Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “It’s not so much naivete as deep self-involvement,” Nell said. “Harry is so wrapped up in his own needs and desires that it never occurs to him that someone else, especially some lowly little Irish mill girl, might have needs and desires that conflict with his—and the cleverness to act on them.”

  “In any event, Bridie came back a week later and told him she’d had a change of heart. She’d decided to keep the baby, and would require regular and generous infusions of cash ad infinitum in order to rear it properly.”

  Nell let out a chuckle that sounded more like a groan. “I almost feel sorry for Harry. What did he say?”

  “He balked at first, so she threatened to go to Saint August and tell him everything. His back was to the wall then, so he agreed to pay her a hundred dollars at the beginning of every month, once the baby was born, plus whatever other expenses she would require for the purposes of buying a house, educating the child, clothing him, and so forth.”

  “Quite a bonanza for someone like Bridie. She must have been ecstatic.”

  “Until Virgil Hines greeted her with that rather ill-timed kiss,” Will said.

  “Ah, yes, the kiss.”

  “Harry realized he’d been had. She was extorting money from him to support a child who might very well not be his. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I was there, and I knew something had upset him, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it, not then—didn’t know how much he could trust me with, I suppose. It took a bellyful of absinthe to loosen his tongue.”

  “That kiss happened last Friday,” Nell said, sorting through the chronology in her mind. “The next morning, Harry fired Bridie.”

  “That actually wasn’t his intent when he fetched her up to his office. He told her he’d deny having fathered her child—after all, scores of people saw this Hines fellow kissing her. He would claim he’d given her the forty dollars merely to avoid trouble, and he told her she could keep her job so long as she let the matter drop quietly. Bridie wasn’t about to give up so easily, though. She told him he could deal with her or with the old man—it was his choice. At that point, he was in no mood for ultimatums. He told her to collect her things and leave.”

  “Wasn’t he have worried that she would go to your father? Even if she couldn’t prove her child was Harry’s, she could prove he was still chasing mill girls.”

  “Harry did confess that he’s breathed a bit more easily since she dropped out of sight.”

  “Yes, I should imagine he has.”

  Will frowned at her tone. “Which doesn’t mean he had anything to do with her disappearance.”

  “But it was rather convenient, no?”

  He turned toward her, one arm draped across the back of the bench, his fingertips grazing the velvet collar of her coat. Quietly he said, “You’re heading down the wrong path here, Nell—after all, Virgil Hines disappeared, too. Who’s to say they didn’t run off together? Or, if foul play was involved, that Hines wasn’t responsible?”

  Her gaze still trained on Gracie, she said, “I’m just taking a peek in Harry’s direction, Will, not calling out the hounds.”

  He leaned a bit closer. “Look. I know Harry’s a bit of a blighter—self-indulgent, immature. And I can’t deny his moral compass is a bit out of whack...”

  “He doesn’t own a moral compass. Perhaps, as part of your campaign to rehabilitate him, you could buy one for him.”

  “Come now—he’s not a monster.”

  Turning to face him, she said, “That’s what Father Beals said about Duncan. The problem is, not all monsters look like monsters. Those who hide their true nature the best are the most monstrous of all, because they ultimately do the most harm. Will, I know Harry is your brother, and that you feel a certain measure of fraternal loyalty toward him, but he simply has no conception of right and wrong. The rules the rest of us live by—they don’t exist for him. He’s selfish, demanding, vicious...”

  “Vicious? Harry? If the occasional drunken fistfight makes someone vicious, then you’ll have to tar me with the same brush.”

  “Would you ever attack a woman?”

  “No, and neither would Harry.”

  “How I wish you were right.”

  “Whom is he supposed to have attacked? Bridie Sullivan?”

  “No,” Nell said. “Me.”

  Chapter 10

  Will stared at her. A bead of water quivered on the brim of his hat, fell onto the sleeve of his coat and dissolved into the fine black wool.

  She looked up. The sky had grown dusky as twilight. Clouds hovered like smoke, roiling, swelling...

  A droplet struck the corner of Nell’s eye, slid down her cheek. She lowered her face to find Will tugging off his righthand glove. He brushed his thumb across her cheek and then down along the raindrop’s damp path, until it met the high collar of her coat.

  Will reached around her. She flattened herself against the back of the bench as he lifted the umbrellas she’d leaned against the arm rest. He opened the large one with a whump and handed it to Nell, then sprinted over to Gracie with hers.

  Nell closed her eyes, breathed in the saturated air, listened to the patter of rain on the drum-tight silk of the umbrella.

  “Nell? Are you all right?”

  She opened her eyes to find Will taking the umbrella from her and reaching for her hand.

  “Yes, of course,” she said as he helped her to her feet, his touch startlingly warm on her bare hand. “The air just feels so thick at the beginning of a rainstorm.” She fumbled in her coat pocket for her gloves, tugged them back on.

  “Uncle Will’s going to walk us home,” announced Gracie from beneath her dainty pink umbrella. “He says I can walk up—may walk up ahead.”

  “So long as you stay in view,” Nell cautioned.

  Holding the umbrella over both of them, Will offered Nell his arm. She took it and let him escort her through the Public Gardens toward the adjacent Common, the most direct route to Colonnade Row. Gracie skipped along the path ahead of them, one hand outstretched to feel the raindrops.

  “What happened?” asked Will, his expression grim. Nell felt the taut muscles of his forearm through the damp woolen coat sleeve.

  She drew in a breath, but she still felt as if she couldn’t really fill her lungs. “It was toward the end of May. Harry had been living in Jack’s house on Commonwealth for about two months. He never came home for visits—because of me, he said. Because of how outrageous it was that I should ‘eviscerate his character in public,’ as he put it, and yet he’d still have to face me, holding down a position of responsibility, every time he walked into his own family’s home.”

  “It was in public that you...?”

  “It was at the Tremont Temple, but in your family’s private box. I’m quite sure they were the only ones who heard me. I felt awful for your mother afterward. She stuck her neck out for me, so I got to keep my job—and Gracie, which meant far more to me—but in doing so, she lost yet another son.”

  “Well...that may be overstating it a bit.”

  “Harry literally never came home, Will, and he didn’t come to Falconwood for even a brief visit while we were there over the summer. As far as I know, your mother hasn’t seen him once since he moved out.”

  “For which Harry, not you, is entirely to blame. You do realize that.”

  “In the abstract. But it pained me so much every time your mother would invite him to Sunday dinner and get no response. Needless to say, he was never in church. He’d only ever gone before when your father bullied him into it.”

  Will, an unbeliever from all appearances, who probably hadn’t entered a church since he was last bullied into it in his youth, kept diplomatically mum.

  The misty rain had intensified into a soft, steady shower, turning the surrounding parkland into a pastiche of greenish-gray smears, as if God had swiped His paintbrush haphazardly over soaking wet watercolor paper. Little Gracie was but a happily bobbing, pinkish-wet blur.

  “I dec
ided to initiate a truce,” Nell said, “even if it meant humbling myself with further apologies. One evening around the middle of May, I asked Miss Parrish to feed Gracie her supper, and I walked over to Commonwealth. I’d wanted to catch Harry before he went out for the evening, and while he was still somewhat sober. He was home all right, but, well... He was eating his supper at one end of that huge Hepplewhite dining table—he’s got all of Jack’s old furniture, you know—but he was washing it down with absinthe...”

  * * *

  “Miss Sweeney,” Harry said thickly, a glass in one hand, knife in the other. “How oddly unexpected.” He made no move to rise from his chair, merely waved away his man, Edwin Speck, who’d ushered Nell into the palatial formal dining room.

  The room felt stuffy despite its size and the mildness of the evening because Harry had the windows shut, their oilcloth roller shades fully drawn beneath brocade-swagged net curtains. She was surprised to find that the Thorpes had left that monumental Venetian chandelier hanging from the lofty ceiling. Harry had the gas turned low, bathing the room in an eerie, crystallized halflight.

  Dispensing with preliminaries, Nell said, “I’ve come to see if we can’t bury the hatchet.”

  Harry thrust the knife into the half-eaten squab on his plate and swallowed down the contents of his glass. “Why?” Yanking the stopper out of a carafe containing a small amount of yellowish-green liqueur, he proceeded to refill the glass with a wobbly precision that betrayed how muddled he already was.

  It wasn’t a cut crystal wineglass he was recharging, as Nell had first thought, but one of those special absinthe glasses with a narrow reservoir at the bottom to mark off the dose. Pouring slowly, and with bleary concentration, Harry overfilled the reservoir by a deliberate half inch, then jammed the stopper back in the carafe so hard she almost expected it to crack.

  In reflecting back on this evening later, she would regret not having turned and walked away right then. He’ll be easier to handle this way, she thought at the time. Slower, muzzier, more open to suggestion.

  More the fool she.

  “You’re breaking your mother’s heart, estranging yourself from her like this,” she told him.

  “She might’ve thought of that before blackmailing the old man into letting you stay on.” Harry balanced an absinthe spoon across the glass with exaggerated care before placing a sugar cube on its perforated bowl.

  Nell stiffened her back along with her resolve. Before coming here, she’d changed into the blue merino suit she thought of as The Uniform because of its exotically martial Zouave jacket. Although fitted with hooks and loops all down the front, she wore it fastened at the neck only, to show off her favorite shirtwaist—white with little curlicues of black braid down the front. A stylishly mannish little bonnet completed the outfit, which always made her feel a bit more confident than usual, as if she were strapping on armor.

  “Any responsibility for this state of affairs rests entirely with me,” she said.

  Harry appeared to contemplate that as he poured a slow stream of water from a pitcher over the sugar cube. As it dissolved, the mixture of absinthe and sugar water in the glass turned whitish and hazy.

  “That would certainly appear to be the case, at first blush.” He stood, his napkin falling to the floor, and held the glass up to the light, admiring the opalescent liquid, which really was quite wickedly beautiful. Even from her position at the foot of the table, Nell could smell the aromatic, anise-flavored liqueur. Harry had on a garishly striped vest and matching Dickens-style cravat, which he’d no doubt worn to the mill that day, but he’d replaced his business coat with a lounging jacket of amethyst velvet festooned with braids and tassels.

  “You made an absurd accusation against me.” He spoke slowly, pronouncing his words with care in an evident attempt to disguise the extent of his drunkenness. “Whas’ worse, you made it in the presence of my family and half of Boston society. But!” He held up a finger to punctuate his point. “It was Mamá who kept Father from tossing you out on that pretty li’l rump, as you so well deserved.” Harry raised the glass to his lips and drank half of it in one tilt.

  Wavering slightly on his feet, he said, “She ought to’ve known better than to take your side against her own. It’s a weakness of some of the more...tender-hearted among the better classes to assume that the lower orders share their sterling qualities deep down—that all that really separates us is filthy lucre. All that Unitarian bunkum Martin’s been getting mixed up in. People like that—people like Martin and Mamá—they fall all over themselves making excuses when your kind show their true colors.”

  “My kind?” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. Dr. Greaves would have cautioned her to think before she spoke.

  Harry drained his glass and reached for the carafe. “It’s no secret why the Irish live as they do, crammed together in their squalid little wharfside burrows, preying on each other and any poor unfortunate who happens to get in their way. Yours is a primitive race—intellectually stunted, too shif’less to get regular work, too intemperate to keep it when you do, and all too readily—”

  Nell let out a little gasp of outrage, her gaze homing in on the carafe, now empty, and the glass in his hand, which he’d just overfilled for the third—or possibly fourth or fifth—time. “You’re a fine one to talk about intemperance.”

  “Les’ see, where was I? Ah, yes—and all too readily excited to anger.” Harry directed an oily smile at her while struggling drunkenly to prop the spoon and sugar cube over the absinthe. “As you’ve just obligingly demonstrated. Look at you. You couldn’t be any pinker if I’d slapped you. No one blushes like the Irish.” Filling the glass with water, he added, in a cartoonishly bad brogue, “‘Specially you creamy-skinned lasses with just a wee touch o’ fire in your hair.” He raised his glass in her direction, took a generous gulp.

  Nell cursed the warmth in her cheeks, which only intensified as Harry stood there grinning at her. She unclenched her hands, took a calming breath. “I came here out of concern for your mother. Surely you care enough about her, despite the malice you bear, to come to some kind of terms with me.”

  He sauntered toward her, swirling the remaining absinthe in its glass. In lieu of boots or shoes, he wore gold-embroidered slippers made out of the same amethyst velvet as his smoking jacket. “I must confess, thas’ one thing I would’ve missed if Father’d managed to sack you—those red-hot blushes of yours. They give you away, you know. Every passion that inflames you—loathing, frustration...desire—it’s all seared onto your cheeks like a brand.”

  Desire? “You’re imagining things.”

  “Am I?” Harry paused a few feet away from her and bowed with mock gravity. “My apologies, dear lady, if your sensibilities have been offended.” He straightened up, his gaze refocusing, with apparent difficulty, behind her. “Yes, Speck.”

  That obsequious little valet was standing in the wide doorway, one hand on each of a pair of ornately carved pocket doors, which he was in the process of pulling together. That Nell hadn’t heard him doing so was a testament to well-oiled runners, a talent for stealth, or both.

  “Shall I lay out your evening clothes, sir?” Speck asked.

  “No, not tonight. But you can go down to the corner and get me another bottle of Pernod.” Harry tossed back the rest of his absinthe and thunked the glass on the table. “It looks as if I’ll be staying in tonight, seeing as I have such diverting company.”

  Nell said, “I’m leaving, actually,” but Speck resumed pulling the doors closed as if he hadn’t heard her. She said, “Excuse me, but I said I’m—”

  “He’ll only respond if he hears it from me,” Harry said.

  The doors met with a muted click. Nell took a step toward them, only to have Harry grab her arm. “Are you sure you want to leave so soon? What about burying the hatchet?”

  Trying ineffectually to pull away from him, she said, “You’ve no intention of letting that happen.”

&nb
sp; “Oh, I don’t know.” He raked his gaze the length of her and back up again in audaciously frank appraisal. “We might be able to work something out.”

  “Let me go.” She pried at his fingers, heart tripping, but he merely seized her other arm, his grip painfully tight, and backed her up against the table. “Mr. Speck!” she screamed, while straining to break free. “Help me!”

  “You’re turning quite red. Does it feel as hot as it looks?” Harry cleaned close, his licorice-sweet breath gusting on her face, forcing her to bend backward.

  “Mr. Speck! Anyone!” Nell tried to writhe out of his grasp, but he was a good deal bigger than she, and surprisingly strong for a man who’d never done a day of honest work in his life. She thought about Duncan, how effortlessly he’d overpowered her, how brutally he’d used her, and felt a paralyzing certainty that it was about to happen all over again.

  Don’t panic, or you’re done for, Nell told herself. Keep your head. Use your wits.

  “How I do love seeing the blood rise in your cheeks,” Harry said, “seeing your own body betray you so cruelly...and all because I’ve managed to get you in a bit of a pucker—not all that hard to do. Your passions run close to the surface, don’t they?—and hot as lava.” He pressed closer, gripped her tighter, his fingers biting into her arms. “But you keep it all locked up tight, ‘cause that’s the way your man in Rome likes it, isn’t that right?”

  “You don’t want to do this,” she said, wishing to God her voice weren’t so tremulous. “It’s the absinthe...”

  “Oh, I’ve wanted this since well before the absinthe.” Gripping both her wrists with one hand, he unhooked her jacket and closed a hand over her snugly corseted bosom through her shirtwaist. “I’ve wanted it ever since Mamá first brought you back from the Cape.”