The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  “I can’t help you,” I said to both of them.

  It was Fitz who answered, of course. “Ellie, for God’s sake. Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  “I’ve advised you already,” I said. “I think you should go to the police. Perhaps you’re in danger, or perhaps not, but they’re the only ones who can help you.”

  “Ellie—”

  I flicked my gaze to Ramona. “I can’t help you. I’ve tried. I have. But I simply can’t.” She gave no indication that she’d heard me; her gaze stayed fixed on Fitz.

  “I’m wasting my time here, aren’t I?” Fitz pushed back his chair and stood, angry and convincingly hurt. “I should have known better than to ask you for help. Don’t disturb Ellie’s quiet little life—that’s the rule, isn’t it?”

  I looked back at him, tired of him, tired of everything. “You have no idea.”

  “If I’m dead, it’s your fault,” he said sullenly, like a child, and then he was gone.

  I pressed my hands to my temples. Ramona had vanished, but a lingering smell remained. When I heard the front door slam, I got up, reluctantly walked into my sitting room, and peered around the edge of the curtain. Fitz was shambling off down my street, his hands in his pockets. I saw no ghosts.

  I sat at the window for a long moment, invisible from the street, looking past the curtain, watching. I saw nothing move, saw no one pass. The houses facing me across the street were still and quiet. And yet I felt certain that someone was watching the house; why not? It could be George Sutter’s man, or Inspector Merriken’s man. It could be the man who had killed Ramona and sent her into her hellish half existence, watching my doorway and waiting for his chance.

  The pain in my temples throbbed, lighter now. I left the window and went upstairs, where I washed, changed my clothes, and put a few belongings into an old messenger bag of my father’s. I chose one of my older dresses to wear, a soft shirtdress with a lace collar and a narrow belt. When I’d finished, I looked around my bedroom—the room that had been my mother’s bedroom and now was mine. I looked at the dressing table, the mirror, the silver-backed hairbrush. I opened the closet door and looked at The Fantastique’s beaded dress hanging there, waiting for my next session. I ran my fingers gently down the sleeve of the dress, feeling its cool perfection, listening to the faint sound it made. I took the head scarf from its hook on the back of the closet door and wound it around the hanger, letting its ends dangle over the dress, and then I closed the door.

  Pickwick waited for me in the front hall, sitting up, his ears alert. He was not exactly exuberant, but he watched me with a bright, calm expression, his intelligent brown eyes following me. Again he thumped his tail once, a gesture that seemed to say, Yes, here we are. You’re not my master, but at least you’re something. It was an improvement over his dejection of yesterday.

  “I should leave you here,” I said to him, shouldering my bag. “I should call my daily woman again. I have no need for a dog, and this way you’d be out of danger.”

  Pickwick made no move, and in my imagination he chided me. He was a collie, after all, bred to run through fields and herd livestock, not to sit decoratively in a London sitting room. I looked around at the silent, ordered house I had lived in for three years now without moving or changing a single piece of furniture.

  “Are you a guard dog?” I said to him, thinking of the danger I would face today.

  Thumps of the tail, and a patient expression.

  I sighed and took up his leash, which my daily woman had left by the door. “All right, then, but don’t blame me if you get tired. I suppose I’ll put up with you.” When I bent to attach his leash, he pressed his nose to the inside of my elbow, as if he knew perfectly well that I was relieved to have him along, that the vision of his master that we’d both seen made me feel like kin to him. “We’re going to Kent,” I told him conversationally, “but we’re making a stop at Harriet Walk first. I have questions for Octavia Murtry. The police are coming to Kent as well, and so is James, but we won’t see them because they’ll be out of sight. So don’t let on, all right?”

  Pickwick seemed to be in agreement. I took a deep breath, gathered my courage, and left my house for what felt like the last time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “I have no time to talk,” Octavia Murtry said to me. “The taxi is leaving.”

  It wasn’t exactly true; the taxi was idling in front of the row house on Harriet Walk, and a burly hired man was working on transporting a trunk and a valise from the door to the back of the cab. Octavia stood on the walk in a beautiful forest green coat, her honey brown hair tucked under a matching hat, as she watched the man work with a vaguely tired expression.

  “It’s just a few questions,” I said. I had put on a belted wool coat over my shirtdress, as well as a soft cloche hat and the comfortable buttoned shoes I usually wore only to the grocer’s. It wasn’t exactly fashionable—the dismissive glance Octavia gave my ensemble confirmed that—but I found I didn’t quite care. I was comfortable, and aside from the aches from the night before, my body felt newly awake, aware of itself.

  “I’m in a hurry,” Octavia complained, though she quite obviously wasn’t doing anything except watch someone else work. “I’m leaving for Paris today, and Lausanne after that. Father says I’m to go to the Continent for at least a month, if not longer.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed, put upon. “He says I need to find a new influence since Gloria has died. He also thinks I’ll meet a man and forget all about Harry.” She slid me a sidelong look. “I’m sorry we won’t have time for a proper séance, like I’d hoped, but perhaps I’ll find someone who can help me in Paris.”

  “I wish you well,” I said, almost meaning it. “But I have one question before you go.”

  “Very well.”

  “Why did Gloria come to see you the day before she died?”

  Octavia’s expression went very still.

  “You said you hadn’t seen her since you went shopping with her last Saturday,” I said. “That was a lie, wasn’t it? She came to see you on Sunday, the day before she died. No one knew about it, not even Davies, and you didn’t tell the police. Why?”

  Octavia had gone ghostly white under her powder. “How could you know that? How could you?”

  I shrugged, and her eyes widened. If she thought I’d used my powers, all the better.

  She shifted and looked away. “I didn’t want to tell anyone,” she said. “In fact, I never wanted to think of it again.”

  She paused, so I prompted her. “Start from the beginning.”

  “I’d been asking her to do a special reading for me. Like you said, you know, when we met the other day. I wanted her to contact her brothers, but she always said no.” She glanced at me; I gave her no reaction, only waited. “On Sunday,” she continued, “she telephoned me. She told me she’d changed her mind, that she wanted to contact Harry and Tommy and Colin. She’d canceled her other appointment for the day, and she hadn’t even told Davies. She wanted money for it—it was a little insulting, because we were practically family and the sum was so large. But I wasn’t about to say no, so I agreed. I was supposed to have tea with my grandmother, but I canceled everything and cleared my schedule.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She came here. God, she looked awful, like she hadn’t been sleeping, like she’d been drinking. She said she had a headache. I can only imagine how much she’d had to drink to make her look like that.”

  I dropped my gaze to the top of Pickwick’s head where he sat at my feet, my own headache pulsing, left over from Ramona’s appearance. Pickwick’s tail slid over my ankles as if he knew what I was thinking. “Go on.”

  “I told you before—there was something wrong with her in those last days. She never did sessions outside of her own flat. But she said she’d been home alone, trying t
o contact her brothers and unable to do it. She said she had to get out of there, that she needed me. That because I’d been engaged to Harry, contact with me would help her do it. She seemed almost panicked. I have to say, it was tasteless of her to ask me for money when she already wanted to contact her brothers herself, but there was nothing I could do at that point. You know what she was like when her mind was made up about something.”

  I can’t listen, I thought. I can’t. I pictured Gloria, her powers fading, knowing that her final chance to speak to her beloved dead brothers was slipping away forever. That Octavia would always have money, but Gloria’s only source of wealth was about to dry up. My mother had had me to cover for the fact that her powers were fading, but Gloria had no one. And neither did I.

  “Did she do the reading?” I asked.

  Octavia was silent for a moment, until I finally raised my gaze and looked at her. She had gone even paler than before, and though she was looking at me, she seemed to be staring at something far away that I could not see. “Tell me,” she said after a moment. “When the dead communicate with you, do you always tell your clients everything they say?”

  “This isn’t about me,” I replied, thinking of suicidal abortions and anonymous babies. “Tell me what happened when you did the reading.”

  The hired man had finished loading the taxi and now he leaned on a lamppost, taking a break to light a cigarette as the taxi idled. “At first there was nothing,” Octavia said. “I thought it was the headache interfering, because she was quite obviously in pain. And then I felt something.” She blinked, still staring at whatever it was behind her eyes. “The air was electric, and there was a sort of smell. Faint and almost bad. And I felt something brush the back of my neck.” She touched a gloved hand to the back of her neck as she recalled it. “I know some would say it was the power of suggestion, but I know what I felt. I’ve been to a great many séances, and I’ve seen tables move and doors open—I’ve heard knocks and seen messages spelled with a Ouija board. But just sitting at a little table in my dressing room with Gloria, I felt something so real I almost couldn’t comprehend it.” She blinked, seemed to notice me, and shrugged, her previous shallowness reappearing. “It sounds mad, but I think you understand.”

  “Yes,” I managed.

  Her brow furrowed. A man, quite obviously her father, had appeared at the front doorway of the house and watched us impatiently. “I looked at Gloria,” Octavia continued, “and her eyes were wide. She was breathing hard, almost as if she was afraid, and she was sweating. Then she looked at something over my shoulder.” Octavia leaned toward me, uninterested in her father’s impatient stance behind us. “She saw something, don’t you see? I begged and begged her to tell me. ‘Is it Harry? What does he look like? What does he say?’ But she wouldn’t answer. She looked like she’d had some sort of shock. She said, ‘I had no idea,’ and tears came down her face. She was weeping.”

  I blinked at that; I couldn’t picture Gloria weeping any more than Octavia could. “That was all she said?”

  “No, not all. She closed her eyes, as if listening to something. I begged her again to tell me what was going on, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She said, ‘Good-bye, darling,’ and then she said it again, softer: ‘Good-bye, darling.’ And then she opened her eyes, just like that. She pushed back her chair and stumbled out of it and said she had to leave.”

  “She didn’t tell you what had happened?”

  “It wasn’t fair.” Now real anger crept into Octavia’s voice. Her father waved at us, and she made an impatient gesture ordering him to wait. “She wouldn’t say. You have no idea how I pleaded with her. I was the customer. I had paid. Harry had been in the room; I felt it the same way I know you’re standing here now. And she wouldn’t tell me what he’d said.” She sounded like a petulant child, and though it wasn’t flattering on her, I couldn’t help but feel empathy. “I was so close, don’t you see? I deserve to know. You don’t understand—you take it for granted, this power you have. You get to see things, to know things, that the rest of us go to our graves wondering about. It isn’t fair.”

  I stared at her. “And that’s what Gloria did,” I said. “The next day. She went to her grave, and now you’ll never know.”

  Octavia patted her cheeks briefly with her gloved hands and straightened her shoulders, collecting herself. “I simply couldn’t believe it. I came to her apartment that day I ran into you there because I had to know if she’d left a diary, a note—anything. I was in such shock. I’m still not over it. I think Europe will be good for my nerves.”

  “But you didn’t tell the police any of this.”

  “I saw no need for it,” she said crisply. “It was a personal matter. What if the murderer was caught and I was required to testify in some sort of courtroom? I couldn’t help but suspect that her murder had something to do with our session. And I was afraid, because Gloria was afraid, and Gloria was never afraid.”

  She turned away and started toward her father, who was saying something to her. She put a hand on the brim of her cloche hat and turned briefly back to me. “Good-bye, Ellie,” she said. “If you speak to Gloria on the other side, tell her—” She stopped, and a look of pain and raw confusion crossed her face.

  “I won’t,” I told her. “I have no plans to. Not ever.”

  She nodded and turned back to her father, who ushered her into the waiting taxi.

  I felt the brush of a tail over my ankles again. “Sometimes you have to lie, Pickwick,” I confessed to the dog. “Sometimes it’s for the best.”

  As the taxi drove away, Octavia’s father turned and stared at me, his expression dark and forbidding. He looked at me for a long moment before he walked back to the house.

  I retreated, tugging on Pickwick’s leash. I’d never seen the man before, but his expression was a familiar one. He wasn’t just a father sending a troublesome dependent to the Continent. When Mr. Murtry looked at me, he was afraid.

  * * *

  The plan was simple. I was to board the 10:47 train from Victoria Station, alighting at Charing, in Kent, from which I was to travel to the Dubbs residence. I was to act normal—that is, oblivious—in case anyone followed me. Inspector Merriken and his men would already be in place in Kent, waiting to see whether Gloria’s killer would show himself.

  “And what will you do if Inspector Merriken refuses to bring you with him?” I’d asked James as I dressed that morning. “Go on foot?”

  James had crooked an arm behind his head, watching me from the sofa. He was washed and dressed already—he was an early riser, I’d discovered—but he had not yet put on his jacket, and he was sprawled deliciously in his white shirtsleeves. “Ellie, did I ever tell you of how I tracked three German horse guards over fourteen miles of terrain in 1916?”

  “You know you didn’t,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ears so I could put on my hat. “Are you saying you’re some sort of tracking genius? And if you are, what are you going to do with it in the wilds of Kent?”

  “I’m no genius, but I spent most of the war trying not to be seen by the enemy. I’d expect the police to know the same.”

  “You’re not even armed.” I reached for my hat, unwilling to admit that my own plans were giving me misgivings, that I was putting his life in danger. “I’d be happier if I knew you had—I don’t know—some way to defend yourself.”

  He’d laughed at that, and I’d had to pause for a moment, appreciating the sight of it in daylight. “I don’t intend to go around shooting people. But I do intend to keep you safe, with or without the police.”

  I wasn’t exactly certain what that meant, and in the moment, I hadn’t the courage to ask. I knew James’s strength, his quickness, his intelligence. I knew he’d have expert help. I knew he’d spent several years fighting, experiencing things I couldn’t bear to imagine before coming home. And now he was relentlessly focused—on me. It would h
ave to be enough. We had no better plan.

  “Ellie.” James had gentled his voice, as if he’d followed my thoughts. “Just worry about yourself. Stay alert and don’t take chances. I’ll handle Merriken. We’ll be there.”

  “And when we get to the house? If no one has come forward? If nothing has happened?”

  “Then we do a séance, as you planned. See what Gloria has to tell us.” His brow furrowed as he looked at me. “You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?”

  I’d assured him I would, that I could do the séance, that I felt well enough. But my head was already aching as I stood in line at the Victoria Station ticket counter, the heavy smell and sound of the crowds beating in time with my heart.

  “You can’t take a dog in third class,” the ticket seller said to me, noting the leash looped around my wrist, the patient collie at my feet. “It isn’t allowed.”

  “But—”

  “You’ll have to buy a first-class ticket if you want to bring a dog. Those are the rules.”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t resist a glance around me, through the dim light and crowds, before turning back to the ticket booth. I didn’t see anyone I recognized, anyone lingering near. I was supposed to stay visible. In the privacy of a first-class compartment, it would take Gloria’s killer only minutes to kill me.

  “My sister can’t afford a first-class ticket,” I said, knowing that by looking at my clothes the ticket seller would never believe I was out of funds myself. “This is her dog. I’m taking him to her because she’s sick and wants him back. She’s devoted to him. We’re meeting in third class. I’ll never see her if I’m in first class. He’s a quiet dog. He’s the most well-behaved dog you’ve ever seen.”

  The ticket seller, distracted and sweaty, scratched his bald head and glanced at Pickwick, and then he shrugged. “Very well. It’s nothing to me. But if he makes trouble and you’re tossed off, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.”