Murder on Black Friday

by P. B. Ryan

  Will said, “I just want to take a look at your father’s room, since it’s where he...well, to help substantiate the diagnosis of suicide. Your sister was reluctant to let me up there, but you seem a bit less...wrought up about things.”

  A classic Will Hewitt understatement, Nell thought.

  From the rear of the house came the creak of the back door opening, and Miriam’s footsteps retreating down the flagstone path toward the drying shed.

  Becky cocked her head to listen. “She’s hanging up that dress, and then she’ll have to clean up in the kitchen. It’ll take her a little while—twenty minutes, maybe.” Shooing them toward the stairs, she said, “If she catches you up there, I had nothing to do with it.”

  Chapter 4

  “Mother of God,” Nell murmured as they stood in the doorway of Noah Bassett’s bedroom.

  The maid Eileen was on her hands and knees with her back to them, scrubbing a sudsy bristle brush over the carpet. Being of petite stature, she really had to put her back into it; a little grunt of effort escaped her with every stroke of the brush. Nell closed her eyes, but a ghastly tableau was emblazoned on her mind’s eye.

  The carpet, an elegant if worn Savonnerie patterned in shades of gold and cream, was smeared with blood, some of which had spurted from Mr. Bassett’s slashed arteries onto the counterpane on the half-tester bed. Part of the carpet had already been scrubbed; it was damp and strewn with pink-stained washrags, on one of which lay an ivory-handled pen knife. Two buckets of reddish water, one soapy and one less so, stood next to a bathing pan of tinned sheet iron that resembled an upended garden hat with a wide, curved brim. Blood, or bloody water, filled the tub’s shallow well.

  Nell took a deep breath, but the stench of old blood mingled with ox-gall soap made the gorge rise in her throat.

  Will closed a strong hand around her arm, said her name softly.

  She opened her eyes and crossed herself.

  Eileen, who’d paused in her scrubbing to survey them over her shoulder, noticed the gesture and cast a curious glance at Nell’s blue silk dress and chic little velvet tam. Unlike the young maid, with her sweetly Gaelic visage, one wouldn’t necessarily peg Nell as Irish Catholic just by looking at her. More often than not, given her attire and comportment, she was taken for a Brahmin miss of the prim and starchy variety.

  Eileen looked from Nell to Will, who was sweeping his gaze around the room, those dark, trenchant eyes seeming to catalogue every detail of the scene. To Nell, it looked as if Mr. Bassett had died exactly as he was purported to have, from cutting his wrists and submerging them in a tubful of warm water; she doubted Will would have a different take on it.

  Pausing in her work, the girl blew away some strands of staw-colored hair that had escaped her head rag to hang in her eyes. There was something familiar about her; Nell was sure she’d seen her somewhere before, but where?

  In a soft, bone-weary brogue, the maid said, “Can I help ya?”

  “We understand Dr. Tanner is up here,” Will said.

  Eileen hesitated, then cocked her head toward a closed door in the far wall. “He’s in there.” She hunkered down and resumed her scrubbing.

  As they crossed the room, side-stepping Eileen and the grisly mess she was cleaning, Nell noticed some items of clothing laid out on a setee: a black, double-breasted frock coat, gray trousers, braces, socks, shirt, drawers, collar... The last suit of clothes Noah Bassett would ever wear.

  Nell knocked softly on the door to Mr. Bassett’s study.

  “Miss Bassett?” Dr. Tanner said from inside.

  So, Nell thought, He even calls her that when they’re alone—just as all those dour old etiquette books advised. She opened the door.

  The minister, sitting at a cylinder desk in the Spartan but sunwashed room, turned to look at them, a hint of disappointment shadowing his face when he saw that it wasn’t Miriam. He rose and bowed to Nell, a ribbon-tied bundle of envelopes in his hand. “Miss Sweeney...Dr. Hewitt.”

  The desk had its top rolled up. All but one of its little nooks had been emptied out onto the desktop, taking up its entire surface except for an inkstand. It was a pewter stand with two ivory-capped inkwells, an ivory-lidded stamp box, a pen rest bearing a well-used quill, and a smaller, empty, rest meant for a pen knife. The lower desk drawers all stood open, the files and papers that had filled them spread out in neat stacks on the rug.

  Looking from Nell and Will to the rummaged-through desk, and back again, Tanner said, “I am, of course, going through these things at Miss Bassett’s behest.”

  “I know. I overheard.” Nell was careful not to specify how very little she’d overheard, in the hope that Dr. Tanner could be finessed into disclosing what he was looking for. “Whispers,” Nell said, “tend to have the unintended effect of drawing one’s attention to what’s being said.”

  “You must understand,” Tanner said as he shoved his eyeglasses up, “Miss Bassett’s tendency toward...I don’t want to say secretiveness...”

  “Circumspection?” Will supplied.

  Tanner accepted the euphemism with a mordant smile. “It’s the product of circumstance, not nature. She’s a lady who’s grown accustomed to, well, taking care of things—of everything—on her own hook entirely, with no aid or input from anyone else. Running a house this size with a staff that’s dwindled down to one, caring for an ailing father, serving as a substitute mother to Becky after Mrs. Bassett’s passing... It’s a great deal to be laid upon one person’s shoulders.”

  “I can understand Mr. Basset’s having done little to ease her burden,” Will said. “He’s evidently been suffering from mental depression for years. But surely the younger Miss Bassett, as she’s come of age, has been able to help out.”

  “Becky...” Tanner flipped through the letters in his hand as he composed his reply. “She’s a charming girl, but she’s simply never been expected to shoulder any real responsibilities.”

  “Are you saying she’s been spoiled?” Nell asked. If so, whose fault would it be but that of the person who’d reared her—her sister Miriam?

  “I wouldn’t say that.” Lowering his voice, his eyes sparking with amusement over the rim of his glasses, Tanner said, “It might get back to Miss Bassett, and there’d be the Devil to pay. I say, do you mind if I, er...” He gestured toward the desk.

  “Oh, do please carry on,” Nell said. “We didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  Acknowledging the small courtesy with a nod, the minister sat back down and placed the letters on the desk, lining them up tidily with the other piles. “Miss Bassett has found that it tends to just complicate things when she tries to share the load with Becky, what with all the explanations and instructions. And Becky, as you’ve no doubt observed, relishes discourse to an extent that Miss Bassett finds, well...”

  “Time-consuming?” Nell said.

  Tanner smiled. “Quite. Being a very busy lady who values her time, she’s learned to keep her counsel—almost to a fault, as you’ve seen.” Pulling a sheaf of papers from one of the cubbies, Tanner said, “In that respect, the Bassett sisters could not be more different.”

  Too true, Nell mused. Every thought Becky had seemed to make its way out of her mouth in short order, without benefit of any kind of filtering process.

  “I imply no judgments,” Tanner said as he sorted through the papers—a train schedule, a dinner invitation, an old tintype... “The Almighty made them both the way they are, and I daresay He loves them equally. But there’s no denying they’re polar opposites. Miriam took after her father. Noah was always a strong believer in personal responsibility and self-reliance.”

  Will said, “If Miss Bassett, the elder Miss Bassett, is so insular, I’m surprised that she enlisted your help just now.”

  “As am I,” Tanner said. “Surprised, but pleased. We are, after all, betrothed. It would be a sad thing, indeed, if she felt she could never turn to me.” He flipped quickly through the last few items in his hand—a folded-up map, some pos
tcards, and a yellowed newspaper clipping that made him shake his head dolefully; it was Lucy Bassett’s obituary. “That’s it, then,” he said as he set about returning the little piles to the slots from which he’d extracted them.

  “No luck?” Nell asked, even as she wondered what it was he’d been looking for.

  “Not in this section here,” he said, indicating the cubbies. “They’re all personal papers—correspondence, memorabilia... Very little related to business or financial matters, and certainly nothing about his gold transactions.”

  His gold transactions? Papa almost never talked about such matters with the family. It had been a vague response—intentionally so, it would seem, to a direct question about whether Noah Bassett had bought gold. He’d been melancholic for years, she’d told them, by way of explaining his suicide. Perhaps the general atmosphere of despair yesterday sent him over the edge—so many men losing everything. “Circumspection” was one thing. It would appear she’d deliberately steered them away from the notion that her father had killed himself in despair over the gold crash. But why?

  With a glance at Will, Nell asked the minister, “Was Mr. Bassett very heavily invested in gold, do you know?”

  “I don’t, actually. He never spoke of such things to me. Filthy lucre, and all that.”

  “Since his business papers are missing,” Will said, “wouldn’t you imagine Mr. Munro has them?”

  Tanner stilled, regarding Will with a kind of guarded puzzlement. “You know about Munro?”

  “That he advised Mr. Bassett on his investments?” Will said. “Yes, we know.”

  “He counseled quite a few gentlemen on such matters,” said Nell, not wanting it to get back to Miriam that Becky had let slip this connection between the two dead men. “Word gets ‘round.”

  Tanner let out an amused little “hmph” as he leaned over to lift a pile of papers from the floor onto the desk. “She doesn’t think anyone knows. She doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Because of his...private life?” Will asked. “Or did she consider him a gutter-blood because he wasn’t born into his fortune?”

  “She’s no high-hat,” Tanner said as he started skimming the papers and setting them aside, “but she does hold to fairly high standards of conduct, so I suspect it’s the former, though I couldn’t say for sure. She’s never liked to talk about him. It seemed to trouble her that he had anything to do with the family, but especially that he was...” He cut himself off, his brow furrowed.

  “That he was what?” Will asked.

  “Er, that he was...” Tanner shook his head without looking up. “Sorry, must have lost my train of thought. Reading and talking at the same time, you know.”

  Clergymen ought to be bad liars, Nell thought. Otherwise, what business did they have calling themselves men of God?

  “So now that both men are dead,” Will said, “Miss Bassett means to eradicate the association altogether.”

  Tanner frowned as he riffled through a file. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that.”

  Nell said, “She sent you to find evidence of her father’s investments because she knew they would connect him to Mr. Munro, thus reflecting badly on the family. My guess is she wants to hide those papers where no one will ever find them—or destroy them.” Perhaps, Nell speculated, the Bassetts’ dire financial straights these past few years had made Miriam all the more determined to maintain the family’s upstanding reputation—hence the need to erase the roguish Philip Munro from the picture.

  “It’s almost certainly what she intended,” Will said. “But Munro must have held onto those papers, seeing as he was acting as Mr. Bassett’s agent or advisor or what have you. I’d like to take a look at them and see for myself how badly the gold failure affected Bassett’s financial picture. All I need is a solid motive for suicide, and then I can move on to Munro himself—which I venture to say will prove a good deal thornier.”

  “Perhaps when we’re done here,” Nell said, “We should pay a call on Mr. Munro’s sister.”

  “We,” Will said with a little half-smile. “I quite like the sound of that.” She must have looked flustered, because he added, “You’ve proven yourself quite adept in matters of deduction, and there’s something about you that makes people want to open up to you. That’s all I meant.”

  She looked away, cheeks warming. “So I assumed.”

  Still smiling, but in a slightly lower voice, he said, “Watch those assumptions, Cornelia, lest you be taken in by so much dissembling blather.”

  Not wanting him to see how his teasing had affected her, she turned away pointedly and said, “Dr. Tanner, I don’t suppose you found a note from Mr. Bassett on his desk, or in one of those little slots. You know—a final goodbye? Some statement as to why he was taking his life?”

  Tanner shook his head as he set the file aside and picked up another. “Nothing like that, and I doubt very much he’d have shoved it in one of these drawers—what would have been the point? Did you ask Miss Bassett if she found anything like that?”

  Nell nodded. “She didn’t.” Or so she claimed.

  * * *

  When they left the study, the maid Eileen was still on her hands and knees, but she’d stopped scrubbing and was gathering up the soiled rags.

  “All done for now?” Will asked her.

  “Got to go down to the kitchen and git some hotch-potch soup started fer dinner,” she said in a soft, high-pitched voice. She was young, indeed, a waifish adolescent no more than a year or two off the boat, judging from her accent. Bracing a hand on the edge of the bed, she started pushing herself up.

  Will offered her his hand. She gaped at it. Had no gentleman ever helped this poor girl to her feet?

  “Allow me,” he said.

  “Och, ye don’t want to be touchin’ me, sir. I got poor Mr. Bassett’s blood all over me hands.”

  “My own hands were covered with his blood just last night,” lifting her gently to her feet despite her protestations. “I’m the surgeon who examined his body after it was brought to the hospital.”

  The girl couldn’t disguise her revulsion. “Ya cut up dead folks fer a livin’? Faith, I won’t never grouse about me job agin.”

  Having gained her feet, Eileen smoothed down her humble skirts, which were hemmed above the ankle for practicality. Her left foot was shod in an ordinary, if shabby boot, but her right... It didn’t even look like a foot, misshapen as it was, a bulging stump encased in wood and leather.

  That was when Nell realized why the maid look so familiar to her. “I say,” Nell asked her, “do you attend mass at St. Stephen’s—early Sunday mass?”

  “Aye.” That wasn’t surprising; it was very much an Irish church.

  Nell said, “I’ve seen you there.” It was the girl’s unwieldy, off-kilter gait that always drew Nell’s attention—and pity—when the parishioners, many of them servants, lined up to receive communion. The poor girl had always struck Nell as far too young and sweet-looking to be saddled with such an affliction. “Your name is Eileen, is it not?” Nell asked.

  The girl nodded. “Eileen Tierney.”

  “I’m Nell Sweeney, and this is Dr. William Hewitt.”

  Will bowed. Eileen, clearly unused to such gallantries, nodded timorously.

  Nell said, “Miss Bassett tells us you were with her when she found her father’s body yesterday afternoon.”

  She nodded morosely. “Aye, and a more terrible thing I never seen.”

  “What, exactly, did you see?” Will asked.

  “Mr. Bassett layin’ right here wid his hands in this tub, blood everywheres. Miss Bassett, she starts wailin’ like a banshee.”

  “Did she do anything?” Nell asked.

  “Just sank to her knees in that doorway there, bawlin’ and screamin’. Miss Becky, she come runnin’ up from downstairs. Takes one look at her da layin’ there and heads straight for the jakes, like maybe she’s fixin’ to be sick.”

  “What did you do?”


  “Nothin’ at first—figgered it weren’t my place—but then I seen the two of ‘em wasn’t gonna be good fer much, so I lifted me skirts and come on in and...well, once I got a look at his face, I knew he was dead and no doubt about it. He kilt himself.” She executed a solemn sign of the cross. “Howly Father have mercy on him. It’s a mortal sin, that is.”

  Will said, “You’re to be commended for taking the situation in hand and going in to check on Mr. Bassett.”

  Eileen accepted the compliment with a shy murmur of thanks.

  Nell said, “Miss Basset eventually got command of herself, I take it.”

  “Aye, she calmed down some, but she never did budge from that doorway.”

  “Did she...ask you to do anything?” Will asked.

  The girl’s gaze shifted from Will to Nell as she clutched her apron in her hands. “I’m sure I dunno what you...”

  “To look for something,” Nell prompted.

  Eileen shook her head as she turned toward the door. “Weren’t nothin’ to find. I got to go start that hotch-potch.”

  “You didn’t find a note?” Nell asked.

  “Sorry, no,” she said as she shuffled haltingly across the room.

  “Eileen.” Will stilled her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “I told you,” she said. “I didn’t find—“

  “Your foot,” he said. “I’d like to take a look at it.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’m a physician,” Will said.

  “I thought you said you was a surgeon.”

  “It’s the same thing. If you’ll just indulge me,” he said as he guided her to an old horsehair wing chair, “it shan’t take long, and perhaps I can even be of some help.”

  “There’s no help fer it, and anyways, I can’t afford no bone butcher.” Eileen glanced at the open door and lowered her voice. “Ye know why I’m the maid of all work here, after the rest of ‘em took off? It’s ‘cause the Bassetts can’t pay nothin’ but room and board no more, and ain’t no one’ll put up with that but me. Only reason I’m still here, doin’ the work of six, is ‘cause I’m a cripple, and nobody else’ll have me.”