Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace

by Patricia Marcantonio

  The theory was nothing new. The ancient Greeks had recognized illnesses of the mind. A Persian scientist born in AD 850 had even written of emotional disorders with symptoms of anger and aggression.

  Perhaps she was taking the wrong approach. Concentrating too much on the physical science. She should also take into account the science of the mind. How unrestrained wants and disorders could rule the physical being. This newer science captivated her. She loved the exactness of mathematics, chemistry, and medicine. Yet a review of the soul, spirit, or whatever the term was for what went on inside a person’s head seemed infinite and testing.

  She typed again:

  Insane

  He must be mad to commit such horrible killings. Yet the murderer wasn’t like the howling lunatics of a bedlam. He was intelligent and methodical, as proven by his skilled surgeries on the victims and the fact that he had eluded capture this long. Some knife wounds did display a near frenzy, while there was a method to others. So his madness, though virulent, had design. She added to her list:

  Not only kills women but punishes them

  The almost punitive wounds to the victims’ female organs supported her supposition that the murderer had a convoluted motive.

  Hates women?

  The streets of Placer and London were filled with easy prey—shop girls, waitresses, vendors. He could have had his pick. But he chose prostitutes, and maybe not just because of their availability. Back home, she had read social commentary portraying all prostitutes as promiscuous, hence their convivial contacts with men to fulfill unchecked cravings. While that might be true in a few cases, she believed women ended up selling themselves because of poverty and illiteracy. They had no other prospects in life or couldn’t survive on pay from what was considered honest employment. From what she had learned about Mattie Morgan, the young woman had evidently found she earned more money as a girl of the line than as a seamstress.

  What was it about these women of the night that enraged this man to the point of such violence? She slapped at the keys.

  Focuses on prostitutes

  Why?

  Their availability?

  Perceived as promiscuous and immoral?

  Like Whitechapel in the East End of London, the Red District of Placer was the perfect place to hunt his particular quarry. Adding to the tragedy was that even without a maniac tracking them down, most of the prostitutes were probably destined for an early death. From drink, disease, or other violence.

  Felicity withdrew her hands from the typewriter keys. Beth and Nellie were right to make fun of her naiveté. She had been sheltered behind thick walls and lived in books for years. Although she had spent the last year seeking out killers, their motives had been profit, revenge, or borne out of a rage that came of a specific moment. All concrete reasons for crimes after a fashion.

  But this killer.

  This killer’s reasons were obscure and justified only in his skewed mind.

  Felicity decided she could no longer follow the old ways of reason. To catch the killer, she would have to think like him. To see out of the eyes of a man who despised the women who sold their bodies.

  The idea chilled her.

  CHAPTER 14

  Taking up the reins of the wagon, Felicity assured Helen and Robert Lowery of her safety. “It’s early afternoon. I shall be perfectly fine.”

  “As long as you get back by dark, Miss.” Helen wrung her hands with worry nevertheless.

  When Felicity swiveled back in her seat to wave, she noticed Lowery holding Helen’s hand. In all the violence she had seen recently, their small gesture gave her optimism and another reason to catch those out to destroy the goodness of life.

  Felicity had not mentioned to them that she had hidden a crossbow and quiver of bolts under a blanket in the wagon. A craftsman in Italy had assembled the weapon from Felicity’s own design, which improved upon the medieval weapon in power and accuracy as well as being lighter and sleeker. With intense practice on the grounds of Carrol Manor, Felicity had been able to load a projectile in a few seconds and strike the center of a target one hundred feet away. When a groundskeeper had asked why she wanted such a weapon, she had replied that it was for a hunt, which wasn’t strictly a lie.

  She had also purchased a derringer for the trip to America but preferred the crossbow because it felt somewhat more civilized, which she admitted was a stretch. Historians believed the crossbow had been created in the fifth century in China and that the weapon had been used greatly during the Middle Ages. Besides the possibility that she might actually have to use the weapon in self-defense, the only thing that upset her was that a medieval crossbow had been used to kill her friend in the first case she had ever investigated. The very case that had set her on this course of solving murders. How ironic that she might now catch a murderer with the weapon that had ignited her quest for justice in the first place.

  So armed, she ventured into the Red District. The place renowned for decadent pleasures at night presented little of those attributes in the day. Because of the proximity to the smelters on the nearby hills, the air stank of sulfur. The eyes of the people walking along the streets were vacant, as if they had pursued gold too long and finally surrendered to disappointment. The young had become old. The old, primordial. Their heartache was as perceptible as the grime layering the scruffy wooden buildings. A man with shadows for eyes kicked at another man who had fallen asleep in front of a saloon. Torn curtains covered broken windows. The body of a dead dog rotted in the middle of the street. Bars probably lively at night now appeared forlorn. The parallels between this area and the East End in London were extraordinary.

  Felicity drove on. She could have been driving through the Whitechapel district in the East End, with the horses clomping over cobblestone and not dirt. Reins loose in her hands, she reflected not on the way ahead in Placer, Montana, but on the time past. To another ride back in London.

  * * *

  Standing on the stairs, Felicity had watched her father put on his coat and hat and was determined to know where he was headed. She was thirteen. She asked Helen to fetch her cloak and summon a hansom cab. With fright turning her blue eyes into deep crystals, the older woman did so but said nothing.

  After dinner at their London house, her father would usually retire alone to the library to read and drink whiskey. Often, he just pulled on his cloak and left, and Felicity had begun to recognize the signals of when that would happen. He smoked one cigarette after another. His eyes flitted over the walls. His fingers tapped out an almost restive message on the chair. When he did go, he didn’t say a word to his daughter. He rarely talked with Felicity anyway, and her attempts at conversation were met with terse answers or silence. All she knew about her father had come from Helen. But tonight Felicity wanted to know more, and she was resolved to follow him.

  “He’s just off to his club,” Helen said with apparent uneasiness.

  “We shall see.” And Felicity stepped out the door.

  Felicity watched as her father’s carriage stopped in front of another affluent house, where a man wearing a top hat and a gentleman’s clothing emerged and joined him. In the feeble light, Felicity couldn’t see the other man’s face. They drove to the East End and Whitechapel, its most infamous district, and continued farther until they stopped in front of a tall gray stone house. Her father exited the carriage, the other man behind. At his knock, the door swung open. A red-haired woman wearing a blue skirt and nothing more greeted her father. Within her opaque face, her red lips parted. A black ribbon circled her neck. Samuel Carrol and the other man walked in as if they had come home. They were laughing. Felicity had never heard her father laugh.

  In the hansom cab, Felicity sat back with exhaustion more than anger or embarrassment and told the driver to take her back to the London house. She was most familiar with her father’s neglect of her. But she grew ashamed to have witnessed another side to him that she didn’t care to know after all.

  * * *

&
nbsp; Felicity’s hands tightened on the reins with another memory. When she was younger, she had had nightmares about the spirit of her dead mother roaming Carrol Manor in a spectral white gown, only to be torn apart by a creature formed from shadow. When she woke up screaming, Helen would hold her and say, “My dear, when you open the door to a dark place, more darkness will rush in. You must close the door.”

  “How?” she would ask.

  “Think about cheerful roses and beautiful rainbows,” Helen had advised.

  But Helen was wrong.

  Under the hot sun of Montana, Felicity could not stop the dark memories. The door had opened. But never mind thinking of roses and rainbows. Moving forward was the best way to keep them out.

  Felicity flicked the reins to hurry the horses along.

  * * *

  ENTER AND BE SAVED proclaimed the banner over the door of the Church of the Morning. Under the banner, THE REVEREND T. PHOENIX had been carved onto a piece of wood. Felicity pulled the wagon over. Located in the Red District, the church appeared to have been converted from a barn. The inside reeked of cheap candles. In the windowless building, Felicity walked over the uneven dirt floor, past rows of nicked benches, to the front. On one side stood a tall pulpit. At the center of the church, a splintered wooden cross tall as a man hung from the roof. She bent down. Speckles of what appeared to be dried blood spotted the ground underneath it. Rising, she inspected the bottom of the cross. More spots of the dried blood.

  “Have you come to be saved?”

  Felicity spun around. “You frightened me.”

  A voice echoed. “I ask that of all who enter here. Do you seek salvation, young lady?” Reverend Phoenix had entered from a side door. He wore a white apron.

  “I seek truth.” Felicity introduced herself and repeated her story about being a writer. He listened and nodded.

  “That explains why so clearly a refined young lady attended the funeral of such a sinner.”

  “Mattie Morgan was a victim of murder.”

  “Not an unusual end for a whore.” He smiled. “I do appreciate writers. They’re like the scribes in the Old Testament. Come into the kitchen. I’m preparing stew for the hungry.” His charm had an edge, like a pillow stuffed with feathers and thorns.

  At a table, he diced beef into cubes and added them to a large boiling pot on the wood-burning stove. In the back of the kitchen, a door opened to a small, simple bedroom. “I’m not a good cook, but I can make a dinner to fill the bellies of the unfortunate. They must listen as I talk about God. The price for a meal.”

  “Your service for Mattie Morgan was quite powerful.” Felicity tried to be tactful.

  “I want to help these women reject their sinful lives and find heaven. I have made this mission my life’s work.”

  “You made that incredibly obvious, Reverend.”

  His penetrating gaze was probably useful for a minister to win converts, as if his congregation peered directly into the eyes of God.

  “How were you acquainted with Mattie Morgan?” she asked.

  “She attended services a few times. Before her untimely death, she told me she wanted to repent her sins and be baptized. Save the Lord.” He chopped potatoes.

  “And Lily Rawlins? Did you know her as well?”

  “She, I am afraid, refused to accept the Lord. I still said words over her grave. The least I could do in hopes that God would take pity on her wretched soul.” Flecks of red meat covered his hands, which he clamped together on the table. He lifted his head with a beguiling expression of belief. “She was weak, and women are much weaker than men, not only in body but in spirit. The Bible tells us so.”

  “I must have missed that passage.” Felicity glanced at a kitchen pot on a hook and wanted to throw it at the man’s head for his inane views, unhappily held by most men. However, just the thought of tossing the pot was gratifying. She pressed on. “Do you think the women were murdered because they were prostitutes?”

  “I’d rather ponder their futures in the afterlife of heaven than their pasts of sin.” He smiled and sliced onions for his stew.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Reverend.” Felicity gave her own winning smile.

  “Miss Carrol, has it crossed your mind that these killings might have been the will of the Almighty? That they were examples of what happens to those who make their living in sin? I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I am a man of God.”

  As Phoenix spoke, he tapped the knife on the table, his white hair silvery in the light. Felicity organized her observations. The reverend was powerfully built. The prostitutes knew him. He could easily get close enough to kill. As a minister, he’d rise above suspicion. Although he used his right hand to cut the vegetables and spoke with an American accent, that might be part of a role he had adopted in the new world. At Mattie’s funeral he had mentioned the whores of Babylon. There were five of them, and there had been five victims in England. The red hairs she had found on Mattie Morgan’s body might have belonged to a customer after all.

  And what about the spots of blood under the cross in his church?

  Felicity easily envisioned him hiding in the gloom, a knife in his hand. Shuddering at the prospect, she needed more facts to count him as a suspect. “You must be busy with the many sinners in town, Reverend.” Her throat dried at the words.

  “I’m blessed to have a large flock to guide to that magnificent place of God.”

  “Phoenix is an unusual name. Not your real one, is it?”

  “I used to be a drinker, fornicator, and gambler. I cheated men out of their money and took foolish pride in my wiles.” His voice rose in power as he continued. “But one night as I lay in my own vomit on a street, an angel appeared to me as the morning sun rose in the sky.”

  “An angel?”

  “She took on the form of a nasty whore. Without moving her lips, the angel’s words appeared in my heart. She told me to minister to others like her.” His eyes and hands pointed upward. “So I placed aside my whiskey, women, and cards and took up the Bible. Like the phoenix of old, I changed into a new man out of the ashes of my own transgressions.”

  “Such a vision would change anyone.” Felicity watched as he renewed his stew making. The man was deranged, but enough to kill? “How long have you lived in Placer?”

  “Since February of this year, and I’ve been blessed every day.”

  “Why this town?”

  “The whore angel whispered the name of Placer in my dreams.”

  “A smart angel, to be sure.” Felicity’s suspicions about Phoenix amplified. He had come to town before Lily Rawlins was killed. Now she had to check on his whereabouts at the time of the murders. “By the way, your stew smells delicious.”

  “I agree with you.” A woman stood in the side doorway. The sunlight at her back obscured her features.

  “Mrs. Albert,” the Reverend said. “What a nice surprise.”

  When the woman stepped into the kitchen, Felicity took notice of a dewy face devoid of garish paint—most odd, she believed, for a madam. Mrs. Albert even had the presence of an aristocrat. She wore a silk dress of the darkest purple with a tasteful, even subdued, hat.

  “You must be the writer working on a book about the unfortunate murders. How interesting.” Mrs. Albert spoke with a refined southern accent.

  “Felicity Carrol is my name, but how did you know?”

  “Girls talk, especially the girls in the business of giving pleasure. How fascinating you entered a field so dominated by the male of the species.”

  “I recognize you from Mattie Morgan’s funeral,” Felicity said.

  “A tragedy.” Mrs. Albert handed Phoenix a small purse of coins. “For your efforts, Reverend.”

  “You’re most gracious, Mrs. Albert.” He addressed Felicity. “She’s one of the more generous contributors to our work at the mission, as are many of the women who operate those houses of degradation and wickedness.”

  “We do what we can.” Mrs. Albert took out a wa
tch from her purse. “I must run.”

  “May I visit you sometime? I’d like to talk with you as part of the research for my book,” Felicity said.

  “Come anytime. You’ll find us at the house with the white rose over the door.”

  Phoenix focused his eyes on the madam. “Have you accepted Jesus as your savior from a wicked life?”

  A wispy smile lit on Mrs. Albert’s lips. “Not yet.” She went out the door.

  Felicity also took her leave of Reverend Phoenix, but she wasn’t through with him. Not at all.

  * * *

  Jeremiah Sutton loved horses more than people.

  Felicity could tell because his face took on a contented serenity as he groomed the animals at his livery stable. He cooed to them as he brushed their manes. When talking with the two-legged kind of animal, however, Sutton’s gnarled features stiffened to the consistency of saddle leather. His business was located directly in back of the Church of the Morning, and he hated the Reverend Phoenix with everything his mean spirit could muster and then some.

  “I wanted that building to expand my business, but the religious jackass bought it out from under me and filled it with holy-holies. He invites painted ladies and other malcontents to his so-called church all hours of the day. Makes me sick.”

  “My gracious. What behavior for a man of God.” Felicity spurred his ire. She wanted Sutton to spy on Phoenix. She thought the reverend’s religious insanity might be masking one more fiendish, particularly now that she had spotted the blood drops. After leaving the church, she had scouted around for a suitable candidate, and she knew she had one as soon as she mentioned Phoenix’s name to Jeremiah Sutton.

  “Man of God, bah.” Sutton’s spittle on the ground was dark from tobacco and animosity. “Phoenix keeps his horse at my stable and pays good money; otherwise I’d piss in his eye.”

  “In that case, I have a proposition, and it must be our secret.”