by Kat Ross
Sundays in New York are less of a religious observance than an opportunity for the gentry to parade in their Sabbath finery. Except for the Bowery, which can’t be bothered to put a lid on sinning for even a single day, the whole town shuts down and a social, festive atmosphere takes over.
I jumped out of bed and threw on a high-necked dress suitable for church. Holy Trinity sat at the intersection of Madison Avenue and Forty-Second Street. I recalled it as having a large, handsome steeple, and being a bit swamped by the tidal flood of passengers heading to and from Grand Central Depot on Lexington.
Mrs. Rivers raised an eyebrow when I told her where I was headed, as she knew well how restless I became when sentenced for an hour to a hard pew, but I guess she thought a little of the Holy Spirit might leak into me for she raised no objection. She seemed unaware of my trip to Chamberlain’s the night before, and I’d taken great care not to make a sound as I crept back to my bed. If she noticed a slight puffiness around my eyes at breakfast that morning, Mrs. Rivers didn’t remark on it.
I found Connor in his room and learned that none of the Bank Street Butchers had seen or heard from Billy since Friday evening, when he’d come to the house.
“I want them all looking for him straightaway,” I said, my stomach twisting with guilt. “Do nothing else. If he’s not found by this evening, we’ll need to report him missing. And see if anyone knows where he went the day before he came to you. It might give us some clue as to where he thought he saw Straker.”
Connor nodded in a businesslike fashion. “We’re on it, Harry. But Billy goes off sometimes. To clear his head, he says.”
“When there’s $50 to collect?” I asked grimly.
“Minus my—”
“Yes, yes, your ten percent commission. Just find him!”
I grabbed a hansom cab on Fifth Avenue, but as it was nearly 10:45, the traffic was already heavy. An overturned cart at Thirty-Second Street provoked further yelling and cursing and general mayhem. My driver did his best to gallop the last few blocks (ignoring the outraged fist-shaking of a group of old ladies attempting to cross), but it was no use. I was still late to the start of the service.
Disapproving faces turned my way as I scurried to a rear pew, trying not to step on too many toes in the process, although after running the gauntlet at Chamberlain’s, I figured it would take more than a few scowls to faze me.
I scanned the congregation for John and Edward and finally spotted the backs of their heads about halfway toward the pulpit, where the minister was holding forth about The Gospel of Matthew. My eyes instantly glazed over. There was something about the soft creaking of people shifting in the pews, the dim light and the echoing, sonorous sermon that always made me want to curl up and go to sleep.
So I spent the next few minutes trying to find the Fox sisters. It wasn’t easy since I was in the very back of the church, but when we stood up to sing Come, Thou Almighty King, I got a quick glimpse of two women who seemed to fit the description. They were middle-aged, with dark hair and a close enough resemblance to each other to be related. Neither was exactly pretty, and you might even say that Margaret was downright plain, but they had a charismatic quality that drew the eye.
There were actually three of them—Kate, Margaret and Leah—but from what I’d read in the papers, Kate and Margaret were feuding with their elder sister. This had led them to publicly confess that their decades of supposed communication with the spirits had all been an elaborate hoax. According to Margaret, they had started at a very young age (Margaret was fifteen, Kate was twelve) by using an apple on a string to make bumping sounds that their mother believed was a ghost. Encouraged by the success of this deception, the girls then claimed they had made contact with a murdered peddler named Charles B. Rosna. When shards of human bone were discovered buried in the cellar, their reputation as psychics began to grow.
It was now some forty years later, and the very same women who had ignited the Spiritualist movement had just brought it crashing to its knees. Would they be willing to talk about Becky Rickard, whose terrible end could be traced back, at least in part, to the Fox sisters’ confession?
I waited impatiently for the service to conclude, leaping out of my seat before the final “amens” had faded away, and met John and Edward at the door.
John broke into a wide grin when he saw me. “Late to church again, Harry? What was it this time? Broken clock? Lame horse? Overturned cart blocking the road?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I said. “The last one. Listen, I think I saw Kate and Margaret before.” I craned my neck to see over the crowd surging through the front doors. “But they’ve disappeared.”
We hurried outside, where the parishioners were milling around, the ladies sporting their fanciest hats, the gentlemen brandishing silver-headed walking sticks. It was a pleasant day, with a fresh breeze coming off the East River. I searched the chattering crowd in vain. Evidently, the Fox sisters didn’t socialize much anymore.
“Over there,” John said.
Two figures in black were walking arm in arm toward Fifth Avenue, not exactly rushing along, but not dallying either. We caught up with them at the corner of Bryant Park.
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping in front of them. “I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but my name is…Miss Pell. Am I correct in presuming that you are Margaret and Kate Fox?”
The sisters’ faces instantly became guarded.
“Are you a reporter?” Kate asked.
“Not at all. I’m a consulting detective. I’ve been hired to look into the murder of Becky Rickard.”
The women shared a quick look. “What do you want with us?” Margaret asked. “We had nothing to do with it.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m just trying to learn a little more about her and who her clients might have been.”
“And who are they?” Kate pointed to John and Edward, her dark eyes wary. She was thinner than her sister, with a pointy nose and long, almost mournful face.
I gave my friends’ names, making sure to introduce John as “Doctor Weston.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t help you,” Kate said, turning away.
“Please!” I called after them. “Just a few minutes of your time. Becky’s killer deserves to be caught and punished, but the police aren’t getting anywhere. It’s not even in the papers anymore. No one cares.” I swept up my skirts and ran after them. “She was only twenty-five!”
Margaret stopped. She whispered a few words to Kate, who shook her head in vehement disagreement, then stalked off alone.
“I’ll talk to you for Becky’s sake,” Margaret said at my approach. “Come, let’s walk in the park.”
I waved over John and Edward and we found a shady spot near the imposing fifty-foot-high wall of the Croton Distributing Reservoir. Perhaps it was my morbid streak, but whenever I passed by this place, I always thought of the thousands of bodies that used to lie in a potter’s field beneath our feet, and whose eternal rest was cut short in 1840 when they were all dug up and relocated to Ward’s Island.
If ghosts were real, one would think they’d be haunting every square foot of this city.
Margaret Fox turned out to be a kind woman, who seemed truly sorry at what had befallen her one-time protégé. She explained that Becky had travelled to Rochester to see them when she was just nineteen. Becky had an ethereal quality that fascinated audiences, especially men. She was well-spoken and passionate about Spiritualism and soon became a sought-after public speaker.
“We conducted many séances together,” Margaret said, “but then Becky began to call herself Valentina von Linden and got herself invited to a few society parties. She was convinced she’d find a rich man to marry her, the poor fool. She didn’t understand that while any of those so-called gentlemen would be happy to carry on a dalliance and whisper promises in her ear, she was too far beneath them to be taken seriously.”
“Were there any men in particular?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “Yes, one who she seemed head over heels for, but she wouldn’t tell me his name.”
“Did you get any impressions about him?”
Margaret thought for a moment. “Very rich. One of the older New York families. She said he was terrified his mother would find out. I think he was afraid of being disinherited.”
“Did she ever say what he looked like?”
“I’m afraid not. She was very secretive. I think he insisted on it.”
“What about her clientele?” John asked. “Can you give us any names?”
“I could.” She gave us a sharp look. “But I’m not sure I should. What’s the use in dragging more people through the mud?
“Because one of them might be Becky’s killer,” I said. “Two hundred dollars was found near her body. She must have gotten it from somewhere. You know she was living in abject poverty?”
“I didn’t before I read what happened in the newspapers,” Margaret said wearily. “We would have tried to help her. But she never asked.”
It reminded me of what Brady had said about Straker, that he was too proud to admit defeat.
“The money rules out robbery,” I said. “And it was such an exact amount, as though she’d just gotten it and hadn’t spent any yet. We need to know who gave it to her.”
Margaret Fox sighed. “Alright, I’ll tell you some names. But if anyone asks, they didn’t come from me, understood?”
We all nodded. John took out a notepad and started writing as Margaret began her recital.
“…Miss Lucy Gould, Mrs. H. R. Pendleton, Mr. and Mrs. March, the Kanes, Mrs. Robert Mortimer, Lord Balthazar, the Whittiers…”
By the time Margaret Fox finally wound down, John had filled six pages with his illegible scrawl. So much for narrowing the field of suspects, I thought glumly.
“Did she ever express any interest in black magic or grimoires?” I asked.
Margaret looked scandalized. “Absolutely not! Such things are antithetical to all that Spiritualism stands for.”
If I told her about the séance, I’d have to explain my client’s involvement, which would inevitably lead to the fact that I was withholding all this information from the police. So I tried to hedge a bit.
“Have you ever seen this symbol?”
I showed her the piece of paper Fred had given me, but I wasn’t surprised when she answered in the negative. No one seemed to know what it was.
“Did she ever mention the name Robert Straker? Or Leland Brady?”
Again, Margaret shook her head. It appeared the well was running dry.
“You’ll have to excuse my sister,” she said, as we walked together toward Sixth Avenue. “She’s had a hard time of it in the last year. Leah has been trying to take her children away. It’s a terrible mess.” She was silent for a long moment. “I taught Becky how to use her ankle joints to make rapping noises. She had a real talent for it. She didn’t seem bothered when she found out that we were frauds. The funny part is that despite everything, I think she really believed it.”
“Believed what?” Edward ventured, taking Margaret’s hand and assisting her into a hansom headed downtown.
“In the spirit world. In ghosts. In all of it.” Margaret Fox sat back and nodded to us. “I wish you luck with your investigation, Miss Pell. Becky deserved better than she got. And if it is one of those society boys…well, I hope he hangs.”
And with that, she was gone.
I spent the afternoon in Myrtle’s chemistry laboratory on the top floor of our home, testing the scorched earth from the cellar. I placed it in a test tube and added a few hundredths of a gram of benzoin, stirring the mixture with a glass rod. I then covered the open end of the test tube with a disc of moist lead acetate paper. I heated a glycerol bath to 130 degrees and plunged the test tube inside, quickly raising the temperature to 150 degrees.
Within seconds, a deep black stain appeared on the reagent paper, confirming the presence of sulphur. Or brimstone, as John melodramatically put it. As I could think of no reason such an element would naturally appear, and the traces had been undisturbed by recent footprints, we could safely assume that it was placed there during the séance. But why, and how?
As often happens in New York in the summertime, the cool morning proved deceptive. By late afternoon, it was sweltering again, and I found myself overcome by a kind of stupor. John had gone home to enjoy a Sunday dinner with his boisterous family, and Edward had headed out to the Coney Island Jockey Club to bet on the races at Sheepshead Bay.
His enthusiasm for the investigation had been powerfully rejuvenated by the possibility that one of his friends or acquaintances might be a cold-blooded killer. Edward promised to wrangle us invitations to a ball the following week hosted by the Kanes at their mansion on Central Park West. As much as I disliked such events, I agreed that since nearly everyone on John’s list would be there, it gave us a chance to survey Becky’s former clients in the flesh.
I ate lunch with Mrs. Rivers (pushing the dreaded aspic salad to the side of my plate, where it quivered malevolently), and retired to my room to think about the case. Margaret Fox’s revelations gave us a whole new avenue to explore. If Becky did have a rich paramour, he had treated her badly. Perhaps a broken heart had also caused her chloral hydrate addiction.
I changed into a lighter shift and curled up on my big canopy bed, which had a view of the rooftops looking south. What if Becky had truly loved him, as Margaret seemed to believe? What if she had waited for him to come to his senses, even as her life fell apart around her?
What if, I thought, she finally grew tired of waiting, and love turned to fury?
It seemed as though this man was in a position to lose everything if it came out that he was having an affair with a girl like Becky. What if she had tried to blackmail him?
That could certainly account for the indications that the killer was struck with remorse after the crime, since he’d once cared for her. But there were problems with this theory. First, the money. He should have taken it with him, unless he was too dazed at what had just occurred and forgot to. Second, the backwards Latin. Third, the Forsizi boy.
And fourth: Straker. It would mean he had nothing to do with it, that the séance that same night was just a coincidence. But we still had the problem of the blood in his flat, and the fact that the man was missing.
I couldn’t shake the unpleasant feeling that I was missing something critical, some clue that Myrtle would recognize in an instant as the key to the entire case. That I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
As far as suspects, we had Straker, of course, and the man who had accompanied him to Chamberlain’s. Then there was Becky’s paramour.
And there was also Brady. He was there that night. He said he hadn’t returned home, but had gone to his office to sleep because it was so late. He too had served in the Army. He could have gotten access to Straker’s flat somehow. It wouldn’t have been difficult.
But it made no sense. Where was his motive? After all, Straker had approached him, not the other way around. We had only Brady’s word for this, but the story rang true. Myrtle had taught me seventeen signs to watch for when a person lied, from subtle eye movements to speech patterns and hand gestures, and Brady had displayed none of them. Either he was a spectacular, pathological liar, or he wasn’t lying at all.
I must have drifted off because the light was fading from the sky in a blaze of orange and red when my eyes opened again. Sweat had glued the shift to my body. I threw off the sheet and sat up. Groggy as I was, I felt as though I’d awakened suddenly. That some noise had pulled me up from the depths of sleep.
Like the creaky floorboard on the second-floor landing.
“Mrs. Rivers?” I called out. “Connor?”
There was no answer.
My nerves began to tingle, although I couldn’t say precisely why. The house was quiet. But I was certain that just before I woke, someone had been climbing the stairs.
I’d left my door ajar a
bout an inch. Now, my eyes locked on the doorknob. Every sense seemed to heighten, the details of the room snapping into sharp focus. I thought I heard a tiny sound in the hall. A stealthy sound. My heart hammered in my chest as I placed one bare foot on the floor, then the other.
Myrtle kept guns in the house, but they were all locked up in her study on the second floor.
If it was a burglar, the best thing would be to make a loud noise so he knew someone was home. Most house-breakers just wanted the silver. They weren’t in it for assault. Or murder. Those were capital offenses.
I opened my mouth to scream but something stopped me. A powerful feeling that whoever was out there was not, in fact, a burglar.
That they were here for me.
And if I gave myself away, the game would be over.
With one eye on the door, I searched the room for something I could use as a weapon. My vanity had only a silver comb and hairbrush, a button hook, a bottle of Crosby’s Brain Food with vitalized phosphates, and a tin of powder that mother encouraged me to dust my freckles with (and which itself had gathered dust since she’d been gone). A messy stack of books and journals sat on the table next to my bed. The top one, which lay open, was an article by the Scottish surgeon Henry Faulds in Nature titled “On the skin-furrows of the hand,” in which he proposed a method for recording fingerprints with ink. It was fascinating stuff, but I doubted I could do much damage with it.
I took a step towards the door, goosebumps rising under my thin shift despite the heat. Because now I was sure I heard something, just outside.
Soft breathing.
I scanned the room, the first wings of panic fluttering in my throat. My gaze landed on the dresser. It held a vase of fresh flowers, bright yellow marigolds from the garden. Mrs. Rivers must have placed them there while I napped. The distance, perhaps fifteen feet, took forever to cross. I placed each foot with exquisite care, the blood rushing in my ears. It made no sense, but I was seized by the absolute certainty that the moment I made a single sound, that door would burst open.
