by Rhys Bowen
He patted my arm and stood up. “But none of this is your concern. Get some sleep. I’ll go and find Liam and report back to you as soon as I can.”
Then he leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the lips. “I said long ago that you were like a cat with nine lives, Molly Murphy Sullivan. I rather think that was the eighth you’ve just used up. I’m going to wrap you in cotton from now on.”
Then he smiled and strode out of the ward.
* * *
I lay back and tried to sleep again, but my mind was alert and now that I knew that Liam was safely with his father, I found myself considering Daniel’s baffling case. I wished he’d have shared more details with me because I actually had time, lying here with nothing to do, to think through them in detail.
Saving the best for last. That certainly did sound like it could mean the killing of a prominent person, didn’t it? I wondered if all the murders had been leading up to this one—honing his skills, seeing what he could get away with, so that he could finally kill his intended target. But from the little Daniel had told me, they had found no clue about the circles the killer moved in, or whether his intended target might be rich or political or even religious. No wonder Daniel looked so worried. This case made searching for that proverbial needle in a haystack seem easy.
I shifted uncomfortably on the hard mattress. Now that the shock had worn off I was horribly aware of my various aches and pains. My head was throbbing and it hurt me to breathe, in spite of the bandage around my ribs. The woman in the next bed was asleep, snoring loudly and moaning in her sleep. At the other end of the ward, orderlies were changing the bed linen, chatting as they worked. It had started to rain and there was the sound of drumming on the roof. It felt so strange and alien here, as if I’d been transported to another world where I didn’t belong. All I wanted was to be safely home with my husband, my child, my friends. Now that I had time to consider it, my mother-in-law’s elegant country home seemed inviting, and I realized that I had been foolish to reject Daniel’s suggestion to take us there to recover. It wasn’t that my mother-in-law was a monster or anything like that. Of course I’d be well looked after with Mrs. Sullivan, her housekeeper, Martha, and young Bridie, her Irish ward, to wait on me. And the pleasant country air wafting in through the windows and fresh fruits and vegetables from the garden to eat would be lovely. It was only because I was too thin-skinned about Daniel’s mother’s subtle criticisms of my child-rearing and housekeeping skills—her hints about what good matches his friends had made, and her constant litany of all things connected to high society— that had made me decide that even this hard hospital bed was a better option. Now, after only a few hours, I had reversed my opinion.
A meal cart was wheeled into the ward and an unappetizing stew was sloshed onto plates. I tried to sit up without letting the watching nurse know I was in pain. I was extremely hungry but could manage only a couple of mouthfuls of the glutinous mess in my bowl. This would be a quick way of killing off the patients, I wanted to say, but I could not see a glimmer of humor in any of the faces around me. The woman who had been snoring was now being fed and dribbles of stew ran down her chin, like Liam when I was feeding him, but far less appealing.
Only one day, I told myself. Tomorrow I’d be safely with Sid and Gus and they’d be making me laugh and spoiling me. Then, of course, I began to worry. Sid and Gus led very active lives. They were always attending meetings with their suffragist sisters, salons with fellow painters and writers. What if they couldn’t or wouldn’t take Liam today? What would Daniel do then? And would I feel well enough tomorrow to look after a lively and curious one-year-old?
I must have drifted off to sleep again because I awoke, instantly alert, to a feeling of danger—the same feeling that had accompanied me to the train station that morning. I sat up with some difficulty and looked around. The ward lay silent, with most of its occupants sleeping. Light was fading, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because it was approaching evening or the rain clouds had made the day even more gloomy. A nurse walked through the ward, her feet clacking on the linoleum floor. She nodded when she saw me. “Oh, you’re awake. Doctor left you some medicine to take away the pain and help you sleep.”
“Thank you, but I’m sure I can sleep without taking anything,” I said.
“Best do what the doctor prescribes,” she said. “But you don’t need to take it until after you’ve had your dinner. Don’t want to fall asleep and miss that delicious food, do we?” And she gave just the hint of a smile.
I propped a pillow behind my back and looked around me. How quiet everything was. Unnervingly quiet, as if I was lying in a morgue. I shuddered and thought of the bodies I had seen lying on the sidewalk. And then I saw someone coming toward me—her black smoking jacket and emerald green pantaloons an amazing contrast to the starched whiteness of the ward.
“Here you are,” Sid said, hurrying over to my bed. “I’ve had a devil of a time. Some awful old crone tried to tell me that visiting hours were over. From two to four only, she said. So I went around the corner and waited until she’d gone, then slipped inside. But I didn’t know which ward you were in. I went into the men’s ward by mistake—imagine the look on their faces when they saw me.” And she laughed. I tried to laugh too but my side hurt. Sid noticed. “Are you in pain? Daniel said you only had bumps and bruises.”
“The doctor thinks I might have cracked a rib. I’ve only just discovered that laughing hurts. I hadn’t had a chance to laugh all day in a place like this.”
“I should think not. It’s like a morgue in here, isn’t it?” She looked around, then gave a guilty grin as she realized her voice echoed from tiled walls.
“How’s Liam doing?” I asked.
“Absolutely splendidly. Delighted to see his aunts again, and of course we have such interesting things to play with.”
“Daniel was afraid it might be your knife collection or hookah.” We exchanged a smile.
“We’re saving those for tomorrow,” she said. “But my dear, we can’t leave you in this house of horrors overnight. Why don’t I take you home with me right now?”
“I haven’t been given leave to go,” I said.
“Nonsense. There are ways around things like that. Hold on a minute.” She opened the briefcase she carried instead of a purse, pulled out a pad of paper, and sat down on my bed to write. I had no idea what she was writing and couldn’t see over her shoulder. But when she had finished, she handed it to me.
“That should do the trick,” she said.
I read what she had written. I am Mrs. Sullivan’s personal physician and give my permission to discharge her to my care in a private nursing home. I looked up at her twinkling eyes. “Sid, you are wicked.”
“Well, do you want to come or don’t you? We’ve a feather mattress waiting, and I believe Gus is cooking duck breast in orange sauce.”
“If you put it like that, help me up. But I’ve no idea where they put my things, or what we’re going to say if they summon the doctor who examined me.”
Sid was scrabbling in the small bedside cabinet. “Your things appear to be in here. Oh, dear—your dress is rather the worse for wear, I’m afraid. We’ll have to go and retrieve a change of clothing for you and Liam from your flat in the morning, but in the meantime Gus has a host of pretty nightgowns and fluffy slippers, so you’ll be quite comfortable.”
I tried to stand up and felt woozy. I had to be able to walk out of here.
“Do you carry smelling salts?” I asked Sid.
“Certainly not. Never having worn a corset in my life, there has been no need for smelling salts,” she said. “Are you feeling faint?”
“Just rather unsteady. I’ve hardly had a thing to eat all day.”
“Then let me see what I can do. You sit down and start getting dressed and I’ll be back.” She set off down the ward. I was just wrestling with getting my dress over my head when I heard an angry voice beside me saying, “Mrs. Sullivan. What do you think y
ou are doing?”
I pulled the dress down from my face. “My doctor learned about my accident and has sent someone to take me to a private nursing home,” I said. “There’s a letter here on the bed.”
She picked it up, sniffed, and said, “I see. I don’t know what Dr. Harrison will say about this. It’s really up to him to discharge a patient. But I have to suppose you are going to good care.”
“The best,” I said.
“Nice for those who can afford it.” She sniffed again. “Didn’t you say your husband was a policeman?”
“We have connections,” I said, trying to sound breezy. “Could you help me get into this dress? I can’t lift my arms.”
She helped, rather roughly, I thought. And I was just having the buttons done up when she looked up and exclaimed, “What the devil?”
Sid was coming toward us, now wheeling a wheelchair that rattled across the floor.
“How do you do?” Sid said. “I’m here on behalf of Dr. Goldfarb and Dr. Walcott. We’ve a cab waiting outside for Mrs. Sullivan.”
“Very well, then.” The nurse looked stunned and lost for words. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Will you take your medicine before you go?”
“I don’t think so, thank you,” I said. “Dr. Goldfarb will prescribe a sleeping draft if I need one.”
Sid helped me into the chair and wheeled me to freedom. Once we were safely in the cab we both burst out laughing. It was a brief moment of triumph.
Five
Soon I was safely tucked into Sid and Gus’s spare bed, with Liam lying beside me, peacefully sucking his thumb and clearly relieved to have his mother back at his side. I had asked Sid to send a message to police headquarters to let Daniel know I had joined Liam at their house, and I lay back, content that I was safe, relatively unharmed, and in a few days would be back in that house across the street.
Sid and Gus looked after Liam like old hands. I heard his delighted squeals of laughter, and then they brought him up to see me, saying they had fed him chicken soup with dumplings and he had eaten like a horse. Gus cooked the promised duck breast with orange sauce for our dinner and served it with crispy potatoes and a green salad. She even insisted on a glass of wine to accompany it. “It will help you sleep. Better than any of those sleeping drafts they force on you in the hospital,” she said.
I nodded. “They had some kind of noxious mixture they wanted me to drink, but I turned them down. How lucky, or I might have been fast asleep when Sid arrived and wouldn’t have been able to be rescued.”
I was lying back, feeling pleasantly drowsy, when there came a thunderous knock at the front door. I heard barked words in an angry voice and footsteps thundering up the stairs, before Daniel burst into my room.
I saw his face and attempted to sit up. “Daniel, what’s the matter?” I asked.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “I go to the hospital to visit my wife, only to find her bed empty and some strange story about a doctor moving her to a private nursing home.”
“Hold your horses.” I raised my hand. “I wrote you a note. I sent it to headquarters with instructions that it was to be given to you immediately. Didn’t you get it?”
“I didn’t go anywhere near headquarters,” he said. “I had a long meeting with the commissioner and the mayor—at which I was soundly chewed out yet again, by the way—and then I rushed straight over to see you. Only to find you gone and hear a garbled story about who had taken you.”
“I’m sorry, but I did try to let you know.”
“You were supposed to stay in that hospital until tomorrow, weren’t you?” He was still blustering. “How could you countermand a doctor’s orders like that?”
“Daniel, calm down,” I said. “You’re shouting and you’ll wake your son—to say nothing of upsetting my hostesses. They were keeping me overnight for observation, that’s all. And I was highly uncomfortable. The bed was hard, the woman next to me was snoring and moaning, and I wouldn’t have fed the slop they call food to my dog. I couldn’t have been more overjoyed when Sid came to rescue me.”
Daniel sank onto the bed beside me. “Do you know what I thought? I thought you’d been kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?” I couldn’t help grinning. “And who was likely to burst into a hospital ward and kidnap me?”
“It’s no joke, Molly,” he said quietly. “I haven’t shared the details of this case I’m working on with you until now, because it didn’t concern you. Now I’m afraid it does concern you—at least to a certain degree. We received another note today.”
“What did it say?”
“It said, ‘If at first you don’t succeed. Better luck next time.’”
“Which meant he’d tried to kill somebody and had been thwarted by your increased police presence?”
He shook his head. “He enclosed a clipping from the early edition of the evening newspaper. A clipping about the train accident.”
“The train accident—but surely, it was just that. He can’t be trying to claim that he caused it, can he?”
Daniel was still staring at me. I shook my head. “Impossible, Daniel. The man is delusional. Someone forgot to switch the points and sent a Ninth Avenue train around the curve on the Sixth Avenue route.”
“We’ll know more when we’ve questioned the man in the signal box and the locomotive driver,” he said. “Of course it’s not unheard of that someone claims credit for a spectacular accident, or even comes forward to confess to a murder he couldn’t possibly have committed. But in this case he had promised to kill on a certain day, and he tried to keep that promise.”
I stared at the silk counterpane with its swirls of bright flowers and tried to make sense of what he was saying. “So you think he arranged this train to crash, knowing that a particular person was on board, only not all the carriages came off the rails, and the person he had in mind was not killed?”
“It’s a possibility,” he said.
“So that might have been what he meant by ‘saving the best for last,’” I said. “Not a prominent person, but a spectacular event. It must have seemed rather spectacular to him if he was watching—the train racing around that curve and then jumping the tracks and plunging downward.” I looked up to meet Daniel’s gaze. “Do we know if any prominent people were on that train?”
He cleared his throat. “You were on that train,” he said.
I gave an uneasy laugh. “Me?”
He nodded. “You said something to me the other night that made an impression. You said the one thing linking all the deaths was me. All the notes were sent to me, not to other officers.”
“So you think it might be someone with a grudge against you?”
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “And what better way to get back at me than killing you.”
I thought for a moment, then shook my head again. “That’s rubbish, Daniel. He could not have known which train I would take. In fact, I was going to board the Sixth Avenue train that came right before it. Only…” I broke off.
“Only what?” Daniel asked sharply, reading my expression.
“A man came running past and bumped into me, knocking me backward. By the time I had righted myself the doors had closed.”
“Did you happen to see what this man looked like?”
“No, it was all a blur. The platform was horribly crowded. I had Liam in my arms. I was most concerned about holding onto him and not falling. But it was a young man, I think. Slim—at least not portly. Wearing some kind of dark suit, dark hat.” I paused, frowning. “That’s all. As I said, it was all a blur.”
Daniel sighed.
“But how could he…” I began.
“He made you miss the Sixth Avenue train, Molly. Knowing that a Ninth Avenue was following it.”
“But he didn’t know I’d take the Ninth Avenue train. I might well have waited for the next Sixth Avenue—after all, that station was much more convenient for me. That is what I was planning to do actually, until I decided to
stop at the French bakery and bring Sid and Gus their favorite croissants. And if he was on the platform, having bumped into me, he could hardly be in the signal box, changing the points, could he?”
“It does all sound rather far-fetched, I agree. And maybe I’m reading too much into this, because it was my wife and child in danger. But the man is an opportunist, Molly. He has taken tremendous risks before, and we know he didn’t succeed in killing the person he wanted to kill today.”
“If at first you don’t succeed,” I said. “The rest of that phrase is ‘try, try again.’ That’s not very encouraging, is it?”
“You stay put right here. I’ll have a man stationed to keep an eye on you, and you are supposed to be resting and recuperating anyway. The murderer won’t know where you are now.”
“I still can’t believe this, Daniel. If someone wanted to kill me, he could have hidden in the bushes when I was up in Westchester County and shot or stabbed me when I went out for a walk. He could have strangled me in the apartment when you were out.”
“True,” Daniel nodded. “And I may just be clutching at straws, Molly. There may have been someone else on that train—someone who took that very train to work every day—whom he wanted to dispose of. It’s just that I’ve been a policeman long enough that I don’t like coincidences. And this was a pretty big coincidence.”
“If it is someone with a grudge against you—why try to kill me and not you?”
“Maybe he wants to punish me. And what could be worse punishment than killing my wife and son?”
I was finding this conversation more and more disturbing, but I tried to sound detached and professional as I continued, “And the other people he has killed so far? Is it possible they have any connection to you? Have their murders been to punish you?”
