Thomas's absence now was not discussed.
Miller pondered. "If I do, you'll sign the Queen's Arms over to me."
"The day we wed." Her father had given her the hope and the means, but then slowly, painfully, she'd discovered she couldn't keep the place alone. She swallowed. "I can't do this by myself."
"And what benefit to me to marry you?"
Her hours of thought had prepared the answer. "You'll get a property you've always wanted, and with it, an eye and an ear to everything that happens all along the waterfront. More than that: respectability. This whole neighborhood is getting nothing but richer, and you'd be in the middle of it. What better way to advance than through deals with the merchant nobs themselves? To say nothing of window dressing for your other … affairs."
Miller laughed, then stopped, considered what she was saying. "Sharp. And a clever wife to entertain my new friends? It makes sense."
"Those merchants, they're no more than a step above hustling themselves. We can be of use to each other," she said carefully. She'd almost said need, but that would have been fatal. "Wine?"
He looked at her, looked at the bottle, the one empty glass. "Thanks."
She poured, the ruby liquid turning blood-black in the green-tinged glasses, against the dark of the room.
He stared at the glass, his brow furrowing. "I've more of a mind for beer, if you don't mind."
She looked disappointed, but didn't press him. "You'll have to get a head for wine if you expect to move up in the world." She rose and slid a pewter mug from a peg on the wall, then filled it from the large barrel behind her bar.
Miller smiled, thanked her. She raised her glass to him, sipped. He saluted and drank too.
It was then he noticed the large Bible on the table next to them. He reached over, flipped through carelessly.
"Too much theater for one about to be so soon remarried, don't you think?" He flicked through the pages, as if looking for something he could make use of. "Devotion doesn't play. Not around here, anyway."
Anna suppressed her feelings at seeing him handle the book so roughly. She shut it firmly, moved it away. "My father said it was the only book besides my ledger to heed."
Miller shrugged. Piety was unexpected, especially after her reaction—or lack thereof—to her husband's murder, but who could pretend to understand a woman? Her reaction aroused him, however. Any resistance did. "Let me see what I'll be getting myself into. Lift your skirts."
Anna had known it would come to this; still, she hesitated. Only a moment. But before Hook had to say another word, she bunched up the silk, slippery in her sweaty palms, and raised her skirts to her thighs. Miller reached out, grabbed the ribbon of her garter, and pulled. It slithered out of its knot, draped itself over his fist. He leaned forward, slid a finger over the top of her stocking, then collapsed onto the table. His head hit hard, and he didn't say another word.
Repulsed, Anna unhooked his finger from her stocking, let his hand fall heavily, smack against the chair leg. She straightened her stocking, retied her garter, then picked up the heavy Bible. She hesitated, gulping air, then, remembering her father's words and the fourth chapter of Judges, nodded.
I must be better than this. I must manage.
She reached into the cracked binding of the Bible and withdrew a long steel needle. Its point picked up the light from the candle and glittered. Her breath held, she stood over the unconscious man, then, aiming carefully, she drove it deep into his ear.
Shortly, with a grunt, a shudder, a sigh, Miller stopped breathing.
* * *
She had been afraid she'd been too stingy, miscalculated the dose, unseen in the bottom of the pewter mug, not wanting to warn him with the smell of belladonna or have it spill as it waited on the peg. Her father had been frailer, older, and when she could stand his rasping, rattling breathing no longer, could wait no longer to begin her own plans for the Queen's Arms, she had mixed a smaller amount into his beer. No matter: either the poison or the needle had done its work on Hook Miller.
Anna threw the rest of the beer onto the floor, followed it with the last of the wine from the bottle. No sense in taking chances. She had a long night ahead of her. She could barely move Hook on her own. Slender though she was, she was strong from hauling water and kegs and wood from the time she could walk, but he was nearly two hundred pounds of dead meat. She'd planned this, though, with as much meticulousness as she planned everything in her life. Everything that could be anticipated, that is. Thomas's ill-conceived greediness she hadn't counted on, nor Miller's interest in her place. These were hard lessons and dearly bought.
She would be better. She would manage.
She went to the back, brought out the barrow used to move stock. With careful work, and a little luck, Anna tipped Miller from his chair into the barrow, and, struggling to keep her balance, wheeled him out of the public room into the back kitchen ell. She left him there, out of sight, and checked again that the back door was still barred. She twitched the curtain so that it hung completely over the small window.
Lighting a taper from the fireplace, she considered her plan. A change of clothes, from silk into something for scut work. She had hours of dirty business ahead of her, as bad and dirty as slaughtering season, but really, it was no different from butchering a hog.
A small price to pay for her freedom and the time to plan how better to keep it.
Holding the taper, she hurried up the narrow back stairs to the chamber over the public room. When she opened the door, her breath caught in her throat. There was a lit candle on the table across from her bed.
Adam Seaver was sitting in her best chair.
Anna felt her mouth parch. Although she'd half expected to be interrupted in her work, she hadn't thought it would be in her own chamber. But Seaver had wanted to see what she'd do—he'd said so himself. She swallowed two or three times before she could ask.
"How?"
"You should nail up that kitchen window. It's too easy to reach in and shove the bar from the door. Then up the stairs, just as you yourself came. But not before I watched you with Miller." He pulled an unopened bottle from his pocket, cut the red wax from the stopper, opened it. "I'll pour my own drinks, thanks. What is the verse? After she gave him drink, Jael went unto him with a peg of the tent and smote the nail into his temple?"
"Near enough."
"A mistake teaching women to read. But then, if you couldn't read, you couldn't figure your books, and you wouldn't have such a brisk business as you do." He drank. "A double-edged sword. But as nice a bit of needlework as I've ever seen from a lady."
Keep breathing, Anna. You're not done yet. "What now?" She thought of the pistol in the trunk by the bed, the knife under her pillow. They might as well have been at the bottom of the harbor.
"A bargain. You're a widow with a tavern, I'm the agent of an important man. You also have a prime piece of real estate, and an eye on everything that happens along here. And, it seems, an eye to advancement. I think we can deal amiably enough, and to our mutual benefit."
At that moment, Anna almost wished Seaver would just cut her throat. She'd never be free of this succession of men, never able to manage by herself. The rage welled up in her, as it had never done before, and she thought she would choke on it. Then she remembered the paper hidden in her shoe, the document that made the tavern and its business wholly her own, and how she'd fought for it. She'd be damned before she handed it over to another man.
But she saw Seaver watching her carefully and it came to her. Perhaps like Miller not immediately grasping that the obvious next move for him was civil life and nearly legitimate trade—with all its fat skimming—she was not ambitious enough. Instead of mere survival, relying on the tavern, she could parlay it into more. Working with Seaver, who, after all, was only the errand boy of one of the most powerful—and dangerous—men in New England, she might do more than survive. She saw the beginning of a much wider, much richer future.
The whol
e world open to her, if she kept sharp. If she could be better than she was.
She went over to the mantel, took down a new bottle, opened it, poured herself a drink. Raised the glass.
She would pour her own drinks, and Seaver would pour his own.
She would manage.
"To our mutual benefit," she toasted.
End of Excerpt
More About Boston Noir
The Boston Noir e-book (eisbn 9781936070145) is available from Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, the iTunes store, Kobo, the Sony eReader store, Google Play, and from the website of participating independent bookstores. The print edition ($15.95, ISBN-13:9781933354910) is availabe on our website and in online and Brick & mortar bookstores everywhere.
Brendan DuBois was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Short Story: "The Dark Island". Dana Cameron and Dennis Lehane were both nominated for the Anthony Awards. In addition, Cameron's story was also nominated for a Macavity Award!
Launched by the summer '04 award-winning, best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.
There was only ever one candidate for the job of assembling Boston Noir: Dennis Lehane!
"Dennis Lehane advises us not to judge the genre by its Hollywood images of sharp men in fedoras lighting cigarettes for femmes fatales standing in the dark alleys...[Lehane] writes persuasively of the gentrification that has...left people feeling crushed." —New York Times Crime Fiction Column, November 15, 2009
Brand-new stories by: Dennis Lehane, Stewart O'Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, and Dana Cameron.
Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, The Given Day) has proven himself to be a master of both crime-fiction and literary fiction. Here, he extends his literary prowess to that of master curator. In keeping with the Akashic Noir Series tradition, each story in Boston Noir is set in a different neighborhood of the city; the impressively diverse collection extends from Roxbury to Cambridge, from Southie to the Boston Harbor; and all stops in between. Lehane's own contribution— the longest story in the volume— is set in his beloved home neighborhood of Dorchester and showcases his phenomenal ability to grip the heart, soul, and throat of the reader.
In 2003, Lehane's novel Mystic River was adapted into film and quickly garnered six Academy Award nominations (with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins each winning Academy Awards). Boston Noir launches in November 2009 just as Shutter Island, the film based on Lehane's best-selling 2003 novel of the same title, hits the big screen.
Dennis Lehane is the author of the New York Times best seller Mystic River (also an Academy Awardwinning major motion picture); Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone (major motion picture); Sacred; Darkness, Take My Hand; A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel; and, most recently, The Given Day. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he splits his time between the Boston area and Florida.
About Akashic Books
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Akashic Books is an award-winning independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers. Akashic Books hosts additional imprints, including the Akashic Noir Series, the Akashic Drug Chronicles Series, the Akashic Urban Surreal Series, Punk Planet Books, Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery Series, Open Lens, Chris Abani's Black Goat Poetry Series, and AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series.
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