What the Dead Leave Behind Page 9

  CHAPTER 7

  “Donald has been very generous, Prudence.” Victoria unlocked the door to her late husband’s study with the key that still hung from the thin gold chain he had worn across his vest. “He’s very fond of you and he only wants what’s best; there are times when he simply must stand in for your father.”

  “I don’t take additional laudanum very often, Victoria.”

  “You frightened both of us. I won’t ask you again what pharmacy you bought it from yesterday, but you have to know how dangerous it can be to buy from an unknown source. There’s no telling what might have been in the mixture.”

  Victoria withdrew the key from the lock and when Prudence reached for it, shook her head. “You might misplace it,” she said, turning abruptly, heels tapping along the polished wood floor of the hallway.

  Only when Victoria had disappeared into the parlor did Prudence enter the study and close the door behind her. She didn’t dare lock it; that risk would have to be run late at night, when the house slept. If there were private papers hidden somewhere in this room, she would search for them when she could be sure of not being interrupted.

  Geoffrey Hunter had mentioned a diary, household accounts, letters. Victoria was not a stupid woman; she would have gone through her husband’s papers before anyone else could get to them. Prudence wouldn’t put it past her to have ransacked the Judge’s desk while he lay ill and dying in his bedroom on the second floor. No, she wouldn’t have ransacked his desk; she would have gone through it drawer by drawer, meticulously replacing the contents exactly how and where she found them. Just in case. In case he recovered. In case he persuaded Cameron to help him downstairs despite the doctor’s orders to remain in bed. Victoria was not the type of woman to take chances. As far as Prudence could tell, she had made not a single mistake since marrying the Judge. Not one.

  “Miss Prudence.” Colleen carried two heavy cardboard letter cases into the room. “Mrs. MacKenzie said I was to take these back up to the attic again when you finish with them. I’m supposed to tell you she’s ordered more from the stationer.”

  “You can put them on the table, Colleen.”

  The long library table stood beneath a broad expanse of windows overlooking the garden. When the heavy dark green drapes were drawn back, light poured over whatever was laid out there for study. The Judge had used it to organize a case, moving around evidence reports, witness statements, his own notes, and even newspaper clippings according to some unfathomable logic of his own. He had taught his daughter that every case was different, and that therefore each one had its own interrelated structure of irrefutable facts. It was up to the investigator hidden inside every good lawyer to find and apply the principles that would validate his conclusions and strengthen his argument. What might look to the uneducated eye like a random collection of odds and ends was actually an exercise in shifting patterns.

  “There are papers inside these cases,” Prudence said, hearing the rustle within.

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Thank you, Colleen.”

  “Is there anything else, miss?”

  “You’ve already taken one big chance for me, Colleen. Mrs. MacKenzie won’t forgive you for not telling her about the key hidden in the hall coatrack. You could lose your position over that if she finds out.”

  “She won’t, Miss Prudence. Nobody dusts that rack except me.”

  “There is one other thing, Colleen.”

  “I can do it, miss, whatever it is.” Excitement reddened the maid’s cheeks and made her blue eyes sparkle. Like most parlor maids, she’d been chosen as much for her looks as for her skills.

  “A gentleman who works for Mr. Conkling, the Judge’s lawyer, is working for me now.” Prudence thought a more detailed explanation would be confusing. “I need a way to receive messages from him without Mrs. MacKenzie knowing, so I gave him two names. Yours and James Kincaid’s. I couldn’t think of anyone else I can trust.”

  “Mr. Kincaid is the safest, miss. Nobody goes out to the stables and carriage house except him. He could easily bring a message to the kitchen when he comes in for a meal or a cup of tea. If he gave it to me, I could get it to you and no one the wiser.”

  “I think you have the makings of a Pinkerton, Colleen. That’s exactly what Mr. Hunter told me would work best.”

  “A Pinkerton, miss?”

  “Mr. Hunter is a former Pinkerton.”

  “Cook sends hot tea to Mr. Kincaid sometimes. I can be the one to take it out. They’ll just think down in the kitchen that I’m sweet on him.”

  “He’s twice your age!”

  “A coachman is a good catch, miss, and Mr. Kincaid’s a favorite with all the maids.”

  “I hope there’s a message for me this morning, Colleen.”

  “Not to worry, Miss Prudence. I’ll see to it Mr. Kincaid is warned what to expect.”

  * * *

  The first cardboard letter case held only a scant handful of documents. Prudence placed them one by one on the table, lining them up precisely. She recognized the handwriting immediately, the heavy black ink her father had always used, the thick letter paper that had the look and feel of vellum. My most darling Sarah, she read. Tears filled her eyes. She counted ten letters, and knew immediately that if the Judge had written ten letters to his wife, he had written hundreds. Cameron would know, she thought. Cameron would know if my father boxed up his letters to my mother before he married Victoria. Boxed them up in heavy cardboard letter cases to preserve them.

  Victoria burned them, she thought. She left only these few so I would think my father had destroyed what he thought too private and too tender to share. Each letter began with the same words: My most darling Sarah. But these letters might have been written by a fond brother sending household instructions home to his sister. There were requests to tell his valet to ready a certain suit which he must have for court, inquiries about a favorite horse discovered to have a split hoof just before the Judge left for Philadelphia, reminders that his prize roses would need careful pruning in the heat of summer, questions about the various dinners and evening galas which his darling Sarah had had to attend without him. The letters were chatty, but oddly impersonal, as if each one had been written in a hurry, almost as an afterthought to a more ardent missive that had already been sent.

  This was not the deeply enamored husband who had bought a bucolic country home in the hills of Staten Island so his consumptive wife could breathe fresh, clean air. Be distracted from her illness by the elegant white-clad cricketers and lawn tennis players at the Staten Island Cricket and Tennis Club. Prudence remembered her father telling her about those few years when it had still been possible to hope that Sarah would recover. She wasn’t poor, malnourished, living cheek to jowl in a tenement flophouse; she was surrounded by the best and most constant care the Judge’s considerable wealth could obtain. Neither husband nor wife gave in to despair, not even when she lay dying and he knelt beside her bed aching to breathe for her.

  He wrote her every day, sometimes several times a day, and sped those letters by messenger across the harbor when they were separated, Sarah in the many-windowed summer house he had built for her atop a wooded hill, Thomas in the law courts that occupied his mind and kept him sane. You can read them when you’re older, he had told Prudence, when you know what love is and how glorious and painful it can be. Ten letters to a wife he adored? Ten letters over the course of a passionate marriage that lasted eight years? Never. Not possible.

  And where were Sarah’s letters to her husband? She had lain on a daybed in the shade of the house’s wide white porch, reading, napping, and writing. Your mother wrote poems, the Judge had told Prudence, and the most beautiful letters imaginable. Those, too, he put aside for her to read when she got older. But he waited too long. Victoria captured him when Prudence was not quite seventeen; life in the mansion on Fifth Avenue had never been the same. Wherever the Judge stored his letters to Sarah and hers to him, they had not survived Victoria. />
  The second letter case contained what seemed to be the contents of a desk drawer, a jumble of notes, fading photographs, unopened invitations, and what looked like bills from a tailor. They were many times folded and creased, with here and there a stain of spilled brandy or coffee, such an unsorted miscellany that Prudence was hard put to believe the mess had really been her father’s. The Judge was conscientious about record keeping; he said no man could be a good lawyer who didn’t respect minutiae. He would never have allowed this accumulation of detritus in his immaculate and well-organized desk. Where had it come from? What did it mean?

  When she read Donald’s name on one of the bills, she knew that Victoria and her brother had lied to her. Sometime during the past three months, Donald had usurped her father’s desk long enough to fill a drawer with his leavings. Which Victoria then unceremoniously dumped into one of the letter cases Colleen brought from the attic.

  But that didn’t make sense. Charles was to have moved into the Judge’s library when the newly wedded couple got back from their honeymoon in Saratoga. That had been the plan. Why would Donald have taken temporary possession of the Judge’s office? Unless he had intended it to be permanent. Which made even less sense. And even more confusing, why would he or Victoria have tried to conceal what he’d done, tried to remove all traces of his presence? It was almost as puzzling as learning that Charles had died with the ace of spades in his hand.

  Prudence heard the longcase clock in the hallway strike the hour. Mr. Linwood should have arrived at Geoffrey Hunter’s suite in the Fifth Avenue Hotel by now. She pictured the two men drinking coffee together, exchanging stories about Charles, allowing an atmosphere of trust to build between them. She thought Mr. Hunter would wait patiently until Charles’s father was ready to talk about whatever was disturbing him. Something to do with the card; it had to be that. Was it a clue to a case Charles was handling? He hadn’t mentioned anything out of the ordinary to her, and he knew how much she enjoyed conundrums of the law.

  Enough. Geoffrey would send word as soon as he had anything to tell her, and Colleen would make sure she got the message. In the meantime, she had work to do here in the study. One by one Prudence examined each of the items Donald had carelessly left behind, returning each to the letter case when she was satisfied it could not answer her questions. The suspicion that Victoria and her brother were concealing vitally important secrets about themselves was stronger than ever. There were no answers here, but it gave her hope that Donald was slipshod enough to have made other mistakes.

  The black silk ribbon was worn and frayed; Prudence retied and knotted it as tightly as she could, careful to leave no trace that the contents of the letter case had received any but the most cursory of examinations.

  She read each of the ten letters the Judge had written to his wife, reread some passages. Not until a tear splashed on to the back of her hand did she realize she was weeping, mourning the loss of all the letters that had been stolen from her, that by rights should have been hers to treasure, that would have kept alive the love her parents shared. Reverently, because unrevealing though they were, they were all she had, she put the letters in order by date, placed a piece of clean white paper in between each of them to keep the ink from bleeding through, and returned them to the letter case.

  The table shone empty in the late-morning light, its polished cherry surface gleaming and bare. Was this a portent of what she would find in her father’s study? In his desk? Bits and pieces that Victoria had decided were not important enough to destroy?

  She tried to go back through the hours and days and weeks after her father’s death, tried to remember the daily life of the house after its master left it. How had Victoria spent those first days of widowhood? Had servants cleared out her father’s clothing after the funeral? Had Victoria closed up the study because the room was supposed to become Charles’s private domain after the wedding? Closed it up and locked it after stripping it of everything that could possibly be of value? She couldn’t remember. She had fallen into the deep and comforting embrace of laudanum, been led into a drowsy world that seemed made of the softest of feathers so that escape was impossible. Even if she had wanted to. Which she didn’t think she had.

  Prudence settled herself deeper into her father’s chair, placed both her forearms on the desktop as she had seen him do many times in a courtroom when he poised himself to listen intently to the questions and answers of the drama playing out below his bench. Listen, really listen to what is being said. You never know when something vital will slip out. She would listen to herself, would examine whatever there was to hear, would search her dulled brain for whatever it might have absorbed but never probed. Always begin with the obvious, start with what you’re tempted to ignore.

  * * *

  Victoria claimed she had wanted to summon Dr. Worthington when the Judge first fell ill, but he scoffed at the idea and refused to allow it. He had a history of dyspepsia, he reminded her. Peter Worthington would scold and fuss, mix him an unpalatable and hideously smelly drink, prohibit cigars and brandy for a week, then collect a fat fee for what he’d done innumerable times before. Victoria should tell Cook to put a spoonful of baking soda into some warm water and be done with it.

  He got better at first, the nausea and pains in his upper abdomen easing on a diet of boiled milk and dry water biscuits straight from the barrel. The day after he pronounced himself cured, he had a second attack, longer and more severe than the first. This time the Judge sent for Dr. Worthington. Prudence had sat so quietly in her dead mother’s dressing room that neither man suspected the connecting door between the two rooms was cracked. She hadn’t trusted either her father or Victoria to tell her the truth about his condition.

  “Judge, I’ve known and treated you for more than twenty-five years. You’re not getting any younger. Neither am I, for that matter.”

  “You have a case to make, Peter. Make it and be done.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, Thomas, you have a young wife. Young and very beautiful, if you will allow the compliment. An older man with a much younger wife needs to see to himself more carefully than he’s often prepared to admit. If you understand what I’m saying.”

  “You’re as good as a lawyer at implying much and stating nothing. Victoria’s age and our marital status have nothing to do with this fire in my gut and the urge to empty myself even when there’s nothing left inside me to get rid of.”

  “I see.” Perhaps if Peter Worthington hadn’t known Thomas MacKenzie for a quarter of a century, didn’t count him as much a friend as a patient, he would have asked the obvious question. But looking at the wan face on the pillow, taking in the fiercely proud and stubbornly set jaw, he knew the Judge would count it an unconscionable invasion of his privacy and refuse to answer.

  He suspected his aging friend had fallen foolish victim to one of the hundreds of patent nostrums advertised to improve male performance; the best he could do under the circumstances was warn him off. The Judge was far from stupid, although as vulnerable as any man to certain weaknesses; he’d have to accept that with years came certain unmentionable dysfunctions. Sad, but true. And nothing to be done but accept the new limitations.

  “I would get rid of any patent medicines you may be taking, Thomas. No matter how beneficial they promise to be. Walk to the office instead of taking the carriage or a hansom cab. Restrict your consumption of brandy and cigars. You’ll be as right as rain in a week or two.”

  * * *

  In the end, it was Dr. Worthington himself who provided the blueprint for the Judge’s demise. How fortuitous. Many of the male enhancement tonics contained arsenic, which had long been used in the treatment of syphilis. The police and the press had dubbed it inheritance powder.

  Buy a bottle of the strongest tonic, boil it down to increase the concentration of arsenic, add the resulting syrup to the heart-regulating concoctions prescribed by the Judge’s physician, and wait for the poison to quietly do its deadly w
ork.

  The Judge was possessed of a young and beautiful wife; it was only natural that he would dose himself with whatever nostrum promised him the staying power of a younger man. Dr. Worthington had warned his patient against the patent medicines. He wouldn’t question the inevitable result. The plan was foolproof.

  The hand that laced the Judge’s heart medicine with arsenic did not hesitate.

  Two weeks later the Judge was dead.

  * * *

  “His heart gave out,” Dr. Worthington told the widow and daughter. “It happens to men of his age, and he hadn’t been well recently.”

  “Not for months, actually, though he wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t allow me to send for you until it was too late,” sobbed Victoria. “He knew, Doctor, he knew what was coming.”

  Peter Worthington doubted that very much, though he seldom bothered to contradict grieving relatives. They rarely heard what he had to say, and usually resented any implication that the corpse brought it on himself. What puzzled him about the Judge’s death was not the fact of his heart giving out, but the suddenness of it. Usually there were warning signs aplenty. Shortness of breath, numbness in the extremities, a tinge of blue beneath the fingernails, the pallid complexion and dark circles under the eyes of someone whose blood isn’t circulating the way it should.

  But aside from the dyspepsia and what Worthington suspected the Judge had done to keep his so much younger wife happy and satisfied, Thomas MacKenzie had been in good health. In fact, he and his friend Roscoe Conkling were the same age. Conkling’s robust physique and enormous energy were envied by some, resented by others. In that, as in his far too blatant affairs with attractive women of all ages, he was a figure of controversy and a boon to the muckrakers. Yet the conservative judge died and the flamboyant Conkling seemed to remain close to his prime long after he should have conceded gracefully to the constrictions of advancing years.