Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets

by Rosemary Simpson

  “Get him out of here!” Geoffrey yelled to Danny, pointing at Little Eddie curled in a fetal position on the floor. Blood was coming out of the boy’s mouth and ears.

  A woman’s piercing scream rang through the basement. Felicia had picked up the syringe loaded with Perpetual Light Embalming Fluid and was calmly approaching Lydia, as if all hell had not broken loose around her and the soul-capturing photograph still had to be taken. Ned took aim, but at the last moment Felicia turned and smiled at him. She held the deadly needle in upraised hands, the universal gesture of surrender, but her eyes roamed the basement. When they settled on her brother, she smiled again and began to move.

  Ned shot her. He took no chances. The bullet pierced Felicia’s torso and lodged against her spine.

  Aaron Sorensen had crawled away from Lydia, feigning weakness and confusion, cradling his injured fingers, none of them broken. He saw Geoffrey glance at him, then bend to untie Lydia’s hands and feet. He was getting out of this cellar, and he was going to make sure there were no witnesses to rat on him. Felicia had not let go of the syringe when she fell, but her eyes were glazed over. As she shuddered and convulsed, her fingers loosened.

  With the deadly syringe in the injured hand and his revolver in the other, Sorensen scrambled to his feet. Monroe had reached the top of the staircase, but the door into the studio area was locked. He was too close to risk a ricochet, so he slammed the butt of the rifle against it repeatedly; splinters of wood flew beneath his fingers. The door was about to give.

  Sorensen clawed his way up the staircase, knocking Monroe off balance, sending both of them tumbling to the basement floor. The photographer tried to stand, sliding in his own blood as it poured from his head wounds. Not understanding what had happened, he reached out an arm for Sorensen to grab and help hoist him to his feet.

  Only when he felt the stab of the needle, and the fiery wash of the arsenic-impregnated embalming fluid, did he realize that he’d made a foolish and fatal mistake. There was no such thing as partners in crime. He should have remembered that. Facedown at the bottom of the staircase, bubbling out his last breaths as the arsenic burned a path through his vital organs, Bartholomew Monroe wondered if he could keep his eyes open as he died. If he’d see his own soul take wing.

  Aaron Sorensen had almost reached the top of the staircase and freedom. Two more steps and he’d push open the damaged door to the gallery, wedge something against it from the other side, and be out on the street and away from the carnage below. He turned to fire at whoever might be coming after him, saw Ned taking aim, raised his revolver, and stepped sideways into shadow. Stepped on the soft white silk embroidered pillow he’d held over Catherine’s face, and lost his footing. Dropped the gun as his arms flew out to hold him upright on the narrow stairs.

  Geoffrey’s bullet caught him in the neck; Ned’s drilled a neat hole in the center of his forehead. When Aaron fell, he dragged the beautiful tasseled pillow with him. And when his body rolled to a stop, his bloody face was pressed against the stain a dying Catherine had made to bear final witness against him.

  CHAPTER 32

  “I’ve had this in my skirt pocket for a week,” Prudence said, placing the tiny vial of laudanum she’d found under Ethel’s bed on the long table in the Hunter and MacKenzie conference room.

  Josiah had ordered pastries from the German bakery and brewed both coffee and tea. Bowls of whipped cream and rich brown sugar sat beside a stack of dessert plates, folded linen napkins, and sterling silver forks and spoons. Fine bone china cups nestled in translucent saucers. The firm might have just closed a rather sordid case of multiple murders for profit, but appearances had to be kept up. It was how you did the ordinary things that defined you. And he was determined that Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law would always do things right.

  Ned touched the laudanum vial with a long, elegant finger, then turned solemnly to Prudence. “Congratulations,” he said. “That must not have been easy.”

  “I had to prove something to myself,” she answered his unspoken question.

  “You’ll have to keep proving it, you know. Over and over again. I wish I could tell you that it gets easier, but I don’t think you’d like me to lie to you.”

  “You just go at it one day at a time, Miss Prudence.” Tyrus refused to pull his chair up to the table. He’d take his pastry and coffee into the outer office when the time came, but he hadn’t been able to say no to Master Ned’s flat-out order that he accompany him today. It was time to re-examine the case and evaluate the results.

  Tyrus wasn’t sure it did anyone any good to pick over things once the problem had been resolved, but he’d learned a long time ago that life was easier if white folk were allowed to do whatever came into their sorry heads. “Worry something to death” was what Tyrus called it. Not much point to it, seeing that the folks that caused the problem were all dead. He took the cup of coffee Master Ned handed him and wandered out into Mister Josiah’s office. He’d rather have a piece of that fancy imported chocolate with his coffee than an apple fritter. He knew where Mister Josiah kept them hidden.

  “Shall we wait for Danny?” Prudence asked.

  “He’s not coming,” Geoffrey said. “He’s teaching Little Eddie how to groom a horse. Says the boy needs to have a trade if he’s ever to get off the streets.”

  “He must be healing well if Danny is putting him to work.”

  “Apparently, he’s younger than he let on. All those teeth he lost when Monroe kicked him would have fallen out anyway. He’s black-and-blue all over, but only a few of the cuts needed stitching, so, yes, I’d say he’s healing very well.”

  “Danny has a soft heart.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that. He’ll admit to caring for Mr. Washington, but he finds his fellow humans extremely wanting.”

  “I suppose you got Little Eddie to tell his story one more time?” Ned asked.

  “Josiah did.”

  The secretary opened a folder lying on the table and took out a neatly transcribed witness statement. All the whipped cream and German pastries in the world wouldn’t make up for not being part of what had happened in the basement of Bartholomew Monroe’s gallery. He wondered if he should be writing all this down the way that British doctor had recorded the strange case of the odd-mannered detective whose Baker Street flat he shared. Josiah wrote himself a note to contact an acquaintance in the publishing business.

  “I’m sorry to be late. Someone named Tyrus let me in.” Claire Buchanan leaned over to kiss Prudence on both cheeks, shook hands with Geoffrey and Ned, and nodded politely at Josiah. Her cheeks were a polished apple-red hue from the cold March wind, and her green eyes sparkled. From her ears dangled the jade-and-gold earrings once worn by her mother and then by her twin. She shrugged out of her coat and helped herself to coffee. “I have wonderful news. The house is definitely mine. It should never have gone to that beast Sorensen in the first place. Catherine wrote a later will when she decided to leave him. She hid it in one of those boxes you can rent at some banks nowadays. When the fee hadn’t been paid for more than a year, they opened it.”

  “Will you live there, Claire?” Prudence asked, hoping the answer would be yes.

  “I’ve been offered a company contract with the Met, and not as a cover singer,” she said, beaming. “I’ll keep the apartment in Paris, but my real roots are here.”

  “Can you bear it? Knowing the crimes Sorensen committed in those rooms?” Ned existed in a world of memories and ghosts. He often wondered how other people managed to avoid them.

  “I hired a medium. Please don’t frown like that, Mr. Hunter. She walked through all the rooms, and when she finished, she told me that the only auras she sensed were good ones. The spirits who lost their lives there don’t linger, but they do return occasionally, so I shouldn’t be surprised if I sense their presence. Catherine and Ethel. I’ve nothing to fear from either of them. Or their babies. There’s no trace of the evil that was Aaron Sorensen.”
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  “Shall we begin?” Geoffrey asked. Talk of ghostly spirits brought back painful memories of the North Carolina plantation house where he had spent his early childhood.

  Josiah opened his stenographer’s notebook and laid two freshly sharpened pencils beside it.

  “From the evidence we have, there’s no doubt that Aaron Sorensen married for one purpose only—to kill and inherit. The young woman in Saratoga Springs, Damaris Tavistock, is the only one to escape him that we’ve been able to identify. There were others, I’m sure, and if we put our minds and a considerable amount of energy to it, we might be able to track them down. A few of them, at any rate.”

  “I told Geoffrey that I saw no point to it. Not now that he’s dead. We paid for an obituary to run in most of the state newspapers every day for a week. I should think women who gave him gifts of money, but were able to pull away before it was too late, would be reading those obituaries every day, hoping to find his name. They’re safe from him now. They should be able to get on with their lives without our interference.” Prudence looked inquiringly at Claire.

  “I agree,” Claire said. “I had no idea what a Pandora’s box I was opening when I asked you to investigate Catherine’s death. But I’m glad I did. The only thing I bitterly regret was that Lucinda lost her life because of it.”

  “Two of the sailors who worked the flies when the sandbag fell are also dead,” Geoffrey said. “The rest of them, the ones we’ve been able to interrogate ourselves or could hire someone in another city to question, either have good alibis or claim no knowledge of a cut rope. The police department has closed the case, concluding ‘death by persons or circumstances unknown.’” He omitted mentioning that Detective Phelan had inquired after Claire by name, then abruptly changed the subject when his face flushed red. “There is always the possibility that whoever severed the rope either did so without deliberate malice or for a personal grudge unsuspected even by Lucinda. I don’t think you should blame yourself, Miss Buchanan.”

  “You’re saying it might have been a spurned lover, or perhaps even what I first thought it was, someone in the company consumed by jealousy and spite, warning me off, trying to frighten me into returning to Europe?”

  “It’s possible,” Geoffrey hedged. “We also checked the Met’s hiring records. Several performers have moved on to other companies, two contracts expired and were not renewed, and there’s been turnover among the stage crew.”

  “We’re wanderers,” Claire said. “Opera gypsies. It’s one of the reasons we’re good enough to entertain in society, but never to be a part of it. It’s always a scandal when a fatuous young gentleman or an elderly fool marries one of us.”

  “Will you want the other photographs Monroe took of Catherine and Ingrid? Jacob Riis says he can get the glass negatives and print them up for you.”

  “Yes. I want to look at all of them one last time. I’ll decide which to keep and then destroy the others. Prints and glass negatives alike.” Claire looked down at her hands, the fingers of which had begun to twist themselves into a knot. “I asked one of our dressers if she could clean Lucinda’s pillow. They work marvels with the company costumes. She tried, and she was able to get most of Sorensen’s blood out, but she said the other stain had been set for too long. I burned it. I couldn’t bear to leave Catherine’s blood mingled with even a drop of Sorensen’s.”

  “She wanted you to know what happened,” Prudence said. “More than that, she was leaving proof behind in the only way she could.”

  “How is your friend?” Claire asked, changing the subject.

  “Much better, but still recovering. She had an unusually strong reaction to the laudanum they gave her. Dr. Worthington said it will take some time to work its way entirely out of her system.”

  “Is there anything I can do for her?”

  “She’s working for her father again, and Ned has been to see her.”

  “Perhaps tickets to some of our performances? When she’s feeling up to it?”

  “I’ll ask,” Ned said. “We haven’t talked much about music, but I have a feeling Miss Lydia would enjoy the opera very much.”

  Still in the outer office, enjoying Josiah’s chocolates, Tyrus cleared his throat loudly. Ned flushed and muttered something unintelligible under his breath.

  “I must go,” Claire said. “We have a rehearsal this afternoon.” She raised her eyebrows in Josiah’s direction; he nodded his head. Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law had been paid in full.

  “I think I’ll always wonder about Felicia Monroe,” Prudence said when Claire had left. “Sorensen was twisted by greed, Bartholomew Monroe obsessed by his quest to become the first photographer to capture an image of the human soul. But Felicia?”

  “She kept a souvenir from many of her brother’s clients,” Geoffrey mused.

  “But they weren’t all jumbled together,” Prudence said. “I think the ones she kept apart from the others, the dozen or so that had initials inked onto them, those must have had a more personal meaning for her.”

  “There were times in the hospital during the war when orderlies carried a dead soldier out to where the graves were being dug, and before they could lay him in a coffin, somebody would notice he was still breathing,” Ned contributed.

  “You think she killed them?” Prudence asked.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time bereaved family members heard the death rattle and assumed it meant what it sounded like. Monroe could have emphasized how important it was for him to be at the bedside immediately after death. He also could have paid hired nurses to warn him when the end was near.”

  “I think there were instances when she helped prop a not-quite-dead subject in place and then stood by until Bartholomew had done his calculations and drawn the black cloth over his head,” Geoffrey said. “And when he did, when he signaled he was ready, she leaned over the victim and pinched shut the nostrils and held her hand or a cloth over the mouth. Then she stepped back out of the picture while he uncovered the lens so the departing soul could get its portrait made. She was as guilty as either Monroe or Sorensen.”

  “If she’d lived, would she have gotten the rope?”

  “It’s supposed to be what they’re calling the electric chair,” Geoffrey reminded her. “A more humane method of execution, if you can believe that electricity is always that reliable. They haven’t tried it out yet.”

  “She’d be lying paralyzed on a cot in an asylum for the criminally insane,” Ned decided. “With my bullet still stuck in her spine.” There wasn’t a trace of compassion or pity in his voice.

  “In that case I think it’s better she didn’t survive,” Prudence decided. She’d visited the Tombs with Geoffrey a few months ago. Bad as the city jail was, an asylum was bound to be a hundred times worse.

  “Telegram, Master Ned.” Tyrus stepped into the conference room, empty coffee cup in hand, a barely discernible trace of imported Belgian chocolate on the dark skin just below his lower lip.

  “It’s addressed to Miss Prudence,” Ned said, passing the flimsy pale yellow envelope across the table.

  “Are we expecting anything, Geoffrey?” Prudence asked as she slid the blade of one of the silver knives beneath the glued flap.

  “Josiah?”

  “Nothing on the books at the moment, sir.”

  Prudence groaned, then flashed a rueful grin at the only other person in the room who would understand the gravity of what was about to descend on them. “It’s Aunt Gillian, Geoffrey. She’s decided to come to America to chaperone me, and it’s too late to stop her. You know how she is. Once she makes up her mind, there’s no changing it. ‘By the time this reaches you, arrangements will be well under way. Final plans to follow.’ ”

  “Who is Aunt Gillian?” Ned asked.

  “My mother’s sister, the Dowager Viscountess Rotherton, for the past twenty-two years a pillar of English society. Geoffrey and I stayed at her London home in December. I’m sure I must have mentioned her to you.”<
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  “Not a word.”

  “We’ll have to be sure people know to address her as Lady Rotherton,” Josiah said. “And your servants will have to call her my lady, Miss Prudence.”

  Prudence stared at him. “You are such an Anglophile, Josiah,” she said.

  “I’ll do my best to ensure that her ladyship has a favorable impression of America,” he replied. Something had gone wrong with his familiar New York City accent.

  “She’s American,” Prudence said. “At least she was.”

  Geoffrey left the conference room and disappeared into his office. When he returned, he was carrying glasses and a bottle of the bourbon Ned Hayes had introduced him to.

  “I think we can all use something a bit stronger,” he said, pouring each of them a neat tot and raising his glass. “To Lady Rotherton.”

  “To Lady Rotherton,” echoed a mystified Ned.

  No one understood what Josiah said. It was very British.

  “To us,” Prudence said. “We’re going to need it.”

  Author’s Note

  Candlestick telephones were not invented until several years after the action of Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets takes place. I decided to bring them into Prudence’s 1889 world because they were too elegant to resist, and such a wonderful addition to the final scenes. I usually try not to take liberties with historical fact, but this one time, I couldn’t resist. Mea culpa, dear reader.

  Thanks as always to Jessica Faust, my patient and inspirational agent, and to John Scognamiglio, whose edits are always spot on.

  My Tuesday morning critique group keeps me honest in more ways than I can count. I don’t know how any writer can survive without a group of loyal and accomplished critics.

  As always, my family supports and soothes the twitchy writer in me. Their constant reassurances are invaluable.