Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “Did you discover this on your own?”

  “If you’re asking whether I snooped around in his things, the answer is no,” Nell said as she continued to poke and prod in the box. “He showed me the drawer because he kept a thousand dollars in there, and he wanted me to have it should anything happen to him. His father had died young, of an apoplectic attack of the brain, and he was always afraid the same thing would happen to him.”

  Will fell silent. He lit a cigarette, then settled onto his side on the floor—the same reclining position in which he used to smoke opium. He knew that she’d been Dr. Greaves’s mistress as well as his assistant, just as he knew that her relationship with Duncan had been no innocent courtship—not that she’d told him the full extent of it, but he knew enough. Sophisticated about such matters and gallant in spite of himself, Will had professed complete acceptance of her past. But now, watching him smoke his cigarette in brooding silence, Nell wondered how he really felt about the two men with whom she’d shared her bed—and especially about Dr. Greaves, for whom she still harbored a great deal of well-deserved, if platonic, affection.

  Nell emptied the smaller compartment, all the sections of which were covered in velvet except for a little square nook made to fit a pewter inkwell of the same size and shape. Its sides were velvet-lined, but the bottom was bare wood. She tilted the writing box to compare the depth of the compartment that held the ink and writing implements with that of the box as a whole. There seemed to be about an inch unaccounted for at the bottom.

  “Eureka.” She laid the box on the floor.

  “You found it?” Will sat up.

  “I know where it is, and unless I’m very much mistaken...” She reached into the inkwell nook and pressed on its little wooden floor. Nothing happened. “Damn,” she muttered.

  Will chuckled as he crushed his cigarette out on one of the plates. “How I do love to hear vulgar language from those un-rouged lips of yours, Cornelia.”

  She glared at him as she pressed again, this time with more force. The floor sank inward, just slightly; she felt something give, heard a dull rasp of metal, and then a hinged panel sprang open along the bottom of the compartment.

  “Ah, what a little righteous indignation won’t do.” Will leaned over, along with Nell, to peer into the inch-high niche that had been revealed. “Eureka, indeed.”

  The niche held a stack of envelopes, perhaps half a dozen. Nell pulled them out, finding them gratifyingly weighty. They weren’t just empty envelopes, but letters, enclosed in coarse, brownish paper that she recognized immediately. Even before she saw the return address on the back, she knew they’d been sent from the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown.

  “Virgil may or may not have written to Father Beals,” Will said as he took the envelopes from her and flipped through them, finding them all identical, “but it would appear that Father Beals has written to him.”

  Nell shook her head, feeling as if her stays had been suddenly yanked tight. In a voice that sounded small and distant even to her own ears, she said, “Those aren’t from Father Beals.”

  Will looked at her, then down at the envelopes. “There’s no name on the return address. What makes you think—”

  “They’re from Duncan. That’s his handwriting.”

  Chapter 13

  Will opened the letter with the earliest postmark first. Nell read it over his shoulder.

  May 15th 1868, Charlstn Chicken Coop

  Virge, you lazy dam bummer,

  Its about time you wrote me, I was starting to think maybee you had 2nd thouts but you’re smarter than that aint you. Im glad to see you came threw, youl be happy when I tell you wear to find them dimin dimund braslits I bet.

  “Diamond bracelets?” Will said.

  “Remember me telling you that Duncan was in prison for beating and knifing a man during an armed robbery?”

  “And mutilating him, as I recall.”

  “It was a jewelry shop he robbed, at gunpoint—Ripley’s, in Newport. He locked the staff in the back room, and then he ordered old Mr. Ripley to unlock all the cases, but he refused.” Nell took a deep, shaky breath. “So he, he tied him up and gagged him, and...he took out his knife, and...”

  Will rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Ripley was smart, though. He realized Duncan was fixing to basically torture him to death, so he started screaming about a pain in his chest, and slumped over. Duncan thought he really was dead, so he took off the mask he’d been wearing, and smashed the cases and snatched the best stuff. But the old man was still very much alive—cut up pretty badly, but alive—and he sent for the constables the second Duncan left. They didn’t catch up with him till the next day, and by that time he’d hidden the stolen jewelry all over the upper Cape—a few pieces here, a few pieces there...”

  “Did he tell you where he’d hidden them?” Will asked.

  “God, no, he wouldn’t have told me. He knew I’d be outraged when I found out what he’d done—which I was, of course. I told him I’d had enough. I tried to leave him. That’s when he...”

  Will nodded tightly; she’d told him last winter, in vague terms, about Duncan’s having “hurt” her. Before he could say anything about that, because she couldn’t take his pity right now, on top of everything else, she said, “After Duncan was arrested, he refused to tell them where he’d hidden the jewels. Because of that, and what he’d done to Mr. Ripley, he got the maximum sentence—not that he’ll end up serving it. I told you what he said about getting out on ‘hocus pocus.’”

  “Surely there’s something you can do to forestall that.”

  “If you get any brilliant ideas, don’t keep them to yourself. In the meantime,” she said as she returned her attention to the letter, “I’m more than a little curious as to what Duncan and Virgil have been corresponding about for the past four months.”

  “Didn’t Duncan say he hardly knew Virgil?” Will asked.

  She sighed. “Duncan says a lot of things.”

  But like I told you bifore Virge you got to earn them braslits, I aint just giving them away cause you told me she lives across from Boston Commun and looks after a kid. I want the street she lives on and the number of the house. I want the name of the famly and the kid and evrybody else in that house and when she gets up in the morning and when she gos to bed at night and what she eats and drinks and if she stil gos to church on Sundays and what she tells the godam preist in confeshun. I want to know evrything.

  “Oh, my God,” Nell whispered.

  Only when Will wrapped an arm around her shoulder, steadying her, did she realize how badly she was trembling. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded yes, then shook her head. “No. Oh, God. I can’t...all this time...oh, my God.”

  Will moved the letters out of her reach. “I’m going to read these and summarize them for you. In the meantime...” He withdrew from inside his coat a small silver flask, which he unscrewed and handed to her. “Brandy. I prescribe one good swallow every minute or so until the tremors have abated.”

  Twenty minutes later, Will said, “All right, this is it in a nutshell.” He sat on the floor with all the letters—there were seven of them—spread out around him in a rectangle of sunlight from the east-facing window, for it was not quite noon yet. “Some time before Virgil Hines’s parole, it came to Duncan’s attention that Virgil wished he had enough money to buy this farm without having to serve time in a Cape May quarry. Duncan, having been fixated for quite a while on finding out what had become of you, entered into an arrangement with his chum Virgil, the nature of which you’ve already surmised. Virgil spies on you and reports back to Duncan, and in return, Duncan reveals to him the location of one of his caches of loot—eventually. He seems to be dragging his heels about it, to Virgil’s frustration.” He paused to light a cigarette. “How are you feeling, by the way?”

  “Much calmer,” said Nell, who was lying on her back with her hat and gloves off, admiring the way the sun sparkled i
n the cobwebs Bridie had missed when dusting the rafters.

  Will took the flask out of her slack hand and shook it; it was still mostly full. “Doesn’t take much for you, does it?”

  “I’m not drunk, just...” Nell shook her head. “I should have suspected something like this. Duncan, he was always so...” She rubbed her face. “It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

  Will took a puff on his cigarette, tapped the ash onto the plate, looked at her. “Virgil was the man leaning against that tree on Commonwealth, watching you button yourself back up after fleeing Harry’s—”

  She groaned. “Of course. Of course.”

  “That feeling you’ve had since then, that someone’s been watching you? It hasn’t been your imagination. It’s been Virgil.”

  Nell closed her eyes, shook her head. She heard paper rustling, felt vibrations in the floor beneath her as Will shifted his weight. When she opened her eyes, he was lying on his side again, stretched out next to her, the letters and the plate he was using as an ashtray in front of him.

  “Duncan assumed, from Virgil’s account, that you were having an affair with Harry,” he said.

  “When he said that about not trusting ‘the son,’ I thought he meant—”

  “Not trusting the son? You didn’t tell me this part. What did he say?”

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

  “He, uh, he said I thought I knew you...well, I assumed he meant you, but he meant Harry.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said through a stream of smoke, “those pesky assumptions of yours.”

  “He said, ‘He’s not what he seems. You think he’s a gentleman because he’s a Hewitt, but if you knew what he does when you’re not around...’” She shrugged.

  “No wonder you thought it was me.” Will’s wry tone didn’t completely mask a hint of something that might have been bitterness, or hurt, or a combination thereof. He stubbed out the cigarette and started sorting through the letters. “The reason he tried to warn you off Harry...ah, this is it. This one is dated July twenty-first, while you were at Falconwood—which he knew about through Virgil, of course. Thinking you were carrying on this torrid liaison with Harry, Duncan had instructed Virgil to keep tabs on him, as well, from about mid-May on. That was how Bridie came to Virgil’s attention. It would appear that he took one look at her, fell hard and fast, contrived to meet her, and before long, they were spending every weekend here. Of course, Virgil also had a job to do, so he dutifully told Duncan about Harry’s Harem, the crown jewel of which happened to be his own lady love, Bridie Sullivan.”

  “Which led Duncan to conclude that Harry was two-timing me with Bridie,” Nell said.

  “He tried to warn Virgil off Bridie, too,” Will said, scanning the letter in his hand. “Here it is. ‘I seen plenty of her type, those painted-up tarts that’ll raise their skirts for a pair of glass ear bobs. She’s nothing but a whore that ain’t honest enough to call herself a whore. She’s using you, Virge, maybe for the farm, maybe for something else. She don’t know any other way. You’re crazy to get all moonstruck over a trashy piece like that. You’re lucky if she ain’t given you the clap by now...’ And so forth and so on.”

  It didn’t surprise Nell that Will chose to repeat Duncan’s coarse language verbatim. Although restrained by the rigid decorum of his class from swearing casually in her presence, he’d never been under the illusion that such words would cause her to swoon from shock. Far from being insulted by this, she actually found it rather refreshing.

  “It’s a refrain that just gets more impassioned with every letter,” Will said. “In the last one... Where is it? Ah. ‘You think if you can talk her into ditching the husband and marrying you, she’ll stop humping everything in trousers? It don’t work like that with her kind. You don’t even know who got her in the club, if it was you or Hewitt or some guy she did once and never saw again.’” Will looked up. “In the club?”

  “With child,” Nell said.

  “Hm. All right... ‘You are one dumb mudsill to think she don’t have no interest in that farm just cause she’s planning on squeezing that Hewitt bastard for money. Why settle for one pot of gold when she can have two? She’ll use you up, Virge. She’ll wait till you buy that place, and then she’ll pick you clean and toss you out with the chicken bones. It’s what my old lady did to my da, and then she tossed me out, too, which is a hell of a way to treat your own kid, which is why I’m telling you to cut her loose now, before she can finish what she started.’”

  Looking up, Will said, “His mother kicked him out of the house?”

  Nell nodded. “When he was nine.”

  “Nine?” Will whispered something under his breath, lit another cigarette, and continued reading. “‘If she won’t go, make her go. Do whatever it takes, but get rid of her. If you’re too much of a Nancy-boy to do it yourself, then I’ll do it soon as I get out of here, on account of I hate to think of her getting her whorish hands on the farm you’re buying with my hard-earned loot, but then you’ll owe me, and I’ll know you’re as much of a puss as she is. Chew on that next time she comes home smelling of some other man’s—’”

  Will cut himself off, frowning at the page, an almost imperceptibly faint smudge of color rising on each cheekbone. “Yes...well...” He set the cigarette on the edge of the plate and gathered up the letters into a neat stack. “You get the idea.”

  Nell smiled to herself at the notion that Will had finally stumbled across a word too foul, even by his lax standards, to repeat in her presence.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Nell said. “From all accounts, Virgil was besotted with Bridie. Yet he knew she was at Harry’s beck and call during work hours. Most men could never live with that.”

  Will shrugged as he brought his cigarette to his mouth. “It would appear he’d found a way to.”

  “It’s just hard to imagine.”

  “Love is a curious malady. The symptoms vary widely among its sufferers.”

  Nell turned her head to look at him through a sun-washed haze of cigarette smoke as he lay next to her on this bare wooden floor. He met her eyes through the glittering veil, holding her gaze with an odd kind of stillness for about two seconds, whereupon she looked away and sat up.

  “We should check out that barn,” she said as she dusted off the sleeves of her dress, “and the field between the house and the orchard, where that smell came from.”

  “You go ahead.” Will gained his feet with some effort, favoring his bad leg, then held out his hand to help her up. “I’m going to put things right in here. I’d hate to leave it like this—” he gestured toward the disassembled table and emptied out writing box “—when we found it so tidy. I’ll meet you out there.”

  * * *

  The barn was much as Nell had expected. It reeked of sour straw, and was empty but for such detritus as a rusted-out wheelbarrow and a ladder missing half its rungs. There was a woodpile behind the barn that was half-split, and a chopping block with an axe stuck in it. Her most interesting discovery was the fact that Virgil Hines was evidently repairing the brick chimney on the north side of the house, crumbled sections having been replaced with new bricks, freshly mortared. He must have been pretty confident that Duncan’s “dimund braslits” were forthcoming.

  Nell reentered the house through the back door, which led into the junk-filled rear parlor. Upon opening the door into the front room, she found that Will had finished tidying up and was now seated on the small fruit crate in his shirtsleeves, the left sleeve rolled high above the elbow, thrusting a silver hypodermic syringe into his upper arm.

  He looked toward her standing in the doorway, his fleeting expression of dismay swiftly replaced by that cool British stoicism he was so good at. There was a bleakness in his eyes, though, a hint of something close to shame. His arm bore clusters of needle marks and bruises.

  Will thumbed the plunger home, injecting a dose of morphine into his left del
toid. A second passed. He let out a sigh, his eyes half closed, and withdrew the syringe.

  She said, “You’re better than this.”

  “If I were,” he said as he unscrewed the needle, “I wouldn’t be doing it, would I?”

  Chapter 14

  The field beyond the orchard was a sprawling acre or so of dried grass and weeds dotted with the occasional tree. Given Nell’s cumbersome skirts, she chose to inspect the section near the house and barn, where the grass wasn’t quite so high, while Will directed his search toward the field’s heavily treed eastern perimeter. She glanced up every now and then to see his black-clad form growing steadily smaller as he waded slowly through the swaying wheat-gold grass, his long strides relatively smooth and graceful.

  Nell was thankful for the light breeze, which kept her from perspiring too badly despite the fierce midday sun. After a while, she unpinned her black straw bonnet and repinned it at a more front-tilted angle, the better to prevent her face from freckling, or worse, tanning. As she did so, she glanced toward Will to find him standing still near the trees at far the edge of the field, looking down at something she couldn’t see.

  He’d taken off his hat.

  Lifting her skirts indecently high, Nell strode toward him as swiftly as she could through the crackling grass, the smell of decaying flesh growing stronger with every step. Will glanced up at her once as she neared, his expression grim. When she was about twenty feet away, the breeze lifted a few strands of something near his feet that fluttered above the level of the grass, glinting in the sunlight like spun copper.

  My Bridie, she’s got the prettiest red hair you ever seen—shines like heaven itself when the sun hits it just right.