Winslow sat behind the front desk, seeming no worse for wear after his ordeal of the other night. Amelia’s stomach gave a queasy lurch when he looked at her. He wouldn’t recognize her. He couldn’t possibly. She looked nothing like the dirty boy he’d seen two days before. Amelia lifted her chin and flashed him her most charming smile.
He blinked and smiled back. “Good morning, miss. May I be of assistance?”
She offered her hand. “I am Miss Matthew. I have an appointment with Dr. Andrew Cavanaugh.”
Something flashed across his face.
Amelia tensed. Surely Andrew couldn’t have been discovered already.
“May I ask the nature of that appointment? Dr. Cavanaugh didn’t mention he was expecting you.”
“I’m interviewing to be his new assistant.” She’d come up with the excuse in the cab. Klafft had a personal assistant. Why not Andrew?
Winslow looked confounded for a moment, then recovered enough to stand. “This way, please.”
Andrew’s door was half-open. Winslow knocked on the jamb as he poked his head inside. “Dr. Cavanaugh. Your appointment is here.”
There was a confused pause from within.
Amelia tensed. She couldn’t let him say he had no appointment. She stepped around Winslow and into Andrew’s line of sight.
Andrew rose from behind the desk, a puzzled crease in his forehead.
“Dr. Cavanaugh, so lovely to see you again.” She stepped into his office and extended her hand. His eyes widened, and his jaw dropped. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she went on, before he could give away the ruse. He continued to stand there with his mouth hanging open. “For my interview. For the secretarial position.”
He shook himself. “Ah. Yes. Miss…”
“Matthew,” she supplied.
“Miss Matthew. Of course.” His voice was hearty and overloud. The whites showed around the edges of his eyes. He took the hand she offered and held it beat too long, as if he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing.
The touch kindled a warmth in Amelia’s chest, wholly inappropriate to the moment. She’d had no time to dwell on what had happened between them the last time she was in this office, but now she felt her cheeks warming as his eyes roved over her face.
She gave his fingers a squeeze, and he started as though it were an electrical shock, tearing his gaze from hers.
He cleared his throat and stepped back. “Thank you, Winslow.”
The instant after the door closed behind the clerk, Andrew whispered, “Amelia, my god.” He took her in as if he were certain she was a mirage. “What are you doing here? Is Jonas—” He stopped, evidently seeing something in her face.
“He was alive when I left him,” she said, not trusting herself with more. “His… Someone is with him.” She went on before he could press her further. There was a stack of books sitting beside a box on his desk. “What’s this?”
He grimaced as he gestured for her to sit. “I’ve ruined everything.” He outlined the morning’s events. “I’m so sorry,” he said as he concluded. “I’m finished here at the asylum.”
Amelia reached into her bag for the list. “Then we don’t have any time to waste.”
She explained her discovery, then called out the names as Andrew found their files. Within a few minutes, they had all six lying open on the desk.
They spotted it at the same time.
“The handwriting on the commitment orders,” Amelia said.
“The same person wrote each of them.” Andrew confirmed. “I would never have noticed while they were all mixed in with the others, but once you see them together, it’s unmistakable.” He disappeared into the storage room and returned a moment later holding another file. “One of the discharges, for comparison.”
The writing was different.
Andrew looked at the six files on the desk, then back at the storage room. Amelia followed his gaze.
“I wonder how many more there are,” she said.
“Only one way to know.” Andrew’s voice was grim.
Half an hour’s work resulted in eleven more files stacked on the desk. They looked at each other for a moment, somber, before Amelia plucked a clean sheet of paper from the tray on Andrew’s desk and began writing, looking between the files and the page as she went.
“What are you doing?” Andrew asked.
“I want to see the complete list, and I want to look at the dates.” Amelia sat back when she was done, pointing at the first name on the new list. “There. That’s the earliest of the bunch.”
Andrew peered over her shoulder. “Five years ago. Harcourt wasn’t here then. So he may well not be involved after all. But thanks to me, he won’t listen if we go to him.” Andrew dropped into his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What are we going to do?”
Amelia stared at the list until the black lines blurred before her eyes, then blinked and turned away. “I don’t know.”
54
He was so thirsty. Jonas tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids were made of lead. He licked his lips. His tongue was cotton, his throat full of sand. He coughed. It hurt. Everything hurt.
There was a strangled gasp from beside him, and he tried to look. Turning his head proved too much, but he did manage to force his eyes open.
Sidney. Sidney was there. Jonas tried to smile.
Sidney reached out a hand and cupped his cheek. Something swept over his face, a look of joy so profound Jonas wondered with a faint sort of puzzlement what could possibly have caused it.
“The fever,” Sidney said, awe in his tone. “It’s broken.” His voice cracked on the last word.
Oh. He’d been ill. That explained why he was so tired. He tried to ask for a drink. The word came out covered in rust and barely a whisper.
Sidney leapt to his feet and disappeared, returning with a glass. Jonas’s eyes fastened on it.
He couldn’t sit up, but Sidney put a hand behind his head and helped him upright enough to put the glass to his lips. The lukewarm liquid trickling into his mouth was the finest thing he’d ever tasted. After a few swallows, Jonas lay back, exhausted.
Sidney said something, but sleep was already pulling him back under.
Shouting roused him to a sort of semiliquid awareness. Sidney was gone, but his voice, the words tumbling over one another in a sort of laughing-sobbing rush, drifted from the other room. “Amelia! Can you hear me? Are you there? He’s awake. The fever is gone!”
There was more. Jonas tried to listen, but the fog rolled back over him and carried him away again.
55
Amelia picked up the list and stood. “I’m going to check these against the admissions ledger. It probably won’t do any good, but I can’t think of anything else to try. Perhaps it will tell us something.”
Andrew nodded without looking at her.
Dr. Lawrence appeared at the top of the steps just as Amelia stepped into the hallway, and as if her body had made the decision without her, she turned in his direction. The faint outline of an idea began to form.
He looked up as she approached, his apartment door ajar.
“Dr. Lawrence, I—” She stopped as he blinked at her in complete confusion. She nearly smacked herself on the forehead. He had no idea who the strange woman speaking to him was. “I’m Dr. Cavanaugh’s new assistant,” she said, hoping he had not heard about Andrew’s firing. “I—that is, Dr. Cavanaugh has a question about your notebooks.”
“My notebooks?”
“Yes. I know you record a great deal of information about the patients. Do you keep notes on those who die?”
“Yes, of course.”
A faint tendril of hope sprouted in her chest. “Do you happen to record details of the discoveries? Specifically, can you identify which of the doctors officially pronounced each death?”
“Certainly. I keep track in case I have questions later.”
Amelia struggled to keep her tone level as her heart began to beat faster. “Might Dr. Cavanaugh and
I be allowed to go through your notebooks to compile those details?”
Dr. Lawrence looked pleased. “You’re welcome to any of my notes. That’s precisely why I’ve kept them. But,” he went on, “if it’s specifically deaths you’re interested in, there’s no need for the notebooks. You can check the ledgers.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My notebooks are daily records of my observations,” he said, “but I keep a separate log of each patient’s admission and eventual outcome.”
He moved into the apartment, and Amelia watched through the open door, barely breathing, as he crossed to the shelf of bound volumes she’d noticed—and ignored—during the aborted search of his quarters. He pulled two of the thick books from the end of the row and returned to the door.
“Back when I first arrived here at the asylum,” he explained, “records were practically nonexistent. No reliable account of who was even here at any given time, or when they left.” He shook his head. “I began keeping my own lists then, and I never got out of the habit. These should cover the last five years or so.”
Amelia’s hands shook as she accepted the books. “Thank you.”
She turned toward Andrew’s office, but before she’d taken more than a step, Winslow called out to her from the stairs. He smiled at her as he neared.
“Miss Matthew. There’s a gentleman on the telephone for you.” He lowered his voice. “I offered to take a message, but he was most insistent on speaking directly to you. I do hope nothing is wrong.”
Spikes of ice pierced her chest. Only Sidney knew she was here. And there was only one thing he could be calling to tell her. She almost refused to go. Almost. Feeling as though she were drowning, Amelia turned to follow the young man down the stairs, the books clutched to her chest as though they were the only thing keeping her afloat in a raging sea.
She set them carefully on the counter beside the telephone and lifted the receiver with a shaking hand.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded like a stranger’s.
A wash of static came over the line as Sidney spoke. “Amelia! Can… hear me?… you there?”
He was crying. That much was clear.
“Yes,” she said in that same foreign, leaden tone, already knowing what came next and hating him for forcing it on her now.
“He’s… gone. He just… and then he…” The line faded out, and with a little click, the connection failed entirely. But she had heard enough.
Jonas was dead.
It was as though the earth heaved beneath her feet. As though the very air itself might crush her. Amelia replaced the receiver and put her shaking hands flat on the counter in front of her, forcing herself to breathe. A minute passed. From far in the distance, a towering wave of grief threatened. But she could not allow it to swamp her. Not yet.
She swallowed hard and turned to the books as she pulled the list from her pocket. She spread it on the counter with icy, tingling hands and opened the first book. She turned the pages, running a finger along the faint, spidery script, until she found the first name on her list. Maryanne Everts was admitted to the asylum in May 1887, aged forty-three. She died—ostensibly of heart failure—three months later.
The page swam before Amelia’s eyes as she read the name of the attending physician. Her own heart began to beat a pounding rhythm in her ears, and she sucked in a desperate breath. They had to be certain. She found the next woman: Susan Degrette—apoplexy. And there was the name again.
Amelia made her way through the rest of the list. She was shaking as she finished. The room spun around her.
Seventeen names.
Seventeen deaths.
All confirmed by William Tyree.
56
Amelia burst through the door, a stack of books clutched to her chest. “It’s Tyree.” Her face was pale. Andrew could see her trembling from across the room.
“Dr. Tyree was the physician who examined all the women on the list when they died,” she said. She explained about seeing Dr. Lawrence, her idea about his notes, about the listings.
Andrew felt the blood drain from his own face. “We have to—”
“Cavanaugh? Are you there?” A voice echoed from the hallway.
Tyree’s voice.
They looked at each other in paralyzed horror for a split second, then turned as one toward the office door, half open after Amelia’s frantic entrance and spilling light out into the hallway. Andrew put a hand on her arm and gestured toward the storage room.
She hesitated, then nodded. Be careful, she mouthed, moving across the floor. She slipped inside, easing the door not quite closed behind her.
Andrew had no time to do more than take a deep breath before Tyree appeared in the doorway. His face bore an expression quite different from his typical joviality. It was utterly blank, as if a mask had fallen away and revealed the void behind it. Only the eyes were alive. They glittered.
Andrew was able to look away only when Tyree extended a hand, holding the corner of a folded piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger as if it were covered in filth.
“Dr. Tyree?” Andrew was surprised; his voice sounded almost normal.
“I was passing through on the way to my apartment.” Tyree’s tone matched his face. “Winslow stopped me. He asked if I’d drop this by your office. He seemed to think it might be important.”
Tyree twitched the paper open. It was the list of names and dates Amelia had written. Across the top was Andrew’s ornate, curling monogram. Little chance of pretending ignorance now. Andrew felt his own face tighten.
“This is your personal stationery, is it not?”
“Yes.” Andrew swallowed and reached out to take the sheet.
Tyree let go just before Andrew’s fingers closed on it. They both watched as the sheet wafted to the floor, coming to rest with the barest whisper. The moment stretched. Andrew had the sensation of standing on the edge of a precipice, looking down; the slightest sound, the slightest movement, might send him plunging downward.
“Let us dispense with the pretense, Cavanaugh,” Tyree said, and Andrew started. “You’ve obviously been poking into matters better left alone.” Tyree bared his teeth in an expression that could have been a smile, had it contained any trace of warmth. “When I said you reminded me of Blounton, I had no idea what an accurate assessment that would turn out to be.”
“He did find you out, then? What you were doing here?”
Tyree gave a single nod. “Indeed. He examined the Weaver woman shortly after she arrived. She managed to convince him to listen to her. He mentioned her case to me. I warned him it was folly to believe the things the patients say.”
“But she was telling the truth.”
Tyree ignored him. “He started looking into things a bit too deeply. I had to take steps.”
“You killed him. How? I thought you were in Philadelphia when he died.” Andrew’s heart pounded.
“I allowed one of my associates to do the actual deed. And I grieved the necessity. I liked him.” He looked past Andrew and nodded at the folders lying open on the desk. “That’s how he finally discovered me, you know. He recognized my handwriting on the commitment orders. He might not have put it together, except there happened to be a note I’d left him sitting on his desk while he was looking at the files. Bad luck, really.”
Tyree shifted his gaze back to Andrew. “I knew at once that he’d figured it out. He tried to pretend nothing was wrong, but he was a terrible actor. All furtive looks and darting eyes. It concerned me. I searched his desk and found his notes. I couldn’t allow him to go spreading the story.”
He regarded Andrew with what appeared to be genuine regret. “Just as I can’t allow you.”
The edge of the cliff began to crumble beneath Andrew’s feet. He shifted his weight as if to take a step back. And suddenly there was a gun in Tyree’s right hand, the stubby black barrel pointed at Andrew’s chest. He went still.
Tyree gestured with the gun. “I made a small det
our to my apartment before coming here.”
“Are you going to shoot me?”
“If I have to. But I’d prefer to use this.” In his other hand he held up a syringe, plucked from somewhere among his pockets.
“What is it?” Andrew eyed the needle.
“It’s a concoction of my own invention. Morphine, primarily. You’ll drift away, and a bit later your heart will stop. It’s quite gentle,” he added. “I’ve never seen it cause anyone the slightest discomfort.”
Andrew heard himself laugh—a startled, bitter sound. “Your concern is much appreciated. How many times have you used it, that you’re so certain of its effect?”
“Quite a few, over the years. A great many men marry unwisely, you know.”
“I’d say it’s the women who married unwisely,” Andrew shot back, contempt overtaking fear for a moment. “They’re the ones who end up imprisoned, tormented for months or years before you finally kill them.”
Tyree made a disdainful gesture with the hand holding the syringe. “There’s no need to be dramatic. I’ve never set out to torment anyone. And as for killing, I merely do as I’ve been directed by my clients. For some of them, out of sight is out of mind. Others desire a more definitive separation.”
“Definitive,” Andrew repeated, sickened. “That’s why Julia Weaver was dead inside six months, but Elizabeth Miner was still here after a year. Bryce Weaver paid for the definitive separation.”
“And Mr. Miner did not. He was most emphatic on the matter, in fact. Something to the effect that if his wife wanted him to remain a poor man, then she could remain here as a poor man’s wife. It was carelessness on my part, I admit. I ought not to have left her alive, regardless of his wishes. Rather unsettling when you came to me with her file, but fortunately I was able to prevent it from going further.”
“You never took it to Harcourt at all? The story of his refusal…”
“A convenient fiction. I couldn’t risk his involvement. I would have gone ahead and removed her after that, but the problem solved itself. It was kind of you to alert me that I needed to keep an eye on you, however. And now I believe that’s enough discussion.” Tyree lifted the syringe and the gun slightly, in turn. “Choose.”
A Deadly Fortune Page 28
