No Quiet among the Shadows

by Nancy Herriman

  “That is slander, Detective Greaves. I’ll see you formally reprimanded for claiming such nonsense.”

  “It’s not slander, Doctor. I’m afraid it’s the truth. Miss Adler has been pawning her jewelry and may owe money to a local criminal, a good friend of Mrs. Loveland’s. Mr. Griffin,” said Nick. “More bad luck for you, Dr. Brown.”

  “That’s why Vivi was so keen to go to that séance.” He scowled. “Why she spoke with that scruffy fellow that evening.”

  “Pretty sad to realize Miss Adler’s not all that sweet and innocent, isn’t it, Dr. Brown?” asked Nick.

  “Vivi did not kill Smith. I won’t believe that about her,” protested Brown. “You’re after Emery and Miss Kimball. You have to be.”

  Nick rested his elbows on his desk, tenting his fingers, and staring over their tips at the man seated across from him. “Did you lend money to Mr. Adler?”

  Brown groaned. “Two thousand dollars.”

  Taylor whistled.

  “I’m going to hazard a guess, Dr. Brown, that you won’t be seeing that money ever again,” said Nick.

  The good doctor, his composure completely shattered, released an impressive set of curse words.

  • • •

  Miss Kimball had fled to a room in a neighborhood between the Barbary and the dockside warehouses. A place where laundries and cigar shops and herbalists rubbed shoulders with saloons and houses where young women could be bought for a night’s pleasure. It could be a dangerous area for a woman alone, even in the middle of the day.

  A horse and rider trotted past, the man astride greeting Celia with an unwelcome wink.

  Perhaps I should have asked Owen to accompany me.

  The rain had stopped, but clouds still hung heavy in the sky, deepening the shadows filling the cramped lanes. Celia tightly clasped her medical bag and turned down the road where the locksmith shop was located. She found it easily, the building’s brick façade cracked and the entire structure leaning slightly to one side. It must have been damaged in the last earthquake and never been repaired. Another earthquake would bring it down.

  Adjacent to the locksmith’s was an alleyway that must lead to Miss Kimball’s room. The locksmith eyed her from the door to his shop. Celia nodded at him and hurried on, past rubbish rotting in corners to an unpainted door that opened onto the alley. She lifted her fist to rap on the door. It was ajar.

  Pressing her fingers to the wood, she gave it a gentle push. Ahead of her stretched a dark, narrow hallway. Paper peeled from the walls. Two openings led off the hallway, a dim light glowing from within the farthest room. The smell inside was no better than the stench of the alley.

  “Hullo?” she called, stepping through the doorway. “Miss Kimball? It’s Mrs. Davies. Molly told me how to find you.”

  A small sound, no louder than a whimper, came from the farthest room.

  Leaving the alleyway door open, she ventured down the hallway. “Miss Kimball, is that you?”

  There was no response. Perhaps she’d misunderstood Molly’s directions.

  She passed the nearest room, a miserable excuse for a parlor with tattered curtains letting in enough light to see shabby furnishings and a boarded-up fireplace. A thin mattress lay on the floor near the fireplace. The space stank of mold and coal smoke and urine, and was unoccupied.

  Celia paused at the doorway of the rear room. The bed coverings on the cot against the far wall were rumpled, half fallen onto the wood floor. A cane-seated chair occupied a corner alongside a table with a cracked mirror above it. Otherwise, it appeared to be empty. Had she imagined the sound she’d heard?

  She stepped inside. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed movement. She turned too late, and the shadow landed a searing, painful blow.

  Chapter 23

  Celia fell to the ground, the stabbing pain in her shoulder shooting down her back.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed a woman behind her. Her voice was familiar. “I’m sorry. So sorry!”

  Groaning, Celia tried to sit up, but her right arm stung from the blow and would not support the weight she put on it.

  The ceramic pitcher the woman had used to strike her dropped to the floor, cracking into pieces. “Mrs. Davies, are you okay? Oh my God. I thought you were Arthur.”

  “Miss Kimball,” Celia managed to squeak out. “Thank goodness I am taller than you and your aim missed my head.”

  “Oh, dear, Mrs. Davies.” Nell Kimball sank to the ground beside her, her expression pinched with concern. “I didn’t mean to hit you like that. At least I didn’t use my iron doorstop!”

  “For which I am immensely grateful.”

  “Why are you here?” asked Nell, helping Celia sit up.

  “Molly said you were unwell.” The proof of her friend’s concern was plain upon Miss Kimball’s face. Her skin was sickly pale.

  Nell collected a shawl off the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders. “She promised me she wouldn’t tell anybody.”

  “I forced her to tell me, and see? You are shivering with fever.” Celia drew in a breath and slowly got to her feet. She cradled her arm, sensation slowly returning with pins and needles. “You need rest and tending. You should return to bed.”

  Nell limped across to the cot and collapsed onto it. “Did anybody follow you?”

  “Do you mean Arthur?” Had it been Dr. Brown, not Mr. Griffin, tracking Nell and Molly the other night?

  “I don’t want him to find out where I am.”

  “No one followed me.” Celia retrieved her medical bag, which was flung from her grasp as she’d fallen. She rolled her shoulder, pleased to discover it was not seriously damaged, and dragged over the cane-seated chair. “May I?” she asked, motioning toward the hem of Nell’s shift before pulling it back to expose the wound on her leg. She eased off the bandaging.

  “I hope you’re right that he didn’t follow you, because otherwise I’m going to have to find someplace else again. Only where would I go now?”

  “Come and stay at my house. We can protect you from him.”

  “‘We’?” The young woman winced, the bandage sticking for a moment to her oozing sore before Celia freed it. “You and your housekeeper?”

  “Addie and I can help you.”

  “That may be, Mrs. Davies, but I’ll take care of myself, thank you,” she replied. “It’s safer for you to not get involved.”

  The wound was not as festered as Celia had dreaded, but the skin around the injury was inflamed and swollen.

  “I shall need to make a tiny incision to drain the suppuration, Miss Kimball. Are you ready?”

  The other woman nodded, and Celia located her scalpel. Nell clenched her fists as Celia made two small incisions and pressed a clean cloth to the wound to assist the draining.

  “You will not be able to hide from him forever,” said Celia.

  “I’ve been running for so long . . . I can’t stop now.”

  Celia retrieved her lotion of white vitriol to apply to the sore. “Do you have fresh water I might use to wash the wound?”

  “In the basin there.”

  She dampened the cloth and poured the vitriol onto it. “This might sting,” she said. “He’s after you because of those letters, I presume. Did you send them?”

  “Those damnable letters.” Nell flinched again as Celia pressed the vitriol-soaked cloth to her wound. “He knows I saw him at Mr. Smith’s room on the Fourth, when the investigator fell from his window. But he’s not after me only because of what I witnessed. It’s because of what I know about her death.”

  Celia’s pulse ratcheted up, and her shoulder began to ache beyond the dull throb caused by the impact of the ceramic pitcher.

  She set aside the damp cloth and wrapped fresh linen bandaging around Nell’s leg. “You mean Etta’s death, don’t you?” she asked. “Who was she to you?”

  “My half sister. Lucetta Kimball.” Nell’s eyes lost their focus as her mind turned inward to the recollections of the heart. “She was sweet,
kind. The gentlest of creatures. But fragile. Desperately fragile. And when the man she was meant to marry died of the typhoid fever, she was distraught. She couldn’t stop crying. Micah—my brother—sympathized at first. But the weeks and then the months passed, and Etta was no better, no calmer. As it was, Micah had never been particularly fond of Mama’s second family, the children of our stepfather, Mr. Kimball. He refused to take stepfather’s last name. He convinced me not to, also.”

  “Your last name is not Kimball?” asked Celia.

  “No. It’s actually McHugh.”

  “Miss McHugh it is, then.” Celia tied off the bandage and folded the unused clean linen strips, returning them to her medical bag. “Did your brother seek treatment for Etta?”

  To quell her grief, perhaps. To fix the bothersome heartache of a grieving woman. No different from what Mrs. Wheaton’s husband sought to do to supposedly cure her.

  “Micah had Etta committed to the state hospital in Stockton. He was the eldest and in charge of the household, after my stepfather passed away,” she said. “I was permitted to visit Etta only once. She wasn’t meant to be there long. Just a few months, the doctors told us, would be enough to cure her. But she never came home.”

  “She died.”

  “She did, but I never learned exactly how. They wouldn’t tell us, other than to say she’d fallen to her death, likely a suicide.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Micah didn’t ask for details. He didn’t care. He was glad to be rid of her, frankly. He didn’t even want to collect her body. She’s buried at that place like a vagrant without a family. But I cared about what had happened.” She rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes, swiping away the tears, but not erasing the sorrow. The pain would never be removed, inscribed forever on her heart. “If she did kill herself, it was because of what they’d done to her. What he’d done to her. He assaulted her, Mrs. Davies. I’m certain he did. Took away her innocence along with the last shred of her sanity.”

  Celia flushed with anger. She took Nell’s hand, warm from fever, and held it tightly. “I am sorry.”

  “Micah threatened to send me to Stockton, too. Said it wasn’t natural, how upset I was about Etta,” she said. “I had to get away from him, because he would commit me. He’s that heartless. I had to find the man who’d hurt my beloved Etta and make him suffer. Somehow. I just didn’t know how.”

  “So you plotted to get revenge on Dr. Brown,” said Celia.

  “What? No . . . I . . .” Her head jerked around like a startled deer to face the door. “Shh. There’s somebody in the hall.”

  Celia leapt to her feet as a man stepped into the room.

  “Nell! There you are!” He pulled a bowie knife from the sheath he’d tucked inside the shaft of his boot. Its wide blade caught the window’s light. “And Mrs. Davies. Isn’t that right?”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Nell’s.”

  “Arthur, don’t hurt her,” pleaded Nell. “She’s just here to tend to my cut. Nothing else.”

  Arthur. Not Arthur Brown, though. But maybe Arthur J. Emery.

  Bloody . . .

  “So, you’ve figured out my Christian name, eh, Nell?”

  She did not answer.

  “But I can’t let your friend go, can I?” Mr. Emery brandished the knife. As though a feverish woman with a damaged leg and an unarmed female holding a roll of bandages could possibly threaten him. “Now that she’s connected you and me.”

  Celia’s gaze flicked over to the cast iron weight propping open the door. If she could distract Mr. Emery, get him to move farther away from the door, somehow grab the doorstop . . .

  “What do you intend to do, Mr. Emery? Kill us both?” asked Celia. “Just like you killed Mr. Smith?”

  “Have you been blabbing, Nell?” He charged across the room, arcing the knife through the air just inches from Nell’s face. She recoiled, hitting her head against the wall behind her. “I ought to do you.”

  Celia scuttled toward the doorway. Mr. Emery danced backward, stepping between her and the open door. “Where are you going, Mrs. Davies?”

  “You cannot kill both of us, Mr. Emery,” she said with more calmness than she felt.

  “How about I slice you first, then?” He swung the knife at her. Celia jumped to the side, stumbling as her skirts tangled her legs. “You think Nell here will be able to come to your aid? She hasn’t the guts, even when she’s not hobbling around with a bum leg. Couldn’t even go through with getting money out of Brown. Got scared.”

  “The police suspect you,” said Celia, uncertain if her statement was true. “It is only a matter of time—”

  He cursed and lunged for her, the swipe of his knife catching on her sleeve, carving through it. Nell screamed. He swung again, this time slicing Celia’s raised forearm. Pain seared.

  “Hey!” a fellow shouted from the doorway.

  Mr. Emery spun to face him. Celia grabbed the iron doorstop and smashed it against Mr. Emery’s head, pain jolting through her arm, just as a gunshot rang out. He tumbled to the floor.

  A man in a red vest stepped into the room. “Well, looks like you didn’t need my help after all, Mrs. Davies,” he said, holstering his pistol. “And you don’t need to check him for bullet holes. I shot wide.”

  Celia dropped the doorstop and clutched her right arm to her chest. “Mr. Griffin,” she said and sank to her knees to check Mr. Emery, in case she had unintentionally killed him.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance at last.” Mr. Griffin tipped his hat. “Dead?”

  “No, Mr. Emery will survive.” She could not decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  “I’d stay and chat, ma’am, but the police will be here any moment. Even in this part of town, the sound of shots brings ’em running like a pack of hungry wolves scenting a kill.” He retreated to the hall, but halted just outside the room. “Oh, tell that husband of yours I’ll be expecting the money he owes me by the end of next week, Mrs. Davies.”

  “Patrick perished in Mexico,” she said, getting to her feet.

  Mr. Griffin’s reply was a hearty, cynical bark of a laugh. “Then I’ve been dealing with a ghost. For he’s as alive as you and me. You can also tell Paddy I’ve got the file Smith was collecting on him, the papers with all those interesting contacts of his. Might encourage him to find the funds.”

  “The tobacconist, Mr. Friedman . . . it was you.”

  “Hope he’s okay,” he said. “You tell Paddy. All right?”

  With that, he ran off, the echo of his feet pounding down the hallway and out the front door the last she heard of him.

  • • •

  “Mrs. Davies, what in—” Damn, thought Nick. “Here you are, as ever. And is your arm bleeding?”

  The beat officer had alerted the station that Nick was needed at a shooting in the dankest, darkest alleyway one could find between the Barbary and the docks. And, of course, Celia Davies had been right in the middle of the commotion, the sleeve of her dress sliced open along with the skin underneath.

  “This? Oh, it is nothing.” Seated alongside an ashen young woman resting on a flea-bitten cot, she cradled her arm. “A battle wound, if you will.”

  “A battle wound . . .” A ratty blanket had been tossed over the woman on the cot, who clutched it to her chest. “Who have we here, Mrs. Davies?” he asked, though her face looked similar to that of a woman in a blistered albumen print Captain Eagan had given him.

  “This is Miss Cornelia McHugh, also known as Nell Kimball,” she answered. “Nell—or perhaps I should call you Corrie—this is Detective Nicholas Greaves. He shall be most interested in what you have to tell him.”

  Well, well. Corrie McHugh.

  “I’m mighty glad you’re alive, Miss McHugh,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you for a while now.”

  Taylor sidled into the room behind him. “They’ve hauled Mr. Emery off in a wagon, sir. A good conk on the head, but he should recover.”

  Nick looked o
ver at Celia. “Are you responsible for the damage to A. J. Emery’s head, ma’am?”

  “I have discovered a fresh use for a doorstop, Mr. Greaves.”

  “Not your medical bag this time?” She’d used it as an improvised weapon once before.

  “I could not reach it,” she answered and stood. “Miss McHugh needs proper tending to, as does my arm. Could you assist me in transporting her to my house, Mr. Greaves, Mr. Taylor? She would be far more comfortable there.”

  • • •

  After exclaiming over the cut on Celia’s arm—which was deeper and more painful than she’d admitted to Mr. Greaves—Addie prepared a hip bath for Corrie McHugh. Properly scrubbed, Corrie settled into Barbara’s room with a fresh shift to wear and a cup of oolong tea. For, in Addie’s estimation, there was no problem that a good cup of tea could not resolve.

  Mr. Taylor slipped into the bedchamber and nodded at Celia and Corrie, who was propped up by pillows, her color already much improved.

  “Glad you’re finished with whatever you were doing downstairs, Taylor,” said Mr. Greaves.

  His assistant blushed—had he been visiting Addie?—and found a spot to stand behind the detective. He located his notebook and readied his pencil.

  “Are you all set, Miss McHugh?” asked Mr. Greaves.

  “Yes,” she replied, and turned to stare out the window. Clouds dotted the sky, and one drifted across the sun, casting the bedchamber in shadow. Nicholas Greaves’s expression was patient as they all waited. In Celia’s experience, the detective never rushed the telling of the story.

  “Lucetta was a gentle, tenderhearted person who my brother sent to the asylum because he got tired of her tears,” Corrie began, as she had with Celia. “She was too gentle, too docile, and a place like that broke her. By the time I visited—the only time I visited while she was alive—she flinched at every noise and movement.”

  Like Mrs. Wheaton. “She gave you a name of the man she feared . . .”