Murder in the North End

by P. B. Ryan

  Will had understood this, which was why he’d chosen to take his extended sojourn away from Boston as a reprieve from the agony of their being together, yet ultimately apart. He’d been surprised to see her at the railroad station that morning, until she’d reminded him of the offer he’d made to her once, in a moment of weakness: one kiss from her—just one, he would never ask for another—and he would remain in Boston. They would go on as before, never speaking of those things better left unsaid. The kiss would be the end of it.

  Ah, but the kiss, when it came, had been the end of nothing, and the promise of far too much. It had been wondrous, devastating, the admission of a secret longing that should never have been acknowledged. A door had been opened, and they both knew, without having to discuss it, that if they walked through that door, she could lose everything.

  And so he’d boarded that train just as it was pulling out of the station, for her sake, his scarf flying off as he’d sprinted across the platform. Nell had picked it up off the granite pavement, her damp cheeks smarting in the cold, and brought it home. She’d taken his top hat, too, which had dropped to the ground during the kiss, and stored it in a hatbox on the top shelf of her clothespress.

  Unwrapping the tissue for the first time since tucking the scarf away in the drawer, Nell rubbed the liquid-smooth silk between her fingers. She unfolded it and held it to her nose, inhaling a whisper of Bay Rum, a trace of tobacco. In the months before leaving Boston, Will had cut down dramatically on the number of cigarettes he smoked, but he’d had one that morning while waiting for his train. Something to soothe me and keep me occupied when I can’t quite abide the world and my role in it.

  The bittersweet scent of the scarf made Nell’s eyes sting. God, how she’d missed him these past six months—that droll wit, that intimate smile, that velvety-deep voice, British-accented from his youthful exile in England. It was as if a great void had been carved from her chest, leaving her empty, needy. She’d always prided herself on her independence and self-reliance, yet here she was, close to tears over the absence of someone who could never be more to her than a friend—the dearest friend she’d ever had. How had this man—this cardsharp, this rake—come to feel like the other half of herself?

  There came a muted creak from the hallway. Nell turned to see a yellowish ribbon of light beneath the door to her room; she’d left the hall lights off when she’d gone to bed.

  Heart kicking, she shoved the scarf back in the drawer and plucked a hatpin from the porcelain holder on her dresser. A door squeaked open, the door from the hall to the adjacent nursery.

  I could crack any lock in this house in less than a minute.

  Nell crossed herself with a quaking hand, whispering a hurried prayer to St. Dismas. She padded on bare, silent feet to the hall door and stood, listening.

  Through the next door down, which led to the nursery, she heard that one loose floorboard groan beneath the Persian rug. He must be looking for her. He’d notice the door connecting her room to the nursery and try that next.

  Very cautiously, so as not to betray her presence, she opened the door to the hall and ran. As she passed the open nursery door, a man yelled, “Whoa there!”

  Nell tore down the gaslit hallway, footsteps gaining from behind. She was almost at the landing when he seized her from behind, toppling her off balance.

  She twisted faceup as she hit the carpeted floor, hauling back with the hatpin. Go for an eye, she thought as he fell on top of her.

  “Nell!” He grabbed her wrist—grabbed both of her wrists—and pinned them to the floor, saying, “Bloody hell. Are you trying to blind me?”

  She stared up at the familiar, darkly handsome face, a lock of inky hair hanging over his forehead.

  “Will? Oh, my God.” This was real, he was actually here, it was actually Will. Nell shook her head as if it would settle her whirling thoughts. “I’m...I’m sorry,” she said on a flutter of nervous laughter. “I...I thought you were Skinner.”

  “Skinner? Charlie Skinner?” Will released her wrists and levered himself off her, pushing his hair back into place. “What the devil would he be doing here in the middle of the night?”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked as she rose onto her elbows.

  “I might ask you the same thing.” Rising to his feet—awkwardly, given the old bullet wound in his leg—he offered her his hand. “Aren’t you supposed to be on the Cape?”

  “Something’s come up,” Nell said as she took his hand.

  He helped her off the floor, his gaze lighting on her bare arms and legs. Heat flooded her face as she realized her state of undress; all she had on was her summer night shift, a short, sleeveless wisp of tissue-thin linen.

  He gallantly turned his back, saying, “I, um...I’ll fetch your wrapper.”

  She followed him on rubbery legs to her room, her arms wrapped rather pointlessly around herself, her mind a turmoil of embarrassment, joy, and confusion. Will’s long-legged gait was perhaps a bit more graceful than it had been when she’d last seen him. She hoped he hadn’t gone back to numbing his pain with opiates.

  “Will, why are you here?” she asked as he lifted her blue plaid wrapper from the foot of her bed and handed it to her, all the while keeping his gaze discreetly averted. “I thought you’d still be in Shanghai.”

  “I came back a bit earlier than I’d expected,” he said as he lit the candle on her nightstand. He turned as she was shrugging into the wrapper, crossed to her in one stride, and tugged it down off her shoulders.

  She sucked in a breath. “What—?”

  “How did this happen?” he asked, gripping her left arm just below the ring of bruises there. “These are finger-marks. Someone’s been manhandling you.”

  “Skinner,” she said on a sigh.

  He met her gaze, eyes shadowed and jaw outthrust in that ominous scowl she’d found so intimidating when she was first getting to know him. He frowned at the bruises, stroking a thumb over them, the gentle friction raising goose bumps up and down her arm. “What happened?”

  Nell sat on the edge of the bed, gathering the wrapper about her, and buttoned it from the throat down it while she told Will about Skinner’s visit. Will leaned against the bedpost with his arms crossed as he listened, swearing under his breath from time to time.

  Pushing off the bedpost, hands fisted, he said, “That cur needs to be taught a lesson.”

  “I’m more concerned with Detective Cook. I doubt Skinner even considered other suspects once he realized he could railroad Detective Cook. If it’s left up to him, Cook will hang for sure. I’ve got to find out what really happened, how this Johnny Cassidy ended up dead.”

  “Ah, Nell...” Will raked his hands through his hair. “You and your missions of justice.”

  “Colin Cook is my friend, Will,” Nell said with conviction. “He’s a good man, and I’m not about to let him hang if there’s anything I can do about it.”

  “Of course not,” he said with a droll little smile. “You’re not that kind of friend—well I know it. But you do realize that, by going up against Skinner, you’re going up against the entire Boston Police Department. You’ll get no aid from that quarter—quite the opposite. Constables stick together.”

  “I’m not saying it will be easy.”

  “Nothing with you ever is.” Will lowered himself onto the bed, reclining on his side as casually as if they were any two chums having a late-night chat. That easy intimacy was something she’d missed terribly these past six months. “So, how is it that you propose to extract the good Detective Cook from Constable Skinner’s talons?”

  “It would help if I could find him, and then he could tell me what really happened.”

  “And why he’s evading justice.” After a thoughtful pause, Will said, “I, er, don’t suppose you’ve seriously considered the possibility that he’s guilty.”

  “Of murder?” She shook her head. “Impossible. I assume he fled because he knows it looks as if he did murder, and he
doesn’t want to hang for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “Watch those assumptions, Cornelia,” Will said with a little wag of the finger. It was a familiar admonition.

  “All right, then, perhaps his disappearance wasn’t voluntary. Perhaps the real murderer had something to do with it.” Nell leaned back onto the pillows mounded against her headboard, wrapping her arms around her updrawn legs. “There are a thousand questions that need answering. I don’t even know the circumstances of the crime, who this Johnny Cassidy was, why they think Cook did it. I must find him. Perhaps his wife knows something.”

  “Do you know her?”

  She shook her head. “We’ve never met, but Cook speaks of her often, in very loving terms. She’s Irish, like him. He quit drinking when he married her. That’s all I really know about her. I don’t even know her first name. He always calls her Mrs. Cook.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where they live.”

  “He bought a new house after he was promoted to the state constabulary. He said it was on...” She plumbed her memory. “Something...something to do with the Revolutionary War. Lafayette? Is there a Lafayette Street in Boston?”

  “There’s a Fayette Street,” Will said. “It’s in the Church Street District. Nice little neighborhood south of the Public Gardens.”

  “That must be it,” Nell said. “I’ll go there tomorrow and find the house, introduce myself to Mrs. Cook, see if she knows anything. Then I’ll head up to the North End and poke about a bit.”

  “Poke about a bit.” Will flopped down on his back, rubbing his hands over his face. “In the North End.” He emitted a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a chuckle. “Nell, Nell, Nell...”

  “That is where this killing took place,” she pointed out.

  “That is where a great many killings take place, my dear Cornelia. And a great many beatings and knifings and thefts and rapes, as you must no doubt be well aware.”

  “I know all about the North End, Will.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Raising himself up on an elbow, he looked her in the eye and said, “How much time have you actually spent up there, Nell?”

  “I’m there almost every Sunday morning.”

  “In the tame, rosy blush of dawn, with Brady escorting you to and from church in the family brougham. I think it’s safe to say you’ve never spent any appreciable time there. If you did, you’d know it’s not a place for a prim little thing like you to be ‘poking about.’ It’s where the worst gutter-prowlers and roughnecks in Boston live and prey on each other.”

  “I’ve been in bad neighborhoods before, Will,” she reminded him. “I’ve associated with those gutter-prowlers and roughnecks. Don’t forget, I was a dipping-girl myself once.”

  “Having your pocket picked is the least of the threats you’ll encounter up there.” He looked away for a moment with a preoccupied frown, as if sorting something out in his head. “If you insist on doing this, I’m going with you.”

  “I’ll probably end up protecting you,” she said with a grin. “It’s an Irish neighborhood, you know. I’m one of them.”

  “At one time, perhaps. Not anymore. You look like a Brahmin and talk like a Brahmin and act like a Brahmin. You’d be mad to wander ‘round there unescorted. And as for your staying here all alone...” He shook his head as he sat up, stretching his back. “It’s far too risky. I’ve no doubt Skinner could pick these door locks fairly easily. That’s how I got in. What if I’d been he?”

  “I would have stuck him in the eye with my hatpin,” Nell said.

  “Whereupon he might very well have bludgeoned you with his truncheon.”

  “He probably would have just shot me,” Nell said.

  “Shot you? They let that mullethead carry a sidearm?”

  “All the constables seem to be carrying them lately.”

  “You realize half of them started out as battlers and sneak thieves themselves. They didn’t have what it took to be successful crooks, so they joined the police force. Bad enough they’ve been given uniforms and badges—now they’ve been armed, as well?” Will shook his head disgustedly. “You’ve got to come stay at my house.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll be safe there.”

  “Will, you know I can’t do that. What would your housekeeper think? And your neighbors?”

  With a rueful smile, he said, “Have I ever let the opinions of others rule my actions?”

  “No, but I have. I must. You know that, Will. I’d be ruined if I were to be seen coming and going from your house at all hours.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Will, why did you come back so soon?” she asked, wanting to redirect the conversation. “You never really answered that.”

  He levered himself off the bed to stroll around the room, looking about curiously in the semidarkness. “These are quite nice,” he said as he perused the new drawings she’d tacked up on the wall. “This sketch of Gracie, in particular. You really captured that spark in her eye.”

  “Thank you,” Nell said, wondering why he was so reticent to discuss his reasons for returning from Shanghai. “She’s beginning to ask rather awkward questions.”

  “That’s what children do.”

  “Questions about her parentage. She’s overhearing things, things that are going to start adding up for her fairly soon.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as who fathered her.”

  Will stood looking at the sketch in silence.

  Nell said, “I can’t keep putting her off forever, Will. Sooner or later, she’ll find out, and I think it would be best if she found out from you.”

  “We’ve had this conversation before, Nell. I’m not the kind of man any young girl would want to acknowledge as her father.”

  “She already views you as a father figure. She still insists she wants to live with us after we’re married.”

  With a sigh, Will continued his pensive tour of her room. Pausing in front of her dresser, he pulled the gray silk scarf from the open drawer. “Is this mine?”

  She hesitated, her cheeks warming. “Yes, it’s...the one you were wearing at the train station when you left. It fell off. I’ve been keeping it for you. Your hat, too.”

  He stood looking at the scarf, seemingly lost in thought. After a long moment, he said, “Shanghai hasn’t changed. Still murky and mysterious and steeped in sin. Just as seductive as ever, in its own perverse way—if one is susceptible to that sort of thing.”

  She had to ask: “Did you smoke opium?”

  He took so long answering that she wondered if he’d heard her. Finally he said, “Yes.”

  Chapter 4

  “Oh, Will.”

  “Just once,” he said over his shoulder. “I, um, I’d drunk more than usual at the card table one night—I’d been feeling lonely—so of course I got careless and started losing. I cashed in and just...wandered the alleyways, smoking cigarettes, thinking too much, missing...”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, looked at her, then away. “I followed a whiff of opium smoke into this squalid little room. I woke up there the next morning with a smoking pistol in my hand, sick with shame. It had taken so much effort, so much pain and sickness to get myself free of that poison. I thought about you, and how appalled you would be, how disgusted.”

  “I would have understood,” she said.

  “Because you understand my weaknesses.” Turning to face her, he said, “You’ve never had any illusions about me. Why would you, considering the shape I was in when you met me? You know how flawed I am, yet still you’ve put up with me.”

  “I don’t just put up with you, Will,” she said quietly. “You know that.”

  Will met her eyes, and she knew he was remembering those final moments under the eave of the railroad station—the tears, the anguished parting...the breath-stealing kiss.

  Just one, he’d implored. I won’t ask for a second. Ever. I promise. And I’ll remain in Boston, and we can go on
as before.

  He looked down at the scarf, absently running it through his hands. “I went directly from the hop joint to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and booked passage back to San Francisco. I...actually thought about staying there.”

  “In San Francisco?”

  “It’s gone through some remarkable changes in the past few years. It’s becoming a real city, yet still with a certain raw western flavor that appeals to me. And I’d won a house on Sacramento Street in a game of faro—quite a nice one, actually, about half again as big as my house here, and newly built. I won it from a real estate speculator, and he could well afford to lose it, believe me—he’s making money hand over fist in that town. I thought about staying and...losing myself, you know? Let this brand new city just grow up around me like a giant cocoon. Forget who I’d been before, where I’d been before, forget...” He looked away from Nell’s gaze, his jaw tight. “In the end, I got on that train.”

  “How long have you been back?” she asked.

  “Since yesterday evening.”

  Steeling herself, she asked, “Will you be...leaving again, or...?”

  He shook his head, his gaze on the floor, hands shoved in his trouser pockets. “I don’t know, Nell. I really don’t. I had lunch with Isaac Foster today, and he said I’d be welcome back at Harvard any time. He’s keeping the position open for me, because there’s no one else who’s qualified to teach forensic studies. He even offered me a full professorship, but with a catch—I’ve got to give him a five-year commitment.”

  “Ah. Well, you can hardly blame him, can you?”

  With a rueful smile, Will said, “He knows me all too well.” Sobering a bit, he said, “I’ve received another offer, as well—or rather, a request. From the president.”

  “The president.” He couldn’t mean...

  “There was a letter from the White House on top of the stack of mail that was waiting for me when I got home yesterday. President Grant sent it a couple of weeks ago.”