Free The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing Page B

that some well-merited revenge, which he had called down upon his own head, was due? Had he deliberately disappeared, because of that, from the scene of some secret crime? Had he— I was plagued by the insane notion that the soul of Gideon Wyck, having exhausted its proper body, had seized upon the healthy one of poor Mike Connell.
    Muriel’s safe return made it seem altogether unlikely that the old doctor had been kept from returning by a mere accident to the car. I wanted to ponder more upon these matters, however, before saying anything to Muriel; and I knew that it was good sense to do my pondering elsewhere than under the shrewd eyes of Daisy Towers.
    When I got home I found a note from Dr. Alling pinned to the door. It merely advised that I spend the day resting. But all day long fellows kept dropping in for a first-hand description of the fight. Toward evening they all spoke of Dr. Wyck’s disappearance.
    Mickey Rehan summed up the prevailing sentiment when he smiled broadly and said, “Hope he died with considerable pain.”
    Between visits, I made a careful record of all the events of the preceding day or two that seemed to ebar upon the mysteries of Mike’s symptoms and of Wyck’s disappearance. I knew that Muriel and the boy Ted were implicated in some fashion, and that the old farmer, Tompkins, had had unusually good reasons for hating an already well hated man. Prendergast’s petition, which had proved such a boomerang, also made it possible to think that Dick might have something to do with the doctor’s disappearance, of only as a prankish kind of revenge.
    Dick’s landlady stopped in to inquire about Biddy and said that he had not come home at all the night before. Later she called again, to inform me that Prendergast had turned up with his uncle, early in the afternoon, to pack all his belongings, pay his rent for the balance of the year, and leave town.
    I told her that Daisy ha phoned, just before going off duty for the day, to say that Biddy was all right and might be home next morning. Mike, she said, had ceased his raving and had lapsed into a deep sleep.
    The last of my visitors was Jarvis, one of the few thorough-going admirers of the hard-boiled old doctor. He was without question the best student in the medical school, a fearfully conscientious bird; and his own frail health had given him a morbid complex, half defiant and half apologetic, when in the presence of normal people. He got a kind of joy out of taking the blame for anything that went wrong in group work, and then demonstrating by subsequent efficiency that it could not have been he who was at fault. I suppose it was exhibitionism; but it had become so much a habit that he had actually come to talk with me about the possibility that his, Jarvis’s, own conduct in the matter of Prendergast’s cribbing and the petition at faculty meeting might have been the cause of Wyck’s vanishing.
    When he at last departed, I got out my shorthand diary again and read over the account for the last two days. Only one thing was plain. I had to decide at once whether I should confess my knowledge of Gideon Wyck’s whereabouts, after he left the faculty meeting. Perhaps he had belatedly realized the full extent to which his presence was complicating things for Prexy, had repented his insistence upon attending the faculty meeting, and had decided that a prompt job of vanishing would be to everyone’s advantage, including his own. If he had committed suicide, the world might be happier if whatever deviltry he had been up to remained undiscovered.
    Finally (for it never occurred to me that kidnapping was the answer to the mystery) there was the very reasonable likelihood that he had been murdered. If so, Muriel Finch seemed the likeliest suspect. The boy Ted might have had as good an excuse, or better, for hating him; but I knew from Muriel’s own statements that she had both feared and loathed him, for a cause too awful to mention. Mere sexual