A Death of No Importance--A Novel

by Mariah Fredericks

  At one point, Behan gave me the bag of candy so he could go in search of the buggy driver. Handing a piece to one little girl, I asked, “Is your mother at home?”

  She nodded.

  “And your father, he’s at work?”

  She nodded again.

  “What does he do?”

  Speaking around the hard lump of sugar, she said, “He works in the Shick—”

  But she couldn’t quite get the word out. Shifting the candy to the other side of her mouth, she finished, “Shinny mine.”

  And that was when I remembered where I had heard the name Coogan.

  * * *

  “Her father was the manager of the mine,” I told Behan as we waited for the buggy. “The company blamed him for the cave-in.”

  “Where is he now?”

  I shook my head. “The store owner said they lived here, not live. But we might find a neighbor who knows where the family went.”

  “You think the father’s still alive?”

  “Her parents are supposed to be dead. She told me she’d lost her father young. Although I see now why she might say that—and why she changed her name.”

  Had Norrie gotten this far? I wondered. Or even farther? Had he found Mr. Coogan? Tried to blackmail Rose Newsome with that discovery?

  Behan was clearly thinking along the same lines. “You think Norrie came through here?”

  “I don’t know. He may not know where she comes from.”

  “Think the husband knows?”

  I shook my head. “It was a very sudden match. At the time, people were horrified that he knew nothing about her except that she went to Phipps.” I remembered the red-faced bully I’d seen at the party. Not a man to tolerate complexities. “I can’t believe she’s told him the truth. Really, why should she?” For a second, I thought of my father, the sensation of rough wool pulled from my hand as he vanished. “People get lost easily in this country.”

  A tired horse clopped into view, and we climbed back into the buggy. Perhaps I imagined it, but our driver’s neck looked even stiffer with disapproval than before. The houses, I saw with some relief, were more refined the farther we got from the center of town. Most of them were freshly painted blue or white. There were curtains on the windows, fences in good condition, the winter remnants of front gardens. I saw one woman vigorously beating a rug of some quality in the backyard.

  The former Coogan home was a fine little two-story home. The windows were clean, the porch swept; it was a cared-for house. Behan rang the bell. From inside, I heard a woman’s voice say, “Yes?”

  She came to the door, and Behan took off his hat. “Excuse me, ma’am, for disturbing you, but we’re trying to locate a family that used to live here.”

  She looked suspicious—and I could hardly blame her. “What’s the name?”

  “Coogan?”

  Suspicion hardened into distaste. “I never knew the Coogans, and I don’t know where they are now. Good day.”

  She shut the door before I had a chance to ask if Norrie had been here before us.

  Defeated, Behan walked down the steps. “Now what?”

  I began looking up and down the street. “Someone must have known them.”

  “It’s a mining town. People don’t necessarily stay.”

  “In these houses they do. These are comfortable, settled people. Who looks like they’ve lived here a long time?”

  Turning, I searched the outside of the houses. Everyone, it seemed, shopped at the general store or ordered from the same catalog; there was little to distinguish one house from another. Until I caught sight of a pretty little house with lace curtains. The curtains were clean and well ironed—but they were not new. The front door had fine brass fixtures, but they needed a polish. The paintwork on the fence was peeling; the roof was worse. Whoever lived there had refined tastes but lacked the resources to properly maintain the house. Those resources were either financial—or physical. A glance through the curtains showed me a dining room with a good-sized table lovingly polished and an arrangement of dried flowers. An elderly person lived there, I was sure of it.

  “That one,” I said. Behan went through the gate, trotted up the steps, and rang the bell. Moments passed.

  “No one home,” he said.

  “Wait,” I whispered. “It may take a while.”

  Sure enough, we heard the thump of a cane on wood floors and a thin voice call, “One moment.”

  Then the door opened to reveal a small, white-haired woman. She wore both a sweater and a shawl over a heavy woolen skirt. Her eyes were large and blue, although one of them was filmed over.

  “I’m very sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” said Behan. “We’re looking for a family, and we wonder if you know them.”

  Her good eye brightened. “Which family? I’ve lived here thirty years.”

  “Coogan.”

  She leaned on the cane and sighed.

  “Did you know them?” I asked.

  “Oh, I knew them.” She swung the cane toward the parlor. “Why don’t you come in?”

  When we were all seated in the snug parlor, the elderly woman, who had introduced herself as Mrs. Thorskill, said, “Funny, we haven’t had your sort around here for a while.”

  She was looking at Behan, who had inched himself as close to the fire as he could. “My sort?”

  “Reporters. Not since the cave-in.” She pointed to the upper floor. “I made a nice bit of money renting a room to newspapermen at the time. My Isaac was one of the few men in town who didn’t work the mines, and we didn’t have children, so it wasn’t as bad for us.”

  “He is a reporter,” I said. “But we’re not here for a story. We need to get in touch with the Coogan family.”

  “Well, if you’re a reporter, you must know what happened,” said Mrs. Thorskill. Behan shook his head. “They blamed the whole mess on Mr. Coogan. Fired him for drunkenness and negligence. The story went that he’d skimped on reinforcing the mine shaft—pocketed the money for himself. There was talk of putting him in jail, but I guess the powers that be figured once he lost his job, that was the end of it.”

  “Did you know him to drink before the cave-in?” I asked.

  The old lady considered. “No, now that you mention it. But people can keep that sort of thing secret a long time—and Lord knows he drank after. People around here gave them a hard time. Rocks through their windows, spitting at them in the street.”

  “Why didn’t they move?” asked Behan. He had his notebook out, I noticed.

  “No one else’d hire him. When he died, that’s when they got out of town.”

  As Behan wrote this down, I asked, “Did you know Rose Coogan?”

  “The daughter?” I nodded. “She was a pretty little thing. I remember her holding her daddy’s hand to keep him steady as he weaved down the street.”

  I lost my father young. It was the end of the world.

  “How did he die?”

  “Worthless,” said the old woman. “The man died drunk and broke and a burden. When he’d taken every dime and spent it, taken every nice thing his wife had and pawned it, taken every bit of dignity she had and soaked it in misery and gin, he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. Left the wife shattered with a daughter to raise. She took off to the city, got a job working at some department store.”

  “Is the mother still alive?” Behan asked.

  “I don’t know. I heard she came into some money after they moved.”

  Behan and I glanced at each other. “And the daughter?” I asked.

  Mrs. Thorskill shook her head. “Never heard.”

  Having come to that dead end, we made our way to the door. Shrugging his coat on, Behan asked, “You don’t recall the name of that department store, do you?”

  “I do,” said the lady, proud of her memory. “It was Wanamaker’s.”

  * * *

  “Still think she’s innocent?”

  The train had lurched away from the rotted platform of Schu
ylkill and was gathering speed. I watched as the town fell away from view. It was not yet late afternoon, but the shadows were already growing. It would be well after dark when we got back. Without the midday sun, it was even more bleak. And the train’s heating stove was apathetic in its efforts to keep us warm.

  Finally I answered, “You think she plotted to marry Robert Newsome so she could murder his son to avenge her father? And waited ten years to do it?”

  “She didn’t have the opportunity to do it before. The notes gave her the perfect cover. Or maybe she wrote the notes herself, you ever think of that?”

  “Why didn’t she simply brain her husband on the wedding night?”

  “Presumably because she’d like to get away with it and inherit the cash.”

  “There’s still Lucinda Newsome.”

  “For now. How’s her health?”

  “Fine,” I said absently, suddenly taken with the memory of Lucinda’s spiteful classmates. It’s those twisted spinsters-in-training you’ve got to look out for. What a hell school must have been for that plain, earnest young woman. Had it been any better for the lovely, lively Rose Coogan? They had been friends. Now Lucinda detested her.

  I thought of how this journey might have felt to Rose when she left. Had she been happy? Relieved? Or was Schuylkill just one more thing she had lost? Did she have any idea that within ten years, she would be smoking French cigarettes in a sumptuous garden as she confessed she was most comfortable talking to servants?

  We drew into a station, and the doors were opened. Bitter wind blew through the car. I hunched against the cold.

  “Here.” Behan shrugged off his coat. Offering it to me, he said, “Put this over you.”

  “Then you’ll be cold.”

  “We’ll swap every half hour.” Depositing it on my lap, he said, “Take it.”

  Realizing I was holding my jaw tight to keep my teeth from chattering, I laid the coat over me. It was heavy wool, pleasantly bulky, and smelled of tobacco and something that put me in mind of cutting a man’s hair: soap and the scent of warm skin laid bare when you lifted the hair off the nape of the neck.

  My muscles eased as my body stopped bracing itself. I murmured, “Thank you.”

  And immediately fell asleep.

  When I woke up, night had fallen. We were going through a small town; I could see lights in distant houses, but the view was dominated by shadowy fields and a vast dark sky. I felt lost in the middle of nowhere.

  Momentarily panicked, I said, “Where are we?”

  “About an hour out.”

  “An hour—what time is it?”

  “About seven.” Behan glanced at me. “What are you worried about? Mrs. Ramsay thinks you’re with your benighted relatives, doesn’t she?”

  “What if she says something to the Benchleys?”

  “Miss Prescott, the Benchleys aren’t going to fire you. After ten minutes of talking with Mr. Benchley, I can assure you he respects you far more than his battle-ax sister-in-law.” He frowned at something he’d written and closed his notebook. “Besides, who’d get ’em out of bed and wipe their backsides?”

  Reassured, I settled back in my seat. “It’s your turn for the coat.”

  “I’m all right, you keep it.” Turning toward me, he said, “Tell me something, Miss Prescott—or can I call you Jane?”

  I was wearing the gentleman’s coat; it seemed only fair. “All right.”

  “Jane. Why don’t you want to believe Rose Newsome might be guilty?”

  Part of me keeps feeling I should be one of you. And so she was, I thought. A poor girl, after all.

  To Behan, I said, “I’m not sure you believe she’s guilty of murder so much as she’s guilty of being poor and marrying well.”

  “What happened to her father, it’s a pretty good motive.”

  “So good she waited more than a year. And why kill Norrie? It would make much more sense for her to kill Mr. Newsome. He was the one responsible for ruining her father’s life, and, as you say, there’s the money.”

  “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Norrie figured out who she was and tried to blackmail her, is it?”

  “I thought of that. But who really stands to lose if her identity is revealed? So he tells his father. What can Mr. Newsome do? Divorce her? That would bring up the mining disaster again, and I have a feeling Mr. Newsome wouldn’t welcome that. And if Norrie tells anyone else, his father would cut him off for good. No, I can’t see her killing Norrie because he threatened to tell people her father was Howard Coogan.”

  “So he found out something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m curious how a lady who worked at Wanamaker’s Department Store managed to send her daughter to such a fancy school.”

  “You’re going to track down that benefactor.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  I toyed with a button on Behan’s coat. It was tightly sewed on and neatly finished. “Mr. Behan, in your quest for dirty secrets, you’re forgetting one simple thing. Anarchists threatened violence against the family—and now Norrie is dead. It’s less exciting, but more than likely the truth.”

  I took no pleasure in saying this. An image of Mr. Pawlicec rising clumsily to greet me came to mind. Anna’s blank look when she saw me at the door of her uncle’s restaurant, her coldness as she told me she would rather not see me until the Newsome murder was solved—it did all point one way.

  “You don’t sound so happy about that.”

  Caught, I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Just now. You didn’t have the ring of righteous condemnation most people do when they say ‘anarchist.’ Are you an anarchist, Miss Prescott? Jane? Know any anarchists?”

  “Is it only women you think have no right to privacy? Or doesn’t your newspaper pay you enough to intrude in men’s lives this way?”

  “I’m trying to figure you out. I guess an anarchist wouldn’t be out here in God-knows-where Pennsylvania trying to help a family like the Benchleys. Most girls in your position would have sold their story and quit the next day. If Charlotte Benchley is suspected of killing the Newsome swine, what’s it to you?”

  “Because people don’t really think she’s guilty, they just don’t like her. That’s not justice, it’s hate. Besides, I’m fond of Louise Benchley, and she’s having enough trouble finding a husband. She doesn’t need a sister suspected of murder as well.”

  “And how come you’re so worried about Louise Benchley catching a husband? Don’t you want a husband of your own?”

  A memory came to me: feet swinging in emptiness. For an instant, the stomach-dropping sensation of being utterly alone.

  “Not especially.”

  “Story you’d care to share?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, now you must have some fellow. A milkman who leaves the extra bottle of cream. Or a policeman—that’s it. A fine young man who walks the Benchley beat. Rosy of cheek, firm of purpose, bright of eye…”

  “We don’t see much of our local policeman. And when we do, he’s drunk.”

  “Chauffeur?”

  “O’Hara?” I laughed.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Say what?”

  “‘O’Hara.’ With a sneer. Like you wouldn’t wipe your shoes on him.” The train swerved, and he rocked a little on the seat. “You don’t like the Irish, do you?”

  Annoyed to be accused of prejudice, I said, “I can hardly know all of them.”

  “And you wouldn’t want to either, I can tell. What superior swamp do you come from?”

  “… Scotland.”

  “That explains it. More snobbish than the English and cheap besides.”

  Ignoring the insults, I said, “It’s not the Irish people, but the Roman Catholic Church—”

  “Careful, I’m Roman Catholic.”

  “Oh.” We sat in silence. “I suppose you want your coat back.”

  “No.” He smiled a litt
le. “I’ll sit here in the moral rectitude and self-sacrifice which are the hallmarks of my faith. Now a Protestant—he’d ask for the coat back.”

  Just before we reached the city, the train made a prolonged stop, and Behan got out to, as he put it, “fill the stomach and empty the extremities.” The station wasn’t much more than a shed, and I stayed on the train. It seemed to me Mr. Behan was taking a long time. Nervous, I went into the station and found him on the phone. From the disgruntled look on the clerk’s face, I guessed he had been talking for some time.

  When Behan saw me, he said, “Train’s leaving. Yes. Soon.”

  As we got back on the train, I asked, “Was that Mr. Benchley?”

  “It was not.” And he said nothing more on the subject.

  * * *

  It was late and I was exhausted by the time I reached the Ramsay home, so I was amazed and slightly frustrated to see Louise waiting up for me. No doubt it had been a long and torturous evening of Pilgrim’s Progress, but I didn’t have the strength to hear it all in detail. I braced myself, only to hear Louise say, “You won’t believe what’s happened!”

  “What?”

  “It’s Mr. Newsome. Mother called to tell me after you left.”

  “And?”

  “You know how he’s been since Norrie’s death—ill, agitated?” I nodded. “Well, the doctors were giving him a sedative to keep him calm. Only someone mixed up the medicines and he got too much and almost died. His valet found him just in time. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Awful,” I echoed, realizing that, as tired as I was, I would not be able to sleep that night.

  17

  The following afternoon, we went in search of the benefactor—or at least the benefactor’s lawyer. The address that Mr. Mayles had provided took us to the law offices of Stadtler and Carr, located on Chestnut Street in the city’s financial district. The law firm kept their offices on the seventh floor of one of the more modern office buildings, which towered over the older, more sedate redbrick buildings. As we rode up in the elevator, I asked Michael Behan, “Why should the lawyer speak with us? We don’t even know the name of his client. All we have is the name of a girl he once wrote checks for. He may not even remember her; she might be one of several children helped by this … benefactor.”