The Frankenstein Factory (19 page)

“Could you make another?”

Vera bit her lower lip. “It took half the magnesium in the lab to make that one. I could do one more, but that would be it.”

“Go to it!”

“Do you think they saw it?”

“They couldn’t miss it unless they were blind.”

“Or looking the other way.”

“The eternal pessimist! Go on—back to the lab!”

It was past midnight when the next homemade magnesium flare was ready. Vera carefully explained its workings, including the deployment of a spandex parachute made from her old bodysuit.

“Such a waste of a good bodysuit,” Earl observed.

Vera ignored him. “It’ll work unless the flaming magnesium hits it and melts the spandex. But that’s a chance we have to take. In any event, it should stay up longer than last time.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

He climbed out onto the roof, as he’d done the first time, propping the V-ramp in place with its bottom resting against the drainpipe. This time he placed another board beneath it, increasing the angle until it was pointed almost straight up.

“Here goes!”

It blasted high into the night, singeing his hand as it took off. “Are you all right?” Vera asked.

“I’ll live. Just a little burn.”

“This one’s going higher.”

“I hope so.”

It burst with a blinding flash that lit the entire island. Suddenly below them they could see Frank, standing near the beach, gun hanging limply at his side, watching the flaming magnesium.

“Get inside before he sees you,” Armstrong cautioned. “He could take a shot at you!”

It seemed like good advice and Earl obeyed it. Above them in the sky the little spandex parachute was slowing the flare’s fall toward the water.

“Perfect!” Earl decided a moment later, when the flare finally reached the waves and died in a fizz of steam. “It was lit well over a minute. Certainly someone from shore must have seen it.”

Armstrong glanced at his watch. “If anyone’s still awake over there now.”

“Don’t be a wet blanket,” Vera said. “Of course someone’s still awake!”

Armstrong shrugged. “Go on and live with your dreams, you two. If you weren’t so busy looking at each other you’d have noticed there’s a fog rolling in. It could be thicker over toward Baja, if it’s coming in from the ocean. On the peninsula your wonderful magnesium flare might have been nothing more than a dull glow in the eastern sky at twelve-thirty in the morning. Heat lightning, maybe.”

“Stop that!” Vera shouted, “I don’t think you want us to be rescued!”

“Sure, I do. But I’m not blind to the truth.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

Dr. Armstrong shrugged. “Wait till morning. And pray.”

They spent the rest of the night huddled together in the big living room, Earl and Vera on the couch and Armstrong across the room in a large foam chair. Outside, the moon had disappeared, and Earl had the feeling that Armstrong might be right about a fog rolling in.

“What are you thinking about?” Vera asked him.

He shifted position in the dark, caressing her firm breasts. It was something he hadn’t done with a girl since high school. “Just wondering what’s going to happen. Whether there’s going to be another murder.”

“I thought you were probably dreaming of New York City.”

“That too, I suppose.”

“Is your office there?”

He nodded, then realized that she probably couldn’t see him in the dark. “On top of the old World Trade Center. The Federal Government rents space there now, and we have the whole upper floor of the north tower. The flat roof is perfect for rocketcopters.”

“What sort of crimes do you investigate?”

“Nothing like this, believe me! Mostly computer frauds of one kind or another. Stock-market rigging, insurance swindles, even some gimmicking of the race-track computers. I’m fairly new with them, so I can’t tell you too much about it.”

“Will they come looking for you if you don’t report?”

“Sure—but not for another week or so. I’m on an undercover assignment here, posing as a medical photographer and records technician. If they came in too soon they’d be fearful of blowing my cover. Besides, it was supposed to be a fairly routine assignment, as these things go.”

“It didn’t turn out that way.”

“No.” He gazed into the darkness. “But then life rarely does. Even death hasn’t been routine for Frank.”

Toward morning he dozed a bit, his head resting on Vera’s lap. He woke with a start at some noise from outside, but she calmed him with a warm palm to his forehead. “It’s only a bird. One of those high in the trees, seeing the first rays of the rising sun.”

He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, trying to moisten it. “Nearly morning,” he mumbled.

“Yes.”

“Have you slept?”

“Not really.”

He raised his voice a bit. “Armstrong—you all right?”

From across the room they heard a stir. “Yes. All right.”

Earl reached out a hand to pull himself up and felt a button that pressed inward under the pressure of his finger. He remembered that it was the signal Hobbes had used on a number of occasions to summon Hilda. “You know …” he began.

“Yes? What is it, Earl?”

“I’m not quite certain.”

He had to think about it for a moment, to put it all together in his mind. He stood up, trying to shake the cobwebs from his brain. “Would you please tell me what’s going on? It’s too early in the morning for games!”

“I’m going out to the kitchen. When I call you, press this button.”

“What for?”

“Just do it. I want to make sure my memory isn’t playing tricks on me.”

He went into the kitchen, holding the door open a bit, and called out, “Press it now.”

The buzzer sounded as he remembered it. He came back to the living room. “What’s all this business?”

Armstrong complained. “It’s still the middle of the night!”

“It’s dawn,” Earl corrected, walking to the window. “But there’s a mist over the island. It’ll take the sun a while to burn it off.”

“Any sign of Frank?” Vera asked.

“No.”

“The help never came,” Armstrong grumbled. “I was right about that!”

“Maybe they were waiting till daylight.”

“Maybe shit!”

Earl smiled. The doctor was not his usual calm self this early in the morning. “Come on—let’s have breakfast and I’ll tell you a story.”

Vera mixed some frozen juice and made bacon and eggs on the microwave stove. It tasted good to Earl, and he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten. It seemed like days ago, though certainly it was only yesterday.

“Now the story,” Vera prompted.

Earl leaned back and took a sip of coffee. “It all revolves around the character of Lawrence Hobbes. And, indirectly, the character of the International Cryogenics Institute. When I think back to all the stories Hobbes told me—told all of us—I realize that ninety percent of them were lies. Consider for a moment—he said the trees here were the result of the unusual climate generated by his freezing equipment. Untrue and scientifically impossible, as was explained earlier. He said there were a limited number of bodies stored in the vaults. Then he said there were over a hundred, including an ex-president. We discovered that at least some of the tubes down there are empty, and have been empty for years. He said Emily Watson gave him large sums of money to carry on the work, but the secret ledger we found shows that the money really came from swindling his dead clients’ estates. He said he wanted Frank brought back to life because it was really his long-dead son Larry, whose mother was Emily Watson. But since the story of Emily Watson’s donations has been proven untrue, we have no reason to accept the story of her motherhood.”

“I’ll agree with that,” Vera said. “But where does that leave us?”

“With the buzzer up there on the wall. I remembered that it was buzzing when I found Hilda stabbed to death in the kitchen. In fact, I’d gone looking for her because she hadn’t answered Hobbes’s summons. But we know she did on other occasions.”

“So what? She didn’t answer it because she was dead.”

“You’re missing the point,” Earl told her. “How could Hilda ever have answered it if she was deaf and dumb?”

Vera and Armstrong looked at each other. “An interesting point,” the doctor admitted.

“We know that Hobbes equipped the house with light signals, because one went off in the conference room, on my first day here, to signal Freddy’s arrival. But there’s no light signal here in the kitchen—only the buzzer.”

“So that was one more of Hobbes’s lies.”

“Exactly. The cook, Hilda, was not deaf, and probably not dumb either.”

“But why lie about something like that? So she could spy on us?”

“Doubtful. With all his electronic gear, he could certainly have the rooms bugged if he wanted. It would be much more effective. No, I think we have to look elsewhere for the explanation of Hilda’s pretended ailment.”

“Maybe she was spying on Hobbes,” Vera suggested, “like Whalen was.”

“No, because Hobbes was the one using the buzzer to summon her. Hobbes certainly knew that she could hear. And the fact that he didn’t change the buzzer to a light system implies that Hilda’s role was only a temporary one.”

“I can’t see what you’re getting at,” Armstrong admitted.

“Remember Hobbes’s dying words? If Emily Watson had been his killer he’d have said, ‘Emily killed me,’ or something like that. If Emily was still alive on the island he might have said, ‘Emily Watson isn’t dead.’ But what he actually said was, ‘Emily Watson didn’t die’! Meaning, I believe, that Emily Watson didn’t die when we thought she died.”

“But …”

“You still don’t see it? Emily Watson didn’t die because Emily Watson never existed at all! Emily Watson and Hilda, the cook, were the same person!”

T
HEIR OBJECTIONS WERE QUICK
and loud. “That can’t be!” Vera insisted. “Hilda always served the meals!”

“But did you ever see them together? I’ll admit that I only arrived on the island Sunday, but I didn’t ever see them together. The routine of the house, as it was explained to me, was as follows: Emily Watson and Dr. Hobbes took breakfast together,
alone,
each morning. For lunch and dinner, the rest of you dined with Hobbes, but Miss Emily never appeared. Sometimes she came down for cocktails, but she appeared only after Hilda had finished serving. That’s how it was Sunday morning when I breakfasted with Hobbes. Hilda had finished serving and vanished into the kitchen some minutes before Miss Emily appeared.”

“But—but they looked nothing alike! Miss Emily was an old lady who walked with a cane. Hilda was a middle-aged Mexican woman!”

“How different were they in truth? Their size was about the same. Their voices could not be compared because Hilda never spoke. It was their age and mannerisms that made them different—Emily’s wrinkled skin and white hair contrasted with Hilda’s tanned skin and dark hair. The cane and the limp were easily acquired as needed. And as for the wrinkled skin and tanned skin, it was a simple makeup job. You’ve been here for months, Armstrong, but how much did you ever notice either woman?”

“I’ll admit that Miss Emily kept pretty much to her room. And one doesn’t look at servants all that closely.”

“Of course, Miss Emily was a spectator during all of the operation on Sunday night—but Hilda was nowhere to be seen that night. One more indication that they were the same person.”

“But what about the bloodstains in her room?” Vera asked.

“We come now to an important point, because we believed until now that the killing of Emily Watson was the first in a series of murders. It now appears that she wasn’t killed at all, and that it was MacKenzie who was the first victim. Instead of seven killings on this island, only six people have died—MacKenzie, Freddy, Hilda, Whalen, Tony, and Hobbes.”

“That’s enough!” Armstrong poured himself more coffee.

“But what about the bloodstains?” Vera persisted.

“I think it was Whalen who suggested the possibility of menstrual blood. Once we accept the fact that Emily Watson wasn’t the old woman she pretended, that possibility becomes the most likely one. It explains why the apparent killing didn’t upset Hobbes all that much. And it explains why Miss Emily couldn’t reappear. We found the blood on Miss Emily’s sheets while she was downstairs in her other identity fixing breakfast. We jumped to the obvious conclusion of a violent deed. Hobbes couldn’t tell us differently, and if Emily reappeared later she’d have to explain the blood. The truth was out of the question—to admit to menstruation would mean blowing the whole masquerade. The image of an elderly Miss Emily bestowing her gifts on ICI would vanish in smoke. So they both went along with the murder theory because they had no choice, and Emily remained as Hilda, the cook, until her death.”

“That’s fantastic!” Vera marveled. “But I suppose it could have happened that way.”

“If it did, though, who killed MacKenzie?”

“It had to be Frank, I suppose,” Earl said. “With Emily removed as the first victim, we get down to MacKenzie and then Freddy. Both of them were killed in the operating room, and their bodies remained there. The problem of no one having seen Frank roaming the house is removed. He stayed right down there and killed those two. He didn’t leave the operating room until he killed number three—Hilda.”

“Was she really Mexican?” Vera asked.

“I doubt it. A clever actress, probably, and an expert with makeup. Your fancy room was probably hers. I don’t doubt that she was sleeping with Hobbes, and quite willing to do whatever he asked in furtherance of his plan.”

Armstrong shook his head. “I won’t argue with your logic, but it’s an awfully intricate structure to erect on the basis of a kitchen buzzer.”

“Well, that wasn’t exactly all of it,” Earl admitted. “Ever since Miss Emily vanished I’ve had the matter of the alarm system in the back of my mind. The wires weren’t cut till the second (apparent) death—that of MacKenzie. The system was still functioning perfectly on Sunday night, which made it impossible for anyone to approach Emily Watson’s room without sounding the alarm. We breezed over that fact at the time simply because we could accept no other explanation for the blood. What really happened was simplicity itself—Emily-Hilda arose at daybreak, when the alarm went off, and went downstairs to make breakfast. In the Hilda role she didn’t need her cane so she left it on the floor. And she didn’t worry about the bloody sheet because she was the one who changed the bedding. But, as it happened, you went looking for her, Vera, and spread the alarm before she could return to her Emily character.”