Chapter XXVIII

My intuitive feeling that we had a night's work before us, which I had voiced prophetically to McGinity earlier in the evening, as we started for the LaRauche place, with only the faint clue of a woman's voice on the telephone to go on, proved conformable to fact. Dawn was breaking when we returned to the castle, weary and heavy at heart. The place was silent; the only sound that came to us was the swish-swish of the incoming tide, as it broke against the rocks at the foot of the cliff.

We were both so saddened and unstrung over our unpleasant and tragic experiences during the past twenty-four hours, and so physically dog-tired, that we were averse to talking them over.

The three tragedies, occurring so closely together, first, Niki, then Mr. Zzyx, and now, Orkins, after all, seemed to have been so unnecessary; or, as Henry had voiced his opinion about Mr. Zzyx's fearful death, so senseless. And while there was a logical connection between them and the perpetration of the Martian hoax, so far they had contributed little or nothing in clearing up the mystery which was still baffling us both.

It was here that Mrs. LaRauche came into the picture. My conviction, from the time I recognized her voice on the telephone, was that she knew more than any one else did. I had been shocked rather than distressed at the death of Orkins. A providential death, perhaps, with LaRauche gone now, and his wife holding the secret.

But where was LaRauche going? Evidently, after the systematic manner of his escape, he had a set goal. He was an experienced pilot, and a very expert one, considering his age, and probably knew of many places where a man could land safely in the dark.

Word of his escape by plane had been broadcast; the machinery of police watchfulness set in motion along the entire eastern seaboard, and far inland, as well. Somewhere in the air, a man was flying--wanted by the police.

Mrs. LaRauche was a badly shaken woman, but her condition was not serious. I remained at her side until the arrival of an ambulance physician from the county hospital. He was accompanied by a nurse, who took her immediately in charge. But she had other ideas than of going to the hospital. Her brain had cleared considerably, and she insisted on remaining in her home. I agreed with her on this, and to the inconvenience of the proprietor of an employment agency in the village, who had retired for the night, I soon had a competent manservant, with his wife, on the premises.

By the time they arrived, bringing ample provisions and milk, which I had the foresight to order, the police had removed the body of Orkins, as well as all traces of his death. The couple set to work at once, systematically clearing up and setting things in order. By midnight, the house was freshened up considerably, and Mrs. LaRauche made as comfortable as possible in her own, redressed bedroom, with the hospital nurse in attendance.

What she needed most, the physician decreed, was absolute rest and quiet. The kindly attentions showered upon her appeared for the moment to compensate for the loss of her demented husband. She had come out of a horror, but she was not thinking--or allowing herself to think--it seemed to me.

The house still seemed empty and queer as McGinity and I drove away, around one o'clock, trailing Chief Meigs' car back to the village. The Chief's last act was to station a policeman on guard, which made me a lot easier in my mind.

The situation was still lamentable enough, but McGinity and I, with an air of bravado, continued our inquiries on reaching the village. With police assistance, we had no difficulty in locating the light truck which Orkins had rented, and once located and properly inspected, we found nothing to indicate that it had been used to transport the stolen rocket from the Museum of Science to the East River.

And then McGinity suddenly found something, which was vitally important. A screw from the rocket. Chief Meigs chuckled; he couldn't see that a screw could possibly have any bearing on our situation. When we returned to the police station, I showed him.

"Why, that's just an ordinary screw," he said, after inspecting the screw more closely. "I don't see how it could mean anything."

"No?" I said. "Then you don't know how they make screws on Mars. If you think it's just ordinary, here's a screw-driver and a piece of pine wood. Now, drive it in!"

"That doesn't worry me at all," Meigs bantered. He went to his task cheerfully, even whistling, and giving a wink to several policemen who were looking on. But the screw refused to function in the ordinary way. Finally, he gave it up. "Why the damn thing won't go into the wood is a mystery to me," he remarked, as he handed the screw and screw-driver back to me.

"Because it works in reverse to our screws," I explained, as I drove the screw into the soft wood easily enough by a reverse motion. "There, I've done the job," I concluded, "which proves conclusively that only a Martian screw could be jolted out of a Martian rocket. And as the screw was found in the truck, the van therefore must have carried the rocket."

The Chief of Police grew pop-eyed in amazement.

"Everything about the rocket has this unusual element," I continued, "except the metal from which it was constructed, and it is a scientific fact that the metallic ores which abound on the earth are to be found in other planets."

The Chief's look of blank astonishment prompted me to go on.

"Now, whatever we may have thought at first about this rocket having originated on Mars, we know now that LaRauche manufactured it himself. He had the brain power necessary to create this fantasy in mechanism, and the means and method of carrying out his motive, which was to bring my brother Henry to shame."

"All of which stirred the popular imagination, and increased the circulation of the Daily Recorder half a million," McGinity interjected.

"Well," Chief Meigs drawled, "all I got to say is this. If making screws that go in backwards is not the act of a lunatic, then I'm crazy myself."

For several hours, McGinity and I remained at the police station, occupying ourselves piecing together from this and that all the information at our command; and at the end, it was as clear as daylight that we knew no more about the actual perpetration of the hoax than we did twenty-four hours back. The impression we both had gained was that tragedy had been obtruded into LaRauche's suave scheme that was shockingly disturbing, but had nothing whatever to do with clearing up the case.

There was little or nothing at the LaRauche home for the police to go on with. No trace of the revolver that had pierced Orkins' heart with its deadly bullet; no firearms of any sort, in fact. Mrs. LaRauche heightened the mystery by declaring her husband had an inherent fear of the use of firearms, as he had of fire, and had never owned a revolver. Nor was any sort of weapon discovered during the inspection of his laboratory, or workrooms, in the observatory and hangar, in which he operated outside his dwelling. No evidence even was found that would in the slightest degree incriminate him in the Martian fraud.

The city papers had come by plane, after midnight, and I read them all with interest. McGinity, fed up on the story, waved them away. They contained a very full account of what had occurred at the castle, Orkins' mysterious death, and LaRauche's escape by plane.

About three o'clock, I succeeded in reaching Olinski on the telephone, at his city home, and he was so upset over the whole affair, as reported in the papers, that at first all he could seem to do was to sputter into the mouthpiece.

"I fear, my dear Mr. Royce," he managed to say, finally, "that you and that reporter fellow have made a great mistake--a serious error. You have found nothing to prove that the radio message, and the rocket, did not originate in Mars, now, have you?"

"Nothing," I replied, "except that water-mark we found in the scroll."

"That proves nothing," he fairly shouted. "Some utterly unscrupulous and wicked person may have changed that scroll after it passed out of my possession."

"That is your theory, Mr. Olinski?" I asked.

"Can you suggest any other?" he countered. "No; because there can be no other. Unless you are accusing me of complicity--"

"I didn't say so, Mr. Olinski," I interrupted.

"Yet you believe this Dr. LaRauche, the scientist you've been telling me about, is at the bottom of this so-called hoax?"

"That is highly possible," I answered. "I myself think so."

"But you have, of course, no idea just how he did it?"

"No idea whatever, but it's quite plain that for motives of his own he had the opportunity."

"And that," Olinski declared, "that's as far as you've got?"

"At present," I replied.

"And that's as far as you'll ever get, my dear Mr. Royce," he rejoined in a bitter, sardonic tone, and then suddenly hung up.

When we had thus made an end, a dead silence followed, during which McGinity and I looked at each other for a moment or two, in silence. After I had told him what Olinski had said, the reporter spoke.

"I've put it out of my mind that Olinski had anything to do with this affair," he said. "The more I think of it, Mr. Royce, the more I'm dead certain that Mrs. LaRauche is our only hope. Finding her husband will be a police detail, and several days may elapse before he's apprehended. Now, if we could get to her, the first thing in the morning. Do you think that would be possible?"

Before I could answer, Chief Meigs walked in to say that a plane, answering the description of LaRauche's machine, had passed over Montauk Point, heading south, a little before three o'clock, had been picked up by a coast-guard searchlight, but had dodged out of the light. With this announcement, all thoughts of Mrs. LaRauche vanished, and--to me, at any rate--did not recur until we had driven back to the castle at the break of dawn, after a weary vigil of waiting at the police station to hear further word of LaRauche. But the reports were blank and disappointing.