Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets Read online

  “Our client believes the mother and child were murdered,” Prudence said. They’d been careful to reveal no names, but Riis was an experienced police reporter used to ferreting out stories someone had gone to great lengths to conceal.

  “If you’re asking for my professional opinion, Miss MacKenzie, I’d have to say that your client may not be entirely wrong. When did they die?”

  “Ten months ago.”

  “Were they embalmed?”

  “Our client doesn’t know.”

  “If you can get me the original glass negative, I can print it up for you. And enlarge it, too. You’ll be able to see the eyes before the photograph was retouched.”

  A sudden rush of heavy footsteps in the stairwell precipitated Riis out the door. “What’s happening?” he yelled, untying his leather apron and reaching behind him for the overcoat and hat thrown over his camera cases.

  “Two Black Marias pulled away from the Mott Street entrance. Headed toward Five Points.” The reporter who answered him was still too young and enthusiastic to keep a story to himself.

  “I’ve got to lock up or there won’t be anything left when I get back,” Riis said. He thrust their cabinet photograph and its holder back at them, then slid his key in the lock. They’d barely brushed past when he slammed shut the door and took off down the stairs ahead of them.

  “He didn’t say he thought it was murder,” Prudence murmured, taking Geoffrey’s arm.

  “But he didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Claire sensed a change among the cast members as soon as she appeared backstage at the Met the afternoon following the opening night performance of Aïda.

  Many a cover singer stepped into a major role for the first time when a review far less critical than what the Times had written about Aïda crushed an aging star. Frau Schröder-Hanfstängl had reportedly taken to her bed. Bets were being placed on whether she’d recover enough to sing the title role again at next Tuesday’s performance.

  In the meantime some reblocking of the grand finale of Act Two had to be gotten through; there had been several near collisions between standard-bearers, spear carriers, trumpet players, dancing girls, and prisoners marching in what was supposed to be military precision. Fortunately, the Times reviewer had been too bedazzled by the gilt and brilliantly colored costumes to comment on momentary confusion. The sheer number of bodies crowded onto the stage during the triumphal march had overwhelmed him.

  The thing audiences never knew about the spectacular scenes they applauded was that there were hours and hours of tedium behind each one of them. Before the entire cast of Act Two, Scene Two finally took the stage, each group of the grand procession had to be rehearsed individually. Over and over again until they got it right. It had already taken most of the afternoon.

  “Do you think you’ll go on?” One of the superstitions no cover singer ever broke was speaking aloud the name of the role he or she hoped to sing within twenty-four hours of the performance. Lucinda Pallazzo was covering Amneris, not Aïda, but she had hopes for Catherine’s sister. It never hurt to be overcautious.

  “I doubt it,” Claire said. “Frau Schröder-Hanfstängl has never been known to step aside because of a bad review. I don’t think anything short of laryngitis or pneumonia will keep her down.”

  “I’m sorry it was losing Catherine that brought you back to New York. But I’m glad to have you here.” Lucinda’s lower-soprano register limited the number of important roles she could cover. Like most contraltos, she joked that she seldom sang anything but bitches, witches, or britches. Britches were the roles originally written for castratos, of whom there were mercifully few in this enlightened century.

  “I did something today I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about.” Claire rose from the makeup chair she was sitting in and closed the door to the tiny dressing room they shared. “I’ve hired a firm of private investigators to look into the circumstances of Catherine’s death.”

  Lucinda’s breath caught in her throat. People said it was best not to ask too many questions, let the dead keep their secrets. She’d acted on impulse, giving Claire the cabinet photo of Catherine and her child. And now this surprising announcement. “What do you hope they’ll find?”

  “I’m not sure.” Claire had decided it would sound preposterous if she accused her brother-in-law of murdering the wife everyone assumed died as a result of childbirth. Not until there was proof positive of his guilt would she confide her suspicions to anyone but Prudence and Mr. Hunter. “I went to our family home. Aaron has put off every request to meet with me, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I have so many questions, Lucinda. I planned to confront him when and where he would least expect it. But when I got there, I saw a heavily pregnant woman come out the front door and get into a carriage. The butler called her Mrs. Sorensen.”

  “I should have told you.”

  “You knew?”

  Lucinda nodded. Tears filled her eyes. “Sorensen is on the Metropolitan Opera Board of Directors, an adjunct member. I’ve seen him from time to time when he’s come here for a meeting. We were all shocked when he married again. So soon. I don’t remember who told me that the new Mrs. Sorensen was in an interesting condition, but it’s become common knowledge.”

  “I wish you had said something.”

  “I didn’t want to be the one to give you such hurtful news, Claire. I hoped you already knew and didn’t mention it out of delicacy. I don’t think she was to blame for the lack of a proper mourning period. I’m sure it was him.”

  “Of course it was. He’s capable of anything. He ruined Catherine’s life, Lucinda. My sister was destined for a great career. Until she married.”

  “Most of us marry at one time or another. Our managers, our agents, our conductors, other singers. It need not be the end of a career if the choice is a wise one.” Lucinda toyed with the bouquet of pale pink roses on her dressing table.

  “From your latest admirer?”

  “He has money, but no staying power. He thinks my voice is beautiful, but he doesn’t want to be a part of the world I live in. And I have no intention of giving it up.”

  “I wish Catherine had felt that way. Opera is a very small community, especially here in New York. She must have studied or sung with some of the permanent members of the company. Have they talked about her?”

  “The gossip didn’t start until we heard you were coming to cover Schröder-Hanfstängl. People who hadn’t heard you sing, but knew you were Catherine Buchanan’s sister, wanted to know if you had the same range and power.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That I’d known both of you for years and comparisons were difficult to make.”

  “That was kind of you.” Though they had occasionally studied with the same vocal coaches and sung on many of the same concert programs, Claire and Lucinda had never been more than casual acquaintances. Until now. As long as her sister was alive, Claire had needed no other woman friend. And until Claire went to Europe, neither had Catherine.

  “Claire?” Lucinda plucked at the petals from one of the pink roses, arranging them in a circle on the dressing table. “There was a rumor that Catherine had spoken to the Met management about joining the company. When I asked her about it, she said she was waiting until after the baby was born to make up her mind.”

  “Are you sure? She never mentioned anything like that in her letters to me.” The letters, she remembered thinking, were stilted and artificial, as though the writer had been noting down someone else’s ideas.

  “She was taking vocal lessons from Gertrude Strauss. No one was supposed to know, but the person who told me was also being coached by her. Strauss had the reputation of being notoriously difficult to please, but a genius when it came to training a voice. Your sister was in the habit of coming and going by the rear entrance to the building where Madame Gertrude lived. One day my friend arrived early for her lesson and saw her in the hallway. Catherine begged my
friend not to tell anyone. She was very insistent about not being found out. My friend promised she’d keep the secret, and she says she did. I was the first one she told, and that was only because she knew we had sung together and she thought you should know. I pretended that Catherine hadn’t already confided in me several months before she died.”

  “I’d like to speak to her.”

  “She’s in San Francisco, with a light-opera company. On tour for the next four months.”

  “Do you think Madame Strauss would be willing to talk to me about Catherine?”

  “She went back to Germany after Catherine died. Said she was too old to teach anymore. I’m so sorry, Claire. When I said that Catherine confided in me, I meant that she told me she was studying again. Not much more than that. She kept anything to do with her marriage to herself. She never talked about her husband, and if I brought up his name, she shut me out. There’s so much I want to tell you, but so little I really know.” Lucinda eyed the pink roses with distaste. Talking about marriage reminded her of the young man who had sent them.

  “I’ll never get over losing her, Lucinda,” Claire said, “but when I think about her, when I remember something from our childhood, a kind of peace eases the heartache. For a little while, at least. You don’t have to worry about mentioning her name or changing the subject.”

  “I’m not very good at it.”

  “I know almost nothing about what Catherine felt and did after I left for Europe.”

  “She concealed her condition for as long as she could. And when your father died, his services were private. Here at the Met we didn’t know he was gone until after the burial. There were many who would have liked to pay their respects, who had worked with him in the days before he retired from the concert stage. But the only announcement was a short obituary notice in the Times.”

  “He was supposed to join me in Paris. It was one of his favorite cities.”

  “I always wondered, but now I think I understand. You weren’t told he’d died until it was too late to come back for the funeral, were you?”

  “That’s another loss I’ll never forgive Aaron Sorensen for inflicting on me. All he had to do was send a telegram. I would have been on the next boat. At least my sister and I could have comforted each other.”

  “It was after his death that Catherine and I became close. I wrote her a condolence note, she answered, and we met for tea. I remember her telling me that her husband was out of town on business. I found out later that the only time she left the house was when she was certain he wouldn’t learn she had gone out.”

  “Did you ever meet Aaron Sorensen?”

  “At Catherine’s viewing. I was struck by what a handsome man he is. But cold, Claire, very cold and correct. He knew who I was because he’d discovered that Catherine and I had become friends and he’d put a stop to our afternoon teas. I never found out how it happened. I assumed he’d come home early and unannounced from one of his business trips.”

  “Would you be willing to talk to the detectives I’ve hired?”

  “I’ll answer any questions I can. Catherine was unhappy. I know that much. She may have been taking the vocal lessons as a way of resuming her career and freeing herself from dependence on her husband.”

  “The money was all hers, Lucinda. The house they lived in was the one my parents bought when we were children.”

  “She didn’t tell me that.”

  “We were brought up to be private people. I never heard my mother speak of anything personal, and my father was the same.”

  “I gave her a gift for the baby,” Lucinda said. “She was so pleased by it. Then she said she’d have to tell her husband she bought it herself, and did I mind? That’s when I first suspected she was afraid of him. It was such an odd thing to say.”

  “What was the gift?”

  “It’s called a carrying pillow. This one was made of embroidered white silk with tassels at each corner. They’re used to hold the infant during baptism and when the baby is resting on someone’s knees. The shop where I bought it imports them from France. They embroider the child’s name on it, but since I purchased the pillow before Ingrid was born, that was going to be done later.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Claire said.

  “I’d hoped to see the pillow in the baby’s coffin with her,” Lucinda said, “but it wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  Neither woman wanted to speculate aloud that a gift for the first wife’s child might well be sitting in a cupboard somewhere, waiting to be used by the second wife’s infant, but they both knew that stranger things had been known to happen.

  Two sharp raps on the door warned them they needed to start making their way through the warren of narrow backstage hallways to the main stage for the triumphal march that was the most famous scene in Aïda. None of the principals had been required to attend this extra rehearsal; their places would be taken by their covers. For most of them it was the closest they would come to playing the roles they had to be prepared to sing at a moment’s notice.

  “This is the part I really hate,” Lucinda whispered as they stood in the wings waiting for places to be called. They were cheek to jowl with dozens of walk-ons carrying everything from wooden spears to square silken banners representing crocodiles, storks, lions, and unidentifiable beasts of Egyptian antiquity. Fanfare trumpets waved above the crowd, dancers jumped in place to flex their feet, and all around was the whispering buzz of bored and underpaid performers complaining about something or other. It didn’t matter what. Complaining was as much a part of opera as singing.

  “Ten minutes,” the stage manager called. “Take ten.”

  “Now what?” asked Lucinda as the crowd surged out of the crowded wings onto the stage to wait out the ten-minute delay. “Seidl and Habelmann have their heads together. That can’t be good.”

  “Maybe they’ll call for a full-voice rehearsal of the entire scene,” Claire said. Sometimes, even though she was just a cover singer in this company, singing at a rehearsal felt like the real thing. Other covers must have read her mind, she thought, as she heard throats being cleared and then a cacophony of voices like the discordant sounds of an orchestra tuning up. Chorus members walked in circles, eyes down, running through their harmonies; the walk-ons clustered together, arguing about their blocking. In the pit the orchestra members stood up to stretch their cramped back muscles. Up above, sailors who were hired for their rope-climbing skills flitted along the catwalks, whistling signals to each other as they secured sandbags and the tall set pieces representing Pharaoh’s triumphal arch and temple pillars.

  Lucinda, covering the role of Pharaoh’s daughter, would sit beside him on a gilded throne, while Claire, covering Aïda, would be part of the crowd of captives, breaking free when the Ethiopian princess recognized her father among the new prisoners. If the principals went on, as they almost always did for every performance, both cover singers would blend into the chorus yet again. It hardly bore thinking about, but there were covers who spent their entire careers standing by, never singing a major role except in rehearsal. This afternoon, if the conductor demanded a full-voice run-through, Lucinda and Claire would perform for their peers.

  “Break a leg,” whispered Lucinda as she began to make her way across the stage to the pair of thrones perched atop a high riser.

  “Toi. Toi. Toi.” Claire tapped out the good luck charm that no one but an opera singer would understand. She stood beside Lucinda for a moment. “Enjoy your evening with the young man who sent the pink roses.”

  “I will.” Lucinda would dine and dance and perhaps indulge in something more tonight, but the shrug of her shoulders when she had spoken of him told Claire that the flirtation meant nothing. A gift, perhaps a diamond bracelet that could be pawned when times got hard, as they always did. Nothing more. The rich young man had bought a box at the Met because it was what you did, not because he was deeply, passionately in love with the music he heard.

  Just
before they parted to go their separate ways into the confusion that would become the triumphal march, Lucinda leaned forward to brush a light kiss on Claire’s cheek. Catherine’s twin looked so wan and bereft; if Lucinda had been fortunate enough to have a sister, she imagined she would have crumpled under the grief of losing her.

  When the sandbag fell, it plunged through empty air from flies to stage with a swooshing sound that could barely be heard above the dancers’ tapping, the singers’ scales, and the walk-ons’ squabbling. Down it came in a straight, heavy drop, building deadly momentum with every second and every foot.

  Lucinda looked into the horrified gaze of a trumpet player who had swung his head back the better to balance a fanfare trumpet that was more than half his height. Her eyes snapped upward, she thrust hard against Claire’s torso, tried to windmill her way out from under what was bearing down on her, and fell to the stage under a hundred pounds of sand that had acquired enough force to break bones and split open skin.

  Screams filled the theater. A wave of frightened performers rushed for the safety of the wings and the house, pushing and shoving past the curtained legs, over the apron, and down the stairs on either side of the stage. Blood spread beneath Lucinda’s body, lapping slowly outward until she lay in a gleaming red pond. Her fingers scratched feebly at the wooden floor beneath them, then lay still, outspread in a last, abortive grasp at life.

  Claire, shoved so hard by her friend that she fell to her knees, felt the passage of the sandbag as a rush of air and the impact as a shuddering of the boards beneath her. For a moment she didn’t understand what had happened; then she heard the screaming and saw a rivulet of blood ooze thickly across the wooden floor. She crawled toward Lucinda. Sobbing, she pushed with all her might against the sandbag until it rolled off the body of her friend. Lucinda’s back and shoulders were curiously flattened, her skull split so that the naked brain shone through tangles of dark hair. Her eyes were open, staring glassily at nothing.

  Cradling her friend’s head in her lap, Claire rocked back and forth in the ancient mourning lament of women of every culture, chants from the dozens of funeral masses she had sung rising unbidden from her singer’s heart and belly. One by one, other members of the company crept back to join her, until Lucinda lay in a circle of mourning as bleak and stylized as anything the opera masters had ever staged. No one tried to revive her; one glance and they knew she was dead.