The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing

attentions, in the case of that easygoing young woman, were insufficient to account for the extreme nature of her reaction. Perhaps he had made her an agent to some loathsome kind of perversion; perhaps he was a modern manifestation of the Marquis de Sade, whose works I had seen on his own bookshelves. If that were true, it seemed to me that I had no right whatever to pass judgment upon any means that Muriel might have taken to free herself.
    If anyone in authority had questioned me, I would have told what I knew at once. But if the reader censures me for not having reported to the police, I ask him to remember that as yet we had not definite knowledge that anything was seriously amiss. It was two days later before the authorities were officially informed of the doctor’s disappearance, and longer than that before we got any definite clue to hint at what had happened to him.
    I was influenced more than anything else by the difficulty of explaining my sudden entrance, torn and bleeding, long after midnight, at Mike’s bedside. Dr. Alling had been astonished by my appearance. If Gideon Wyck had been murdered that very night, on the lonely hillside up which I had followed him, how could I clear myself of suspicion? Only by involving Muriel and the boy Ted. And what would my single voice be worth, in testimony, against both of theirs? It might so happen that they were possessed of perfect alibis, and I knew that I had no convincing alibi at all, during those hours on the hillside. I began to hope that Gideon Wyck was still alive. Muriel’s expression of happiness, when I saw her in the hospital, had not seemed like that of a murderess. I decided to wait, and not make a fool of myself.
    For all I knew, Dr. Alling might have set people to watch my reactions and to report upon my movements. Just to play safe, I hid my diaries in my mattress, and for several days did nothing whatever outside the usual routine of work. I did no want to betray myself by too much of a change of manner, so I continued to stop for a few words with Daisy every day; but I was careful about what I said to her.
    At last the awaited event happened, a week after the mysterious night. On the morning of the 11th of April, 1932, Marjorie Wyck received by parcel post a bundle containing every item of clothing worn by her father when he was last seen. Nothing which he might have been supposed to have had on his person seemed on first examination to be missing. The linen had been immaculately laundered, the socks washed, the shoes polished. The woolen garments, moreover, smelt so strongly of cleaning fluid that they presumably had been dry-cleaned just before mailing. This left us with two likely assumptions: either Gideon Wyck had been disposed of by a cleverly insolent murderer or else the sending of his clothes was a symbol that for good reasons of his own he was discarding his former identity and disappearing deliberately from among his old acquaintances.

Ten
    One curious sidelight on Gideon Wyck’s disappearance was the tacit willingness of everyone concerned to do nothing whatever about it. His absence was looked upon as good riddance. But the delivery of the bundle of clothing of course brought the authorities into action. Hos Creel, the postman, described the beginning of the investigation to a group of us on the school steps.
    “Made out like I didn’t think it nothin’ special,” he explained. “ ‘Hull darned new outfit, here,’ I says, ‘from the heft of it.’ ‘Hope so,’ she says, just like that, ‘but who’d be a-sendin’ me one?’ Took it brave too. Lots o’ starch in that girl. Right away she says, ‘Don’t ye tetch ’em, Hos. Don’t lay even a finger on ’em.’ The sheriff comes and says, ‘Ye did right, not to tetch ’em. Fingerprints.’ And he wraps the whole bundle, paper and all, in another paper. ‘Hos,’ he says to me, ‘you got an important part in this case.’ Wal, I told him back to help find where the