infected?"
"Exactly. Neither Doctor Adams nor the specialists could have suspected the possibility of such a thing; and a pinprick would leave no noticeable trace. That was the idea which kept recurring to my mind. I told myself that I must be crazy to think of it; but then Julian died, and I could see my own fears reflected in the faces of the whole family. After that there came the two accidents to Gene and Dad, and that settled it."
"Why did you not tell me of all this before?" Odell looked straight into the boy's eyes. "When we had our first talk you said nothing about having the bacteria in your possession."
"I didn't want to get hauled off to jail on suspicion before I had an opportunity to do a little investigating on my own account; I wanted to discover if I could whether anyone had really been at my books or tampered with the bacteria in the incubator. You see, I hadn't much faith in your perspicacity, Sergeant; and I was under the impression that you would be in such a hurry to make out a case against the first person circumstantial evidence might point to that you wouldn't hesitate.—A fat lot of good it did for me to keep silent!" he added with a shrug. "I've thought the whole matter over in my mind, and tried to imagine each member of the family in turn as guilty; but it didn't work. I know their faults and shams to the last tiresome, petty weakness; ​but it is simply impossible for me to convince myself that any of them could be capable of such a monstrous, unnatural crime."
"How did you expect to discover anything in these two days which would lead you to suspect the guilt of some member of the household?"
"Simply by studying them and asking unexpected questions; but, as I told you, it didn't get me anywhere. As an amateur detective, I am a failure; and now I've put it squarely up to you. Sergeant. The means of bringing about my mother's death was here, ready to anyone's hand; and the knowledge of how to make use of it was equally accessible. I have no proof that anyone did avail themselves of it, merely suspicion; and if the circumstantial evidence were twice as strong—"
"Strong!" A raucous but strangely exultant voice behind them caught up the word and repeated it with impish glee. "Strong! Nobody knows how strong I am!"
It was Socrates, dancing excitedly upon his perch and eyeing them obliquely with a knowing leer.
"Who taught the parrot to say that?" demanded the detective abruptly. It was the phrase which had first arrested Taylor's attention outside the closed door when that conscientious operative was searching the house for possible clues.
"Nobody. He's been harping on that for a month or more; but I never can tell how he manages to pick up half that he knows." Rannie laughed with a tinge of the old bitterness. "He certainly never heard me boasting of my physical prowess!"
"Is he ever taken out of this room?"
​"No; but occasionally when I let him out of his cage, and the window is open, he gets out upon the ledge and walks along the cornice to Dad's room, looking for him. Dad is the only one in the family he has any use for, except me; probably because the old man hates him so cordially!"
"Parrots usually repeat a phrase which they have just acquired until the novelty wears off; do they not?"
"I suppose so; or until a new sentence impresses itself upon what minds they have," Rannie responded indifferently.
"Then any new phrase which Socrates repeats he must have learned in this room?" Odell persisted.
"Of course.—I say, what are you driving at?" The indifference was gone from the boy's tone. "You don't think—? But that sentence doesn't mean anything; it couldn't possibly have any connection with the case. No matter who Socrates is imitating, strength was no factor in my mother's death."
"But it was in both the attempted murders," the detective remarked. "Do you think, too, that your brother Julian permitted his razor to be wrested from him without a struggle? I wish our friend Socrates could be induced to talk some more."