Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “Here, Nell, give me that.” Adam took the key from her and used it to lock the door from the inside, then slipped the key in his vest pocket.

  Will’s gaze cut to the desk in the corner. Adam noticed, and fetched Will’s key as well.

  “Suit yourself.” Will stretched out on his side on the couch, which was upholstered in leather, but with spiral-carved wooden arms fitted with padded armrests. He lay his head on the armrest and used a spindle to scoop a little daub of opium paste from a wooden box. Holding the opium just above the flame of the lamp, he twirled it until it bubbled and seethed, then kneaded it upon the roof of the pipe bowl.

  “Just two days ago,” Adam reminded him, “you asked me to kill you if you ever took up this habit again.”

  “I won’t hold you to that.” Will rolled the opium into a little nugget on the end of the spindle, seated it in the bowl’s small aperture, and leaned over the spirit lamp. Keeping the opium in place with the spindle, he watched it vaporize while inhaling its fumes in one long draw.

  Smoke fluttered from his mouth; his eyes drifted shut. The pipe rolled out of his hand and onto the tray as he went utterly limp on the couch—a six foot plus rag doll.

  Nell said, “I’d like to take everything on that tray and burn it—whatever’s burnable—and throw the rest into Boston Harbor.”

  “He’ll be furious.”

  “Because we didn’t put a bullet in his brain instead?” she asked as she bent over the tray, sorting the flammable from the nonflammable. “It takes him up to twenty minutes to rouse from an opium stupor. That’s how much time I’ve got to destroy this—or as much as I can—because once he’s awake again, he can be remarkably alert.”

  “What about that?” Adam pointed to Will’s morphine and related accoutrement on the nightstand.

  She shook her head. “He’ll suffer from withdrawal sickness without that, and he needs it for pain—although he might try cutting down his dosage.”

  “If he had any real backbone, he’d go without it altogether. I used to take it for my leg—I injected myself, just as Will does—but I gave it up when I realized I was becoming dependent on it.”

  “The circumstances that led to Will’s addiction were extraordinary,” Nell said. “He escaped from Andersonville with a terrible bullet wound, and it took nine months for him to make his way north through enemy territory. I...well, of course I have no idea what’s wrong with your leg. I’m sure it’s quite painful, but—“

  “Syphilis.”

  It took a second for Nell to realize that she was staring with her mouth open. “Oh. Oh, I’m...so sorry.” And so astounded that he’d just come out with it, to a female, calling it “syphilis,” no less, rather than the somewhat more delicate “blood-poison” or “French pox.”

  “I’ve shocked you,” he said. “I thought, since you were a sort of nurse—“

  “Yes, of course. I’m not shocked, just, um...” She couldn’t keep from glancing down at his bad leg.

  “It’s just started to affect the bones and joints, and my vision isn’t what it used to be. I had a seizure a few months ago, and I get the most godawful headaches. Of course, you’re familiar with the late-stage symptoms.”

  “To some extent.” Enough to know that dementia, blindness and paralysis were what Adam had to look forward to unless the disease was brought under control. “Can’t they do anything for it?”

  “I had four years’ worth of mercury treatments. I ate mercury, I had it rubbed onto me, cooked into me... They put me in a cabinet with my head sticking out and lit a fire under it so the mercury inside would vaporize—pounds of it, literally. I can’t begin to tell you how hellish that was.”

  “Oh, Adam.” Nell felt feverish just thinking about it; her forehead actually grew damp. “Did it do any good at all?”

  He shook his head. “Came back every time. The doctors want to try potassium iodide, but if it’s half as grueling as the mercury...”

  “It isn’t,” she said. Nor was it as toxic as mercury, which could cause the very symptoms it was enlisted to cure. “And it works. You should let them try it.”

  Will stirred, rolling onto his back, one arm thrown over his head.

  “Perhaps,” Adam said, “God means for me to suffer. Perhaps it’s my penance.”

  “Penance for what?”

  “For disobeying His commandment.”

  “Ah.” Thou shalt not commit adultery. “You mean, for...having contracted syphilis in this first place?”

  He regarded her in obvious bewilderment for a moment before shaking his head. “No. No, you have the wrong idea. I’m not the one who... That is...my wife gave it to me.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was early in our marriage. She was...not the person I thought she was.” He looked away, his expression hardening. “Not remotely.”

  Nell couldn’t, for the life of her, think what to say to that. Lifting the tray with hands that felt just ever so tremulous, she said, “I think the pipe and the sponge will burn. And the box the opium came in.” She carried the tray to the fireplace and set it on the mantle. “I don’t know about the opium itself. If I put it in the fire, do you suppose the smoke will do that to us?” She nodded toward Will, shifting groggily on the couch.

  “There should be a washout closet in the W.C.,” Adam said. “I’ll get rid of it there.” He took the little box and the spindle into the bathroom and turned the gas jets up high.

  The glass over the steel engraving was as reflective as a mirror in this light. In it, Nell could see the room behind her in minute detail, including the brightly lit bathroom, visible through its wide-open door. Adam was leaning over the toilet, using the spindle to scoop opium paste out of the wooden box.

  Nell tossed the sea sponge, used for cooling off the hot pipe, into the fire. It was damp, so it steamed and popped, but presently it caught around the edges. She watched it smolder with a curious detachment. It was almost as if she were watching herself from without—as if she were looking down on herself standing in front of the fireplace in her dove gray dress and smart little hat, utterly absorbed in watching a sponge catch fire.

  The smoking pistol came next. It was slow to catch, as well. The clay bowl would be left intact, she realized, unless the heat cracked it—unlikely, since it had presumably been fired in a kiln.

  Curious, that she should think of that. She wasn’t usually so analytical. She raised her gaze to the tray on the mantle. Everything else—spirit lamp, horn-handled pen knife, wick scissors, china bowl, stone ashtray—couldn’t be burned.

  Nell picked up the knife and unfolded it, only to discover that it wasn’t a pen knife at all, but a slim little folding lancet. It looked brand new. She wondered if Will had purchased it just that day.

  A glimmer of movement caught her attention. She looked up at the engraving to see Adam standing in front of the toilet glass over the bathroom sink, running his fingers through his hair with an unaccountably grim expression.

  He looked toward Nell, clearly unaware that she could see him. His expression didn’t change, but that wasn’t what took her aback. He’d pushed his hair aside rather haphazardly, revealing his forehead and the mark thereon.

  Must be a birthmark, Nell thought, one of those big, livid port wine stains. But its contours were too precise, as if someone had taken a good detail brush loaded with alizarin crimson and painstakingly painted a crescent moon—the convex edge especially dark and crisp, the concave a bit more shaded. Port wine stains tended to be irregular.

  It looked like a burn, and a fairly bad one—like those on Bridie’s palms from the handle of the hot skillet.

  Perhaps she got a lick in, Will had said, perhaps not...

  Nell’s heart batted against her stays like a bird in a box. The lancet trembled in her hand.

  “Think outside of yourself,” she whispered.

  “I beg your pardon?” Adam came up behind her, smoothing his hair over his forehead, still oblivious to the fact that she could
see him in the glass.

  “Oh, it was...just a little prayer.” Her back still to him, she slipped the lancet into her righthand glove, sliding it along her palm and the underside of her index finger. The steel was just visible through the black crochet, and her finger stood straight out, as if splinted; she would have to have to be aware of how she held her hands. “I was asking God to help Will.”

  “Here.” Adam handed her the box. “I got out as much of the opium as I could.”

  She turned to take it with her left hand, and added it to the fire. The residue of opium inside began to sizzle almost immediately, its odor thick and sweet.

  “I thought you might be asking me what I meant about penance,” he said. “I never explained that, did I?”

  He was standing just a little too close for propriety.

  Nell edged away a bit. “You said something about disobeying a commandment.”

  He frowned into the fire as the flames licked at the box. “It’s a challenge sometimes, interpreting God’s laws, figuring out what to do and what not to do. The Commandments might say one thing, scripture another... Thou shalt not kill, for example. Did you know the Old Testament statutes require punishment by death for certain offenses? Will knows this. He quoted Deuteronomy on the subject of adultery just last night.”

  “I’m still in,” Will muttered groggily, possibly in reaction to hearing his name. “I’ll see you an’ raise you five hun’red.”

  “Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Proverbs...” Adam continued, as if he hadn’t even heard Will. “All state that adulterers must be destroyed.”

  It might just have been the dim light, but Adam’s eyes, which she’d thought so darkly expressive when she’d first met him, looked as flat and soulless as if they’d been painted on a statue.

  “So therein lies my problem,” he said. “The Old Testament scriptures dictate—demand—a certain course of action, which the Commandments appear to denounce. I can’t obey both. I’ve got to choose one—and I’ve done so—but the fact that it was a difficult choice doesn’t absolve me from penance for having disobeyed the word of God. Do you understand?” he asked, as if it were important to him that she did.

  “Er, yes. Yes, I...believe I do.” She backed away a step, feeling the lancet slide against her sweat-dampened palm as she nervously smoothed her skirts. With feigned composure, she said, “Will seems to be coming to. I think I’ll try to take him outside so he can walk this off.”

  Adam smiled, but it was the smile of someone whose child was trying to get away with something absurd.

  “May I have the key so I can open the door?” She went to hold out her right hand, remembered the lancet, and held out her left.

  He shook his head, the cold-eyed smile still in place, as if to say, I’m on to you. We’re on to each other.

  Steeling herself, Nell walked right up to him so that he stood between her and the fireplace, her hands clasped in a supplicating manner so that that he wouldn’t see her pushing the lancet through the fingertip of her glove. The blade was keen; it sliced with ease through the delicate crochet. Through an effort of will, she envisioned the two of them as if from above, he with his back against the marble mantle, she with a weapon.

  You can do this, she told herself. You got the better of Harry, didn’t you? This is no different.

  In a softly inveigling tone, she said, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” He stared at her unblinkingly as she stepped closer, reaching up to caress his face. “Just give me the keys,” she murmured as she slid her left hand into his hair and closed it around a thick fistful, while at the same time pressing the tip of the little knife to his Adam’s apple. “Both of them. And then stand over there by that bedpost.” To which she would tie him so that he’d still be there when she returned with the police.

  His smile changed as he stared at her; he was, it seemed, grudgingly impressed. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” The smile faded; his eyes betrayed a glimmer of that sweet melancholy she’d seen in them in the beginning. “If only you weren’t what you are,” he said as he retrieved the keys from his vest pocket...

  And dropped them into the fire.

  Nell gasped and pushed him aside, thinking only of retrieving the keys—a fatal mistake, she realized when she saw him hauling back to strike her.

  This will hurt, she thought as he backhanded her, hard, into the marble mantle.

  It did hurt—her world bloomed with bright white pain. It detonated again as her head struck the slate hearth, then sputtered away into blackness.

  Chapter 22

  “Leviticus, chapter twenty, verse ten. ‘And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife...’”

  Coaxed awake by the sing-songy cadence of Adam’s voice, Nell opened her eyes to find her head pulsing with pain, but cradled in downy pillows.

  “‘...the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.’”

  It took mere seconds for it all to come back to her—Will and his opium, Adam and his delusions... Syphilis... Mercury... I ate it, I had it rubbed onto me, cooked into me... the keys, the lancet, Adam hurling her into that mantle...

  Nell lay half sitting up against a mound of pillows on a bed—Will’s bed—fully clothed but for her gloves and hat, although her hair had been unpinned. She felt a sticky film on the left side of her face that she knew to be blood trickling from a gash on her forehead. When she tried to rise, she discovered herself to be tethered to the green-painted iron headboard by rope tied around her wrists and neck. There was just enough slack on the neck rope for her to sit up; her hands were bound tightly to the rails.

  Someone groaned; Will.

  Nell looked toward the couch on the opposite wall, craning her neck to see beyond the damask bed curtains gathered with silken tiebacks to the bottom bedposts. The little spirit lamp was on the nightstand now, casting its meager, wavering light over about half the room. Things seemed to be shifting, as they had that time she’d shared a whole bottle of cognac with Viola, so it took her a moment to make out what was happening. Adam was tying Will’s hands to one arm of the couch, having already tied his feet to the other. Will was clearly still insensible, but coming to. He pulled blearily at the restraints, muttering something under his breath.

  Adam, a coil of rope in his hand—had he brought it with him?—looked toward Nell. “You’re awake, I see. Do you think he heard any of that?” He slapped Will’s face; Will flinched, blinked his eyes open. Leaning over him, Adam recited loudly, as if to a someone who was hard of hearing, “‘And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.’ Do you know what that means? Do you?”

  Will looked at Adam with an expression of utter incomprehension. When he tried to sit up and discovered he couldn’t, he yanked in bewilderment at his fetters.

  “Will...” Nell began.

  Adam wheeled around. “Did I say you could speak?”

  “Nell?” Will met her gaze, his eyes widening in shock when he saw her tied up and bleeding. “Jesus! Nell, are you all—”

  “Do you know what that means?” Adam repeated.

  “What the hell is this?” Will demanded, straining against the ropes. “What did you do to her?”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “If you’ve done anything to her, so help me God—“

  “‘And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife’—that would be you, Will—‘shall surely be put to death.’ A man who lies with a married woman is just as guilty of adultery as she is. He doesn’t have to be married to be guilty of adultery in the eyes of the Lord. That’s the law as handed down by God, Will. It’s right out of the Bible.”

  Will look toward Nell as if to ask, Is he serious?

  She nodded balefully.

  “You’re daft,” Will said. “Untie us both right now.”

  “Deuteronomy, chapter tw
enty-two, verse twenty-two. You know this one. ‘If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband, then they shall both of them die.’ Both of them, Will. They’re equally guilty.”

  “You bloody lunatic, neither one of us is guilty. It’s...it’s not like that between us.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Adam screamed, the rope shaking in his hand.

  “I’m not—”

  “Stop lying to me! Do I look like a fool?”

  “Adam,” Will said in a quiet, strained voice, “just listen to me.”

  “No, you listen to me. You need to understand why I’m doing this. You need to accept that it’s God’s will.”

  “All right,” Will said softly. “All right, Adam. I’ll listen as long as you like, and I’ll understand and accept, and then you can do what you please—to me. But you must let Nell go.”

  “Will...” Nell pulled at her ropes.

  Adam barked with laughter. “Let her go?”

  “She’s blameless, Adam. I’m the guilty one. I’ve been guilty all my life, of one thing or another. Ask anyone who knows me. Keep me here, punish me as you will, but let her leave.”

  “A surprisingly gallant gesture, but I’m not quite that easily misled. If either one of you is more to blame, it’s her.” Pointing to Nell, his face a mask of contempt, he said, “Women like you, you snare men in your net just because you can. You snared Duncan, and now look at him. I went to see him at City Hall today. I saw what you did to him, what you turned him into. Are you proud of yourself? You took a harmless, good-natured man and destroyed him.”

  “Harmless?” Nell said. “You told us yourself he gets what he wants through fear and coercion and violence. He threatened my life!”

  “How much of what you told us about him is true?” Will asked.

  Adam thought for a moment. “Virgil did roll his cigarettes.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Nell whispered.

  “He rushed at Nell with a gun!” Will said.

  “He was rushing at me with that gun,” Adam replied, as if to a simpleton. “It was almost certainly a misguided attempt to protect Nell. I’d tried to explain things to him last week, after Nell visited him, in a way he could grasp. I tried to make him understand that Nell is unworthy of him, and that he’ll be free of her soon, but he...became agitated. And, of course, that night, he escaped. When I found out he was in Boston, and trying to keep me from carrying out God’s will, I had no choice but to try to discredit him in case he was caught.”