“Of course. It’s my idea, after all.”
She smiled at him, and in response he reached up and brushed back a piece of her hair. “Do try to stay out of trouble.”
“Why do you even bother asking her that?” Oliver called.
Hetty turned, having nearly forgotten her friends were still there.
Oliver sighed, gesturing for Benjy to follow him. “I have things to do, places to be, and a house to clean. Although . . .” What could be called a smile made an appearance across his face. “It’s good to see you listened to my advice.”
“Dare I ask what he meant?” Hetty remarked as Oliver swept out of the room.
“It was mostly nonsense.” Benjy leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I’ll tell you later.”
When Hetty turned to her friends, a bit of her smile lingered even at the sight of their smirks.
“Go on.” Hetty steeled herself for the teasing she deserved. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Best get it out of the way now.”
“To say what?” Penelope asked innocently. “Do you think we spend our time talking about your relationship?”
“Or that we made bets,” Darlene added.
“And that Maybelle owes us five dollars?” Penelope said.
Both succumbed to laughter that only grew louder the more Hetty scowled at them.
“I think I missed some very interesting events.” George peered into the room. He held his daughter facing outward, so the baby also did her fair share of peering. “I saw Oliver just a moment ago. When did he get up early enough to come to church?”
“He came to fetch Benjy,” Darlene said, wiping a tear from her eye. “Something about dead bodies in his cellar.”
“Is that all?” George grumbled. “That’s not news.”
“Thomas is coming home,” Hetty added. “I don’t know when, but it must be soon enough to have Oliver cleaning the house.”
“Well, I’ll be—”
“George,” Darlene cut in. “Just because the baby can’t hear doesn’t mean you’re going to swear around her!”
“All I was going to say is that I’m happy as a clam,” he said rather innocently, which got a snort from Hetty.
“Come on, Hetty, you know more than anyone Oliver has been a bit much lately. He’d be deep in cups more often if you hadn’t bullied him into performing funerals, and getting tangled up with your murder things.”
“Murder things?” Penelope chuckled.
“What else would you call it?” George said as Darlene shook her head.
“George,” Hetty sighed, “you have quite the way with words. You say all the right things, but your tone makes it hard to take you seriously.”
“That’s right.” George nodded, before he stopped. “Hey!”
Darlene took the baby from him. “Sweetheart, Hetty might need your help. She needs a list of Degray members to find out who killed Charlie.”
This distracted him. “You do? Why didn’t you ask before? Stars, even Benjy was asking me things and this didn’t come up.”
“He was only asking to find out if you murdered Charlie,” Hetty said. “Both of you were on the suspect list for a few reasons, but mostly because of the little gathering at your house the other night.”
Darlene and George exchanged a glance. After a long moment they shrugged, hardly bothered.
“Can’t blame you,” Darlene said. “I had a number of violent thoughts over that unpleasant situation.”
“Is this why you ran out the other night,” George asked of Penelope, “and were acting stranger than usual? I’m flattered at the thought.”
“I’m sure you are,” Hetty drawled. “Can you help with a list of names from E.C. Degray?”
George shook his head. “Don’t quite have the access. I’m a new member.”
“That’s wonderful to hear,” Hetty said impatiently. “Do you know who can help?”
“Clarence Loring, but you know how he is about rules. He won’t help you. And most of the others probably won’t point out the moon to you. You might have to sneak in.” George started to chortle. “But not even you, Hetty, with all your talent, can manage that one!”
“Why not?” Penelope asked.
Hetty answered, not wanting George to gleefully point it out instead: “Degray’s headquarters has wards to keep women out.”
Instead of being discouraged, Penelope snapped her fingers. “That’s no trouble. That’s how we’ll get in!”
LITTLE HORSE
30
“THIS DOESN’T SIT RIGHT with me,” Hetty whispered as they lingered on the corner opposite E.C. Degray’s headquarters. People walking past them scarcely gave them a glance, but the longer they stayed there, the more notice they’d gain.
“I never said it was a good idea.” Penelope took out a tiny bristle brush and dipped it into a small tin. Penelope ran the waxy dark red color along her lips, rubbing them together when she finished. “If it was easy, we’d already be inside.”
“I told you, I can break those wards from a distance,” Hetty said. “There’s no need for this foolishness.”
Penelope checked her reflection. “You do all sorts of outrageous things every day, but this bothers you?”
“There are other ways,” Hetty insisted.
“This is simpler.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“And it’s the only plan that will work, unless you can come up with another one. Before I— Wait, here’s a likely victim now!”
Penelope tucked her mirror away and sashayed over to the man approaching the club’s front door. She called out to him with a giggle. The man turned, and his leer was only slightly worse than the obvious way his eyes swept across Penelope’s figure.
“Why, aren’t you a pretty one,” he said, tipping back his hat.
Hetty’s skin crawled, but Penelope only simpered, fluttering her eyelashes. “And aren’t you”—she added a rasp to her voice—“a handsome one, looking all important and such.” She daringly brushed a hand along his shoulder as if to remove a bit of dirt. “Where’re you off to?”
“Just the club. Important business.”
Penelope pouted. “That sounds dreadfully dull.”
“It wouldn’t be, with some company.”
“Oh, I’ve never been inside. Isn’t it boring?”
“Not at all. I’m sure you won’t find it so.” He grabbed at Penelope’s waist, pressing her close to him. “Come along and I’ll show you.”
“What about my friend?”
“What friend?”
Penelope spun around to look for Hetty, but it was a fruitless effort.
The moment this farce began, Hetty had pulled a glamour around herself. She was standing right next to them, impatiently waiting for this nonsense to reach its conclusion.
“What about you?” Penelope said, recovering. “You’re not going to get into trouble?”
“We’ll go through the back. No one would even know you’re there.”
The man led Penelope around the back of the building, his hand firmly planted on her waist.
Hetty kept right on their heels as they passed through the side entrance.
No wards stopped her this time, and Penelope’s plan managed to work out perfectly.
Though not entirely.
Penelope was still ensnared in a trap of her own creation, but her friend never got into trouble she couldn’t get herself out of.
Hetty crept along the room until she reached a door. Peering through the crack along its frame, she saw bright light illuminating a series of tables where games of chance and fortune were in play.
Men lounged at the tables, ranging from tradesmen uncomfortably stuffed into Sunday suits to well-dressed men of leisure. There were no women anywhere on the floor, and even the servers were all men. While they floated indifferently throughout the room, some leaned over to whisper suggestions to certain patrons as they poured drinks.
Hetty spotted a set of stairs in the
back of the room. She chewed on her lip as she considered her chances. There must be spells about the room to dampen magic. She could deal with those, but risked drawing attention that created more problems than it solved.
There had to be another set of stairs, she thought. Otherwise she’d have to—
A gentle thud interrupted her thoughts.
In the opposite room, the man they used as their admission ticket lay stretched out on the floor, his lips stained with dark red.
Dragging the back of her hand along her mouth, Penelope stepped carefully over the man and whispered, “Hetty, are you there?”
“Here I am,” Hetty said as she reappeared. She nudged the man with her foot. He didn’t move, but he did start to snore.
“That wasn’t normal lipstick, I take it?”
“A little something of my own creation. I had some hours at the shop and some leftover herbs.” Penelope puffed herself up like a cat that surprised a canary. “He should sleep for hours and not remember a thing.”
“Well, let’s give him a little help with that. Look for a bottle of spirits,” Hetty said. “If anyone wonders why this man’s dead asleep on the floor, a bottle of booze in his hand will make a convincing cover story.”
“Will it work?”
“Hopefully. There’s plenty going on here tonight. There’s gambling in the next room. A man engaging in some carousing should not look amiss.”
Something crashed behind them.
They froze, listening. Moments rolled past with no doors opening or voices calling angrily at them.
“It’s probably nothing,” Hetty whispered. “But let’s find this list.”
With the din in the main room covering the sound of their movements, Hetty and Penelope crept through the adjacent rooms looking for the orderly parts of the club. There were a few smaller rooms filled with plush couches and tables, but it wasn’t until they reached the end of the hall that they found anything proving this club to be more than a collection of vices and sin.
There were two doors. The one on the right was locked and had Isaac Baxter’s name on it. The one on the left had four names neatly lined up in a column:
Laurence Freemont, Vice President
Sam Roberts, Lore Keeper
Clarence Loring, Secretary
Charlie Richardson, Treasurer
“Well, isn’t that funny, Charlie was the treasurer,” Hetty said.
“He was always good with money,” Penelope whispered.
“Good at taking and losing, but not keeping it.”
They entered a room with four desks placed close enough that they’d all have little privacy. While the tops of all the desks held an assortment of papers and books and the like, one desk, while no less cluttered, had the distinct appearance of disuse.
Charlie’s desk.
Hetty passed it. “Clarence is the secretary. He would have a membership list. I’ll check the drawers. You search—”
Penelope stood next to Charlie’s desk, the bit of fading sunlight highlighting a quizzical expression on her face.
“What’s wrong?” Hetty asked.
“Something started glowing on this desk when you passed it.”
Hetty forgot all about the list as she spun around. In one swift move, she pulled Penelope behind her. Nothing happened. The more Hetty stared at the glass bowl that was the source of the glowing, she realized there was a different sort of spell in place.
“This is a watcher,” Hetty whispered. “It will tell the caster if anything has been disturbed. This sort of thing could have been placed there by someone wishing to respect Charlie’s passing.”
“But it wasn’t, was it?”
“No.” Hetty tapped the band around her neck. “It wasn’t.”
The Herdsman took form next to her, joining the two of them as if she was the third member of their cohort. With a sweep of her staff, the woman made of stars struck at the glass bowl and encased it with a blue light. The bowl kept glowing, but its effect would spread no further.
With this fixed into place, Hetty drew the Hare star sigil on the desk. Thin pale gold lines sprang from the sigil, spanning the desk until they arranged themselves and pointed to the topmost desk drawer. Hetty opened it and found that the spell spilled onto a small wooden box. The size of a small book, it was covered in an array of sigils so tightly packed that the individual ones were hard to make out. Warning enchantments, protection charms, alarms . . . any of the above could be there.
While the density of such enchantments was overwhelming, they were done by someone with only basic skill.
With a gesture to the Herdsman, the spell reached over and tapped the box. The sigils vanished at once—leaving behind a very plain-looking box.
A plain box with a tiny keyhole on its side.
Hetty smiled.
Before they arrived at the club that evening, Hetty returned to her home to change into something more practical. As she jammed hairpins into her hair, she saw Charlie’s key in the small tin. Without thinking twice, she tucked the key into her pocket.
Setting the box on the desk, Hetty inserted the key into the keyhole, satisfied that it fit perfectly. She twisted it to the left. It didn’t budge. She twisted it right, heard a click, and then . . .
The box sprang open.
Papers peered up at her from inside. Receipts, mostly, with a number of stubs for plays, clippings from a newspaper, and pages torn out of a notebook with numbers scribbled on them. Near the bottom of the stack, in the neatest handwriting possible, was a short list of names. And there was the money. Tucked at the bottom and rolled up in bills.
“Look at that!” Penelope whistled as Hetty unfurled the money. “What was he saving it for?”
Isaac Baxter and Clarence had both hinted at Charlie’s massive debts. Hints that were seemingly corroborated by Marianne’s report of strange men approaching her home, even going as far as breaking in.
Yet if Charlie had such mounting debts, why had he held on to this money? There was nearly a thousand dollars in here, something should be done with it.
Hetty sorted through more papers until she found a small book with a list of nothing but numbers. Some pages had the corner folded over with a word or letter marking the page. The only one she felt confident of was the page corner marked with Boxing. That page was filled with numbers. One column was a series of dates, starting in early March and continuing every week since, separated by columns of wins and losses. Some were scratched out and others circled, and the numbers grew bigger the further down the list she went.
If Hetty went through and tallied these numbers, which would be bigger? The wins or the losses?
Hetty turned the page over, but instead of more numbers all she found was a folded slip of paper. She unfolded it and scribbled inside was the following: You owe me for last week’s match. But the handwriting wasn’t Charlie’s.
It was Benjy’s.
As Hetty stared at the familiar loops and points of the letters, she saw the stuffy boxing venue and remembered the talk of the matches that had occurred since the previous winter. Benjy had known about Charlie’s betting and of course Benjy had been taking part in the matches. But he’d never said how closely it was all linked. Surely Benjy knew better than to let Charlie place bets on him. Didn’t he?
Then Hetty remembered how persuasive Charlie could be. He tricked her into making a full wardrobe of clothes as a gift and then sold the garments to strangers. If he could trick her, it was possible to trick Benjy as well.
Well, this was no time to dwell on such matters, she thought. Hetty returned her attention to the box’s contents and found another small piece of paper. It had today’s date on it, along with Benjy’s name and his Irish combatant. There was an impossibly large number scribbled on the bottom, and a circle around Benjy’s name with a single word in Charlie’s handwriting: Falls.
Hetty stared at it for a long time before she fully understood that last word.
“A boxing match,” she
said, gripping the desk’s edges. She remembered Benjy mentioning to her about following up on a lead related to Charlie’s betting. Not a lie, but not the truth. “There’s a boxing match tonight.”
“There is?” Penelope’s voice floated from half a world away. She held some of the papers Hetty had discarded, but lowered them as Hetty spoke.
“Benjy is boxing tonight. He’s in this match that Charlie placed a great deal of money on. Enough it could mean the worst depending on how it goes.”
Hetty shoved all the papers and stubs back into the box. She set it back on the table, drew the first sigil that came to mind, and shrank the box down small enough to fit into her pocket. “I have to go there. Now.”
“Hetty.” Penelope blocked her path. “We can’t just rush out of here. It’ll cause a stir. Didn’t you come to find the membership list? Without that, how will you find Charlie’s murderer?”
“Oh, who cares about that!”
“Hetty! You can’t mean that. Charlie was our friend. You and Benjy—”
“We helped him, and we’re still helping him even as I keep finding evidence that suggests he only returned the favor when it suited him! Now my husband’s in a boxing match—a crooked boxing match—because of that man. Maybe Benjy’s doing it for the money, maybe he got himself tricked, I don’t know! If anything happens to him, I’m going to find a way to make Charlie pay.”
“But,” Penelope protested, “he’s dead.”
“Yes,” Hetty said, “but I’ve never been afraid of breaking taboos.”
RIVER
31
AS HETTY AND PENELOPE made their way through the press of people, Hetty heard snatches of conversation swirling around about the match and the bets riding on it. It was her only clue that they’d arrived in the right place. Although it was the same space Hetty had visited just days earlier, nothing felt familiar about the saloon that housed the boxing match. People packed the room to the brim leaving no space to even jut out an elbow. The crowd was different. It was still a mix of people of different means, but as Hetty and Penelope pushed their way closer, the people around them went from poor laborers to wealthy luminaries. There were quite a few white faces in the room. Hetty had not seen any of those at the previous match. Not only did they all appear to be men, they were arranged together in a neat bloc on the other side of the boxing ring. There was no barrier in place that Hetty could see, and no mixing in the crowd overall.
The Conductors Page 31
