These Shallow Graves

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “The veil, Mrs. Montfort,” Madame Gavard said, returning to the room with a length of lace.

  “Wait on that for a moment, please. Take the gown off her,” Anna instructed. “It’s not falling correctly. You need to pull her corset tighter.”

  “Mama, there’s something I have to say,” Jo whispered, her voice heavy with emotion. She felt Madame Gavard’s brisk fingers at her back, undoing the gown’s buttons.

  Jo needed to tell her mother the truth. About the stories she wanted to write. The boy she wanted to love. The life she wanted to lead. Her feelings raged inside her like a hurricane, gathering force, trying to push their way out.

  “What is it, Josephine?” her mother asked.

  “I—I can’t go through with this.”

  Her mother smiled understandingly, and for the briefest of seconds, Jo thought everything would be all right.

  “Don’t be silly. Of course you can. You’re just having a case of nerves. Every bride-to-be suffers from them,” Anna said, shattering Jo’s hopes.

  “No, it’s more than nerves,” Jo insisted. “I can’t go through with this wedding. I don’t love—”

  “Stop it. Right now,” Anna ordered, gently but firmly. “I forbid another word on this topic. It’s one thing to have nerves, another to give in to them. Dwelling on your worries will only upset you, and you shouldn’t have more upsets. Not with everything we’ve endured these past few weeks. Not with a wedding coming.”

  “Mama, listen to me. Please,” Jo cried. “I don’t want this wedding!”

  “Josephine, that is enough!”

  Her mother’s sharp words rang out in the quiet room. Jo stopped speaking, shocked. Her mother never raised her voice. Never. Jo saw anger sparking in her eyes. But there was something else there, too: fear.

  Why? Jo wondered, mystified. What is she afraid of? Whatever it was, Jo decided, it would not stop her. She was going to win this battle.

  Before she could open her mouth to argue, however, her aunt bustled into the room.

  “Oh, Anna, my dear! There you are!” she said. She was breathless and red-cheeked.

  “Of course I’m here,” Anna said, turning to her. “Why are you so late? And so flushed?”

  Jo’s aunt sat down across from her mother in a whirl of silk and fur. One of Madame Gavard’s assistants immediately brought her a cup of tea.

  “Thank you,” Madeleine said, handing the girl her stole. “I’ll keep my coat for now. I’m chilled through. Simply can’t stop shivering. I’ve had quite a shock.”

  “What’s the matter, Aunt Maddie?” Jo asked, putting her own upset aside.

  “Oh, Jo! I didn’t see you there,” Maddie said, pressing a hand to her heaving chest. “You look like an angel, my darling.” She turned to Madame Gavard. “Might we have a moment alone, please?” It was phrased as a question but was unmistakably a command.

  The dressmaker dipped her head. She motioned for her assistant and they left the room, closing a pair of double doors behind them. Jo joined her mother and aunt on some slipper chairs near a low table.

  “Madeleine, what is going on? You’re making me anxious,” Anna said.

  “Oh, Anna! That disturbed man, Kinch, the one who killed Alvah, killed himself!” Madeleine said breathlessly. “They found him this morning. He hanged himself with his belt in his cell sometime during the night, they think.”

  “How dreadful!” Jo’s mother said.

  Jo slumped in her chair. Kinch was dead. He was gone. There were answers she needed that only he could supply. Now she would never get them.

  “Did he talk to the police, Aunt Maddie?” she asked, hoping against hope. “Did he tell them anything?”

  “Yes. The police say last night he confessed to Alvah’s murder and the attack on Phillip. He told the orderly caring for him what he’d done. He was anguished by guilt, apparently, and terrified of facing a trial.”

  Jo sat up. That can’t be right, she thought. Oscar said Kinch couldn’t have done it because Beekman’s killer is left-handed and Kinch is right-handed. Why would he confess to a crime he didn’t commit? And then kill himself over it? She would go to Eddie as soon as she could, to see if he knew anything more.

  “According to the orderly, Kinch was a morphine addict, and he may have been in some sort of drug-induced rage during the attack,” Madeline explained. She reached for Anna’s hand and then Jo’s. “I’m afraid there’s more,” she said gravely. “Kinch also confessed to killing Richard Scully—”

  “Oh, no, Maddie. Please. Please don’t,” Anna said, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “—and our beloved Charles.”

  Anna nodded, struggling to keep her emotion in check. “I suppose the papers have gotten hold of this?” she asked, opening her eyes.

  “You have no idea, Anna. It’s as if the entire city has turned into some mad choir of shrieking newsboys,” Madeleine said. “They’re shouting the headlines from every sidewalk.”

  Anna’s mask of calmness suddenly cracked. She balled her hands into fists. “So we can hear it over and over again,” she said bitterly. “It was hard enough losing him … but now this … a murder … Someone killed him. … Someone killed my husband. … I don’t—”

  A sob escaped her. She pressed her free hand to her mouth, as if to stop any others from getting out, but she couldn’t contain her sorrow. With a low moan of pain, she doubled over. Jo rushed to her and put an arm around her, her questions about Kinch’s confession forgotten in the face of her mother’s grief.

  She’d never seen her stoic, self-contained mother weep, and it both devastated and frightened her. She remembered her own grief when she found out the truth of her father’s death and wished she could do something to take her mother’s pain away, to make it better. She’d do anything.

  “I’m sorry, Anna. I’m so, so sorry,” Madeleine whispered.

  After a few moments, her mother straightened. Her face was ravaged. Her eyes were filled with sorrow. She looked completely helpless.

  “What does one do?” she asked. “How does one go on after something like this?”

  Her voice, so small and bewildered, broke Jo’s heart.

  Madeleine took her hand again. “By looking ahead of ourselves, Anna, not back,” she said resolutely. “By watching what Charles left behind—our beautiful Jo—take her first steps into the future with a wonderful companion by her side. By dandling their children on our knees, and seeing Charles in their sweet faces, and knowing that all he was, all he stood for, his goodness and kindness, lives on.”

  Anna nodded brokenly.

  “We must be strong, Anna. This awfulness will pass. Come spring, we’ll have a beautiful wedding at Herondale. With a lovely couple to toast and a new beginning to celebrate. And it will be beautiful, won’t it, Jo?”

  Jo gazed at her aunt’s hopeful face. She looked at her mother—always so straight-backed, always so strong—struggle like a wounded animal. As she did, Jo’s resolve drained away. How could she break her mother’s heart? Her entire family’s?

  “Yes, Aunt Maddie,” she said, utterly defeated. “It will.”

  A fine rain pattered over Jo’s black umbrella and dampened the hem of her black coat.

  “Another funeral. Another member of our circle buried. It seems we will never get out of black,” her uncle said.

  They were walking arm in arm out of Grace Church’s graveyard, together with dozens of other mourners. Moments ago, they’d all stood by Alvah Beekman’s grave as his casket was lowered into the ground.

  Cries pierced the air now. Outside the cemetery gates, newsboys yelled the day’s headlines.

  “ ‘Thanksgiving Tragedy! Beekman Buried Today’!”

  “ ‘Third Victim of Tattoo Terror Laid to Rest’!”

  “ ‘Murder and Mayhem in Manhattan’!”

  “No pe
ace for the departed, even here,” Phillip observed dryly. “None for the living, either.”

  The story of Kinch’s confession and suicide had broken two days ago, and the newsboys had barely taken a break since. Most of New York had celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, though the Beekmans, Montforts, and other mourners had not, and the topic of conversation over every dining table had been the lunatic Kinch and how he had murdered three of Van Houten Shipping’s partners. But why? That was what all of New York wanted to know, and what the papers—all except the Standard—were only too happy to tell them.

  A spokesman for Darkbriar, a Dr. Ellsworth, told the press that from the moment Kinch had been brought to the asylum to the night of his death twenty-four hours later, several doctors had tried to get sense out of him but had found it impossible. He would rave one moment and become almost completely catatonic the next.

  They’d tried to examine him, but when an orderly went to remove Kinch’s clothing, Kinch became so incensed, he tried to kill the man. That same orderly, Francis Mallon, expressed the opinion that Kinch was under the influence of drugs. It was decided to wait a day or two for whatever substance Kinch had injected to clear from his system; then the doctors would try again to question him.

  Unfortunately, before that could happen, he’d hanged himself with his belt from one of the bars of his cell window.

  The papers reported that Kinch had finally become clearheaded the night of his death and had begged Mallon to sit with him so that he could unburden himself. He did, and Kinch told him his story. He said he was an ex-employee of Van Houten and had crewed on several of the firm’s ships. Phillip Montfort was asked by the police to confirm this. He said he could recall neither Kinch’s name nor his face, but that it was certainly possible that Kinch had worked for the firm. He was not familiar with the faces and names of every man who sailed on their ships.

  Kinch claimed that Van Houten had done him out of a vast fortune and said he would have his revenge. When Mallon asked him what the fortune was, he told him it was a chest full of treasure. Mallon expressed disbelief and Kinch grew enraged. He told him he’d learned the address of Charles Montfort and went to his house late one night with the aim of getting his treasure back.

  Charles recognized him and let him in. They went to Charles’s study, where he’d been cleaning a revolver. Kinch demanded his treasure, and when Charles could not produce it, he grabbed his revolver, which Charles had placed on his desk, and shot him. Frightened, he placed the revolver in Charles’s hand to make it look like an accident, or a suicide, anything but a murder. Then he escaped by climbing out the study window. It had been difficult. He’d had to force the window open, balance on the shallow ledge outside it, close it again, then drop twenty feet to the ground. He hadn’t broken anything, but he’d bruised himself badly in several places.

  Kinch also told Mallon that he’d accosted Richard Scully on Van Houten’s Wharf, hit him over the head, and thrown him, unconscious, into the water. He’d cut Alvah Beekman’s throat and tried to do the same to Phillip Montfort.

  It was concluded that he was hopelessly insane. No one at Darkbriar had been able to find out who he really was, where he’d come from, or what had led to his mental breakdown. His orderly prepared his body, and he was buried, in the suit of clothes in which he’d been apprehended, in Darkbriar’s lonely cemetery. No one attended the burial.

  “I do hope this is the last visit I make to a graveyard for quite some time,” Phillip said now.

  “How are you feeling?” Jo asked. There was an ugly bruise on his cheek where he’d been hit, and the knife wound on his chest hadn’t healed yet.

  “I’m perfectly well. And so very glad this is over. The papers will grow tired of the story in a few days, things will calm down, and we can resume our lives.”

  “So we won’t have to rent a place in the country after all?” Jo asked, gently teasing him. She remembered his threat to move them all out of the city if reporters hounded them.

  “Hopefully not,” he said, smiling. He covered her hand with his, and as he did, his smile faded. “Josephine, I’ve been remiss. I want to thank you.”

  “For what, Uncle Phillip?” Jo asked, struck by his sudden seriousness.

  “For warning me,” he said. “I should have listened to you more carefully when you told me about seeing a strange man outside your house. I was so convinced that Charles had committed suicide, there was no room in my mind for any other explanation. I was wrong, Jo. Dangerously so. But we’ve arrived at the truth at last, and Charles, Richard, and Alvah have justice of a sort. We must leave it at that.”

  Yes, Jo thought. We must.

  It was easier to stop digging, stop probing, stop asking questions that never seemed to get answered. If only she could.

  She would have to cut away a part of herself—the restless, questing part. She’d have to cut away many parts of herself in the weeks and months to come. She’d decided, in Madame Gavard’s, to do her duty by her mother, and her family, and marry Bram. And now, and for the rest of her days, she would have to make good on that decision.

  Yet questions remained. And they gnawed at her.

  “I would like to leave it, Uncle Phillip,” she said. “But there are still so many answers I wish I had. I know now how Papa’s murderer escaped when the door to his office had been locked from the inside—that’s something. But Kinch’s confession doesn’t explain the bullet I found under the draperies.”

  “Your father might’ve dropped it ages ago, Jo. And accidentally kicked it under the curtains himself.”

  “I suppose so,” Jo said. “But what about Oscar Edwards’s assertions that Beekman’s killer was left-handed and Kinch was right-handed? And that Kinch had an accomplice—a man with a scar on his face?”

  Jo continued to use her fictional private eye to pose the more objectionable questions. There were places she’d never told her uncle she’d visited. The morgue and Madam Esther’s were among them.

  “I don’t know what to say about that. All I can tell you is what I remember—Kinch punching me and then coming at both Alvah and me with a knife,” Phillip explained.

  Jo recalled Oscar’s assertion that her uncle had taken two blows to the head and therefore was not a reliable witness. It was certainly possible that all her uncle remembered of the attack was Kinch, not the scar-faced man.

  Jo also recalled how confident Oscar was that Kinch could not be Beekman’s killer. She had taken Oscar at his word, but Eddie said most people dismissed his theories. Had she been rash to put so much faith in them? What if he was wrong? Kinch’s right-handedness certainly wouldn’t have stopped him from shooting her father, or hitting Richard Scully over the head. She told herself now that Oscar was wrong. And tried her best to believe it.

  But a myriad of other questions lingered, too. “What of Eleanor Owens and the manifests?” she asked her uncle. “What was the Bonaventure carrying?

  “I’m not sure we’ll ever know,” Phillip replied.

  Absorbed by her questions presented, Jo did not catch the note of weariness in her uncle’s voice.

  “The thing that haunts me most of all,” she continued, “is Papa’s sadness. You yourself said he was feeling distraught right before he died. I can’t shake that, or the feeling that his despair had something to do with his death. I go around and around in circles, and always end up back there, at Papa’s sadness.”

  Phillip abruptly stopped walking. “Josephine, why do you insist on seeking out darkness?” he asked, dismayed. “Have we not had enough of it?”

  Because I want answers, Uncle Phillip. I want the truth! Jo wanted to shout. Because that’s the way I’m made!

  Instead she said, “I’ve upset you, Uncle Phillip. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve become obsessed,” her uncle said, his faced creased with concern. “Your father’s sadness was just a coincidence. We all go th
rough times when we’re not ourselves. But now we must put this ugly chapter behind us. You most of all. You cannot embrace the future if you refuse to let go of the past. A good marriage, a comfortable home, children—that’s where your mind should be now. That’s what your father would have wanted for you.”

  “There you are, Jo,” a voice said from behind them.

  Jo turned. It was Bram. The party of mourners had reached the cemetery gates. Jo and her mother had ridden with the Aldriches to the church and then the graveyard, and would now continue on with them to the Beekmans’ home.

  “May I steal her from you, Mr. Montfort?” Bram asked.

  “I’m afraid you already have, Bram. Heart and soul,” Phillip replied, a smile replacing his anxious frown.

  “Blast it, Lolly! You come out of there this instant!” a voice bellowed from behind them.

  Bram grimaced. He recognized his grandmother’s voice. They all did.

  Addie suddenly appeared, flushed and breathless. “Bram, can you help Grandmama? She’s lost one of her dogs in the bushes. Why did she bring them here? To a cemetery!” She nodded at Phillip. “Hello, Mr. Montfort. Please pardon me for intruding. I am, of course, mortified. Bram, do come!”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Bram said.

  “Go ahead,” Jo said. “I’ll meet you at your carriage.”

  As Bram loped off to corral the errant spaniel, Jo released her uncle’s arm. “And I’ll meet you at the Beekmans’, Uncle Phillip,” she said.

  “Jo,” her uncle said, catching her sleeve.

  “Yes?” She turned back to him. His face had taken on a fearfully worried look. “What is it, Uncle Phillip?” she asked alarmed. “Are you unwell?”

  His hand tightened on her arm. “I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about. Terribly so,” he said. “Don’t let the darkness that’s been visited upon this family pull you in so deeply, you cannot get out. Turn back from it, darling Jo. Now. While you still can.”

  Jo entered her room and flopped onto her bed. She was exhausted. The funeral reception at the Beekmans’ was over. It had tired her, and so had her uncle’s lecture.