I stared at the stamp. “You could have told me,” I said.
“I don’t like to worry you unnecessarily, Matthew.”
“Yeah,” I said. “All right — how did you get out of the coffin?”
Ardis said, “The Blue Room Illusion, or a variant of it. The coffin’s lid is a double pane of glass. The bottom pane drops down at a forty-five degree angle. At the same time the lights on one side of the coffin go off, and a set on the other side come on, turning the glass into a mirror.”
“Uh-huh. Then Steele disappears, and what the viewers see is—”
“—a reflected image of a photograph of Christopher pasted along the inside of the coffin, invisible from the street.”
“Right,” I said. “And the necessary distraction?”
“When I let that poster flap, remember? Everyone looked at me, and Christopher rolled out a hinged panel on the other side. In exactly fifteen minutes, I provided him with another distraction, and he mounted the stamp on the poster with one motion, and rolled back into the coffin. While you were having dinner, that was.”
I asked Steele, “You picked the lock on the Stamp Room door?”
“Of course.”
“How about the alarm?”
“I turned it off. With a duplicate key. I took an impression of the alarm lock as a customer in the Sportswear Department last week.”
“One more question: you didn’t figure out that Thorp had made a phone call from the Stamp Room through deduction alone, did you?”
“Not really. When I entered the room the second time, with you and everyone else, I saw immediately that the telephone had been moved. So I knew that someone had made a call in the interim — either Schneider or his killer, since McCarthy and the police had not used the instrument.”
“You know,” I said, “this insane passion of yours for taking on all challenges, and for creating your own when there’s none around, almost got you rung in for murder this time. If your timing had been off, or if someone had spotted the stamp...”
“But it wasn’t, and no one did,” he said. “I had to solve poor Schneider’s murder to make sure I wasn’t implicated in the appropriation of the Vermilion or in the homicide itself. Now there was a challenge.”
I shook my head wearily. “You’re going to return the stamp, naturally.”
“Naturally. I’ll arrange for it to be found somewhere in Lorde’s. And its ‘theft’ will forever remain a mystery.”
“What next, you maniac?” I asked him. “What next?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered. “I’ve sort of been considering the crown of Henry the Seventh.”
The hell of it was, I couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding...
Angel of Mercy
Her name was Mercy.
Born with a second name, yes, like everyone else, but it had been so long since she’d used it she could scarce remember what it was. Scarce remember so many things about her youth, long faded now — except for Father, of course. It seemed, sometimes, that she had never had a youth at all. That she’d spent her whole life on the road, first with Caleb and then with Elias, jouncing from place to place in the big black traveling wagon, always moving, drifting, never settling anywhere. Birth to death, with her small deft hands working tirelessly and her eyes asquint in smoky lamplight and her head aswirl with medicines, mixtures, measurements, what was best for this ailment, what was the proper dosage for that one...
Miss Mercy. Father had been the first to call her that, in his little apothecary shop in... what was the name of the town where she’d been born? Lester? No, Dexter. Dexter, Pennsylvania. “A druggist is an angel of mercy,” he said to her when she was ten or eleven. “Your name comes from my belief in that, child. Mercy. Miss Mercy. And wouldn’t you like to be an angel of mercy one day, too?”
“Oh yes, Father, yes! Will you show me how?”
And he had shown her, with great patience, because he had no sons and because he bore no prejudice against his daughter or the daughter of any man. He had shown her carefully and well for five or six or seven years, until Mr. President Lincoln declared war against the Confederate States of America and Father went away to bring his mercy to sick and wounded Union soldiers on far-off battlefields. But there was no mercy for him. On one of those battlefields, a place called Antietam, he was himself mortally wounded by cannon fire.
As soon as she received word of his death, she knew what she must do. She had no siblings, and Mother had died years before; Father’s legacy was all that was left. And it seemed as though the next thing she knew, she was sitting on the high seat of the big black traveling wagon, alone in the beginning, then with Caleb and then Elias to drive the team of horses, bringing her mercy to those in need. Death to birth, birth to death — it was her true calling. Father would have been proud. He would have understood and he would have been so proud.
Miss Mercy. If it had been necessary to paint a name on the side of the wagon, that was the name she would have chosen. Just that and nothing more. It was what Caleb had called her, too, from their very first meeting in... Saint Louis, hadn’t it been? Young and strong and restless — there driving the wagon one day, gone the next and never seen again. And Miss Mercy was the only name Elias wrote on his pad of white paper when the need arose, the name he would have spoken aloud if he hadn’t been born deaf and dumb. She had chanced upon him down South somewhere. Georgia, perhaps — he was an emancipated slave from the state of Georgia. Chanced upon him, befriended him, and they had been together ever since. Twenty years? Thirty? Dear Elias. She couldn’t have traveled so long and so far, or done so much, if it were not for him.
In all the long years, how many miles had they traveled together? Countless number. North and east in the spring and summer, south and west in the fall and winter. Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas... maybe all the states and territories there were. Civilization and wilderness frontier. Ranches, farms, settlements. Towns that had no druggist, towns that had druggists with short supplies or too little understanding of their craft. Cities, now and then, to replenish medicines that could not be gotten elsewhere. Saint Louis and... Chicago? Yes, Chicago. Oh, she could scarce remember them all.
And everywhere they went, the people came. The needy people with their aches and pains, ills and ailments, troubles and sorrows. First to marvel at her skill with mortar and pestle and her vast pharmacopoeial knowledge; at the cabinets and tight-fitted shelves Elias had built to hold the myriad glass bottles filled with liquids in all the colors of the rainbow, and below the shelves the rows upon rows of drawers containing ground and powdered drugs, herbs and barks, pastilles and pills. And then to buy what they needed: cough syrups, liniments, worm cures, liver medicines, stomach bitters, blood purifiers. And so much more: two-grain quinine tablets, Bateman’s drops, castor oil, Epsom salts and Rochelle salts and Seidlitz powders, paregorics and rheumatism tonics, bottles of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and Ford’s Laxative Compound and Dr. Williams’s Pink Pills for Pale People. And, too, in private, with their hands and eyes nervous and their voices low, embarrassed, sometimes ashamed: potency elixirs and aphrodisiacs, emmenagogues and contraceptives, Apiol Compound for suppressed and painful menstruation, fluid extract of kava-kava or emulsion of copaiba for gonorrhea, blue ointment for crab lice.