“Amelia said you were the one who planned the escape,” Elizabeth said as they crossed the street near the park.
Jonas grunted his assent, wondering if the thing Amelia had described seeing on the footpath was still there. He suppressed a shudder. Amelia’s description of the shade, with its reaching hand and eager face, had been enough to make him vow never to go anywhere near that spot.
“How did you come up with such an idea?”
The words were slightly breathless. Jonas looked down. Elizabeth trotted along beside him, trying to keep up with his long strides. He slowed, and she flashed him an appreciative smile as she asked, “How did you know what to do?”
Jonas felt himself thawing in the face of her determined good nature. None of this was Elizabeth’s fault. It was unfair to blame her. “We have a friend who does costumes for a theater troupe,” he said. “We ran with the same gang for a while several years ago. He’s a genius with things like that—he can paint an entirely new face on you if you need one. I asked him what to do, and he got me the supplies.”
They climbed aboard the northbound streetcar at Broadway. This early in the morning, it was all but empty. Fifteen minutes later, they stepped off less than a block from Grand Central Depot.
In contrast to the streetcar, the depot was bustling. Jonas led Elizabeth across the shining marble floor and over to the ticket counter.
A clerk looked up at their approach. “How may I help you?”
“The lady is headed to Chicago,” Jonas said.
“Alone?” He peered at Elizabeth. “You’ll want at least second-class,” the man said, “for a lady traveling unaccompanied. Wouldn’t do to put her in third with all the trash.” He eyed Jonas as if he expected him to argue.
“How much?” Jonas asked.
“That will be twenty-three dollars.”
Gritting his teeth, Jonas peeled off a large portion of the stack of bills and handed it to the man, who handed over a wide yellow ticket in return.
“Train leaves in half an hour,” he said. “Second-class waiting room is that way.” He pointed.
In the waiting room, Jonas bought coffee and a pair of sweet rolls. By the time they finished, the train was boarding.
Elizabeth gave him an unsteady smile as he helped her up the steps. “I suppose this is it.”
Jonas wanted to say something encouraging. This would be well beyond anything she’d been prepared for. He plucked the remainder of the bills from the wallet and handed them to her. “Here. You’ll need to eat on the train, and something to see you to your friend’s house.”
Elizabeth blinked, then took the money with a nod. “There aren’t words for what you’ve done,” she said, a catch in her voice. She folded the bills carefully into a pocket. “You and Amelia both. Thank you.”
The whistle blew again, and the train began to move. Elizabeth allowed the conductor to take her arm, and a moment later she appeared in one of the windows, waving.
Jonas raised one hand in farewell and jingled the coins left in his pocket with the other. He watched as the train pulled away, not precisely sorry to have helped her but unable to avoid counting the cost.
32
After the concentrated terror surrounding Elizabeth’s escape, Andrew was almost relieved to wake the following morning to the mere constant, buzzing anxiety of the previous weeks. Julia Weaver remained hidden from them, her captor remained unidentified, and the date of Amelia’s own departure remained nonnegotiable.
It felt positively manageable.
Andrew answered a knock at his office door that evening to find Jonas standing in the hallway.
“What’s that?” Andrew asked, nodding at the bundle Jonas held under one arm.
“Boy’s clothes in Amelia’s size, and some theatrical makeup,” Jonas said, thrusting it at him.
Andrew must have looked skeptical, because Jonas’s tone hardened. “She’s done it before. I don’t know that we’ll use them, but better to have them than not. I’m trying to create some options. Just stow them for me.”
Andrew accepted the clothes, despite his doubts about their utility. Even as slight and fine-boned as she was, he had a hard time imagining anyone ever mistaking Amelia for a boy. Beneath the ragged mop of hair, her face was distinctly feminine. Her eyes, especially. And her mouth was— He cut himself off, suddenly uncomfortable.
Andrew hid the bundle in the storage room and left his office, headed for the infirmary, where he had little enough time to think about things best left unconsidered. Six patients—all from the same ward as the woman earlier in the week—had come down with some sort of ague. Three were quite ill.
Another eight sickened the following day, and Andrew spent a sleepless night tending to them.
When he stumbled back to his office the next morning, he found a thick envelope from the coroner’s office waiting on his desk—the copy of Blounton’s autopsy results he had requested. He paged through them wearily, but they told him nothing he hadn’t already known.
The body had been spotted by a passing boat some two hundred yards north of the asylum dock, which meant it had gone into the water near the north end of the island. Depressed fractures in the area of the suture of the occipital and parietal bones, Andrew read, rubbing the area at the back of his own head. Water in the lungs. Cause of death: drowning.
Perhaps Blounton slipped and hit his head on the seawall as he went in. Or perhaps he’d been attacked. Based on the report, there was no way to know. Andrew sighed and tossed the report in a drawer, just as Jonas knocked at his door again. Amelia was at his side, her face pale and strained.
Alarmed, Andrew swung the door wide and ushered them inside.
“She can’t stay in five,” Jonas muttered to Andrew he passed.
Amelia paced the office like a tiger in a too-small cage as she relayed the things she’d seen when she touched the women in the incurables ward. A harrowing childbirth. A fire in a crowded tenement. Several near strangulations. Beatings at the hands of mothers, fathers, strangers, lovers. Her voice was strained, her face pale as she ticked off their names.
Andrew shot Jonas a horrified look over her head and hurriedly wrote out a transfer to ward four. Jonas crouched beside her chair, speaking in a low, gentle voice. Whatever friction there had been between them seemed to have evaporated.
“They’ve all been like that?” Andrew asked.
Amelia nodded, her eyes tired.
“But you don’t get a vision every time you touch someone?”
“No. Thank god.” She shuddered.
“And these are definitely memories, not futures?”
Amelia nodded again, frowning slightly. “They feel different. More like with Mara. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m sure these are things that have already happened.”
Jonas looked thoughtful. “I think I understand what’s happening. Your power changed when you nearly died, and now death is what you’re seeing in others. All these memories you’re seeing, they’re times when someone almost died. If someone hasn’t had such an experience, you don’t see anything when you touch them. And those flashes of the future you’re getting, they’re happening when you touch people who are at risk of death—Mrs. Franklin, Elizabeth. When they’re in the valley of the shadow, if you will.”
They looked at him.
Jonas waved a hand. “Yes, I know. That was overly dramatic. But accurate, nonetheless. That means—”
“It means there’s no point to my going around trying to read people,” Amelia said. She laughed, and the hollow despair in it made Andrew’s heart twist. “I’ve been making myself see all those horrible things for no good reason.”
There was an appalled silence in the room. Guilt stabbed at Andrew’s chest. He’d kept her here. He was responsible for what she was enduring. And it seemed it was for nothing.
“We’re going to have to try another way,” Jonas said finally. He looked at Andrew. “That scrap of paper you found in the desk. Do you have it?
”
Andrew blinked at the change in subject. “It’s in my rooms at the boardinghouse.” Hidden in the middle of a book on diseases of the kidney, in fact, and buried in a box of similar tomes. He’d initially kept it in his shaving case but found himself imagining outlandish scenarios in which it was discovered—by whom was unclear, even in his own mind. He’d moved it in the middle of the night during a fit of paranoia. In the light of day, the precaution seemed foolish.
But he hadn’t moved it back.
“Could you bring it with you in the morning?”
“Why?”
Jonas gestured to Amelia. “I want both of us to have another look at the handwriting before we start searching the doctors’ apartments.”
Andrew gaped at him. “You cannot be serious.”
“It’s the obvious next step,” Amelia said. “We need proof. Letters, records of payments—anything that proves someone here knows about Julia or Elizabeth.”
This was madness. “You’ll be caught,” Andrew protested. “Surely there’s another way.”
Jonas snorted. “I suppose one of us could stand in the Octagon and shout accusations. Anyone who looks confused probably isn’t involved.”
“We could go to the police,” Andrew said. “Or the press.”
“With what?” Amelia’s voice had steadied. “We think there may be more women hidden, but we’re certain of only two. We haven’t found Julia, and as far as anyone knows, Elizabeth is dead. We have a suicide, a psychic, and a scrap of paper. That’s not proof of anything. There’s no reason for anyone to believe us. This is the only way. And we won’t get caught.”
Andrew had the distinct impression she was now avoiding his eyes.
“We’re not precisely amateurs,” Amelia concluded.
33
Jonas had forgiven her, and ward four was almost pleasant after her brief sojourn in ward five. Nevertheless, Amelia rose the following morning with a churning stomach and a sullen headache prodding behind her eyes. Their years on the street had left them with a great many unorthodox skills, but it had been a long time since she and Jonas tested their housebreaking prowess.
The stakes were unutterably high. Disguise or no, Jonas would never be able to sneak her away from the asylum later if they got caught breaking into the doctors’ apartments. He’d be fired—or jailed. And they’d toss Amelia in isolation and put a nurse in front of the door.
She pushed her breakfast aside—one of the other women snatched up the bowl before it stopped moving—and waited for someone to bring her to Cavanaugh’s office.
Midmorning, however, there was a flurry of activity. The patients were lined up, and nurses began dividing them into groups. Amelia was waiting her turn when Jonas appeared near the door. He conferred with a nurse, then beckoned to her. Amelia followed him into the hallway and stepped into chaos.
“It’s the fever,” he explained as they walked. “Another dozen patients came down with it overnight. Too many for the infirmary. They’re turning ward four into a quarantine unit, trying to keep it from spreading further.”
As they maneuvered through the hall, harried nurses rushed past. Carts piled with linens sat outside the wards while strings of orderlies carried folded cots through the hallways, looking like ants hauling grains of rice.
If the second floor was pandemonium, the third was eerily quiet, which allowed the sound of a muttered curse to filter toward them from the hallway ahead. Amelia and Jonas glanced at each other, their steps slowing as they rounded a corner. Klafft’s assistant, Connolly, stood outside the door to the doctor’s apartment, struggling to maintain his hold on a large, unwieldy carton as he fumbled with the key. His burden began to tilt to one side, a series of muffled clinks sounding from within. Connolly dropped the key with another oath and grabbed at the box, raising one knee beneath it. This done, he looked down at the fallen key.
“Hang on,” Jonas called as the secretary began to reach for it.
Connolly looked up as they reached him.
“Let me.” Jonas bent to retrieve the key, then unlocked the door and swung it open. Amelia had time for a glimpse of gleaming wood and velvet curtains before Connolly brushed past with a mumbled thanks and kicked the door closed behind him.
“I wonder…” she said.
Jonas finished the thought in a low voice as they began walking again. “Where Klafft gets his money? I saw it, too. That furniture looked expensive. He wears good-quality suits, and he’s paying for a private secretary.”
They’d almost reached Cavanaugh’s office when Klafft’s voice came from behind them. Amelia turned. He and Connolly were stepping out of the apartment and heading for the stairs.
Amelia exchanged a wordless nod with Jonas as the two men disappeared from view. They couldn’t ignore the chance to have a look at the good doctor’s unaccountably luxurious quarters.
Amelia tried to slow her pounding heart. An air of unreality settled over her as they turned back toward Klafft’s apartment, Jonas scanning the hallway in both directions. They were really going to do this. She slid a hairpin from her pocket as they neared the door, her eyes already fastened on the lock.
They were no more than three paces away when two things happened. Perhaps twenty feet ahead, Lawrence’s apartment door swung open. And from around the corner just beyond him, a pair of voices approached. One, meek, was unintelligible. The other, strident, was that of Mrs. Brennan.
Lawrence stepped into the corridor and swung the door shut behind him.
He did not lock it.
Amelia plucked at Jonas’s sleeve and glided past Klafft’s door.
Lawrence passed without looking at them.
The hectoring voice ahead grew louder.
Amelia’s hand reached out, as if of its own volition, to turn the knob on Lawrence’s door. Then they were inside the apartment, and the door clicked shut at what must have been the same instant Mrs. Brennan rounded the corner.
Amelia pressed her forehead against the wooden panel, hardly daring to breathe, Jonas standing rigid behind her. One heartbeat. Two. Amelia could have sworn she felt when the woman passed by the door.
She and Jonas shared a relieved smile. Amelia turned, then blinked in surprise.
Notebooks. Everywhere, stacks of notebooks. They covered every surface and lined the walls in ragged towers—several of them almost as tall as she. Some were pocket-size booklets of the sort used to hold lists and reminders. Others were sturdy hard-covered journals, their ribbon page markers frayed and faded. One long shelf on the opposite wall was crammed with wide volumes, all dark blue bindings and blank spines. The rooms were full of dust and the musty scent of damp and old paper.
Jonas ducked into the bedroom.
“More of the same,” he reported as he emerged.
Amelia lifted the topmost book from one of the stacks. The date inside its cover indicated Lawrence had begun using it some six years before. She fanned through the pages. A half-drafted essay on the efficacy of a solution of cocaine as a cure for melancholy. A list of temperature readings in ward three during the month of July 1888. Patients’ names, followed by indecipherable strings of abbreviations and symbols—some sort of personal shorthand. Amelia could make nothing of it.
Jonas held up another book from a stack on the other side of the room. “A description of every meal served at the asylum over the course of a week.” He snapped the book shut with a derisive sound. “What in hell does Lawrence think he’s accomplishing by recording such rubbish?”
Amelia looked around again and conceded defeat. “This is pointless. Finding anything useful in this mess would be like hunting a needle in a field of haystacks. Blindfolded.”
“It isn’t as though he’s much of a suspect, in any case,” Jonas agreed. “Let’s move on to Klafft.”
Amelia replaced the book on top of the stack and returned to the door. She pressed her ear to the wood and heard nothing, then eased it open an inch and peered out. The hallway was clear. In a moment
they had slipped back out of the apartment and closed the door.
Before they could turn, Klafft appeared at the other end of the hallway, walked past them without a glance, unlocked his apartment, and entered, closing the door behind him.
Amelia exchanged a somber glance with Jonas. If they’d gone for Klafft’s apartment as they planned, they would have been caught. Their instincts were rusty. It was only the merest coincidence that had saved them. They’d be fools to count on it happening again.
34
Amelia loitered behind Cavanaugh as he and Dr. Lawrence examined Mrs. Lattimore, a querulous-looking woman of about forty. While Cavanaugh took the woman’s pulse, Lawrence nodded and scribbled, never looking up from his notebook. He listened with every appearance of interest to the torrent of gibberish coming from her.
What could the elderly doctor possibly be writing? The notebooks in his apartment were full of bizarre details, but they were at least coherent. Mrs. Lattimore mixed words with her nonsense now and again, but nothing was worth recording. Amelia leaned forward, hoping for a glimpse of the pages, then hastily moved back as the woman threw her a dark look. No point in antagonizing her. The patients assigned to ward six tended to be docile, but there were exceptions.
Cavanaugh muttered something soothing, and Mrs. Lattimore subsided. Amelia’s eyes settled on his hand as he held the woman’s wrist in a gentle grip. His square nails were tidy, as usual, and the shirt cuff was sharp and clean. How did he always manage that, working in this place? She glanced up and caught him studying her face. He looked chagrined as their eyes met, and he shifted his gaze back down to the pocket watch he held. Amelia looked away, then back again. He looked tired. She’d barely seen him since the fever had taken hold. Jonas said he was sleeping in his office, spending almost all his waking hours tending to sick patients. No one had died—yet—but all the staff were on edge.
A Deadly Fortune Page 18
