The Shadow Conspiracy II

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  “What are you doing?”

  The voice, sharp and commanding, caused me to abandon my investigation. I dropped back to the turf and turned. A tall bluff of a man stood just off the vessel’s bow.

  “I was examining Professor DeGear’s machine. The Professor is —”

  “I’m quite familiar with Dr. DeGear, sir. And his antics.”

  I moved several steps toward him, bringing him into the light of my lamp. He wore a cavalry uniform; an officer’s bars glinted against the dark fabric. “And you would be?”

  “Captain Reddy. Dr. DeGear is my charge. He is an inventor, as he’s no doubt told you.”

  “Indeed.”

  Over Reddy’s shoulder and around the prow of the “flying machine,” I noticed that a biting swarm of fellow reporters had arrived on the heels of a uniformed man I assumed was a military physician, who was now examining DeGear’s companion. A surge of icy dread coursed through me at the idea of these latecomers filing their stories ahead of me.

  I felt around in my jacket pocket for my notepad and pencil. “An inventor, you said. He invented this machine?”

  “Machine?” His lips quirked in an amusement that failed to reach his eyes. “Look at it, Mr....”

  “Cranfeldt,” I said. “San Francisco Chronicle.”

  The Captain swept an arm toward DeGear’s Seraph. “Look at it. Ungainly, heavy. Surely you don’t believe it could fly! Could such insubstantial material as those so-called wings are made of hold this hulk aloft?”

  “He mentioned having designed submersibles,” I said. “During the War.”

  Reddy’s eyes narrowed. “Did he, indeed? Yes, well...it’s a sad story, really. Jack DeGear was a brilliant engineer. When the war broke out, he joined the Navy. Was instrumental in the design of the USS Monitor, which made him of some importance to the war effort — a thing that was not lost on the Confederates. They captured him and pressed him into the service of their own naval program. As you are a newspaper man, I suspect you may have heard of the CSS Hunley.”

  “Tragic,” I said. “But what about the War was not?”

  “The Union triumph, sir. But I agree — the loss of life aboard the Hunley was regrettable, notwithstanding they were Confederate lives. Dr. DeGear had a hand in the design of the Hunley. He was aware of her mission even as he worked on her. It is not certain, but he may have made intentional...design decisions that doomed the craft.”

  I was stunned. “Sabotage? But surely the Confederates would not have trusted a captured enemy so completely.”

  Reddy shrugged. “He was aboard the vessel when it sank. I suppose they thought he would not commit suicide.”

  “The Hunley was lost with all hands.”

  “All but one who, not being officially aboard the vessel, was never missed. The Professor has been obsessed with the disaster since. He refuses to work on any more submersible craft for fear more men will drown. He has turned his attention elsewhere.”

  I followed his eyes upward to where clouds scudded across the face of the moon.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I beheld one of my colleagues furiously scribbling notes. Well, I thought smugly, he has only half the story. He hadn’t interviewed DeGear. Nor would he, for that hapless gentleman was even now being hoisted onto a stretcher for his trip up to the waiting ambulance. His companion had already been carried off, still unconscious.

  “So, a brilliant inventor of military machinery now invents fictions.” Reddy turned his gaze to the crumpled wings of the Seraph. “He was no doubt trying to launch the damned thing from the hilltop.”

  I nodded, watching DeGear’s stretcher make its way up the hillside. Some of my cohorts moved to intercept it, which drew Captain Reddy from my side.

  “Here, here!” I heard him say brusquely. “Leave the poor man alone. He’s in no condition for your poking and prodding.”

  Reluctantly the reporters let the stretcher pass. On its way to the road, it passed a contingent of gentlemen with ropes and other tackle. Apparently they’d come to take the craft away.

  Heartily wishing I had a photographer on site to capture the thing before they reduced it to scrap, I took several steps back and gave the contraption a long look. I’d have to settle for my own poor sketches. It rested about thirty feet from the base of the bluff, nose elevated, tail section sunk into Goddard’s pasture.

  Before I could do much more than sketch the general lay of the wreckage in my notebook, the work crew began the process of removing it. So eager were they that they quite literally shoved me out of the way and nearly into a fat cowpat.

  One fellow, a heavy rope slung across his chest like a bandoleer, cast me an apologetic glance and said: “Excuse me, sir,” in unexpectedly refined English.

  I sidestepped the cowpat and moved away from the wreck as the crew swarmed over it. There were a dozen of them and I had to wonder where they’d rounded up such a group at this hour of the morning. They were amazingly efficient, dismantling and folding the wings and removing the propeller in a matter of minutes.

  I felt a hand clasp my shoulder. “Surely, Mr. Cranfeldt,” said Captain Reddy, “you have better things to do with your time than watch this travesty be carted off to the scrap heap.”

  “How is Dr. DeGear?” I asked.

  “Better.”

  “I should like to interview him.”

  “Mr. Cranfeldt, you can’t believe...”

  “A human interest story, perhaps. I’m intrigued by a mind that would conceive of such a hoax.”

  Reddy flicked a glance at the dismantling of DeGear’s creation and shrugged. “He’s resting in the ambulance. Let us go up and see if he’s regained his composure.”

  I puffed up the hill behind the Captain and presented myself at the ambulance. He motioned me to the rear, wherein Dr. DeGear sat — still pale, but a good deal less dazed than before. He was younger than I expected, considering Reddy’s talk of the War. His face was smooth as a youth’s and he had a full head of reddish-brown hair and wary brown eyes. There, though, his age reposed in full.

  “I’m sorry about your airship, sir,” I said, watching his expression.

  His gaze jerked upward toward the Captain standing behind me. “My friend tells me I owe you an apology, Mr....Cranfeldt, is it? You and the several other gentlemen I’ve kept from sleep tonight.”

  “I’m a newspaper man, professor. We never sleep. Do you recall what happened?”

  “An accident of some sort.”

  “Do you remember what you told me earlier?”

  “Vaguely. I suspect it was one of my tall tales. I hope it wasn’t too ridiculous.”

  “You said you and your companion were flying when your... ship suddenly went down.”

  “Did I?” He glanced over my shoulder again.

  “Yes, Jack,” Reddy told him. “I’m afraid you did. You were not quite yourself.”

  DeGear brought his eyes back to my face, the expression as bland as his voice. “You have my most heartfelt apologies, Mr. Cranfeldt. I regret I am sometimes subject to...flights of fancy.”

  Captain Reddy placed a hand on my shoulder. “As you can see, Dr. DeGear is in fine health and seems to have recovered his wits.”

  I looked back to DeGear. “Did you really expect to fly, as Captain Reddy suggests?”

  “I...” He glanced up at Reddy again. “I had seen a prototype for this craft in the workshop of my late colleague — Darius Green. It captured my imagination. I did expect to fly, but that is hardly rational, is it?”

  I would have asked more, but the orderlies insisted they must transfer their patients to hospital. I stood aside at the top of the hill, watching the ambulances drive away. The freight wagons were being loaded, and I watched this activity for a while, marveling at how such a sprawling wreck could be so condensed. Even the hull was broken down into smaller pieces, draped with canvas and carted away on two large wagons.

  I left my competitors to mill about the crash site, and went home to pen my
story. I prepared sketches from different angles and jotted down my impressions of the craft and my conversations with DeGear and Reddy.

  I filed the story at 4:30 am, barely in time to make the morning paper. My editor, Andrew Sawyer, gave me hope I might bump another story from the front page. I returned to my rooms, exhausted, and fell into a heavy sleep.

  I didn’t wake until late morning, decided to take breakfast at a local eatery, and there discovered that the Seraph of the Air was nowhere near the front page of the Chronicle. It was, in fact, buried on a back page among advertisements for corrective shoes and mustache wax. Worse than that, the story itself had been edited to omit both my initial interview with Professor DeGear and my first impressions of the craft’s peculiar construction.

  The food turned to sawdust in my mouth. I got up without finishing and made my way to the offices of the Chronicle, clutching the morning edition, which I slapped down atop Andrew Sawyer’s desk.

  “This isn’t the story I filed!”

  He didn’t so much as glance at me. “The story you filed was unprintable.”

  “At 4:30 this morning it wasn’t unprintable,” I reminded him. “It was front page material.”

  “At 4:30 this morning, I didn’t have the full story.”

  “And you got that from...?”

  He reddened. “From Regis Canemore, for one.”

  “That hack? Why in God’s name —”

  “Detail, Lee. Your story was light on detail.”

  “Light on detail? I described the propellers, the wings, the seating compartments —”

  “Fine. Your story was light on pertinent detail.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as that the paint was scraped from the undercarriage by the slide down the hill. Such as that Professor DeGear was witnessed earlier yesterday to have used the Almshouse telephone to call Sam Whitehouse to assure him the ‘event’ would go on as planned.”

  “Witnessed by whom?”

  “By a Captain Reddy.”

  “I met Captain Reddy. He said nothing to me of a telephone call. Neither did he mention DeGear being at the Almshouse, which is odd because we spoke of Professor DeGear at length.”

  Andrew’s eyes remained focused upon the top of his desk. “Yes, he told me.”

  I rocked back on my heels, taking in his downcast eyes and flushed face. “What really happened?”

  He sighed and looked at me, finally. “All right, Lee. You’re too good a reporter — and a friend — to sand bag.”

  I lowered myself into the chair opposite his desk.

  “You filed a good story, Lee. Considering the circumstances, it was a great story. Unfortunately, it made Professor DeGear out to be...somewhat unstable.”

  “He is somewhat unstable. Disturbed, in fact. That was the substance of my conversation with Reddy. The poor man holds himself accountable for the sinking of the CSS Hunley. Perhaps it has addled his mind.”

  “That notwithstanding, Captain Reddy visited me before you filed and let me know that we could not print a story that would portray DeGear as mad.”

  “So instead you printed a story that portrayed him as the author of a hoax?”

  “At the request of the United States Army.”

  “But why?”

  “Apparently, the military still relies on the Professor’s expertise but the government would look askance at an expert who was publicly revealed to be of unsound mind. Mischief may be overlooked. Madness...” He shrugged eloquently.

  I said I understood, but when I compared my story with what the Chronicle had printed, I realized I didn’t understand. Certainly, I could see that it might be better for DeGear to appear mischievous than mad, but why the other alterations to the story? There had been no scraped paint, wet or otherwise. Yes, the propellers bent at a touch, but they also snapped back into place — seemingly unbreakable. The craft had clearly not slid down the hill; it rested too far from its base and had landed tail first. If it had slid down, its bow would have been buried in the pasture, not its tail.

  And then there was DeGear himself. I recalled his conviction when I first pulled him from the wreck that he had flown to the unlucky spot. I recalled just as clearly the moment at which he had come to himself. He had swooned. The man was clearly disturbed. It seemed cruel to paint him as a hoaxer for the sake of being able to use his intellect to military advantage.

  I resolved to find Professor DeGear and interview him again. To that end, I checked the local hospitals, starting with the Almshouse. I was out of luck. None of them had received Jack DeGear or his companion, whom I knew only as “Harry.” I gave descriptions of both men, thinking that perhaps Captain Reddy had given fictitious names to the hospital.

  I was in the midst of an earnest discourse with a stern but pretty admissions nurse at St. Mary’s when it struck me as almost a physical blow: Jack DeGear being mentally disturbed might explain his presence in the ill-fated “airship,” but what of his companion?

  I had stopped speaking in mid-sentence, causing the nurse to look at me with concern.

  “Are you all right, sir?” she asked. “Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No. No, thank you, miss. I require something substantially stronger.”

  I left the hospital with curiosity burning a hole in my stomach. One mad inventor was credible — if only just. Two stretched credulity considerably.

  Supposing that Captain Reddy must have taken the crash victims to a military hospital, I presented myself at the Presidio. I had no luck. All three men seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  I remembered the name Professor DeGear had dropped: Darius Green. The late Darius Green, DeGear had said. Here, I had better fortune. My journalistic contacts led me to a story from the Midwest that placed an inventor named Darius Green at the centre of a series of sightings of unidentifiable flying machines not unlike DeGear’s Seraph.

  Several reporters had filed stories on the sightings. Some were scoffing. Some were ambiguous. Most described glorified balloons. But one, dating from three summers previous, dealt with the crash of something distinctly un-balloon-like.

  The crash had claimed the life of one Darius Green, inventor.

  Fascinated, I wrote to the reporter of record — Stephen Deering of Topeka, Kansas, told him about my own experience, and awaited a reply. It was not long in coming.

  “I wish,” he wrote, “that I had never reported that story, for life has been hell since. I have gained the unwelcome reputation as a gullible crank, and no newspaper hereabouts will hire me. I have been living hand-to-mouth as a freelancer, and am planning to come to California, where I hope to rebuild my career. Be careful of this story, my friend: do not get caught up in it.”

  He shared some details of his own experience, including the circumstances of Dr. Green’s accident. Green had attempted to launch his airship from the top of a bluff. The machine had apparently glided some yards before plummeting to earth, severely injuring its driver.

  “The local cavalry took the wreck away,” Deering continued, “and that was that. Except that when I inquired at Fort Riley some days later, I was told that Dr. Green, whom I had hopes of interviewing, had died of his injuries.”

  A literal dead end. And in the time that had passed since the wreck of the Seraph, the trail in San Francisco had also grown cold. Even so, I found it impossible to simply shrug and walk away, if for no other reason than that I felt a fool. I had been duped — either by Jack DeGear with his “flights of fancy,” or by Captain Reddy with his alternating tales of madness and chicanery. The greatest frustration was that I didn’t know which.

  As the month of February wound down and I was no closer to the truth, I sat down to determine a next step. I started with two theories: The Two Madmen Theory and the Two Hoaxers Theory. Then I laid out the facts to see which of the two they best fit. At the end of the process I had more questions than answers.

  If, as Reddy claimed, DeGear was unstable and under watch, how
was he able to conceal such a monumental machine, transport it to a remote location, and attempt to launch it into the air? Moreover, how was he able to draw a co-conspirator into the “experiment?” Whatever the answer, it hardly spoke well of Captain Reddy’s guardianship.

  And what of his confederate? If Harry wasn’t mad, what was he doing in such a dubious contraption in the first place? Unless he was a willing partner in a hoax. But, if this was a hoax, who was the target? And why? One would assume a hoaxer’s object would be to fool as many people as possible. What was to be gained by hoaxing a handful of midnight tipplers and a pasture full of cows?

  When Jack DeGear claimed to have flown the craft, he was injured and addled — possibly even concussed. Hardly, one would think, capable of keeping up a hoax. Even seeing his companion unconscious didn’t jar him from his story.

  But something had.

  Madness or hoax — neither made sense. Nothing made sense...unless Green and now DeGear really had been attempting to fly some sort of experimental craft that the Army did not want known.

  I reread Stephen Deering’s account of the Topeka incident. The crash had occurred sometime after midnight well outside of town. The cavalrymen from Fort Riley had carted the wreck away.

  I returned to the Presidio and tried again to contact Reddy, asking the clerk to whom I spoke to tell the Captain I wished to confirm the death of a Professor Darius Green of Topeka, Kansas, in an aerial mishap. The blank-faced young corporal gave every evidence that he thought me a complete crackpot, raising the ghost of Stephen Deering’s warning. I went away half-hoping that if Reddy received my message, he would ignore it.

  Two weeks went by with no word from the Presidio. On the first day of March I put away my notes on the affair. On the evening of the same day, I received a telegram from Stephen Deering.

  “Flying ship sighted in Uvalde, Texas, last spring,” it read. “Interested?”

  God help me, I was. And so, it would appear, was Stephen Deering, for he had ignored his own advice, gotten caught up in the story, and chased it all the way to the Lone Star state.