Victoria would recover; she was the type of woman who rebounded from the worst of tragedies. It was Prudence who worried Dr. Worthington. She had that air of disengagement often worn by ladies who faded away in their beds and on their couches until they breathed a last quiet sigh and were gone. As if life had grown too much for them to bear and the alternative too attractive to resist. Laudanum could help, but it could also be risky. Still, he had no other balm to offer.
He warned Victoria about the dangers of overdosing and hoped he had done the right thing.
* * *
As if she were reliving the moment, Prudence saw Victoria sobbing, heard Dr. Worthington confirm what everyone in the house already suspected. The Judge had suffered a massive and fatal heart attack. Then she floated through the wake and the funeral, glided above the heads of the mourners who came to express their condolences, hung weightless over the open casket in which her father’s body lay. Not his body. Him. Thomas Pickering MacKenzie, sleeping beneath her gaze until some magic word or potion should awaken him. She couldn’t separate what was dream from what was reality, what was true memory from what might have been.
And finally she understood that she would never be able to force back what the laudanum had muffled in grayness so she could bear it. What was gone was lost forever.
CHAPTER 8
James Kincaid took the team of prize grays to be reshod later that morning, after confirming with Mrs. MacKenzie and Mr. Morley that the carriage would not be needed until the afternoon.
“There’s been no throwing of shoes yet,” he explained, “but they’re almost due for a change and Smoker’s gait is off. I noticed it the last time we took them out. No point waiting for the worst to happen. Cobblestones are the hardest surface in the world for horseshoes; they wear down the nails faster than anything else.”
Donald Morley knew nothing about fine horses, but it was the mark of a gentleman to be knowledgeable about the steeds he owned, so he nodded his head sagely and gave permission for Kincaid to drive the team to the farrier’s. James had been prepared to explain that while the farrier usually came to the MacKenzie stable to trim and shoe the grays’ hooves, he’d lately taken to requiring his clients to bring the animals to him, and since he was the best at his craft, they did. It turned out that Mr. Morley’s ignorance was so profound, the explanation was unnecessary.
* * *
“Shall I come back for you, miss?” James Kincaid reined in the grays at the entrance to the United Bank Building on Wall Street where Roscoe Conkling’s office was located.
“I don’t think we’d better risk it, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be,” Prudence told him. “I’ll take a hansom cab home.”
“Mrs. MacKenzie won’t like that.” Kincaid smiled at the thought of her discomfiture. He’d been in the Judge’s service for more than twenty years, ever since he’d been hired on as a stableboy. He’d driven Prudence’s mother all over Staten Island when it was thought the fresh air would do her good. Might cure her. He didn’t like the woman who’d replaced her, and he didn’t always care who knew it. “Mr. Conkling uses a cabbie named Danny Dennis. He’s the best in the city. Josiah can get him for you. Don’t forget to ask for him by name. You can trust Danny to take you wherever you want to go.”
Kincaid waited until Miss Prudence disappeared into the bank’s lobby before moving away from the curb. Something was going on that he didn’t understand yet, but he hadn’t hesitated for a second when he’d been handed a note to pass along to Colleen. Whatever Miss Prudence needed was what he was prepared to help her get. Especially if it meant putting one over on Mrs. MacKenzie and Mr. Morley. They weren’t quality; he felt it in his bones, the same way he recognized the truth of good bloodlines in the animals he drove.
The grays didn’t need their hooves attended to, but since he was the one who kept the stable account book, he’d also be the one to fiddle with the numbers.
* * *
“This is the card Charles was holding,” Geoffrey Hunter said. The piece of pasteboard was wrinkled, ripped along the edges, mottled with melted snow, and stained with dirt and something darker that he didn’t tell Prudence was probably dried blood.
“Where did Mr. Linwood get it?” Prudence asked. She wanted to touch the object that had been so important to Charles, but she was afraid that if she did, she would begin to weep with the sadness of it all. She would wear black for many months to come, but she was determined not to sink down again into the helplessness of laudanum-laced grief.
“You would expect the police to have viewed it as evidence, but they didn’t,” Hunter explained. “The body was taken to Bellevue along with so many others who had died in the blizzard that not much individual attention was paid to the victims. The deaths were all presumed to be accidental, and that’s the way they were treated. Only cursory examinations. No autopsies. People flocked to Bellevue in search of their missing relatives, and as soon as a body could be identified, it was released to the next of kin or a mortuary parlor. We only know Charles was holding it in his hand because the policeman who notified Mr. Linwood of his son’s death retrieved it. He thought it might mean something to a relative and was afraid it would be thrown away by one of the Bellevue attendants.”
“Mr. Linwood isn’t satisfied that his son’s death was accidental,” Roscoe Conkling declared. “He doesn’t know what it was, but he doesn’t believe the word accidental fits what happened.”
“How can he know that?”
“He can’t. No one can, Prudence,” Conkling replied. “But someone like Hunter will come as close to the truth as it’s possible to get without actually having been there.”
“Is that what Mr. Linwood asked you to do, Mr. Hunter? Find out the truth of Charles’s death?”
“His firm has hired me a number of times in the past. I told him this wouldn’t be one of those cases.” Geoffrey’s strong fist closed over the ace of spades. “I told him I’d do this because Charles was asking me to take it on.” He opened his fist. “You were right, Miss MacKenzie, when you said Charles was sending me a message. I just have to figure out what it is.”
“Not alone, Mr. Hunter. I’ve read about Kate Warne.”
“She’s been dead for twenty years, Miss MacKenzie. Very few women have followed in her footsteps, even though Allan Pinkerton did create a division of female detectives in his agency.”
“But there have been some. She wasn’t the only female spy during the war, and she hasn’t been the only woman detective since then. You know that’s true.”
“There have been a few women making a name for themselves in detection,” he conceded. “But not many.”
“Perhaps that’s because no one is willing to give them the opportunity.” Prudence turned to her late father’s lawyer, the man who was very nearly an uncle to her. She was counting on his support, on his love of womankind in general, and his passion for women who had made names for themselves before taking up with him. “Don’t you think that’s the reason, Mr. Conkling? Not because a woman isn’t intelligent or cunning enough to probe the depths of a mystery, but because no one is willing to give her a chance?”
“What are you proposing, Miss MacKenzie?”
Geoffrey Hunter’s question was simple and straightforward. Her answer needed to be equally as frank.
“I’m proposing that you and I become partners, Mr. Hunter, that you share with me and I with you whatever information we find. Two minds are better than one. You may well understand what puzzles me, and I the same for you. We reached an understanding about my stepmother, about finding out everything there is to know about her. Now Charles is asking us to do the same for him, but for a different reason.”
“What would that reason be, Miss MacKenzie?”
“What his father suspects. Why he came to you in the first place. If that tree branch didn’t fall on Charles all by itself, with only the wind for accomplice, then someone picked it up and used it to kill him. Deliberately. Knowing full well the p
olice would assume he was another victim of the blizzard.” Prudence had phrased it as succinctly as she could. Now she waited for a reaction.
Conkling chuckled. “I think she’s got you, Hunter,” he said. Geoffrey Hunter reached out his right hand. “I believe partners shake on a deal,” he said.
Prudence MacKenzie stripped off her black glove and for the first time in her life touched the flesh of a man who wasn’t a member of her family.
* * *
The Warneke and Sons funeral home was quiet and smelled of lilies. In silence, Maurice Warneke led Geoffrey Hunter and Prudence MacKenzie past parlors being readied for afternoon and evening visitations to an office whose door he unlocked and held open for his guests. He wondered if this was the call he had been waiting for, though he’d said nothing to Charles Linwood’s father about his suspicions.
“I read about Mr. Conkling’s walk up Broadway. He’s lucky to have survived it,” Warneke began. “The note his secretary sent said you had questions about the late Charles Linwood. How can I help you?”
“Miss MacKenzie was Mr. Linwood’s fiancée,” Hunter explained.
“My condolences, Miss MacKenzie.” Maurice Warneke doubted the young woman remembered him, though he had spoken briefly to her before the funeral service. He had caught a faint whiff of bitter laudanum, not from her breath, but as if she had spilled a few drops of the liquid on the black mourning veil covering her face. Odd, but nothing about the conduct of the bereaved surprised him. Except now, when she raised the mourning veil and looked at him with steady determination and not a trace of female weakness.
“You prepared the body yourself?” Hunter asked.
“I did.”
“Is that usual?”
“I have a young man who normally does the preliminary work, if that’s what you mean. But I chose to take care of Mr. Linwood myself.”
“Why was that?”
“Sometimes when the death is a violent one, special skills are required if the body is to be viewed by relatives.”
“And that was so in Charles Linwood’s case?”
“His head was badly battered.”
“By the tree limb that fell on him?”
Warneke looked intently at Hunter, assessing the former Pinkerton operative he knew had investigated cases for the Linwood law firm. Hunter had the look of a stalker about him. Appropriate, given his name. He glanced at Prudence MacKenzie, sitting rigidly alert in her chair. She hadn’t said a word so far, but from the look on her face, she was prepared to hear what he had to tell. These two people might be the only individuals who ever came to inquire about the late Charles Linwood. Maurice Warneke decided it was time to break his silence.
“It might not have fallen,” he said. There. He could tell by Miss MacKenzie’s quick, indrawn breath that the statement had not been entirely unexpected.
“I think that requires some explanation,” she finally said.
“It was the spot where the tree limb hit, and the amount of force it took to drive as much bark into the wound as I picked out.” Warneke raised a hand to his own head. “Right here, just where the back of the neck meets the spine.” He turned and then bent his head forward and to one side to show the exposure.
“He must have been wearing a hat and scarf. He couldn’t have gotten as far up Broadway as he did if his head had been uncovered.” Miss MacKenzie’s voice was steady. No trace of choked-back tears.
“It wasn’t,” Warneke agreed. “I suspect that when he sat down, he was readjusting the scarf, perhaps taking off the hat momentarily to brush some of the snow off it. The timing of the tree limb was fortuitous.”
“But not accidental,” Hunter said. He looked briefly at Miss MacKenzie as if in apology for exposing her to the details he knew would follow.
Warneke stood up and moved to behind the chair in which he had been sitting. He took a black umbrella from its stand against the wall and raised it above his head, holding it as though it were a branch attached to a tree. “This is how the limb would fall if the weight of the snow snapped it off,” he said, bringing the umbrella straight down. “Even allowing for the wind, there wouldn’t have been enough sideways force to make the wounds I saw. However, if the branch were held and swung thusly, it could easily have smashed into the base of the young man’s skull.” He swung the umbrella with a strong backhanded heave whose force whistled through the still air. Repeated the movement. “There’s no other way he could have sustained the injuries he did in precisely that spot at the base of his neck. I’ve tried every type of blow I could think of. This is the only one that matches.”
“So he was murdered,” Prudence breathed.
“Perhaps.”
“Yet you said nothing to the police?” Hunter questioned.
“What I just showed you isn’t proof. Doesn’t even come close to being proof. It could be argued that the wind gusted at precisely the moment the tree decided to release its limb, that the gust picked up the branch and hurled it against Linwood with the same type of accuracy that a human being could achieve. He was robbed and left to freeze to death, his assailant long gone and perhaps dead himself shortly afterward. The body was taken to the city morgue before being brought here to me. Released as an accident victim. Death by mischance is what they call it. The doctor who examined the young man when he was carried into the morgue called him a victim of the storm; the police had no qualms, and his family wanted him buried quietly, respectfully. I did the best I could for him and for them. I knew my questions would have no answers. What was the point in asking them?”
“Have you seen this kind of thing before?” Prudence asked.
“A murder gone unpunished, you mean?”
“Gone unsuspected.”
“Ask any undertaker. We’ve all had our doubts at one time or another.”
“Was there only the one blow?” Hunter brought them back to the matter at hand.
“Hard to tell. Definitely one blow that was particularly vicious and caused him to fall forward. If there were another, or even two more, the murderer would have had to step around the bench and strike him across the back of the neck and skull as he lay on the ground. The wound was examined while the body was in the morgue; it was probed, given a preliminary cleaning, and pronounced accidental. After that, the morgue attendants weren’t too careful about preserving whatever evidence might have remained.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Geoffrey Hunter took the battered ace of spades from his pocket and laid it on Warneke’s desk. “The policeman who informed Mr. Linwood of his son’s death took it from his hand. He thought it might have some meaning for the family and he was afraid a Bellevue attendant might throw it away.”
“Charles’s wallet and briefcase weren’t found,” Prudence added. “He was only identified fairly quickly because he was known to be missing.”
“Could the card have been placed in his hand by someone else?” Warneke asked.
“You mean by whoever assaulted him?”
“It’s not unknown for a revenge killing to be marked by the gang that’s ordered it.”
“My fiancé’s legal practice wasn’t a source of danger,” Prudence explained. “Was it, Mr. Hunter?”
“Not as far as I know. The cases I investigated for him were far from being the type you read about in the headlines.”
“That does explain one thing, then,” Warneke said. “Why he’d taken the glove off his right hand. I assume Mr. Linwood carried the card somewhere on his person. In a pocket perhaps? If someone else didn’t put it into his hand, he must have reached for it himself.”
“As he lay dying, Mr. Warneke. That’s how important it was to him. We believe he was trying to send us a message.”
“I’m so sorry, Miss MacKenzie,” Warneke said. He handed the card back to Geoffrey Hunter. “I can only tell you what I observed when I prepared Mr. Linwood for burial.”
“There’s nothing else you can tell us?”
“He was a young man
in the best of health. He should have lived a long life.”
“I thought my father would live longer than he did,” Prudence said quietly, as if thinking of one recent death led her inevitably to remember another.
“I remember the Judge,” Maurice Warneke said.
Geoffrey Hunter had stood up. Now he sat down again. “Did you prepare his body, too, Mr. Warneke? It would have been about three months ago. Between Christmas and New Year’s.” Again he glanced apologetically at Prudence, but he needn’t have worried. There were lines of sadness carved on her lovely face, but overlaid by the clenched muscles of stern control. He had the strange idea that if he hadn’t asked the question, she might have. Suddenly the need to know more about Victoria MacKenzie grew more urgent.
“In the Judge’s case, my assistant and I washed and dressed the body and then placed it in the casket. He stayed in his own home until it was time to transport the remains to the church and then on to the graveyard.”
“And was there anything unusual about my father’s body, Mr. Warneke?” Only Prudence MacKenzie’s tightly clasped hands indicated what it had cost her to ask the question.
“I was given to understand that he had suffered for some time from an increasingly debilitating weakness of the heart. He had the blueness around the fingertips and lips that one often sees when the heart is unable to function well. The death certificate was in order, and a doctor had been in attendance, so there didn’t seem to be anything amiss that I could discern.”
Warneke was taking great care with how he phrased his answers.
“But there’s a reason why you particularly remember the Judge?”
“He was a very well-known man, Mr. Hunter, often in the newspapers. His wife had begun to make her mark in society.”
“Do you always know this much about the people you bury?”
“Part of what we do is advise families on the most suitable services for the departed, tailored to the appropriate station in life. We assisted with Judge MacKenzie’s first wife, so we naturally assumed we would be serving the family again. There’s a certain comfort and trust in familiarity.”
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