Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets Page 16

  “There are photographers who pay for information about childbirths that go wrong,” Prudence continued. “But only if they’re called in to photograph the deceased. I think you stayed that night in case something went wrong, as it so often does. You were planning to recommend a particular photographer, if one were needed. He’d paid you in the past and you’d gotten used to the extra bit of money now and then.”

  Mrs. Emerson stared coldly at Prudence, then turned to look at Geoffrey. It was plain that she regretted having told them anything.

  “Just a few more questions.” Geoffrey smiled engagingly.

  “I don’t have anything else to tell you.”

  “Mr. Sorensen arrived home after the child was born. We know that. Were you with Mrs. Sorensen when he came into the room to see the infant?” he asked, ignoring her protestation. He smiled again and leaned forward, as though only good manners kept him from picking up and holding one of her hands.

  “The housekeeper put me in the baby nurse’s room,” Mrs. Emerson answered. “I was very tired and it was late, so I fell asleep right away.”

  “You didn’t hear or see anything during the night?” Geoffrey prodded. “An experienced midwife like yourself must sleep lightly when an infant has just been delivered. Even when you’re not completely awake, you must be listening for a cry or perhaps a moan of distress from the mother. Isn’t that true, Mrs. Emerson?”

  “I did hear someone come up the stairs.” Paulina Emerson seemed mesmerized by Geoffrey’s hypnotically persuasive voice. “I waited, in case I was needed, but I heard nothing more. Then, after a while, I opened the nursery door just a narrow crack to see out into the hallway, and there was Mr. Sorensen, locking the door to his wife’s bedroom. I must have made a sound, because he turned around and saw me.”

  “Then what?” Geoffrey urged.

  “He was furious. I don’t know when I’ve seen a man so angry. He came into the nursery, grabbed me by the arm and demanded to know what I was still doing there. Before I could answer, he told me to get my clothes on and leave his house. Immediately. He waited outside the nursery door until I came out and then he marched me down the stairs and into the street.”

  “Did he pay you?”

  “Yes.” She flushed that deep red color again.

  “More than you expected?”

  “Twice what we’d agreed on. He told me I’d be sorry if I ever came back to that house.”

  “Have you told this story to anyone else before today?”

  Mrs. Emerson shook her head. As she looked at the two strangers, her face suddenly contorted and she bit her lower lip. Fear. Paulina Emerson was terrified of something. Or someone.

  She bolted to her feet and was gone from the room before they realized what she intended.

  The door slammed behind her retreating back.

  CHAPTER 18

  “The only time I see you is when you want something,” Billy McGlory said.

  He poured two fingers of Cascade Tennessee Whisky, one of Ned Hayes’s preferred brands of bourbon, and held the crystal glass out to the man who had saved his life at the expense of his career with the New York City Police. For himself he favored an Irish whiskey tapped straight from the barrel and sold for pennies all over Hell’s Kitchen. Uisce beatha in Gaelic, water of life, though for many it was pure perdition.

  “I wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.” Ned raised his glass in a silent toast.

  McGlory was one of the most notorious casino saloon owners in the city; there were more stories told about him than anyone could keep track of. He dressed like a dandy and ran his empire with merciless efficiency. He’d bought the police and all the judges he needed years ago; his only opposition were the reformers who swarmed out of their churches every few years determined to convert the godless and destroy the cesspits of sin. They could rarely be bought off, but the wave of righteousness never lasted very long. Putting up with them was accepted as part of the cost of doing business.

  “I always pay my debts,” McGlory reminded him. It was the first thing anyone who crossed his path remembered. “And I collect on them, too.”

  When you owed your life to a man, the debt never ended. McGlory expected to be doing favors for Hayes until the ex-detective’s twin addictions to morphine and alcohol finished him off. He looked good today, though. McGlory’s dealers reported that Hayes’s buying had changed. Nowadays he rarely purchased enough morphine to make it worth their while to sell it to him, though they made sure that what he did buy was the best that could be obtained. No cutting with rat poison, either. That was part of McGlory’s debt.

  “I need information about a man named Aaron Sorensen,” Hayes began. “Whatever you have, but I’m especially interested in his gambling habits. How much he owes and where. If what I already know is any indication, he’s verging on the desperate. A lady’s life is at stake.”

  “I take it he’s not a client.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Clients have been known to lie.”

  “Everybody lies, Billy. But Sorensen is not our client.”

  “I heard you were working with Geoffrey Hunter again.”

  “Hunter and MacKenzie.”

  “Miss MacKenzie proved herself as brave as any man in the Joseph Nolan affair. And probably more resourceful. I doubt either one of us would have thought of bringing him down with the knotted waist cord from a religious habit and a large rosary.”

  “I’m not sure she and Josiah Gregory would have succeeded without the dog. Miss MacKenzie promised Kevin Carney in the carriage that day that he and Blossom would always be welcome to bed down in her stables.”

  “They’ll turn up from time to time,” McGlory said. “They’re both fond of horses.”

  “Aaron Sorensen?”

  “He’s the worst kind of gambler for himself, his family, and whatever business he makes his money in. He doesn’t know when to walk away from the table and his card sense gets worse and worse as the night progresses. But he’s exactly the kind of loser I like to see walk through my doors.”

  “How much does he owe?”

  “At his clubs or around town?”

  “Both.”

  Billy McGlory scribbled something on a scrap of paper, then handed the message to the bouncer who stood guard outside his office door. He strolled back across the thick Turkish carpets that helped make his private quarters both luxurious and soundproof, dimming the gaslights along the wood-paneled walls as he came. He liked to conduct business in the equivalent gloom of a moonlit back alley.

  “Will you ever go back down South, Ned?” he asked.

  “Will you ever be tempted to visit Ireland?”

  “I was born here. Why go somewhere that’s never been home to me?”

  “Nostalgia?”

  “It’s not an emotion strong enough to get me across the ocean.”

  “My father was a Union man. My mother married North, but her heart didn’t come with her.”

  “Yet you became a Confederate officer.”

  “I couldn’t bear to disappoint her. I was seventeen when I was commissioned. That’s not old enough to know anything about real life.”

  “Still. You were the one who asked the question. I’ve just turned it around and pointed it at you.”

  “Touché, Billy. I miss the South with about the same intensity as a sufferer from toothache mourns the loss of what caused him so much pain. Which is to say, I wish it were still there, but I’m glad I don’t have to put up with it.”

  McGlory chuckled to himself as he opened the door to the hesitant knock he’d been expecting. A tiny man with the sharp-featured face of a mythical leprechaun sidled into the office. He carried a heavy ledger that rocked him back on his feet. McGlory poured him a healthy glass of the staggeringly potent Irish whiskey and spoke to him in Gaelic.

  “He doesn’t understand a word of English,” he explained to Ned. “And as long as he remains ignorant of the language, he’ll have a very well-paying job kee
ping my books. The minute he learns how to communicate in American, I fire him,” he continued, switching to Gaelic and then translating what he’d said.

  The bookkeeper smiled, drank down his uisce beatha in a single swallow, and opened the ledger. McGlory leaned over Aaron Sorensen’s page, asking questions in hesitant Gaelic as he ran a diamond-ringed forefinger down the columns.

  “All the old people in the neighborhood turned to Gaelic when they didn’t want us kids to know what they were talking about,” he said in answer to Ned Hayes’s unspoken question. “I don’t think it ever occurred to them that hearing the language that often made understanding it become as natural as drinking mother’s milk. For some of us. Not all.”

  The bookkeeper wrote two figures on the same scrap of paper on which McGlory had printed Sorensen’s name. He hefted his enormous ledger and left his employer’s opulent office with a longing, backward glance at the bottle of Irish whiskey sitting on the table.

  “The first figure is what he owes club members at the Union and Lotos. The second is what his less gentlemanly creditors are ready to collect from him, one way or another.”

  “How much more time will they give him?” Ned Hayes asked.

  “How much time do you need?”

  “I’m not sure. A month or two.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. I can lean on the gamblers who owe money to the casinos, but probably not the careful players who confine their wins and losses to within the walls of their clubs. Unless they have other, less acceptable vices.”

  “I’ll be grateful for whatever time you can buy him. He doesn’t deserve it, but his wife does.”

  “That’s the lady whose life may be in danger?”

  “It is,” Ned replied. “He’s got her trapped in as tightly tied a Gordian knot as I’ve ever come across.”

  McGlory shot his diamond-studded cuffs and sipped from his crystal glass of uisce beatha. Sparks of light leaped into the dimness in which both men sat.

  “How involved is Miss MacKenzie?” Billy asked. There was something undeniably compelling and stimulating about a young woman who was determined to shape her life exactly the way she wanted to live it. If he’d sired a daughter, Billy would have wanted her to have Prudence MacKenzie’s spirit.

  “Mr. Hunter and Josiah Gregory are doing their best to keep her safe.” Ned shrugged his shoulders. Miss Prudence had a mind of her own.

  “Then I’ll drink to her good health,” McGlory said. He’d send some men out, too, he decided, just to be on the safe side. Women were unpredictable creatures.

  * * *

  “I’m so tired,” Ethel said, setting down the tea she hadn’t finished drinking. It tasted bitter. The sound of the cup settling into the saucer was unexpectedly loud.

  “You should go to bed, my love,” Aaron Sorensen told his wife, one arm around her waist as he helped her to her feet. “We’ll talk tomorrow about my trip. I’m afraid my return has fatigued you more than is good either for you or for my son.”

  “We don’t know that it’s a boy.” She rather hoped it would be a girl who would grow up to cherish and look after her mother.

  “I know it’s a son, Ethel. You mustn’t worry about disappointing me.”

  She felt something warm and wet trickle down her legs and ducked her head in embarrassment. That had been happening too often of late; as her belly grew larger, her ability to make it to a chamber pot became less reliable. She decided to say nothing, though there was also a most annoying pulling sensation in the small of her back. Ethel thought she had been sitting too long. The baby wasn’t due for another three or four weeks, and everyone told her that first babies were always late. Nothing to be concerned about.

  Aaron dismissed his wife’s maid. He would see to her comfort himself tonight. It was the least he could do after nearly two weeks away. The maid almost said something about the lady’s companion who had only been in the house for four days before her brother-in-law’s death ended her employment, but then she remembered that the housekeeper had instructed all of the servants not to mention the brief episode. You never knew how Mr. Sorensen would react to news he didn’t expect. Better to pretend it had never happened, since it was highly unlikely Miss Penelope Mason would ever return. She closed the door to Mrs. Sorensen’s bedroom and went off to her own attic room, where she promptly fell asleep.

  When the pains began in earnest, Ethel held tightly to Aaron’s hands and drank the bitter brew he held to her lips, then the laudanum that eased the agony and tipped her into sleep. She clasped her legs around the towels he put between them to absorb the blood flowing too fast and thick to be normal, never realizing that her life forces were draining out of her. The babe she carried fought his way toward the future, but the muscles that should have propelled him from his mother’s body moved spasmodically, convulsed by the pennyroyal, rendered too quickly flaccid by the laudanum. The boy smothered to death during the passage down the birth canal. Ethel’s body was too weak to expel him.

  Aaron pinched a thumb and forefinger on either side of his wife’s nose, closing off the delicate nostrils she’d occasionally dared flare at him. So much blood lost. So much pennyroyal and laudanum swallowed. Ethel died without a fuss, without a sound.

  She had finally done something right.

  * * *

  Two weeks in Philadelphia had been barely enough time to ease Ethel’s father out of life, bury him, and meet with the lawyers who had drawn up his will. They understood when Aaron explained that his wife was in fragile health herself, and also with child, so they agreed, of course, that since the estate would pass under his control anyway, there was no reason to insist that Samuel Caswell’s daughter make the journey from New York City to Philadelphia. They also understood that it was in her best interests, and to ensure the safe delivery of her child, that her husband choose the time to inform her of her father’s passing. Women were fragile creatures.

  Aaron Sorensen returned to New York two lives away from a fortune larger than he had hoped for. Ethel would have to die; the child, her heir, could not live, either.

  He made his plans on the train hurtling toward the most exciting city in America. He loved New York; he regretted that he would have to leave it soon, but he was a careful man. He had to pay debts that could cost him his life if left unsettled, and then he had to move on to new territory, where past losses would not haunt him. There would be the house to sell; that might slow him down, but the property was too valuable not to cash it in. He wondered if Catherine’s sister might want to buy the home in which she had grown up.

  The conundrum he faced this morning as he closed Ethel’s bedroom door and slowly descended the staircase toward the dining room was whether or not to send for Bartholomew Monroe and his sister. Catherine’s cabinet photograph had done precisely what he had intended. Her passing had been mourned by friends and admirers of her talent, the tragedy of two lives snuffed out at the moment of great promise lost on no one. Nor was the deep sorrow of the bereft widower. The key was doing what was expected, not shirking any of the rituals society countenanced. But first the body had to be discovered.

  “Tell Mrs. Sorensen’s maid to bring her up a breakfast tray,” Aaron told his butler.

  “I trust you slept well, sir.”

  “I did. There’s nothing quite like one’s own bed at the end of a journey.” The dining room had a certain glow to it this morning, which was as soothing as the fragrance of the coffee being poured into his cup. The size of his gambling debts had been worrisome, and his own temporary inability to win back the losses had begun to eat away at his confidence. Not to mention the threats that had surfaced and the presence of two vicious-looking thugs he had spied dogging his footsteps. Now all would be well again. Ethel’s money would flow like manna from heaven, and he could get on with the life he was meant to lead. Women had proved the surest way to wealth, but they were never the easiest creatures to deal with. Fortunately, they were among the most vulnerable. No one questioned a deat
h in childbirth.

  He heard the sound of breaking crockery and panicked footsteps running down the servants’ staircase. The butler reappeared in the dining room, his face blanched of color.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of sending for the doctor, Mr. Sorensen,” he said. “Mrs. Sorensen appears to have gone into labor during the night and lost consciousness. The housekeeper and her maid have gone up to her.”

  The doctor? Couldn’t the damn maid see she was already dead? But he didn’t dare ask, in case questions were posed later on and someone remembered.

  Leaving his coffee to cool on the table, Aaron rushed from the room, the butler following close behind. Up the stairs, down the hallway. He could see the door to Ethel’s bedroom standing ajar. A wide-eyed maid came out as he approached; she carried a basin heaped with bloody towels.

  What would a concerned husband do? He reached out a hand and touched the maid’s arm.

  “Is she . . . ?” he asked.

  “No, sir, thanks be to God. But Mrs. Hopkins says it’ll be touch and go, and she may not last until the doctor gets here.” The maid ducked her head and spun away, suddenly aware she’d said too much.

  “Perhaps it’s best not to go in, sir,” the butler said.

  Aaron allowed the man to help him to a chair. He sank into it heavily, as though the weight of imminent loss had suddenly fallen onto his shoulders.

  “I’ll bring up some brandy, sir.”

  “And the doctor, the moment he gets here.”

  “It won’t be long, sir. His sister said he’d been summoned out during the night. He’s only a few streets away and the house is on the telephone.”

  “Who did you call?”

  “Dr. Peter Worthington, sir.”

  “He’s not my wife’s regular physician.”

  “No, sir, but we were unable to reach him. Mrs. Sorensen gave me Dr. Worthington’s number in case of just such an occurrence. Apparently, he comes highly recommended.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  Brandy in hand, listening intently to the muted sounds coming from within his wife’s bedroom, Aaron Sorensen waited for his future to arrive.