“We can walk home together. Or you can go on ahead if you don’t want to wait. It will take me ten minutes or so to wrap things up.”
Morticians will pump Birdie Day’s body with embalming chemicals, restoring the look of life to her plump face and figure. But right now, she lies here very dead and much grayer than she was just five hours ago. Her arm twitches. Rigor mortis is still setting in; it will take another twenty-four hours before it passes and the muscles regain their flexibility. After tying the string around her big toe, I rock her onto a bed of ice blocks and push the pallet into a storage cabinet.
When I emerge from the anteroom, Archer is wearing his usual severe expression. I nod and peel my gloves off, quickly melting the strips over the flame of the burner. I dip my hands into a pan filled with a diluted isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide mixture and then shimmy over to the sink. Lathering my hands with a cake of Castile soap, I scrub them with a coarse brush until they are hot pink.
Although he is quiet, I feel Archer’s gaze on me. I glance over my shoulder and tip my chin at a half-sheet of paper on the counter. “Will you drop it off at the front desk while I gather my things?”
“You’re releasing her?” he asks, arching a single brow. “You’ve finished?”
“Yes,” I say, closing the grate of the stove on my way to the rear antechamber again.
“And?” He peers down at the page. “What do you mean, abscessed? Was that a complication then? I can’t make out your writing.”
“I’ll fill you in on our way, and you’ll have my written report late tomorrow morning.” The results of my autopsy will be surprising. And in spite of what he said earlier: “I’m not hoping Ennis is right about Varga,” I’m not sure how Archer will take the news. From one day to the next, namely yesterday to today, I’ve sensed a mixture of sadness and hope brewing in him that I can just barely put my finger on.
Shivering into my coat, gloves, and hat, I’m lost in thought when he returns. “Watch it,” I forewarn, remembering the puddle.
He doesn’t speak until we are on Washington. “Is there a chance Ennis is onto something?”
The pavement glistens, highlighted by the new gaslights lining the street. It has rained, just as Billy’s mother and Edwina Carr had portended earlier. “He still could be but not obviously in this case.” I cast a glance up at him, and he simply nods. “It’s a godawful mess, though. She, Birdie Day, actually did die of natural causes, if a botched surgery can be thought of as such. I know medical science isn’t exactly rocket science these days, but trial by error is in widespread practice around here. Hack doctors plying their …” My comment trails off as we wait for a break in the traffic, and my eyes fall on a particular storefront.
The gold gilt lettering across the large theater-esque window reads, “Dr. Harold Bannock, Private Ladies Physician, by appointment.” Beyond the glass, the crimson drapes are drawn closed. But I’ve passed by this office often enough by day to know the interior is opulent. This doctor only serves a well-to-do, clinically repressed, female clientele, and pretty much exclusively offers “treatments” to relieve onset hysteria. That’s right. The emergence of hysteria. Which means that in exchange for money, not unlike a favorite whore, Dr. Bannock manually and regularly induces what Victorians call “paroxysms.” Us enlightened folks refer to them as orgasmic events or just plain-old orgasms. And like his peers, he’s an idiot, too stupid to know why precisely his services are so popular. Questionable evidence—gathered how? I don’t know, not diligence or open-mindedness, that’s for sure—along with the superior male intellect has affirmed that hysterical females are very sick indeed and sorely in need of help from physicians trained in such matters.
“The delivery? What are you saying, River? Is Varga involved or not?” Archer cuts in, swiping at his nose with a gloved hand. Although warmer, the extra moisture in the atmosphere has green-housed in the usual stench.
“Not exactly. I know you don’t want the gory details, but … well, I fully expected her to have hemorrhaged, which would explain her sudden death straight away. But Mrs. Day expired from a pelvic growth that had abscessed and ruptured a while ago, causing slow bacterial leakage into her bloodstream and her abdomen to swell. The mass and infection were caused by a poorly healed wound, a complication of a hysterectomy, Archer.”
With the slightest falter in his stride, he says matter-of-factly, “The baby isn’t hers.”
Forgetting where we are, he takes hold of my elbow and tries to lead me down an adjacent, quieter street. I yank my arm away and look around with feigned nonchalance. All it would take is one crass comment from a passerby. Then we’d be in it. Any public defense of me via my brother’s fist would only bring my masculinity into question—like the small kid wearing an invisible target slung around his neck on days when the schoolyard bully is absent. It’s bad enough that Archer is a foot taller than me and more than twice as wide.
This same obstacle at the office had taken over a year for me to hurdle. From my first official day, while the men obeyed Archer—likely from his first day—they tolerated me only out of fear and deference to him. Where once they looked at me with disdain, they now concede my lack of brawn belies my abilities in other areas. Since, luckily, men think only other men are intelligent, this saved my hide.
“Damn, I am tired of this.”
I cast him a sidelong glance and grin at him. “You’re telling me.”
“Begs the question: Who, then, is Avis’s mother,” he says as if asking himself.
“That’s one for Varga, I would think. What strikes me as peculiar is how everyone is acting as though Birdie Day was, in fact, pregnant, including her husband and her obstetrician. They would have known she couldn’t conceive. Although, we don’t know how anything about her relationship with her husband or her mental stability. She could have been keeping her condition from him. It could be that she also didn’t tell the physician and let him believe she was pretending as part of the plan.”
“Mm. A plan gone wrong.”
“For Birdie, yes, but Jed Day got his baby in the end, and Varga presumably got paid. Strange, the Days would opt for a girl though, don’t you think? I mean that’s going through a lot of trouble for more trouble. Girls aren’t considered an asset usually, more like a burden.”
“There’s that too.”
“Granted, Ennis is, was, an alienist and not a medical doctor, he and Mr. Day were friends you said. Maybe he picked up that something was not quite right with that picture. Might be worthwhile asking him if the Days were ‘trying to conceive for long.’” My comments are met with contemplative silence.
The damp air cools my cheeks, and I suck in a refreshing if toxic breath. The sky is still cloudless, and yet, the stars hide as though behind a veil of steel plate. It brings to mind a midnight walk through Millennium Park with Vale. I imagine the ghost of him walking beside me now, his arm around my waist, my head lolling on his shoulder, one of my hands tucked into his jacket pocket and the other in my own. My heart skips a beat, and a lump forms in my throat. I could stop doing this to myself, but the memories are all I have or will ever have now.
“Day would have known that the detail would be uncovered when he called En-Henry. Before he went to their house this morning, he specifically told the man that was sending a messenger over to me. And Henry said nothing about the news catching Mr. Day off guard or causing him to worry.”
Hm. Henry. Clearing my throat, I say, “There’s also the possibility that Mr. Day was just being led to believe his wife was pregnant, and this has nothing to do with Varga at all. Or maybe the physician became involved after the fact.” When we round the corner onto St. Clair Street, my heart does a quick little lurch. But there she is. For a minute, I’d thought she’d gone.
In the distance, Perpetua’s conical turret pierces a velvet gray sky while the rest of her seems to meld into a murky background. The fire had turned her facade a dingy lavender as well as darkened her gabled roof. At one
point, I was afraid of her. Now, I think she considers us family (where she’s the head of the household).
Francis Maitland Pinckney St. Clair commissioned the ten-thousand-square-foot grande dame in 1837, the same year the city of Chicago was incorporated. Frank, as we’ve agreed to call him, lived in the house with his wife and children for “not long” according to Martin. Though, as Archer once put it: “We may never know when the disconnect happened, but obviously, there was one. All of their children grew up in this house. A decade is a long time to most people.”
Then after the family’s sudden disappearance, the trail vanishes until almost three centuries into the future. In 2140, Marlowe St. Clair would find Perpetua (a recent moniker) vacant with no record of prior ownership and only rumors of the hauntings that had scared countless renters away. Indeed, her history is cloaked in as much mystery as the St. Clairs’ is. Quinn mostly spends his days trying to unravel her inner workings, and if that cracks a sliver of light into the family’s and the house’s convoluted past all the better.
“Elaborate. What gives you that idea?”
“Her abdomen was quite distended as well as striped with new stretch marks, in other words not from her previous pregnancy. Those were much fainter, older.”
“They have no other children.”
“I could maybe find evidence to support that she didn’t make it to term during a previous pregnancy. The extent of the internal scarring from the hysterectomy makes it hard to tell without further investigation. Anyway, the swelling would have been gradual, so it’s possible Birdie was fooled into thinking she’d become pregnant and so passed that belief on to her husband. The fact remains, though. Soon after she contacted Dr. Varga, he would have made the situation clear. All-in-all, I guess you’ll have to decide if any of it matters. From my vantage point, it looks like a private matter between husband and wife, not murder. And the alienist will need—”
He mounts the front steps, and I am right behind him when he pauses, one hand on the doorknob, one in his pocket jingling keys. He turns to me, his massive figure casting its shadow over me. “River, …”
“Hm?”
He says nothing. Instead, his blue eyes, which, despite the porch light, look like black marbles, bore into the crescent-shaped scar above my eyebrow. After a full minute of waiting for him to resume, I start to feel a little wriggly under his stare. “Archer, I have to admit the cryptic start is a teensy bit unsettling coming from you,” I say gently, cocking my head. “I haven’t forgotten what tomorrow is. Is that it?”
“No. You wouldn’t. How could you?” he asks rhetorically. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down along the thick column of his throat.
“Then why are you looming over me like the dark and brooding Batman and—”
“Batman.”
“Yeah, the Batman. He wore a mask and a cape. Don’t act like you’ve never heard of him.”
“He’s not the … never mind. Don’t you think you should stop avoiding Ennis?” he asks. “It’s been long enough.”
Whoa. I square my shoulders and cross my arms over my chest. “That’s up to me, isn’t it? Besides, why should I?” My questions elicit a mild snort. I can’t tell if he’s found something I said funny, or I’ve reached the limit of his tolerance for me for the day. “Fine. I’ll think about it.”
“Christ. Get on with it then,” he murmurs without the slightest twitch, though his voice is gravelly now.
“What?! What was that?”
“Somehow I can’t believe you haven’t already thought about it.” He turns to the door and inserts the awkwardly large skeleton key into the thumb-sized keyhole. “So, do us both a favor and stop dragging your feet.”
“What’s it to you?” I ask to his wall of a back, following him inside.
“You just think really hard about it, River. Or I’ll do it for you.”
CHAPTER SIX
WITH ARCHER’S TYPICALLY severe but still odd behavior knocking around in my head, I absently shed my coat and hat at the tiger-wood bureau in the entry hall. Some undefinable current of disturbance has been running through my veins these past few days. Because of it, I haven’t been able to focus long enough to have one complete thought. I feel inundated. And it all started with Dr. Ennis’s presence in my living room. Of course, meeting Edwina Carr has nothing to do with anything. But her sudden appearance pricks like a splinter in my big toe while Archer’s demand jabs like a cattle prod to the eyeball.
The light clapping of Allen’s footsteps on the parquet-tile flooring at the end of the long foyer snaps me back from my thoughts. I will never understand why he wears shoes inside. A penchant all the males of the house have adopted I realize, my eye straying to the shoe-clad big-feet beside my own. I find the idea of bringing the filth of the streets into our home, on our carpets, revolting. And I’m about to illustrate my point when our Does-everything man announces in a tone that can only be described as marmish, “You’ve missed dinner. It’ll be a while before—” Why he’s chosen to skewer me alone with his disapproving gaze is beyond my current grasp.
I wink at him. “As luck would have it, Bryce, that’s the same amount of time I’ll need to get cleaned up.” I kick off my shoes and flex my feet one at a time, then curl my toes into the thick pile of the Persian entryway rug. Pinching my nostrils and flicking my chin at my wingtip oxford ankle boots, I say, “These will need to be sanitized. And burn the laces.”
“Your footwear always gets special treatment, River—you’re a coroner.”
I bobble my head and grimace at the sense he makes. At the base of the stairwell leading up to the bedrooms, I add, “Oh, and Allen …”
“Yeeez?” he intones with superior nasal skill, clicking his heels together.
“About my other brother, the one who believes he’s a robot, but we all know is really mostly human still.”
“Mm-hm. I know him.”
“Pass it along, would you, that it would be good to run into him every once in a while?”
“It’s by your command Quinn graces us with his company sometimes as much as twice a day, River,” Archer counters, disappearing into the sitting room.
“Humph. Let me rephrase: It would make me incredibly happy to see my brother not by appointment, outside of meals when our mouths are full, and when he doesn’t have somewhere else to be after ten minutes. All I ask is that he just take the occasional break from tickling Perpetua’s extremities.”
“At least there’s an upside. We always know where to find Quinn.”
“True.” I have expressed more than a handful of times that shutting himself up in the house isn’t good for his health. But assailing my bionic brother with the benefits of other people’s company—and Gaia forbid fresh air—is like admonishing a fan for spinning counterclockwise. Suddenly I recollect Edwina’s question, “Are you not lonely?” and I realize I am. Not only that, but it’s starting to wear on me. “Anyway, see what you can do. I’ll be back down in fifteen or twenty,” I say and then take the stairs two at a time.
Down the long black and gold hallway, the first and second doors on the right, which was Reid and Kinnari’s former apartment, is now my suite. After the Milner case, I finally worked up the courage to accept the loss of my best friend and brother. And upon seeing the renovation completed just a month ago, I relocated from my much smaller room at the very back, past Everly’s, to this one.
With its prospect overlooking the side garden, the black, aubergine, and gold rooms are now the loveliest in the house, in my humble opinion. I’m not one for vibrant or pastel hues, and any view outdoors affords me a glimpse of the area enclosed by the ivy-covered, wrought-iron fence.
Breathing out a sigh of release, although my chest feels heavy, I walk over to one tall window and cast a cursory glance over the sparsely lit space below. I can just about make out the flash of movement in the koi pond, the sway of the swing, and rustle of leaves and branches as a gust of wind passing through the yard.
Solid bl
ack in the evening’s light is a half-dead row of tall conical shrubs dotting the periphery of the house to my right. Several holly trees of the same type didn’t fare as well, but despite the abuse they’d taken in the fire, the remaining giants are hearty and persistent. “Right,” I say aloud as a kind of reminder. I’d forgotten to mention that one of them doesn’t look like the others.
Wheeling around on my heels, my fingertips graze the marble mantel of my fireplace, which is warm to the touch. The new maids we hired just before Selene moved out are a godsend. There can be no going back to tending to our own fires now. I do miss Selene, though.
We may not have been close, we’re too different for that, but having another woman around the house who understood our unusual predicament was reassuring. And it’s a rather solitary existence when you’re surrounded by men all the time, and more than half the time you have to pretend to be one yourself. My bed of nails is of my own making, of course, but even if I could do it all over again, I’d make the same choices. You won’t catch me whiling away the hours and days doing whatever it is entirely capable homebodies (females) do.
I crouch over my washstand and peel away the thatch of black fringe above my upper lip. My sideburns come off next, followed by the bushy strips over my own eyebrows. Arranging each piece as I go into one of two velvet-lined cases, I assess the leftover mess in the small oval mirror. No matter how slow and careful a process I make of donning and removing it, upon close inspection, it’s clear that my daily mask isn’t doing my complexion any favors. I’ll need to concoct some kind of salve for the chapped patches around my mouth, nose, and ears before they get worse.
I dampen a rag and gently rub away the cake foundation and glue remnants. My complexion turns brightly rosy before normalizing to its usual peachy olive state. When I was little, my hair and eyes were lighter and my skin darker, Willow told me. She also said, I hadn’t grown into my mother’s eyes until I was twelve, which is when they changed from gray to the palest shade of jade. At times, they shift color now, turning flintier or aventurine depending on my mood. I wish they weren’t so telling as this is the one characteristic I can’t rein in at will.
No Time Like the Present Page 8
