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engineer might suddenly envision what he had envisioned.
    And in fact he was right to be concerned. Scientists around the world were conducting experiments with electromagnetic waves, though they still focused on their optical qualities. Lodge had come closest, but inexplicably had not continued his research.

         
    T HE S CAR

    T HE YOUNG WOMAN WHO NOW presented herself at the Brooklyn, New York, office of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, and who was destined to cause such tumult in his life, was named Cora Turner. At least that was her name for the present. She was seventeen years old, Crippen thirty and already a widower, but the distance between them was not as great as chronology alone suggested, for Miss Turner had the demeanor and physical presence of a woman much older. Her figure was full and inevitably drew forth the adjective
voluptuous.
Her eyes were alight with a knowledge not of books but of how hardship made morality more fungible than the clerics of Brooklyn’s churches might have wanted parishioners to believe. She was a patient of the physician who owned the practice, a Dr. Jeffrey, and she had come in for a problem described with Victorian reticence as “female.”
    Crippen was lonely, and genetic fate had conspired to keep him that way. He was not handsome, and his short stature and small bones conveyed neither strength nor virility. Even his scalp had betrayed him, his hair having begun a brisk retreat years before. He did have a few assets, however. Though he was nearsighted, his eyes were large and conveyed warmth and sympathy—provided he was wearing his glasses. Lately he had grown a beard in a narrow V, which imparted a whiff of continental sophistication. He dressed well, and the sharp collars and crisp-cut suits that tailors of the day favored gave him definition against the passing landscape, the way a line of India ink edged a drawing. Also, he was a doctor. Medicine in this era was becoming a more scientific profession, one that conveyed intellect and character, and, increasingly, prosperity.
    Crippen fell for Cora Turner immediately. He saw her youth as no obstacle and began courting her, taking her out to lunch and dinner and for walks. Gradually he learned her story. Her father, a Russian Pole, had died when she was a toddler; her German mother had remarried, but now she too was dead. Cora was fluent both in German and in English. Her stepfather, Fritz Mersinger, lived on Forrest Avenue in Brooklyn. Crippen learned that for one of her birthdays Mersinger had taken her into Manhattan to hear an opera, and the experience had ignited an ambition to become one of the world’s great divas.
    As Crippen got to know her, he learned too that her passion had become obsession, which in turn had led her down a path that diverged from the savory. She lived alone in an apartment paid for by a man named C. C. Lincoln, a stove maker who was married and lived elsewhere. He paid for her food and clothing and voice lessons. In return he received sex and the companionship of a woman who was young, vivacious, and physically striking. But a complication arose: She became pregnant. The problem that brought her to the office of Crippen’s employer, Dr. Jeffrey, was not some routine female complaint. “I believe she had had a miscarriage, or something of that kind,” Crippen said. But this may have been code for a circumstance even more wrenching.
    Nonetheless Crippen was entranced, and Cora knew it. With each new encounter, she came increasingly to see him as a tool to help her break from Lincoln and achieve her dream of operatic stardom. She knew how to get his attention. During one of their outings she told him that Lincoln had just asked her to run away with him. Whether true or not, the news had the desired effect.
    “I told her I could not stand that,” Crippen said.
    A few days later, on September 1, 1892, the two exchanged vows in a private ceremony at the home of a Catholic priest in Jersey