What the Dead Leave Behind Read online

  “I don’t remember much about what happened in the hours and days immediately after my father’s death, Mr. Warneke. By the time I was able to ask, I was told it would be better to remember him as he had been in life. I accepted that idea. Then. Now I want answers.”

  “I don’t wish to cause you undue pain, Miss MacKenzie. Or to reawaken your grief.”

  “I want the truth, Mr. Warneke. You may be one of the very few people who can at least give us some clues as to what that might be.” Prudence leaned forward and placed one hand on his desk. “Please.”

  “You must stop me if it becomes too much to bear.” Warneke thought he’d never dealt with a daughter as brave as this one.

  “I shall. But I must hear whatever you can tell me.”

  “Was there anything unusual about Judge MacKenzie’s death?” Hunter asked. “Anything that made you question what you saw?”

  “Usually, in a household that large, there is someone who will see to the washing and the clothing of the deceased. It’s felt that hands that served the departed in life bring some personal solicitude to the tasks that must be done. Very often it’s one or more of the older servants, the cook or the housekeeper. Those are the women most likely to have been with the family for a number of years. We usually take over once the intimacies have been completed. In Judge MacKenzie’s case, the body lay unattended in a darkened room until we arrived. Nothing had been done, nothing had been prepared. There is always at least one candle burning, but he lay in utter blackness.”

  “I don’t remember anything after Dr. Worthington closed his eyes,” Prudence said.

  “You had been put to bed before my assistant and I arrived. I understand Dr. Worthington administered laudanum and advised that you continue to be dosed with it at least until the funeral was over. Mrs. MacKenzie was bearing up very courageously; her brother was there to assist and support her. I was told he lived in the house.”

  “Donald Morley,” Hunter contributed.

  “Yes. Mr. Morley served as intermediary between me and my staff and Mrs. MacKenzie. As I say, she was dealing with her loss very bravely, but she naturally avoided company as much as possible. At one point, she took refuge in her husband’s study. That’s where I found her when I went to report that we had coffined and laid him out in the large parlor so there would be room for everyone who was expected to pay respects.”

  “Did you go into my father’s study?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was Mrs. MacKenzie doing when you came into the room?” Allan Pinkerton had insisted that all of his operatives establish a base of facts at the beginning of every case.

  “It was a very cold evening. The fire had been built up and she was standing in front of it warming her hands.” Warneke paused, cleared his throat. “She was also throwing papers into the fire. By the amount of black ash I could see drifting over the logs, I surmised that she’d burned a great many papers. She was very angry that I’d come in unannounced. I apologized, told her what I’d come to report, and took my leave.”

  “Anything else?” Prudence’s question pleaded for more information.

  “The death certificate had been signed by Dr. Worthington. He’s not the kind of physician who makes mistakes.”

  “But something was wrong or you wouldn’t have remembered so many details,” she insisted. “You must tell me.”

  “It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it was. All I can really say is that the Judge’s home didn’t feel like a house of mourning, despite the fact that his body lay in the parlor. With true loss it’s as though the loved ones left behind are walking through waves of rough water; they hold themselves erect and push on ahead, but their hearts aren’t in it. They want nothing more than to sink into the ocean with their departed and give up the struggle. Of course most of them don’t. A very few will never recover, but almost everyone else gradually finds peace and acceptance. I never saw or spoke to you that day, Miss MacKenzie, but what I sensed in the widow and her brother was an absence of feeling, a blankness of spirit that I hope never to encounter again.” He paused. “None of the Christmas decorations, including the tree, had been taken down.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Mr. Hunter, if you’re asking what I think you are, all I can say is that everything I’ve told you is speculation. You’ll have to give it whatever weight you think it deserves. I look death in the face every day of my life. I know what to expect in almost every instance. When I see something I don’t anticipate, I look more closely. But I keep my doubts to myself unless they become certainties. I found Charles Linwood’s death to be deeply disturbing. Judge MacKenzie’s fingers and lips showed the blueness of heart failure, but a man’s heart can give out for many reasons. I’m truly sorry for both your losses, Miss MacKenzie.”

  Maurice Warneke stood up and ushered his guests from his office. As he opened the funeral parlor’s massive front doors and bowed his respects, he summed up what he knew to be true and the creed by which he lived.

  “Once they are in their graves, the dead can no longer speak to us. I don’t believe in ghostly communication, but I do think that what has been left behind can bear eloquent witness. If we know how to listen.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “There’s something I must do by myself, Mr. Hunter,” Prudence said.

  They were moving slowly down Fifth Avenue in the hansom cab that had taken them from Conkling’s office to the mortuary parlor of Warneke and Sons. It was nearly noon. The streets of Lower Manhattan were crowded with carriages and cabs carrying the city’s elite to the fashionable restaurants and hotel dining rooms where as much business was done as in any of its office buildings.

  “Can I be of any help?” asked Hunter.

  “I’ll meet you again at Mr. Conkling’s in two hours.”

  “Are you all right, Miss MacKenzie?”

  “I wasn’t sure until I had listened to everything Mr. Warneke told us,” she answered quietly. “I thought perhaps I was imagining things about Victoria that couldn’t possibly be true. But I know differently now, and I won’t ever be the weakling she thought to make me become when she handed me the laudanum and told me to dose myself. I don’t know how she did it, but she killed my father, Mr. Hunter.”

  “Even Warneke wouldn’t go that far, Miss MacKenzie. What he described was a callous, unfeeling woman, but not a murderess.”

  “If she let him die through neglect or if she ruined his life somehow so that the will to live was sucked out of him, she’s guilty of his death. That may not be the law’s definition of murder, but it’s mine.”

  “I wish you’d tell me what you’re planning to do.”

  “I’m not going to confront my stepmother and accuse her of causing my father’s death, if that’s what you’re afraid of. It’s too soon for that. Mr. Warneke said suspicions are not evidence, and he’s right. I’m going to try to gather more information, but I have to do it alone. I have to prove to myself that I can do it. It’s important to me, Mr. Hunter.”

  She’s going to question Worthington, Geoffrey Hunter thought. He’d never known a doctor who would admit to having made a wrong diagnosis. Admitting to error wasn’t in their lexicon.

  “Two hours, Miss MacKenzie.”

  “I won’t need any more time than that.” Prudence smiled confidently at him as Hunter helped her out of the cab in front of the Fifth Avenue mansion where she and Charles Linwood should have begun a new life together. She had never known any other home but this one, yet as he watched her walk up the marble steps and disappear through the massive front door, he could not help but wonder how safe this sanctuary really was.

  * * *

  The dining room was empty, the long, polished mahogany table bare of dishes, silverware, and crystal.

  “Mrs. MacKenzie is having a tray in her room, miss. Shall I tell Cook you’ll do the same?” The tone of Jackson’s voice left no room for any other arrangement.

  “I’m going out again,” Prudence informed him.
“No need to disturb Mrs. MacKenzie. I’ll look in on her before I leave,” she lied. “Where is Mr. Morley?”

  “He left about an hour ago, miss. Said he’d be home for dinner.”

  They were making it easy for her, Prudence thought as she climbed the staircase to her bedroom on the second floor. With any luck at all she’d be gone before that toady Jackson realized that she was coming and going without her stepmother’s knowledge or approval. She pictured Victoria lurking in her heavily scented boudoir like a black widow spider sitting invitingly at the center of her web, waiting for some careless bit of succulent life to wander into the sticky strands from which there was no escape. Prudence smiled to herself as she moved silently down the carpeted hallway, wondering if spiders ever got trapped in their own webs.

  When she left the house twenty minutes later, Prudence had exchanged the heavy black veils and skirts of full mourning for a day costume of dark gray skirt, jacket, and matching hat that might have been suitable for a young working woman of good family and limited income. A closer look would reveal that the gray wool was too fine and far too expensive for a lady who had to earn her own bread, but it was the best Prudence had been able to do. No one intercepted her as she eased open the heavy front door. Minutes later she blended into the foot traffic of Fifth Avenue, one more dark figure hurrying along the street.

  As she wove her way up the avenue, she realized this was the first time in her life she’d gone out entirely alone, no lady of her family or acquaintance to accompany her, no gentleman to protect her, no coachman to drive her wherever she chose to go. Not even a maid for the most basic of proprieties. It was liberating, exciting, and just the slightest bit frightening.

  She had been to Dr. Worthington’s home and office twice before, the first time when, as a very small child, she had fallen on a piece of glass that cut open the palm of her hand. Cameron had scooped her up in his arms and run the three blocks to the doctor’s office. She had been older the second time. James had driven her in the coach, her father sitting by her side holding her tightly in his arms while she sobbed hysterically. She remembered with perfect clarity every turn of the coach, every building sliding by the open window. She had no idea what had brought on the attack of hysteria; neither her father nor the doctor ever mentioned it to her again.

  She retraced on foot that long-ago coach ride, Dr. Worthington’s address memorized and also written down for good measure. If necessary, she could ask someone to direct her; she wouldn’t be defeated by a simple thing like city streets that all looked the same. A discreet brass rectangle identified Peter Worthington’s consulting room, though nothing else about the brownstone that was very much like her own indicated that business of any kind might be conducted there. She climbed the steps, rang the bell. When a maid wearing a crisp white apron opened the door, she congratulated herself on having taken the first step to independence.

  “I want to know what caused my father’s death,” Prudence said baldly. She had taken the seat offered her, refused tea, and waited impatiently for Dr. Worthington to finish with another patient. Now that he was facing her across his consulting desk, she was determined not to waste another moment on social niceties. She wanted truthful, honest answers, and she was prepared to stay right where she was for as long as it took to get them.

  “I wish I knew all of it, my dear, but I don’t. I can only give you what is a medically sound diagnosis. I did not live his daily life alongside him, and sometimes that is the only way to fully explain why a person remains healthy or dies.” Peter Worthington wasn’t sure when he had begun to expect this visit; he only knew that the something pricking at him must have communicated itself to the Judge’s daughter. How else to explain her presence and her question? “Do you understand what I mean by that, Prudence?”

  “I’m not a child any longer.”

  “I didn’t mean to insinuate you were. I only want to be sure you understand that there are many factors affecting a life in addition to what is written on the death certificate.” He waited, and when she nodded that she understood, or at least accepted what he had said, he sighed deeply. “Your father’s death was caused by the sudden failure of his heart to beat. It simply stopped. I doubt he felt anything but a single sharp pain and perhaps a feeling of bewilderment. How could this be happening to me? he must have thought. Patients who have survived their heart attacks all tell me that is what ran through their minds as they fell. Their last conscious thoughts were not of family, not of business, not even of a particularly beloved dog. Just a sense of surprise, astonishment, shock at the suddenness, and fear of the finality of what they were experiencing. I tell you this as comfort, the only comfort I can offer. He went very quickly.”

  “That’s what you wrote and signed your name to on the death certificate. But as you said, there are many factors that take a life. I want to know what these might have been in my father’s case.”

  “He drank far too much French brandy and smoked too many cigars. Every time he had to order a man’s life strangled out of him by the rope or curtailed by prison bars, a piece of your father was cut out and thrown away. He worried that some among them might not be guilty of the crimes proven against them. We talked about it.”

  “So did we. In the evening, when he taught me the law, he also reminded me over and over again of the price an honest lawyer pays. Of the doubts that plague a good judge. Over brandy and cigars for him, weak tea and later on sherry for me. But brandy, cigars, and the law didn’t kill him, Dr. Worthington. You and I both know that.”

  “He married a much younger woman, Prudence.”

  “He didn’t die of an excess of marital obligation. I lived in the same house with them. I sat in their company day after day for the two years of their marriage. There was no affection between them, though it took me months to realize it. I had believed he was lonely for a woman the way only a man who has been happily married can be. But whatever he thought he had found in Victoria turned out to be nothing at all. When Donald Morley moved in, which was almost immediately, the four of us might have been living in a hotel. We met in the dining room for meals, sat in stiff silence in the parlor, nodded politely when we passed on the stairs.”

  “A life may seem to be composed of many parts, but they all fit together when you examine it closely. Every piece is joined to every other piece; it’s a jigsaw puzzle whose separate bits can only go one way. So all of what a person is might be what destroys him. Sometimes the dying is just the acknowledgment of everything that’s gone before.”

  “You won’t name it, will you?”

  “I can’t, Prudence. I’m a medical man. I can observe, but I cannot speculate.”

  It wasn’t the clear-cut answer she had come for, but she sensed it was all she would get. The absence of the word she feared might be as telling as if Peter Worthington had pronounced it. He denied nothing. He simply refused to go any further than his signature on the Judge’s death certificate allowed. So be it.

  Maurice Warneke had said much the same thing when he talked about lack of evidence. He had been willing to entertain the possibility that Charles had been murdered because that death had been so violent and so unexpected, but he had drawn back from suggesting that the Judge’s death had been anything but natural. Unmourned by his widow perhaps, but not murder.

  Geoffrey Hunter had cautioned her against telling anyone about their visit to Warneke and Sons, and so Prudence left Dr. Worthington’s office without sharing the undertaker’s observations about Victoria’s unwidowlike behavior. She didn’t think it would have made much difference. Peter Worthington regretted the loss of his friend, but he would not have welcomed the unsubstantiated conjectures of a man whose clients were already dead when they came to him.

  As she walked to Roscoe Conkling’s office through the rush of midday crowds, Prudence decided that nothing and no one would prevent her from finding out the truth of her father’s death. Of Charles’s puzzling and entirely too coincidental accident. She wouldn’t
live with the niggling finger of doubt scratching at her as insistently as the laudanum once had, with the urge to look over her shoulder at odd moments as if a threat loomed just behind her. She would not spend the rest of her life pretending to welcome Donald Morley’s presence in the house and Victoria’s reign as stepmother.

  The idea that her father may have been murdered by his own wife strained credulity and challenged the ordinariness of everyday life, but it was the damnable logic of the suggestion that was drumming away at her.

  What if he didn’t die of natural heart failure? What if he were given something that stopped his heart from beating? Something that left no trace, that fooled even the doctor who tended him? What if?

  * * *

  The first attempt came three blocks from Dr. Worthington’s office.

  As Prudence paused before crossing the street, the driver of a hansom cab whipped up his horses to barrel around the corner and into the traffic along Fifth Avenue. Prudence felt herself teeter on the curb. She stepped backward, startled by the pounding of hooves as the cab veered closer to the small knot of pedestrians waiting for it to go by. Another cab slotted itself behind the first one, taking advantage of the leader’s luck in the dangerous game of taking the corner too fast.

  Something, a cane perhaps, prodded the back of her legs so hard, they buckled. She screamed, windmilling her arms to regain her balance. She felt her knees collapse, her upper body sway backward, then begin to fall forward between the charging hansom cabs.

  “Steady, miss.” Two men, one on either side of her, reached for an arm at the same moment and held her upright. “You don’t want to be in too much of a hurry along here,” one of them said, letting go her arm and touching his hat politely. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Are you all right?” asked the other man, ready to be on his way now that the vehicles had swept by and the crossing was clear.

  “I am,” she replied, settling her hat and her skirts with trembling hands. She looked behind and to both sides for the person whose cane had caused her to lose her footing, but the crowd was thick and impatient to move on. No one looked either apologetic or embarrassed to have bumped into her. “Thank you very much.”