Lies That Comfort and Betray Read online

  Nora had such wonderful stories to tell about when she and Miss Prudence played together on the lawns of the Staten Island hilltop house called Windscape. Miss Prudence had let Nora ride her pony and shared her dolls as though they were cousins or sisters instead of young mistress and servant’s child. Even now, though the closeness had ended years ago, Nora maintained there was a tie between them that would never be broken. She’d be there if Miss Prudence ever needed her, and she didn’t doubt that the loyalty would be reciprocated.

  Too bad the Kennys didn’t have one of the new telephones. Miss Prudence treated the instrument she’d had installed in the library as casually as if it were an everyday tool like the shovel used to rake out fireplace coals. But it wasn’t. Not yet. Voices traveling across wires was too magical to be taken for granted. Colleen had only held the earpiece to her head twice, thunderstruck at the sounds coming out of it. But it would have been nice to have heard Nora’s pert voice saying she’d missed the ferry and would come tomorrow. There’d be a lot less worry in the world if people could talk to one another across the great distances that separated them. Where had that idea come from?

  By five o’clock in the morning Colleen was up and on her feet for good, face washed, hair twisted into a respectable bun, teeth cleaned, and fingernails inspected for any bit of lingering dirt from yesterday. She’d go to the early Mass at Saint Anselm’s, she decided, even though Sunday was the one day in the week when she could have stayed an extra hour in her bed. She’d go by herself and be back before the first cups of tea and coffee had been poured downstairs.

  Saint Anselm’s was a working class parish, so there was a daily six o’clock Mass for the nuns who taught at the school, the elderly widows in need of companionship, and the men on their way to the docks and slaughterhouses. Even on Sunday, people had to get up before the sun to earn the few coins that put a bit of bread and dripping in their mouths. Later in the day you saw well dressed men and women kneeling in Saint Anselm’s pews, but for the most part it was their servants who dropped the occasional penny into the early morning collection baskets. There weren’t any tenements within the parish boundaries, but just beyond the immediate vicinity of Fifth Avenue stretched blocks of narrow buildings crowded cheek by jowl on lots no wider than they had to be. The wage earners who lived in them were one uncertain step up from the disaster of no work at all.

  Colleen picked up her prayer book and rosary, made sure she had a clean handkerchief, and tiptoed quietly down four flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs to the basement kitchen. She hadn’t had so much as a sip of water since midnight, so yes, she could go to Communion. She checked the state of her soul; nothing but a few venial sins of the kind everybody committed every single day of their lives. It was only the mortal sins you had to confess and get absolution for before you could approach the altar.

  As hard as she worked and as little as she stepped out, Colleen rarely had the opportunity to sin. More’s the pity. She made a quick sign of the cross because she didn’t really mean it. Her mother would have rapped her knuckles against the side of her daughter’s head for even thinking such a thought.

  She’d wear her new navy blue wool coat faced with shiny brass buttons, an early Christmas gift from Miss Prudence. She was a good mistress; no one who worked for her went cold or sick or hungry. The same couldn’t be said for every employer. Other maids wore thin shawls against the wintry air and shivered in the damp New York City chill. Not Colleen. In her fancy new coat she’d catch every envious eye in Saint Anselm’s.

  *

  “I didn’t see you there, Miss,” Colleen apologized. She’d shrieked loud enough to wake the dead and dropped her prayer book and rosary onto the stone floor. The last person she’d expected to see in the kitchen was the young mistress of the house, especially at this time of the morning. It wasn’t even daylight yet.

  “I came down to make myself some warm milk,” Prudence explained. She held a small copper pot in one hand. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at this. I meant to stir up the fire, but I couldn’t get the door to the stove open, and I have no idea where Cook keeps the milk.”

  Colleen picked up her prayer book, set it on the small writing desk where Mrs. Hearne worked out her menus, and slipped her rosary beads into her skirt pocket. Then she scooped up kindling from the stack beside the stove and pried the lid off the firebox. A whoosh of flame flared out as the slender sticks of split wood caught fire.

  “A lady like yourself has no business fiddling about with stoves and firewood, Miss Prudence. I’ll have your milk warm in a few minutes and I’ll bring it upstairs to you.”

  “There’s no need to make you late for church,” Prudence said, surrendering the empty copper pot.

  “There’s another Mass at seven that’ll do me just as well.”

  Miss Prudence had saved Colleen’s life when the second Mrs. MacKenzie paid someone to push her down the servants’ staircase to this very kitchen not so long ago. Colleen knew too much about how Judge MacKenzie had died. She’d spent nearly a month in bed before she got back on her feet again. Any other mistress would have fired her or docked her wages, but not Miss Prudence. Colleen had gotten her full earnings packet just as though she’d been working. Never a word was said to her that wasn’t kind. She’d do anything for Miss Prudence, anything at all.

  “I’ll see if the milkman has delivered yet. You’ll have a nice cup of fresh milk with a good bit of cream on top.”

  Colleen unlocked and opened the kitchen door on a predawn darkness that was beginning to lighten to gray. No milk bottles stood in their wooden crate on the cold stone slab. She supposed that on Sunday even the milkman had the luxury of a later delivery. Still, she’d have a closer look outside just to be sure.

  One step into the areaway, and she nearly fell. Over a basket, of all things. Surely a delivery man wouldn’t have left supplies outside without ringing the bell, without being certain someone accepted them. Colleen bent to pick up the basket. It was heavy, the contents protected against the elements by a once clean cloth now spotted with the soot no one who lived in New York City ever escaped.

  “Colleen?” Miss Prudence approached the doorway, one hand clutching the cashmere shawl tightly around her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Miss. I tripped over something.”

  “What was it?”

  Colleen lifted off the soot spotted cloth that had been folded over the basket’s contents. Four plucked and gutted hens, each wrapped in its own napkin, were neatly bedded down side by side, two below, two on top. Fowl gone bad emitted a smell no one could mistake; these birds were still fresh, though she wondered how long they’d sat by the kitchen door. And where they’d come from. And why Cook hadn’t looked outside for them if she’d missed the bell. Mrs. Hearne ran a very tight kitchen, every penny tallied, every bite of meat and morsel of bread accounted for. It wasn’t like her to order provisions and then forget them. Not like her at all.

  “You’d better bring them inside. I can’t imagine who could have left them there. Or why.” Prudence stepped out into the areaway then back into the kitchen while Colleen carried the basket to the long wooden work table that ran nearly the length of the room.

  One by one Colleen unwrapped the stewing hens. She stared at them as though she’d never seen plucked poultry before, then her face paled and she leaned forward as though she were about to collapse, both hands grasping the edge of the table.

  “That’s Agnes Kenny’s basket, Miss,” she said. “See where the handle’s been repaired? She always sends Cook her best whenever someone makes the trip into Manhattan, so she must have packed it for Nora to bring with her yesterday. But Nora never arrived. We all thought she must have missed the ferry.”

  “Are you sure, Colleen?”

  “Nora’s not here, Miss Prudence. She was coming to help with the holiday cleaning, so I made up the extra bed in my room for her. She wasn’t in it last night and she’s not there this morning.” Colleen turned tow
ard the kitchen door. “You don’t suppose she’s hurt herself? Slipped on the steps outside and knocked her head? She’ll be frozen stiff if she’s been out there all night.”

  “There’s no one in the areaway. I looked,” Prudence said. “But we’ll search again, just to be sure.”

  “Shall I go up to the street, Miss?” Colleen asked.

  “Go ahead, but be careful. Hold on to the railing.”

  “Nora,” Colleen hissed as loudly as she dared, climbing the outside steps and opening the iron gate of the areaway. This was still Fifth Avenue; the toffs who owned the houses on either side of the street were sound asleep in their feather beds and wouldn’t appreciate being waked up.

  Nothing. No sign of her Staten Island friend on the sidewalk, the steps, or in any of the small sunken area’s four corners. “She’s not here, Miss Prudence.”

  “Someone left these hens outside the kitchen door. It had to have been Nora. No one else would be carrying Agnes’s basket,” Prudence said. “If she took the last ferry and got here late, she might have gone around to the stables. Kincaid could have seen or talked to her.”

  “I’ll find out, Miss.” Colleen scurried through the kitchen and out the back downstairs entrance that gave onto the stable yard, leaving the door open in her haste.

  Prudence could hear the rapid tapping of her heels on the cobblestones. Moments later a light flared in the coachman’s quarters above the stable. She watched as a lantern was carried from stall to stall and then across the yard. James Kincaid walked rapidly toward the house, Colleen following in his wake.

  “There’s no one out there who shouldn’t be, Miss Prudence,” the coachman said. Every button of his dark green uniform jacket was properly buttoned; his boots shone with polish. “The horses would have woken me if anyone had gotten into the stable. No one slips past them.”

  “We thought Nora Kenny might have tried to wake you when she couldn’t get into the house.”

  “Nora Kenny?” Ian Cameron had come down the servants’ staircase and into the kitchen so quietly that Prudence hadn’t heard him. The butler who had been like a second father to her had come back to the MacKenzie household out of forced retirement with a promise to stay as long as Miss Prudence needed him. He had no plans to leave. “What’s this about Nora?”

  “She never came up to my room last night.” Colleen’s fingers moved rapidly along the rosary beads in her skirt pocket. “I worried, but I thought she’d just missed the ferry. Then I stumbled over her basket when I went out the door to bring in the milk.”

  Prudence was speaking quietly to Kincaid, who nodded his head and left the kitchen without another word.

  “You’re sure she’s not outside somewhere? Injured? Maybe from a fall on the steps?”

  “I went up to the street and looked in both directions, Mr. Cameron. There’s no sign of her,” Colleen said.

  “I’ve sent Kincaid in the carriage to bring Mr. Hunter from his hotel,” Prudence told them. “He was a Pinkerton. They find missing people all the time.”

  “You’re positive she’s not upstairs in some other room?” Cameron asked Colleen. Privately he thought the maid was probably making a fuss about nothing. Young girls in service had a tendency to skittishness. It was a shame she had bothered Miss Prudence with what was undoubtedly a misunderstanding. The wrong date or the wrong ferry.

  “I didn’t look. I didn’t want to wake up any of the others when I was just on my way out to early Mass. She was supposed to share my room with me, like she’s done before. There’s no other place for her to be.” Colleen reached for the clean apron and cap lying folded in the cubbyhole beneath her coat hook, then remembered that she wasn’t wearing her morning uniform. Nothing was as it should be; the safe world of the MacKenzie household was all topsy-turvy.

  “Nora must have brought those hens yesterday and left them when nobody answered the door.” Prudence pointed at the four plump birds sitting on the scrubbed wooden table. “If she’s not in the house, then something’s happened to her.”

  “I wonder if we shouldn’t take a look into all of the servants’ bedrooms before we think the worst,” Cameron said quietly. Tall, silver haired, and immensely dignified, he was also the soul of authoritative calm. “She might have come much later than expected, and been let in by one of the staff who hadn’t gone up to bed yet. She could have been so tired she didn’t realize she’d put the basket down and not picked it up again.”

  “She’d never leave her mother’s hens sitting outside, Mr. Cameron,” Colleen protested indignantly.

  “It will only take a few minutes,” Cameron insisted. “Nora may not have wanted to open your door and chance waking you up. She could be sleeping soundly in someone else’s bed or on a pallet on the floor.”

  “She won’t be,” predicted Colleen, unshed tears glittering in her eyes.

  “I’ll be in the library, Cameron,” Prudence said, “waiting by the telephone. I’d like to forewarn Mr. Hunter before Kincaid knocks on his door, but I won’t call until you can report back to me.”

  Cameron was nothing if not thorough and meticulous, qualities that served him well as a butler, but Prudence doubted that Nora Kenny would be found safely ensconced in one of the empty servants’ rooms upstairs. She hadn’t forgotten a word of the Ripper article she’d read this morning. Respectable girls in New York City could be just as vulnerable as Whitechapel’s ladies of the night. No city street was safe after dark.

  “Nora Kenny is missing, Mrs. Hearne,” Prudence explained to the heavyset woman who lumbered into the kitchen, tying on a fresh Sunday apron and adjusting her traditional cook’s mobcap. “We don’t know yet what may have happened to her.”

  Cook stared at her mistress, looked intently at the four hens glistening on her worktable beside their wicker basket, then turned toward the stove. If the world was coming to an end, at least they’d have coffee before it collapsed around them. “That’s Agnes Kenny’s basket for sure,” she said. “The one with the mended handle. I’d know it anywhere.”

  As Prudence left the kitchen, she could hear Cook filling her largest kettle and hauling out the wooden grinder for the coffee beans, muttering under her breath as she worked.

  Colleen accompanied Cameron with one hand on the rosary in her pocket; Cook was saying the prayers aloud, counting them off on her fingers.

  *

  “We’ll send someone to meet the Staten Island ferries as they dock,” Geoffrey Hunter said, mapping out the strategy they would use in their search for Nora Kenny.

  “Frank can go. He’s the boot boy.” Prudence pushed aside her empty coffee cup. “He can stay on the dock either until Nora arrives or we find her.”

  “You’re sure he knows what she looks like?”

  “She was here in September. He’s not likely to have forgotten. I can’t bear to think what it will do to her parents if something has happened to her. Nora is their only daughter, Geoffrey. She’s supposed to be getting married after Christmas. I was planning to go to the wedding.”

  “We’ll find her, Prudence. There could be a dozen reasons why she didn’t turn up last night.”

  “Or one horrible one.”

  “The stables have been searched again?”

  “Kincaid checked every stall and behind every hay bale. It would have been such a logical thing to do if Nora got delayed somehow and then no one answered the kitchen door. We thought she might have gone to the stables looking for Kincaid and then stayed there to get warm and fallen asleep.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “No, she didn’t. He said there was no sign anyone had ever been there last night.”

  “The Kennys don’t have a telephone?”

  “There’s service on the island, but Brian Kenny said he’d wait for fish to talk before he’d have one in his house. Brian is Nora’s father; he’s a fisherman. There is a telegraph office, though.”

  “It’s too early to send a telegram. We’d only alarm them unnecessarily.”<
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  “At least we’d know.” Prudence crossed out what she’d just written on the list she was composing. “You’re right, though. We can’t tell them anything yet except that she’s not here.”

  “You said Brian Kenny isn’t on the telephone line. But he knows you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if Nora went back to Staten Island for some reason, if she caught the last ferry, her father would have asked if she’d told you. And if she said she hadn’t, he’d go to wherever there was a telephone to let you know. Or he would have sent a telegram.”

  “We’ve known the Kennys for years. Most of the sons worked for my father at one time or another, whenever the fish weren’t running or Brian could spare them from the boat. Odd jobs. Painting, carpentry, pruning, keeping the lawns seeded and cut. Agnes worked for my mother. Nora and I played together when we were children. She was like the sister I never had. You’re right, Geoffrey. Brian Kenny would have telephoned or sent a wire.” Prudence capped her pen and laid it on the table. “So Nora didn’t go home.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, Cameron?” Prudence had been aware of approaching footsteps before she saw the butler materialize in the doorway. Very unlike Cameron to warn of his arrival. He was usually as silent as a ghost.

  “There’s a policeman at the kitchen door, Miss. He brought this.” Cameron had placed a bloodstained envelope on the silver letter tray.

  Through the stains Prudence could make out her name and address. She reached out a hand, but her fingers hovered above the ruined stationery and would not descend to pick it up. She nodded at Geoffrey, who took both tray and envelope from Cameron and set them on the table.

  “He said it was in the coat pocket of a young woman found in Colonial Park. One of the Marlowe footmen was taking Mrs. Marlowe’s dog for its morning walk. They called the police.”