Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “Who?”

  “Who did I tell? Well, Dr. Greaves. He was the doctor who treated me after...”

  Duncan looked down, nodded.

  “He was very good to me, very kind. He let me assist him in his work, and he taught me all about medicine and, well, lots of things. History, French, writing, comportment... I lived in his house in East Falmouth for four years. The cook and housekeeper and I all had little dormer rooms upstairs.” Although she rarely slept in hers, once she started sharing Dr. Greaves’s bed, but Duncan didn’t need to know that.

  “Who’s the other one?” he asked. “You said there were two you talked to.”

  Something in his tone made her reluctant to bring Will into this. “Why do you care, Duncan? Why should it matter to you?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “Just curious. I used to be the one you trusted, the one you told stuff to. Well, me and your brother.”

  It was true. At one time, Duncan and Jamie were the center of Nell’s world, the bedrock beneath her feet. Now Duncan was locked up in here, and Jamie, if he was still alive, was probably locked up somewhere else.

  “Everything changes,” she said. “Take you, talking about Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” he said a little sheepishly. “That’s Father Beals’s doing.”

  “I must say, I’m a bit worried about what you may have said to him. You seem to have talked to him quite a bit.”

  Duncan nodded. “He’s a good man, for a Piscopal. He started me thinkin’ about God, and what’s gonna happen to my eternal soul after I kick the bucket.”

  “Does Father Beals know about me? About...?”

  He grinned. “About Cornelia Cutpurse, you mean?” It had been her nickname among the thieves, whores and cardsharps of the Upper Cape, into whose dark and lively world Duncan had introduced her at sixteen. She’d been proud of that name, and of the nimble fingers and ghostly stealth that had inspired it. “Yeah, he knows.”

  She rubbed her forehead, the air leaving her lungs in a moan.

  “He’s got this way of makin’ you feel...I don’t know, like you can tell him things,” Duncan said. “Like he’ll understand, and not just cast judgment. Talking to him, it’s like goin’ to confession, only better, ‘cause he talks back instead of just telling you how many Hail Mary’s you owe. You were like that, back when we were together. I could never keep anything from you.”

  “You told him everything?” she asked, deeply dismayed. “About you and me?”

  “Yeah, but see, it don’t matter. You got nothin’ to worry about from him, Nell. He don’t even know the Hewitts, and if he did, he wouldn’t tell ‘em nothin’. Tell you who you should be worried about, though.” Duncan leaned forward on his elbows, the sunlight turning his eyes a scalding, lucent blue. “The son.”

  She stared at him. “The...?”

  “I know he’s the other one, the one you think you can trust. I know you’re sweet on him, but he’s—”

  “Wait a minute...”

  “He ain’t what he seems. You think you know him, that he’s a gentleman just ‘cause he’s a Hewitt, and he knows how to dress and act, and all the rest of it, but if you knew how he really is, what he does when you ain’t around...”

  “Wait a minute!” How could he know about Will? How could he know about any of it? “Where do you get your information?” she demanded. “How do you know where I live, who I work for, who I associate with? How did you know I went to the Cape with the Hewitts over the summer?”

  He shook the handkerchief out, scrubbed it over his hands. “That ain’t important.”

  “Of course it’s important. You’ve been locked up in here for eight years. How are you finding these things out?”

  “Just ‘cause you’re in jail don’t have to mean you’re completely cut off from the world, not if you’re smart.”

  “You’re wrong about me being sweet on him,” she said.

  “Look, I know about you two, all right? I know everything. But what you don’t know is, men like that, one woman is never good enough for ‘em, and there’s no getting serious about some sweet little thing from the old country, no matter how pretty she is or what kind of airs she puts on. That type, they only want a woman like you for one thing.”

  “You don’t know everything, Duncan.” It had never been like that between her and Will. Nor would it...could it...ever be that way.

  “I know enough.”

  “Believe what you will.” It hardly mattered, at this point. He’d promised not to write to her anymore. With any luck, he’d keep that promise, and she’d never have to deal with him again. “I don’t think we have anything more to say to each other,” she said as she rose from her chair. “Except goodbye.”

  “I know where you can find Virgil Hines.”

  She stilled, sat back down.

  “I got a pretty good idea, anyway,” he said.

  She waited him out.

  “Father Beals told me you been asking about him. He said Virgil and some girl went missing a few days ago.”

  “Did you know Mr. Hines?”

  “‘Mr. Hines?’” Duncan snorted with laughter. “Damn, you have gone all highfalutin on me, haven’t you?”

  Nell regarded him in expectant silence.

  “I didn’t know him well,” Duncan said, idly dragging the now-filthy handkerchief over his upper chest, “but I knew him. There’s only about three-hundred of us here, all told, so everybody knows everybody else. He had a big mouth, that Virgil. Liked to talk about a little farm north of here that’s not being worked anymore on account of all the rocks, and nobody lives there. He used to hide out there from the law after he done something stupid, which I take it was pretty often. A nice enough fella, but not the swiftest upstairs.”

  “Where is this farm? Did he say?”

  “South of Salem.”

  Salem was about fifteen miles to the north. “He wasn’t any more specific than that?”

  “He was, actually.” Duncan lazed back in his chair, smiling in that cocky way she’d once known so well. “Like I said, he was a talker.”

  Nell gave him a look that said, Go on, but she knew Duncan well enough to suspect that it wasn’t going to be quite that easy.

  “You know, I really need to be getting cleaned up for Bible study,” he said as he wadded up the handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket. “I don’t like to show up all covered with—”

  “You bastard.”

  He burst out laughing. “That’s my Nell!”

  “I’m not your Nell, Duncan. I stopped being your Nell eight years ago.”

  “And it was all my fault, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. You’re mad at me, and you got a right to be. But you can never stop being mine, not entirely.”

  “Actually, yes, I can. And I have.” She stood and pushed her chair back. “Goodbye, Duncan.”

  “Don’t you want to know where the farm is?” he asked as he rose.

  “Do you intend to tell me?”

  “Sure. Next time.”

  “Next...?” Of course.

  “I’ve got to wash up now,” he said as he crossed to the door, “but come see me again and we’ll talk some more.”

  “You told me if I came to see you once—just once—you’d leave me alone.”

  “I told you I’d stop writing to you. I never said I wouldn’t try to win you back.”

  “Win...” On a gust of incredulous laughter, she asked, “Are you serious? Even if I were fool enough to want anything more to do with you, would you honestly expect me to wait another twenty-two years for you?”

  “It won’t be that long. I’ll be out on hocus pocus in two years—maybe sooner, with good behavior counted in.”

  “Good behavior? You?”

  “Father Beals wrote somethin’ up saying he thought I should be released next year, and the warden signed off on it. It’s up to the Parole Board, but if I keep my nose clean between now and then, Beals says there won’t be any problem.
He says he’s gonna give me a writing box when I get out, so I can—”

  “Oh, my God.” The world seemed to wobble on its axis. Nell grabbed the table to steady herself. “I can’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”

  “You better get used to the idea, darlin’, ‘cause I’ll be a free man before you know it, and then it’ll be you and me again, just like before.”

  Her voice tremulous with outrage, Nell said, “Do you honestly think I’d let you near me again, after what you did to me?”

  “I’m a different man than I was back then,” he said as he reached for the doorknob. “After I get out of here and you get to know me again, you’ll see that’s true.”

  “Never! I don’t believe for a moment that you’ve changed, Duncan, not really—not inside, where it counts,” she said the door swung open. “You’re still the same sly, devious son of a bitch you always were, and I’ll be damned if I’ll come back here and let you...”

  Father Beals, waiting out in the hall, stood gaping at her, clearly astounded to hear such language come out of a lady’s mouth.

  Duncan burst out laughing. “Oh, Nell... Darlin’ girl, I just can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.”

  Chapter 7

  It’s about time, Nell thought when she saw the front door of number ten Commonwealth Avenue swing open. Yellow gaslight fanned out onto the front stoop as the silhouette of a man emerged from Harry Hewitt’s handsome bay-windowed brownstone and sprinted down the steps.

  It was a nearly moonless night, and Nell was a good hundred feet away, hidden behind one of the many plane trees that had been planted in two stately rows down the grassy esplanade separating the north and south sides of this unfinished boulevard; still, she could tell, to her dismay, that the figure walking hurriedly toward nearby Arlington Street wasn’t Harry. He was too short, too slight. Harry was tall—not as tall as his brother Will, but taller than average, and he moved with a distinctive masculine grace, like all the Hewitt men.

  Nell recognized this man when he passed beneath a street lamp—about forty, with receding blond hair, quite well turned out in a black frock coat and gray trousers. He was Harry’s valet and all-around manservant, Edwin Speck, whom he’d brought with him when he moved out of his parents’ home last March in protest over his father’s refusal to dismiss Nell for being an “insolent little bog-trotter who should learn to peel potatoes and keep her damned mouth shut.” That August Hewitt would have sacked Nell in a heartbeat had his wife not threatened to leave him over it did little to placate Harry. Mr. Hewitt’s friend Leo Thorpe held the deed to the Back Bay townhouse in which his son Jack used to live, so Harry offered to rent it; he never spent another night under his parents’ roof.

  Nell held her pendant watch close to her face, squinting to read it in the dark: almost ten o’clock. She’d been lurking here, waiting for Harry to head out for his nightly debauchery, for over an hour.

  She tugged her shawl more snugly around herself, rubbed her arms. It had been an unusually warm day for September, prompting her to wear her favorite summer dress one last time, but the temperature had been plummeting since nightfall, and she was starting to shiver.

  Last night she’d conducted a similar, if briefer, vigil. After returning from Charlestown, she’d fed Gracie her supper, tucked her in, and walked over here in the hope of following Harry to some public place where she could question him in relative safety; never again would she enter his home alone. Unfortunately, he never left the house. At half past nine, his valet walked down to the corner, as he was doing now, and hailed a hack heading south on Arlington. Forty minutes later, it pulled up in front of ten Commonwealth. Speck got out and paid the driver as two giggling women emerged from the vehicle rather clumsily, not so much because they were unaided, but because they were clearly sotted. They were the frowziest of streetwalkers, all rouge and bosom and swaying hips—and not even that pretty, although they oozed a frank carnality of a type most men found irresistible. The valet herded them, laughing and stumbling, through the iron gate, up the front steps, and into the house. A few minutes later, lamplight shone through the windows of the second floor master bedroom. Dark forms moved behind the curtains, shifting, merging...

  It would appear that both Harry’s secretary and his valet counted pimping among their many and varied duties.

  Frustrated but not defeated, Nell had returned to Colonnade Row determined to try again tonight. Now, as Edwin Speck flagged down yet another hack on Arlington, she was beginning to wonder if Harry Hewitt, spoiled and lazy as he was, no longer cared to go in search of his evening entertainment, but preferred to have it delivered directly to his doorstep.

  Nell groaned as the hack pulled over to the curb. Except this time, instead of entering it, Speck merely said something to the driver, who steered his horses around the corner and down Commonwealth. As the hack pulled up in front of number ten with the valet jogging alongside it, Harry Hewitt stepped out of his house, dapper as always in full evening dress beneath an open black great coat, including one of his signature garish waistcoats, this one of an Oriental-patterned crimson brocade. A long, gold-fringed scarf of the same color hung over his shoulders like the stole of a priest.

  Whispering a brief prayer of thanks, Nell watched Harry adjust the angle of his opera hat as he strode through the front gate, his scarf snapping smartly as a breeze wafted across the boulevard. His servant bowed as he held the gate open, then trotted to the hack to get the door, bowing a second time. “Good luck with the cards tonight, Mr. Hewitt.”

  Harry didn’t so much as grunt a response. He settled into the seat, looking faintly bored, as Speck said to the driver, “He’s going to Orlando Poole’s.”

  “What’s that?” the young driver asked. “A restaurant?”

  “Christ,” Harry growled from inside the hack. “Province Street. Corner of Bosworth.”

  Flicking his reins, the driver guided the coach in an about-face on the wide, granite-paved street and headed back toward Arlington.

  Nell waited until Edwin Speck had reentered the house to walk up to the corner and wave down another hack.

  “Orlando Poole’s,” she said as the driver handed her into the shabby brown Landau. “It’s on Province and—”

  “I know where it is,” he said in a gruff, whiskey-scented Irish brogue. “Patrick Nulty’s been drivin’ this hack enough years that he don’t need to be spoon-fed no addresses, thank you very much.” He stared at her a moment. “I must say, though, you don’t quite seem the type.”

  Before she could summon a response to that, he shook his head in evident bemusement, climbed up onto his box and snapped the reins.

  * * *

  The Landau clattered to a stop on the narrow cobblestone lane, eerily dark save for a single ornamental lamp—oil, not gas—suspended from an iron arch over the stone steps that led from Province Street to Bosworth. Brick buildings loomed on either side, their ground level shops well-shuttered, a scattered handful of upper windows faintly lit. It reminded Nell of the illustrations in Dr. Greaves’s book about medieval London.

  “Um...where exactly is Orlando Poole’s?” Nell asked Patrick Nulty as he helped her out of the coach.

  “Right there.” He cocked his head toward a set of stone steps that led to a partially belowground door. “Ain’t you never been to Poole’s hell before?”

  “I...no, but I...”

  “You do know what kind of a place it is.”

  “It’s a gaming hell,” she said with feigned confidence as she paid him.

  “You ain’t goin’ in there to pray over ‘em, are you? They’ll laugh you out of there so fast—”

  “No, I just... The truth is, I need to talk to someone, and the only way I can do it is to go in there.”

  “Hmph. Tell you what. Business is slow on Thursday nights, and I could use a little break. Why don’t I just wait right here so’s I can take you back home when you’re done with your business inside?”

  “I ac
tually don’t live very far from here,” she said. “Just three blocks that way—Tremont and West. I can walk.”

  His eyes betrayed his surprise that she hailed from Colonnade Row, but all he said, as he climbed back up into his box, was, “It ain’t good for a lady to be wanderin’ the city alone at night. I’ll be right here. And if you happen to need a helpin’ hand in the meantime, you’ll know where to find me.”

  Nell thanked him, descended the stone steps and knocked on the door, which bore no street number or other identification of any kind. She was about to knock a second time when it swung inward, courtesy of a burly, plainly dressed colored man who looked from her to the hack, and back again. “Yes?”

  “I, um...I’m looking for Orlando Poole’s.” Nell glanced behind this man to the hallway in which he stood, which was dimly lit and unfurnished.

  “Sorry, miss,” he said as he stepped back from the door. “There’s no one here by that name.”

  “Um, wait,” she pleaded as he shut the door in her face. She stared at it for a moment, then turned and climbed back up to the brick sidewalk, to find Nulty chuckling as he raised a flask to his mouth. “Why are you laughing?” she asked. “That was very embarrassing. You sent me to the wrong door.”

  “I sent you to the right door. But it’s that fellow’s job to make sure only the right sort gain admittance, and he must have decided you didn’t qualify.”

  “Not because I’m... You don’t suppose he could tell I’m Irish.”

  “Nah, it’s the way you’re dressed.”

  Nell opened her shawl and looked down at herself. Of all the coolly sophisticated frocks Viola had ordered for her over the past four years, this one was by far the prettiest, a confection of gauzy smoke-colored lawn over a matching silk underdress. Although demurely styled, with long, full sleeves and a prim collar of Brussels lace, the fabric of the outer dress was so sheer that her bare arms and the snug, low-cut underbodice were clearly visible beneath it. “This is the only dress I own that doesn’t make me look as if I’m in half mourning.”