Mr. Lancet was creating a scene of his own after he lumbered onto the veranda. “I want them off the property – now!” he bellowed. “This is the work of that Italian police lieutenant. He’s at the bottom of this!”
Hurrying past him into the lobby, I clutched the paper, scrunching it into a ball in my hand to hide it until I was up in my room. If Mr. Lancet wanted the newspaper story off the property, that was enough of a reason for me to bring it through the front door. I practically ran for an open elevator, leaving my family far behind.
Once I was alone, I opened my fist, now blackened with ink – this would have to be fresh newsprint. I didn’t care. I smoothed out the front-page sheet. Among the other most important news articles of the day was a short boxed off story in the middle, within a thick black border. The headline read: Darling of Dundas Street Strangled: Police in Search of Witnesses.
The article itself read: A girl of twenty-two years of age, Katherine O’Malley, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Aloysius O’Malley of Dundas Street, was found on Manhattan Beach this morning, by passersby. Miss O’Malley met her untimely death by misadventure, announced Lieutenant Anthony Pellegrino of the Sixty-First Precinct of the New York Police Department. Marks on the girl’s throat indicated strangulation. Miss O’Malley was a waitress at the establishment of Devlin’s, on the Bowery Street of Coney Island. Her parents reported her missing at the police precinct early this morning. After Mr. O’Malley identified his only child at the mortuary, he was taken to Kings County Hospital with heart palpitations. Lieutenant Pellegrino asks that anyone who was in the vicinity of the beach south of Pier Fifteen, between the Oriental Hotel and the Manhattan Beach Hotel, between sunset and dawn, and observed any person acting suspiciously, to report with all possible speed to the Precinct House at 2575 Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn, to be interviewed. This is the second young female employed by a Coney Island establishment to be found dead in a public place in three days. Beatrice Stompers, twenty years of age, was recovered from the water off Brighton Beach Pier on 2 July.. Police would not comment if the two victims knew each other or if there was any other connection.
Standing in the middle of the room, my ink-stained hands shook as I read the story twice, then a third time. My stomach, only moderately queasy up to now, seized up and turned over. I was in distinct danger of vomiting – I could taste the beluga caviar, crackers, and alcohol roiling in the back of my throat.
I closed my eyes, willing the nausea to pass, and to my relief, after a moment the worst of it did.
A young woman had been killed, a few feet from the spot where I embraced Stefan, and she was not a nameless corpse, but a real person, a girl cherished by her parents and her neighbors. I couldn’t bear to contemplate the ordeal of her father, it was too horrific.
And I had shrugged off any responsibility for knowing anything about this. Instead, I’d gone off with my wretched family and drank champagne and quarreled over nothing, her death gone from my thoughts entirely. It was unconscionable.
As I scrubbed the ink off my hands in the gleaming porcelain sink, I thought about what happened on the beach the night before. I hadn’t seen the man who hovered nearby but Stefan had. I remembered all too well how much he disliked legal authorities – “He is police, and no, I am not fond police, with excellent reason” – but we needed to help the police. There wasn’t a choice.
Tomorrow, I would find my way back to Dreamland, to Stefan. He might not be too glad to see me, but I would find a way to apologize, calmly and with some dignity this time, and to persuade him to accompany me to the precinct.
Now that I had formed a plan, I wanted to pull myself together in every way. First, I craved a bath, but Alice hadn’t yet appeared to draw it. I couldn’t summon her directly – obviously there were no bells connecting my room to hers – but I could call down to the main desk and be put through to the maids’ quarters and leave a message. She might already be off duty and enjoying the Fourth of July celebration, however. I could cope with starting a bath myself.
Squatting to the side of the large tub, I tried to turn the correct levers and handles in coordination, straining to remember how Alice had opened these pipes for the water to come gushing out, but no matter what I did, nothing worked. The pipes wheezed and clicked; no water appeared. Frustrated, perspiring, I pulled on one of the levers with all my strength. It didn’t bring water, but I did fall off my heels, hard onto my rear end. For a few wobbly seconds I laughed out loud, all alone, at my ridiculousness. But the laughter caught in my throat, threatening to turn into tears. I was heading toward a sodden scene: sprawled on a washroom floor, sweaty, a little drunk, weeping in self-pity. I grimly resumed my battle with the bath, kneeling this time, and after a few more minutes, I succeeded.
The delicious shock of submerging myself in a bath of cold water knocked the tipsiness out of me. I scrubbed salts into my skin with industriousness, welcoming the pain. It was only then, after my head had fully cleared, that various aspects of the murder of Katherine O’Malley began to nag at me. How did she come to that part of the beach, between the Oriental and Manhattan Beach hotels? Thanks to the Pinkerton guard who’d questioned Stefan and myself, I knew that it wasn’t easy to leave Coney Island for these properties. She wasn’t a hotel guest – she lived in Brooklyn with her parents – so that meant Katherine must have crossed over in the company of a guest or found her way here some other way. Perhaps she was visiting a staff member at the hotel? But then, how did she end up in the sand late at night with a murderer? My mind went blank on that. And the news of the drowned woman of several days earlier relegated to the last sentences of the story, confused me. Surely that woman’s drowning and the strangling of Katherine O’Malley were unrelated, even though both women were close to the same age and lived in the same city. I supposed they might have known each other. But as I’d said myself on that first day on the boardwalk with Lawrence, no one goes swimming wearing all their clothes. The possibility existed that she took her own life. But the water off the Brooklyn shoreline wasn’t that turbulent. Someone would really have to put a lot of effort into suicide by walking into the ocean, and fully clothed.
Alice arrived, interrupting my morbid train of thought. It obviously surprised her that I’d drawn my own bath, and she didn’t look pleased. I couldn’t believe that Alice might think I’d try to take her duties away from her, render her superfluous. But just to be on the safe side, I asked her to fetch a complicated meal of black tea, toast, and, if possible, fresh fruit and steamed vegetables.
“Won’t you be joining the others for the fireworks display, Miss?” she asked.
“No, I’m staying in for the night. As soon as you’ve found my supper, I hope you’ll go out and enjoy the show.”
Alice returned with a tray in double quick time – motivated, no doubt, by her desire to see the night’s colorful display of rockets in the sky. As for me, I felt restored by consuming the tea, toast, and blueberries, in peaceful solitude. It wasn’t until I finished the berries that I realized something rather unsettling. This whole regimen of a cold bath followed by black tea and fresh food was something imposed on me and my sister and my brother by our second German nanny, Magda. She’d been a fiercely unaffectionate woman but devoted to principles of good health that she learned in a school of German naturopathy. My parents, distracted, approved of her ideas and gave her a free hand. She was particularly convinced that cold baths and steamed vegetables stabilized moods and prevented disease. Oh, we hated that nanny more than any other. Yet now, when feeling upset and overheated and nauseous, I’d turned not to wisdom of my family but to a childhood cure of Magda’s.
The sounds of the fireworks exploding, followed by ooohs and aaahs, streamed into my window, but I’d set my mind against all that. Nor did I want to contemplate the tragic murders or my meeting with Stefan tomorrow, which was already triggering a nervous quiver in the pit of my stomach. I lit a single candle and opened The Wings of the Dove, hoping it would occupy me. Thankfully, J
ames’ story succeeded in holding my interest. The main character was deeply in love with a man named Merton Desher, a handsome, intelligent, but penniless journalist, and she was trying to hide that fact from her family while meeting him in secret.
I half-expected some member of my own family to come knocking, but no one did, and I put the latch on the door before reading just one last chapter before bed. However, the heat and the unpleasant excitement of the day – and all the champagne, most likely – caught up with me, and I never made it to bed but fell asleep in the chair, the book in my lap.
I woke with a start, my heart pounding from a nightmare that dissolved before I could try to make sense of it. The Wings of the Dove was at my feet – apparently it slid off my lap while I slept. The flickering candle was only an inch high, the wax bubbling in the dish like a tiny volcano. I must have been asleep for quite a while, at least a couple of hours.
I bent down to pick up the novel and, as I did so, something caught my attention across the room, a movement. I rubbed my eyes, still thick-headed, and scanned the room.
The doorknob on the main door turned to the left, very slowly. Someone standing in the corridor, on the other side of the door, was trying to come into my room. I couldn’t move or speak. It was as if I were frozen solid in this hot, airless room.
I hadn’t locked the door from the inside – I couldn’t believe my careless stupidity – but I’d pushed the latch across, of that I was sure. And so even though the knob turned this way and that, the door did not open as the seconds crawled by. The latch held.
Seeing that, I flew across the room to just inches from the door, safely on my side.
“Who is it?” I shouted. “What do you want?”
There was no sound from the other side; the doorknob did not turn.
I was shaking with fear yet, after working up my courage, I unlatched the door and yanked it open. I stepped out into the hall and looked this way and that, my right arm instinctively raised as if preparing to ward off a blow, but there was no one else there. All I saw was the closed doors of all the other members of the Batternberg family.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Tell me,” I said to Lydia. “Did anyone seem particularly angry at me last night?”
My younger sister, languidly stretched out on her settee, sipped coffee. It was already uncomfortably warm this morning, yet with her usual indifference to temperature, she chose hot, black, unsweetened coffee to drink. She said, “After a certain point, I don’t think anyone mentioned you.”
“And before that point?”
She shrugged. “Not much was said that I can remember. Nothing surprising, really. I told Paul that he’d been a perfect pest. Everyone knows you don’t like to have your photograph taken.”
“Thanks for sticking up,” I said, relieved she wasn’t holding a grudge for my blurting to Henry Taul he was marrying into a rotten family. “I don’t look like you do in photographs, you know.”
Lydia smiled complacently. Well, I had to butter her up before asking my favor. I still intended to follow through with my plan no matter what, but if she’d be my ally, I’d have a lot less to worry about back here in the hotel.
“Why do you care if anyone was mad at you?” she asked, alert with interest. That was one of the challenges of Lydia. Once something caught her curiosity, she could be single-minded about it, a dog with a bone, although my sister seemed more like a silky cat than a canine.
I took a deep breath and said, “At about two in the morning, someone turned the knob on my door as if they were trying to come in, but it was latched. I could see it happening – the knob turning. When I yelled, ‘Who is it?’ there wasn’t any answer. I waited a bit and opened the door and looked out—”
“No, you didn’t,” Lydia cried, clutching her coffee. “I can’t believe you, Peggy! I never would have had the nerve. Who did you see?”
“Nobody.”
“So very strange.” She thought for a moment. “Why would you assume it was one of us? You know there’s a back staircase on the end of the corridor, so it isn’t just the elevator and the operator letting us on and off. Someone could have used the stairs to come from another floor. Yes, that must be it.” She shivered elaborately. “Just think what might have happened if you hadn’t latched. You should tell Uncle David. And Mother.”
The last thing I needed right now was closer watch of my movements. “I’ll manage that,” I said. “Don’t say anything to anybody about it.”
“Well, if that’s what you want,” she said.
Taking the plunge, I said, “There’s something else I need to ask of you, Lydia. A big favor.” I let the word hang in the air, hoping she would reflect on the fact that my being here – and, specifically, my pushing Henry to set a wedding date – was a humongous favor to her.
“I’m all ears,” she said. Unfortunately, it was her cool gaze that most concerned me.
“I need to be away from the hotel for a number of hours this afternoon, and I don’t want anyone bothering me about it, asking me questions. If you could say we spoke and, because I had a bit too much to drink last night, I was going to take it easy, take a long nap in my room… That will help tremendously. And you can say you’ll check on me, no one else need do so.”
A frown line deepened between her eyes. “Are you leaving Brooklyn?”
“Oh no, I won’t be far. Just not… here.”
Lydia chose that moment to put the coffee cup in a saucer on the side table. She leaned toward me and said, “I will cover for you, Peggy. But only if you tell me what you’re about.”
I said quickly, “It’s better for you not to know.”
“And I think it’s better that I do know,” she countered.
I sat back in my chair, frustrated.
“You can trust me, Peggy,” she said.
The trouble was, I couldn’t. As much as I cared about my only sister – and I probably harbored more feeling for her than anyone else in this world drawing breath – I was incapable of putting my full trust in anyone born Batternberg. However, it seemed I would have to tell her something more to get her to help me today.
“All right. A man,” I said. “I am meeting someone. And I don’t want Mother or anyone else breathing down my back about it.”
With that, Lydia was transformed. She sat upright, her pale skin flushed pink, her eyes sparkled. “A man! Who? When did you meet him? Not since we’ve come to the Oriental. You couldn’t have.”
“Do you remember when I went to Coney Island with Ben and the others? I wasn’t with them after a certain point – I went off on my own. I met someone then.”
She cupped her face in her hands. I could even get a close look at the reddened, bitten cuticles of her fingernails – she was too caught up in what I was telling her to remember to hide her hands. “I haven’t set foot there, but Coney Island, Peggy? Really? What sort of man would you possibly meet there who you’d want to see again?”
This was the first time it dawned on me that, not only would my family look askance at my interest in a foreign artist, but such a social connection might reflect poorly on Lydia in the eyes of others, in particular her fiancé and of course the fearsome Mrs. Taul, who had yet to reveal herself. A wedding date might have been set, but until the ring was on her finger, I’d have to be careful.
“He’s a journalist,” I heard myself say. Thank God for Henry James and the love story I read last night.
“Ah, you would swoon over a writer,” she said triumphantly. “But why be so secretive? He isn’t one of those terrible gossip writers, is he? What do they call them – hacks?
“Oh, no, no. He’s quite… idealistic. But he doesn’t have any money, Lydia. Newspapers don’t pay too much.”
She sighed. “Such a shame,” said my practical sister. “But where did he go to school? If it’s Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, that’ll help.”
I managed to hide my wry smile. In America, if a man either made a fortune or attended a ranking universi
ty, he was as good as anybody in New York. While across the Atlantic, no one could ever escape their humble beginnings. Or at least not according to Wings of the Dove.
“I don’t know. I only met him once.”
“And yet you managed to arrange another rendezvous – how impressive.”
If Lydia knew my goal for this “rendezvous” with Stefan was a trip to the Coney Island police precinct, what would her reaction be then? I put that out of my mind as I thanked her for her help. Tugging playfully on my sleeve, she said, “I only demand one more piece of information, Peggy, and then I promise to play my part to perfection. What’s his name?”
Looking her straight in the eye, I said, “Merton Desher.”
She flinched. “He’d have to be mighty handsome to overcome a name like that.”
And so, my disappearance explained, I slipped out of the Oriental at one o’clock in the afternoon – a time when my family would be lunching together at the neighboring Manhattan Beach Hotel, according to Lydia – to find my way to Coney Island. Mindful of the heat, I wore my coolest summer dress, white cotton with sleeves ending at the elbow, and my plainest hat this time, one with a wide, flat brim, and my hair pinned in a loose bun. I didn’t want to call any attention to myself as I walked out the back, the same pathway I’d taken with Ben on the way to his motor car. A tall woman with long black hair tends to stand out, I feared.
I waved to a heavyset, incurious-looking man standing next to his horse and buggy at the stand, offering to convey passengers to Coney Island. With a grunt, he folded up his newspaper and helped me step into the buggy. It didn’t seem to surprise him in the least that I was headed there alone. For all I knew, a stream of young women escaped their families every day to seek excitement in Coney Island.
The man delivered me to the gate of the amusement park too quickly. I paid him and stepped out of the buggy with a certain reluctance. I still hadn’t a clear idea of what to say to Stefan. Disconnected sentences, or just phrases even, bobbed in my brain. I was pretty sure I could come up with a persuasive case for the two of us going to the police to share what we knew. But that shouldn’t be the first thing out of my mouth. What should I say when he first laid eyes on me?
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