Murder at Miskatonic

A Mystery of Intrigue, Passion, and Material Balances.

Jake Vestal

The Scene

“Thank you Pendleton. Just park here and we’ll go in together; it’s much too cold for you to wait in the car.”

Dr. Xavier Verawood opened his own door and stepped out into the cold wet air, pulling down his hat. Life in Atlanta had caused him to forget the chill of Boston in November, and he wasn’t quite sure if he missed it.

He looked to see if Richard Pendleton had gotten out of the motorcar without mishap. Pendleton, who had served the Verawood family for three generations, was getting rather stiff in his old age. Xavier smiled. He had very tender feelings for the old man whose dry wit and quiet confidence were a pleasant memory from his New England childhood. Seeing Pendleton again for the first time since the start of his new life in the South filled Verawood with pleasant nostalgia.

The two men walked away from the car, down a paved sidewalk which led to the steps of the Miskatonic University School of Chemistry and Engineering. The old pile of stones sat smugly framed against the glaring, grey sky on the top of a little brown hill. A limp banner still hung over the Gothic arch of the entrance, welcoming the new Class of 1935 that had been admitted that August.

Pendleton opened the large wooden door for Xavier, who stepped into the carpeted atrium and checked in with the secretary. Their names were neatly written down in the log like this:

“Verawood, Xavier and Pendleton, Richard- In 9:00 am Monday, Nov. 21, 1932.”

The pair continued past the reception desk and took the dank staircase that led to the basement. Moldy and dark, the basement delved far into the hill upon which it was built, and had for a long time been used only for storage. Xavier’s older brother, the great Dr. Alexander Verawood, who was a professor on the Miskatonic Chemical Engineering faculty and the reason for Xavier’s visit, had renovated old basment, transforming it into his research facility upon his reception of a substantial grant in 1925.

Xavier was always amazed at the spectacle of a cutting-edge engineering research facility, which he considered rather romantic. Though he understood nothing of engineering and even less of chemistry, the young man appreciated deeply the beauty that he found in the bold ordering of tubing, pumps, and columns, which, to him, embodied the very spirit of academic pursuit in their solemn defiance of natural disorder.

That was why he took a deep breath of admiration when he stepped into the lab of his brother. The room was dominated by a huge copper tank, taller than Xavier and polished to a bright orange luster. It was feeding from a collection of tanks that surrounded it as it brooded in the center of the room. From the top and sides of the tank sprouted a multitude of thin pipes, which stretched out like tendrils from a vast and carnivorous jungle plant. Each line snaked its way to one of many outlandish contraptions on sturdy tables arrayed about the stone floor of the lab, or to a wall rack where amber-colored liquid was subjected to the gauntlet of a multitude of delicate glassware and shiny metal whose many reaction vessels, pistons, Bunsen burners and distillation columns looked to Verawood as some kind of glittering alchemy. The myriad of equipment produced a humming sound and a regular pulse like a slow heartbeat, and every now and then pressure was released from somewhere in great puffs. Verawood, being a man of rather fanciful tendencies, felt like he had just entered the bowels of a gigantic, mythical beast. Fascinated, he moved towards the large tank.

“Oh!” came a voice from across the room. “I’ll be right with you as soon as I put these away.”

Xavier snapped out of his reverie to see a very small, dark-haired young woman whose large brown eyes stood out starkly against the white of her lab coat. She was wheeling a cart that bore three large tanks to a corner of the room. Xavier and Pendleton helped her wrestle the tanks off the cart and onto the floor, where they were safely chained to the wall.

“Thank you” said the woman, brushing away a strand of black hair. “Those empty CO2 tanks were somehow over there next to the full ones. It’s lucky they were still on the cart; they’re very heavy and quite cumbersome to move around. Are you here to see anyone?”

“Yes ma’am, I’m Xavier Verawood, brother of the Professor, and I think you must already know Richard Pendleton, my brother’s assistant. I arrived from Georgia last night and I’m here to see the Professor.”

“Ah, the Professor has spoken of you to me, Dr. Verawood. You yourself are a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Emory University, no? My name is Celia de Morcef; I am your brother’s graduate student.”

Her English is very good, thought Verawood, though he wondered how this young woman had come about that Italian first name.

“Well, I did come here to see my brother, but if it’s not too much of an inconvenience I was rather hoping you could explain this cyclopean monstrosity to us,” he said, meaning the huge copper tank. “It looks terribly interesting, but I’m afraid I must humbly confess to a deplorable ignorance of chemistry and mathematics. And, please, call me Xavier: I still haven’t quite gotten used to ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor’.”

At this, Celia lit up.

“But of course! Follow me to the incubator: this is where it all starts.”

Intrigued, the two men allowed themselves to be swept in the wake of the tiny French scientist, who led them to the monolithic bronze tank in the center of the room. Opening a slide in the outer casing of the incubator, Celia exposed a view cell through which a churning amber liquid could be seen swirling against the glass.

“It’s fortunate that you arrived on a collection day Monsieur; otherwise you wouldn’t have seen the lab in all its splendor.

“Now, this yellow liquid that you see through the glass is really a solution of yeast cells, kept at 37 degrees Celsius in a mixture containing 10 parts tryptone and other proteins (that’s milk, well, more or less), 10 parts NaCl, 1 part glucose and 1 part MgCl. These tanks that you see surrounding the incubator all contain O2 or CO2. The CO2 feed is part of a buffering system we use to keep our yeast cells producing their wonderful chemicals which this lab is dedicated to studying. They need the O2 to breathe, of course. Other reagents are mixed in with the solution, but they vary with the experiment that is being performed.

“As you must know, yeast cells are able to produce ethyl alcohol through fermentation; this is how beer is made. This lab is really quite like a plant, a brewery if you will, except we have found that we can coerce our little yeast cells to produce amazing hydrocarbons that can be modified for other uses, chiefly for fuel and industrial lubricant applications. The trick is a combination of the proper choice of media and correct treatment of the cellular products. Essentially, we are using the machinery that already exists within the yeast cells to make our product! You can surely see how these very processes might drastically reduce our dependence on oil, and perhaps even eliminate it.”

Here, Celia indicated the wild pipes that radiated out from the incubator.

“On a collection day, the yeast solution, which by now contains our hydrocarbons of interest, is being sent off through this network of tubes to stations where various components alter the yeast feed. In the business, we call this a ‘semi-batch’ process. You can see on the wall there one of our distillation units; that particular component happens to be purifying the n-octane that the yeast cells have produced. The cells are being lysed by a detergent, releasing the n-octane and forming a slurry of media, octane, and dead cell debris. From there, the mixture is heated and subjected to fractional distillation; thus, the octane is readily recovered. Each component that you see is doing essentially the same thing: it’s either synthesizing something or separating some important component of the virgin yeast feed that we might find to be a useful fuel or lubricant. It’s really a very simple process if you think of it in pieces.”

She smiled expectantly. Verawood tried not to let his eyes cross, but Pendleton simply nodded serenely. Xavier blushed, feeling like he had to ask something in order to avoid looking dim.

“Does nothing go to waste?” he blurted.

“Very astute, Professor. Yes, the methane and ethane that we necessarily produce is useless. We store it in that tank over there in about a 3:1 methane/ethane ratio- scented, of course, for safety. CO2 is also produced; the yeasts respire just as you and I do. That extra CO2, however, is taken in tanks on the cart that you helped me with to photosynthetic algae that we grow on the roof in clear containers. There, the algae produce the sugars that we use in the yeast media in a CO2 rich environment. We could, of course, be purchasing or using atmospheric CO2, but why should we when we’re producing it right here in this room? Further, what we’re really trying to do is set up a working model of a plant that might someday operate on a near-closed cycle that couples the yeast/algae molecule exchange in order to supply us with cheap and virtually infinite fuels and lubricants. In the real plant, the CO2 would probably just be piped into the algae tanks automatically.

“As for the methane/ethane waste, we used to just burn it up until the professor bought that little 5 cubic foot tank you see over there on the bench. Every Friday he fills it up to 3000 psi. When he wants, he opens up a little valve under his desk, which allows the gas to flow from that tank to his office. There, he has a clever little burner of his own design that is almost completely fuel and energy efficient. He’s even constructed a marvelous little carburetor that draws the perfect amount of oxygen into the flame chamber; I saw it heat a liter of water to boiling in only one minute when I had coffee with him last week. Look, the tank is down to 1370 already, he must have eaten and slept here the whole weekend. He really is a brilliant man, hates to waste anything at all.”

“He’s been like that since childhood, Miss de Morcef, I can assure you. Is he in? I should very much like to see him; in fact, that’s the reason I came to Boston. I stayed at his house last night, but you know how he gets so involved that he winds up sleeping here.”

“His new office is next door to the left. He took it because it’s close to the lab; it’s really not much more than a converted utility closet that was put into the basement when the building was built. I would walk you there, but it’s never good to leave a high-pressure process unattended if one can help it, so you must forgive me. It was nice meeting you.”

They shook hands, and the two men departed to Dr. Verawood’s office, which was out of the lab and next door, as they had been instructed. They found a handsome hardwood door bearing the name “Dr. Alexander Verawood” on a golden strip. Both men noticed a strange smell that seemed to be leaking out from the large space underneath the Professor’s door, no doubt put there in order to facilitate the slipping in of papers by tardy students. Xavier knocked, but received no reply.

“Well Pendleton, he’s either engrossed in some great work or asleep. There’s no lock on this door; I’m sure he won’t mind if we go wake him up.”

“Of course he won’t mind, Dr. Verawood; he’s been very excited about your coming for two weeks now.”

Xavier turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Immediately he uttered a choked gasp, cut short by the noxious rush of a malignant vapor, which smelled unmistakably like fuel gas. Pendleton coughed and sputtered.

“Ghastly smell, that. What’s the professor been-“ he was cut short by the expression of horror on Xavier’s face. When Pendleton followed his gaze into the office, he saw what had upset the young professor.

There, on the floor of his own office, sprawled on the rug that he and Xavier had brought back from China, was the great Dr. Alexander Verawood. He was cold, pale, and as dead as the flagstones he lay upon. Pendleton, falling to his knees from the horrible fumes and the sudden dull anguish that gnawed at his stomach, picked up the Professor’s hand to check for a pulse. As he did so, Xavier noticed a pad of paper near the Professor’s elbow bearing a single word:

“MURDER.”

The Suspects

“Monstrous!” cried Xavier that evening, in his late brother’s study at the Verawood family mansion. He was reflecting upon the day’s events, of how they had moved his brother’s body to the Verawood family vault with the help of a trusted family physician. First, though, Xavier had had to fumble for that blasted supply valve in order to shut off the gas that was pouring forth from his brother’s unlit burner. Luckily, they had been able to get the body out of the building by placing it in a black bag on a cart and saying that it was a delicate piece of equipment that someone in the physics building had requested to borrow for a while. Faraday, the family physician, had performed an autopsy that afternoon with the conclusion that Verawood had died of a heart attack. Maddeningly, no traces of poisons, cuts, bruises, or any other trauma had been found anywhere on or in the late Professor’s mortal coil.

“How could this have happened? What callous fiend could be responsible for such a heinous act! Oh, Pendleton, what are we to do?”

“Courage, Doctor, courage, there’s hope yet. We won’t find your brother’s assassin by raving like mad Lear, if you’ll forgive me saying, but by logic. I must admit though, it’s rather puzzling. Perhaps we should involve the police?”

“Not on your life, Pendleton, not with that Hardcastle around. He probably owns every policeman in Massachusetts by now. The murdering thug! I’m sure it was him, he’s been hounding my brother since the beginning of the yeast project, and we know he was there the weekend of the murder.” Xavier was shouting.

“That’s a wild accusation, young master, and you know it. Sit down and I’ll have Doris bring us some brandy and whatever is left from that chicken dish we ate last night.”

Xavier moved from the window to the soft suede chair beside the bookshelf, where his father used to read Goethe on rainy nights.

“Do you think there’s such thing as the perfect murder, Pendleton?” he asked, despondently looking out at the cold trees.

“No. You should know that. Nothing in the real world corresponds exactly to its ideal counterpart, though it can get very close. Perfection only exists in mathematics. No, your brother’s murderer made at least one mistake, maybe more, and it’s up to us to find it and exploit it.”

Doris arrived with the chicken and brandy. The two men moved to the heavy wooden table near the short wall of the room, which was still somewhat cluttered by Alexander’s notes and calculations. After setting down the food and drink, Doris slipped out, noticing that the two were deeply engaged in conversation. Xavier took a bite of chicken and a sip of his drink.

“That feels better, I think we can get on with it now” he said.

“Let’s start at the beginning. We conferred with the secretary and checked the log, and decided that only six associates of my brother were present in the C & E building between the time he was seen at his evening class on Friday and 9:00 Monday morning, when we found him.”

Xavier found a scrap sheet of paper and a pen, and started writing.

“There were six” agreed Pendleton, “All of which had some kind of connection or business with your brother.”

This is what Xavier wrote down:

Suspects:

Thaddeus Hardcastle

Aurora Simonova

Zelda Verawood

Erroll Curry

Tommy Benedict

Celia de Morcef

“Why don’t we start with old Thaddeus,” suggested Verawood bitterly.

“Very well. We know from the secretary’s log that he visited the Professor on Friday evening, but did he have a motive?”

“A motive!” shouted Xavier. “Of course he had a motive! This is the Baron himself we’re talking about! He’s always in the papers, in and out of court for the convenient and ‘accidental’ deaths involving anyone opposed to his juggernaut of an oil empire. He’s the only one not affected by this depression we’re in, Pendleton- everyone needs oil. Only now, he gets to pay his workers less for the same amount of labor: more people are willing to strain away on his derricks and rigs because no one can find jobs. Alex’s yeasts would have ruined his entire industry eventually, and he visited my brother on the weekend he was murdered!”

Xavier was becoming heated, and Pendleton thought it best to push along the conversation.

“Friday evening, from 5 to 6. Ample time, I should think. Let’s move on to Miss Simonova.”

“Well, I won’t pretend I don’t know what she was, but I think you know more than I do about her,” admitted Xavier. “Alexander hardly talked about her in his letters. Look, she was at the building from 8:30 to 9:30 PM on Saturday. Tell me about Aurora, Pendleton.”

“She was rather the climbing type, I came to believe, though I don’t insult your brother’s taste. Unfortunately, despite my personal opinions (which reflect somewhat poorly on Miss Simonova’s character), I can’t say much about her save one important detail: she thought she and Alexander were legally married.”

“What?” scoffed Xavier. “How is that possible?”

“Apparently she convinced the late Dr. Verawood to enter into some kind of contract with her that she believed legally tied the Verawood estate to her name. I think a lawyer of dubious qualifications and reputation was involved, but the contract will never stand up in a court of law. It is, I think, rather akin to what is often called the ‘Vegas marriage.’ The point is I’m rather convinced that at the time of the murder she truly believed that she stood to inherit all that was your brother’s upon his untimely demise. Ironic, isn’t it, that someone so adroit in the arena of social interaction should be so naïve when it comes to even the simplest of legal issues.”

Xavier didn’t ask how the old servant knew all this; he didn’t want to put Pendleton in the position of admitting to being a snooper. Instead, he said:

“Well, the next one is obvious. Alex told me in a letter that Zelda found out about Aurora and that the resulting tempest was cataclysmic.”

Pendleton shuddered, remembering. “That’s not too far from the mark. Mrs. Verawood has been getting increasingly agitated since that day in August, and the onset of winter has not lifted her spirits. Before she left here on Friday to stay at her parent’s estate, she had taken to brooding in her rooms. As you know, she’s always been one to hold in her feelings until they compel her to rashness, and when she left she seemed elated, as if her melancholy had lifted upon the making of some decision. And she was there, at the C & E building, from 8-9 PM on Sunday.”

Xavier hung his head. “I wish that poor Alex’s married life had worked out, but the truth is that they just weren’t made for each other. Naturally I’d like to cite Zelda’s intractably spoiled attitude; I thought her a right termagant when Alex first met her. That’s probably prejudice, though, and my brother ought not to have behaved as he did in his private life.”

There was a sad silence, pregnant with melancholy and regret.

“Dr. Errol Curry,” said Pendleton.

“Well, Erroll grew up with us, as of course you remember. I can only recall the keen jealousy he felt for my brother, who was always his better in school, sports, and social relations. Alex treated him very magnanimously, as far as I know, but I think that that only seemed to infuriate Erroll even more. Alex wrote to me last month and told me that the Department, like everything else these days, is having serious financial problems and that one of the faculty would have to be cut. I’m sure Erroll was afraid for his life. The poor man hasn’t done very well recently, or truthfully, at all, and perhaps he became rather desperate.”

“Though I do remember the jealous admiration with which he regarded your brother in childhood, I cannot lay claim to any knowledge about his professional situation. Still, we must include him in our consideration, for he was present at the building from 9 AM to 12 PM on Saturday, and from 9 AM 8 PM on Friday. But who is this Tommy Benedict?”

“He’s the janitor,” replied Verawood, “who was scheduled to work this Saturday from 7 PM to 10 PM in the basement while no one was around. We know that the labs are locked all through the weekend, and he had one of the three keys. Curry and Miss de Morcef have the other two, I believe, tied as they are to the University. Alex, of course, had the third.

“That’s a sketchy connection,” continued Verawood, shaking his finger, “But Benedict certainly warrants consideration on circumstance alone. Now, you said you had something to tell me about Celia.”

Pendleton steepled his hands and took on a rather ironic expression.

“My dear young Master Verawood, you won’t believe what I am about to tell you,” he began, “but our Miss Celia de Morcef has an acute case of hallucinogenic paranoia.”

“What? What does that even mean? Could she have killed him?”

“Not only that, but she might not remember it.” Pendleton waited for the implications to sink in.

“The late Professor received a letter from her mother in southern France. She is, by the way, the progeny of rather noble French stock on her father’s side, but her mother was an Italian serving-girl with whom her father became completely enamored during a trip to Italyin his youth. She turned out to be quite a graceful, intelligent, and virtuous woman who adapted to her new life without a hitch and delighted everyone around her, much like her daughter Celia.

“Your brother always raved about Celia’s unsurpassed creative and analytical prowess, how she saw to the heart of even the most complex problems with a quick and sure dexterity that rivaled and perhaps even surpassed his own. Being the man he was, the late Doctor felt elated by the considerable gifts of his young apprentice.

“That letter from her mother, however, told of an incident that occurred while Celia and the family were vacationing in Nice one June. I think that Celia’s mother felt that Dr. Verawood should hear about it. The details are delicate and not pressingly relevant, but the end result was that Celia had an episode in which she felt that her life was in danger by unseen beings- beings, apparently, that gibbered to her in the sounds that a wind-flapped shingle made on the roof of her family’s seaside villa. Luckily her father found her before she could do any harm, for I’m given to understand that when he entered Celia’s room he found to his horror that her terrified little sister was physically restrained and in danger of receiving a mortal injury by Celia’s hand. Celia remembered nothing the next morning. Since, the young woman has been treated with medication, which has eliminated these violent episodes. What concerns me about this is that your brother told me once, in passing, that she feels her medicine curtails her higher and more subtle mental abilities, and that she does sometimes skip her pills.”

Xavier remembered the delicate, brilliant woman from the lab, so excited by her research and full of potential, and he felt a shiver well up.

“She was there on Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM, and again Sunday evening from 5 PM to 12 AM. When we asked her this afternoon, she said she spent Sunday in the library and Friday in the lab, and she doesn’t recall seeing the Professor after his evening lecture. Pendleton, what can we say about the fact that no one reported the Professor’s death at all? If Hardcastle was the one, then my poor brother lay in his office for the whole weekend while everyone else was coming in and out; surely someone must have seen the murder scene?”

“True,” replied Pendleton, thoughtfully, “true. I think that we must assume that every suspect that might have entered the building after the murder either 1) didn’t open the door of the Professor’s office or 2) did open the office door, but didn’t report what he or she found. The former is not so hard to believe with Curry, Celia, and Tommy, who are likely to have not sought the professor out and would not have missed his absence. We can be almost certain that Hardcastle saw the Professor alive on Friday, though he may have murdered him at that time. If Hardcastle is not the murderer, then he simply left when his audience had concluded.

“As for Aurora and Mrs. Verawood… well… we can’t assume that they entered the Professor’s office just because we know they were in the building. To have both not murdered the Professor and to have discovered and not reported the Professor’s demise seems unlikely; therefore we can guess that if one of these women is a murderess then the other one probably didn’t enter the room.’

Pendleton had finished and sat quietly, musing. Xavier’s gaze turned again to the window, through which he looked forlornly at the dark, flowing Miskatonic under the night sky. The minutes ticked by on the grandfather clock that had stood in the study since Xavier’s grandfather’s time. Sighing, Xavier looked back at Pendleton. Curiously, Pendleton was staring intently at the suspect list, which had been flipped over to reveal one of the late Professor’s old calculation pages. A hot fire was slowly kindling behind the old man’s eyes, and a mirthless smile tinged the corners of his mouth.

“What is it, Pendleton?” whispered Xavier.

“I was a boy in this house when your grandfather was building railroads across the continent. I was here when your father, who wielded his mastery over matter as a violinist wields his bow, designed his famous chemical plants and units. I served your brother while he worked sedulously on his brilliant research.

“I know a little something about logic and engineering after all my years in this house. Xavier, the murderer can only be one person: I know how to find out who killed Dr. Alexander Verawood, and we can do it without leaving the room.”