MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER

by Cynthia Peale

  “You would like me to help her.”

  “Yes. She needs help now, and I have very little faith—as you can imagine—that Inspector Crippen is up to the job.”

  “You and my sister both,” he said, “agree on that point.”

  “And did she—your sister—urge you to involve yourself in the case?”

  “To do what I can, yes. She feels that if this man—this murderer—is not apprehended quickly, the Bower will suffer scandal that will make it impossible for the place to continue, depending as it does on donations.”

  “From the respectable people of the city.” She made “respectable” sound like a slur. “People who would not allow any of Miss Montgomery’s charges into their homes but who feel it their Christian duty to support her in her work. At a respectable distance,” she added with some bitterness.

  He shrugged. “Hypocrisy does not necessarily cancel out people’s desire to do good.”

  “No. It does not. But I believe your sister is right, Mr. Ames. People will not want to be associated with the Bower if this man—this killer—is not found quickly.”

  She shuddered. Did she see herself, he wondered, night-walking the streets, as degraded as any girl whom Agatha Montgomery took in? But no, Serena Vincent would never have stooped to such an existence. True, it was scandalous of her to have gone on the stage, but at least it was not too unpleasant a life, and from what he saw around him, she made plenty of money.

  Unless she had found a lover to support her. He hated to think that; forcibly he pushed the notion from his mind. She’d recently had a lover, he knew, but the fellow had killed himself last fall, and in any case he’d not been wealthy. Had she mourned him? Did she still? He couldn’t tell. But she made a fine high salary at the Park Theater, where she was the resident star; she didn’t need some man’s fortune to live well. He thought that most women earning so much would have been coarsened—unsexed—by that fact, but she was not. Far from it.

  “Do you—now—support Miss Montgomery in her work?” he asked.

  “Of course. I give as generously as I can. I can hardly do otherwise, considering what she did for me.”

  “Her brother does well at raising funds.”

  “Yes.” Her face had suddenly gone blank.

  “You know him?”

  “I—yes. A little.”

  “Do you”—it seemed intrusive, but he wanted to know—“give your donations to him, or do you give directly to Miss Montgomery?”

  “I give to her.”

  Tell me more, he thought, but apparently, she was not about to. The moment passed; she was smiling at him.

  “Well, then,” he said. “Since not only my sister, but also the most acclaimed actress in the city, asks me to involve myself in the case, I can hardly do otherwise, can I?”

  He was not accustomed to delivering gallant little speeches, and certainly not to a woman like Serena Vincent, but the words had come to him effortlessly, due, no doubt, to her somewhat intoxicating effect on him.

  Yes. He felt intoxicated. He realized it—and realized, too, that he should probably take his leave. Allowing oneself to be intoxicated by any woman, but particularly by a woman like Serena Vincent, was a dangerous business.

  But he didn’t want to leave. That was the very devil of it: He would happily have stayed in this luxurious little bijou flat for as long as she would have him. Just to sit here across from her and watch her, and catch a whiff of her perfume, and listen to her low, sensuous voice—it hardly mattered what she said—was like some amazing gift.

  Just then the maid brought in a tea tray, and so he did not need to take his leave just yet. He accepted a cup and allowed Mrs. Vincent to charm him further with a lively patter, her painful memories apparently forgotten, but all the while, as he watched her, he pondered in a small corner of his mind the story she had told him. Amazing, that she’d been so destitute, that she’d had nowhere to turn for help. She’d been born and bred a Boston Brahmin like himself, but in her hour of need, it had not been any of those folks who had helped her, but another castoff from that same cold, insular tribe, Agatha Montgomery.

  “… and so, of course, we had to demand a rewrite,” she was saying, her beautiful face illuminated with laughter just barely contained. “No one—and certainly not I—could stand before an audience and say lines like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  There was a little pause. She set down her cup and clasped her hands—slender and long-fingered, the nails shaped to a perfect oval and buffed to a high polish (and who gave you that stunning emerald ring? he wondered; and what favor did you bestow on him who gave it?)—clasped her hands before her swelling bosom and said, in what he was sure was her best tragedienne’s voice, “Mr. Ames, I have never adequately thanked you for what you did for me in the business of Colonel Mann’s murder.”

  “No thanks necessary.”

  “Ah, but I think they are. If you had not persevered—why, I might have been on trial for my life. And now I am asking you for help once more. I am shameless in my asking, because I ask not for myself but for Agatha Montgomery. If it were for myself, I would not ask at all—but you understand that.”

  “Yes.” Lovely woman, he thought—and where would you turn, should you yourself ever need help again?

  She rose, and he did also. “It is late,” she said, “and I must get to the theater.” She walked to the door, opened it, and went before him into the foyer. The maid was nowhere to be seen, but Ames had the sense that they were being watched.

  Mrs. Vincent took his things from the hall tree and handed them to him. When he’d thrown his cape around his shoulders and was reaching for his hat and gloves, she held out her hand to him and he took it. He felt the impact of her touch rocket through him. She fixed him in her lustrous eyes. “If I can be of any help, you will tell me,” she said. “I am tied to the schedule of my performances, but otherwise you can find me here.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you will let me know how you do?” She was holding his hand in both her own.

  “Yes.”

  His heart hurt a little when she released him. And then he was out in the hall, her door closed behind him. Too late, he wished he’d managed to say something more. As he waited for the elevator, as he went down and out into the street once more, as he stood on the sidewalk and gathered his wits, deciding what to do next so as to avoid returning home and getting in Caroline’s way—during all that time he realized that he had the sense of having narrowly escaped some dangerous episode. If he had stayed, if he had kissed her hand instead of merely holding it …

  Stop it.

  She had asked him for help. That was enough—for now.

  The rain had lessened, but the chilly damp of the thaw still blanketed the city. He took a deep breath of the salty air and began to walk.

  At No. 16½ Louisburg Square, Dr. MacKenzie alighted from the herdic. As always when he returned to this place, he felt his heart lift at the thought of seeing Caroline Ames. She would be busy now, of course, because there were only a few hours until her guests arrived, and he’d have no hope of a word with her, or a cup of late afternoon tea by the parlor fire. But still, he would know she was near, he would feel her presence in the house, making of it the home he’d never had, not since his childhood. And even then, that childhood home had not meant to him what this one did.

  He took off his hat and gloves and hung his overcoat on the hall tree. His cane stood, unused, in the umbrella stand. He hated it, was glad he didn’t need it anymore. Caroline was just coming up from the kitchen as he went into the front hall.

  “Oh! Dr. MacKenzie! I thought it was Addington.”

  Her hair was disarranged, and a grease spot soiled her apron. The cuffs of her sleeves were turned up, revealing a smear of flour on one forearm.

  “He has not returned?”

  “No.” A frown creased her smooth white brow. “I know it sounds selfish of me, but I don’t like to think of him wi
th that woman.”

  He understood: For all her kind and generous heart, Caroline Ames, like all respectable women, was deeply suspicious of actresses. Even actresses like Serena Vincent, who had come from her own class.

  “He will be back soon, no doubt.” He tried to sound reassuring. Despite her beauty, Serena Vincent was not the kind of woman he himself would ever be attracted to, but he did not yet know Addington Ames well enough to judge Ames’s susceptibilities. The man had hidden depths to him, a romantic side to his temperament that MacKenzie had been surprised to discover: Only last fall, Ames had been scheduled to travel to Egypt, to the Valley of the Kings, on an archaeological expedition with one of his former professors at Harvard. The professor had broken his leg, and so the trip had been canceled.

  Caroline had reverted to her immediate concerns. “The blancmange did not come right,” she said, almost as if she were thinking aloud. “And the hired girl cannot seem to understand that I do not want the napkins laid flat, but folded to stand straight, as I showed her—and she cannot master the folding.”

  Suddenly she slumped against the wall. MacKenzie, alarmed, put out a hand to steady her.

  “My dear Miss Ames, if you will allow me to speak in my professional capacity—you need to rest a bit. You are working yourself up into a nervous state over this dinner, and if I were your physician, I would order you to stop.”

  She gazed into his kind, worried eyes and managed a smile.

  “You are not my physician,” she said softly, “but I know you are right. Let us have tea together, Doctor, and you can tell me of your afternoon’s adventures.”

  He slid open the pocket doors to the front parlor, and Caroline pulled the bellpull by the fireplace to summon Margaret. Then she sank onto the sofa and smiled at MacKenzie again.

  “You see how reasonable I am, Doctor. Twelve people coming tonight, and yet I obey you because I trust your opinion.”

  He heard the sound of hooves on cobblestones, and he went to the window to look out through the lavender-glass panes. In the gathering darkness, the bare trees in the little iron-fenced oval seemed like twisting arms ready to snatch the unwary interloper, and the shrubbery, shriveled in the winter cold, looked as if it hid goblins ready to pounce. The lights in the tall redbrick town houses across the way glimmered with the suggestion of sanctuary.

  A four-wheeler clattered by. He gave himself a little mental shake. He reminded himself that aside from being reluctant to spend even the smallest sum on something (like a cab) that he found unnecessary, Ames was a dedicated walker. He roamed the city at all hours, loping in his long stride, thinking, thinking—about what? MacKenzie hardly knew. Ames was a man of many interests, most of them intellectual. In a way, although he had graduated from the College years before, he’d never stopped being a student. He was an autodidact, always studying some esoteric subject or other, a faithful patron of the Athenaeum, visiting his former professors across the river for conversations that lasted long into the night.

  Margaret appeared with their tea, and Caroline poured and offered MacKenzie his cup as he came back to her.

  “And what did you discover this afternoon, Doctor?”

  He settled himself into what had become his own chair, a Morris rocker. “Not much.”

  “You found the girl who was expelled from the Bower?”

  “Yes.” He frowned at the memory.

  “And?”

  “I doubt she could have been responsible for the crimes. She was very ill—with pneumonia, I think.”

  “She was bedridden?”

  “Yes.” In a stinking room in a stinking tenement, although he would not tell her that. “She was very weak, with a high fever. She did not want to talk to me at first, but then, when she realized what I was asking her, she vehemently denied any involvement in Mary Flaherty’s death. It seemed unnecessary to ask her about the second girl.”

  “Well, at least you have discovered that much—that she is one less person we need to consider.”

  He caught the “we,” and he met her gaze, which had suddenly turned defiant.

  “Yes, Doctor. We. I know Addington does not want me to involve myself in this matter, but how can I not? Poor Agatha! I do hope she will come this evening. You’re sure she said she would?”

  “Yes. And the reverend as well.”

  MacKenzie was torn. He understood—and applauded—her urge to help her friend. But her brother was right: Bertram’s Bower was no place for a lady like Caroline Ames.

  But he understood, as well, that despite her charming exterior, she was a woman made of stern stuff. Underneath her pretty coiffure lay a mind as keen, in some ways, as her brother’s, despite the fact that it had never been educated beyond Miss May’s School for Girls. And her character, too, was steely and determined, infused with a fierce sense of right and wrong. He knew that the Ameses’ formidable aunt Euphemia, who lived over on Chestnut Street, had been a stalwart in the fight for abolition decades ago before the war; some of her blood ran in the veins of this delightful woman before him now, and inevitably, it would find a way to announce itself.

  She smiled at him again. “You will think me strong-minded,” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Oh, yes. I can see it in your eyes. You think I am an Amazon, and at any moment I will start to agitate for the vote.”

  He cringed a little. Given the opportunity, would Caroline Ames join the suffragists?

  “No,” he said. “I do not think that.”

  She laughed at him. “Well, to be perfectly frank with you, Doctor, I do not care if you do. But woman suffrage is not our problem at the moment, is it?”

  Despite her laughter, her voice was strained. He watched her for a moment, and then he said, “Miss Ames, do you not think you should go up to your room to rest for a while before you dress for dinner? I am sure that Cook has everything well in hand—”

  “But I am not,” she retorted. “Dear heaven, that reminds me—the blancmange! She said she’d do it over, and she sent down to the market for another two dozen eggs. I don’t even know if they’ve come. Please excuse me, Doctor.”

  As she sprang up, they heard the front door slam. Ames, home at last, thought MacKenzie. Well, that should ease her mind a bit.

  She slid open the pocket doors.

  “Addington! I am so glad you’re back! Cook is in a temper, and we don’t have our blancmange yet, and—”

  She broke off. Through long years of experience, she knew better than to bother him with her domestic concerns; this was no time to begin.

  She hesitated, torn between her need to tend to affairs in the kitchen and her desire to hear what he might have to report. And so when he came into the room, she followed him.

  “Well?” she said. “And what did Mrs. Vincent want?”

  He accepted the cup of tea she handed him and took his accustomed place by the fire.

  “She wanted what you want, Caro,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  Should he tell them the story he’d heard from Serena Vincent—her abandonment, her disgrace, her rescue by Agatha Montgomery? No.

  “She is a strong supporter of the Bower,” he said.

  “She is? You mean financially? I never knew that.”

  “Yes, well, I imagine she and Miss Montgomery both wish to keep it quiet. Her money is not quite so pure as some.”

  They heard the unmistakable note of sarcasm in his voice.

  “And so she asked you to help?”

  “Yes.”

  Caroline struggled with it, and her better nature won. “I am glad she did that. Good for her. I never would have thought that someone like Mrs. Vincent—”

  “Had an altruistic bone in her body?” Ames finished for her.

  She lifted her chin. “No, Addington. That is not what I meant. What I meant was, she left the world of good works behind when she took up her life on the stage. I always think of actresses and artists and such as rather selfish, self-absorb
ed creatures. Which I suppose they have to be. I never would have thought of her as being concerned for women less fortunate than herself.”

  “You call Serena Vincent fortunate? When she suffered disgrace that would have killed many women?”

  “Yes, but she turned it to her advantage, didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he replied softly. “She did.”

  There was a silence as he stared into the fire. Then MacKenzie said, “I found that girl, Ames.”

  “Ah.” Ames came back from his reverie and turned his dark eyes on his lodger. “And did she confess?”

  “Hardly. She was very ill. I doubt that she could have been up and about two or three nights ago.”

  “Hmmm. Well, then, at least we have eliminated her. After I left Mrs. Vincent, I went across the river. I took the electric cars”—a new wonder, a marvelous improvement over the horse-drawn omnibuses—“to visit Professor Harbinger.”

  “Your Egyptologist friend at Harvard.”

  “Yes. I thought he might be able to tell me something about that very odd note that Crippen showed us.”

  “And did he?” MacKenzie asked.

  “No. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. We went through all kinds of possibilities—a simple transposition code, the cipher wheel, the Vigenère Table, the St. Cyr Slide, a cipher square with a key word—”

  “Excuse me, miss.” The pocket doors slid open to reveal Margaret, looking harassed. “If you could come down—Cook’s sayin’ she’s goin’ to leave this instant, and the hired girl’s takin’ a fit—”

  And so Caroline’s moment of respite came to an end, and with an exclamation of alarm she hurried out.