by Kat Ross
I wandered down a flagstone path between two tall hedges, looking for George. I thought I’d seen him come this way. But the garden was larger than it appeared, a maze of twisting lanes and dense shrubbery. Fortunately, the sky was clear and the moon bright enough to see by. I took a few steadying breaths. The scent of some night-blooming flower drifted, thick and sweet as syrup, through the air. My head began to clear.
Then I rounded a corner and nearly tripped over my prey. He was sitting on the grass next to a tinkling marble fountain, a bottle of champagne propped between his knees. His neatly combed hair had fallen into his eyes, and his cravat hung loose across his chest, like bat’s wings.
“What is this wondrous vision I see before me?” George Kane declared, flashing a smarmy grin. “A naiad of the woodland forest! Or is it a dryad? I always get them confused.” He shrugged and patted the ground next to him. “No matter. Come have a drink with me. Even fairies drink champagne, don’t they?”
I looked down, trying to imagine this man stabbing and strangling five people. He wasn’t much older than I was, and his features had the softness of someone whose idea of exertion was shooting some poor animal from the back of a horse.
But then, as John pointed out, the face our killer wore to the world would be very different from the face his victims saw in their final minutes on earth.
“Why are you out here?” I asked. “The party just got going.”
George scowled. “Mother says I need to sober up a bit. So that’s what I’m doing!” He held the bottle up in a toast and took a swig. “Do you happen to have a cigarette? I left mine inside.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Well, don’t just stand there looming over me. I’m getting a crick in my neck. Sit down or go away.”
I sank to the grass across from him, on my knees, which was the only position my dress would allow.
“Who are you?” George asked. “I thought I knew all the pretty ones.”
“Harrison Fearing Pell.”
“Wait, Pell…as in Myrtle Fearing Pell?”
I sighed. “Yes. She’s my sister.”
George laughed aloud. “I remember Myrtle from school. Quite the odd duck. We used to call her Myrtle the Misfit. Thought she was smarter than everyone else.”
I decided it was time to take the wind out of Mr. George X. Kane II’s sails.
“I’m not here to talk about Myrtle, actually,” I said.
“Oh? What are you here for then?” He leaned back, a flirtatious grin on his face.
“I’m here to talk about Becky Rickard,” I said.
George’s grin slipped several notches.
“I don’t know that name,” he said.
“Oh, I think you do. I spoke to a witness who saw Thomas Sweet give her $200. They’re willing to testify in court. And he’s not exactly difficult to identify.” I smiled. “I know that you were lovers. I know you gave her a grimoire. And I know that she tried to blackmail you, and died for it.”
George’s face had grown paler with each word. “Who are you?” He grabbed the bottle of champagne but didn’t drink from it. “And I had nothing to do with her murder!”
“But—”
“You haven’t got your facts straight. Becky would never have tried to blackmail me. She loved me, for God’s sake.” George put his head in his hands. “Becky was…a mistake.”
“A mistake?” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“I met her through Mother,” George said tonelessly. “She would come to house to hold séances. We hit it off.”
“She thought you were going to marry her,” I said coldly.
“I never said that, not once.”
“I’m sure you implied it.”
George was silent.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I told you, I didn’t kill her. I don’t know who did. Maybe she had another lover.”
I glared at him until he looked away. “Men like you make themselves feel better thinking everyone’s as rotten as they are, that’s how you justify treating girls like Becky as though they’re trash, but she wasn’t.” The gunmetal felt hot against my breasts. “The grimoire. Was it The Black Pullet?”
He looked up at me with an unreadable expression. “Yes. I got it from a gentleman at my club.”
“Why did you give it to Becky?”
George’s green eyes suddenly chilled. I felt it, as if an icy breeze had swept through the garden.
“Why the hell should I tell you that?”
“Because if you don’t, I’m going straight to the police with everything I know. Your family name will be dragged through the mud. Even the Kanes can’t buy their way out of a murder charge.”
George considered this but said nothing. I decided to give him another little push.
“Becky wrote a letter to her sister just before she died. She names you, George.”
“That little…” He swore under his breath.
“Why did you give Becky the grimoire?”
“I just wanted to test it out,” he muttered. “See if it actually worked. The man who sold it to me said it was effective, but dangerous. He told me stories of what had happened to others who tried to use it. One threw himself in front of a streetcar. Another massacred his wife, children and servants and ended up in an asylum. He said I must have a medium. Performed incorrectly…well, he claimed it could open a doorway and there’s no telling what might come through. I figured he was just trying to increase the price, but I didn’t care to take a chance. So I paid Becky to try it first.”
“But what do you need a fortune for anyway? Aren’t you rich enough?”
George laughed mirthlessly. “My father is rich, Miss Pell. And he’s a hard man.”
“So he’s threatened to cut you off, is that it?” I shook my head in disgust.
“He refused to pay my debts,” George said. “I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands.”
I remembered Edward saying he’d just spent the day with George at the racetrack, and wondered how vast his debts had become. But there was something wrong with his story.
“You went there, to Becky’s flat, didn’t you?” I said.
“What?”
“The book was never found. Someone took it.”
George’s eyes glazed over. His fingers loosened around the neck of the bottle. “I keep seeing things. In the mirror. Shapes. My God, there was so much blood. On the walls. The ceiling.” George looked at me, all traces of drunkenness gone. “They did it, didn’t they? They let something through.”
The moment stretched out, and then I heard the soft crunch of footfalls on gravel.
“What’s going on here?” It was Mrs. Temple Kane. She had her son’s green eyes and blonde hair, but the resemblance ended there. Temple’s face was all hard planes and angles. She towered over me, and I guessed her height must have been close to six feet.
George opened his mouth but no sound came out.
“Get back inside,” she said to her son in a peremptory tone.
He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the champagne.
“Mother—”
“Just do as I say.”
George couldn’t meet her gaze. “Yes, Mother.”
He turned and stumbled down the path like a whipped dog. Mrs. Kane turned to me.
“You look tired, Miss Pell. It’s been a long evening. I’m sure you wish to go home now.”
I was being dismissed as surely as George, if in a somewhat more polite manner.
“Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Kane,” I said. “It was certainly an exciting party.”
She smiled, and it was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen.
“I’m so glad you thought so. Shall I fetch Mr. Weston to escort you to your carriage?”
“I can do it myself.”
She inclined her head. “So independent. I suppose it runs in the family. Good evening, then, Miss Pell.”
She
swept up her skirts and glided away down the path.
I stood there for a moment. George had said something that tickled the back of my mind, like a maddening itch I couldn’t quite reach. He’d been in Becky’s flat, all right, and retrieved the book. But had he been the one to kill her? As John had noted, he could be a fluent liar. He certainly didn’t seem to feel any remorse for using Becky to carry out his dirty work.
Was it true fear I saw in his eyes at the end, or simply a calculated performance?
I went back inside. John was dancing with Parthena, who clung to him like a leech. Edward had disappeared. Mrs. Kane’s eyes bored into me as I crossed the ballroom, as though she could shove me out the front door through sheer force of will.
So I snagged two cherry tarts from the groaning food table and brought them out to the long line of carriages waiting at the curb. Most of the drivers were dozing in their seats. A few stood on the street, talking quietly. The mansion itself occupied the middle of the block, with a high wrought-iron fence extending around the grounds. I headed north, searching for Connor. When I reached the corner of Sixty-Seventh Street, I happened to glance back.
A slender figure lounged against the fence, smoking a cigarette. Something about the profile was wrong, distorted, like a reflection in moving water. I froze. It was Thomas Sweet. He seemed to feel my eyes on him, because he turned and grinned. Then he flicked his cigarette into the gutter and slipped through a gate into the gardens.
I watched for another minute, but he seemed to have vanished. A hound gone to heel at his master’s side.
I walked quickly up the line of carriages and finally found Connor at Seventy-First Street. His eyes lit up when he saw the tarts.
“Where’s the others?” he mumbled through a mouthful of crust.
“Still inside. Listen, Connor, we’ll fetch them in a bit. I just need to walk, do some thinking.”
“Keep out of the park,” he warned.
“Naturally. I’ll be back soon.”
“Sure you don’t want some company?” he asked.
“Thanks, but you’d best stay here.”
I left him happily inflicting cherry stains on his new clothes and set off up Fifth Avenue. By Seventy-Fifth Street, the traffic had thinned. It was a perfect mid-August night. Insects chirped in the trees to my right, where the dark mass of Central Park sat behind a low stone wall.
I reviewed the facts of the case as we now knew them.
George Kane acquires The Black Pullet but he’s afraid to use it himself, so he gives it to his lover, Becky Rickard, along with $200 to perform the ritual. He knows she is desperate enough to accept, and indeed she does, justifying it to herself after consulting “the Spirits,” which she still believes in despite the Fox sisters’ fraud.
Becky recruits Robert Straker, who in turn recruits his old friend Leland Brady. For some unknown reason, she scatters sulphur on the floor of the cellar. Perhaps it is part of the ritual. Things do not go as planned, but we know that Becky is still alive after Straker and Brady leave, since she went to the owner of the building to compensate her for the mess they made.
Becky then returns to her flat, where someone comes and brutally murders her. It was someone she knew well, since she would never have opened the door in the middle of the night to a stranger. The $200 is still there, but The Black Pullet is not found among her belongings. Despite the savagery of the crime, the killer appears remorseful afterwards.
I say appears because if we are indeed dealing with a habitual and practiced liar, the scene could easily have been staged to create a particular impression aimed at throwing off the investigation.
Straker disappears the next day, after Brady reports that he acted deranged. But he leaves the only picture of his beloved mother hidden under his mattress, and cigarette ash indicates the presence of a second person in the room. His soldier’s uniform is missing, and both the button found next to Raffaele’s body and Mary Fletcher’s account indicate that the killer dresses as a soldier. However, we have no proof that it’s Straker’s uniform.
The same day Straker disappears, Raffaele Forsizi is lured or abducted from the Third Avenue Elevated and strangled in Washington Square Park. A so-called “diabolical signature” is burned into the grass next to his body, heightening the impression that the killer is obsessed with the occult, or believes themselves possessed. This is confirmed with the death of Anne Marlowe, where another taunting message in backwards Latin is left painted on the wall in blood.
Two days later, the killer strikes again. It becomes clear he is using the elevated lines to stalk his victims, a pair this time, just hours apart. The single consistent act is to cover the faces of the dead.
That was yesterday. My steps slowed as I mulled it all over. A carriage moved past, curtains drawn tight, the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and soft creaking of the harness the only sounds in the still night. It was evident that the person we were dealing with was very sophisticated. Highly organized. He had managed to kill Raffaele in a relatively crowded place without being seen. He had enticed Anne Marlowe to a deserted location. He had a firm working knowledge of arcane practices, such as pacts with the Devil and the supposed dangers of using a grimoire like The Black Pullet to conjure wealth.
I didn’t doubt that he was a lunatic. But the later victims struck me almost as afterthoughts. Part of a game that was proving too enjoyable to quit.
It all started with Becky.
I was just turning to go back to the Kane mansion when a faint but agonized scream cut through the summer night. It came from somewhere deep inside the park.
15
The scream hung in the air, then stopped abruptly. As though the person’s air supply had been suddenly cut off.
I looked up and down the street, but there was no one else in sight. The carriage had vanished, turning the corner perhaps. Never was I so glad to have followed Myrtle’s advice. I rummaged around in my bodice and retrieved the pistol. The grip was slippery with perspiration, but its metallic weight was reassuring in my hand as I took a deep breath and entered Central Park at the Seventy-Ninth Street transverse.
I ran down the winding road, trying not to trip over my skirts. I had been to the park many times with John and his brothers, but always during the daytime. We would bring a picnic lunch and they would play rugby on a large lawn called the Green, while I read a book or just lay on my back watching the clouds. I knew the Green was a bit to the south near a ladies’ restaurant called the Casino. I was less familiar with this area.
Newly installed electric lamps illuminated a fork in the road. I caught a glimpse of the lake through the trees to my left, not the water itself but the red and blue lights of the hired pleasure boats. We skated there last winter, John, Connor and I, before the blizzard. When the ice was frozen solid, all the omnibuses and horse cars would fly white flags and word would spread that “the ball is up in the park!”—meaning the red ball had been hoisted on the Arsenal and it was safe to skate.
Connor wasn’t living with us yet, but John had taken an immediate fancy to him. I think he enjoyed showing Connor new things, things he couldn’t even have dreamt of before he tried to rob Myrtle and ended up getting a job instead. I smiled at the memory. A frosty January morning, just after New Year’s. The sky was a lustrous, bottomless blue. We’d gone to one of the nearby cottages afterwards and sipped hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire. John told a ghost story, something about the restless souls of smallpox patients haunting the Gothic-style hospital on Ward’s Island after its closure two years ago…
All was silent. I began to wonder if what I thought was a scream had actually been wild laughter.
I paused at the entrance to a heavily wooded area that could only be the Ramble. In the sunlight, it was reputed to be one of the most beautiful parts of the park, a rustic paradise of gurgling brooks and wildflowers. Tonight, it just looked dark and impenetrable.
“Hello?” I called, feeling idiotic. “Does anyone need help?”
Not even a cricket replied.
I was turning to leave when I heard a noise. It had a wet, squelching quality that made my skin crawl. With very little effort, my mind conjured up the image of a deer carcass being dressed with a sharp knife.
I switched the pistol to my left hand and wiped the sweat off my right palm. Then I returned the pistol to my right and cocked it.
“You really are a fool, Harry,” I muttered.
I began to walk cautiously deeper into the Ramble. Trees laden with vines pressed close on both sides. The lights of the main thoroughfare faded behind me. I tried to be stealthy, but my dress rustled like a pile of autumn leaves with every step. Then the breeze died, leaving an airless void. Stinging beads of sweat popped out on my forehead and rolled into my eyes.
It was so dark that I tripped over the body.
All I knew was that my left foot caught on something in the middle of the path. I pinwheeled my arms and tried to recover, but when I looked down and saw the white flash of skin gleaming in the moonlight, I let out a shriek and went arse over teakettle, as Connor would say, into the undergrowth. The pistol flew from my hand.
I lay there, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come. My chest felt like a locked door with no key. My eyes still worked though. And what I saw lifted all the hair on my body straight up.
A rough stone wall crossed the path ten paces away. It was broken by a narrow archway, through which the night poured black as pitch. But something even darker stood just within the shadow of the arch. Watching me.
I groped for the pistol but my hands came away empty. Empty and wet.
I was lying in a pool of blood.
The whole scene was so surreal, my mind simply rejected it. This couldn’t be happening. Not an hour ago I was dancing with John in a brightly lit ballroom filled with people. Maybe not the nicest people, but still, regular people.
How easy it is in New York City to tumble down the rabbit hole. It just takes a few wrong steps. One or two poor decisions. The abyss is always waiting for the unwary. A hidden signal, and the trapdoor suddenly opens beneath your feet, dropping you into a lightless pit, a charnel house like the one in the Benders’ cellar.
