“That, I dare say, I should have stated. At the time John Cooper devised his hoax, he owned this little bachelor bungalow and had a bequest of about ten thousand dollars which he had inherited from his father. He was then an orphan. But at the time he visited me in Arcadyville, he was even better fixed, for our uncle Jarndyce — Edward Thurston Jarndyce — who lived for years in his little cottage on Ritchie Court with just an occasional servant, had died and left behind him an estate amounting to about two hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars in stocks and bonds. This estate was bequeathed, according to the terms of Uncle Jarndyce’s will deposited in Chicago with his lawyer, in the following manner; two thousand dollars cash was to be paid immediately after his death to each of us three cousins, John Cooper, Catherwood, and myself; and the entire balance of the estate was to go to John Cooper on his twenty-eighth birthday, which is July 2nd, of this year.”
“About twelve days from now?” commented Darrell, a little line of intensive thought between his eyes.
“Yes — about twelve days hence,” she agreed. She continued: “The furniture of the old Ritchie Court cottage, such as it was, reverted immediately to John Cooper himself; and at the time I saw him he was only awaiting a court order to sell it all for what he could get for it. But now for a further point or two about Uncle Jarndyce’s will. It stipulated that if John Cooper died before reaching his twenty-eighth birthday, the balance of the estate was to go to Catherwood on the latter’s twenty-eighth birthday. I myself, never having been particularly close to Uncle Jarndyce, did not come in for a majority interest, and my little two thousand dollars was not affected in any way by anyone’s death.”
Darrell pondered. “And when does Catherwood reach his twenty-eighth birthday?”
“On the first of the coming August,” the girl replied.
“Or, roughly, about three weeks after John Cooper’s,” Darrell said. A low speculative whistle escaped from his lips. “For the first time in this tangle which I thought all along was a life-insurance swindle, I am beginning to see faintly a motive crystallizing. But pray go on. As yet I am far from being out of the dark.”
She smiled at him. “Well, as I have said, John Cooper and I were walking together through the woods near Arcadyville one day, and we fell to discussing Uncle Jarndyce’s recent death and discussing how we would spend our various bequests. I had calculated that it would take several hundred dollars of mine to fully square up all of father’s obligations, and the rest I told John Cooper I would put away for a rainy day. It was then that in a burst of confidence to a cousin who had been like a sister to him, John Cooper told me all about his wild scheme. It seemed so wild, so rash to me, that I tried hard to dissuade him from carrying it out. But it had little effect upon him, for his mind was fired with the picture of himself appearing in his old haunts after having been dead and buried by his friends and forgotten.”
“And who had he intended to secure to help him out on this mad scheme of his?”
“At the time he had the wax shell made, he had not worked out this detail. But he subsequently reached a solution of that. Just about a week before he had run down to see me, he had helped — always generous, John Cooper was — to bury a poor child who had died in his neighborhood. In this way he had become acquainted with one Harold Adelbert Bross, an undertaker. This man had casually stated to John Cooper that he intended leaving this country for what he termed ‘the old country’ some time around the first of June, and of giving up his undertaking establishment. And thus it came about that John Cooper adroitly broached the subject of having a spurious burial — a burial which should be just a huge joke.”
“I suppose,” commented Darrell, “that Bross, the undertaker, however, refused even to touch the thing, harmless and a practical joke as it was, until he should be all in readiness to close up his business and depart from America?”
“Yes,” she said, “so John Cooper told me. Bross complained that when the news of the joke came out, it would injure him financially. The only conditions under which he would agree were that John Cooper pay him double the cost of an ordinary funeral, and also put off the spurious demise until around the first of June. This introduced a further complication, for Catherwood would be in Chicago at this date, and John Cooper did not see for certain reasons how he could achieve this hoax with Catherwood in Chicago. The upshot of it was that he agreed to pay this man Bross even a bit more so that the latter would delay his departure till after the ninth of June, on which date the spurious funeral could take place, and on which date Catherwood would be down in Havana, Cuba, acting as best man at an important wedding which had been scheduled for many months for this date.”
“Then I take it,” said Darrell, “that John Cooper did not believe he could make a success of the thing with Catherwood around, and furthermore did not wish to take him into his confidence?”
She nodded. “Catherwood, he claimed, would have let in two or three of his friends, and within twenty-four hours the news would have traveled and the whole hoax collapsed. John Cooper seemed convinced that the great joke of jokes, as he termed it, demanded absolute secrecy in order for it to be a success — to be a big sensation. And this artistic hoax, likewise, was costing him too much, he claimed, to allow it any opportunity to fall flat.”
“Well I have seen the shell,” Darrell commented, “which evidently cost him a man’s transportation clear to Honolulu, and it is a most remarkable piece of work. In the shadows of an undertaker’s chapel, surrounded by wreaths and palms and flowers, it looks so much like a dead body that nothing less than the nail of an inquisitive forefinger would reveal the deception. In bright sunlight, however, I am not so sure that it would deceive everybody.”
“No,” she admitted, “but John Cooper had decided upon just those expedients: of holding his own funeral in the undertaker’s chapel, and of having sufficient wreaths and flowers around to cast a semi-gloom on his coffin and to prevent the public from crowding too close. There he expected to have scores of his friends attend his funeral, and look what they considered their last upon him.”
“And all this time where did John Cooper intend to stay hidden?”
“He intended,” Iris replied, “to keep to himself down in the basement store-room of his bungalow, which he had fitted up as a photographic dark room. He had put in a couch, a cooking plate, several pieces of furniture, and a stack of books; and there, working up some new scheme or indulging in some long-deferred reading, John Cooper expected, much as a bear, to hibernate for a week or ten days until the day when he should astound about fifty or sixty Chicagoans, and set several hundred more to talking.”
“He was not afraid to trust you, Iris?” Darrell as ked.
She shook her head. “John Cooper and I were far too close to each other to be afraid to confide in one another,” she replied. “But he did outline to me his whole scheme so that I would not be inveigled into making a long trip up to Chicago when notified of his death. He stated to me that if I should ever receive from him a long-distance message or a telegram bearing just the cryptic word ‘Sprung’ I was to understand that he had at last enacted his counterfeit death, and I was to disregard any telegrams sent to me by any of his friends in Chicago.”
“Two questions now,” asked Darrell. “First, how was Bross to protect himself in case somebody somehow discovered that the whole affair was an ingeniously contrived hoax? And second, how were John Cooper’s multitudinous friends to be notified?”
“Yes,” she replied. “How was Bross to protect himself? Simply this way: He had demanded, John Cooper told me, that before he went ahead and put this strange affair through to a successful conclusion, he be given a written and signed statement by John declaring that the whole thing was a practical joke and entirely free of fraud of all sort.” She paused. “As to how his friends were to be notified? This was even more simple than it sounds. Bross, John told me, through some previous business connections in the Chicago ghetto, had buried many German Jews in th
e past. These people, it seems, frequently hire what are known as professional mourners. Bross called them by the more pungent term of ‘weepers.’ Bross was to obtain the services of three of these professional mourners at five or ten dollars apiece, two of them women who would appear heavily veiled, and one of them an imposing-looking rascal with gray hair who did little other than this kind of work. This man, without in any way being taken into the scheme, would by his appearance only represent John’s granduncle, Noah Buckman, an illiterate farmer who lives up in Canada. About an hour after the supposed demise, Bross was to call up twenty or thirty names on a typewritten list given him by John Cooper, informing them that he was John’s granduncle, Noah Buckman, and that John Cooper had just passed away suddenly with myocarditis. These names were presumably to have been found in the dead man’s notebook. Bross, as Noah Buckman, was also to request the services as pallbearers of six names which John Cooper specially selected.
“He had assured John that it would be easy to obtain, as the name of the doctor supposed to have attended him, the name of some physician who would be out of town and consequently unable to answer any queries by phone. Subsequently, at the funeral, the man who the undertaker would point out as Mr. Buckman, the decease’s granduncle, would be earning his ten dollars so efficiently that no one would dare question a person so overcome with grief. And, as you yourself realize, at a funeral everyone endeavors to be quite unobtrusive, thinking that everybody else knows all about it — who the relatives are, and so forth. Now does this answer all of your questions?”
“All but one,” was Darrell’s answer. “Wasn’t Bross in the least frightened that if the joke somehow fell through, the existence of the big insurance policy on John Cooper Jarndyce’s life would make it appear almost certain that an insurance swindle had been attempted, and that all the participants would be sent to the penitentiary?”
CHAPTER XVII
Concerning One Sir Clyde Miffleton
AT Darrell’s significant question, the girl shook her head.
“The existence of that insurance,” she said, “is an unfortunate thing. Bross, as you yourself have suggested, refused to become a party to this hoax if any insurance were involved, but John Cooper assured him that there would be not a dollar’s worth of insurance on his life. John did not tell Bross all he might have told him; for at the time he was concocting the scheme there was a fifty-thousand-dollar policy on his life made in favor of me. Something less than a year before he had been out carousing for several days and nights with a party of fast flyers, and one of them, an insurance agent, had written John up — written him up, Jeffrey, when John was not himself at all — for the huge sum I had just mentioned.
“In the same party of celebrators was one of the insurance company doctors, and John Cooper — poor helpless John when he was intoxicated — wrote out a check for one thousand and twelve dollars, the annual premium, signed the application and before he hardly knew it he was insured at an overwritten rate in the Metronational Life. He told me, that day in Arcadyville, that when he came to he was astounded and chagrined to think that he had parted with all that money, and he told me that if he should die in a year I would get the money, for I had been made his beneficiary. But he further stated that he intended to allow the policy to lapse entirely, for he had learned that they had overwritten him — that is, charged him a rate corresponding to an age two years greater than his own, a thing which insurance companies sometimes do in what they term ‘doubtful cases.’ As this made a difference of over fifty dollars a year in the premium, John was firm in his intentions to drop the policy entirely. He quit his insurance friend after that spree, and I believe never again drank a drop.”
“Yet this insurance was renewed, a money order for the amount of the premium being sent to the Metronational,” said Darrell puzzledly. “And it was paid by Iris Shaftsbury.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “by Iris Shaftsbury — by me! John Cooper’s letters to me seemed to indicate that he had dropped entirely his mad scheme for his sham death, and they were now all full of plans for a genuine trip to the interior of tropical Africa as soon as he should reach his twenty-eighth birthday and come into Uncle Jarndyce’s estate which was waiting for him. I began to wonder if that mad, rash cousin of mine would not come to some unfortunate end with his trips and tours and expeditions, and knowing him to be none too strong physically I felt a profound conviction that this proposed trip to tropical Africa would end his career. Consequently I took from the money Uncle Jarndyce had left me one thousand and twelve dollars, and sent a postal order to the Metronational Life, paying the insurance for another year. It was a case of a woman’s intuition, perhaps.”
“But after you had done this,” put in Darrell puzzledly, “you learned that John Cooper had gone ahead with his counterfeit death after all?”
“Yes,” she replied. “He had been working on the thing all the while in Chicago. But this brings me to the reason I am here as Rita Thorne, and how I learned that John Cooper had, after all, gone through with his fantastic scheme.”
She paused a moment and then continued.
“In this connection I have to touch once more upon that Gubbio which lies on the floor there in pieces.”
“And I,” he said regretfully, “am the cause of that valuable destruction.” He shook his head. “Sixteen hundred dollars I cost you, Iris. I am sorry.”
“It — it doesn’t matter,” she endeavored to assure him. “If the loss of it saved your life, then the cost doesn’t matter at all!” She sighed. “But about the Gubbio and about Rita Thorne. Here are the facts. Just before father died, he attended an auction of antiques in New Orleans over in the French quarter, and there bid upon that plate. He got it for fifty dollars and deposited twenty-five dollars in cash and his note for twenty-five. He had recognized the plate at once as a genuine Gubbio, and the auctioneer, on the other hand, did not know anything about the stock he was auctioning off.
“Father never had much money, and before he went back to redeem his note and secure his purchase, he died. I first surmised that he had picked up something valuable when Gaston Bosquette, a domineering native of the town of Arcadyville, and also an extensive collector, approached me with an offer to take over a partial purchase father had made in New Orleans for the full amount of the deposit. I knew old Gaston Bosquette only too well. If he were willing to confer a favor such as that, there was something back of it. I jumped on a train, went down to New Orleans and looked up a well-known collector on St. Charles Avenue. We went over to the French quarter. There I found that father had purchased a Gubbio worth at least twenty-five hundred dollars, one of the three pieces known as the ‘Child and Tree’ pieces, and that Gaston Bosquette had made a subsequent counter-purchase of the plate at the same price of fifty dollars, contingent on the first purchaser — my father — not making up his note on time. I took up father’s note at once and carried off the plate. And no sooner had I got away from the place with it than Gaston Bosquette served an injunction on the auctioneer, tying up the plate until the ownership be adjudicated in law.”
“But how could he — on what technicality could he — claim that his counter-purchase of the plate, after your father had already paid twenty-five dollars in cash and had given a twenty-five dollar note for it, invalidate the first purchase?”
“The following technicality,” the girl replied. “That father was bankrupt when he died, had been virtually bankrupt for months, and hence any note given by him was invalid. But the law does not prohibit any relative of a bankrupt person taking up one of the latter’s notes, does it?”
“Of course not,” Darrell assured her. “That is legal. Your father’s purchase was not invalidated so long as the note was not defaulted.”
“And it was not, for I met it,” replied the girl, closing her teeth. “And I got the Gubbio which father had bought fairly and squarely and honorably in an open auction; got it away just in time to avoid an injunction and a legal fight which I was in
no position to wage.
“But I was afraid,” she continued, “that so long as I kept that Gubbio in Arcadyville, old Gaston Bosquette would harass me and get it tied up in the courts — perhaps even get it away from me on a technicality. He is a vindictive old man, and stories of his cupidity are legion. Likewise the Bosquette family are related to almost every other person in that part of Louisiana — judges, jurymen, shopkeepers, bankers. Even the postmistress at Arcadyville — old Madame Bosquette with her nose almost meeting her chin — is Gaston Bosquette’s sister. So I decided to sell what was now mine, and cabled Sir Clyde Miffleton, the famous English collector, who makes a specialty of perfect specimens of the Italian majolica. He wrote me that he would be pleased to purchase my ‘Child and Tree’ at the catalogue price if after examining it he found it to be a perfect, unmended specimen; and stated furthermore that he was to pass through Chicago some time between the eighth of June and the first of July.”
“And where does Rita Thorne come in?” asked Darrell.
She smiled. “Rita Thorne is a boarding-school chum of mine who has made a success singing and dancing in the revues around Chicago. She maintains this apartment here the year round. When she learned from my last letter some of the conditions confronting me in Arcadyville, and that I was compelled to wait in Chicago during part of June for Sir Clyde Miffleton’s arrival here, nothing else would satisfy her than that I occupy her apartment here in the Bradbury, and even to use her name for a reason which I will explain in a minute. So, with my precious plate — practically my heritage, you might call it — I came on to Chicago on the sixth of June under a strange plan agreed upon between Rita and myself to keep Gaston Bosquette outwitted.”
“You feared him even in Chicago?” asked Darrell.
She nodded. “His brother, Alphonse Bosquette, is a member of a firm of lawyers here in Chicago who are said to be somewhat unscrupulous.” She paused. “As to the plan — my aunt with whom I lived was the only one in Arcadyville cognizant of it. When I left New Orleans I purchased a ticket only to Memphis — not to Chicago. At Memphis I bought a further ticket to Chicago. This left the Bosquettes in ignorance of my destination. Arriving here I took Rita’s flat, for Rita, as I haven’t told you, had gone to New York to join a company which expected to tour England and France. As for the letters from my aunt telling me all that is transpiring back in Arcadyville, these have come here to me addressed not Iris Shaftsbury, but Rita Thorne. Similar letters have gone out from auntie every day addressed Iris Shaftsbury, Hotel Ardmore, New York City, and these have been duly received by Rita, who has adopted for the time being the name of Iris Shaftsbury, and duly destroyed. In this way, Madame Bosquette, the ogre of the Arcadyville postoffice, who it is said carefully reads every postcard which goes in or out of that office, sees only evidence that Iris Shaftsbury has gone to New York, and thus reports to her brother Gaston. In Rita’s last letter she told me that an attempt was made to serve some legal papers on her in New York just before sailing. Those papers were meant for me, of course. But the interchange of names has fooled Bosquette; and I, alone here in Chicago where the same legal firm of which Gaston Bosquette’s brother is a member practices, have been protected from having the Gubbio tied up.”
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