Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets Page 9

  “This is baby Ingrid,” Prudence breathed. “I had trouble making anything out when I looked at the glass negative, but I could tell that the eyes were open and it was the only plate that seemed to contain a close-up view of her face. Poor baby. Hardly arrived before she was taken away.”

  Catherine Sorensen’s child was lying in the crook of her mother’s arm. The photographer had leaned in as close as he could; there seemed to be traces of some sort of salve in a few places around her eyes. Which were wide open.

  “What you’re seeing on her skin is spirit gum. He’s put a tiny drop on her eyelid, then pressed it against her skin to hold it open for the length of the exposure. Which, since he used a dry plate negative, was probably not that long. The spirit gum is taken off with alcohol or grease, and if you use it very sparingly, it’s not difficult to remove. Actors hate it because they say it burns the skin, but they all use it to attach false mustaches and beards.”

  “I can see the petechiae in her eyes,” Prudence said. “Even without a magnifying glass.”

  Riis handed around close-ups of Catherine Sorensen, and then the last set of pictures. In these, Catherine and her baby lay together atop rumpled sheets, as though the photographer had turned back for one last picture before putting away his camera and setting the room and the bodies to rights again. The infant had been placed atop an embroidered pillow that seemed too big to fit comfortably within the mother’s arm. “You could argue that what you see in the mother’s eyes is from natural causes, but you can’t say the same for her child. If you look closely at them, the petechiae are so alike that they appear to have been caused by the same type of pressure. As I said before, I think someone held a pillow over their faces until they stopped breathing.”

  In the thunderous silence that followed Jacob Riis’s accusation, no one heard the outer office door open.

  “I came to see if you had discovered anything yet.” Claire Buchanan stared at the photographs scattered on the conference room table.

  Before anyone could stop her, she was holding a close-up of her dead sister’s face in her gloved hand.

  CHAPTER 10

  The only other time Jacob Riis had seen Claire Buchanan was on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera when she stepped out of the dark wings and walked toward the body of Lucinda Pallazzo. His last glass plate negative had slipped from his fingers then; today he dropped one of the postmortem prints of Catherine Sorensen.

  “Where did you get these?” Claire asked. Her eyes skipped from photograph to photograph.

  “We went to Bartholomew Monroe’s gallery,” Prudence answered. She started to gather up the prints, but when she glanced at Geoffrey, he shook his head.

  “He gave them to you?”

  “We stole the glass negatives,” Josiah said proudly.

  Claire nodded, then turned to speak directly to Jacob Riis. “I saw you at the Met. You’re the police photographer.” She gestured toward the brown envelope containing the prints he had made of Lucinda’s death scene. Enough of one photograph could be seen to identify what it was.

  “Riis also works for us when we need him,” Geoffrey explained. “He knows we’re investigating Catherine’s death. And why.”

  Riis had been thumbing through the photographs in the brown envelope. Now he chose one and placed it in the center of the table. The end of the hemp rope tied to the sandbag had been circled with a grease pencil, and an exclamation point added in case there was any doubt about what was being scrutinized. Half of the rope end looked as though it had ripped and shredded itself free; the other half was neatly cut.

  “This is what caught Detective Phelan’s attention.” Riis placed additional copies of the print on the table.

  “Lucinda’s death was a warning gone terribly wrong,” Claire said. “Someone believed I was a threat to the principal soprano or to another cover singer’s career. The sandbag was meant to frighten me out of the company. But as I told Miss MacKenzie and Mr. Hunter, I don’t think it has anything to do with Catherine’s murder. I believe Aaron Sorensen killed my sister and her child. For his own reasons, one of which must certainly be the fortune she inherited.”

  “Have you met with the attorney who drew up your will?” Prudence asked.

  “I went straight from your offices to his. Aaron Sorensen no longer profits from my death.”

  “Does he know that?” asked Geoffrey.

  “The attorney is sending him a letter to the effect that a new will is in existence that does not name him as a beneficiary. He said it was a very unusual thing to do, but I insisted. In the end he agreed.” Claire took off her gloves before picking up her sister’s photograph again. “I have a care for my own safety, Mr. Hunter. I’ve looked out for myself since the first time I was given a company contract.”

  “Mr. Riis, what is this shadow on the baby’s nose?” Josiah Gregory brushed furiously at a print atop which he’d momentarily laid his stenographer’s notebook and pencil. “I thought the pencil had rubbed against it, but now I’m not so sure.” He passed the photograph down the table.

  Riis laid two prints of the same photograph side by side, then reached for the other three. When he had them lined up, he used the magnifying glass to study each in turn. “It wasn’t your pencil, Mr. Gregory,” he said. “And it isn’t a shadow, either. The photographer held the flash gun directly over the subject. There are no shadows anywhere in the picture.”

  “But there is definitely some sort of darkening there,” Josiah insisted. “You can see it more clearly in some prints than in others.”

  “I varied the contrast deliberately,” Riis said. “It’s easy to fool the human eye.”

  “He held the pillow too tightly over the baby’s nose, perhaps afraid the child would wake up and cry out,” Geoffrey said. “I’m sorry, Claire, but that’s how it could have happened. That’s how this bruising might have occurred.”

  Claire’s horrified gasp reminded all of them that what they regarded as a fascinating and challenging puzzle would continue to haunt her dreams and nightmares well after all of the facts were known. Even now her brain was conjuring up horrific images brought to life by Geoffrey’s assertion of how Catherine and Ingrid’s deaths had been managed.

  Prudence had been turning pages in Compton’s Medical Guide. Now she began reading aloud from an entry on the appearance of newborn babies: “‘The nose may appear flattened, but this will usually resolve itself within one to two weeks. In addition, the whites of the eyes may be yellowed or display what seem to be small pinpricks of blood. The jaundice will dissipate more quickly than the blood spots, which may remain for as long as three weeks.’ ” She looked across the table at the dismay written on Claire Buchanan’s drawn face. “Everything we’ve taken as an indication of foul play can be explained away as a normal occurrence in the newborn child.”

  “There has to be a logical reason why Monroe retouched the cabinet photograph the way he did,” Geoffrey said. “Either he was instructed to do so by Aaron Sorensen, who ordered the prints made, or he did it for his own reasons, without Sorensen’s knowledge. From what we’ve seen here, it really wasn’t necessary. Even Mr. Riis had to search to find the petechiae. The naked eye or the casual glance doesn’t see them. Miss Buchanan?”

  “I didn’t notice them. I couldn’t even have told you that the photograph had been retouched.”

  “Mr. Riis, put yourself into Bartholomew Monroe’s place,” Prudence urged. “Imagine that you’ve been called to the Sorensen home. What do you find? What do you do?”

  “The negative plates were numbered, Miss MacKenzie.” Riis arranged the four photographs in the order in which they were taken. “If all of the dozen plates in the box you saw were exposed, we’re missing eight of them, but I think I can reconstruct what happened from the four we do have.”

  Josiah’s pencil scratched across the page of his stenographer’s pad. No one else in the room moved.

  “All right. Strange as it might seem, the cabinet photo was the fi
rst one taken. Monroe must have been anxious to pose the bodies while they were still flexible.” Riis glanced at Claire Buchanan. Her hands were clenched, the fingers a bloodless white, but she looked back at him with an urgency that told him she would neither faint nor cry out, no matter what he said.

  “His sister is his assistant. She’s especially useful when the deceased is a woman or a female child. So I would say that the two of them followed someone’s instructions about how the bodies were to be posed. Mrs. Sorensen and her daughter had probably already been washed and dressed for the viewing that was to follow. They lay on the bed together or perhaps the child had been placed in her cradle. Monroe has done this so many times that it would have taken no more than a few minutes to place the mother in the rocking chair and arrange the baby in her arms. The eyes would have been closed by whoever had tended to them, but Monroe was able to open them and keep them from closing while he took the cabinet photograph. Either rigor had not begun to set in or he used an infinitesimal and therefore undetectable amount of spirit gum.

  “We’re missing four photographs, according to the numbering system, then we have the close-up of baby Ingrid. I think Monroe saw something he decided to photograph for his own records, not for the family. I’m going to speculate that when he was leaning over the baby to make final adjustments before he took the first exposure, he saw the petechiae in her eyes, and when he looked at Catherine again, he saw the same tiny pinpricks of blood. He knew that could happen during childbirth because he’s taken hundreds of pictures of dead mothers and infants, but there was something else that bothered him. He might have talked to his sister about it, perhaps not. At any rate he uses spirit gum, severe close-ups, and long exposures to capture what he’s seen. Then we’re missing more photographs. The last plate, the one Miss MacKenzie described as looking rumpled, tells me more about Monroe and what may have been going on in that bedroom than any of the others.

  “He and his sister put Mrs. Sorensen and her child back onto the bed, where they were before he posed them for the cabinet photo. He props the baby on a pillow. He wants to look again at the faces he’s photographed, so he leans over the bed. Maybe he takes a magnifying glass or an extra camera lens out of his bag and uses it to examine the skin and the features more closely. To do that, he has to straddle the bodies, which means he’s disarranging the sheets. Whatever he sees has him so excited he doesn’t pay attention to the rumpled bedcovers until after he’s taken that last photograph. Then I’d have to presume the two Monroes leave everything in perfect order before they finally leave.

  “What I think is that Bartholomew Monroe may not be averse to a bit of blackmail. He doesn’t know for certain that the deaths are suspicious, but he’s willing to document what he thinks might jar the complacency of whoever believes he’s gotten away with murder. In his mind it has to be the husband. He paints over the eyes in the cabinet photograph, but says nothing. You yourself said you never noticed it, Miss Buchanan. He keeps the other negatives unretouched. Just in case he decides to use them. That’s what I think happened, Miss MacKenzie.”

  Riis sat back in his chair. He looked around the table at the faces staring at him. Mr. Hunter had told him to be logical. Miss Buchanan had begged for an explanation of the proof that wasn’t really proof. Miss Prudence had encouraged him to put himself in the shoes of a fellow photographer who was probably also a blackmailer. There was one other possibility, but he was counting on Geoffrey Hunter’s Pinkerton training to sniff that out.

  “What did he see?” asked Prudence.

  “Petechiae and bruising. I think he found faint indications of bruising on the baby’s flattened nose and perhaps on Catherine also. Either from the force of the pillow on their faces, or in the infant’s case from pinching the nose so she couldn’t breathe. I think he or his sister discovered the bruises when one of them, probably Miss Monroe, applied liquid powder to make the skin appear more lifelike. At some point they wiped off the powder so he could take photographs for his own purposes, then reapplied it before they left. If the bodies were not to be embalmed, they would have been lifted right away into their coffins for the viewing, perhaps surrounded by flowers. No one is surprised when the skin begins to discolor a bit. Most of the time one of the women in the family pats the face with more powder.”

  “Is there anything else to be learned from the photographs?” Prudence asked.

  “We’ve uncovered what was supposed to remain hidden,” Riis replied.

  “There is something else.” Claire used one of the grease pencils lying on the table to circle the figure of baby Ingrid lying on a pillow against the side of her mother’s body. “Look at the tassels and the embroidery,” she said. “This is the pillow Lucinda gave my sister. Catherine told her she would have to pretend she bought it herself. Lucinda expected to see it in the coffin, but it wasn’t there.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Look how awkwardly the baby has been placed on the pillow. Everything else Monroe has done looks carefully thought out. I think he needed something to keep the baby from falling off the bed when he leaned over it or when he straddled the bodies, if that’s what he did to take the picture. At any rate Catherine and Ingrid weren’t meant to be posed this way. Ingrid’s gown has ridden up over her legs. There’s a dark stain beneath her. You can just make it out.”

  “Perhaps the pillow was used right after the delivery,” Prudence suggested. “It wasn’t washed because someone turned it over to hide the spot and then forgot about it.”

  “Until Monroe picked it up. Along with what he’d captured on his negatives, he saw something that convinced him he had enough proof of a crime to blackmail the newly wealthy widower. So he put the pillow into one of his cases and took it away with him. That’s why it wasn’t in the coffin, where Lucinda expected to see it.”

  No one said aloud what each was thinking. A gift had become a weapon.

  “I think we know what has to come next,” Geoffrey said.

  “We have to find out everything there is to know about Aaron Sorensen,” Prudence said.

  “And Bartholomew Monroe,” her partner added.

  * * *

  “There’s a letter here for you from a law firm.”

  Ethel Sorensen pointed toward the silver salver the butler had brought into the parlor late in the afternoon while she was still reading through the letters and invitations from the day’s earlier deliveries. Aaron had told her he rented a post office box for his business mail; this letter in its expensive envelope was disconcerting and out of place in their home.

  “Are you perusing the return addresses of my correspondence now?” Sorensen was tall, very blond, wide of shoulder, and narrow of hip. He was no one’s idea of what a dealer in fine antiquities should look like; it amused him to see the surprise on the faces of first-time clients.

  “Of course not, Aaron. But I couldn’t help but notice.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t open it, being so curious.”

  “It’s inscribed to you.”

  Her husband had a way of insulting her without ever raising his voice, which Ethel found as disturbing as it was annoying. During their courtship he had been unfailingly polite and deferential; she’d yearned for him to demonstrate more of the forcefulness she admired in heroes of the romantic novels she read. Be careful what you wish for.

  She no longer recognized herself and her thoughts; being with child was a woman’s greatest gift to her husband and most daunting challenge to herself. Young wives talked about it endlessly, their only sources of information each other: “I burst into tears for no reason whatsoever”; “I’m so tired I can hardly drag myself out of bed in the morning”; “I ache all over, and when my husband approaches me, all I want to do is turn away.” Childbirth, dangerous though it might be, apparently wrote finis to all of these strange and unwelcome changes.

  Well-bred wives, like Ethel Sorensen, bit their lips and their tongues, kept silent for the most part, a
nd knitted or crocheted furiously. It was something to do, a way of passing time until they proved their worth in labor and delivery. Everyone wanted a boy, of course, so as not to disappoint a husband, who could never be expected to understand what it felt like to experience an unborn child’s kick against the ribs or the anticipatory ache in breasts yearning to suckle.

  Aaron’s face darkened as he read the lawyer’s letter. He folded it up carefully when he had finished and slid it back into its envelope.

  The parlor door opened. Lewis, the butler, came in quietly and said something in Aaron’s ear that Ethel could not hear. Her husband nodded his head and left the room. No explanation. No apology for deserting his pregnant wife during the important hour before dinner was served. Sometimes it was the only time they spent together throughout a day that seemed far longer than twenty-four hours.

  Ethel struggled up from the chair, which was holding her prisoner. Aaron had tossed the lawyer’s letter onto the small writing desk, where she crafted polished answers to invitations she was forced to decline. That’s careless of him, she thought, if he’s hiding something. She felt a warm flush surge from her rounded belly to her cheeks, and for a moment she wondered why she was doing what no properly submissive wife should do.

  The letter from the lawyer was clearly phrased, but confusing. It seemed that someone named Claire Buchanan had rewritten her will and wanted Aaron Sorensen to be informed that he was not included as a beneficiary in the new document.

  And then she remembered.

  The cabinet photograph of her husband’s first wife and deceased child was hidden in the bottom of a box of Ethel Sorensen’s monogrammed stationery. She had found it fallen between the wall and the writing desk. No telling how long it had been there. Ethel thought it might be the only one in the house, because Aaron had been adamant about putting away images of his first wife, though he had been equally insistent that Ethel wear the mourning that society expected of a hastily acquired successor wife.