Read The Book of the Dead for Free Online

above Stonehill, Vermont.”
    â€œI don’t believe it’s a thing he’ll ever laugh about. Mr. Gamadge—how could you bring those pencil marks back again?”
    â€œOr read the traces of them? Well—there are several ways. There are the cold fumes of iodine; they condense on the paper and bring out all sorts of things. But the trouble is that the paper has to be photographed immediately, or the recreated marks die away. As a one man job it’s not the handiest in the world; and it had better be a one man job—we don’t want accomplices. If we did, I should send the book to a friend of mine who would get it treated in a police laboratory.”
    Idelia looked frightened.
    â€œThen there’s what they call the addition method,” continued Gamadge, “but let’s not go into that; it’s very complicated; you use collodion plates and I don’t remember what all. Then there’s the diapositive method; and there’s polarized light with crossed Nicols. You don’t want to know about crossed Nicols, do you?”
    Idelia shook her head.
    â€œI’m glad you don’t. My assistant Harold would have been delighted to instruct you, but I’ve never used them myself. Then there’s the dodge by which you photograph the back of the paper in an oblique light; that may bring out traces of the writing, and that, God helping me, I shall try if I must.”
    Idelia sat despondent. “It’s terrible. I ought to have known that it would be. Mr. Gamadge—if Mr. Crenshaw is in trouble, and we get him out of it, he might be glad to pay you.”
    â€œThose underlined passages, let me repeat, don’t sound as though he would thank us for getting him out of trouble. Don’t worry about my getting paid. Hang it all, I have the apparatus; I ought to lick this if Harold could. And I’m getting interested—” he opened the Shakespeare again, and smilingly turned pages—“deeply interested in the problem; for it is one. Will you leave Mr. Crenshaw’s book with me for the present?”
    â€œYou’ll have to have it if you work on those rubbed-out marks.”
    Gamadge rose, went over to one of the steel filing cabinets, and locked the Shakespeare away. He came back to his guest, but remained standing beside her. “Shall we go up to St. Damian’s?” he asked.
    Idelia got out of her chair as if worked by a spring. “Now?”
    â€œIt’s only a quarter past eight; why not? Hospitals admit visitors in the evening until at least nine o’clock.”
    They went out into the hall. Gamadge picked up his hat from the console that had probably held three-cornered hats in its young days, and unchained the door. He closed it behind him as they stepped out into the stupefying heat of the vestibule.
    â€œThick evening,” said Gamadge, as they went down the steps and turned west. The sky there was yellow, turning to violet, to purple; no human being could be seen as far as the eye could reach, but presently they passed a caretaker sitting on the front steps of his house in his shirtsleeves, and Gamadge nodded to him.
    â€œYou never see anybody,” said Idelia.
    â€œNo; it’s like a plague year. The court has moved to Hoydon; somebody will write a beautiful poem about brightness falling from the air—there will be fever in it.”
    A commotion above made them glance upwards at a plane whose body was almost invisible; the cluster of colored lights blinked on and off, on and off, as they sailed north.
    â€œJust a product of our fevered imagination,” said Gamadge. “It will vanish. It was never really there.”
    Idelia said: “I like those big drugstores, with all the lights and everything to buy.”
    â€œThey do give us a sense of reality. After we’ve been to the hospital we’ll visit one; you must have a soda. I always stand a new client a drink. Hurry, Idelia;