by Anna Maclean
When we paused before what we believed was the correct door, it being difficult to discern in such darkness, I asked Mr. Phips if he had a lucifer upon him. I had thought to bring a candle stub in case the gas had been shut off, but the matches in my pocket were soaked from the snow and in no lightable condition.
“I do,” he whispered with some excitement, reaching into his waistcoat pocket.
I opened the door, which had been unlocked and unbolted since the discovery of Mrs. Percy’s body, and with Mr. Phips close behind me entered once again the scene of the crime, as Mr. Phips had described it. There was considerable light in this room from the windows and the gauze curtain; it would seem that Mrs. Percy, when she was not speaking with the dead, had preferred a bright environment. Her preparation room was just as it had been last time I had seen it, with the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on the floor and that lingering odor of poppy in the air, except now, of course, there was no body on the chaise.
“It looks mundane enough, doesn’t it?” Mr. Phips whispered. “The sofa, the curtains, the rug. Is it Aubusson, do you think?”
“Imitation Aubusson,” I answered. “The room does indeed appear quite ordinary, except for the broken windows where you acquired entrance that day.” The little points of glass were still on the floor under the window, and were now covered with a light layer of snow that had drifted in. “The floor will be ruined,” I said. There are moments, dear reader, when Marmee seems to speak through me.
I turned back to the door to examine the bolt from this side.
“Perhaps Mr. Barnum is right,” I said, as much to myself as to Mr. Phips. “I shall try. Mr. Phips, in a moment bolt the door behind me, will you?” I looped my thick wire around the bolt head, held it firmly in my grasp, and stepped back into the hall. After Mr. Phips shut the door, I tugged gently on the wire. It moved, slowly and with difficulty, but it moved. Judging from the wire, the bolt was halfway home. Then it stopped, somehow stuck, at the same point at which the trick always seemed to fail. I tugged a little bit harder, trying to slide the bolt without undoing the loop. It began to move again, in minuscule jerks, and then would move no farther.
“It is bolted!” exclaimed Mr. Phips with great wonder. “My dear girl! You’ve done it! Will you allow me to give a tea some afternoon? You will, of course, bring the chaperon of your choice.”
He seemed so eager it pained me to disappoint him, but, “I am so very busy just now, Mr. Phips,” I told him.
His brow clouded with displeasure. He was, I saw then, a man used to getting his own way.
“Life requires boldness, Miss Alcott,” he said. “A young woman should not only think of duty, but once in a while of entertainment as well.” He strode off, his shoulders back and his chin high.
“YOU SHOULD NOT have gone to see Mr. Nichols without me,” said Constable Cobban, plainly irritated. He sat in Auntie Bond’s best parlor with a teacup and saucer balanced on his knee, and a cake plate in his left hand. I had sent him a note explaining my visit to Mrs. Percy’s stepbrother.
“More poppy-seed biscuit?” asked Sylvia, holding the silver cake tongs poised over the cake stand. She sat close beside him on the settee, and he looked at her as if she were a misbehaving puppy that had climbed onto the furniture without permission.
“I realize that now,” I said quietly. “I do ask your pardon, but I’m certain you have set all to rights. I have no doubt that any little disturbance we caused was quickly remedied by your competence.”
Faced with such feminine meekness he was at a loss, which had been my intention, of course. The best way to disarm a man’s wrath is to allow him to feel the false superiority underlying the temper tantrum, and then to flatter him.
“Not all of my day’s work was bungled,” I continued, and then described my visit to Mrs. Percy’s, and running into Mr. Phips there.
“The door was open? I’ll have to have a word with my men,” Cobban said. His red-and-black-checked suit contrasted very badly with Auntie Bond’s blue-and-gray floral carpet, and he had forgotten to remove his hat. “Very bad procedure,” he continued, frowning. “They should know better. Taints the entire robbery investigation, knowing the door was open. What was stolen before the murder, and what was stolen after?” How such a bright and freckled face could look stormy is a mystery in itself, but he looked stormy with fresh anger.
“The orange cake is delightful,” said Sylvia.
“Do stop going on about the cake,” said Cobban and I together.
“I have irritated you.” She put the tongs down and leaned back into the settee. “Thank heavens for stopping me. I don’t know what got into me there for a moment. Do you think it was Father, encouraging me to be a good hostess?”
Cobban looked at her in wonder, and his expression softened.
“The robbery investigation is secondary to the murder, isn’t it?” I asked, returning to the main subject. “Besides, if you depend on Mr. Nichols to provide the quality and quantity of the goods removed from his stepsister’s home, that investigation is already severely tainted.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Cobban agreed. “I wouldn’t trust him with a penny of mine.”
“And Mr. Barnum trusted him with many thousands of dollars,” I said. “But the point is that I tried the wire trick that Mr. Barnum taught me to bolt a door from the other side, and it worked. We know now how we came to find a murdered person inside a bolted room. Of course, we’ve only the stepbrother’s say that it was murder. Perhaps he lied about that as well. Perhaps Mrs. Percy did have a weak heart. Oh, my.” I put my teacup down so quickly and so hard on the table that it rattled.
A new thought had just occurred to me. What if Mrs. Percy had died of natural causes, and Mr. Nichols merely wished us to think she had been murdered? Why would he? Because Mr. Barnum would be a suspect; Mr. Barnum, to whom he owed an honest lifetime’s wages; Mr. Barnum, who was taking him to the courts in a lawsuit. Is there no end to perfidy? How much greed can a society allow, and still survive?
“But it was murder,” Cobban said. “I saw Dr. Roder this morning, and took him to see Mrs. Percy at the morgue.”
“Is he to do a postmortem?” Sylvia asked cautiously. The last time she had sat at a postmortem she had almost fainted.
“No need.” Cobban put down his teacup and saucer as well, and looked greatly relieved when he had been freed of those fragile objects. “He could tell from her eyes. That bloodshot pinkness was cerebral hemorrhaging, he said. She’d been suffocated.”
“The pillow on the floor,” I said. “The souvenir pillow from Niagara Falls.”
“Well, I won’t be going there on my honeymoon,” decided Sylvia.
“Are you engaged, Miss Shattuck?” asked Constable Cobban, and both his voice and expression were those I would imagine sheep would use (if they could understand and speak in our language) on the day the farmer prodded them into the slaughterhouse. Sylvia did not answer, but once again passed the cake plate.
“So it is murder. Again.” I could not restrain a sigh. Marmee would not be pleased to hear this. She had reasonable objections to having her second-eldest daughter involved in squalid and dangerous affairs. I knew the neighbors would talk about us again, for one thing.
“That Alcott girl!” they would say. “Always tripping over dead bodies! Makes one wonder, don’t it?”
“Yes,” another would say. “I hear she even whistles in public!”
“Why are you smiling, Louy?” Sylvia broke my train of thought.
“I am sorry. That is highly inappropriate and disrespectful to poor Mrs. Percy,” I said. “So, it is murder. That means, of course, there is a murderer, no doubt about it.”
“Yes. And we have her locked up,” said Cobban, mumbling through a mouthful of seed cake.
“You have been wrong before,” I reminded him. “First suspicions are not necessarily correct. I have an instinct about Suzie Dear….”
“And your instincts have often been incorrect,” Co
bban retorted, reaching for another piece of cake.
“Dear Constable Cobban,” I said somewhat primly, “consider the evidence you have. Suzie was wearing some of the crystal gazer’s jewelry when she fled the house. She maintains that the jewelry was given to her as a gift, meaning a bribe, of course, to assist with the séances and to keep quiet about the tricks. As for fleeing the house, she fled because she knew the constabulary would jump to the exact conclusion to which you have jumped.”
“But how did she know the medium was dead,” Cobban said, “if she didn’t kill her?”
“Instinct,” I said. “Mrs. Percy was very late that morning, and not responding to knocks upon the door.”
“We searched her rooms. We found a diamond ring and a bag of money. About two hundred dollars, I’d say. Explain that, Miss Louisa. Do you really think Mrs. Percy was that generous?”
Oh, Suzie! So much greed leads to dire consequences!
“A thief,” I said. “Perhaps Suzie is a thief because too much temptation was put in her path. But not a murderess.”
“I don’t share your opinion.” He brushed crumbs from his boldly checkered trousers and rose to leave.
“I haven’t finished,” I said. “Please stay another ten minutes and hear about the rest of my afternoon.”
“You bolted the door from outside,” Cobban said patiently. “My congratulations on learning to emulate the behavior of the lower classes. What else happened?”
Sometimes I wanted to thwack Cobban on the head, he could get so smug. “After Mr. Phips left, I saw Miss Snodgrass again. She was standing in the side garden, looking at an upstairs window.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Cook Sleeps In
I NOW HAD the young constable’s full attention. “All in brown again?”
“Yes. And when she saw me looking at her, she almost turned and fled, then decided to stand her ground.”
“I don’t like the look of this,” Cobban said.
“Nor do I. Her behavior is suggestive, but what it is suggesting I cannot yet identify.”
Cobban reached for a third piece of cake, changed his mind, and jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, which were stretched and rounded from this repeated gesture, making his suit look even shabbier. A good-looking young man, I thought, but with little regard for appearances. Maybe Lizzie is right: I shouldn’t put my hands in my pockets and whistle.
“Did you speak with her?”
“Yes. She came into the house when she saw the front door was open. We exchanged ‘good days’ and such and she said she had been drawn to the house by a morbid curiosity about Mrs. Percy’s death.”
“Sounds innocent enough,” said Cobban. “The citizenry often show up to peer at crime scenes.”
“Miss Snodgrass never asked how Mr. Phips and I came to be at the house, and it seemed she had been standing and watching us for some time. It would appear her morbid curiosity is somewhat limited,” I said.
“She was preoccupied.” Sylvia spoke up. Cobban and I both turned to look at her. She was sweeping crumbs off the tray. “Women in love are forever preoccupied, and she has just become engaged, remember.”
“True,” admitted Cobban.
“The afternoon was not yet over,” I continued. “Mrs. Deeds also arrived. She was coming up the path just as we were going out the front door. She seemed most surprised and unhappy to see us there.”
“Did she explain her visit?” Cobban asked. “More morbid curiosity about the crime scene?”
“Quite the contrary. She was hoping that Mrs. Percy’s cook had returned to the house, so that she might employ her in her own kitchen. ‘She is out of work now,’ she had said. ‘Why should I not have her?’”
“Vultures.” Cobban snorted. “You don’t think Mrs. Deeds would resort to murder to obtain a cook, do you? I do wonder where the cook has gone, and why she fled. Makes her look guilty, don’t you think? But why would a cook murder her employer?”
“It has happened,” said Sylvia darkly. “When I was a child and old Mr. Paterson hadn’t given his cook her Christmas envelope, he got terribly ill the next week, and the family all claimed he’d been fed rat poison from the larder.”
“Sylvia, there are weeks still before Christmas,” I pointed out. “And Mrs. Percy seems to have been a generous rather than a miserly employer. Cook had a large room with windows and a good mattress, as I recall. No, the Chinese woman would have no cause to murder her employer. She fled for some other reason.”
“Well, I must continue my rounds,” said Constable Cobban, rising. Sylvia rose also and went to get his hat and coat.
We had walked to Auntie Bond’s hall by then, and Sylvia stood there, smiling, holding the constable’s coat. “Do stay warm,” she told him. “It is snowing again. Here, wrap this.” She reached up and twisted a brightly colored muffler around his neck.
“What’s this?” he asked, frowning.
“I knitted it,” said Sylvia.
“Did you, then! Thank you, Miss Shattuck. Well, congratulations on your engagement, and I wouldn’t let my comment about Niagara Falls spoil your honeymoon plans.”
When the door was closed, I turned to my friend. “You purposely let him think you are affianced,” I accused.
“I did,” she admitted with a little smile. “There’s more tea cake in the parlor. Shall we finish it?”
THAT NIGHT I stayed up late writing, sitting before smoky candle stubs in my attic room so that Lizzie could sleep undisturbed in our bedroom. Progress on “Agatha’s Confession” had slowed, because my thoughts more and more settled on the mysterious fate of Mrs. Agatha Percy rather than her namesake. I realized that my story was tied to the investigation, that to know what was to happen to my Agatha meant knowing what happened to the real Agatha. Tomorrow, I decided, questions must be answered. And then, out of nowhere, came a paragraph for the story, about Agatha, deeply in love with Philip but seeing her lover conversing with her friend Clara:
They stood together, both beautiful and gay in the flood of light that shone down from the shaded lamps. Dark and plain and sad, I sat apart in the twilight shadows, struggling silently to find some outlet from the maze of doubts and fears that filled my heart and brain.
I wanted to be generous and just, to forget self and think of Philip’s happiness alone. But my great love rose up so importunate and strong, I could only listen to its pleading and cling fast to the old hope and faith, though both were broken reeds, I knew.
I watched and waited many days, trying to seem unchanged. But the veil had fallen from my eyes, and the blessed calm was gone that for a little while had brooded over me. Ah, what a little while it seemed! I saw the cloud coming nearer and nearer which should overshadow me and leave them in the sunshine I had lost.
Jealousy. That was why Sylvia had suggested to Cobban that she was engaged: to make him notice her, to awaken his own feelings, if there were any. And now my poor Agatha, plain and poor, must suffer this most terrible of feelings. I sat chewing the end of my pen for some moments; more than Sylvia’s little ploy had begun this train of thought, but I could not yet identify the source of my musings. That is one of the defects of the universal mind, I thought. We may all step into the same stream, but that does not mean we see the source!
Who was jealous of whom? And what did it have to do with Mrs. Percy, murdered in her preparation room? Shadows leaped about the dark attic as my candle stubs flickered; a sudden gust from the ill-fitting window snuffed them both, and I sat in the dark with snowflakes landing on my face and hands like the cold touch of an invisible presence. I shivered with more than cold and quickly relit the candles. What a strange time we live in, I thought, when grown people sit in the dark and frighten one another with ghost stories. As if there weren’t enough in reality to make us cower: slavery and bank failures, the homeless. How lucky I was to have my health, the means of earning a living, and my family. This year, though I was parted from them, we would have gifts for one another.
> I chewed my pen again, this time daydreaming about several winters before, when Father had been traveling and the Alcott brood and Marmee had spent a long winter night before the fire, talking about the Christmas to come.
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” I had grumbled, for we were even poorer than usual then, and Anna and Lizzie and Abby had complained as well, until Marmee came home, wet and cold and exhausted but beaming with joy because she had a letter from Father in her pocket.
“Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles,” Marmee had said.
Sighing, I put away my paper and capped the inkwell, then made my way down the narrow attic stars. I kissed Lizzie on the forehead and went to sleep.
MORNING CAME EARLY for me, well before dawn, for I had several errands to do that day, and had determined to finish at least one more of the reverend’s shirts before stepping out of the house.
“Louy? Up so early?” said Lizzie, rubbing her eyes and stepping into the sewing room. “What time is it?” She had wrapped a blanket about her shoulders and looked very young.
“Not yet six,” I said. “Go back to bed and sleep some more, two more hours at least.”
“Ummm,” she murmured. No one but Lizzie murmurs in the notes of a Chopin étude, I thought, smiling and threading my needle with grim determination. By nine o’clock I had finished the shirt and my bowl of porridge, and was ready for the first errand of the day. Mrs. Dahlia O’Connor, a friend of Mother’s, would still be drowsy, but she was a sharp creature and I would be at a slight advantage if I caught her off guard.
She lived on the other side of Beacon Hill, where clusters of somewhat desperate-looking ramshackle houses provided shelter for Boston’s free blacks, the day servants and laundrywomen, and the increasing numbers of Irish immigrants. On this side of the hill, slop buckets were emptied in the street, not in private privies in the back, and simply walking could be a hazardous business if one did not check the placement of each step. Unemployed young men loitered on corners, and streetwalking women finally done with the night’s work made their exhausted way to the single, often shared room they called home. Just on the other side of the hill were the old mansions and old names and old blood of Boston; the contrast always seemed a parable to me, that nothing but a mound of soil separated the classes, the newcomers from the old comers, in life as in death. How fragile, secure reader, is estate and esteem!
