The reverend’s hand tightened on the mantel as if he were afraid he would collapse, but his gaze did not falter.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“No. You cannot possibly see.” Montgomery shook his head violently, as if he would shake all his bad memories away. “Agatha is so very … involved with the Bower. It is all she has—all she needs. She is not afflicted, as I am, with a taste for—” His eyes swept the room. “For all this. I cannot help it, Mr. Ames. I cannot live, as she does, a life deprived of beauty. Of beauty in all its forms—fine paintings, objets d’art, elegant clothes. Agatha can wear the same dress day in, day out, and never notice. She can live in one bare room at the Bower and never really see it, much less hate it. But I—I am different, you see.”
Let us get to the point, MacKenzie thought; we are not your congregation, to be swayed by your eloquence.
“And Mary was a very pretty girl,” Montgomery went on. “Very pretty indeed. When she came to us, she was quite ill. We—Agatha, I mean—brought her back to health. And then one day, in the late summer, I went to the Bower on some business or other, and it was as if I were seeing her for the first time. She put herself in my way, of course. She wanted me to notice her, and I did. I did.…”
He trailed off.
Ames glanced at MacKenzie, and a wordless message passed between them: Say nothing, no matter how long he rambles on, say nothing to distract him from what he will tell us in the end.
“She was not an innocent,” Montgomery said. “Oh, no. Far from it. But you know what they are, those girls at the Bower. Their innocence has been destroyed long before Agatha takes them in. It can never be restored, never repaired. But the odd thing is—Mary looked innocent. She had that fresh-faced, girlish appearance, as if she’d never known a man in her life. And when she—when she put herself in my way, I thought, why not? It was not as if I were deflowering her, after all. She’d made her living on the streets before she came to Agatha’s, and she knew a few tricks too, I don’t mind telling you.”
Suddenly, horribly, he leered at them.
“So I took her,” he said. “Why not? She was a … reward, of a kind, for all my years of devotion to the Bower.”
Ames thought of what Serena Vincent had told him, he thought of what Dr. Hannah had told Caroline, but he gritted his teeth and stayed silent.
“Yes,” Montgomery said. “A reward. It never occurred to me that she would let herself become pregnant. They have ways, don’t they, those girls on the streets, of preventing it? Sinful as they are, what is one more little sin like that—interfering with Nature? I thought Mary would do the same. It never occurred to me that she had another agenda entirely.”
“Which was marriage,” Ames said.
Montgomery grimaced. “Yes,” he said. “The slut wanted to marry me. Can you imagine? I would as soon marry that old battle-ax Carry Nation.”
“And Miss Montgomery knew all this?”
“Eventually—I suppose inevitably—yes.”
“Even the coded notes?”
“Mary must have told her about those. Certainly I never did.”
“Why do you say that your sister betrayed you, Reverend?”
“Because—” Montgomery paused, wiped his hand down over his face, and took a deep breath. “The Medusa head,” he said simply.
“I don’t follow.”
“Damn it, man! Don’t you see? I didn’t kill that girl tonight! And when it becomes necessary, as it undoubtedly will, for me to account for my time, I will do so, no matter the embarrassment. Yes—I was at the Black Sea just now. I admit it. I often take dinner there. Then I find a girl and bring her back here for the evening. The atmosphere is somewhat better here than there.” He thought for a moment. “I was on my way there tonight, when I came upon your sister. It was most foolhardy of her to be out alone after dark, particularly in this district. She began to run away from me. She must have feared that I was about to attack her. She tripped and fell. Fortunately for her I am not the Bower killer, or I would have had an easy victim. She refused to allow me to accompany her home, but at least I was able to help her into a herdic. She has told you about it? Yes. After that, I went to the Black Sea.”
“And the conference in Cambridge?” Ames asked.
“I planned to join them tomorrow. To be frank, two days in the company of my fellow ministers is more than I can endure.”
He peered at Ames, squinting a little, as if his vision had suddenly clouded.
“So you see, Mr. Ames, I did not kill that girl tonight. I lost the coin a few days ago. Someone found it and planted it on the girl’s body—someone who knew it was mine, someone who wanted to implicate me in her death.”
Ames waited. Then, when Montgomery did not continue, he said, “Your sister?”
“Yes.” The reverend’s eyes were blank, his voice—his fine preacher’s voice—hollow.
“It was my impression that Miss Montgomery is devoted to you. Why would she try to implicate you in a murder?”
Montgomery gave a short, harsh laugh. “You do not know Agatha very well, Mr. Ames. She is—was, I should say—exceptionally devoted to me, yes. Or she always has been, until—what was it? Three days ago? When one of your guests spoke out of turn, and tactlessly brought up the subject of my impending marriage to Mrs. Wilson.”
“The wealthy widow in New York.”
“Yes.”
“Miss Montgomery had not known of your plans?”
“No. I had intended to tell her, of course, but not so soon. I suppose she felt … betrayed, in some sense. Abandoned, perhaps.”
“It hardly seems sufficient reason—”
“As I said, Mr. Ames, you do not know Agatha. I suppose she saw the collapse of all her life’s work if I should cease my efforts in her behalf. My so very successful”—he swept his hand to encompass the room—“financial efforts.”
She saw something more even than that, MacKenzie thought. She loved you for more than your fund-raising, Reverend. Did you know that? Do you know it now?
“And so she took her revenge by making it look as if you killed Peg Corcoran tonight,” Ames said.
“Was that her name? I can’t place her. But, yes, it was Agatha—it must have been—taking her revenge on me. For my sins,” he added sarcastically.
“And the other girls?” Ames said quietly. “Mary? Bridget?”
Montgomery took a deep breath. “I knew nothing of how Mary met her death until the next evening, when the girl who roomed with her—Bridget Brown—came hammering at my door. She had known, apparently, of Mary’s condition—and of my part in it. She was overcome with grief, with anger. She came to accuse me, to threaten to expose me to the authorities. But she hardly had time to say more than a few words, when Agatha came.” He paused, remembering. “We were standing in the front hall. Agatha came rushing in. Before I realized what she meant to do, she had attacked the girl.” He spoke as if he were reciting a dream, thought MacKenzie. A nightmare.
“I must have worked half the night to wash the floor,” Montgomery went on. “Fortunately, I do not keep servants, so there was no one to see … what I did.”
“And the body?” said Ames.
“The body. Yes. Dear God, the body.” He drew a deep, harsh breath. “I waited until—until much later that night. Then I took it to—I don’t remember. An alley.”
“Miss Montgomery?”
“Returned to the Bower. They had seen her run out after Bridget. She told them she’d searched for her without success. They accepted it.”
“Her skirts must have been soaked with blood.”
“Yes. She washed them in the kitchen sink here. I imagine that at the Bower, they thought her dress had gotten wet—very wet—in the rain.”
“Was it then she told you about Mary?”
“You mean that she’d killed her? Yes. I could not believe it at first, but after seeing how she’d attacked Bridget—in a frenzy, a madness—I did.”
“But her murder of Mary was not a sudden frenzy. It was planned. She lured her out of the Bower with a coded note—”
“Yes. She feared that Mary would disgrace me—and the Bower as well. As she might have done in the end, of course. So Agatha was angry with Mary, but even more, she feared her.”
“And when she discovered your plans to marry, she felt betrayed by you as well, and turned on you? You believe that she killed a third girl for no reason but to throw suspicion on you?”
“It seems so, yes.” The reverend’s face was bleak, his voice flat with exhaustion.
“Crippen has arrested the Irish boy,” Ames said. “But when I spoke to Miss Montgomery this evening, she said she did not believe Garrett was guilty.”
“Did she say whom she suspected?”
“No.”
“She means to implicate me. That is obvious.” Montgomery looked suddenly afraid. “When the police realize that the coin is mine—”
“We must go to her—we must confront her, insist that she confess—take her to Crippen!”
“But—”
“What, man? Come on, we must go at once!”
“Then I will be—what do they call it? An accessory.”
“Yes, undoubtedly you will.” Ames threw him a scornful glance. “But the authorities have ways of dealing with accessories. As I understand it, they will treat you gently if you provide them with evidence against her.”
Both Ames and MacKenzie were appalled to see the look of relief that passed over the reverend’s face.
“All right,” Montgomery muttered. “Let us go to her and get done with this miserable business once and for all.”
At Bertram’s Bower, the windows were still brightly illuminated behind the drawn shades. As the three men approached, the uniformed patrolman intercepted them and ordered them to halt. He was appeased when Ames stepped forward to identify himself.
“Beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “I’m ordered to question everyone, you understand.”
They hurried up the steps, and Ames sharply brought down the brass knocker. He had no idea what to expect from Agatha Montgomery: hysterics, denial, an attempt to implicate someone—anyone—else?
The door flew open.
“You’ve come back—” It was Matron Pratt. When she saw who they were, she collected herself and assumed her normal hostile demeanor. “Mr. Ames,” she said curtly. “And Reverend—”
“Whom were you expecting, Matron?” Ames asked, but already he knew, and his heart sank.
“She went out,” Mrs. Pratt said, not moving aside to allow them to enter.
“When?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that either. She said she had an errand to do.”
“At this hour of a Saturday night?” said Ames. “And after—” He turned to the reverend, who stood on the step below him. “Where could she have gone? Have you any idea?”
“None. I cannot imagine—”
But Ames, suddenly, could. Into his mind’s eye had come a vision of the company at Caroline’s dinner party three nights before. He saw the ladies in their finery, the men in their more subdued attire. And very distinctly, he saw the Reverend Randolph Montgomery, standing with the others in the parlor before they went in to dinner. He was certain—yes, absolutely—that Montgomery had had a gold disc dangling from his watch chain.
“Reverend, when did you say you first missed the Medusa head?”
He heard the Bower’s door slam shut behind them as they descended to the sidewalk.
“I’m not sure,” Montgomery replied. “Thursday, I think.”
“So you probably had it on Wednesday.”
“Yes. In fact, I am sure I did, because someone admired it on Wednesday afternoon.”
“So. Between then and Thursday—”
“What are you getting at, Mr. Ames?”
“I am getting at—” Suddenly it came to him in a rush, and he nearly choked on it.
“Doctor—you have your weapon at home?”
“Yes.”
“I pray you won’t need it, but—you must go there at once. Only hope you arrive in time, before she—”
“Who, Ames?” said the reverend. Already MacKenzie, disregarding the pain in his knee, was hurrying down the square in search of a herdic.
“Why—your sister, man!” Ames was nearly shouting now. “If I am not mistaken, she has gone to Caroline to make sure—Go on! Go with MacKenzie! You may need to deal with her! She is your sister after all. She may listen to you. Go on!”
Finally Montgomery seemed to understand. With an exclamation of alarm, he hurried after the doctor, down to the avenue where a herdic, on this foul night, might be found.
Ames bounded back up the Bower’s steps and, ignoring the door knocker, pounded on the wooden panel.
“Matron!” he called. “Open—at once!”
The door swung back.
“What?” Mrs. Pratt began, but Ames pushed past her, into the hall where the Bower’s telephone was. He’d never used a telephone, and so now he hesitated, but only for a moment, as he stared at the wooden box and its appendages.
“How does this thing work?” he demanded. Matron Pratt had followed him and stood now at his side, breathing heavily.
“Why?”
“Damnation, woman! Never mind why! This is an emergency, and if you do not tell me how to operate this confounded contraption, I will have you charged with interfering with a police investigation!”
Seeming unintimidated by his threat, still she stepped forward, seized the handle attached to one side of the box, and cranked it hard, four times. Then she lifted a black earpiece attached to a tube and held it out to him. “Hold this to your ear. Speak here, into this. Tell the operator who you want.”
In an amazingly short time, Ames was connected, but the connection was so poor he could hardly understand what the person on the other end of the line was saying, and it was obvious that person could not understand him either, even when he shouted. Which he felt he needed to do, else how could someone a mile and more distant—two miles—ever hear him? After a moment more of frustration, he slammed down the earpiece and without a further word to Mrs. Pratt, hurried out.
At the other end of the square, the patrolman was just finishing a circuit. When Ames insisted that he needed to get to Inspector Crippen at once, the man produced his clacker and whirled it rapidly, making a tremendous noise in the quiet night. In no more than a few seconds, a police wagon appeared and Ames clambered in.
“Whip up the horses, man! There is no time to lose!”
In the parlor at no. 16½, Agatha Montgomery leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, which poked up sharply through the thin stuff of her skirt, not properly swaddled in layers of petticoats as they should have been. But she has no money for petticoats, Caroline thought; she has no money for anything except the Bower. And what money she has, she gets from the reverend.
“Caroline, can you imagine how I felt when I learned of Mary’s condition?”
“Her condition?” Caroline repeated faintly. Had Agatha known it all the time?
“No. Of course you cannot. No one can. That girl whom I had rescued from the streets—as I rescue all of them, but—she was different. She was—” Miss Montgomery broke off as if she were remembering what Mary had been. “Do you know, I actually thought that someday, Mary might take my place as directress of the Bower? Can you imagine such foolishness?”
She paused. She was breathing heavily.
Tea, Caroline thought. If only I could get her to drink a cup of tea, and eat something—
“She was a slut!” snarled Miss Montgomery, her pale eyes blazing. “A vicious little trollop who tried to blackmail him into marriage!”
Her voice broke, and for a moment, she clapped her hand over her mouth as if she were ashamed of her weakness.
A cup of hot tea, Caroline thought. And then Dr. MacKenzie, when he comes back,
can tend to her professionally, give her a few drops of chloral hydrate to sedate her.
“As if my brother—my brother—would ever allow himself to be trapped like that! You have taken leave of your senses, Mary my girl, I told her. She defied me. She threw it up to me—that she carried his child. Can you imagine? She thought she would get him in the end, but she was wrong. I could never have allowed her to do that, could I?”
Miss Montgomery wiped away a tear. “Don’t you understand, Caroline? I could never have allowed her to marry my Randolph. It would have been his ruin—and ours. Not that I had any sympathy for him, mind you. No, indeed. Men are so weak, aren’t they? So weak, so easily taken in by a scheming female.”
The bellpull, Caroline thought. It was only a few steps away, hanging by the mantel. If she could stand up, surely she could bear to put her weight on her foot for just a step or two, and then Margaret would come—
But then she remembered that surely, by now, Margaret had gone, and Cook along with her.
“Bridget knew,” Miss Montgomery said. “She confronted me the day after Mary’s death. She knew of Randolph’s involvement with Mary, and she knew of Mary’s condition. She said she intended to go to Randolph and make him confess. Confess! Can you picture it?”
She paused, as if she were reordering her thoughts. A sudden burst of rain spattered against the windows, sounding very loud in the silent room.
Caroline realized that she had been clenching her hands. She looked down and saw the small, bright red half-moon cuts where her nails had dug into her palms.
“Randolph had to work half the night to clean up her blood,” Miss Montgomery went on. “We were indoors—in his front hall—and so there was no rain to wash it away. He was very good about it. He never complained. He said it would be our secret, his and mine. No one would ever know, he said. But all the time he had another secret of his own that he never told me.”
She had begun to cry. She made small, wheezing, whistling sounds—horrid sounds—while her mouth quivered and tears ran down her long, pale cheeks.
Caroline fumbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief. For once in her life, she didn’t have one. A napkin, then, from the tea tray—
MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER Page 28
