Contagion

by Joanne Dahme

  My smile was tired, but the affection, and perhaps the ease I felt in my father’s presence, was in my face. “I’m sorry I worried you,” I replied, slipping onto the bar stool. I nodded at the bartender, and a pint of beer appeared.

  “I didn’t say I was worried about you,” my father corrected me, although I knew he always got irritable when he worried. “But you must stay away from Rose Dugan.”

  I looked up, surprised. I hoped that the darkness of the bar would hide my face. “What do you mean?” I asked, willing my heart to slow.

  He reached out and grabbed my wrist, preventing me from lifting my glass to my mouth. “I mean that I heard at the stables today that a detective has been assigned to investigate the Murphy accident. According to my friend Henry, who tends the police horses, that means they believe that Mrs. Murphy was murdered.”Thomas paused to allow the information to sink in. “I don’t want you getting involved with this, Sean.You have enough to worry about with your job.”

  I suddenly felt cold. I gripped my pint of beer. “Who do they suspect?” I asked, ignoring my father’s appeal to me to mind my own business.

  “Henry wouldn’t know that,”Thomas snapped, annoyed at what I surmised was my missing the point. “Dugan is dangerous, Sean. You’re in the wrong camp already. Any concern for his wife will only make things a thousand times worse for you.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” I replied angrily, taking a long draft of the beer. “You forget that Mrs. Murphy died at the Water Works. Am I to ignore that?”

  My father’s eyes were narrow again now, his brows creased in anger. “Don’t talk to me that way. And slow down.” He held me by my forearm. “I only meant that you should leave the investigation to the police.”

  I twisted my arm away from my father’s grasp. “Here,” I said, slapping some money onto the bar counter. “I’ll see you at home. I need to go for a long walk.”

  I cut a quick path through the patrons and exited the bar. When I stood on the street, I scowled at City Hall’s tower, looming in the west like some ancient obelisk over the rows of houses and businesses. In the twilight, the tower looked on fire. I turned away from it to walk briskly in the other direction toward 12th Street.

  ROSE

  Patrick was at his office at the lumberyard, on Broad and Vine streets. Martha, the only household servant who might think something was amiss and give me away, was at the market. My heart was pounding in anticipation of what I knew to be a terrible violation. I turned the knob and pushed against the heavy door of Patrick’s study. I needed to find the letters.

  Patrick had missed the interview with Officer Russo yesterday, and he had forbidden me to say anything about the anonymous warnings unless he was with me.

  “I was conducting my own investigation, Rose. Talking to people who might know the author of the letters. I can’t rely on the police to locate the writer. What do they know about my work, or the people I deal with regularly?” he had asked me after I had demanded to know where he had been. His eyebrows were raised, surprised that I could question the practicality of this explanation.

  “But Patrick, we must, at some point, show the letters to the police. Nellie is dead because of them!” I had cried.

  “That’s ridiculous, Rose!” Patrick’s dark eyes flashed at my stubborn insistence on this point. “Those letters had nothing to do with Nellie’s death.”

  I hadn’t slept all night. My thoughts were about Nellie. Her funeral was to take place in two days, and I could still not believe, in my heart, that Nellie was dead. I saw Nellie as she had appeared when we last visited Hanscom’s, one of our favorite restaurants. Nellie had been wearing a white blouse with a large sailor collar. She wore her favorite hat—a flat boater trimmed with a wide blue ribbon. I had already been seated at our table when Nellie walked in. I waved to her, despite the stares from the other patrons. Nellie smiled back, thrilled to discover me here. She had always made me feel like an unexpected pleasure.

  Nellie was one of those women whose beauty was not as physical as much as a force of personality. She was pale and freckled, with a wide face and light blue eyes. On that day, her dark red hair was loose about her face, tied in a bun with a gentle French twist. Nellie was my height but a little broader in body—softer and with more curves than I—a true hourglass figure.To me, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Her affections and her furies darkened her cheeks, and made her eyes more luminous and wise. I couldn’t believe that I would never experience the liveliness of those eyes again. I cried angry and desperate tears last night.

  Could Patrick be right? Was Nellie’s murder a mere coincidence? I didn’t think so. When I heard the chimes of the clock in Patrick’s bedroom toll four in the morning, I decided then that I had to find those letters and give them to Officer Russo. Patrick would be furious with me, but Nellie was dead.

  The study was dark, as the heavy drapes were closed. I stood for a moment to allow my eyes to adjust to the gray light and then cautiously made my way to his desk, shuffling slowly as to be careful not to knock into the mahogany chairs or the glass-enclosed bookcases lined against the walls. Although I knew that Martha was out of the house, I was still nervous about being discovered. Patrick’s study was a forbidden place, even for me. Beyond his desk, against a wall by the fireplace, I could just barely make out the table on which Patrick stacked all of his construction drawings. Everything seemed to be in place, although Patrick had recently repainted the room.

  I had debated whether or not to turn on the chandelier but decided against it, fearing that the light might attract some attention. I was also bothered by Patrick’s disparate choice in colors.The cherry wood bookcases against the sage green walls looked like festivity gone rank to me. Patrick had told me that his study was similar in design to that of the Prince of Wales. I couldn’t remember Patrick ever being interested in British royalty. His study had become a reflection of a facet of Patrick that I did not know.

  I reached the desk and turned on its small lamp. Stacks of papers lay in neat piles. I did not take time to read them; most were typed or otherwise looked official. I gently tugged at the handle of the top desk drawer. It opened easily and held a blotter and some writing and drafting tools. I closed it slowly and opened the next drawer. It contained a long, thin white box.

  It was a glove box. I recognized it immediately by its shape and size. But the box was also the perfect size to store folded letters. I took it from the drawer and placed it on the desk, for a moment simply staring at it. At first, I could not get myself to open it. “Don’t be a child,” I chided myself softly. “This is for Nellie.”

  The glove box was embossed with the John Wanamaker insignia. My hand trembled as I removed the lid. In the box, lay a small pair of women’s white silk gloves, a smattering of pearls sewn across their back. Patrick had given me a pair of the very same gloves just a few weeks ago. I picked them up reluctantly. I knew that they were not for me. This pair was much too small.

  My hands were still trembling as I pulled a folded note from the bottom of the box. I knew that this was not one of the letters that I was looking for. I opened it.

  For Elizabeth. Much Love.

  I fought the sudden wave of nausea welling in my stomach. Surely there was an explanation for this. Elizabeth? Perhaps a distant niece or cousin of Patrick’s? I fell into the chair behind the desk and rubbed my temples. Nellie murdered. Patrick with a mistress. Was I having a nervous collapse? This was impossible. Suddenly, I remembered a recent encounter with Mrs. Price.

  I had been waiting on the sidewalk for Julius and the carriage, when Mrs. Price, a neighbor, whose husband was on the Board of the Park Commissioners, almost walked right by me, feigning interest in a pamphlet she was carrying. When I said hello, she did stop reluctantly, to greet me, but she was obviously nervous. This was odd, for Mrs. Price, a woman of indefatigable energy, was always eager to share neighborhood gossip. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I had witnessed th
at sort of strange behavior before—nervous wives at the socials, glancing at one another uneasily as their husbands danced with attractive, eligible women.

  I carefully placed the note and the gloves back into the box. I was allowing my emotions to carry me away. I would ask him about the gloves, not accusingly, for I was sure that there was a good explanation. The women I knew had nothing to do but talk among one another. At the present, I needed to find those letters.

  It was then that I spied the ledger in the drawer. It was the ledger that Patrick usually kept at his office. The last time I had seen it, Patrick had been home for lunch and had left it on the dining room table.When I had picked it up to make room for his place setting, he had grabbed me by the wrist and smiled, “Sorry dear, but I need to have that.”

  Nellie had thought that Patrick might know the letter writer. I placed the ledger beneath the glow of the desk lamp and opened its worn cover. I squinted at the lists of names, over a hundred names, neatly written, on page after page. Some of the names I recognized—businessmen and contractors, ward leaders, city employees. Above the names, on each page, I noted the heading, “Monies Paid” in Patrick’s neat script. My finger canvassed the names line by line. I gasped when I reached the name of the mayor, scrawled in Patrick’s bold handwriting. Alongside the names was another column, which detailed various dollar amounts, ranging from small figures to amounts in the hundreds. I read the newspapers, and I had heard the rumors about contractors obtaining lucrative city contracts by graft.

  I tasted the bitterness in my mouth. My worst fears had been confirmed. Could the anonymous writer of my letters have a connection to this ledger? Could he be one of many indebted to Patrick and looking for some sort of revenge?

  I paged through the book with a sudden sense of urgency. I found the letters folded, slipped between pages in the back of the ledger. I realized with a start that there were three of them, although I had received only two. I recognized the crude penmanship immediately.The one letter had obviously been crushed in someone’s hand, although the press of the ledger had flattened its crumpled appearance. I remembered Patrick’s angry sneer as he had jammed the note into the pocket of his coat.The second letter was the letter I had received in the South Garden, the day before Nellie’s death.

  My mouth was dry as I unfolded and read the third letter.

  YOU ARE WORSE THAN A CONTASHUN. UNLESS YOU STOP,

  WE WILL DESTROY YOU AND THOSE YOU LOVE.

  THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.

  I couldn’t help but cry out. When had this one arrived? Although the word was carelessly spelled, I had heard the discussion about contagions fairly recently. It was during the recent City Councils’ meeting. Patrick had obviously made enemies.

  I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to get out of Patrick’s study. I slammed the book closed, and put it back into the drawer, carefully placing the glove box on top. I was suffocating under the weight of so many suspicions. I couldn’t think clearly in here.

  I stood and turned quickly from Patrick’s desk, stumbling into the drawing table. There, lying flat on the surface, its curled edges held down with pins pushed into the tabletop, I saw a drawing of the Fairmount Water Works, its name in bold, black letters printed across the top. I leaned closer, pulling the lamp on Patrick’s desk to the edge. This print wasn’t the sort that Patrick usually was interested in, the ones that detailed the actual structure and the materials to build it—steel, mortar, brick, or stone. This one instead traced piping, which to me looked like so many lines connecting the pumping station to its reservoir and standpipe. The lines then branched out into the blocks of the city and to the Corinthian Reservoir. They reminded me of human veins radiating from a heart.

  It was then that I noticed that someone had marked the drawing with black “Xs” at various points along the piping. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I thought of Sean—of Patrick’s vow to ruin him—and the ledger, which contained the names of city and water bureau employees, apparently on Patrick’s payroll. I knew with a horrible certainty that this drawing connected Patrick to Sean. Could Sean have possibly written the letters? I couldn’t believe that.

  I placed the tip of my finger on each X trying to trace some connection among them. One X marked the arch; another one crossed a pipe suspended over the forebay. There were a number of them in the North Garden, one very close to the pleasure boat wharf.

  Why did Patrick mark the map in this manner, if indeed it was Patrick who penned them? Was he looking for something—something buried and hidden under the X of a treasure map? Or was he looking to build something?

  I stared at my reflection in the mirror of my vanity table. I brushed my hair with automatic, repetitive strokes. I was distracted by Patrick’s absence. Hours ago, just before our normal dinner hour, Martha had said that Patrick had phoned to say he would be delayed.

  I was thinking about the letters, now resting in the top drawer of my chiffonier. I would have to tell Patrick of my intentions. I would be firm and honest about my actions. I would have to make him understand why we must turn the letters over to the police.

  What I wasn’t so sure about was the glove box. I didn’t want Patrick to think I was suspicious. I knew that suspicion was a poison to the best of marriages.

  I was already in my nightdress. I had been feeling so tired since Nellie’s death and had retired to my bedroom earlier than normal again. I was staring into the mirror, staring at the dark hollows beneath my eyes, examining a face I had never seen before—the face of a woman bereft of her dearest friend.

  “Rose,” I heard Patrick whisper, his voice deep, and oddly without emotion.

  I turned to him, my brush suspended in midstroke. Patrick was still in his dress clothes. In the soft light of my bedroom, his face was shadowed as he stood in the open doorway. He didn’t move.

  I felt myself flush. “Patrick, you startled me,” I said, out of breath. I dropped the brush on the vanity and went to take his hand. “Are you coming in?” I asked, still nervous but resolved to understand what was going on. “We must talk.”

  But Patrick remained in the doorway. “Were you in my study?” he asked, in that same odd, detached manner. His gaze was directed at my vanity.

  I was taken aback by his tone. He stood tall, but I thought I detected a looseness in his normally disciplined stance.

  “Your study?” I repeated, wondering if my voice wavered with the skip of my heart. I had wanted to explain to Patrick why I had taken the letters without this interrogation. I knew Patrick would understand my motivations once I had a chance to explain my concerns about Nellie and the letters. I hadn’t had any real time with Patrick since Nellie’s death to share my convictions about my cape—and my guilt over Nellie’s death. Patrick had just returned home. How did he know that I had been in his study? Had Martha somehow found out and told him?

  “Why, yes, I was Patrick. You must let me explain,” I replied, reaching for his hands. I tried to draw him into the room. His hands felt large and cold in my own. “Please, Patrick, let’s sit on the love seat.You must be tired after such a long day.”

  He gave me an odd smile as I led him to the seat by the window. He fell into the chair, almost playfully pulling me down with him.

  “All right, Rose, dear. I am listening,” he said. I thought I smelled wine on his breath.

  I pulled his hands onto my lap, and held them, imploring his attention. “Yes. I was in your study this afternoon. I was looking for the letters. They are crucial to Nellie’s murder investigation. I cannot rest, Patrick, until we find out why Nellie was murdered.” The words began to pour from me. I could feel the tears welling in my eyes. I couldn’t talk aloud about Nellie without it breaking my heart.

  Patrick released my hands to raise his own and place them against my cheeks. I instinctively leaned against his palm and closed my eyes.

  “The police are not saying that Nellie was murdered, my dear. I fear your imagination is building this case.”
He gently pulled my head against his chest. The threads of his morning coat were still cold. I could smell the air and something else that was a faint bit cloying. I thought of the glove box and pulled away.

  Patrick didn’t notice.

  “Patrick,” I said slowly, controlling the sudden agitation in my voice. “Nellie was wearing my cape. The letters you and I received threatened us. Don’t you see? The writer thought that Nellie was me.” This was the first time that I had blurted out this conviction. I needed Patrick to believe this, although my distress over the glove box and his whereabouts tonight were roiling within me.

  “So that is what you believe,” he replied quietly. The light from the ceiling fixture cast a shadow over his face. His usually taut features appeared relaxed, and a lock of his black hair fell across his forehead, partially covering an eye. He pushed it back lackadaisically. I noticed that his eyes were dull. He had been drinking. He also smelled faintly of a woman’s perfume. I felt a flicker of anger.

  “Yes, that’s what I believe,” I asserted, my voice rising as I stood. “Patrick, where have you been?” I could not hold back. How dare he treat me this way. How dare he treat Nellie’s death this way.

  His eyes narrowed before he frowned and dropped his head into his hands. “Sit down beside me, Rose,” he commanded without looking at me. “We will not talk until you are seated.”

  I knew my face was red. My hands were in fists as I sat beside him again.

  He raised his head and smiled almost sweetly. “I’ve had a long day, Rose. This evening, I had to meet with a few ward leaders and a city councilman about a contract I’m interested in. I was the perfect host, of course. We spoke over dinner and wine,” he said pointedly, looking into my face. I thought about the ledger, but I dared not mention that.

  “Could any of these men possibly be the writer of the letters?” I asked. I knew he was speaking of the filtration contract.