by P. B. Ryan
“Nell?” Viola, in jet-beaded aubergine velvet, an opera glass cradled in her white-gloved hand as it rested upon the railing, had turned to address her governess with an expression of anxious bewilderment. Her two ivory-handled canes, folded at present, were hooked over the arm of her chair. “Nell, darling, is something wrong? Is it Gracie?” she asked, making an awkward effort to rise.
“No! No, Gracie is... Nurse Parrish is watching her. I...” Nell pressed a hand to her churning stomach. “I need to speak to Mister Harry.”
“What business do you have with my son,” asked August Hewitt in his formidable baritone, “that would prompt you to interrupt us at such a time?”
Nell nodded toward the door and said, “I’d rather speak to him in pri—”
“You’ll speak to him in front of me, or not at all,” his father intoned as laughter rose from the audience. “What is this about?”
Nell licked her lips. Everyone was staring at her. Viola looked terrified. “I...” Turning to Harry, she asked, “Do you...do you know where I might find your brother?”
“My brother?” Harry pointed to Martin, wide-eyed with confusion. “He’s right—”
“Not him,” Nell said. “William. Has he ever mentioned a hotel or rooming house? I desperately need to find him.”
The only sound, a short intake of air, came from Martin, who must have thought she’d lost her senses.
“My brother William,” Harry said slowly, “is in a graveyard in Georgia.”
“I don’t know what this is about,” his father bit out, “but I’ll have you know I do not appreciate—”
“How long have you known he was alive?” Nell asked Harry. “How long? Since before he came to Boston, or has it only been—”
“You’re mad.” Harry turned to his parents, hands raised in self-absolution. “She’s mad. I have no idea—”
“Liar!” Nell said. “You knew. You knew and didn’t—”
“He didn’t know,” said Mr. Hewitt. “No one knew but Mrs. Hewitt and I.”
“What?” Martin exclaimed.
“I’m sorry, Martin,” Viola began. “We only found out—”
“He’s alive? How could you know and not tell me?”
“That’s enough,” his father scolded as one or two audience members glanced up at them. “We’ll discuss it when we get home.”
“Ah, yes,” Harry muttered. “Mustn’t make a scene.”
“You knew,” Nell accused Harry. “But you kept it a secret. And how convenient it was, after they found Ernest Tulley in that alley, to have an older brother handy to take the blame for—”
“What are you implying?” Mr. Hewitt demanded.
Still addressing Harry, Nell said, “It was you. It was you in that back room at Flynn’s that night, wasn’t it?”
“Flynn’s?” Harry shook his head in apparent puzzlement, as if he’d never heard of the place.
“It’s a boardinghouse for sailors in Fort Hill,” Nell said, “and you know it very well.”
“Sorry,” Harry said on a little huff of laughter. “Not my kind of neighborhood—or establishment.”
“I think it is,” she said. “I think you like whiskey and cards and whores, and I think—”
“My God!” Mr. Hewitt exclaimed, gripping his wife’s shoulder. “Miss Sweeney, I’ll thank you to leave here and—”
“No! Not until he—” she stabbed a finger at Harry “—admits what he’s done and helps me to find William.”
“I’ve never heard of Flynn’s Boardinghouse,” Harry said.
“That’s funny,” she countered, “because Seamus Flynn and a prostitute named Molly have identified you from your photograph, and they swear you’re a regular cust—”
“See here,” he said. “Out of consideration for my mother’s sensibilities, if you’re absolutely determined to pursue the subject, I really think we should do it out of her hearing.” Harry looked toward his father, who nodded acquiescence, his mouth a grim slit, before turning his frosty gaze on Nell.
“Pack up your belongings tomorrow, Miss Sweeney,” Mr. Hewitt said, to the accompaniment of a gasp of dismay from his wife. “And I hope you don’t expect a reference, not after this little performance.”
She had anticipated the dismissal. Still, a dull sense of shock deadened her legs as she followed Harry out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. She thought about Gracie, and felt a crushing jolt of grief. God, what have I done?
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Harry ground out as he yanked a silver flask from inside his coat, “but frankly, life in the Hewitt household is excruciating enough without you playing these sorts of games.”
“You have been to Flynn’s,” she said. “You were there that Saturday night.”
He lowered the flask, having taken a generous swallow, and recapped it. “Saturday night is Rat Night. I don’t play the rats.”
“No, but you thought you could still get in on a game of poker, or chuck-a-luck, and when you found you couldn’t, you sat with your brother in the back parlor and drank. William told you about Ernest Tulley, and by the time Tulley returned at midnight, you were drunk enough to want to pay him back for killing Robbie. William had nodded off from the opium, I presume, but his bistoury was lying about, because he uses it to scrape the spindle between bowls.”
“His what?”
“The folding surgical knife, the one you used to slash Ernest Tulley’s throat. William woke up, probably from sound of Tulley’s struggles when you attacked him. He offered to stay with the body while you made your escape, and you let him. You let him be arrested. And now you’re going to let him hang—if he lives that long.”
“What a remarkable imagination you have, Miss Sweeney. No wonder you’re such a capable artist.”
“Pearl was the only one who got a good look at you. Did you pay her to disappear, like you pay off your mill girls?”
“You tell me,” he said, chuckling as he took another drink. “You’ve got all the answers.”
“I think you did. I think you’ll do whatever it takes to make your problems go away, as long as it leaves you free to create more of them—even sacrifice your own brother.”
“Dear me,” he sneered. “I must be quite the cad.”
“He’s going to die for you! Does that mean nothing to you?”
“You’re presuming he’s doing it for me. Perhaps he’s doing it for someone else. Perhaps he’s doing it for himself. Perhaps he wants to die.”
“Did you kill Ernest Tulley?”
Another humorless chuckle. “Does it matter whether I did or not?”
“Of course it does.”
His laughter had a ragged, drunken edge to it; he must have imbibed earlier, perhaps during intermission. “That only proves how naive you are, Miss Sweeney. You remind me of Robbie. He used to tell me that life had meaning, that one must try to be a good man and do the right thing, always, and everything would work out splendidly as a result. Well, that’s exactly what he did, and now his twenty-five-year-old corpse is rotting under six feet of red Georgia clay. So forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to ‘doing the right thing.’”
“Nothing matters, then?”
“Why, I believe you’re catching on, Miss Sweeney. Very little matters, certainly—aside from the pursuit of simple animal gratification. Once one has absorbed that essential truth, it’s actually quite liberating. The rules that keep others on a short leash don’t exist for you—as they shouldn’t, because they’re arbitrary and suffocating, most of them. Everything becomes possible. Nothing is taboo.”
“As long as there’s someone to clean up after you, or pay the price for your sins.”
“That would be their choice.”
“You’re that sure you’ll never have to pay the price yourself?”
He tucked away the flask, saying, “I’m a Hewitt, Miss Sweeney,” as if that were answer enough.
Chapter 16
“This is it,” Cook said as
he handed Nell down from the squeaky old police department gig in which they’d made this morning’s journey from Boston to Quincy.
Nell yawned as she appraised the white clapboard house, its ground floor windows fitted out with green and white striped awnings, a painted-over shop sign on a pole in the tidy front yard. She’d been up the entire night, searching in vain for Will. Once, she’d stopped by Jack’s house to see whether he’d had any luck, but there’d been no answer, so he must have still been making the rounds of the less reputable hotels.
Nell had spent most of the ninety-minute drive, while Detective Cook had chatted on, reins in hand, about this and that, imagining the relief she would feel when she knocked on Jack’s door later this morning and found Will there. Even as he mocked them for wasting an entire night looking for him, Nell would see in his eyes that he was touched by their concern. She would still be without a job, without a home...without Gracie...but Will would not be lying dead in some hotel room, a needle in his arm, waiting to be found by the maid when she came in to make up the bed.
Wrung out as she was, emotionally and physically, she refused to consider any other scenario. If she did, she could not go on. And she must go on.
A curtain in a front window twitched as they climbed the porch steps. From inside came the creak of a floorboard, muted voices.
Detective Cook gave the brass door knocker—which looked to have been freshly polished—three quick raps; no response. He rapped again. “Pearl? I know you’re in there. You, too, Molly. We’re all a bit too long in the tooth for hide and seek, so kindly open the door, if you would.”
More voices. About half a minute passed, and then the door creaked open, courtesy of Pearl, although it took Nell a moment to recognize her. Her formerly yellow hair, half covered by a kerchief, had been dyed brown. In lieu of the too-tight green satin dress in which she’d once plied her trade, she wore a plain cotton frock, sans crinoline, and a bib apron. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of her transformation was her face, which, scrubbed free of paints and powders, looked remarkably soft and young.
Molly, standing next to her, had also re-dyed her hair—to a slightly darker brown than Pearl’s—and was similarly attired and devoid of makeup. She glared at them. “I’d tell you you’re not wanted here,” she said, “but I don’t guess coppers care much about that sort of thing, do they?”
“May we come in?” Nell asked.
Molly said “No” as Pearl opened the door wider, stepping back for them to enter. “They’re already here,” she told her friend. “They know where we are. What difference does it make?”
Nell and Cook followed the two women into the empty but freshly painted front room, equipped with a sales counter and shelves, through a storage room behind it, and up a narrow staircase. The second floor was modestly but neatly furnished as living quarters. Nell noticed a tidy little kitchen and a bedroom with prints of birds and flowers on the walls.
Pearl offered to take their outerwear and bring them tea as she ushered them into a cozy little front parlor, but Cook declined. “This will be a brief visit,” he said, withdrawing a folded sheet of paper from inside his coat and handing it to her. “Just wanted to let you know that your presence will be required in court when William Touchette is tried for the murder of Ernest Tulley. This here’s a subpoena. It means you have to show up or go to jail.”
She nodded resignedly as she glanced at the document, inked in a rather slapdash scrawl by some judge’s clerk yesterday afternoon. “You sure about the tea? We’ve just had some, me and Molly, and the water’s still hot.”
Nell said, “I’d love some, actually, if we can spare a few minutes.” She looked at Cook.
“I don’t suppose one little cup will take that long,” the detective said.
Pearl, seeming gratified, sent Molly to fix the tea as she hung up their things on a coat tree in the corner. “Have a seat,” she invited as she took one herself, seeming for all the world like any ordinary matron receiving morning callers. Nell couldn’t quite believe this was the same booze-steeped whore she’d known in Boston.
“This is a lovely little house,” Nell said, feeling the weight of the pint of rum she’d tucked into her chatelaine before coming here; somehow she didn’t think she’d need it.
Pearl smiled, her cheeks warming with color. “I been fixin’ up the downstairs for a shop. We’re gonna be dressmakers, me and Molly. Well, I’ll be doing the sewing—Molly, she can hardly thread a needle. But she’s got a real good business head, so she’ll be handlin’ that end of things. She’ll get me my raw goods from the mills up in Charlestown, and she’s gonna paint us a sign for out front, and take out some ads in the newspapers. Oh, and she’s fixin’ to buy me one of them sewing machines, like they use in the big garment factories.”
“That’s wonderful,” Nell said. “Sounds expensive, though.”
Pearl’s smile dimmed a bit. “I...I been savin’ my money.”
“Enough to buy this house?” Nell asked. “And provide capital for a new business? Pearl, I know you were paid to leave Boston.”
Cook cast a quizzical glance at Nell, who hadn’t yet disclosed to him her true reason for wanting to accompany him here.
“It was the man from the back parlor, wasn’t it?” Nell asked. “The one who was talking to Touchette about Earnest Tulley. He found you and offered you money to disappear so that he wouldn’t be identified.”
“You don’t have to answer that,” Molly said from the doorway, holding a tray of tea and cookies. “You ain’t in court yet.”
“I will be soon enough,” Pearl said. “It don’t matter anymore. Don’t you see that, Molly? They found me.”
“You’ll have to testify,” Nell said, “but the man who paid you the money will be locked up, most likely, so you won’t be in any danger from him, and the money will be yours to keep.”
“Good thing,” Molly snorted as she handed Nell and Cook steaming cups of tea. “It’s spent already, most of it. Can’t get blood from a stone.”
“I don’t know about that,” Pearl told Nell. “I mean, what you said about this fella bein’ locked up. It’s not like he done anything wrong. He didn’t kill that man. He just didn’t want anybody finding out he’d been at Flynn’s that night, is all. He come to our flat there on Milk Street about a week after the murder—it was a Sunday morning, early. I remember me and Molly was still sleepin’ when he starts knockin’ on the door. Saturday nights are late nights for us.”
“Used to be,” Molly corrected.
“I threw on my shawl and let him in,” Pearl said. “He hands me the fattest roll of greenbacks I ever seen and tells me he knows the cops are sniffin’ around for witnesses, but his old man’ll skin him alive if he finds out he was at a place like Flynn’s drinkin’ whiskey and...consortin’ with the likes of me.”
“So it was supposedly just a matter of avoiding his father’s wrath?” Nell asked.
Pearl nodded. “So he said, but I could tell that wasn’t the full story. You know how sometimes you just know?”
Cook grunted.
“I reckoned maybe there was a wife in the picture,” Pearl said, “or a sweetheart.”
“Or a pending murder charge,” Nell conjectured.
“Not this fella,” Pearl said. “He was a real gentleman—handsome, well dressed...”
“I wonder if you’d mind looking at this.” Nell retrieved the photograph taken before the Children’s Aid ball from her bulging chatelaine, opened the leather case and handed it to Pearl.
“Oh, why, it’s Doc,” Pearl said, squinting as she held the picture close to her face. “Touchette, I mean.” Wistfully she added, “That’s what he looked like back when I first met him.”
“Do you recognize the man from the back parlor?” Nell asked, “the one who paid you to leave Boston?”
“Yeah, that’s him right there.” Pearl pointed, Molly looking over her shoulder. “He was even better lookin’ back then, or maybe it’s just what he’s w
earin’. Men look so elegant in white tie.”
“I’m not so sure about that waistcoat,” Nell said.
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a plain white waistcoat.”
“No, I meant—” Nell stopped breathing. She’d meant Harry’s flashy brocade waistcoat. It was the other three men—Will, Robbie and Jack—who’d worn classic white vests with their tailcoats that night.
“You know how I said I thought he was in the city government?” Pearl mused. “I remember why now. It was ‘cause the other one, Touchette, kept callin’ him somethin’. What is they call them fellas—the ones on the Common Council? Councilman?”
“Councilor, usually,” Cook said. “Course, they call lawyers the same thing, only it’s spelled different.”
Counselor.
“Holy Mother of God,” Nell whispered.
o0o
Nell jumped out of the gig, nerves buzzing, as Detective Cook tugged on the reins in front of ten Commonwealth Avenue. “You will wait for me, Miss Sweeney!”
Light glared through the leaded glass door of Jack’s house, too much light, especially for this early in the day; it was barely eleven a.m. Who would light the gas jets at this hour, and on such a sunny morning?
Leaping up the front steps, her skirts clutched in her fists, she peered through the glass, eyes shaded, to find the hallway off the foyer choked with furniture and blazing with light streaming from the wide dining room entrance. That huge mahogany table had been pulled halfway into the hall in what must have been an arduous undertaking. Most of the matching chairs were shoved haphazardly against the wall, but one had been drawn up to the table before the crystal decanter and glass Jack had been drinking from earlier, both now empty, and an inkwell with a pen in it.
“What the devil...?” muttered Cook from behind her. He knocked a few times, then jiggled the doorknob. Whipping off his bowler, he balled his big fist in the crown and rammed it through a pane of glass next to the knob, shards raining on the tiled entryway inside. He reached carefully through the jagged gap, unlocked the door, pushed it open. There came a steady, snakelike hiss, and the unmistakable smell of death. “Stay here.”
