Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II

by Padgett Lively

  Special markings: missing right fourth toe, possibly postmortem, slightly raised port-wine triangular mark on left hand…

  Triangular mark on left hand! Evelyn jumped to her feet with a sharp intake of air. It couldn’t be! She paced agitatedly around the small room. She had seen her! At least two or three times a week at the market, just this Tuesday past, in fact. There was no way she could possibly be the dead woman, but there couldn’t be two such women with that distinctive mark.

  Evelyn went to Fancy’s desk and grabbed the stack of maps that were neatly situated under a brass paperweight. She strode into the bedroom and dropped them down upon the large canopied bed in the center of the room. Doctor Robbins lived on Walnut Street and Seventh, almost directly across from the South-East Square. It wasn’t unusual for a physician to have a residence close to Pennsylvania Hospital on Eight Street, but his house was also located at the center of the South-East loyalist camp.

  Mister Thornton had sectioned off the city by loyalist strongholds. There were the Cherry Alley and Arch Street Camps in the north central part of the city, the Market Street Group in the north near the docks, the Queen Street Camp in the far southern part of Philadelphia, and another at Spruce and Forth Streets. These, along with the South-East Group, were the main loyalist camps in the city. They were kept under almost constant surveillance by the patriots.

  Evelyn placed the maps by loyalist groupings. Within each group were several maps tracing movements, meeting places, and drop locations in that particular section of the city. Mostly, the loyalists stayed within their home sections, handing off to another camp’s operative only when absolutely necessary. She found these crossover maps for each group; maps that documented loyalist movement when they had to pass information along to another part of the city.

  Removing the other maps to a stack on the dresser, she studied only the crossover activity. Most of it seemed to converge on the Cherry Alley camp. As she moved them around the bed rearranging them in different orders, Evelyn looked for a commonality and found one.

  All of the crossover operatives were noted entering a bakery, ostensibly to buy a meat pie for lunch or dinner, an act so ordinary as to elicit little notice or comment, certainly not suspicion. The fact that a crossover was infrequent further obscured what was right before their eyes: a pattern, one that led to a small neighborhood bakery next to a tidy little lodging house.

  “Ho, Evie,” a gentle voice said from the doorway.

  She jumped nonetheless, so deep in concentration she had not heard Jimmy come in.

  “Your father said I might find you here,” he continued, entering the bedroom and looking down at the maps she had spread out. “What is this?”

  She swallowed and forced back the tears that had started in her eyes, saying, “I think I’ve found Billy’s killer.”

  *

  Hershel picked his way along King Street, attuned to the general bustle of the docks. He liked it here. The River Thames had brought many a great ship pass his view in London, but the concentrated activity of the Docks of Philadelphia always presented him with a feast for the senses.

  Along this busy shore, he often played a little game with himself. In the space of a few blocks, he would walk along as if on his way to an appointment. Then, finding an appropriate stopping place, turn to look back, taking note of what his senses had registered and what had escaped his notice. It was good training, something he had put into practice when first arriving as a young man in London. It helped to focus his mind and eye even when his thoughts were occupied with other matters. He knew that the brain stored away information, much more than it revealed, sometimes to sit for days or even years until something, some trigger, called it forth again.

  But today was not one of those days. His avoidance of the usual obstacles along the broad wharf was almost automatic. He didn’t stop to look back, but kept his eyes glued in front of him thinking about what he had learned.

  Hershel never really left off investigating, although he had been retired for three years before they sailed for America. Cara, as well, had sold her thriving dressmaking business, and they settled into a comfortable London life of modest luxury and intermittent travel. His services had been called into action a few times during this period, even once or twice when they were off on one of their jaunts. Cara had been his partner in all these adventures, and nothing had given him greater pleasure than to share his passion for crime solving with the woman he loved. The fact that she was often a step or two ahead of him never failed to elicit his feelings of being the luckiest man in England.

  But with the couple’s removal to the colonies, the pattern of their life changed drastically. He knew that there was no question of them staying in London. Even though Odette never asked them to come, Cara would not be separated from her. Hershel would never dream of being an obstacle to their friendship, yet since their arrival, he all too frequently felt disengaged from his wife. With Cara often involved in assignments that did not include him, Hershel sometimes felt adrift.

  Difficult though it was, the changing character of his marriage was easier to accept than the impending revolution. Hershel wasn’t a monarchist by any stretch of the imagination. He didn’t believe in the inherent right of some to rule over all others. He was, however, an Englishman to the marrow of his bones, and the thought of taking up arms against other Englishmen left him cold and sickened.

  As much as he admired men like Franklin, he found the average patriot to be rather brutish, often deeply mired in their sense of entitlement for the new land. His sympathies for the loyalist cause, however, had gradually eroded over the course of the last few months. He was often appalled at their arrogance. They gave no ground and saw no merit in any argument but their own. The colonists had reason to be dissatisfied with their treatment, and the Crown’s haughty dismissal of their concerns left him bitter and confused. If you deny your people their rights, what can one expect but revolution. It was now inevitable.

  He knew it was coming even before leaving London. Twenty years before when he had stumbled onto a crazy conspiracy that had changed his life, he learned that the American Revolution had to be fought. That it would bring forth a new world. Now he was being told that the revolution was flawed. Slavery had led to a country irrevocably divided and eventually so consumed with the fruits of commerce as to leave behind any semblance of a social contract.

  Odell’s plan made sense in the grand, far-fetched scheme of the universe, but it was almost too much for Hershel. The political maneuvering was frustratingly slow and left him feeling useless and depressed. That is why he had spent most of his time investigating the explosion at the Blue Anchor Tavern and the identity of the Godfather.

  Hershel was returning now from a meeting that had yielded some eye-opening new information. He had sought out this informant weeks prior, but found her absent from Philadelphia on what her associates had labeled an “extended leave.” He couldn’t begin to know upon what new venture she had embarked, but felt certain that it was as lucrative as it was illegal.

  “Well, Sally,” he had said upon greeting her, “you look well rested. That ‘extended leave’ must have done you some good.”

  To which she had cackled in her rather sinister way. “Dear, dear, Mister Gordon, my extended leaves always do me good.”

  They sat in the captain’s cabin of a particularly fine schooner. It was at least twenty years old, yet so well-preserved it seemed almost new. Word around the docks was that Peg-leg Sally had inherited it from a famed pirate, having been his favorite mistress. Hershel didn’t believe it for a minute. Sally was nobody’s mistress but her own. Of that, he was certain. He knew her wealth to derive from smuggling, fishing, and slaving. Most of her trade centered on the West Indies and up and down the Atlantic Coast. She was smart and careful, also ruthless. A fact he never forgot for a moment in her company.

  “I was wondering if you might help me out with an investigation I’m running,” he asked in his blunt way.


  She shook her head in mock frustration. “I’ve told you how many times, Hershel? You can’t go about requesting information as if it were free.” She grinned at him, displaying the large gap between her two front teeth. “I mean, I like you and all, but we ain’t friends, and I only help out me friends.”

  He frowned and also shook his head, but with mock sadness. “And all this time, I thought we were close.”

  She laughed. “Now where would you get that idea, I wonder?”

  “Maybe from the fact that I hold a lien against this ship that I’ve not seen fit to enforce.”

  She sat back abruptly, all the raillery gone from her voice, “What do you mean?” she asked with barely suppressed hostility.

  “I mean what I say,” he replied keeping his poker face firmly in place, “I won a lien on this ship off the rather dim nephew of one Rodger Hawkins, an early financer of yours, I believe.”

  Her mouth was clamped shut, thin-lipped with fury. Rodger Hawkins had died in a knife fight two years ago, and Sally had hoped that any documents he held over her had made their way into the trash heap. It seemed she was wrong. “Why ain’t you ever told me this?” she asked, suspicion creeping into her voice. “You’ve always paid for information before.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re smart, Sally.”

  She cocked an eyebrow in response, a little of her mocking self-confidence returning. “You want me for something bigger.”

  “The war is coming, and we’ll need information.”

  “I don’t take sides. It ain’t profitable.”

  “Just so,” he agreed, “Your intelligence will be more valuable because it won’t be colored by ideology or politics.”

  She sat back in the wooden captain’s chair, one she had padded with worn cushions. Sally was a buxom woman whose full figure had filled out upon entering middle age. She didn’t actually have a peg leg. It was a joke from her supposed pirate days. She kept her thin strawberry blond hair short; her face was lined and weathered, but Hershel could tell she must have been quite attractive in her youth.

  “And after all this is over? When the war is fought and won by whichever side?”

  “I’ll tear it up in your presence.”

  She smiled and nodded, squinting a little in his direction. “Let’s hope I live to see the day.”

  “Let’s hope we both do,” he replied. “In the meantime, I need information on a matter that may or may not have to do with the impending war.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Godfather? And this syndicate? Know anything about it?”

  She threw her head back in a full-throated laugh of real amusement. “And here I thought you needed me for the important stuff.”

  He looked at her unblinkingly. “So it’s not real?”

  “Oh, it’s real all right,” she answered, wiping her eyes and brushing the hair back from her forehead, “It’s just been… how do you say it? Exaggerated… yeah, that’s the word.”

  “So, there’s no Godfather?”

  “There’s definitely someone,” she replied, “but it ain’t no all-knowing Chinaman who’ll slit your throat soon as look at you, although there’s plenty who believe it.”

  “You don’t?”

  “This is what I know,” she told him straight-forwardly, “ ’Bout half a year ago, lots o money started filtering through the docks, secret-like, buying up property on the wharf. Some boats come in carrying large payloads, but some of me contacts say there was nothing in ’em. And nothing in the warehouses either.”

  “Empty?”

  “Yeah, like decoys.”

  Hershel nodded knowingly, beginning to understand. “Smoke and mirrors,” he mumbled under his breath, and then said more loudly, “Someone wants us to believe there’s a far-reaching criminal syndicate.”

  She nodded in agreement, and added, “There ain’t no syndicate, but there is something. Someone’s got a plan afoot and enough money to make it seem like something else.”

  “Like a loyalist plot.”

  Sally looked at him sharply. “I hadn’t thought ’o that, but, yeah, there’s money and ammunition going to the loyalists.”

  “And the Godfather?”

  “He’s just a story. No one’s ever seen ’em… just the woman…”

  Hershel stopped now to look back down King Street, turning this conversation over and over again in his mind. Sally had described the woman as middle-aged, blond, and pretty. He had to fight the old-fashioned urge to dismiss the possibility that this elaborate ruse had been designed by a woman. After all, he had just left the presence of a woman who, by all accounts, was as formidable as any of the ruffians who ran their schemes up and down the coast. As if his own wife and her associates weren’t enough of an example.

  With one final look, he retreated from the busy docks and turned up Walnut Street, heading for home. He and Cara occupied a set of rooms in an old, spacious house they shared with its elderly owner. Their landlord was a spry eighty-year-old who needed little help outside of his two servants. Even so, Cara and Hershel made it a practice to check in with him on a daily basis. But the old man routinely waved them on with a gentle, “I’m fine, I’m fine. You needn’t bother.”

  While it was perfectly acceptable for him to enter through the front door, Hershel preferred ascending the side stairs to a balcony door that opened into their private foyer. He divested himself of hat and cape and heard the muffled snippets of a lively conversation emanating from behind the door of their small sitting room. A split second later, that same door was opened abruptly by Evelyn.

  “Uncle Hershel, how glad I am that you’ve finally returned!” she exclaimed.

  Jimmy emerged from behind her as she rushed over and grasped both his hands in her own. Hershel was not a physically demonstrative man, but his years as Evelyn’s “uncle” had accustomed him to the girl’s impulsive warmth, and he returned her grasp firmly.

  “What is it, my dear?” he asked, concern clouding his face. “Why have you been waiting for me?”

  She had been so distraught after Billy’s death that there was little anyone could do to console her. Even Benjamin Franklin’s gratitude for the comfort she had rendered his grandson only heightened her feelings of failure and inadequacy.

  Hershel could see that she was struggling with something momentous and ushered her and Jimmy back into the sitting room. “Sit down and tell me calmly what it is you need,” he insisted, himself sitting in a chair next to the fireplace.

  “I know… I think I know who killed Billy,” she said in a rush.

  Hershel looked quickly over at Jimmy, who nodded seriously in agreement.

  “Tell me what you have learned,” he urged her.

  Evelyn did, beginning with the postmortem examination and ending with the declaration, “So, it’s poor Mrs. Lynch who’s been killed, and this woman has taken her place. Billy must have figured it out somehow. That’s why he said she was false. That man was really a woman, and I think she killed him to keep him from talking.”

  Hershel raised his eyebrows at this. What Billy had or hadn’t uncovered would likely never be known for certain. But he wasn’t going to disabuse Evelyn of a conclusion that obviously gave her comfort.

  He got up and paced over to the window, turning his back on the view to look at the girl and boy sitting on the sofa.

  “We have a woman, Mrs. Lynch, the innkeeper and Mister Thornton’s sister-in-law, who you believe was murdered several weeks ago and thrown into the Schuylkill,” he recited. “Another woman took her place, presumably disguised so expertly as to fool even her brother-in-law.”

  “And me!” Evelyn declared intensely. “I saw her at the market. We spoke several times since the discovery of the body. I tell you, Uncle Hershel, that marking is too distinctive. I noticed it when we first stayed at the inn. Mother called it a port-wine birthmark.”

  “Next, we have the inn—” he began again.

  “The bakery next to the inn,”
Evelyn corrected.

  “Right, the bakery,” he continued. “We have a common point of intersection of loyalists throughout the city that leads back to Mrs. Lynch, or rather, her impostor.” He looked contemplatively down at his feet. “But why?” he practically whispered to himself.

  “What better way to infiltrate our ranks than by taking the identity of someone trusted?” Jimmy pronounced. “Mrs. Lynch wasn’t really active in the movement. No one took much notice of her, but everyone knew her. She was a fixture; her presence wouldn’t have been questioned.”

  “I know it sounds unbelievable,” Evelyn implored. “But—”

  Hershel shook his head smilingly and held up his hand. “It is no more unbelievable than a woman who fronts for an imaginary crime boss and creates the illusion of loyalist support.”

  They looked at him in confusion.

  “The Godfather and this syndicate are a sophisticated hoax, apparently perpetrated by a woman.”

  “But why?” Evelyn questioned to no one in particular.

  “I suspect we won’t know ‘the why’…,” he answered her, “…until we know ‘the who.’ ”

  “Lillian Brandon.”

  They turned as one to find Fancy and Cara standing on the threshold.

  “Archibald Brandon’s daughter!” Hershel exclaimed disbelievingly.

  “You knew he had a daughter?” Cara replied in astonishment as she walked into the room.

  “Indeed, I did,” he responded. “We runners were often deployed as security for important officials and sometimes for their family members. Sir Archibald was particularly paranoid regarding his daughter.”

  “With good reason,” she told him. “He—” She broke off, looking uncomfortably over at Evelyn and Jimmy.

  “He abused her terribly,” Fancy declared as Cara hesitated. “He used her only as one should… well, relations that should be restricted to husband and wife.”

  Evelyn and Jimmy looked at each other in confusion. Hershel merely asked in his even, straightforward way, “Do you mean, there was an incestuous relationship between Sir Archibald and his daughter?”