The Widow's Secret

by Sara Mitchell

  “Thank you, Mr. Hobbes,” she managed, giddiness transforming into a tangled mix of hope and dread. The letter might be from Operative MacKenzie. He was probably writing to tell her he’d been ordered to California or the Wyoming Territory. She glanced down and all the blood drained from her head.

  “Have a doughnut,” she offered the mailman automatically, while the buzzing in her ears intensified so that she scarcely heard her own voice. “They’re fresh, from Bromm’s Bakery.”

  “Why, thank you kindly, Miz Tremayne. Ma’am.” He nodded to Katya, then whistled his way down the walk.

  Somehow Jocelyn managed to climb the porch steps and unlock the door. She could feel the weight of Katya’s curiosity pressing down on her shoulders; she dropped her cloak onto the hall tree, then wandered into the parlor, the envelope clenched in her hand.

  The Honorable Augustus Brock, New York City.

  Not Micah MacKenzie, but Chadwick’s uncle, his mother’s brother. Jocelyn’s last memory of Augustus Brock and his narcissistic wife, Portia, was the day of Chadwick’s funeral. Dressed in their hastily dyed mourning clothes, they’d glared at Jocelyn like two black ravens about to pick out her eyes. “He wouldn’t have been driven to commit such an abominable act of shame if you’d given him the child he longed for,” Augustus’s wife proclaimed loudly enough for the rest of the mourners to stiffen into appalled silence.

  “Don’t know why Rupert agreed to let his son marry you in the first place,” her husband muttered, his complexion flushed above the high shirt collar. “Who would have thought it—all that brass in your hair and you turn out to be barren. Disgrace to the whole family.”

  Jocelyn started violently when a hand brushed her arm, only then realizing that Katya was beside her, waving a piece of paper in front of her face. “Sorry.” She squeezed Katya’s hand, but after reading the words moved away, unable to bear even the loyal maid’s proximity. “It’s a letter from…some people I used to know. Be a dear, won’t you, and…and make us some tea?”

  Satisfied to have a task, Katya nodded and hurried from the room. Jocelyn collapsed onto the sofa. Why now? She felt like a puppet whose master delighted in dangling her over a fire. One day, she thought, the flames would leap up and consume her.

  Hurriedly, before she yielded to the urge to rip the letter unread into tiny pieces, she opened the envelope and withdrew two sheets of expensive vellum.

  To our niece, beloved widow of Chadwick. No doubt this missive will come as a surprise after all these years. It has long been upon my heart, and Mrs. Brock’s, that the family treated you most shamefully in its disregard for your health and well-being after the death of your dear husband. It is with deep regret to know that, perhaps influenced in part by our regrettably Bourbonic conduct, you felt compelled to forsake his name.

  Now there was a masterstroke of understatement for you. The entire Bingham clan, including the Brocks, had disowned Jocelyn before the gravediggers finished shoveling dirt over Chadwick’s coffin. One of the Brock cousins—she neither remembered nor cared which—had gone so far as to spit on her, claiming she was nothing but poor white trash, a pathetic creature whose hair and face had embarrassed Chadwick almost as much as her barrenness.

  The letter crumpled in her hands. Jocelyn inhaled a shuddering breath, flexed her fingers and forced herself to read the rest of it.

  After years of searching, at last we learned of your whereabouts. I thus most humbly beseech you to lay aside the acrimony you justifiably must feel, and to consider the following as an olive branch extended toward you—a gesture of our desire for reconciliation.

  It is our wish for you to return to New York for an extended visit, with the express purpose of allowing this family to atone for our shameful neglect. Time has given a far more charitable heart to myself and Mrs. Brock; I plead with you to consider this invitation as one made in utter sincerity. The past, like your beloved husband, is beyond our reach. We must fix our hearts and minds upon hope of a brighter future for us all, in which we can come to better know our dear niece. Even as I write, rooms are being readied for your arrival. Enclosed, as further proof of our goodwill, please find two one-way tickets in our private Pullman, the Aurora (as you may remember) for you and an appropriate chaperone.

  Your humble servant and contrite uncle-in-law, Augustus Brock.

  When Katya tiptoed in with a tray some time later, she found Jocelyn sitting on the edge of the sofa, bowed at the waist with her face in her hands, the wrinkled vellum sheets lying faceup on the floor.

  Micah returned to Richmond a day after the clear, cool autumn days of the past week blew into the Atlantic, driven out by another ill-tempered hot spell from the south. Indifferent to its cloying humidity, he rented a buggy from the livery stable and drove himself directly to the Third District Police Station.

  “Operative MacKenzie! ’Bout time you brought your ugly self back to help us poor clods of the Richmond Police.” George Firth, acting sergeant, greeted him with a congenial handshake—and the unpleasant news that “Your little redheaded widow’s got more trouble than a cemetery’s got head-stones.”

  “What’s happened? Has she been harmed? Why didn’t someone notify me?”

  The sergeant threw back his head and guffawed. “I’ll be…they wuz right, about you and Miz Tremayne. And here I am telling ’em you’re just a high-falutin’ government man, keeping his sticky fingers in our business.”

  Heat crept up Micah’s face. He felt like a rube, the target of public ridicule, but he counted to thirty and waited until the other man’s coarse jesting finally wound down. “I’ve been in constant touch with your chief, the Detective Bureau and the mayor, concerning Mr. Hepplewhite’s murder and its possible connection with my case. Mrs. Tremayne is part of that investigation,” he stated evenly. “Now, over the past few weeks I spent three days locked in an airless room, examining approximately $100,000 in fraudulent two-and five-dollar bills, not to mention over $20,000 in spurious coinage. Less than twelve hours later, I caught a midnight train heading west, and I’ve been on the road going on ten days now. I came here straight from the train station, I haven’t had a decent meal or a bath in—” he glanced at the large round clock on the wall across the room “—almost forty hours. So when I ask if Mrs. Tremayne is all right, you might want to let me know—at once.”

  “Oh-ho, tetchy today, eh? Fair enough. Now that you mention it, you do look frayed a bit around the edges. Here—Tenner! Fetch Sergeant Whitlock. We got our own gen-yoo-ine agent from the Treasury Department back in town. Fill him in, and let’s watch how fast he hightails it over to the widow Tremayne’s.”

  Micah tied the livery horse to a post three houses down from Jocelyn’s home, then checked the time. Seventeen minutes. He’d driven the buggy with imprudent haste through a maze of narrow streets, dodged two streetcars, an oncoming freight train, and clipped the wheel on a curb when he took a corner too fast on the edge of Monroe Park. He’d planned to return to Richmond a week earlier, but duty, not to mention Chief Hazen, bound him with chains he could not afford to break. Sighing, he thrust the watch back in his pocket. Ah, yes. Duty.

  Katya’s round face lit up like a harvest moon when she opened the door. But her gestures spoke of urgency as she bustled him into the front parlor.

  “Hello, Katya. You’re looking fine.” When the maid rolled her eyes, Micah smiled a little. “It’s all right, I came from the police station. I know about the break-in. Is she home?” he asked, glancing around the room, noticing the absence of a pair of green glass paperweights with flower etchings that had been displayed on the doily-covered table next to the window. A colorful urn in the foyer that had boasted several peacock feathers was also gone.

  He started to say something else, but the words drained out of his head when Jocelyn appeared between the fringed draperies lining the entrance to the parlor. “Mrs. Tremayne.”

  “Operative MacKenzie.”

  She hovered, seemingly uncertain about whether to ent
er, or perhaps flee up the staircase. Her reception was so contrary to Micah’s expectations that for a moment he floundered in his own swamp of indecision. Then he looked more closely into her eyes and realized that her lack of warmth stemmed from causes other than himself. “I believe we agreed that ‘Mister’ is less official-sounding. What’s happened, besides your home being vandalized?”

  “Oh…I’d forgotten. How did you know?”

  With a wry look, he gestured to his wrinkled, travel-worn attire. “I went from the train station to the police station to your house as fast as I could. I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. Katya’s back to looking anxious, and you’re looking—” he reeled in the words dancing indiscriminately on his tongue “—subdued,” he finished, and behind him Katya stomped the floor.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Jocelyn said, waving a limp hand at her maid. “There’s nobody else I can ask….”

  Micah waited, but when she didn’t elaborate, and a backward glance at the maid revealed her frantically writing in her tablet, he went with instinct. “Here.” He placed his hand under her elbow, exulting in the feel of her despite the alarming fragility that hovered all around her. “Come and sit down. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Anywhere you like.” He sat her down on one end of the luxurious sofa, and commandeered the other end for himself. “Perhaps…what happened the other night? The police report indicated that you weren’t home, so the only damage was to some of your possessions.” And he thanked God for it, though not aloud.

  Jocelyn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about that, not right now.”

  Katya thrust her paper into his hand. Tell her we can not to New York go, do not know these people.

  “New York?” Alarmed, he searched Jocelyn’s lackluster countenance. “Who is requesting your presence in New York?”

  Her complexion paled further, highlighting purple smudges beneath eyes that made her look far too old. “You needn’t glare as though I were guilty of a crime.” Her mouth flattened. “Or have you and Chief Hazen decided otherwise, and the purpose of this visit is to finally arrest me? Did you bring your handcuffs along with your badge?”

  “No, of course not.” Micah better recognized now the fear driving her barbed questions. It replicated the fear she had manifested from the day they’d met again in Clocks & Watches. Since he and Chief Hazen had decided not to badger her about her relationship with the Bingham family, opting instead to wait to see how things developed, her continued anxieties over being arrested were troubling. In Micah’s experience, only guilt promulgated this level of fear.

  And now—New York? Stalling, he folded his arms across his chest. “Katya, has your mistress always had a penchant for melodrama?”

  “She won’t understand ‘penchant’ or ‘melodrama,’” Jocelyn muttered, flushing. She shot Katya a quick look.

  The maid scowled as she wrote her response. She is afraid ever since a letter. You must help.

  “And I will, Katya.” A strand of Jocelyn’s hair had slipped free of its chignon and dangled behind her ear, an alluring temptation inches from the reach of his fingers. Above her ruffled collar, the creamy texture of her neck with those irresistible freckles begged to be touched. Micah blinked, then produced what he hoped was a coaxing smile. “Before I can help, first I need to understand how a letter can frighten you enough to want to flee.”

  “Katya, I’d like to talk to Oper—to Mr. MacKenzie alone for a few moments, all right?”

  She waited until the maid reluctantly left the parlor. “Mr. MacKenzie…I know our acquaintance has been brief, but from the moment I remembered—” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again Micah felt as though he’d fallen into a sea churning with despair. “My intention is not to take advantage of your kindness,” she whispered desperately, “but I—There’s no one else. I have no other choice. Chief Hazen obviously thinks highly of you, and I remembered that before you were assigned to Washington, you were the operative in charge, in New York. And…you knew Chadwick.”

  After an awkward pause she resumed speaking, her gaze fixed somewhere over Micah’s right shoulder. “My marriage was not a happy one. I was unable—We never had children. There were expectations. I failed. The Binghams renounced me.”

  She turned her head so that Micah could not see her face, but the toneless manifestation of her pain resonated inside his soul. Some griefs were harder to heal from than others, he thought, tamping more nails onto the lid of his own anguished memories.

  “It’s been five years since he died,” she said. “I’ve neither seen nor heard from anyone in my husband’s family. Until—” her voice wobbled, then steadied “—until I received a letter, the day before yesterday, from Chadwick’s uncle. A-Augustus Brock is Chadwick’s mother’s brother.”

  She might as well have slammed a baseball bat against the side of Micah’s head. “Mrs. Tremayne—Jocelyn. Whatever he said, whatever he wants, it’s all right. Everything will be all right.”

  “Don’t try to coddle me as though I were an invalid.”

  Despite his own shock, her reply made Micah want to smile. He resisted the urge; if his lips so much as twitched, she’d either shatter, or hand him his head on a silver plate.

  If he were smart, he’d remove himself from this case—and from Jocelyn—before the sun set.

  But he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t. Jocelyn Tremayne Bingham was in trouble, and for some reason God had seen fit to bring her back into Micah’s life.

  Or to bring Micah into hers.

  Thanks, Lord. I think. “There’s a difference between coddling and caring, you know.” When she continued to stare through him, he raised an eyebrow, then tried again. “Would you like me to read the letter?”

  “No. You were born in New York, you attended university there. I just want to know what you remember about the Binghams. If you ever met the rest of their family, specifically Augustus Brock.”

  She wouldn’t want to know what he knew about the Brocks, or the Binghams, but the time was fast approaching when her lack of knowledge could cost her her life. “My family did not move in those circles,” he told her, choosing his words carefully. “I believe you know that my father was Rupert Bingham’s head bookkeeper?” She nodded. “Yet it wasn’t your father-in-law, but Augustus Brock who wrote you the letter inviting you to come to New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say why?”

  After a protracted moment she nodded. “He said he regrets the way the family treated me. He wants to be…reconciled.”

  Every muscle in Micah’s body clenched in anticipation; his mind flatly rejected the prospect. “So you’re wondering why, after they ignored you all these years?” Moving slowly so he wouldn’t startle her, he sat forward on the edge of the seat. “Your own family died in a typhoid epidemic, you told me. But surely you have someone other than Katya to whom you could turn?”

  That garnered a quick look and a jerky headshake. Choosing his words, Micah continued speaking in a calm voice that belied his own perturbation. “Your husband’s family renounced you, so you renounced them by taking back your maiden name. You’ve lived here in Richmond for three years now, but I gather nobody here, including Katya, knows of your connection to the Bingham family, and you don’t want anyone to know.”

  “I’m the widow Tremayne,” she insisted, her hands twisting restlessly. “I don’t confide personal details to others. Katya is loyal, but this is not a burden she deserves, unless I decide to—” the breath seemed to stall in her throat “—unless I decide to accept his offer. I didn’t want to tell you, except you’ve been…kind. You even championed me, as it were, in front of Chief Hazen, which I know put you at risk. You already know who I am. What I…used to be, yet you went out of your way to protect me.” Her eyelids fluttered, and her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. In another woman the motion would have been provocative; Jocelyn Tremayne
only looked fragile, and achingly alone.

  Did he know her at all? Micah wondered. Would he ever?

  Not likely she would ever offer him the privilege, when he was honor-bound to expose her father-in-law and possibly her uncle-in-law as murdering scoundrels. Arrogant criminals wearing dinner jackets and diamond stickpins, who had funneled millions of counterfeit currency into the economy so they and their families could live in mansions.

  On the other hand, Micah felt equally honor-bound to do what he could to protect this vulnerable woman. After Chadwick died, she must have stumbled onto something incriminating, and run for her life.

  “I know who you married,” he corrected her. “And I know what has been happening in your life over this past month.” He couldn’t help himself. He reached out his hand, lightly brushing his fingers over her mottled knuckles, and felt the tingle of response all the way to the marrow of his bones. “I know you’re an independent woman, and a frightened woman. What I don’t know, Mrs. Tremayne, is whether or not you really want me to advise you on your choices, or if you’ve already made up your mind on how you plan to respond to your uncle’s letter.”

  She was staring at her hand, her lips half-parted; when she looked up, a fiery blush consumed her face. “Why did you do that?”

  Well, at least she hadn’t slapped him. Micah smiled at her crookedly. “Because I couldn’t help myself,” he admitted. When her hazel eyes darkened to jade, he added self-deprecatingly, “My mother would warn you that I’m not very polished around women. Since my wife died, I suppose I haven’t invested a lot of time cultivating the proper deportment of a gentleman.”

  “You were married?”

  Sighing, he searched for composure while he shared pieces of his own broken past. “I met Alice a couple of years after your marriage to Chadwick. I’d just graduated from college, landed my first job. At the time, I was a civil engineer. We fell in love, married six months later.”