The Formula for Murder (39 page)

He selects a lancet, a sharp-pointed knife used by surgeons to make small incisions.

“The first actually documented transfusion took place when Pope Innocent VIII was dying several hundred years ago. When the sixty-year-old pope was on death’s bed, the blood of three young boys was infused into him in an attempt to help him recover. He died and so did the boys.”

I watch with a macabre fascination, as if I am not involved, as Lacroix heats a small, round glass container over an alcohol burner.

“I am going to draw blood from your vein, what we call breathing a vein,” he says too calmly. “The blood is taken by cupping. I do it by cutting a small hole in your vein and then put this warm glass cup over the wound. The heated air in the cup creates a suction that draws blood. It is safer and causes less infections and internal bleeding than sticking a needle into the vein.”

He feels my arm to locate a vein. “This will hurt very little.”

I hear his words but they are meaningless to me. The only thing I comprehend is that he will take blood from me.

He leans down to me with the lancet and I give an involuntary cry as he slices into my arm deep enough to reach a vein. Removing the heated glass cup from the burner, he places it over the wound.

I feel both the heat of the glass rim and the suction as it pulls blood from my vein. My body is shaking uncontrollably and I bite down on my lip to keep myself from whimpering or crying more from terror than the pain.

He leaves me and Hailey is suddenly there.

She bandages my wound by wrapping a white cloth around my arm and pulling it snug. Then she undoes the strap holding me down and helps me sit up.

I am shaking so badly I can’t hold the glass of water she offers. She holds it for me and I guide it to my lips. She sets down the glass after I have drank my fill and says, “I’ll be back.”

Sitting on the edge of the table, I am weak and faint, but watch with dark fascination as Dr. Lacroix speaks to the countess while he prepares an injection of my blood for her.

“The first injection I give you will be minute, just a tiny drop. If you feel no effects from it, I will slowly increase the dose over a period of hours, pausing between each injection to ensure that your body is not reacting negatively to the injection. No one knows why an injection of blood taken from one person can harm the person receiving it and the same amount taken from another person can be of benefit. But the technique I have developed should ensure that you have no serious reaction. If you feel ill at all, I will stop it immediately and we will know that she is not the proper donor for you.”

His last words about the possibility of not being the right donor prompt another hair-raising question in me.

What if I am not the “proper donor”? Does that mean I am disposable?

My life hinges on the compatibility of my blood with hers?

As the time ticks away, I sit and watch the countess as she reclines on a couch with her eyes covered.

Hailey has disappeared somewhere.

The countess has no reaction to the first injection and he tries another and then a third. My eyes are getting lazy, trying to close, when I hear the countess suddenly screech. For a moment it sounded like a death rattle to me, but she sits up with a wide grin.

“
I feel rejuvenated!
” she shouts.

Dr. Lacroix welcomes the news, but the two briefly argue as the countess demands a full dose.

“It may just be your excited desires,” he tells her. “We have to move cautiously.”

He gives her another injection, but this time she is only down for a few minutes before she is on her feet again.

“I tell you it’s working,” she shouts at him. “
I want more.
” She stares at me, her eyes wild and crazy. “I want
all
of her blood.
Now!
”

Mother of God!

68

“It’s too dangerous, we can’t just give you all the blood,” Dr. Lacroix says, “we have to follow the protocol I’ve established.”

“We have to rush, you fool. Don’t you realize her friends will be here soon? In this sparsely populated area, the carriage has to have stood out. Someone will have seen something.”

She gets up and faces Lacroix and he fades back just enough to make it obvious to me that he is not only under her control, but frightened of her.

“We’ve spent years trying to perfect your procedure and looking for a match.” Her voice is controlling and demanding. “I am not going to lose this one. We can drain her blood, put it in airtight containers, and store them in the estate’s icehouse.”

She turns to Hare. “After we’re finished with her, take her to the bog. She can join your comrade.”

Drain my blood? Dump me in the bog?

I’m off the table with my feet on the run the moment the soles of my shoes hit the floor.

I hear the countess shout, “
Stop her!
”

Hare comes at me and connects his shoulder against mine, sending me staggering, hitting a lab table. I go down as the table flies over, sending scientific apparatus flying everywhere. Flames burst up from an alcohol burner.

He stands over me with his ice pick. “I told you I would put out your eyes.”

“
Leave her alone!
”

Hailey has come down from upstairs and pauses at the bottom. She has a double-barreled shotgun, holding it with both hands, the butt against her side, just above her hip.

“I told you she was crazy,” Hare yells to the countess as he charges Hailey.

“
Stop!
” Hailey screams.

Hare keeps charging and the shotgun goes off with a sound that is deafening. Hare spins around and falls backward onto the floor.

For a frozen moment everything in the room is still.

I’ve gotten up onto my knees and stare wide-eyed at the large blotch of red spreading across Hare’s chest as his arms and legs shake compulsively as if some energy source is trying to escape his dead body.

I feel the heat of the fire caused by the broken alcohol burner—it’s raging next to me.

“
Run!
” I scream at Hailey.

The countess has pulled a dagger and is going toward her.

Hailey backs up, her heel catching on the step behind her and she goes down, the shotgun going off. The blast appears to me to have hit the countess because she spins around and loses her footing, but goes down only for a second and then is back up.

The burst from the gun actually hit Lacroix—he’s down on the floor, on his back, lying still.

The countess still has the dagger. Once on her feet she sways for a moment, then like a rabid dog that is mindless except for its rage, she goes for Hailey because that’s who’s in her sights.

I grab a microscope that is lying on the floor next to me and get up and run as fast as I can.

As the countess comes up to her, Hailey rises and pulls the trigger of the shotgun again, but nothing happens—she’s used both barrels.

The countess raises the dagger and plunges down.

Hailey hand-deflects the strike, but the sharp blade catches the inside of her bare arm, slicing down it.

Grasping the microscope by the narrow lens end, I swing it as a club, the heavy iron footing hitting the countess on the side of her shoulder. It’s enough to make her drop the dagger and send her sprawling.

Behind us there is an explosion as the fire below spreads to another alcohol lamp. The escape path out the front is swallowed by roaring flames and the room has become dense with smoke.

“Hurry,” I tell Hailey as I start up the stairs. I don’t realize she isn’t with me until I’ve taken several steps. I turn around and she has gone to Lacroix’s body. She sits down next to him and puts his head in her lap. She has the countess’s dagger in her hand.

“
Hailey!
”

She looks up at me and shakes her head. Her face tells me she has made her choice. She would rather join the man she loves in death than face life without him.

I turn my head as she raises the dagger with both hands to plunge it into herself. I don’t look but start racing up the stairs.

Reaching the top of the stairway, I stumble across the living space, my eyes and lungs burning from the fumes. I reach for the doors to the patio only because I know where they are.

Pulling open the doors, I am grabbed from behind by female hands that claw at my throat and start pulling me back into the smoke-choked room.

“
You’re mine!
”

Crazy bitch!

I bring my arms up and bend my knees to break her grip. She leans down with me and I rise suddenly and push backward. As I force her back, I twist, loosening her grip on my throat and break free.

I step back and ball my fist to strike her.

With a screech that comes out of my mouth but sounds like it came from a wild beast, I throw what my bare-knuckle pal would call a power punch, straight at her face, my fist connecting with her nose, feeling the nose squish and squash as my fist makes impact.

A spray of her blood hits me—
her blood.

She falls backward and I screech with glee as I race out onto the balcony. I want to get the hell out of here.

Suddenly the countess is coming at me again. I don’t know how, but that insane rage of hers keeps her going. She comes flying wildly out of the door behind me, but her momentum keeps her going, over me and over the railing. She sweeps by me with just a quick gasp as she realizes at the last moment of life that she is soaring headfirst toward a hard surface.

I hear the thump of her hitting the roof below and leap over the railing as I did before, dropping down to the roof.

The countess is there, too, lying with the quiet of the dead, her head flopped almost beneath her, twisted in a grotesque angle.

My first thought as I drop to the ground is to get the pasture gate open to make sure the carriage horses won’t be harmed by the fire consuming the building.

That’s when I see my three friends come running, Wells’s voice shouting my name as I swing open the gate for the horses.

“Where are you going?” Oscar shouts as I turn and race back to the burning house.

“To open the chimp cages,” I shout back.

69

“Nellie, a toast to you!” Oscar lifts his crystal glass of champagne. “One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then you, daring Nellie Bly, come around and one suddenly is dangling precariously on the edge of a cliff.”

“Amen to that!” Wells chimes in.

I curtsy the best I can sitting down. “Thank you, gentlemen. I must say, I will miss you all terribly.”

My friends insisted we all get together for one last time at the Langham Hotel before my ship sails for New York.

After long conversations with the police, I was able to give Hailey’s remains a proper burial. She might have had bad judgments in men, but she had a heart of gold and in the end saved my life.

Besides the Dartmoor police, we spent many hours explaining to Inspector Bradley in Bath and my dear Inspector Abberline in London as to what happened from London to Dartmoor.

“However,” I add, “I believe many women in Bath and London will not be too sad to see me leave, considering I had a hand in getting their rejuvenation spa closed down.”

A proper arrest was made with Dr. Radic, and Aqua Vitae was shut down.

“You probably are correct.” Oscar addresses me as he pets his dog, Lord Dudley. “But one day people will realize that the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young, and no spa in the world will help them.”

We all laugh.

“Oscar,” I say, reaching over and holding his hand, “I am so going to miss you and your wit.”

“So, Nellie, tell me, am I going to have another competitor in writing mysteries?” Conan Doyle smiles.

“I doubt it.”

“Ah, but you have a wealth of information and firsthand experience to write from.”

“Yes, but I don’t have Sherlock Holmes to help sort out the killer.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, murder is always a mistake … one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner,” Oscar says.

“Ah, but murder and mysteries do bring entertainment,” Doyle responds.

“That’s because such dark deeds are so lucrative—to writers,” Wells adds.

“Quite true, but look what we have found out in this adventure—”

I interrupt Doyle. “An adventure is what you call a harrowing experience—
after
you survive it.”

“Yes, but we also found that the more bizarre Dr. Lacroix became, the less mysterious he proved to be. It’s your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.”

“May I interject—” Oscar starts to say, but I stop him before he spurts out another one of his witticisms.

“Gentlemen, before you get into a long discussion of murder and mayhem, I must say good-bye. I have a long day ahead tomorrow and a girl needs her beauty rest.”

“Quite,” comes from all of them as they get up.

“Oscar, take care of yourself.” I give him a big hug. “I truly hate saying good-bye to my partner in crime.”

“You, too, Nellie-girl.”

“Conan, it has been a great pleasure meeting you. I hope we meet again.”

He gives me a hug. “The pleasure is all mine. You, young lady, have solved a great mystery for me.”

“What’s that?”

“My next story.”

All I can do is blush. What a compliment … but I wonder what he means.

“Nellie,” Wells comes over to me, “while Oscar and Conan solve the mysteries of the world, I shall walk you to your room.”

Away from the others, Oscar grabs my arm and whispers softly in my ear, “I’m proud of you, my dear. I, too, advocate free love.”

HISTORICAL NOTE