“But I am a scientist, a logician,” The Thinking Machine had protested. “I know nothing whatever of crime.”
“No one knows that a crime has been committed,” the reporter hastened to say.
“There is something far beyond the ordinary in this affair. A woman has disappeared, evaporated into thin air in the hearing, almost in sight, of her friends. The police can make nothing of it. It is a problem for a greater mind than theirs.”
Professor Van Dusen waved the newspaper man to a seat and himself sank back into a great cushioned chair in which his diminutive figure seemed even more childlike than it really was.
“Tell me the story,” he said petulantly, “All of it.”
The enormous yellow head rested against the chair back, the blue eyes squinted steadily upward, the slender fingers were pressed tip to tip. The Thinking Machine was in a receptive mood. Hatch was triumphant; he had had only a vague hope that he could interest this man in an affair which was as bizarre as it was incomprehensible.
“Miss Wallack is thirty years old and beautiful,” the reporter began. “As an actress she has won high recognition not only in this country but in England. You may have read something of her in the daily papers, and if—”
“I never read the papers,” the other interrupted curtly. “Go on.”
“She is unmarried, and as far as anyone knows, had no immediate intention of changing her condition,” Hatch resumed, staring curiously at the thin face of the scientist. “I presume she had admirers—most beautiful women of the stage have—but she is one whose life has been perfectly clean, whose record is an open book. I tell you this because it might have a bearing on your conclusion as to a possible reason for her disappearance.
“Now the actual circumstances of that disappearance. Miss Wallack has been playing in Shakespearean repertoire. Last week she was in Springfield. On Saturday night, which concluded her engagement there, she appeared as Rosalind in ‘As You Like It.’ The house was crowded. She played the first two acts amid great enthusiasm, and this despite the fact that she was suffering intensely from headache to which she was subject at times. After the second act she returned to her dressing room and just before the curtain went up for the third the stage manager called her. She replied that she would be out immediately. There seems no possible shadow of doubt that it was her voice.
“Rosalind does not appear in the third act until the curtain has been up for six minutes. When Miss Wallack’s cue came she did not answer it. The stage manager rushed to her door and again called her. There was no answer. Then, fearing that she might have fainted, he went in. She was not there. A hurried search was made without result, and the stage manager finally was compelled to announce to the audience that the sudden illness of the star would make it impossible to finish the performance.
“The curtain was lowered and the search resumed. Every nook and corner back of the footlights was gone over. The stage doorkeeper, William Meegan, had seen no one go out. He and a policeman had been standing at the stage door talking for at least twenty minutes. It is therefore conclusive that Miss Wallack did not leave by that exit. The only other way it was possible to leave the stage was over the footlights. Of course she didn’t go that way. Yet no trace of her has been found. Where is she?”
“The windows?” asked The Thinking Machine.
“The stage is below the street level,” explained Hatch. “The window of her dressing room, Room A, is small and barred with iron. It opens into an air shaft that goes straight up for ten feet, and that is covered with an iron grating fixed in the granite. The other windows on the stage are not only inaccessible but are also barred with iron. She could not have approached either of these windows without being seen by other members of the company or the stage hands.”
“Under the stage?” suggested the scientist.
“Nothing,” the reporter went on. “It is a large cemented basement which was vacant. It was searched, because there was of course a chance that Miss Wallack might have become temporarily unbalanced and wandered down there. There was even a search made of the flies—that is the galleries over the stage where the men who work the drop curtains are stationed.”
There was silence for a long time. The Thinking Machine twiddled his fingers and continued to stare upward. He had not looked at the reporter. He broke the silence after a time. “How was Miss Wallack dressed at the time of her disappearance?”
“In doublet and hose—that is, tights,” the newspaper man responded. “She wears that costume from the second act until practically the end of the play.”
“Was all her street clothing in her room?”
“Yes, everything, spread across an unopened trunk of costumes. It was all as if she had left the room to answer her cue—all in order even to an open box of chocolate-cream candy on her table.”
“No sign of a struggle, nor any noise heard?”
“No.”
“Nor trace of blood?”
“Nothing.”
“Her maid? Did she have one?”
“Oh, yes. I neglected to tell you that the maid, Gertrude Manning, had gone home immediately after the first act. She grew suddenly ill and was excused.”
The Thinking Machine turned his squint eyes on the reporter for the first time.
“Ill?” he repeated. “What was the matter?”
“That I can’t say,” replied the reporter.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. Everyone forgot all about her in the excitement about Miss Wallack.”
“What kind of candy was it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that either.”
“Where was it bought?’”
The reporter shrugged his shoulders; that was something else he didn’t know.
The Thinking Machine shot out the questions aggressively, staring meanwhile steadily at Hatch, who squirmed uncomfortably. “Where is the candy now?” demanded the scientist.
Again Hatch shrugged his shoulders.
“How much did Miss Wallack weigh?”
The reporter was willing to guess at this. He had seen her half a dozen times.
“Between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty,” he ventured.
“Does there happen to be a hypnotist connected with the company?”
“I don’t know,” Hatch replied.
The Thinking Machine waved his slender hands impatiently; he was annoyed. “It is perfectly absurd, Mr. Hatch,” he expostulated, “to come to me with only a few facts and ask advice. If you had all the facts I might be able to do something; but this—”
The newspaper man was nettled. In his own profession he was accredited a man of discernment and acumen. He resented the tone, the manner, even the seemingly trivial questions, which the other asked. “I don’t see,” he began, “that the candy even if it had been poisoned as I imagine you think possible, or a hypnotist could have had anything to do with Miss Wallack’s disappearance. Certainly neither poison nor hypnotism would have made her invisible.”
“Of course you don’t see!” blazed The Thinking Machine. “If you did, you wouldn’t have come to me. When did this thing happen?”
“Saturday night, as I said,” the reporter informed him a little more humbly. “It closed the engagement in Springfield. Miss Wallack was to have appeared here in Boston tonight.”
“When did she disappear—by the clock, I mean?”
“The stage