by Kat Ross
“Visitors for you, Mary,” she said. “Mind your manners.”
Mary Elizabeth Wickes sat on a straw mattress, picking at her skirts with feigned disinterest. She was nineteen years old but looked fifteen. Her mouse-brown hair was neatly parted in the center and pinned into a bun at the nape of her long neck. Nothing about her stood out in any way, Harry thought with a slight chill. Not a hint of the aberrant personality lurking behind those grey-blue eyes.
“Hello, Mary,” Harry ventured.
She looked up then and smiled, revealing a set of oddly small but even teeth. “I know you.”
“Do you?”
“You’re the one that caught Mr. Hyde, aren’t you?”
“We both did,” Harry replied. “This is my associate, Mr. John Weston.”
Mary nodded thoughtfully. “Killed himself before they could bring him here and hang him.” She paused. “Too bad. I would have liked to see that.”
The matron shook her head wearily. “I’ve things to do. Bang on the door if you change your mind and wish to come out early. Otherwise, I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Harry and John entered the cell. The door closed behind them. Matron locked it. The space suddenly seemed much smaller. Mary Elizabeth Wickes had murdered her victims by stealth, preying on the small and weak. Her keepers didn’t seem to consider her an immediate physical danger to others. Still, Harry kept her back against the bars and was glad to have John at her side.
“We’d like to speak to you about a letter you wrote,” John said. “To Julius Sabelline.”
Mary didn’t respond for a long moment. A certain wariness entered her eyes, though she held herself perfectly still.
“What’s happened to him?” she said at last.
“Why do you think something’s happened to him?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” The matter-of-fact tone raised the hair on Harry’s arms.
“Yes,” John replied. “Two days ago.”
“I warned him.” Mary’s mouth twisted. “I told him to get rid of it.”
“Get rid of what? The amulet?”
Mary said nothing, staring at the stone floor. It glistened with a foul dampness that seemed to pervade every inch of the prison. Harry didn’t wonder so many sickened and died here.
“Please, Mary.” John crouched down so they were eye to eye. “Won’t you help us?”
She lifted her face and studied him. “Nice-looking, aren’t you? Pretty eyelashes, like a girl.”
John held her intense gaze without flinching, which Harry found impressive. “What do you know about Mr. Hyde?” he asked mildly. “Has he something to do with Julius Sabelline?”
She lifted her chin. “Why should I talk to you?”
“You’ve nothing to lose.”
“You think not? How stupid you are.”
“You said in the letter that you wanted to make amends,” Harry said. “This is your chance. What did you feel remorse about, Mary? You said it wasn’t the thing they put you here for. What was it?”
They locked gazes for an instant. Mary looked away. A full minute passed, and Harry didn’t think she would answer.
“I let him through,” Mary said at last, her voice empty of all emotion.
“Who?” Harry demanded.
“The master. The one you call Hyde.”
Harry’s fingers tightened around the letter in her pocket, unconsciously crushing it into a ball just as Julius Sabelline had done.
“He spoke to me from the other side. Came to me in dreams. He showed me such terrible, awful, wonderful things.” She twisted her skirts in her hands. “God help me, I let him through.”
“When was this?” John asked.
“Last summer. It was dreadfully hot.”
“What do you mean by let him through?”
Mary’s eyes grew distant. “There was a girl here, always crying. Night and day. She wouldn’t shut up.” An edge of barely suppressed fury entered her voice. Harry wondered how many of Mary’s young victims had annoyed her with their wailing. “She’d killed her husband and was sure she’d be sent to the gallows. It’s not always a clean death, you know. People shit themselves. If your neck doesn’t snap from the drop, you suffocate slowly. I told her that. It wasn’t hard to convince her to end things herself. She used a hairpin to open the vein in her wrist.”
Harry and John shared a look of mutual revulsion.
“You talked her into committing suicide?” he asked.
“Someone had to pay the blood price.”
“What was this girl’s name?”
“I don’t remember. What does it matter?”
“What’s the blood price, Mary?”
She turned her face away and refused to answer.
“Did Dr. Sabelline answer your letter?”
Mary shook her head. “He never came. He didn’t listen. And now he’s dead.”
“Do you know who killed him?” John asked. “Was it your master?”
“Shadow and flame,” she muttered. “Flame and shadow. It comes for us all.” She gave John a sly smile and tapped the corner of her eye. “Pervadunt oculus.”
Harry’s skin prickled as a cold draft swept through the tiny window. She hugged herself, rubbing her arms for warmth.
“Did your master want the amulet?” he pressed.
Mary Elizabeth Wickes looked at them. She drew herself up, suddenly haughty as a queen on her throne. “He’s coming and he will take what’s his. You can’t stop him now. It is loosed.”
“Whoever killed Julius Sabelline tore his eyes out, Mary,” John said. “I think you know who it was. Tell us, for God’s sake.”
With startling abruptness, her demeanor changed. The imperious woman became a frightened girl again. “He’ll come back for me too, sure as sunrise. I begged them to move up my date with the gallows, but they won’t do it.” A sob tore from her throat. “I’ve seen what waits beyond the veil. Oh, sweet Jesus, have mercy on my soul.”
There was an awful silence. Harry heard footsteps approaching in the corridor.
“Did the master tell you to kill those children?” John asked.
Mary wiped her nose with her sleeve. “No.” She gave a bark of brittle laughter. “I did that on my own.”
A key turned in the cell door. “Time’s up,” Sister Emily said briskly.
“But can’t we—” Harry began.
“I’m afraid not,” she interrupted. “I’ve bent the rules for you enough already. It’s time for Mary to take her exercise.”
The girl seemed not to hear, or even to be aware of the matron’s presence. Her eyes looked like black holes in her thin face.
“Abyssus abyssum invocat,” she hissed. “The master comes for what’s his.”
“I see she’s having one of her spells.” Sister Emily sounded almost pitying. “She wouldn’t be any good to you anyway.”
They left Mary alternately giggling and weeping on her straw-covered cot. Harry had a thousand more questions she would have liked to ask, but it was a relief to get out of that dank cell. The Latin phrase—deep calls to deep—brought back half-buried memories of the terrible summer she and John had hunted Mr. Hyde. For the first time, she felt truly afraid.
“I used to wonder if she wasn’t faking madness in hopes of clemency,” the matron remarked as they headed back toward the prison entrance. “Her crimes didn’t seem to have an ounce of passion in them. Just cold-blooded viciousness. It took planning and cunning to get away with it as long as she did. And when she first came to us, Mary seemed as lucid as anyone. But the girl’s been strange lately. Likely she’s realizing there won’t be any more appeals. She’s going to hang in a week and that’s all there is to it.”
“Was there a suicide on the ward over the summer?” John asked. “A woman awaiting trial for killing her husband?”
“Aye. Sally McBride. She was in the cell next to Mary.”
“When did it happen?”
“I’d have to check the records.”
<
br /> “Would you mind?”
She sighed. “Wait here.”
Ten minutes later, Sister Emily returned.
“It was during that heatwave,” she said. “Sally McBride died on August 6th.”
Chapter 20
“I’m not sure what to think, except that Mary is tied up in this business somehow,” Harry said as they walked down Centre Street toward Broadway. “August 6th is the same day Brady killed Becky Rickard.”
“Mary said she let him through. There has to be some connection to the séance and The Black Pullet grimoire, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so, though I can’t imagine what, since Mary was locked up at the time. One thing did strike me, John. She said the master would come for what was his. That means he doesn’t have it yet.”
“The amulet of Osiris.”
“Someone else is still in possession of it. Whoever killed Julius Sabelline.”
They chewed on this as they cut across the trolley tracks bisecting the open plaza past the courthouse. To the right lay City Hall and the towering baroque Post Office the newspapers had dubbed “Mullett’s Monstrosity” because it was widely considered a hideous eyesore.
“Maybe she gave the grimoire to George Kane,” John said.
Kane was the dissolute son of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New York. He’d been romantically involved with the medium Becky Rickard, Brady’s first victim, who’d conducted the ill-fated séance that ended with her vicious murder.
“George said he got The Black Pullet from a gentleman at his club, but he could have been lying,” Harry replied. “I can’t imagine how he’d cross paths with Mary though.”
“She might have been a nanny for one of the rich families who were friends with the Kanes.”
“I suppose it’s possible.” She frowned. “But it doesn’t seem to fit somehow. George was a cad, but Mary’s not his type. I doubt he’d even notice her existence. And there’s the matter of the blood price, whatever that is, and Sally McBride’s suicide.”
They reached the bustling artery of Broadway and turned south toward the Ninth Avenue elevated stop at Dey Street, where they bought tickets for a nickel apiece.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” John said as the uptown train rumbled into the station with a great clatter and screech of brakes. “I received a cable this morning from a friend at Yale. We went to St. Andrews together. His anthropology professor was connected to the expedition to Brazil.”
“And?”
“Rumor has it the real reason Sharpe was dropped from the Alexandria dig is that he was having a torrid affair with Araminta. Her husband found out somehow. That’s the row Sharpe mentioned. Sounds rather major to me.”
Harry felt a pain behind her left eye. “Another complication. I can’t for the life of me see how all of this fits together, John. It’s like two entirely different cases!”
“I know. What if the two of them decided to do him in? Make it look like a robbery?”
“And gouge his eyes out? Mary used the phrase pervadunt oculus, John. I don’t know about you, but I found it extremely creepy. That’s what Brady scribbled on the walls of the Beach tunnel.”
“I remember. It comes through the eyes.”
She sighed. “So what do we do about Mr. Sharpe?”
The tide of humanity on the platform swept them into the car.
“Only one thing for it,” John said. “I say we go ask him ourselves.”
It had only been three days since the discovery of Julius Sabelline’s body, and one since the story made the newspapers, but the museum was already overrun with visitors. No one seemed to care that the Alexandria exhibit wouldn’t be opening until after the New Year—they just wanted to gawk at the general vicinity of the crime scene.
Harry and John elbowed their way through the crush and slipped through the door leading to the basement. They found Davis Sharpe in one of the storerooms, labelling shards of pre-Columbian pottery.
His blue eyes seemed to darken when he saw them. There was no pretense of warmth this time. “What is it you want?”
“We have new information we hoped you could verify,” Harry said.
“I’m rather busy at the moment. Why don’t you make an appointment?”
“That’s a fine idea,” John said lazily. “But seeing as we’re already here, I’ll just ask you now. Sorry if this is an indelicate question, but were you having an affair with Araminta Sabelline?”
Sharpe’s face turned the color of a brick. He opened his mouth and closed it again. “Indelicate? I’d say that’s damn rude.”
“Perhaps we should speak with the detectives at the Thirty-First Ward,” Harry said with a polite smile. “Sorry to impose on your time.”
Sharpe watched them turn toward the door. “Wait!” he called. “For God’s sake, I’m sick to death of talking about it, but I see you’re leaving me no choice. Just close the door behind you.”
John did so. Sharpe set aside the paper tags he’d been filling out and ran a hand through unkempt brown hair. He took a deep breath. “Julius thought the same. Five months ago, just before the expedition was to leave, he accused me of engaging in a dalliance with his wife. I hotly denied it because it wasn’t true.”
“He didn’t believe you?” John asked.
“Of course he didn’t. Julius was a sour, vindictive man. He threatened to ruin my career. I voluntarily dropped out of the expedition.” He scowled. “Araminta was having an affair, just not with me.”
“The count?” Harry guessed.
Sharpe gave a bitter laugh. “Nelson Holland. I walked in on them once, in his office. Araminta had come to see Julius, but he wasn’t here. So she’d gone up to say hello to Holland. Quite a hello it was.”
“Did you tell Dr. Sabelline?”
“How could I? It’s as much as my job is worth. Holland would have known it came from me. All I could do was deny my own involvement.”
“Do you think Dr. Sabelline might have discovered the truth?” John asked.
“I don’t think so. Five months in Alexandria did nothing to calm his jealous rage. He was still barely speaking to me by the time of the party.” Sharpe rubbed his mouth in that nervous way Harry remembered from before. “I’ll tell you, I was tired of it. I was going to insist that Araminta do something about the situation or I’d have to tell Julius myself, but I never got the chance. He died that same night.”
“Do you think Holland suspected you were going to reveal their secret?”
“I’m honestly not sure he would have cared. Oh, of course he had a reputation to consider. But who would believe me? I have a reputation myself—for drink.” He laughed hollowly. “If you’re looking for motive there, it’s a bit thin. Holland might be physically capable, but I simply can’t picture him cutting Julius’s eyes out. It’s too bizarre.”
He glanced away. “If you take a hard look at anyone, it should be that Count Koháry. He collects ancient weapons, you know, among other things. Holland told me Julius wasn’t killed with an ordinary knife. That you have no idea what it was.”
Harry and John shared a look.
“And how did Holland know?” she asked.
“How else? Orpha Winter. They’re thick as thieves.”
Harry sighed. “Thank you, Mr. Sharpe, you’ve been most forthcoming. I apologize for the intrusive nature of our visit, but it couldn’t be helped.”
“Don’t tell anyone what I said, for God’s sake.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. If anything, the tremor had gotten worse. “Holland would ruin me.”
Dark had fallen by the time they left the museum. The crowds of visitors were thinning out, most of them drifting downtown towards Columbus Circle. One by one, the new electric lamps in the park pushed back the dark shadows under the trees.
“Did you believe him?” John asked.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“So Holland’s back in the picture.”
“It would seem so.” Harry rubbed
her forehead. “I need to think. This case is a vipers’ nest.”
“Fine. Just promise you won’t do anything rash without me.”
“I promise.” Harry fussed with the new scarf she’d given him for Christmas, tucking the ends snugly into his coat. “I’ve been meaning to thank you, John. Most people wouldn’t want to get involved in the sorts of things I’ve dragged you into. They’d run the other way. But I couldn’t do this without you.”
He studied her face. “Well, you could. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” She smiled. “I’d like to walk alone for a bit. Is that all right?”
“Of course.”
“Goodnight then.”
“Goodnight, Harry.”
John flipped his collar up and set off down Central Park West, whistling O Come, All Ye Faithful. For an instant, the clouds parted and a full yellow moon appeared, sailing across the sky. Before he looked up, the rift sealed again and darkness descended. A scattering of raindrops struck the pavement. John ducked his head and walked quickly for the downtown elevated.
A storm was coming.
Chapter 21
Friday, December 28
Harry woke to the biting odor of lye soap. As she did every year, Mrs. Rivers had gone into a lather of scrubbing and baking, sewing and broiling. Tradition dictated people visit each other on New Year’s Day and she firmly believed in a top-to-bottom overhaul.
It was also a tradition for Connor to make a desperate bid to dodge forced conscription in her campaign, not that it did him any good. Mrs. Rivers had an uncanny talent for ferreting him out of the deepest, darkest hiding places.
Harry could hear her in the dining room, humming some martial tune as she polished the silver. Myrtle had locked herself in her laboratory. It was the only room in the whole house to escape the mid-winter sanitizing. Ever since a memorable occasion several years back when Mrs. Rivers had nearly been stung by a Javanese scorpion the size of a feather duster, she’d refused to enter.
Harry wandered blearily down to the kitchen, where she found Little Artie sitting at the table, a newsboy cap pulled low over his butter-yellow hair.