We exited the elevator on the third floor and passed the nurse’s station. Brainert’s room was all the way down the hall, in the corner.
From the doctor’s cautious tone, I expected to find my friend flat on his back, swathed from head to toe in bandages, tubes running into a vein in each arm. Then I rounded the doorway to his room and heard:
“I’m quite comfortable, nurse! Please stop fussing!”
Brainert’s voice was shaky, but his cranky stubbornness was undiminished, which meant he was practically back to his old self!
“Please nurse,” he declared, “stop fiddling with the bed and find my friend in the waiting room. I must see her at once!”
I entered to find Brainert sitting up, a nurse gamely trying to adjust his position. He was bandaged, but thankfully no tubes were visible, though a wire ran from a dressing on the tip of his finger to a pulse and respiration monitor beeping next to the bed.
“Pen! Please come in,” Brainert called when he saw me—out of one eye; the other was covered by a thick bandage. So was his nose, and both of Brainert’s forearms were swathed in thick gauze.
“Your face!” I cried.
“Broken glass,” muttered Brainert. “Didn’t damage my eye, so it’s good news. And the scars—I’m hoping—will make me look distinguished, maybe even a little dangerous. It would be a nice change for me to start looking a little dangerous, don’t you think?”
Jack laughed. Tell your bird to lose his bow tie and he might have a fighting chance.
“I think you’ll wear any scars with as much panache as you wear everything in your life, Brainert.”
He smiled, then lifted his arms. “Fifteen stitches in the left, twenty-two in the right.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Now you just sound like you’re bragging.”
Brainert and I fell silent until the nurse finished her tasks. Finally she departed along with Jack’s favorite blonde angel of mercy, and we were alone.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It was around noon,” Brainert began, his voice low. “I was working in the living room, papers spread out on the coffee table. I’d made several phone calls and was compiling notes, and I heard a crash on the porch.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to investigate.” Brainert sighed. “Like a fool I unlocked the front door without first looking to see who was there—I might as well have invited my attacker to mug me!”
“Who was on the porch?”
“A tall man. He wore a black denim jacket and a crudely improvised mask—”
“Was the mask black?” I interrupted. “Did it have ragged eye slits like he’d cut the knitted cap himself then pulled it down over his face?”
Brainert nodded. “I remember your description from the Quibblers meeting of the man who assaulted you. I’m positive this was the same person. As soon as I saw the mask, I knew he wanted my notes—”
“Notes? What notes?”
Brainert chatted on as if he hadn’t heard me. “He demanded money, of course—in that raspy whisper meant to disguise his real voice—but it was all a ruse, and a clumsy one. He was really after the solution.”
“Solution?”
“He grabbed my wallet, emptied it of cash. Then he pocketed my wristwatch. As he was stuffing his ill-gotten gains into his jacket, I jumped him.”
“You what!”
“I fought him, Pen. I know how to stick up for myself! I sunk my fist into his gut. I even whacked him on the snout—”
“Snout,” I thought. “Oh, my God. Jack, did you hear—”
I heard.
“I was doing well,” Brainert went on, “until he rammed my face into the Victorian mirror—”
“Oh, God, Brainert, you poor—”
“That mirror was a treasure. I hope it brings him seven years bad luck. He was the one who broke the glass, you see. My skull was merely the instrument.”
Brainert was really getting worked up now. The shock obviously had worn off, anger and outrage replacing it. I saw a nurse pause at his door, curious about the commotion.
“Shush, Brainert,” I said in a whisper. “Calm down.”
“Yes, yes, sorry,” he said, quieter now. “It’s not every day a guy fights for his life.”
“What happened next?”
“When I was on the ground again, and bleeding all over my beautiful custom-weave Persian rug, the intruder found the papers I was working on. He gathered all of them up, stuffed them into his jacket. I tried to stop him, but, frankly, I couldn’t get up. My assailant must have seen all the blood, probably thought he’d killed me. He fled. I remember trying to stand up…”
Brainert touched his battered nose. “The next thing I knew I was in the hospital, doctors working on me.”
“Are you sure he came for your notes?”
“I’m certain, Pen! The way he gathered up every sheet of paper, this wasn’t a casual swipe. He was very careful…He wanted my secret!”
“The solution to the Poe Code?”
Brainert nodded.
“What is it?” I asked. “You were about to announce the solution when Detective Marsh showed up at the Quibblers meeting to arrest me. The last thing I heard you say was something about an obscure quote…”
Brainert smiled. “‘This is indeed Life itself.’”
“What’s it from? What’s it mean?”
“It’s from Poe’s story ‘The Oval Portrait.’”
I think I gasped just then. Jack exclaimed something in my mind, but he didn’t have to remind me. The case I’d been dreaming about in Jack’s time involved an oval portrait. The missing man, Vincent Tattershawe, had taken it off the desk of his secretary—and old lover—and sent it to his fiancée, Dorothy Kerns, just before he disappeared with most of her inheritance.
“Is that the treasure then?” I asked Brainert. “Is it an oval portrait?”
Brainert nodded. “I believe it is, yes—although it could be just another piece of the puzzle, another part of the larger treasure hunt.”
“And all of your papers, the copies of the title pages Sadie made for you, they’re all gone?” I asked.
“The intruder took the papers, but I have backup files.” Brainert tapped his index finger to his temple. “And I recall what I’ve learned.”
“Then you really did solve it?”
Brainert sighed. “While I’m certain an oval portrait is involved, I’m still missing one small piece of the puzzle. There is, however, a very promising theory I have yet to put to the test…”
“Go on.”
“You see, my attacker didn’t get one vital piece of information needed to solve the mystery and obtain the treasure, because I never got a chance to write it down…. I was curious to find out what happened to the estate of publisher Eugene Phelps after the man committed suicide. My Providence friend examined the estate sale records and discovered that Miles Chesley—Peter’s grandfather—purchased the entire contents of Eugene Phelps’s library in 1935. He had it transported to his Newport mansion. This occurred years before Phelps’s home burned to the ground.”
I gave Brainert a blank stare.
“Don’t you see, Pen? It all makes sense. Miles Chesley solved the first riddle of the Poe Code, the same one that Dr. Conte solved.”
“What was it again?”
“‘Mystic Library east wall sunset reveals all.’ Dr. Conte thought the reference was to the library in Mystic, Connecticut. But he was wrong. Miles Chesley, who was alive in Eugene Phelps’s day, knew Mystic referred to Phelps’s mansion in Newport—Mystic House. That’s why he purchased the entire contents of Phelps’s library after the man killed himself. And that’s why the Poe Code treasure would not have been destroyed in the 1956 fire that burned down Phelps’s home. Miles Chesley had already moved the library’s contents to his mansion! It’s probably right there in Prospero House as we speak.”