The Daemoniac

by Kat Ross

  “She might still be alive if we’d stayed,” Mary said, wiping her nose with a damp handkerchief. She was a slender, waif-like girl, with pale eyes and pale hair that seemed the exact same color.

  “Did Anne have any boyfriends?” Nellie asked.

  “No. Not that she talked about.”

  “Special fans? Men who sent her flowers, or came back night after night?”

  Mary frowned. “I don’t think so. Lilla Vane gets most of that kind of thing.”

  “Can you tell us everything you remember when you went home last night?” I asked, wondering if this was going to be another waste of time.

  “I already told the police,” Mary said wearily.

  “Just once more? Sometimes we recall details that we’d forgotten when we retell a story.”

  “I suppose, if you think it might help. We left the party at about half past ten. It was drizzling. Anne and I discussed taking a hansom cab as there were several waiting at the curb, but that would’ve been expensive. In the end, we decided to take the El, like always.”

  “Did you see anyone outside the theatre?”

  “Not really. I mean, there’s always people on Broadway. I recall a couple, walking arm in arm. They were laughing loud. I figured they’d been drinking.”

  Nellie gave her an encouraging smile. “You have an excellent memory, Miss Fletcher. Do go on.”

  “We caught the uptown train at Houston Street. It was fairly deserted at that hour, which was usual. It’s one of the reasons I was so glad to ride home with Anne.”

  “How long did the trip normally take?”

  “About twenty-five minutes.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing special. Other cast members, mostly. Anne was a bit of a gossip. Not malicious or anything. She just liked to talk. She was really happy to finally have a speaking part.”

  “Did she seem worried or anxious about anything? Excited?”

  “Not at all. She was a little quieter than usual, but I think it’s just because her tooth hurt.”

  “Who else was on the train with you?” Nellie ventured.

  Mary closed her eyes. “Give me a moment. There was a mother and child. The child was pretty, no more than five years old, and I remember thinking she should be in bed. Two or three men. Not together, separate. I’m afraid I can’t remember much about them, except that one was a soldier.”

  “A soldier?” I leaned forward. “Are you sure?”

  Mary nodded. “I’m sure. I don’t remember when he got on. He might have been there already, I just don’t remember. But the uniform stood out.”

  “Where was he?”

  “The other end of the car, I think. Across from us. Now that you ask, I do have a vague sensation that he might have been watching us. But I wasn’t really paying attention.” She smiled and tears welled in her eyes again. “Anne was so lovely, you know? Men always stared at her. You just got used to it.”

  I exchanged a look with Nellie.

  “Can you remember anything about what he looked like? Anything at all? Height, hair color, whether he had whiskers, that sort of thing.”

  Mary thought hard for a minute, then shook her head. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “He was sitting down, of course, so I can’t tell you how tall he was. And I barely looked at him. I’m fairly sure he was clean-shaven. And young, although that’s just an impression. The uniform is the only thing I’m really certain about.”

  “When did you get off?”

  “Forty-Seventh Street. That’s where we said goodbye. Anne stayed on for two more stops.” She swallowed. “Do you think it was someone from the train? The soldier?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But I did know. It was him.

  I couldn’t say if he was a real soldier, or if he just dressed up like one. But there was no doubt in my mind that Mary Fletcher had seen Anne Marlowe’s killer. And we now had independent confirmation that Raffaele’s murder was connected. The button found near his hand had indeed been ripped from his assailant’s uniform. I couldn’t wait to tell John.

  “Do you think I’m in danger?” Mary asked.

  “You could be,” I said. “You’re a witness. And he doesn’t know how much you remember. The best thing would be to leave the city for a little while. Can you do that?”

  “Leave the city? But I can’t quit the show! It just opened!”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “No, I share a flat with three other girls.”

  “Well, that sounds relatively safe,” Nellie said. “Can you take another route home? Stay away from the Third Avenue El?”

  “Certainly. I wouldn’t take it alone anyhow. Not after what’s happened.”

  “Why don’t I speak with Mr. Kirafly and see if he can’t pay for a cab for the next week or so, just until the case is resolved? It’s the least he can do.”

  When Nellie decided she wanted something from somebody, she was relentless. It’s how she landed her job at the World. Still in her early twenties, she was already an accomplished reporter. She’d written a series of investigative stories on the plight of women factory workers, and later travelled to Mexico, where she was nearly arrested after denouncing the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz.

  But when Nellie had first arrived in New York from Pittsburgh last year, no one would give her the time of day. She scraped by for a bit sending features to her old editor at the Dispatch, until she had the clever idea of getting a foot in the door by interviewing the editors of the top newspapers in town on their opinions about women journalists. Then she finagled an appointment with John Cockerill, Pulitzer’s managing editor, and talked her way into the undercover assignment at Blackwell’s notorious asylum. It was a risky gambit, but it worked. Nellie Bly became an instant sensation.

  I had no doubt that Mr. Bolossy Kirafly would be wet clay in her hands.

  “You think he’d do that?” Mary asked, her pale eyes wandering restlessly across the pots of face paint and glittery costumes for the Automaton Dance and Fête of the Storks.

  “I’m certain of it.” Nellie smiled. “And if he won’t, my readers will hear about it.”

  Mary didn’t smile back, but she cast Nellie a grateful look. “Thank you, Miss Bly.”

  Nellie gave her a card in case she remembered anything else and we exited through the main auditorium, where the French daredevil Charles Blondin was dangling from a tightrope strung across the stage. He shouted at us in annoyance but I barely heard. My pulse was racing. We were closing in on our quarry.

  All the talk about the Devil and dark forces had me half believing we were facing a monster, a wraith who materialized and vanished like a wisp of smoke. But he was real. Mary Fletcher had seen him. He was young, and clean-shaven. He dressed as a soldier when he stalked his victims. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was more than we had a few days ago.

  What we needed to figure out is why them. Why those particular people? What did they have in common? A medium, a street musician and an actress. Nearly everything about them was different.

  Becky Rickard is stabbed early in the morning of Monday, August 6th, a message of apparent remorse written on the wall. Raffaele Forsizi is strangled the following evening, August 7th. No message, just a symbol that so far we had been unable to identify. Five days go by. Then Anne Marlowe is killed on Sunday night. There’s a message, but it’s more boastful than guilty.

  There seemed to be no common thread.

  And yet there had to be. I just wasn’t seeing it.

  “Isn’t he the chap who walked across Niagara Falls?” Nellie asked, as we made our way down the center aisle, the three tiers of box seats looming on either side like a great honeycomb.

  “Yes,” I said, still distracted. “Blindfolded, on stilts, pushing a wheelbarrow. I think he even sat down halfway once and cooked an omelette.”

  Nellie arched her eyebrows. “A lunatic, then?”

  I grinned at her. “A kindre
d spirit.”

  “I’ll have to do a feature on him,” she said. “Now, about Miss Fletcher. What’s all this about a soldier? You know something, Harry.”

  I reminded her about Raffaele Forsizi’s button.

  “There’s more,” Nellie said, looking at me in that thoughtful, penetrating way she had. “You’re holding back. Out with it.”

  I waged a brief debate with myself. But in the end, expediency won out. Nellie couldn’t help if she didn’t know about Brady and Straker and all of it. And there was no time to waste. So as we stood on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street next to the busy main entrance of the fashionable Metropolitan Hotel, I laid it out as coherently as I could. Everything except the fact that Myrtle had no idea what I was up to. And that (God help me) she could be on a train home as we spoke.

  “So this Straker fellow used to serve in the army?” she asked. “And he’s vanished?”

  “Yes. One of the Bank Street Butchers, a kid named Billy Finn, thought he found him, and now he’s disappeared too. But we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  Nellie gave me her skeptical look. “He sounds pretty guilty to me.”

  “This morning, Elizabeth Brady came to the house. She said she ran into Straker a few months ago. Her story jibed with what Chamberlain told me and Edward, that Straker seemed to be holding a grudge against the man who lost his money. A stockbroker, first name Gerald.”

  “That’s all you know?”

  “He’s a heavy smoker. Like whoever broke in yesterday evening.”

  “And I suppose you want me to find this man?”

  “If you can. It might be a wild goose chase, or not, so be careful. John and I leave for Cassadaga Lake this afternoon. I don’t expect to spend more than a night there, but if you can follow up…”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll have your undying gratitude.” Nellie waved a hand. “How about you buy me dinner at the Hotel Windsor? I’m quite partial to their strip steak.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, thinking I’d try to wheedle some money from Mrs. Rivers when we returned. I had a small allowance that she doled out each week, but it wasn’t even enough to cover the tip at the Windsor’s elegant restaurant.

  “Good luck upstate,” she said. “I’m off to strong-arm Mr. Kirafly. And then I have to write my story on Anne’s murder. The others may not realize yet that we have a repeat killer on our hands, but it won’t take them long. This is going to be big, Harry.”

  “I know. Maybe it’s better. At least people will be on their guard.”

  Nellie snorted. “And panicking. There’ll be heavy pressure on the police to catch the killer. Croker and Hewitt are allergic to bad publicity. They might need a scapegoat.” She smiled grimly. “So let’s both be careful.”

  We parted ways with a quick hug, and two hours later, I boarded a train at Grand Central Depot with John and Mrs. Rivers. Cassadaga Lake was situated in Chautauqua County, in the far southwestern corner of New York State. We planned to take the Hudson River line north to Albany, where we would switch to the New York Central, which passed by the west side of the lake.

  Late afternoon sun poured through the cavernous glass-and-iron space of the train shed, whose ceiling, unbroken by pillar, column or wall, arched more than a hundred feet over our heads. The dozen tracks were serviced by modern raised platforms, which were bustling with tourists, commuters and porters. Grand Central was the pet project of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had snatched up thirty-three acres of land—some of which he outright seized from reluctant owners who’d refused to sell—between Forty-Second and Forty-Eighth Streets, and Lexington and Madison Avenue. One of the buildings in the way was a new Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled, which barely escaped demolition.

  It was said, only half jokingly, that if the law was not on the Commodore’s side, he would simply go to the Legislature and have a new law put in place.

  But I had to admit, the station was impressive. It was like standing inside the airframe of a zeppelin, and I felt a thrill of excitement as we stepped aboard and the steam locomotive gave a great belching whistle, slowly gathering speed as the tracks veered northwest toward the Hudson River.

  We deposited the luggage in adjoining first-class compartments and then settled ourselves in the dining car. John had spent the morning doing basic research on our destination, and over lunch he told us about the curious community called the Cassadaga Lake Free Association.

  “It was founded forty-odd years ago by a group of people interested in mesmerism,” John said, diving into a plate of roast chicken.

  “Mesmerism?” Mrs. Rivers asked. “What on earth is that?”

  “A rather cock-eyed theory that there’s an invisible force surrounding the body which can be manipulated to heal sickness. The fellow who invented it would wave magnets around and induce his subjects to do very silly things. It was all the power of suggestion, really. It’s largely discredited now, but had a strong following for decades.”

  Mrs. Rivers gave a sniff, but I could see she was intrigued. This was a woman who embraced quackery with open arms. When Myrtle and I were little, she would dose us with vile concoctions on a daily basis. She owned no less than three of Dr. Scott’s Electric Belts, swore by Dr. Scott’s Electric Foot Salve, and regularly chugged the contents of a brown bottle with the ominous label Microbe Killer. It claimed to “cure all diseases,” and she refused to renounce it even after Myrtle took it into her chemistry laboratory and discovered that Microbe Killer was in fact diluted sulfuric acid, colored and made palatable with a healthy measure of red wine.

  “Anyway, in 1873, a bunch of them got together and bought twenty acres of land, calling it the Cassadaga Lake Free Association,” John went on. “It became a hub for Spiritualists and Freethinkers. They hold regular séances and claim to communicate with the dead. Rose Rickard is a medium there. I received a cable back just before we left. She’s willing to speak with us about her sister.”

  “I wonder if they were very close,” I said, nibbling on some tasty fried oysters. “And why she didn’t go to Cassadaga after the whole Fox sisters fiasco.”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t welcome her there,” John mused. “Not after her reputation was destroyed.”

  “Poor child,” Mrs. Rivers murmured.

  “I also received a response from that professor at St. John’s College, the one recommended by Arthur. His name is Father Bruno Alighieri. I have an appointment to meet with him on Thursday afternoon. He may be able to shed some light on the grimoire.”

  “And that symbol,” I said. “It has to mean something, to the killer at least.”

  “I did some reading on demonology while I was at the Lenox Library looking into Cassadaga,” John said. “I know you refuse to credit it, Harry, but there have been cases of possession that appear to go far beyond the bounds of simple abnormal psychiatry. Take the case of Jeanne Fery, a twenty-five-year-old Dominican nun. She claimed her father made a pact with the Devil, and that she was inhabited by a demon called Namon. She injured others and herself, and spoke in different regional dialects that she wouldn’t have known. Two exorcisms were conducted, and she got better.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “The 1580s.”

  “Yes, they were very enlightened back then. I’m sure we can take their word for it.”

  John threw his hands up. “Just because Myrtle traumatized you as a child—”

  “You told him about that?” I shot an accusing look at Mrs. Rivers, who shrugged.

  “—you refuse to even consider the possibility that what we’re facing is something…more than a man. Look, when that wind came, Becky screamed at them to close their eyes. Brady obeyed. But what if Straker didn’t? What if he opened himself somehow?”

  “To what?” I stared out the window. We’d left the city behind, and the view now was of thick forest and rolling farmland. The barracks of the West Point Military Academy rose up on the far shore. In the middle of the river, a southbound steamboat trail
ed a perfect v-shaped wake, its bright blue flag snapping in the breeze.

  John pushed a lock of hair from his eyes. He had such long lashes. I’d never really noticed them before.

  “To a fallen angel,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  The conversation quieted for a moment as a waiter came and cleared the plates away. The moment he left, Mrs. Rivers leaned forward.

  “You really should listen to him, Harry,” she said in a stage whisper that was probably audible to the cooks in the next car. “I’ve always thought it quite likely that there are demons walking among us. Remember the Benders!”

  “Not you too.” I crossed my arms defensively and tried not to think about the crow. “I believe you’ve both gone mad.”

  “What about the brimstone?” John persisted. “The backwards Latin, which is a hallmark of diabolical pacts? When they burned Urbain Grandier at the stake for witchcraft in 1634, it was one of the chief pieces of evidence against him.”

  I stared at John. “Are you actually siding with the Inquisition?” I asked.

  “That’s not the point. Alright then, how about the chain? And the fingerprints? They were burned into her throat, Harry! I saw it.”

  “Oh my,” Mrs. Rivers said faintly, raising a hand to her neck.

  “Well, I can’t explain those—”

  “Aha!”

  “—yet. But I will.”

  We glared at each other for a moment. Some of the other diners had turned to look at us.

  Mrs. Rivers made a soothing noise. “I have an idea!” she said with forced cheer. “How about a lovely game of whist?”

  “Fine,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Fine,” John said, beaming his brightest, fakest smile at me.

  So we played cards until Albany, and both got trounced by the ruthless card sharp that lurked beneath Mrs. Rivers’ benign old lady façade.

  The New York Central train pulled into the tiny station at Cassadaga early the next morning. John coaxed a farmer into giving us a ride into town on his wagon, and I think half my teeth were loose by the time we finally arrived at the Grand Hotel. Its name was a bit of an exaggeration as the hotel looked like nothing so much as a large, whitewashed barn. But it was situated near the shore of the lake and surrounded by tall elm trees that cast welcome shade across the front porch.