The Anatomy of Deception

by Lawrence Goldstone

  “Abigail,” I began, “they tried to keep me from you. I know that you would never—”

  She put up her hand. Her movements were graceful, deliberate. “Ephraim,” she said softly, “in one hour I am leaving for New York with my parents and Albert and Margaret. From there, we are sailing for Europe.”

  “Europe?” I echoed, stunned. “How long will you be gone? How can I reach you?”

  “Father has planned an extensive tour of the Continent. There is no date for our return. And he has insisted that our itinerary remain secret.”

  “But what about us?”

  Abigail did not drop her gaze or alter her expression. “I treasure our time together, Ephraim. Truly I do. I have deep feelings for you. But circumstances have overtaken both of us. I cannot bear to remain here with the memory of the horrible fate that befell my friend so fresh in my mind. I ache terribly. I need time and distance so that my soul may heal.”

  My throat had gone completely dry and I felt my heart tripping against my ribs. “What about my soul?” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Ephraim.”

  “I thought you loved me.”

  “I said I have feelings for you. I never once said I loved you. I have never loved any man. I’m not convinced that I ever will.”

  “But the night in the studio … the portrait …”

  “Lovemaking is not the same thing as love, Ephraim.”

  “It was to me.”

  Abigail sighed. “It isn’t my fault, Ephraim, that you made me into something I’m not.”

  I felt desperation, as does a patient who has been just told that he is terminally ill. How many times had I watched one of them grapple with this news? There must be something to say, something to do, each thinks, something that will alter the diagnosis, something to inject a glimmer of hope. I wanted to beg her, accuse her, charm her, plead with her, berate her for enticing me to fall in love with her and then abandoning me. Before I could do any of that, however, she spoke once more.

  “When you came by yesterday morning, I was too aggrieved to see you and, to be honest, extremely distressed that you ignored my wishes. How could you possibly have made that grisly visit to the cemetery?”

  “You begged me to help.” I heard the shrillness in my protest. “To find out the truth about Rebecca. If I had not gone … done what I did … you never would have known.”

  Her face was beautiful, implacable. “I know now that sometimes it may be better to have a terrible truth withheld. I will never be able to look at you again without being reminded of poor Rebecca’s coffin being dug up and opened in the dead of night.”

  “Perhaps after some time away …” I mumbled.

  “Quite some time, I’m afraid. Simply put, Ephraim, I do not expect to return anytime in the near future, so it would be pointless to pretend there is any potential for us. You are an exceptional man and I have complete confidence that you will find the love and fulfillment you seek with another. Although I have no right to make such a request, I ask for your indulgence and understanding. I hope that one day you will be able to think of me with fondness rather than rancor.”

  A stunning emptiness came over me, as if I had been hollowed out, followed by a horrible pain—searing, tearing through me. Never to see her again, never to touch her, hear her voice. The helplessness, the sense of loss, was crushing. This was, surely, a death, how Halsted must have felt when he realized that his destiny had been totally wrested from his control.

  “Then there is nothing …”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but looking on her face, so placid, so utterly unaffected, I knew at once that she had been regretful before, that I was not the first man to sit across from her with dashed hopes and smashed dreams. I was surely not the only man who found her to be the most alluring woman he’d ever met, not the first to fall in love with her. Eakins, I now knew, was in love with her, too. Every man she met, I expected, was prone to the same fate.

  While she loved none of them in return.

  Then, suddenly, as with Monique, I saw Abigail for the person she was. Beauty without soul. All her passion went on her canvases. There was none in the person herself. It was she who was truly hollowed out.

  There was nothing more to be said. I stood to leave.

  “There is something I’d like you to have, if you want it,” she said.

  “What is that?”

  “The portrait. I’ve had it wrapped for you. If you don’t want it, I’m going to have it destroyed. I’ve already done that with Rebecca’s painting. I want no reminders.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  Abigail rang and instructed Martin to bring the package. He soon returned with a parcel wrapped in cloth and tied with string.

  She stood and faced me. “Good-bye, Ephraim.”

  I couldn’t speak the word. I mutely took up the package and walked past her out of the room. As I passed into the vestibule, Albert was standing at the top of the stairs. I stopped and our eyes met. I considered confronting him for his perfidy, but I realized that he felt no more responsibility for Rebecca Lachtmann than the butcher surgeon Burleigh had felt for Mr. Whitbread. For a moment, we stared at one another and then, without the hypocrisy of false pleasantries, I left the Benedict home for the final time.

  When I arrived home and placed the painting in the hall, Mrs. Mooney asked what it was. When I told her, she fetched a knife and, without uttering a word, cut the string binding the cloth. When the painting was unwrapped, she leaned it against the wall and stood back to examine it. She placed her right index finger to her lower lip and cocked her head back and forth, never taking her eyes from the canvas. Finally, she emitted a long breath, slowly shook her head, and retired to prepare me a light supper.

  As I examined the portrait for myself, I also was not as taken with it as I had been earlier. What had appeared strong and indomitable in Abigail’s studio seemed now to be only mean and self-absorbed. I looked carefully to see if Abigail had altered the painting in any way, but there was no evidence of change. Perhaps it was I who had changed.

  Simpson arrived precisely on time. She was wearing a maroon dress, once again plain but not unfashionable. She stood at the threshold for a moment before entering. She was not alone.

  “Samuel,” she said, looking down at a boy of about eight standing next to her, “please say hello to Dr. Carroll.”

  The boy stepped forward and extended his hand. He had a mop of soft brown hair under a small cap and was dressed in knickers and a wool jacket. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” he said.

  Simpson stood across from me with hope and challenge. “Ephraim, I would like you to meet my son.”

  “Samuel,” I said with a smile, suppressing my astonishment. “This is indeed a pleasure. I’ve wanted to meet the son of such a fine doctor as your mother.”

  “You knew about me then, sir?” asked the boy. “I’m supposed to be a secret from the other doctors … except Dr. Osler, that is.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, with a glance at his mother. “But I should have suspected.”

  Samuel smiled. He was a fine-looking lad with an open and intelligent face. “Mother says that you’re very smart … and a good detective.”

  “Did she? Well, I’m not sure she’s correct, but I’m terribly flattered.”

  Mrs. Mooney had appeared at my side, as beamingly maternal as if one of her own grandchildren had appeared. “Why don’t I take Samuel in the kitchen so that you two can work?”

  After they had departed, Simpson said, “We agreed to be honest with each other.” Before I could reply, she saw the portrait leaning against the wall. “Did she do that?”

  I replied that, yes, Abigail Benedict had painted it.

  “Doesn’t look like you,” Simpson remarked.

  “It’s not supposed to,” I answered. “It isn’t supposed to be realistic.”

  “No,” said Simpson. “I mean that it isn’t you. It’s somebody else with your features.”

>   I found myself relieved and pleased that Simpson had seen it so.

  “Well, Ephraim,” she said abruptly, “let’s get to work.”

  “Before we begin,” I said, “please tell me about Samuel.”

  “I’m sure you can guess most of it,” she began selfconsciously, but also with relief. “I was born near Pittsburgh …”

  “I thought you were native to Philadelphia.”

  “No. I moved here just after Samuel was born. I became pregnant at sixteen by a man who claimed to love me but who then abandoned me when he discovered my condition. My father and mother railed at me, called me godless, and insisted I either publicly confess my sins to their congregation and then give up the baby, or leave their home. I chose the latter.

  “You know all too well what choices are available to a woman who finds herself in my situation. I, however, decided to create an option of my own. I moved to Philadelphia and cajoled a ‘home for fallen women’ to take me in—that’s what Croskey was at the time. While the women who lived there watched my baby, I worked at whatever employment I could find. I studied at night. I eventually registered at the university. I completed my studies about the time Dr. Osler arrived. He had a reputation for progressive thought, so I sought him out and asked him to allow me to study medicine under his auspices. He agreed without hesitation. What I am today is the result.”

  “So it was you who created the settlement house?”

  “I and a number of others.”

  “Samuel is a fine boy, as I am sure you know,” I said. “You should be immensely proud. But why bring him here tonight?”

  “Living a lie is fatiguing,” she replied simply. “I wish to stop.” She eyed me carefully, wary of any false gesture or response. “But we should get to work now.”

  “Wait,” I said. “There is something I want … need … to tell you. I need you to know about my father …”

  For twenty minutes, I told Simpson of my past with relief but not trepidation, while she listened with sympathy but not judgment. When I was done, she smiled shyly, thanked me for my trust, and then said simply, “Now let’s find something to save poor Farnshaw.”

  I was buoyed. With her help, I felt, for the first time, that I might find my way through the thicket.

  Since I had already been through the materials, at least cursorily, I examined the journal while Simpson familiarized herself with some of the more common techniques of encryption. Even when we engaged in individual tasks, we worked together, as if at the autopsy table, two students of science applying logic and method to unravel an enigma.

  “If Turk employed an exotic cipher, I’m not all at sure we can penetrate it,” she concluded, “but if not, since we are able to form a solid hypothesis as to the subject matter that he wished to hide, we may be able to work backward to set us on the road to a solution.”

  I agreed. Inference would be vital in forming working hypotheses. We began with a page of the journal containing a number of entries. For the next hours, we tried substitutions, transpositions, the Caesar cipher, transliteral cipher, and polyalphabetic ciphers. We performed elementary frequency analysis, and tried some obvious keys for the Vigenère code. Once or twice, we seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough, only to have our edifice crumble and collapse. At one point, Mrs. Mooney poked her head into the room to report that Samuel was asleep in her spare room.

  By midnight I was deeply fatigued of the effort, despite Mrs. Mooney’s indulgence with a large pot of coffee, but Simpson seemed unruffled. Finally, however, she put down the book.

  “Ephraim,” she said. “I do believe we may be wasting our time.”

  “Is it unbreakable, then?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it certainly seems so to us. Not every puzzle can be solved.”

  “But if this book holds the secret of Farnshaw’s innocence …”

  “I’m as frustrated as you, Ephraim, be we cannot simply divine a solution. I’m beginning to suspect another possibility, however. Have you considered that this journal may be nothing more than an elaborate hoax?”

  “A hoax? I had suspected that myself with the journal Borst unearthed, but there is no such obvious direction here. If it were not to implicate another, why would Turk go to all that trouble just to create a specious clue?”

  “I’m starting to know Turk,” she said. “He might well have done it for the very purpose of setting a couple of fools like us to frustration.

  “We have been examining this book as if it were a heart or a liver. Cut it open and its secrets will be revealed. But this is not the Dead House. The character of the person is as important as the artifact. I have come to see that, despite all his pretensions to wealth, Turk did not do all of this just for the money. Turk needed to get even. He needed to get away with it, to laugh at everyone who he thought had laughed at him his whole life … motivation each of us can understand, I warrant. Perhaps Turk did not blackmail Dr. Halsted, but he would have. Gleefully. Halsted was rich, from a good family. He went to Yale. Turk would have done anything to bring him down, to prove that he was the smarter man, that it was only accident of birth that had prevented him from attaining similar heights. All of those silly precautions—hiding where he lived, that room on Wharf Lane—everything had to be so complicated. Leaving a key in a book. How silly. The best place to hide a key was with his other keys.

  “Don’t you see, Ephraim? There were no real practical advantages to his intrigues … he left plenty of hints that anyone interested could follow … he wanted things complicated because he had decided complicated meant clever. I can just see him, hunched over his desk at night, chortling to himself as he created his fakes. ‘Let them try and figure this out,’ he would have thought. He was so desperate to show everyone how smart he was. Well, he wasn’t smarter than you and he definitely wasn’t smarter than whoever killed him.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I believe you’re correct about the man. But to sit down and pen a meaningless journal and then hide it? That surely is too much trouble to go to.”

  “Approach the question from the other end. Ask yourself, why would he keep a journal? He would have known it could sink him. For money? How was a journal possibly going to make him money? Anyone Turk was blackmailing was not going to be more likely to pay just because Turk had written his name in cipher in a book.”

  “Why hide it, then?”

  “Maybe he had plans to use it as a red herring in one of his schemes. Who knows? Maybe he simply did it for fun, telling himself that one day he would use it to have the inferior minds with whom he matched wits—like us—chase their own tails.”

  “But what about the journal in his rooms? The one Borst uncovered?”

  “That was different. That one had an obvious purpose. You were correct. If he ever needed to bargain with the police or anyone else, he could point to the journal and use it as proof that it was not he who had done the deed. Then he could trade the identity of ‘GF’ for a better deal.”

  “So it is your contention that both books were fraudulent.”

  “Everything about Turk was fraudulent. He told you so himself. Didn’t he say that he was a creation only of himself? You could not have known at the time just how true that was.”

  I should have known precisely, of course, being of similar creation myself, but I had missed the significance. “But how does this help Farnshaw?”

  “It helps a great deal,” she replied. “Don’t you remember what Dr. Osler said to Turk, after we autopsied the carpenter who had died of hypertrophy? ‘We have chronicled a case that does not correspond to accepted data. It is an enigma therefore open to the first who deciphers it.’ The journals are just such an enigma.

  “Think for a moment about Borst’s case against Farnshaw. It rests on the assumption that the journal with ‘GF’ is genuine. But the existence of this second journal casts doubt on the legitimacy of the first. If it is authentic and eventually deciphered, it will likely contain the names of Turk’s true associate
s and prove Farnshaw’s innocence. In the more likely case that it is not deciphered, it will be dismissed as a hoax. If that comes to pass, it becomes difficult to assert that the ‘GF’ journal is not a hoax as well.”

  “We must get it into the right hands, then,” I said. “I don’t trust giving it to Borst.”

  “No. If Borst is under Lachtmann’s sway, I am confident the journal would vanish before anyone could be made aware of its existence. What about Dr. Osler?”

  “Of course,” I agreed but, although I felt a sharp pang of guilt, I was not sure.

  Simpson noted my ambivalence. “Yes,” she agreed, “that is the conundrum. We cannot underestimate how well it suits everyone to have Farnshaw accused of this crime. No one will want him to be innocent, let alone be proved innocent. If Farnshaw is guilty, Lachtmann will have his revenge, the Pinkertons will have a success, the newspapers will have a juicy scandal, and the policeman who arrested him will have a triumph. Even Dr. Osler benefits—he can continue his career with neither scandal nor professional acrimony dogging his footsteps. I think it is important that we understand that in pursuing this matter, we do so against the interests of everyone involved, even those we admire and respect.”

  “Does it not disturb you to include Dr. Osler?”

  “Of course. You are disturbed as well. But it is his own doing, really. It was he who trained us to be scientists, to follow the evidence wherever it might lead, no matter the consequence. I fully expect that he will be found to have no part in this, but we must account for every hypothesis. We cannot allow Farnshaw to hang for crimes in which he had no part. I think we must hold on to the journal and wait for the proper moment.”

  I agreed, and she stood and emitted a deep sigh. “That’s all we can do for tonight.”

  “Thanks to you, we have made some significant progress.”

  “I’m sorry for the circumstances,” she told me, “but it has been a pleasure working with you.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, getting out of my chair. “I have enjoyed working with you as well.”