What the Dead Leave Behind Page 7

  “Where are they?”

  “Here.” Conkling pointed to one of the heavy cardboard folders.

  Wordlessly, Prudence held out her hand. Conkling shook his head. Gave the folder to his secretary.

  “Josiah, read the addresses on the envelopes, please.”

  “Yes, Mr. Conkling.” He held the first envelope close to one of the oil lamps. The handwriting on it was thin and spidery, as if penned by someone whose hand was unsteady. “‘To Prudence MacKenzie Linwood, wife of Charles Montgomery Linwood, ’” he read.

  “Such a person does not exist. Will never exist.” With a flick of the wrist, Conkling dismissed her. “And the second one?”

  “‘To Charles Montgomery Linwood, husband of Prudence MacKenzie Linwood.’”

  “That person does not exist either.”

  Conkling nodded his head. Josiah, who was well schooled in the lawyer’s ways, rose from his chair and placed both envelopes on the coals burning brightly in the center of the office fireplace. Flames licked eagerly at the new fuel. The envelopes flared, crackled, then dissolved into black ash. In the few moments before their complete destruction, as the pages within uncurled, lines of the same shaky handwriting could be glimpsed. But not deciphered. Whatever the Judge had wanted to tell his married daughter and her husband was gone forever. As completely as if the words had never been written.

  No one moved. No one spoke. Josiah stood beside the fireplace until the last flake of ash collapsed on itself.

  “I don’t know what he wrote, Prudence. I haven’t the slightest notion of what might have been on his mind. He was already ill, but he managed to bring me the envelopes shortly after the day he and Victoria came to arrange for that special codicil. He was alone and he’d come by hansom cab. I looked out the window and saw it waiting below, saw him helped inside by the driver. I wondered why he hadn’t used his own carriage; it seemed unlike him. The next time I saw your father was when Worthington sent to tell me he was on his deathbed. I don’t know what Thomas was thinking, but there was no final request I could fulfill. He was already unconscious when I got to the house.”

  “I remember.” With a last anguished glance at the fireplace, Prudence straightened her back, sitting as upright in her chair as a schoolgirl called to the headmistress’s office. “Nothing has changed,” she said. “Nothing has changed.”

  “Expectations have changed, and that may be the most important thing to have resulted from Charles’s unfortunate and unexpected demise.” Conkling’s eyes sparkled the way they always did when he was about to take on a case that no one else thought he could win. “Do you see where I’m going, Prudence?”

  Puzzled, she shook her head. She knew he was hinting that the Judge had somehow managed to circumvent the woman who seemed to have controlled the last months of his life, but Prudence could not untangle Victoria’s web enough to see a way out of it. “Explain, please,” she asked, embarrassed not to know the answer.

  “Victoria’s initial expectation was that she would be the trustee of your estate for only the months between your father’s death and your marriage, and he had stipulated that one was to follow closely upon the other. Three months. I thought that odd, but I assumed he did it purposely in order to allow Victoria her freedom and to ensure that you were safely and legally in Charles’s care. Victoria was to move into the apartment he had secured for her at the Dakota, and you and Charles were to have the house. But there was one other codicil that Victoria didn’t know about. The Judge added it on the day he brought me the envelopes, and from the look on Victoria’s face when the will was read, he never informed her of what he’d done.”

  Conkling stood up and moved from behind his desk to the fireplace where the envelopes and their secrets had burned. He held out his hands to warm them, then turned to face his audience, very much like an actor about to deliver the climactic lines of a scene.

  “If you died before you married Charles Linwood, the fifty percent of the Judge’s estate intended to come to you in trust would go to the four charities named in his will. Since that did not happen, the alternative clause is activated. The charities also benefit if you die before you reach the age of thirty. Neither you nor Victoria can name new beneficiaries. You either live to enjoy the fruits of the trust or everything contained in the trust passes out of the family. Victoria, in turn, may not name a beneficiary for what she has inherited from the Judge. She has the use of his wealth for her lifetime, but everything she possesses at the time of her death reverts either to your trust, to you yourself if you are past the age of thirty and mentally competent, to any heirs of your body, or to the named charities.”

  “None of this seemed important when the will was read. Even afterward, when you and Charles explained it to me. I understood that Victoria would administer the trust and be my legal guardian until Charles and I married. But then I would be free of her. Nothing else made much of an impression, I’m afraid.”

  “No one, certainly not Charles himself, thought he would die when he did. It was the one contingency the Judge did not envision. That’s what I meant when I said he was not as farseeing in his private life as he was on the bench. No one expects a healthy young man in his early thirties to freeze to death in a blizzard, but it happened. I asked your father, just once, what he envisaged for you if Linwood were not here. He flew into a rage, as though simply asking the question were tempting the Fates. You remember how precise he always was in his speech? That day he sputtered like a Roman candle. I could hardly understand him. He had a plan, you see, and it was inconceivable that anything, human or divine, could possibly interfere with it.”

  “It’s in Mrs. MacKenzie’s best interests that Miss MacKenzie live a happy and healthy life for the next eleven years. If, that is, she wants to enjoy the income from both fortunes.” Geoffrey Hunter’s comment was frankly speculative.

  “She does, Mr. Hunter. Have no doubt about it. My stepmother brought nothing but her body to that marriage.”

  “Prudence!”

  “My father would say the same, if he were here, Mr. Conkling. And probably in far more explicit terms.”

  “He was a true gentleman in speech and manners, Prudence.”

  “He taught me law the same way the students at Harvard are now taught. Case law, Mr. Conkling. One on one and face to face with one of the bench’s great jurists. I learned human nature along with the law. Victoria is a greedy woman. She dislikes me as much as I despise her, but she needs me. Mr. Hunter is right. She has to have a stepdaughter who is both healthy and happy. How else can she maintain the place in society that marriage to my father brought her? She can’t drain the trust dry; that would be malfeasance. But she can live very, very well on it, and as long as both of us are seen to benefit, as long as she appears to be a loving and responsible guardian, no one will question what she does or how she does it.”

  “There’s no oversight at all?” asked Hunter.

  “The bank has its officers, of course,” replied Conkling, “and they’ll monitor what flows in and out. Strictly for their own purposes, however. They have no power to refuse a transaction. Even to question it. Fraud is one of the more difficult crimes to prove.”

  “How well did Charles understand the provisions of the Judge’s will?” Geoffrey asked. “Did he go over them in detail with you, Mr. Conkling?”

  “Charles was as good a young lawyer as you’re likely to find anywhere.” Conkling stroked his beard while he debated whether to say something that would sound like a criticism of the dead man. “The only thing I can fault him for was a certain reticence about discussing all of the will’s provisions before his marriage to Miss MacKenzie took place.”

  “Charles was the consummate gentleman,” Prudence said.

  “He was, my dear. He knew what had to be done and what his role would be in the management of your trust, but he felt it was indelicate and indiscreet to probe too deeply before he became your husband. After all, nothing about the will could be changed. It was ju
st a question of implemention.”

  “I’m meeting with Charles’s father early tomorrow morning,” Geoffrey interrupted. “At his request.”

  Neither Conkling nor Prudence could find the words to ask him why.

  “He told me something at the funeral I didn’t know before. When they found Charles in Union Square Park, he was holding an ace of spades in his hand. From what his father hinted, it had to have been the same card he always carried in his pocket. Like this one.” Geoffrey laid a playing card on Conkling’s desk. An ace of spades worn around the edges with frequent handling, its large black center spade rubbed to gray by time and fingertips. “The one I placed in his coffin this morning was from a new deck.”

  “What does it mean, Mr. Hunter?”

  “The card itself means danger, Miss MacKenzie, though I don’t know why Charles had it in his hand. There wasn’t time at the church to ask Mr. Linwood any questions. As I said, he’s calling on me tomorrow morning.”

  “I want to be there. I think I have a right to know what he tells you.”

  “It may not be anything, Miss MacKenzie,” Geoffrey said. “I imagine there are things too painful for Charles’s mother to hear. She’s not a strong woman. Mr. Linwood may just want to talk about his son with someone else who knew and loved him.”

  “You and I both know it’s more than that. Charles was sending you a message, Mr. Hunter.”

  “I think you should leave it at that for the moment, Prudence.” Conkling squared the corners of the stack of papers lying before him. “Let Mr. Hunter meet with Charles’s father as planned. Mr. Linwood is more likely to be forthcoming if he doesn’t have to worry about upsetting you.”

  “And you have hired me to represent you,” Geoffrey reminded her with a smile.

  “I want to know everything he says to you. I don’t want anything to be kept hidden from me.”

  “You have my word, Miss MacKenzie.”

  “We were talking about the will, and Prudence’s stepmother,” Conkling reminded them. “At the moment, Prudence’s most important problem is what to do about Victoria’s hold on her inheritance.”

  Prudence wrenched her mind back from contemplation of Charles’s hand outstretched in the snow, the ace of spades dark against the white. Mr. Conkling was right. Until Hunter found out what Charles’s father wanted to talk to him about, there was no point speculating. She had a more immediate, more pressing problem, and the afternoon was wearing on. She could imagine Victoria pacing furiously in the parlor, enraged that her stepdaughter had eluded her. Something had occurred to her just before Geoffrey Hunter’s revelation sidetracked the conversation, something the Judge had been very vehement about.

  “Mr. Conkling, does the codicil say anything about the moral turpitude of the trustee? I seem to remember my father telling me that some such language should be a part of every legal situation where control of one person is placed in the hands of another.” Prudence smiled at him when Conkling handed her the document to read for herself. It meant she was whole again, her father’s daughter again, free of the taint that haunted every laudanum addict. Tears flooded her eyes; she passed the Judge’s will to Geoffrey Hunter.

  “Here it is.” Hunter paged immediately to the codicil that Victoria had insisted upon, the one in which she was named sole trustee of her stepdaughter’s fortune. “You were right, Prudence. The trustee is described as being an individual free of moral turpitude. The implication is clear. If Victoria is guilty of evil intent where you or anyone else is concerned, she can be removed as trustee. The catch is that intent may be the hardest thing in the world to prove.”

  “He slipped it past her, Prudence.” Conkling pressed one hand to his right ear; it felt as if an insect were burrowing along the canal. “You were wrong. He did trust that you would be able to manage your own life. For some reason we don’t know yet, the Judge couldn’t openly challenge Victoria. So he did it by the back door. He left you a clue, my dear. He knew you would remember what he’d taught you. He wagered your freedom on your ability to find out whatever Victoria has to be hiding. It’s not a bet he expected to lose.”

  No one spoke for a moment. The next move was up to Prudence.

  “That’s the motive for the laudanum, that’s why Victoria was so generous with it, why she encouraged me to ignore Dr. Worthington’s warnings about taking too much. Laudanum makes the brain flaccid, dulls curiosity because there’s no energy to ask questions, no interest in finding answers The women who carry those tiny brown bottles around in their reticules have no more willpower than some of the unfortunate war veterans no one wants to talk about. Every family has someone nodding away his or her life in a quiet upstairs bedroom. My father taught me about powers of attorney, about petitions to declare someone incompetent. That’s what Victoria planned for me, Mr. Conkling. A very long, very slow decline until just past my thirtieth birthday. After that, who knows?

  “You said you’ve tried your hand at many professions, Mr. Hunter.”

  “I’m a curious man, Miss MacKenzie.”

  “He was a Pinkerton, Prudence.”

  “Not for very long, Mr. Conkling.”

  “Long enough. He made some very sensitive inquiries for Charles. Especially for one client who didn’t wish his name mentioned.”

  “May I ask what the result was?” Prudence turned to look directly at the man she had known for only a few hours. He met her eyes steadily, as if he already knew what she was about to ask of him.

  “Charles was pleased. His client was ecstatic. Or so I’m told. The client paid very well. Promptly and without demur. Always the best indication of success.”

  “I want to know who Victoria Morley was before she married my father. Where and when she was born, who her family is, her education or lack of it, what her brother does and why he sticks to her side like an overfed dog. We’ll need the name of every man who courted her, every woman who might have been jealous of her. Where her money came from before she married my father. How much of it there was, how she spent it. I want to know everything about her, Mr. Hunter. Everything.”

  “So do I, Miss MacKenzie. So do I.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The rain had stopped and the skies cleared to a bright spring blue by the time Geoffrey Hunter handed Prudence into a hansom cab outside the United Bank Building at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway.

  She paused in the lobby, looking around her as if trying to capture those last few moments before Charles, William Sulzer, and Roscoe Conkling plunged out into the fierce winds and blinding snow of what people were already calling the Great Blizzard. Just nine days ago. This morning she had seen the cheerful yellow of early daffodils breaking through what remained of the snow in the Trinity Church graveyard; now the afternoon breeze was light and playful. Almost impossible to believe that Charles, young and strong, had not survived that walk up Broadway.

  “I won’t contact you directly, Miss MacKenzie,” Hunter said. “I’ll send word via Mr. Conkling’s office.”

  “When?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep. I’ll start with the obvious. Your father’s death certificate and their marriage license. Both are on file at the City Records Office. Anything else you can find will help. Letters, your father’s diary, if he kept one, financial records.”

  “Mr. Conkling has copies of the bank holdings.”

  “Household accounts are more what I had in mind. The Judge’s personal expenditures. Your stepmother’s also. Any regular payments that would indicate MacKenzie funds were being used to support someone or several someones outside the immediate household.”

  Blackmail? The word breathed itself in Prudence’s mind like the unforeseen answer to a baffling case history. Blackmail? Was Hunter suggesting that the Judge was being blackmailed? That knowledge of that blackmail was what had given Victoria MacKenzie the strange power she seemed to have held over him? No, she refused to consider it. As a practicing lawyer, her father had
rarely lost a case; as a judge, he’d never been overturned. Victoria was young and beautiful; the Judge had been lonely for many years when they met. Prudence could forgive that in some respects he was a man like any other. But his professional life was a model of probity. To believe anything else was to desecrate his memory. Victoria, she reminded herself. Concentrate on finding something in Victoria’s past that will prove her guilty of moral turpitude.

  “Be careful.” Geoffrey nodded to the driver, watched the hansom cab edge its way out into the traffic surging around this busy section of Lower Manhattan. She was long out of hearing when he repeated, “Be very careful, Prudence.”

  * * *

  The man who opened the door to her had joined the MacKenzie household as underbutler shortly before the Judge’s death. He was of medium height and muscular, with thick brown hair turning gray above oddly flat ears, ice-cold eyes more yellow than brown, and lips so thin they were like pencil lines drawn onto his face. Even though it had been more than four months, Prudence hadn’t gotten used either to Obediah Jackson’s looks or to the sneer she read in his eyes after Victoria dismissed Ian Cameron and installed Jackson in his place as butler.

  “Prudence, my dear, we were so worried when you didn’t arrive at the cemetery.” Victoria stood at the parlor door like a headmistress about to deliver a punishment. “Jackson, take Miss MacKenzie’s coat.”

  Prudence repressed a shudder as Jackson helped her off with her coat. She missed Cameron, who’d been the Judge’s valet and then his butler since before Prudence was born. In all those years he’d never failed to see her out or welcome her home.

  The worst part of the abrupt dismissal that Victoria termed a well-deserved retirement was that it had happened so quickly, without warning or explanation, another event Prudence only vaguely remembered from the dark, laudanum-drenched weeks immediately after the Judge’s death. Cameron was gone before Prudence knew he had been relieved of his position. No chance to ask what his plans were, no opportunity to say good-bye to the man she had thought of as a second father. Where was he?