Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets

by Rosemary Simpson

  “Your sister?” he asked.

  “My twin,” Claire said. “As children we were inseparable.”

  “The resemblance is striking. Not all twins look so much alike.”

  “When did you lose her?” Prudence asked gently. “Lose both of them?”

  “Catherine and her child only survived for a day after the birth. She gave the baby our mother’s name. Ingrid.”

  Prudence and Geoffrey waited. Their client-to-be needed time to tell the story in her own words.

  “Catherine’s voice was extraordinary. Had she not married Aaron Sorensen, she would have been one of the greatest divas the world of opera has ever known. Compared to my sister, mine is a very modest talent.” Claire hesitated. “The Met contacted me to cover for Frau Schröder-Hanfstängl this season because I’d done it in Europe and I knew the repertoire. That’s what brought me back to America.”

  “Not this?” asked Prudence, gesturing to the postmortem photograph of Catherine Sorensen and her dead child. There was a New York City address below the photographer’s name on the back of the folder.

  “I was in Vienna when Catherine died. That was ten months ago. Sorensen had sent a carte de visite announcing her passing to my apartment in Paris. I don’t have my mail forwarded when I’m on tour. There’s no point to it. Any correspondence is more likely to get lost than to catch up with me. So I didn’t know what had happened until the tour ended and I returned home. By that time my manager had received the offer from the Royal Opera. I knew no one in London. It seemed the ideal place to hide with my grief.”

  “Did your brother-in-law also send you this?” Geoffrey tapped his forefinger on the closed cardboard folder.

  “I had no idea it existed until after I started rehearsals three weeks ago. I share a dressing room at the Met with another cover singer, Lucinda Pallazzo. We’ve known each other casually for years. She and Catherine became close after I left New York. This photograph was in a drawer of her makeup table. She had put it away to spare my feelings. When I told her I’d never seen it before, she gave it to me.”

  Claire handed him a black-bordered envelope she took from her reticule. “This is what was waiting for me in Paris when I returned from Vienna.”

  “May I?” Geoffrey waited politely. At Claire’s nod he extracted a black-bordered carte de visite: In loving memory of Catherine Sorensen, who departed this life on April 30, 1888, aged twenty-four years, two months, and three days, taking with her the pure soul of her infant daughter, Ingrid, aged one day. Cherished wife of Aaron Sorensen. They are gone, but not forgotten. The message was engraved in the center of an embossed frieze of winged angels and weeping cypress trees. An elegant copperplate signature had been penned in black ink across the bottom: Aaron Sorensen.

  Geoffrey passed both the card and the envelope to Prudence.

  “As you can see, there’s no personal message. Just Sorensen’s name. His full name. Exactly the way he would have signed dozens of cards sent to friends, acquaintances, perhaps even business colleagues. He did everything he could to come between my sister and me. Omitting her maiden name from the announcement of her death was the final blow.”

  “You mentioned business colleagues, Claire.” Prudence ran a finger over the black-bordered card stock, with its expensively embossed images, before laying it on Geoffrey’s desk.

  “Aaron Sorensen was an importer of European antiques when he first came into our lives. Our parents had settled in New York City before we were born, and they maintained a home here, even though they traveled extensively. We grew up in hotels and concert halls. I remember my father joking that sometimes the only way he could tell what country we were in was by the cuisine. We were fifteen when our mother fell ill. She begged to be brought back to America to die. Afterward, we stayed on.”

  “I know how terrible it is to lose a parent when you’re young.” Prudence had been six years old when her mother succumbed to consumption.

  “My father never recovered. He was a pianist, but for a long time he couldn’t bear to hear the pieces they had performed together. He never played another public concert. He turned all his attention to my sister and me, but especially Catherine. She was the finest soprano I’ve ever heard.”

  “Aaron Sorensen,” Prudence prompted.

  “He approached my father when a client asked him to broker a Brazilian rosewood Chickering piano that had been owned and played by Franz Liszt. The provenance had been authenticated, and my father became fixated on the instrument. It was all he could talk about. I don’t know why he insisted that Catherine and I accompany him when he went to see it. Perhaps he had some idea we would be his final audience. He still practiced as though he were on tour, just never the pieces he had played as accompanist to our mother. That day he played Liszt’s Sonata in B minor.”

  “Did he purchase the piano?” Prudence found herself captivated by the story Claire Buchanan was telling.

  “No. I don’t think he had any intention of buying it. He just wanted to prove himself Liszt’s technical equal on the master’s own keyboard. He was magnificent. It was as good a performance as any of his concerts. Three months later, Catherine and Sorensen eloped. She stopped taking vocal lessons. As far as I know, she never sang in public again.”

  Claire Buchanan reached for the folder containing the photograph of her sister, the image she had said broke her heart every time she looked at it. She sat for a moment holding the open folder beside the announcement of Catherine Sorensen’s death.

  “What happened after they eloped?” Prudence asked. “Your father must have been very angry.”

  “Strangely enough, he wasn’t. I didn’t understand it at the time, and he refused to discuss it. Aaron moved into our home, and my father gave him and Catherine the suite of rooms where he and my mother had lived. The antipathy between me and my new brother-in-law was immediate and impossible to overcome. He hated the fact that as children Catherine and I had been inseparable, and that as adults we tried never to be apart for very long. We could read each other’s minds. Sometimes it seemed we were a single individual. He was jealous. He did everything he could to drive a wedge between us.”

  “Did he succeed, Claire?” Prudence asked.

  “No. One of the reasons I went to Europe was to make life easier for Catherine. She paid a price whenever we went out together in the afternoon or if her husband walked in on us when we were having tea and laughing together. Aaron never said or did anything overtly hostile, but every word, every look and gesture, was calculated to wound. When I felt her pain becoming unbearable, I left.”

  “When was that?” Geoffrey glanced at Josiah, who nodded as he continued to take notes. He’d mastered Gregg shorthand so as not to miss a word of a client’s interview or deposition.

  “Less than a month after they married. I think I knew from the first day that Aaron was determined to destroy what my sister and I shared. He had convinced her not to confide in me about the elopement. It was the first secret either of us kept from the other. My father deeded our house in New York to Catherine. He provided me with funds of equal value to buy an apartment in Paris. I was to continue my vocal studies there, and he would join me. It seemed a workable solution to what we knew would eventually become an irreconcilable break if we continued to try to live together.”

  “Was Sorensen a part of these discussions?” Geoffrey asked.

  “It seems strange now, but we didn’t talk about what was happening. Not with any degree of frankness. It all took place very quickly and quietly.” Claire lowered her head for a moment. When she looked up, tears stood diamond-bright in her eyes. “My father never came to Paris. He fell ill shortly after I sailed at the end of October that year. He didn’t recover.”

  “How alone you must have felt,” Prudence murmured.

  “To survive I threw myself into my work. I took vocal lessons by day, practiced for hours on end, and joined the first company to offer me a contract. I wrote to Catherine every day. She rarely an
swered, and when a letter did come, I could tell the words weren’t hers. Aaron had dictated them.”

  “Did you keep the letters?” Geoffrey wanted to know.

  Claire nodded. “There are only five of them. Nowhere does she tell me she’s with child. Not a word about her condition.” She gestured toward the cabinet photo and the carte de visite. “That’s the first I knew of the baby. When she and Catherine were already dead.”

  “There were no letters from friends or relatives mentioning her condition?”

  “None. My father hadn’t encouraged us to make friends, and both he and our mother were the only children in their families to live into adulthood. Lucinda said she never imagined Catherine had not written me the news.”

  “Sorensen didn’t object to their friendship?”

  “He didn’t discover it until just before Catherine gave birth. They usually met for tea in out-of-the-way places, where they wouldn’t be seen by anyone they knew. Sometimes they went to museums. When Sorensen did find out, he was furious. He forbade Catherine to see her friend again. Lucinda received a note that I am certain my sister did not write.”

  “When did you decide to come back to America?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I always knew I wouldn’t stay away forever,” Claire said. “But I couldn’t face returning to nothing. I didn’t want to live in a New York that didn’t contain my sister. I told you I was in Vienna when Catherine died, and that I didn’t learn what had happened until I was back in Paris nearly two months later. But I sensed something was wrong long before then.

  “The night Catherine died, in the middle of a performance at the Vienna Court Opera, I felt a terrible pain wash over me. I thought I might be falling ill. I had no idea what caused it. I went back to my hotel after the performance, but I couldn’t sleep. The next day I sent a telegram to America. There was never any answer. Then the dreams began.”

  “Can you tell us about them?” Prudence asked. She wanted to stretch out a hand to comfort, console, and strengthen her shipboard friend, but she didn’t dare. Something about the set of Claire’s mouth told her that any such gesture might break the singer’s fragile control.

  “They were vague at first. An image of mist and of a person I couldn’t make out hidden in cloudlike swirls too thick for the eye to penetrate. The figure and I seemed to be walking toward one another, but we never met. Then I woke up. Gradually the dreams became longer and more complicated. Sometimes I saw an infant in its mother’s arms. The woman wept and held the child out to me, but when I tried to take it from her, both dissolved into nothing. Often there was no visible image. I heard cries of despair and anger, a far-off wailing that became so loud it pained my ears.”

  “Did you recognize the woman?”

  “Not until I read the carte de visite announcing Catherine’s death. Then I understood immediately that it was my sister I’d seen struggling through the mist. I didn’t know what she wanted, only that she was desperately trying to reach me from the other side. I can’t explain my reasoning, but by the time the Met offer was made, I had healed enough so that I knew I would accept. It meant a homecoming of sorts, and also the opportunity to find out more about my sister. I thought I knew her as well as I knew myself, but I was wrong. Now I wonder what other secrets she kept from me. I want desperately to know what she experienced during the months before she delivered her child. And I have to know what went wrong. A healthy woman doesn’t die without warning. What made her child suddenly cease breathing? Catherine comes to me nearly every night in dreams that verge on nightmares. I have so many questions, and no answers.”

  “Have you tried talking to Catherine’s husband?” Prudence asked.

  “I sent him a note the day after our ship docked,” Claire said, “inquiring when it would be convenient to call on him. When I didn’t hear back in a few days, I sent another. He finally replied, but it was only to inform me that he was going out of town on business and would contact me when he returned.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I walked past the house after a rehearsal, remembering how Catherine and I had played and practiced in those rooms. How much we loved coming home every time we accompanied our parents wherever their concerts took them. I stood on the sidewalk staring up at blank windows, picturing our schoolroom; our bedrooms; the music room, where my father’s concert piano stood; the parlor, where we gathered in the evening and where sometimes my mother sang French country songs and lullabies by the fire. Finally, two days ago, I could bear it no longer. I suspected Aaron was avoiding me, so I made up my mind to call on him without warning.

  “I’d gotten as far as the corner when it started to rain. I put up my umbrella, but my skirts were already wet. I thought I must look a sight and had almost decided to come back another day when a carriage came around from the alley and halted in front of the house. The front door opened and a butler I didn’t recognize came out. He held a large umbrella over a woman dressed in mourning and helped her into the carriage. I could see her very clearly. She was only a few feet away from me. She gave the butler some instructions. When he answered, he called her by name. Mrs. Sorensen.

  “My former brother-in-law has a new wife. Judging from her figure, she’s at least seven or eight months pregnant.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “My sister and her child didn’t die natural deaths, Mr. Hunter,” Claire said. “Whether he did it with his own hands or hired someone to do it for him, Aaron Sorensen killed them. I want you to find the evidence that will convict him. He has to pay for his crime.”

  “Do you have any proof they were murdered?” Geoffrey asked. Every client who had ever come to him sought evidence for what he or she already believed. They were always sure someone had stolen from them, a spouse had cheated, or undue influence had been used to write them out of a will. Accusations of murder were as common as leaves on the ground when there was money or property to be inherited.

  “Aaron Sorensen became a very wealthy man when Catherine died. For his new wife to be as far gone with child as she is, he had to have married again within two or three months.”

  “What else do you know?” Prudence asked.

  “Almost nothing. I’ll give you the name of the firm of lawyers who handled my father’s affairs. I wrote them when Aaron didn’t respond to my telegram. One of them answered very promptly with his condolences and the information that her husband was the sole beneficiary of Catherine’s will. I wasn’t surprised. In the short time I lived with them, I realized that Sorensen controlled every aspect of her life. If I sound bitter, Mr. Hunter, it’s because I am.”

  “You haven’t been to their offices since returning to New York?”

  “I made one appointment, which I had to cancel because of rehearsals. There didn’t seem an urgent need to schedule another. Until I saw the current Mrs. Sorensen, I didn’t doubt that Catherine was another victim of childbirth. I thought the dreams were manifestations of my grief and inability to accept that she was gone. I’ve been to her grave. I wept my tears and said my farewell. I had begun to believe the dreams would gradually cease to haunt me. I was wrong. I knew it the moment I realized how quickly Sorensen had found another wife.”

  Geoffrey passed the cabinet photograph to Josiah, who examined the gold-embossed name and address of the photographer. “Do you know anything about him?” he asked.

  “It happens I do, sir. When Mr. Conkling died, there was talk of calling this Bartholomew Monroe in to take memorial photographs. He’s considered one of the best in the city at his craft.”

  “Did he? Make postmortem studies of Mr. Conkling?”

  “No. Mrs. Conkling decided there were enough portraits of her husband in existence already.” Josiah handed back the cabinet photograph. “There were other considerations as well.” Josiah’s former employer had had a hard death; weeks of fever and hallucinations had appalled and taxed those who cared for him.

  “I did go to Monroe’s gallery, but when I saw what was in his display windows, I tur
ned away without going in,” Claire volunteered.

  “Can you tell us why, Claire?”

  “Why I went? I thought he might have taken other photos of Catherine and baby Ingrid. I didn’t want my only picture of them together to be the one Aaron chose to have printed.”

  “I meant why you didn’t go in.”

  “I couldn’t, not when I saw what was in the windows. It’s a large gallery, and in the center of each display window stands an easel, draped in black velvet. The photographs resting on the easels are greatly enlarged. A dozen or more smaller photographs are positioned in the folds of the velvet. When I looked beyond the windows, I could see walls and display boards covered with the same type of photographs as were on view outside. I didn’t think I could stand it if he had chosen to mount Catherine’s likeness there among all those others. So I turned away.”

  “You told us you had a strange foreboding before you actually knew your sister had died,” Prudence said.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard people say that time stood still.” Claire read the skepticism on Prudence’s face.

  “There were men who claimed that occurred on the battlefield,” Geoffrey said. “What they meant was they had no sense of minutes or even hours passing. They remembered everything later on, but as though the entirety of what happened to them had been preserved in a single, painful image.”

  “Something like that happened to me on the stage of the Vienna Court Opera. For a few moments it was as though I were moving through a dream while everyone stood still around me. The following morning I sent the telegram that was never answered.” Claire’s eyes pleaded with them to believe her. “However distressing it may be, I have to know what happened to my sister and her child that night.”

  “We won’t lie to you, Claire. We won’t conceal anything from you,” Prudence promised.

  “If we take your case,” Geoffrey temporized.