FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I hesitate to speak plainly even now,” the Pig Lady’s soft voice said.

  That very reluctance installed a hush over the table as everyone kept quiet, leaned inward, and strove to learn the secret.

  “This event, after all,” she went on, “honors their lives as well as mourns their deaths. Please do not make me speak ill of them.”

  “I don’t think you could,” Irene said. “They were warmhearted women who were dear to all of us here, second mothers to me, although I can’t accept either one of them for my actual mother, unless you tell me differently. I must admit that I had thought I had set aside all notion, need, and care for a mother years ago. Yet seeing you all again, my foster family of the theater, has made me eager to find what was lost, if it can be had.”

  There was no doubting Irene’s simple sincerity. Her old associates eyes brightened and blinked.

  The Pig Lady’s eyes were not visible, but her voice resumed, and she said what she had feared to say before. “I know neither Sophie or Salamandra could be your mother, Rena, because they were young girls when you were born. Even then it would have been possible, and they could have concealed it, for desperate young girls can accomplish amazing feats of directing attention away from what would normally be obvious conditions, especially in such a transient profession as ours. As a matter of fact, both could have been your mother, for both had been in the family way before you were born. Girls can be taken sad advantage of, and are often so innocent they don’t even know why it happens.”

  Irene had sat back down in shock at these revelations. The women’s sordid history did not surprise her, I am sorry to say, so much as the fact that not one, but two of them had been with child at a time just before she was born.

  “Then either one could have—” she began, appalled to think that she may have just missed seeing the one again, and certainly had missed recognizing the other for her mother. . . .

  “No.” The Pig Lady’s voice was loud and firm. “Both were ‘in trouble.’ They visited a ‘woman doctor’ who claimed to help them, and no children resulted.”

  “Madame Restell!” Irene exclaimed. “But there could have been future occasions—”

  “No. They had learned their lessons, and, later, when they married, they discovered they could no longer do what they were so loath to do just a few years earlier. It was why both were no longer with their husbands, and had not been for years.”

  “Both unable to have children?” Irene sounded extremely doubtful.

  “They were twins,” Sherlock Holmes reminded her, and the table. “It could be they suffered the same adverse effects. I understand that sort of illegal surgery is quite crude.”

  Irene’s eyebrows went up, even as she didn’t argue with his conclusions. She was no doubt thinking what I was: that Sherlock Holmes had grown increasingly knowledgeable about hidden female matters since consulting with Professor Krafft-Ebing.

  “Then”—Irene was sounding more appalled by the moment—“were their deaths a mistake? Because they were mistaken for my possible mother, each of them? Why would anyone be so set upon killing a mother I had never known?”

  “You forget,” Sherlock Holmes put in, rather gently for one of his bent, I thought. “As a young performer you engendered a great deal of jealousy. Jealousy motivated the Bible’s first murder; because of it Cain killed Abel. I seldom see a case of pure jealousy, one that does not involve the romantic relationship between man and woman, which is the most puzzling motive of all. It lies in the heart and perception of the murderer, which is often invisible, and incomprehensible, to the larger world.”

  Irene sat thunderstruck and silent. I remember her referring to the same Biblical crime when talking to Pink not long ago. Yet she had forgotten her own lesson. This fact was a disturbing reminder of all she had been made to “forget” when last in this country.

  “Madam Abyssinia,” Sherlock Holmes was saying to the larger table, ignoring Irene now as I wished he would ignore her now and forever. “I believe she was what is called a snake charmer in the trade. She also was slain by the means of her profession, a boa constrictor of apparently unusual length, strength, and size. Is this true?”

  “She was not one of our particular theatrical set,” Professor Marvel said after a silence indicated no one else would answer his question.

  “She did share a bill occasionally, in the old days,” the Pig Lady offered.

  “She only died in June,” the maestro put in morosely. “I knew her,” he added with a smile that was both apologetic and bereft, “better than most.” He drew patterns on the heavily padded damask tablecloth with the nails of his right hand. I noticed again his arthritis-mangled joints and wondered that he could play the violin at all. “She died childless, as I will. But”—his final words were muttered—“she had seen Madame Restell, years and years ago.”

  “That is the connection!” Irene’s voice rang out. “Not me. Madame Restell! I am beside the point.”

  “I doubt that, madam,” Sherlock Holmes was too hasty, in my opinion, to respond.

  His comment brought a thin smile to Irene’s tense lips.

  “Madame Restell,” he echoed. “Madam Norton is correct. I have searched for an element in common to these deaths, and only Madame Restell will serve, though she has been dead herself these eleven years. The problem is the matter of the person who wished these women dead, and the person who actually accomplished it. I believe that they are not one and the same—in fact, I found a tall man’s hand print on the curtains of the fatal séance room, a misshapen man’s hand—yet how seldom two people share the same mania. Almost never.”

  “Almost?” Irene asked.

  “It is time,” Mr. Holmes said, “to be frank with your friends, and all seated at this table are your friends, are they not? Or, at least, they are friends of the dead women we memorialize, for whom we attempt to seek justice. The dual nature of this case struck me from the first, and the more I learned of it, the more it rang double chimes. Not one pair of twins, but two. Events of eleven or more years ago, and fresh events of today, all resulting in death. The confusing search for a mother, which has instead found many who were not mothers, whether they could not or would not be.

  “It is time to reveal one side of the coin, though many here would hush the matter: Mina Gilfoyle died by her own hand. Hers was the twisted mind that demanded these most recent deaths, as it had demanded another death years ago. She had lost two children to that vaunted savior of women’s reputations, Madame Restell. One was prevented from entering the world, and young Mina in fact welcomed this release at the time. The other was borne, and born, and sent to another woman. This apparently face-saving arrangement an older Mina came to regret, only to find that she was forever barred from changing her mind, not only by Madame Restell, but by her then-husband. The child was alive, but gone. Later, a second husband would have given anything for a child she could no longer provide. This is when the secrets of her past, and its long-concealed petty jealousies, combined to turn lethal.

  “For her sister, Petunia, too, had been a casualty of undoing the results of seduction. She had died by her own hand, hardly older than a child herself, because, I suspect, Madame Restell had been resorted to and told the young girl she was too close to delivery to undo the deed. So, Petunia chose death rather than disgrace, a not uncommon outcome even now.

  “Having later suffered her own follies and losses, the surviving twin grew slowly mad. She hunted the daughter she’d lost and hated the woman who had survived missing a mother, her unsuspecting rival, Rena the Ballerina.”

  He pronounced that last title with suspicious relish.

  Irene ignored the references to herself. “But what,” she asked, “made Mina resort to murder so late in the story?”

  “Two things.” Sherlock Holmes produced a briarwood pipe from his pocket and proceeded to light it.

  While he did so, every breath in the room was held. Once the old pipe was puffing away, tendrils o
f smoke drifted like baby’s breath over the pink lilies in the floral arrangement near his seat. His slight smile acknowledged his awareness of the almost tangible curiosity and suspense also wreathing the chamber and everyone in it.

  “First was the bizarre passing only last May of Washington Irving Bishop, the cataleptic alleged to have been accidentally done to death by a series of careless medical mistakes. This was the story that Miss Nellie Bly so resented occurring while she was otherwise engaged in Europe. It was exactly the sort of story she would have ridden into the ground like a Wild West horse, and so she looked into it anyway when she returned to New York at the end of June.

  “The second event was the same Miss Nellie Bly’s stumbling over old playbills among Mr. Bishop’s effects that surprised her with evidence of her European acquaintance’s New York City past. Miss Bly’s newspaper, the New York World, has been recently acquired by a new publisher intent on making news, not just reporting it. Miss Bly was determined to show Mr. Joseph Pulitzer that she was his man. Er, woman. She was sure that the death of Mr. Bishop was exceedingly odd, and that the circumstances offered much opportunity for misdeeds.

  “And she was right.”

  Here Pink sat back with a satisfied sigh, crossing her arms across her chest like the most blatant hoyden.

  While I sent a glare Pink’s way, Irene kept her gaze on Sherlock Holmes.

  He paused to take a long indulgence of his pipe. When he next spoke, the words came out on puffs of blue smoke.

  “And she was wrong.”

  Now Irene shot Pink a look, but only for a moment.

  “Bizarre as the events surrounding Mr. Bishop’s premature death were, they served to inspire a mad pair of like minds. The notion of disposing of performers while they were literally ‘in the act,’ occurred to them then.

  “As for the motive and for why it cropped up at this point, I will have to ask Mrs. Norton some telling questions, if she will answer.”

  “I will answer what I can,” Irene said cautiously, wary of his hidden motives.

  “I take you back, madam, to that day of all days you don’t wish to remember. To that day for which the maestro ultimately gave up his Guarneri violin to forget, for he gave it to you in penance for taking your memory even while saving your voice, is that not so, Maestro?”

  The old man’s long white hair fell over his face as he nodded agreement and shame.

  “A magnificent atonement, sir,” Mr. Holmes said. “I have played it recently, only for a few moments. That, I think”—here he glanced at Irene—“caused the first stirring of what would lead to her long dormant memories reviving.”

  She looked surprised at his claiming credit for first touching the strings of her long-buried memories, and would have objected, but his narrative drove on mercilessly, and her moment was gone.

  “You found this young girl dead in the bathtub,” he told her. “You both were of an age. She was a sister performer. She had cut her wrists almost up to the elbows with a razor—”

  “How did you know that?”

  He shrugged, shook his head. “You screamed. The shock. The horror of all that bloody bathwater. Can you deny any of this?”

  “No.”

  “But you can remember it now?”

  She glanced at me, a faint, weary triumph beneath the reviving horror. He doesn’t know, Nell, she thought at me. For all he can deduce about the dead girl years ago, he doesn’t know that we have released my memory.

  “I can try,” she said.

  “I know you found this girl. I know it shocked you into screams, and then silence. What I wish to know is who found you?”

  “What?”

  “Your screams, an entire aria of screams I understand, must have alerted someone. Who came first. Who found you at the side of the dead girl?”

  Irene blinked and looked to the array of paintings above us, as if hoping some artist might have painted the scene. Or perhaps she was consulting heaven, a rare occupation for her.

  Her glance came back to the luncheon table, and flicked over all the men sitting there.

  They were all tall, I realized . . . Professor Marvel, the maestro, even the policeman and the Pinkerton, both of them old enough to have been involved in Madame Restell’s trials, arrest, imprisonments and, finally, death.

  And the hand print Mr. Holmes had alluded to finding in the séance room: twisted. As were Professor Marvel’s and the maestro’s, with the arthritis of age.

  “It was a theatrical boarding house,” Irene recalled slowly, even as she spoke. “We most of us lived there, together. The professor. The maestro. The Pig Lady.”

  A woman! who but a woman would have understood Mina’s pain? The Pig Lady, as we had seen, knew the hidden, shameful history of every woman in the troupe. What troubled female would not have confided in the nunlike, veiled figure denied normal human intercourse of every kind?

  I was instantly glad little Edith was cavorting in the park outside with Mrs. McGillicuddy. Poor child, yet another daughter of scandal!

  “Who found you?” Mr. Holmes insisted, like a barrister at the bar. For a moment he almost reminded me of Godfrey.

  Perhaps that odd fact shook Irene loose from the fog of her manipulated memory.

  “Tim,” she said, certain as a witness in the box. “Tiny Tim found me.”

  We all held our conjoined breaths, not knowing what this meant, but realizing it was what Mr. Holmes had required.

  He himself exhaled an endless stream of blue smoke.

  “In all this search for mothers,” he said, “there has been no talk of fathers.”

  Irene clapped a hand to her mouth, then removed it to speak. “So it wasn’t necessarily the men in their mother’s shadowed social circles who seduced the Hermann twins. I’d assumed, we all assumed . . . easier to blame those shallow swells of turning a young girl’s head and deserting her than one of our own?”

  “A backstage romance,” Professor Marvel diagnosed with a sad smile. “So common that sometimes it doesn’t even come to mind. I confess that we mostly worried about the fast crowd that adopted Pet and Pansy like pretty little lapdogs, thanks to their heedless mother. We never thought of young love. Puppy love.” He glanced at Irene. “It must have been that, at that age. There was innocence in it.”

  Irene put her spread fingers to one side of her face, like a mentalist pretending to consult inner powers. In her instance, she was conjuring freshets of insight from the well of memory.

  “Pet died, but Pansy, her twin, lived. Tim had nothing left. From a distance, he consecrated himself to Pansy, even as she repeated her sister’s mistakes . . . and became Mina.”

  “And when Mina,” I said, surprising everybody by speaking at all, “now lost in despair and fury, learned that you, her youthful rival in her own mind, were alive and performing well in Europe and that Nellie Bly was delving into the past to find your mother . . . she resolved to forbid you the family connection she had lost in losing her daughter.”

  “And she punished women like herself,” Irene added, “women who had consulted Madame Restell.”

  “But why would Tiny Tim help her?” I asked.

  “Perhaps,” said Sherlock Holmes, “we should ask him.”

  Everyone at the table stared at each other. Tiny Tim was not here. He had left suddenly on a recent engagement in the West. So he had told his landlady. Who would have thought his “recent engagement” was murder?

  “Quick, Conroy!” Mr. Holmes cried sharply. “The wine waiter!”

  I have never seen a portly man in a checked suit move as fast. His chair fell over as he dashed toward the sideboard. On the table’s other side Pink’s police detective also threw politeness to the winds and kicked over his chair to assist his unofficial compatriot.

  In a minute a tall young man in black-and-white waiter’s dress was pinioned against a Restoration sideboard.

  I had not seen this man’s face during the entire luncheon, but I had noticed his knotted hands as he f
illed the glasses . . . and had averted my eyes from his face so as not to embarrass him for his affliction.

  As perfect a disguise as the Pig Lady’s! Disability makes one invisible, as Phoebe Cummings, professional dwarf, had told us. And so also she and the Pig Lady had been spared, because they had never needed to consult Madame Restell.

  The two lawmen pushed Tim to the table, forcing his crooked hands as flat as possible on the linens. The hands of a strangler, and an arsonist, and who knew what else.

  “Of course,” Irene said. “Look at his knuckles! I still thought of him as the raw-boned young man I last knew when we met again, and thought nothing of his knobby joints. Arthritis, it was, showing up early, nothing a drummer can overcome. He didn’t simply outgrow the theatrical life, he was forced to retire. Nor was there any ‘recent engagement.’ He merely needed to disappear once he knew Nellie Bly and I were hunting Sophie’s killer. So what was his motive?” she asked Mr. Holmes.

  Nellie Bly answered for him, stepping forward boldly. “The killer can’t be Tim. I sat next to him at the séance. We held hands the entire time. I heard him swallow nervously next to me as well, the entire time.” She eyed Mr. Holmes, who was looking only slightly surprised. “You have the wrong man.”

  He did not need to defend himself; Irene did it for him.

  “Pink, beware,” she warned. “You reveal your ignorance. People hold hands at séances only because the use of medium confederates had become so well known that measures had to be taken to prove tampering impossible. And such measures always result in ways to overcome them. False hands.”

  “I’m not a fool! I know about false hands. I could feel the nervous dampness from his hands seeping through my gloves.”

  “A clever touch,” Mr. Holmes said. “The false hand would be shaped like a shell, hollow, so the manipulator could withdraw his own hand and be about his work in the dark. A damp cloth over the false hand would reinforce the impression that Mr. Flynn was still sitting there doing various tricks to assist in the tableside illusions, and provide a nice distraction from what he was actually doing while the medium’s moans snared everyone’s attention.”