Veiled in Smoke

by Jocelyn Green

  “What happens now for Jasper?” Perhaps it was vulgar to think of the practical implications when Grosvenor’s family was flung into sudden mourning, but Jasper would want to know. So did she. “If the will isn’t found, will the property go to public auction?”

  “It might,” Nate responded. “Likely not anytime soon, but I can’t think of a different plausible fate for it. For now, the government is preoccupied surveying and redrawing property lines, not to mention coming up with fireproofing ordinances to prevent such a disaster from happening again. You can be sure Jasper Davenport is the only one thinking about his uncle’s property at the moment.”

  “Not quite.” Fresh urgency brought Meg to her feet. “Hiram must have a copy of the will somewhere in this house. And I happen to have lots of time on my hands.”

  Nate stood and looked down at her, one eyebrow tented. “I thought Jasper said he didn’t want you to look. That’s why you asked me to go to the attorney’s office with you instead.”

  “Jasper needs more help than he realizes.” And so, perhaps, did Meg. “Come on. You have twice as many fingers at your disposal as I do.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  With renewed energy, Meg followed the corridor until it brought her into Hiram’s old study.

  Nate halted in the doorway behind her. “I’m as curious as you are, but if I get involved in this, my job is on the line. Escorting you to Grosvenor’s office was one thing, but actively searching like this—my editor wouldn’t like it.”

  She turned to frown at him. “Since when is investigating outside the bounds of journalism?”

  “He thinks I’m biased. He says I’m too close to the story.” But his bearing looked willing to take another step. His lean frame made clean lines as he shifted his weight to his front foot. Even the cuffs of his sleeves now fit him, and she wondered if he had wielded needle and thread himself, or if Edith had done it for him.

  She wondered what it would be like to paint him, to trace the contours of his cheek and jaw with her brush, and which colors she would mix for that particular blue of his eyes.

  She shook the thought free. “And are you? Too close to the story?”

  His lips pressed together as he considered his answer. He shook his head. “If you ask me, I’m not close enough.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.” She smiled. “Let’s get to work.”

  While Nate searched in the drawers and trays of the massive desk, Meg took quick measure of the rest of the room. The day shed scant light through the window, but it was enough to gleam on the silver candlesticks on the mantel. A cigar box inlaid with mother-of-pearl sat between them. She lifted its lid and felt inside. Empty.

  She spent the next quarter of an hour pulling books from a low shelf and flipping through the pages for anything that might be hidden inside. Other than a few pressed leaves and flowers, she found nothing.

  Until she looked inside a Chinese vase and saw an envelope. She reached inside to fish it out, then passed it to Nate. “If you please,” she said. Pulling out the contents was too much for just one hand.

  He removed a sheet of foolscap rather than a formal legal document.

  “Not the will,” she presumed.

  He turned it toward her. “Take a look.”

  “Look at what?” Jasper entered the room, cheeks still ruddy from the cold outside. Sylvie could not have stood closer to him if her arm were looped through his. Meg wondered when Jasper had started escorting her home from the church. “You were searching for the will?”

  “We’ve had a setback, Jasper,” she replied. “The attorney, Mr. Grosvenor, was shot and killed for curfew violation last night. Your only hope to stay in this house lies in finding the will yourself.”

  “I see.” Jasper removed his hat and tossed it on the desk, the white line of his scar stark on his brow. His gaze darted toward the paper in Nate’s hand. “May I?”

  Nate gave it to him.

  Eyebrows knitting together, Jasper read it aloud. “It says, ‘You ruined me. You ruined my name, my future, and my family. You’re guilty as sin, Hiram Sloane. You’ll pay for what you’ve done. Someday, when you least expect it, you’ll pay your debt, and with interest.’ It’s signed, ‘Otto Schneider.’”

  The room was already cold without a fire in the hearth, but the chill Meg felt was something else.

  Nate looked from one face to another. “The name is familiar, but I’m missing something here. What happened between Schneider and Sloane?”

  Briefly, Meg relayed the story. “Years ago, Schneider sued Hiram, saying he’d been tricked into selling stocks to him, and that Hiram’s fortune ought to be his. Legal fees bankrupted him, and his reputation was ruined. He had a wife and baby at the time. The child can’t be more than eleven years old now. But he has an alibi for the night of the fire. He was already in prison.”

  “Schneider. Schneider. I know that name.” Nate circled the desk and leaned his elbows on the back of the leather wingback chair, hands clasped. “He’s been in and out of trouble with the law for some time now.”

  “And he seemed a likely suspect until I went to the police and found out he’s already in prison,” Meg repeated.

  Nate straightened. “Now I remember where I’ve seen the name before. It was on the list of prisoners freed from the jail below the courthouse the night of the fire. They were all in for minor crimes like theft, drunkenness, or vagrancy. There was an Otto Schneider among them. He was in jail, not in prison. Whoever you spoke to at the police station was misinformed.”

  Meg replayed that day in her mind. Mr. Gruber hadn’t been working there long, and the papers all over his desk were the picture of chaos. It would have been easy for him to mistake the list or simply use the wrong word. “This changes things,” she breathed. “We have a new suspect.”

  Nate held up a hand. “Let’s not rush to pin a murder on him because he wasn’t behind bars that night after all. If he had done it—which would have been quite a feat on such a night—wouldn’t he try to steal from Hiram too? There was no burglary in the house that night or any time after. Revenge is one thing, but this revenge was all about money.”

  “Maybe he didn’t care about the money anymore,” Sylvie guessed. “Maybe he saw an opportunity to kill Hiram and took it in a fit of passion.”

  Jasper framed himself in the window, staring out. Sunlight dappled the wrought-iron fences and the soldiers patrolling the neighborhood. “No one stops caring about money, unless he has so much of it he can afford to think about other things. But a man like Schneider, if he really blames his financial ruin on my uncle, he wouldn’t have stopped with murder. He’d have tried to get a piece of his riches too.” Then, snapping his fingers, he spun around. “Schneider couldn’t have robbed this house even if he tried. The night of the fire, Uncle Hiram wandered out of the safety of this neighborhood. When Schneider killed him—”

  “Allegedly killed him.” Nate nodded for him to continue.

  “Allegedly, then. Schneider would have fled the scene of the crime, and the fire would have prevented him from coming here. He’d have had to preserve his own life and plan to come back later, assuming the house was empty except for the servants. But Prairie Avenue has been under armed guard around the clock ever since. He wouldn’t have been able to get past the soldiers.”

  Meg caught Sylvie’s gaze, gauging her reaction. She looked as weak as Meg felt.

  Sylvie turned to Jasper and tilted her head. “But if he came straight from the jail, he wouldn’t have had a weapon on him.”

  “True.” Jasper crossed his arms. “But it wouldn’t have been hard to find one, given the chaos and the thousands of people in the street.”

  Meg’s heartbeat tapped against her chest. Stephen had dropped his gun, and someone else had found it. It would be too much of a coincidence to believe that someone was Otto Schneider. But the criminal could have found or taken anyone else’s.

  A few beats of silence passed, marked only by the muffled t
icking of the timepiece in Nate’s vest. “The police are already looking for the prisoners they set free,” he said. “If they apprehend him, he can be questioned. I warn you against false hope, however. It may not turn up anything useful.”

  “Then again, it might,” Meg whispered, and to her amazement, her sister nodded and smiled.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help, rest assured I will.” Jasper touched Sylvie’s shoulder, bringing an instant bloom to her cheeks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1871

  Dust clouded Nate’s steps as he sloughed through a southwest section of the burned district. He’d made a habit of touring it every day to mark its progress and keep tabs on any stories brewing there. Usually the hive of activity energized him. Today, however, he felt sluggish. Dull. In an hour he’d need to be sharp for the city aldermen’s meeting, where they would be discussing the controversial ordinance to make downtown Chicago fireproof. But right now, all he wanted was to sit.

  A loaded wagon crossed the road in front of him, the horses pulling it glistening with sweat. Wheelbarrows passed, and more wagons. Hoofbeats, scraping shovels, and voices amplified in Nate’s ears, adding to the growing ache in his head. There must be something going around. When he’d called on Meg yesterday, Helene had turned him away, saying Meg and Sylvie were feeling poorly and didn’t want him to catch anything. If he wasn’t feeling better by the weekend, he’d skip visiting Edith and her family this Sunday rather than risk getting them sick.

  Trudging to the western edge of the district, he made his way to a wooden chair set up as a shoeshine stand at the foot of the Randolph Street Bridge. He lowered himself into it, propping one shoe on the crate in front of him. The southern branch of the Chicago River flowed under the bridge, the sound of its movement echoing off the steel girders.

  “Afternoon.” Martin Sullivan tugged his cap down, then set to work wiping the dust from Nate’s shoes. Grey hair puffed over the tops of his large ears, the lobes sagging against his silver-stubbled jaw. “The weather’s changing, it is. A chill in the air says winter’s hard on our heels. Don’t you think?” A trace of Irish accent lilted among his words.

  Nate agreed but didn’t say much else. He didn’t need to, since Martin supplied a streaming monologue along with the polish. Nate didn’t mind. His thoughts veered back to Meg.

  He’d told her she wasn’t a burden to him. More surprising, he’d meant it.

  After all his resolutions not to get involved, not to care, not to tie himself to anything that might keep him from work, what was he doing? Endangering his job by doing the opposite.

  Meg wasn’t a burden, or at least not one he resented. That was the thing about people, wasn’t it? If you were close enough to someone, if you were truly walking beside her, her yoke would fit over your shoulders too. Together, the weight would be borne, the load lightened.

  This was different from the way it had been and how he’d felt with his stepsiblings.

  Nate had had opportunities to back away from Meg. When she’d asked about long hours at work, he could have told her he didn’t have time for her. He could have refused to help her search for the will. That would have been the more logical choice. But he found he didn’t want to be released from whatever it was that tied them together. Friendship? Was that what they were calling it now?

  Nate coughed into his handkerchief and turned his attention back to Martin, whose brown-spotted hands were thick and meaty yet, better suited to carriage-making than shoe-shining. Still, he rounded his back over his work to do an honest job.

  “’Twill be a cold winter for many a folk this year,” he was saying. “The barracks give us a roof, that’s sure, but how warm we’ll be in that flimsy, rushed construction, I can’t say. We may have to huddle together like pups, which wouldn’t be hard, given the number of us crammed together.”

  A raw wind from the northwest scraped Nate’s face. He hunched his shoulders toward his ears. “Do you know your neighbors? Are they folks you knew before the fire?”

  Martin rubbed behind Nate’s heel. “Some yes, some no. But no matter. We’ll all know each other well enough before long, won’t we? You wouldn’t believe how fast the gossip flies.” His face pinching, he rocked off one hip, as though to relieve some discomfort.

  Nate waited for Martin’s grimace to fade. “Do you happen to know the Schneider family? Otto is the husband and father. I believe they have at least one child, about eleven years old.” Nate didn’t know where the Schneiders lived before the fire, since the city directories had been burned. But with the fire so widespread, and the Schneiders being poor after the bankruptcy, it wasn’t such a leap to imagine they were one of the families who’d been burned out and who wouldn’t qualify for their own shanty house.

  Martin switched to the other shoe. “I know of the family, sure. Otto is no prize, I can tell you that, but for some reason his wife has stuck with him. They’ve got three kids now, if we’re speaking of the same Otto Schneider. The oldest boy is eleven, then there’s a set of twin girls. Six years old, maybe?” He shrugged. “Haven’t seen Otto about the barracks, actually. But Martha and the kids, sure. They’re struggling to get by, I can tell you that. They didn’t have much before the fire. Now they have even less.”

  Three kids. Otto Schneider, who Meg hoped to prove a murderer, had a faithful wife and three kids.

  On the opposite side of the river, a train chugged by, belching grey smoke into the fading sky. Nate watched Martin Sullivan finish shining his shoes, and he regretted all over again the story he had written a dozen years ago that ruined Martin’s reputation and put him out of business. If he had slowed down, pursued all the leads, and questioned more people before drawing conclusions, Martin’s life wouldn’t have come off the rails.

  Otto Schneider’s reputation was already a wreck, it seemed, and that of his own doing. But the charge of murder was another thing altogether. Nate knew Meg and Sylvie were hanging their hopes on Schneider’s guilt for the sake of their father. But as much as Nate wanted Stephen Townsend exonerated, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he allowed another innocent man to take the blame for the crime instead.

  All of this was assuming Schneider could even be found. Nate scanned the burned district to the east, noting how much emptier it was since martial law had ended yesterday, an action rooted in Thomas Grosvenor’s untimely death. If Otto Schneider was still at large, still in Chicago, and if he did want to rob Hiram’s house, he would know it was no longer protected.

  That was a lot of ifs.

  It was too late for Martin Sullivan. But perhaps this was a second chance for Nate to do things right. A chance to pursue the full truth instead of settling for halves.

  Heaviness settled into his gut. His editor had told him not to get involved. He was not the police, he was not a detective. He was only a reporter—not even a famous one, at that—who wanted to see justice served.

  Was that enough?

  The polish complete, Martin snapped his blackened rag. “How do they look?”

  Nate peered at his shining old shoes. “Perfect, as usual, Martin. Thank you.”

  He paid the fee along with a tip. It wasn’t as much as he wanted to give, but it was all he had today. And Nate was the kind of man who gave all he had.

  With a clang that woke Stephen from a nightmare, the metal slot at the bottom of the door opened, and a plate of food was shoved inside the cell, followed by a shallow dish of water. The slot closed and locked with a resounding click that reverberated through Stephen.

  “Hey!” he shouted and lunged to bang on the door, a straitjacket pinning his arms. “Hey!” he shouted again, ramming his shoulder into the iron slab. “What day is it? You have to let me out of here!” Desperate to be heard, he slammed his body against the walls of the cell until he felt bruised.

  No wonder they locked you up in here. That voice again. It was his conscience, his tormentor, his sole companion while in solitary confineme
nt. You’re volatile. You won’t allow anyone near you without fighting, ever since the ice bath. They think you’ll hurt others, not to mention yourself. Can you blame them?

  Stephen dropped to his knees, eating and drinking out of the dishes like a dog. Gruel smeared his cheek and chin, and water sloshed up his nose. He couldn’t wipe his face. He felt food congealing on his skin, and he could not clean himself.

  Tears of humiliation clotted his throat until he released them with a guttural howl of anger and despair. They had done this to him. They had taken a man and made him an animal.

  You are not an animal. You are made in the image of God.

  He lowered his head to his knees and wept. “This is not a reflection of Almighty God. I am closer to beast than man.”

  You are made in the image of God.

  “The image of God,” he repeated to himself. “I am made in the image of God. Oh my God, my God, how did I come to this?” Sitting on his heels, he rocked back and forth and called on the only One who could save him from himself.

  Wearying, he leaned back against the cold tiles and stretched out his legs. Water that had spilled from the bowl soaked through his pants and chilled his skin. He coughed until his ribs ached, then shouted with frustration. His constitution had been completely broken at Andersonville, his lungs forever weakened. What further damage would he sustain in this place?

  Be still. Just be still.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, he moaned. He still didn’t know if he had killed his friend, but it frightened him to think he might have. Whoever he was now, it wasn’t who he wanted to be. A small part of him recognized that was worth grieving, as one would grieve a good friend who died. But if he mourned anyone right now, it was Hiram.

  Like Stephen, the older man wasn’t who he’d been a decade ago. Yet he’d always treated Stephen as though he were still the best version of himself. Hiram didn’t deserve what had happened to him. He ought to have passed in his sleep, warm in his bed, when his time came, and even then Stephen would have lamented the loss of his loyal friend.