by Sara Donati
“The box was in the cellar,” he said. His voice was raw and tremulous.
Anna cleared her throat. “There was a commotion upstairs, we heard it very clearly. Is there any reason for alarm?”
“Oh, no.” He didn’t try to hide his irritation. “You’re quite mistaken. I leave windows and doors open when the weather’s so fine and sound drifts in from everywhere. Now just let me see to wrapping these for you.”
* * *
• • •
THEY LEFT THE bookshop a few minutes later and Anna started straight across Sixth Avenue, almost daring traffic to stop her.
“Anna!” Sophie broke into a trot to catch up. “What are you doing? Where are we going? Anna? Not the police station.”
There was a police station on the other side of Jefferson Market, but to Sophie’s relief, Anna started up the stairs to the elevated train ticket booth. At the top she slid two coins across the counter to the clerk, glanced at Sophie, and inclined her head toward the platform.
“Let’s have a look at those windows Mr. Hobart has opened in this fine weather.”
There was nothing for it, so Sophie marched along behind her very determined cousin to the platform crowded with waiting passengers.
At this height they could see into the second- and third-story windows of all the buildings on the east side of Sixth Avenue. From here it was obvious that the bookshop and the apothecary had been designed and built by the same person; everything from the color of the brick to the set of the lintels over the doors was identical. The enclosed external staircase in the passageway between the two buildings was not an afterthought, but constructed to make it possible to move back and forth between the second-story apartments out of the public eye.
Odd architecture was nothing out of the ordinary in this city; at that very moment, according to Oscar, a Mr. Lafferty was building a hotel in the shape of an elephant on Coney Island. In comparison an external staircase seemed quite sensible; in a fire the residents had a reliable escape route. Sophie could imagine two brothers living side by side in the way, each with his own business and family.
She had almost forgotten why they had climbed the stairs to the train platform, but Anna had not.
“So he lied to us.”
And in fact all the windows in Hobart’s building were closed, with shades drawn. The windows of the apothecary were shuttered and latched.
Sophie bumped Anna’s shoulder. “What are you thinking? We should report him to the police for lying about his windows?”
* * *
• • •
ANNA CONSIDERED THIS idea, which Sophie was proposing as a way to make her see the futility of such an action. And in fact, if they approached a police officer and reported shut windows, or even came right out and described strange noises from Mr. Hobart’s apartment, they would sound like busybodies hoping for a scandal. She thought of going straight to Mulberry Street to fetch Jack and Oscar, and remembered that Jack had been on his way to testify in a robbery case this morning. Oscar was almost certainly there too.
Suddenly she was feeling unsure about what they had heard and its importance. She was about to confess this when Sophie grabbed her hand so hard that she gasped.
“What?” Anna turned to her, and Sophie pointed to a servant girl on the street below. She carried a marketing basket over one arm and was about to cross Sixth Avenue.
“Do you know her?”
Sophie nodded. “That is Grace, the housemaid Elise wanted to talk to. The one from the Shepherd’s Fold who was fired. Reverend Crowley’s mother bragged about putting her out to live on the streets.”
The girl was gone from sight, crossing the avenue almost directly below them.
“Where did she come from just now?”
“The passageway door.”
Anna blinked. “Maybe Nora Smithson hired her after she was fired from the Shepherd’s Fold.”
“Or maybe Mr. Hobart did. It might have been her voice we heard from his apartment.”
“There’s one way to find out,” Anna said. “We’ll ask him.”
* * *
• • •
FIRST THEY TRIED the door to the passageway and found that it was locked, as Anna had expected it to be.
“You’re sure you want to do this,” Sophie said, and Anna stopped.
“There’s something wrong with Mr. Hobart, you know that. He looked as though he was in withdrawal from opiates and he kept glancing at the clock. We heard women’s voices in his apartment, raised in argument. Mr. Hobart’s apartment has direct access to the Smithsons’ apartment. Maybe it all means nothing, but one way or the other, I mean to find out.”
Sophie’s mouth quirked at the corner. “I know better than to get in your way when you’re in this mood. Carry on.”
The bookshop was exactly as they had seen it a quarter hour earlier, but this time Mr. Hobart didn’t come through the door behind the counter when the bell jingled. Anna very sensibly opened and shut the door once more to make the bells chime again, but there was still no sign of Mr. Hobart.
“What now?” Sophie whispered.
Anna went to the counter and called. “Mr. Hobart?”
Nothing.
“Very odd, that he would be away from the shop without locking the door,” Sophie said.
Anna opened the gate and they walked through to the workroom. Unopened shipping boxes were stacked everywhere, leaving only a narrow corridor to navigate to other doors—all of which stood open—and the staircase.
Sophie’s heart was beating hard, but she followed Anna up the stairs as she called for the shopkeeper.
“Mr. Hobart? Mr. Hobart, are you quite well?”
At the second-floor landing were two open doors. On the right they could see out to the external staircase, and on the left into the family apartment.
Anna knocked on the apartment door and it swung all the way open to let out a puff of air. Stale air, warmer than the day would warrant, that smelled of sweat and dust and sour milk. Many older widowers lived just like this, Sophie reminded herself. This was nothing out of the ordinary.
“Mr. Hobart?”
A thump came from down the hall. A second thump, and a third.
Anna hesitated no more, walking into the apartment to look down the hallway; Sophie knew when an appeal to common sense would make no impression, and so she followed.
There were two doors on the north side and one on the south. In the dim light it was possible to make out some basic facts: first, that both of the doors to the left lacked doorknobs, and that the wooden doors themselves had been altered.
Anna ran a finger over the surface of the closest door.
“Those are nail heads,” Sophie said.
In fact the whole door was covered by nail heads in straight lines, hundreds of them at one-inch intervals from side to side and top to bottom.
Sophie said, “Shall I go to the police station for help?”
Anna shook her head sharply and cleared her throat. “Do you see a doorknob anywhere? Check that dresser.”
It was a large, old-fashioned dresser with dozens of drawers. On the top was a box of candles, stacks of dirty dishes, an empty glass jug, a washbasin with a bar of soap stuck to its bottom, a jumble of hand towels. The deep top drawer held what she took to be the contents of a well-stocked Gladstone bag: a travel-sized spirit lamp, a thermometer in its case, an otoscope, a very expensive ophthalmoscope, percussion hammers, catheters and bougies, hypodermics, scalpels, probes, tweezers, lancets, scissors, dressings of all kinds, and the same drugs every doctor carried: quinine, morphine, laudanum, ergotamine, strychnine, digitalis, and a half-dozen others.
Anna came to look over her shoulder, then walked to the other end of the dresser and crouched down. When she stood she was holding a Gladstone bag with the initials N.C.G. stamped in gold
leaf.
They both glanced at the door with its pattern of nail heads and then at each other. Sophie began pulling open more drawers, finding folded linens, tablecloths, embroidered doilies, and finally, an old-fashioned doorknob.
“What are you doing here?”
Sophie dropped the doorknob in her surprise, and turned to see Mr. Hobart standing in the open doorway at the far end of the hall.
“Mr. Hobart,” Anna said. “Who have you got locked in these rooms?”
With both hands he reached up and began to scratch his scalp. “Go away. This is none of your business.”
Sophie had retrieved the doorknob and she handed it to Anna, who went back to the door.
“Go away, I said.”
“You must be very tired,” Sophie told him. “You’ve just had your medicine, I can tell. Why not sleep for a half hour, and we can talk when you’re more yourself.”
She used her most reasonable, comforting tone, the one she reserved for fretful children. To her surprise it worked on an old man in an opium haze. Mr. Hobart turned away and disappeared down the stairs to the shop.
Anna had fitted the doorknob into its slot and for a moment stood, thoughtfully, staring. As she did before she made a first incision in an urgent surgery. Then she turned suddenly to Sophie, something like panic in her expression.
“The front door.”
Sophie ran to lock it.
* * *
• • •
ANNA TURNED THE knob and pushed open the door into a room so dim that at first she could make out nothing at all. The air was stale, thick with sweat and the stink of a chamber pot too long unattended. Behind her she heard the scrape and hiss of a safety match, and then Sophie touched her shoulder to offer a lit candle.
The window had been boarded over and the room emptied with the exception of one narrow bed. The woman sitting on the edge of the bed was gagged, and her hands were bound behind her. She was no one Anna had ever seen before.
Sophie was already moving, walking through a minefield of broken crockery to the bedside where she made short work of the gag.
The woman’s voice came low and unsteady.
“Please hurry. One of them will be back very soon.”
“What—who—”
“There’s no time,” the woman said. She spoke a refined English, the language of the well-to-do, but she looked like someone who lived in the back alleys. Filthy clothes, grimy skin, her hair a mass of knots and tangles. She squinted in the little bit of light from the candle. The part of Anna that was a doctor first realized that her eyes were inflamed and probably infected.
“I need a knife for these bindings,” Sophie said. And without looking up: “Anna, there are scalpels in the dresser drawer.”
“My daughter,” the woman said. “Have you got my daughter? She’s in the next room. And I need shoes of some kind to walk out of here, as you can see.”
The shards of glass and pottery covered the floor from the end of the bed to the door, where three-inch nails protruded at one-inch intervals. The invention of a clever and quite insane mind.
“Please,” the woman said. “My daughter. I haven’t heard anything from that room in so long, I’m afraid they put her somewhere else.”
Anna went back to get the empty Gladstone bag and propped it in the doorway before she took the knob.
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Minnie,” said the woman. “Minnie Gillespie.”
* * *
• • •
ANNA TRIED TO make sense of the evidence before her. Neill Graham had disappeared to come here and help his sister with her plan, or maybe it was his plan, and she was only assisting. Somehow that possibility had never occurred to any of them, as obvious as it seemed at this moment.
Jack and Oscar had mentioned a Minnie Gillespie weeks ago, but they had never mentioned that she was also missing. In what connection had they raised her name?
That thought made her pause. More slowly she went back to the dresser, found another candle and lit it, and then looked into the room where Sophie was cutting away the bindings on the woman’s wrists.
She said, “Mrs. Louden? Charlotte Louden?”
Sophie looked up. “You’re Charlotte Louden?”
“Yes,” said one of the city’s richest and most well-placed ladies. “How did you know?”
“Mrs. Louden, why do you think your daughter is in the next room?”
The surprise and shock on Charlotte’s Louden face was genuine. “She’s not? But that woman said— She told me— I had to be quiet, or—”
“I haven’t opened the door yet. Give me a minute.”
“But they’ll be back soon!” Mrs. Louden’s voice broke, and with that tears began to cascade down her face.
“We’ve locked the doors,” Sophie told her.
“Oh, you’ve locked the doors,” Mrs. Louden said, and she began to laugh, her whole body convulsing.
Anna moved to the second bedroom and opened the door to another dark, pungent cave. With some trepidation, she lifted the candle before herself.
Broken glass on the floor, a door studded with nails, and a single bed, but this time the occupant wasn’t waiting or watching. The form on the bed was turned toward the wall.
The shards crunched underfoot as she walked forward, but the person—most likely a corpse, she told herself—was still. She drew in a deeper breath, expecting to find putrefaction and decay in the air, and found nothing more than sickly sweat and urine.
The candlelight played over a litter of hypodermic needles on the floor, cast aside carelessly, along with gauze stained with dried blood.
With her free hand she pulled back the sheet, already fairly sure that she was not going to find Minnie Gillespie in this bed. In fact, the face turned away from her was covered in a growth of beard at least a few weeks old, above furrowed cheeks flushed with fever.
Neill Graham murmured in his sleep and rolled onto his back, showing her a filthy, sweat-streaked face. Unlike Mrs. Louden he was not gagged, and his hands were not bound.
She crouched down beside him, put a hand to his shoulder, and shook him, gently.
“Dr. Graham.”
His brow pulled down in a flinch, but he didn’t wake.
“Dr. Graham, please wake up. You are free to leave this room now.”
The eye she could see cracked open. Bloodshot, with a pupil that was constricted to a pinpoint. He put a hand to his head and blinked at her.
“What?”
“You’ve been held prisoner, but you’re free to go now. The police will want to talk to you.”
His only response was to blink at her. In fact, Anna thought that if she let him, he would go back to sleep. She considered the strangeness of this: a man who had been locked up like an animal for weeks, but rather than jumping up to run out the door, he simply stared at her. The reason was obvious. There was nothing keeping him in this bed except the effects of morphine.
She said, “I’m going to take your pulse. Your wrist, please.”
He worked his mouth for a moment, studying her face as if he had never seen such a thing before. And then he shrugged and held out an arm. He used the other hand to scratch his face, slowly at first and then intently.
The cuff was already unbuttoned and the sleeve folded up to the elbow. The back of his hand and his forearm were flecked with scratches, some healed, a few suppurating, others fresh. Evidence that he had tried to open the door but had been unable to deal with the protruding nails. No doubt his feet were covered with cuts.
He slipped away toward sleep while she studied the needle tracks that reached from wrist to inner elbow.
Nora Smithson had been injecting him with morphine, to keep him placid and agreeable. But Mrs. Louden had not received the same treatment. Why that should be t
he case was a crucial question.
He roused, twisting to his side. “I don’t understand where you came from,” he said, something close to petulance in his tone.
She stood and brushed off her skirts. “You need to be hospitalized. I’ll send for an ambulance.”
That finally seemed to reach him. He made an attempt to sit up but couldn’t manage. “There’s somebody in the next room.”
“She is being attended to.”
Confusion and irritation seemed to rob him of the ability to focus on anything but asking questions. “Where is—where are the others?”
“What others?”
He began to tremble like a sapling in a high wind, and spittle tracked down his chin.
The last time Anna saw this man, he had been dressed expensively and meticulously groomed. Now he turned his head to wipe his mouth on his shoulder.
At the New Amsterdam she did not often see people addicted to the opium pipe or morphine; drugs were expensive and her patients were poor. Alcohol was their scourge, and sometimes, cocaine. But as a student she had seen addicts, many of them soldiers who had come home from battlefield hospitals crippled by pain and morphine both. By the time she started her internship, most of those veterans were dead, carried away by infection or overdose or suicide.
She thought of Nicola Visser, who had had the addiction forced on her, her body covered with hypodermic needle scars. To keep her quiet, Sophie had guessed.
How and when Neill Graham had developed an addiction was less of a question. What she wondered now was, how he had ended up in this room.
She imagined that he had come to see his sister in the apothecary. Maybe he had read about Nicola Visser in the papers and had reason to suspect his sister’s involvement. He came to try to stop her, and she had solved that problem by dosing his tea or hitting him over the head or injecting him. When he woke he was in this room that was foreign to him and unable to leave. He could walk out of here now, but he was hesitating, afraid to miss his next appointment with the hypodermic.
