Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

  But no. It couldn’t be! Hamish felt his stomach turn over and lurch. He knew what the glow meant, winking expensively in the streams of sunlight like crystal on fire. But wouldn’t she have told him if she was planning to take that next step away from him? Wouldn’t she have been a little less eager to show up every morning and let her head fall against his shoulder when he carried her soaking wet from the wharf?

  The first time he tried her name it stuck in the back of his throat. He tried it again and his voice rippled a little on the R. Then, in a voice he didn’t recognize, “Reg . . .”

  “Oh. Right.” She tucked her hand behind her back. “Well. Turns out I’m engaged.”

  “Congratulations.” His voice rippled on every consonant.

  “Only you could make congratulations sound like I’ve contracted Spanish influenza.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Neither was I.”

  What was that tone? It was clipped and elusive like one of the heroines in the pictures she liked when confronted with a beau from the past. Hamish studied the floor. Tears were harrowingly close to forming in his eyes and his hand was shaking something fierce. Every nerve and jitter and quake was suddenly very alive and aware and awake. He was going to get the girl. He figured he had time. He saw her every day. They solved puzzles and people together. She had become a constant. He looked up only to see the sun streaming through the wind slice over the pendant at her collarbone. The necklace he had given her. Spira, Spera.

  “Anything more on Toby?” Reggie said for the second time before he heard it.

  “No.”

  “Well . . .” Her tone was casual now—too casual—as she hoisted herself on the edge of her desk. Darned if that ring didn’t flash in the transition. Clearly expensive, blinding diamonds—one yellow—bright like the sun over the North Square or lemon cannoli or her smile.

  How fortunate you are that somebody loves you. Hamish mentally quoted Quasimodo telling Phoebus, the golden-haired soldier, that the object of his affection, Esmeralda, pined for him.

  * * *

  Reggie could make out that dimple in his cheek. He brushed a truant strand of hair from his forehead. She watched his profile when he turned away. Slight comma of ebony hair, strong profile, chin that jutted out, just a little, ears he most likely grew into in adulthood, unfathomably blue eyes magnified by black-rimmed glasses.

  “I made things strange between us, didn’t I?” Reggie asked, using the voice her mother taught her to use to apologize for breaking the Pellers’ floral heirloom vase, even though it was her schoolmate Jenny Wyatt’s fault.

  “I don’t know that you did, Reg. Maybe they were always meant to . . .” He was searching for a word, eyes darting to all four corners of the office. When he couldn’t pull it from the ceiling, he exhaled and shifted. His long legs stretched before him, ending in his customary two-toned shoes, scuffed a little at the edges from his fervent cycling.

  Then he crossed his feet one over the other and reached for a pen, simultaneously extracting a folder from a drawer. He tucked the pen behind his ear. It stuck out, just a little, always alert. Hamish was someone she had trouble imagining in complete repose.

  “Hamish, I don’t want you to think that . . .” Could she say anything without saying everything? “That I haven’t considered that you and I . . .”

  His head shot up, sending his glasses halfway down his nose. He readjusted them, a look of surprised expectation on his face.

  Reggie wondered if her face mirrored the melting endearment streaming through her. “I am very fond of you. We have this . . .” She stalled, crooking her mouth pensively. “Connection.”

  Why did the word have such an air of finality to it? Hamish’s eyelashes flicked over his cheekbones a few times. He remained silent.

  Connection. Was that the best she could do? Reggie inspected her nails: a little chipped at the tips from her last self-manicure. She studied the radio at the edge of her desk, then reached out and fiddled with the dial.

  Soon enough, the distinctive minor scale ushering in Winchester Molloy’s case du jour waffled through the speakers. Reggie turned up the volume, hoping the triad of chords undercutting the first muted conversation between Winchester and the femme fatale Veronica would draw Hamish’s attention up from contemplating the edge of his desk blotter. Reggie’s voice eventually did.

  “There’s more to this story than you know,” she said sadly, hoping he didn’t notice her fingers play delicately with the necklace tucked under her collar. Spira, Spera. The necklace he gave her on the roof of the Old North Church in thanks for the pearls she pawned to secure their office.

  “I don’t like not knowing just a bit of a story.” Hamish shrugged. “I guess it’s the lawyer in me.” He took a breath that was almost indistinguishable from the crackle of the radio. “Or maybe it’s the romantic.” And if she hadn’t been straining to hear and if she hadn’t been studying him, she might not have seen a flicker that showed his heart. She might have doubted he said it at all.

  “Hamish, why can’t we be just friends!”

  “Are you asking me or yourself?”

  “I-I don’t know! I don’t want to ruin anything.”

  “So . . .” He rolled his pencil across the desk and caught it. “We’ll be friends.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “I can’t be dishonest. Not with you. If I start talking, I will start talking, and then I won’t be able to stop any words. So I think”—the pencil rolled and he shoved it up again—“we should . . .” He flicked the pencil again and it made a farther trail before returning.

  Reggie flinched. “Stop rolling that infernal pencil!”

  “There’s a Christian Patriots meeting tonight,” Hamish said, his voice drained of color. “If you can attend unchaperoned with me.”

  Reggie soured. “Vaughan is willing to make a lot of exceptions for me, Hamish. Because he wants us to be friends.”

  “Well, we’ll go make it work.”

  * * *

  At the strike of noon, with a slight nod to Reggie and a polite smile for Hamish, a man lowered himself into the seat across from Hamish. Not just any man. Joe from the baseball field. The team was on the road and Joe had time on his hands. Reggie rose and leaned against the wall, just under the window, one shoe crossed over the other at the hem of her light cotton, high-waist trousers.

  “How may we help you?” asked Hamish. Then, clearly recalling that the man didn’t say much the day they visited the ballpark to question Errol about the pranks, Hamish retrieved a pencil and legal pad from his desk.

  Joe nodded and moved to sit in front of Reggie’s desk. Reggie slid into the seat Joe vacated on the other side of Hamish’s desk. She studied Hamish’s scrawl on a fresh legal pad.

  He raised an eyebrow, sliding the paper to her side of the desk. Does he seem at all guilty to you? Wouldn’t he have seen what had happened? Hamish had jotted.

  Reggie read Hamish’s neat, slanted writing and looked furtively at Joe. He was taking careful consideration, at least according to his body language.

  Reggie looked at Hamish and filled the lines under his questions. I don’t know. But he knows more than he lets on. He observes.

  She slid the paper back. Joe looked up and Hamish quickly grabbed a folder, innocently looking through it.

  Reggie laughed. In his quick movement Hamish had knocked over another folder. He scrambled to pick up the papers, his glasses sliding down his nose.

  Joe motioned to leave, and Reggie and Hamish stood at attention. Reggie walked him to the door with a broad smile, and Hamish tried to focus on his desk rather than studying the way her hips moved while the sun through the window lightened her hair.

  When he resettled into his chair, he gave her a comical look. Maybe things could tick on. Maybe they could be work colleagues. Reggie wound a strand of hair so tightly around her index finger it almost cut off circulation.

  Hamish was studying Joe’s co
mments.

  “What do you see?”

  “He thinks he saw the man who attacked Toby Morris.” Hamish worked his lip with his teeth. “The first time.” Hamish squinted over the writing. “Toby told me it was several men who pulled something over his head. Truthfully, I thought it might be Bricker and the men I saw at the train station that night. But Joe disagrees. He said it was only one. The same one who has been attending several games and hanging around too often.”

  “Bricker?”

  Hamish just shrugged. “My guess.”

  “Well, who else?”

  The rest of the afternoon was slow. Rosa Leoni dropped by and batted her eyelashes at Hamish, having him look over an employment contract for a cousin Reggie suspected did not exist. Then they tied up the last ends of a case they had been working on before Errol, even before Pete Kelly. Hamish was called as witness to a court case, and they were both finishing the paperwork and statements to close it for good.

  * * *

  “I wish we could go to the movies instead of to some silly political meeting.” Reggie tried to keep her voice light, but Hamish could read through it. “It’s my turn to buy the popcorn. You bought the last three times. Besides, you seemed bored at Prisoner of Zenda, and I owe you something you’ll enjoy.”

  “I wasn’t bored,” he told her. No one could be bored with Reggie’s running commentary on Ronald Colman’s virtues intermingled with questions about how Madeleine Carroll’s blonde curls kept so perfectly in place.

  “Well, not completely bored.” Reggie collected her hat and handbag. “Too much sword fighting for that. And with all that derring-do, Madeleine Carroll’s hair was always perfect. Always perfect. She was escaping death and it looked as if she had just stepped out of the salon!”

  “There must be something just as exciting about a political group with hateful views entangled in property development.”

  “My mother said something about my father being in property now.”

  Hamish’s eyebrow rose. “Here in Boston?”

  Reggie shrugged and began to collect her things so they could go to the rally.

  He watched her ruefully as she attended to smoothing her pants and piling her papers in neat order for the next morning. “If you were my fiancée, I wouldn’t want you to step out with another man. Not even on a case.”

  “Step out with another man?” Reggie’s nose wrinkled with a spurt of laughter. “You are not another man. You’re Hamish!”

  Hamish warred with feeling relieved and confused. And a little hurt. He was Hamish. Good old Hamish! He gripped the handlebars of his bicycle and maneuvered it out of the office into the hallway. Then he hoisted it over his shoulder and walked it down the staircase, Reggie right behind him. She fit well on the front of the bike now, due to their practice. It was natural to him, too, to feel the extra weight. The night was calm and warm as he navigated the North End over Cross Street and into downtown Boston.

  Once they reached Washington, she hopped off the handlebars.

  “I don’t think Vaughan Vanderlaan would enjoy your being on the front of a man’s bike.”

  “Well, he’d better get used to it,” she said. Shifting.

  “Reggie.” Hamish sighed.

  “Why are there monsters and gargoyles? In Notre-Dame?”

  It was a less than graceful way to swerve the subject. But he humored her. “They protect the cathedral from evil spirits. They guard the saints.”

  Reggie looked up at Hamish, eyes bright as they passed under a streetlamp. “And Quasimodo thinks they’re his friends?”

  “He talks to them.” Hamish was surprised at how easily he explained it. A book that was as much of his makeup as the cells and blood and valves and ticking heartbeat. “And they hear him. He can’t hear because he has always rung the bells and they are loud and burst his eardrum.”

  “Like your dad?”

  Hamish’s mouth twitched. “Sort of. He can still hear in one ear.”

  “I leafed through your copy one day. When you were out. Started reading it. It’s so sad. There was something about it that made me feel . . . small . . . trapped.” She shrugged.

  He remembered telling her on one of their first meetings how imagining the stones and crevices, the parapets and turrets, even the bells made him feel safe from the world. Yes, his nerves clanged and his heartbeat thudded; but Quasimodo’s safe sanctuary was something he would mentally retreat to.

  She fingered her necklace. Spira, Spera. She looked up at him.

  They passed newsboys bellowing the evening edition’s headlines in a raucous competition: Roosevelt’s Moral Embargo urging American companies to refrain from business with the Soviet Union. The sinking of the German U-Boat U-36.

  They hadn’t really talked about the war. It dominated all of the letters from his father and the Telegraph just the same.

  “Do you have friends over there?” Reggie asked while Hamish rolled the bike.

  Hamish nodded. “A lot of boys I went to school with.”

  “I’m sorry.” She squeezed his arm.

  “Me too.”

  The artificial light of Washington Street drenched the pavement. Reggie nodded at the Bijou: “Vaughan took me to Gone with the Wind at the Bijou. Clark Gable sweeps Vivien Leigh into no less than three end-of-the-world kisses. One while Atlanta burns around them.”

  Her eyes flicked up to Hamish’s, which were suddenly the color of the Charles after a storm and not their usual light blue like the sky above the Common. His lashes flickered downward, his mouth turned up. She wondered what it would taste like to press her lips against his, kiss that crescent moon of a smile away. They reached Bromfield, which reminded Reggie of the first job she was offered when she came to the city. The memory put an end to the dangerous waters of end-of-the-world kisses.

  She described the man who wanted her for more than her less-than-perfunctory skills. “He was a lecherous oaf of a man.” She wrinkled her nose. “And then I found your cousin and he was all moonlight and Valentino.”

  Hamish laughed. “And then you got to know him.”

  “And then I got to know him.”

  “Regina!” They turned at a familiar voice.

  “Dirk.” Reggie said the name like a word that a New Haven Van Buren wouldn’t use in polite company.

  He flicked a look at Hamish briefly but without a smile or recognition. He offered his hand, but Reggie kept her own hidden. Finally, he leaned forward, his cologne tickling her nose, and kissed her on both cheeks. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “We’re here for the Christian Patriots meeting.”

  “The one I am speaking at!” he said pointedly.

  “Still surprised you are interested in politics, Dirk. Trying to place when—”

  “Since we’re at war.” Dirk didn’t stop the annoyance from creeping into his voice. “Well. Humankind is at war.”

  “Since when are you interested in human—”

  Dirk silenced her with his sleek gloved hand. “Reggie, you will find I have spent some time getting my head on straight. We’re young. Idealistic. We will be the ones to make this nation great.” He turned and truly looked at Hamish for the first time. “Your countrymen are already over there, aren’t they? Britain snaps its fingers and—”

  Reggie rolled her eyes and tugged Hamish’s coat sleeve. “We don’t have time for this. If you’re just going to be condescending.”

  “Tsk-tsk, Reggie. Keep an open mind. It’s time for us to step out and decide what we believe. Beyond our parents and our heritage.”

  Reggie cocked her head. “What we believe?”

  “Just follow me,” he said. “And try to remember you’re a Van Buren.” He stabbed Reggie with a look.

  Reggie raised an eyebrow. “Last time I heard you speak was at your commencement. You were quite fond of quoting W. H. Auden, if I recall. And in the most surprising contexts.”

  “I made Mark write that for me. You remember little Mark Talbot? Scrawny freckled boy
whose parents delivered our groceries?”

  “Such a charmer, Dirk.” They let him get ahead. He took them down Winter in the direction of the Common, the Park Street Church steeple just under the swath of stars. Reggie’s eyes followed Hamish’s to the apartment building he’d shared with Luca Valari two summers before. It was easy to find: the shiny windows of the penthouse catching the glow from the streetlights and the thumbnail of moon. “Why go chasing the case when the case might come to us?” she whispered as Dirk led them through an open door, light ribboning out to the street.

  “I do agree that we’ll have to decide things for ourselves beyond our parents and heritage,” Hamish said. “I don’t come from the same heritage, but I only know war through what my parents lived through, and I would like to understand this one better.”

  “You’re a diplomat,” Reggie said thoughtfully. “You should have been a politician.”

  * * *

  They settled into their seats. The speakers were adamant that the war in Europe was doing one thing very well: assessing the inhabitants of certain races and tracing the downfall of economies and militaries based on racial profiles. It nearly (nearly) erased Reggie’s proximity from Hamish’s mind.

  When the speaker’s ideals became too uncomfortable, he watched Reggie shift, then cross her legs. Then uncross them. Then she flinched. Then she blinked. Then she seethed. Then her mouth gaped and a small sound that almost became a word formed in the back of her throat. Hamish tugged at his collar. It was almost as cold over the tiles and in the hard wooden chairs as it was outside, but something inflamed him. As if even just hearing the misguided words in these ignorant, hateful voices could burn. It was the wrong kind of incendiary. A directed passion pointed in a direction that shocked and sickened him. He stared at his shoes. He felt guilty even for being in the same space as these words. The only thing that kept him there—beside Reggie, who was obviously equally troubled—was what his father always said: that every viewpoint, even the most appalling ones, helped one form a well-rounded view of human nature. What if a man who subscribed to the same point of view as Dirk and his political friends were to knock on their office door? What if Nate heard this nonsense spewed at his office?