What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. I have work to do.”

  “You may think you’re successfully fighting off a chill from your famous walk up Broadway, but if you don’t rest it’s bound to develop into something far more serious.”

  “I have a case to plead.”

  “Will you at least forego Delmonico’s for one night?”

  “Going to bed early is for old men.”

  “I rest my case.” Prudence smiled as she said it, but she knew he could read the worry in her eyes.

  “I’ll have him out of here and in his bed within the hour, Miss MacKenzie,” Josiah said from the doorway. “There’s to be no arguing, Mr. Conkling. It won’t do your client any good if you collapse in court.” He gathered up the notebook pages, put them into a sturdy brown envelope, and handed it to the Judge’s daughter. “Danny is waiting downstairs. He says you can have him and Mr. Washington for as long as you need them.”

  “Mr. Washington?”

  “The horse.” With a last glance back at Conkling, Geoffrey ushered Prudence out of the lawyer’s office.

  “Wait,” she said. “Is he really all right, Josiah?”

  “No. He’s not. He knows it and so do I, but we keep up the pretense.”

  “What can I do? Shall I send Dr. Worthington to him?”

  “He’s already been. Mr. Conkling is not the most cooperative of patients.”

  “He has amazing recuperative powers. My father said he never missed a day in the Senate or in court.”

  “You don’t want to keep Danny and Mr. Washington waiting, miss.”

  Impulsively, she raised herself on tiptoe and kissed Josiah Gregory’s clean-shaven cheek. “Promise you’ll send a messenger if he worsens.”

  He nodded, too touched by her kindness and too genuinely frightened to be able to say a word.

  * * *

  By the time Danny Dennis’s hansom cab was making its way across the Brooklyn Bridge, Hunter and Prudence had thoroughly reviewed what they had learned at the Dakota and at Billy McGlory’s concert saloon, trying to fit what they had found out about Victoria into the discovery of the Judge’s secret notebook. It was the first opportunity they had had to talk since the afternoon of Colleen’s fall. By unspoken agreement, neither mentioned the attempts to intimidate Prudence.

  “He wanted me to know,” she said quietly. “After everything he did to conceal it, my father then took precautions to make sure I would find out he had been accepting bribes for years. Why? There’s only one answer, Mr. Hunter. Only one answer that makes any sense at all.”

  When she looked at him again, it was with the steely determination he’d only seen once before, across a gun barrel at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, six months into the war. He’d fired first, but he’d never forgotten that look.

  “I couldn’t get Dr. Worthington to confirm it, but she was killing him, Mr. Hunter. I said it before, but if anything, I’m more sure of it than ever. She was killing him, and he knew it.”

  “More than that, Miss MacKenzie.”

  “The codicil to the will,” Prudence said. “He added it without her knowledge because he realized she wouldn’t be satisfied with his death, with half a fortune. She would want it all. So he made sure I was worth much more to her alive than dead. But I don’t think even he realized how evil she was. He never imagined she would kill Charles also. I don’t know how she managed it; I just know with every fiber of my being that somehow she did. And now Colleen has paid a terrible price for Victoria’s greed.”

  “Conkling is right, you know. It’s not safe for you to return to that house.”

  “Victoria thinks she can’t possibly be connected to Charles’s death, but she must believe Colleen saw or heard something when my father lay dying. She was in and out of the room all the time changing linens and carrying up trays. Nobody stops to think that servants hear whatever is being said until later, until it’s too late to take back the words. If she believed Colleen had figured out what was done, my stepmother would also worry that she was about to sell whatever information she had. Victoria’s mind works that way; she wouldn’t be able to conceive of anything else.”

  “Did she know you’d been in the attic and in your father’s rooms?”

  “She saw me in the hallway, closing the door to my father’s bedroom. She made a remark about someone being careless with her keys. I told her I’d found the door open and that it was the first time I’d been in there since his death.”

  “Do you think she believed you?”

  “I wanted to think so. Then. Now I’m not sure.”

  “Someone had to unlock those rooms for cleaning.”

  “Clara does the cleaning, but Mrs. Barstow would have unlocked and then relocked them. She’d never trust her keys to Clara.”

  “Is it always Mrs. Barstow who unlocks those rooms? Are you sure?”

  “Let me think.” Prudence closed her eyes, trying to visualize the second-floor hallway. Waxed wooden floors laid with oriental runners, gaslights interspersed with landscape paintings at regular intervals along the walls, narrow tables holding decorative Chinese vases. Mirrors above the tables. She saw German Clara approaching the Judge’s suite, watched her turn and stand for a moment with broom in hand, dusting cloths draped over her arm. Another maid appeared, said something, took a ring of keys from her apron pocket. It was Colleen, Colleen taking Mrs. Barstow’s place on a cold winter’s morning when the housekeeper’s knees were swollen and painful. Victoria had already left the house, she remembered, else Colleen would never have been given the keys. Prudence wondered how many times the housekeeper had sent Colleen in her place to unlock those upstairs rooms. “No, it hasn’t always been Mrs. Barstow. She has bad knees that bother her in cold weather. I saw Colleen with the housekeeper’s keys at least once. There may have been other times as well.”

  “It’s what Victoria believes that’s important.”

  “My poor father. He cared so much for his honor and for mine. He allowed himself to be trapped into a loveless marriage to save me from disgrace and ruin. He knew what it would mean for me if what he had done became common knowledge, if he were removed from the bench and not allowed to practice law anymore. No decent home would be open to either of us, and no son would be allowed to marry me. He might have felt he would have to take his own life rather than live it as an outcast. And if the daughter of a crooked judge shared his shame, then how much worse if she were also the child of a suicide. Once Victoria had her claws in him, there was no escape.”

  “None.”

  “Do you think your cryptographer will be able to decode the notebook pages?”

  “I’ll let you decide that for yourself. We’re here.”

  * * *

  Benjamin Truitt and his widowed daughter, Lydia, lived in a narrow, three-story brownstone within walking distance of the part of the Hudson River called the Narrows. A park stretched from the street down to the shore, tall trees just beginning to leaf out, patches of daffodils and dandelions dotting the green grass with yellow stars. Which Benjamin Truitt hadn’t been able to see for years. He was blind.

  “My father will be so happy you’re here again, Mr. Hunter,” Lydia Truitt said. She ushered them toward the many-windowed back parlor where Benjamin spent most of every spring day enjoying the feel of the sun on his face. He was always chilled. The shell whose concussive blast took his sight in the early days of the war had also deprived his frail body of its ability to regulate heat and cold. “I hope the code you’re bringing him this time is more challenging than the last one.”

  “It once took him a day and a half to break what the Pinkerton Detective Agency gave up on after three of their best operatives worked on it for a month,” Geoffrey explained to Prudence.

  “Don’t tell tales on me, Geoffrey,” came a strong voice from the end of the hallway.

  “He has ears like a fox,” Lydia whispered.

  “Like a bat,” the voice corrected. “Though I’ll admit the fox i
s better looking.”

  The man who stood up to greet them was small, slender, bent with the pain of shattered bones badly knit together, but his thick red hair was as bright and full as a much younger man’s. He looked, Prudence thought irreverently, like a caricature of an Irish leprechaun. Without the freckles. And wearing smoked glasses to hide the blankness of eyes that could not see.

  “We’ll have tea, Lydia. And some of those cookies you baked this morning.”

  “How are you, Ben?” Geoffrey held both the codebreaker’s hands in his own, bending his head to hear a whispered question. “He’d like permission to touch your face. Just briefly.”

  It felt, Prudence thought, as though a butterfly wing had brushed her cheek, that quickly and lightly did Ben’s crooked forefinger touch her skin. She closed her eyes and sensed something passing across her lids, her nose, her lips. Passing, but not touching, as if it were enough for the blind man to allow his hand to hover an inch above what he was examining.

  “Thank you,” he breathed. “You’re a very beautiful young woman, Miss Prudence. You don’t mind if I call you that, do you?’

  “Not at all.” She suddenly remembered that in the coach, when they were talking about her father, Mr. Hunter had also called her by her name. Inadvertently, of course. He hadn’t noticed he’d done it. She felt warmth in her cheeks and quickly ducked her head.

  “I’m not a very good baker,” Lydia said, pouring tea and handing around a plate of sugar cookies, “but Father insists these are worth eating.”

  “What have you brought me, Geoffrey? Something out of the ordinary, I hope.”

  “I’m going to let Prudence tell you, Ben. She found the documents and she’s done at least as well as I could have to parse out what the subject matter must be.”

  “I found a leather-bound notebook hidden in a secret drawer of a desk that belonged to my father,” Prudence began. “The entries are all in his handwriting. I think, no, I’m sure they represent a record he kept of the cases he argued when he was practicing law and the trials on which he sat as the presiding judge. But the groupings of letters and numbers don’t make sense. I’ve tried every substitution I could manage, but nothing has worked.”

  “Read them to me, Lydia.”

  For the next half hour, Lydia painstakingly read each entry letter by letter, numeral by numeral, including any spaces between. Benjamin nodded from time to time, sipped his tea, chewed thoughtfully on half a dozen sugar cookies. When his daughter finished reading the last page, she poured a healthy dollop of whiskey into his cup and offered the bottle around the table. Only Geoffrey accepted.

  “I don’t see the pattern yet,” Benjamin said.

  “Perhaps there isn’t one.”

  “There’s always a pattern, my dear Prudence. Man can’t help himself. He seeks to impose order on chaos and to understand the incomprehensible.”

  Lydia fastened a sheet of exceptionally thick paper to a metal slate with four rows of precisely spaced rectangles cut through the metal. She picked up a sharply pointed stylus whose round wooden handle fit snugly into the palm of her hand. As Prudence and Geoffrey watched, she punched holes through the rectangles, quick taps with the stylus that sounded like heavy drops of rain against a windowpane.

  “She’s creating a Braille copy for me to read with my fingertips,” Benjamin explained. The tiny pops were background to his description of what the Braille system of raised dots had come to mean to so many blind persons. “Even with a memory sharpened by years of training my mind to picture what my eyes can’t see, there are times when I need the absolute certainty of what Lydia copies for me in Braille. It’s demanding work, but she’s very good at it. Changing the position of even one of the raised dots can alter the meaning of a word.”

  “You said you hadn’t discerned a pattern in what your daughter read to you.” Prudence could hardly take her eyes off Lydia’s precise tapping.

  “There are patterns. But on a first reading I couldn’t make sense of them.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Very much what other cryptographers don’t do, Miss Prudence. I shall let my brain work independently of every other sense. I’ll suspend the coded pages in mental midair, if you can imagine such a thing, and fix my attention on them.”

  “It looks like sleeping,” Lydia commented, never breaking the even tap tapping of the steel stylus.

  “And sometimes it is,” agreed her father. “But most often it’s akin to mesmerism, although the more modern term is hypnosis. To put it as simply as possible, I put myself into a trance and live there with the code I’m trying to break. Associations and suggestions occur to me that otherwise wouldn’t. I then examine them in a normal waking state, and almost always find the first clue that allows me to break the code. If I still had my sight, I’d be limited by what I could see. I’d spend hours poring over lines and squiggles, trying to force them into logical forms and patterns.”

  “That’s what I was doing with the substitutions I tried.”

  “Exactly. That’s a useful exercise if the code is simple, but for anything complex, disassociation from method can sometimes bring surprisingly useful results.”

  “And if the code is a substitution based on certain portions or words in an already existing text?” Geoffrey shook his head, remembering a code that had been based on a wildly popular book by Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  “I know the one you’re thinking of,” Ben said. “And I can tell you now the clue that broke that code was a mental picture that came entirely unbidden when I’m sure Lydia thought I was asleep in my chair.”

  “Tom whitewashing the fence?”

  “Too obvious, Geoff. Our code creator thought the scene where Tom redeems the Bible verse tickets was the dullest in the book, and therefore the least likely to stick in anyone’s brain. But Twain has a rhythm to what he writes, and it was the rhythm that came through the substitutions. I saw Tom Sawyer standing in front of the Sunday School superintendent as clear as if I were there myself.”

  “Why would someone writing in code pick a book that’s so popular? Why not something obscure that few people have heard of? Wouldn’t that make the cracking much more difficult?”

  “It would, Miss Prudence. But your code writer needs a book that’s not likely to draw attention to itself by its rarity. It also has to be readily available wherever the recipient of the messages happens to be. What Lydia read to me doesn’t fit the kind of rhythm I can usually sense when a book passage is used.”

  The blind man reached out with unerring accuracy and lightly touched Prudence’s hand. “Don’t worry, Miss Prudence. Your father wanted you to know what he’d written, and now so do I.”

  * * *

  “She’s no better, Miss Prudence, but she’s no worse either. That’s something to be grateful for.”

  “It’s good of you to take her in, Mrs. Dailey.”

  “Colleen was always a sweet, hardworking child. I remember when her mother brought her to the kitchen door. You couldn’t hardly tell which of the two of them was going to break down crying first.”

  “I’ll sit here by her for a while, if I may.”

  “You drink that cup of tea I brought you, miss. No matter how bad things are, they always look better over a nice cup of hot tea. Call out if anything happens. We’ll hear you in the parlor.”

  “How much longer can she remain like this?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Prudence. The doctor shrugged his shoulders when I asked. She swallows water and the broth I spoon into her mouth, but that’s the best that can be done.”

  Mrs. Dailey eased the door not quite closed, whispered a quick prayer to Saint Jude, and rejoined Cameron and Geoffrey Hunter in the parlor.

  “I didn’t want to leave Kathleen alone with Colleen in such a bad way,” Ian Cameron was saying. His arm crept around Mrs. Dailey’s still-slender waist when she sat down next to him on the silk upholstered sofa.

  “I told him to go ahead, tha
t I’d be fine here. Every single one of the boarders has volunteered to help. We held a meeting. You have an army of five former butlers and four retired housekeepers at your disposal, Mr. Hunter. They may not be young and limber anymore, but there’s nothing they don’t know about ferreting out secrets. The stories they can tell! Not naming any names, of course, but we all know who the other person is talking about.”

  “I need information about Victoria MacKenzie. McGlory knew her as Ronnie, short for Veronica, she told him. He recognized Donald Morley in the wedding photo, but not the name. Apparently, she was always accompanied by her brother when she came to Armory Hall. Which she did only until she’d gotten the information she wanted out of McGlory.”

  “She used him.”

  “But he let her get away with it, Ian. That doesn’t sound very much like the Billy McGlory we’ve all heard about.” Mrs. Dailey hesitated, then made up her mind. “If you’re Irish, like I am, Mr. Hunter, every Irish name in the newspaper jumps out at you. You’re constantly on watch for the ones who’ve gone bad. When I first came to this country, there were signs everywhere I looked. No Irish Need Apply. To make the sentiment even plainer, they’d put a No Dogs Allowed sign right beside it.

  “So when there’s an Irishman like McGlory giving all the rest of us a reputation as drunkards and criminals, you follow the stories about him. There’s a terrible fascination about it because you know that as soon as you have to give your name or someone recognizes the brogue, you’ll be tarred with the same brush. I know a lot about Billy McGlory, and I’ve ways of finding out more. He wouldn’t let Victoria MacKenzie disappear, no matter what he claims. He set someone to keep an eye on her, you can be sure of that. And that someone is bound to have left a trail. Leave it to me. My army and I have more informants than General Grant ever did.”