“Doctor Forden who signed the papers said so,” corrected Andrews. “Heart failure—what does that mean? As well say breath failure, or nerve failure. I’ll tell you what kind of failure I think it was. It was money failure. Hard times and poor investments struck Phelps before he really knew how to handle his small fortune. It called him home and—pouf!—he is off—to leave to his family a cool half-million by his death. But did he do it himself or did some one else do it? That’s the question.”
“What is your theory,” inquired Kennedy absently, “assuming there is no scandal hidden in the life of Phelps before or after he married the Russian dancer?”
“I don’t know, Kennedy,” confessed Andrews. “I have had so many theories and have changed them so rapidly that all I lay claim to believing, outside of the bald facts that I have stated, is that there must have been some poison. I rather sense it, feel that there is no doubt of it, in fact. That is why I have come to you. I want you to clear it up, one way or another. The company has no interest except in getting at the truth.”
“The body is really there?” asked Kennedy. “You saw it?”
“It was there no later than this afternoon, and in an almost perfect state of preservation, too.”
Kennedy seemed to be looking at and through Andrews as if he would hypnotise the truth out of him. “Let me see,” he said quickly. “It is not very late now. Can we visit the mausoleum to-night?”
“Easily. My car is down-stairs. Woodbine is not far, and you’ll find it a very attractive suburb, aside from this mystery.”
Andrews lost no time in getting us out to Woodbine, and on the fringe of the little town, one of the wealthiest around the city, he deposited us at the least likely place of all, the cemetery. A visit to a cemetery is none too enjoyable even on a bright day. In the early night it is positively uncanny. What was gruesome in the daylight became doubly so under the shroud of darkness.
We made our way into the grounds through a gate, and I, at least, even with all the enlightenment of modern science, could not restrain a weird and creepy sensation.
“Here is the Phelps tomb,” directed Andrews, pausing beside a marble structure of Grecian lines and pulling out a duplicate key of a new lock which had been placed on the heavy door of grated iron. As we entered, it was with a shudder at the damp odour of decay. Kennedy had brought his little electric bull’s-eye, and, as he flashed it about, we could see at a glance that the reports had not been exaggerated. Everything showed marks of a struggle. Some of the ornaments had been broken, and the coffin itself had been forced open.