“And I don’t want you to leave, for I cannot manage without you, Miss Dressler.” With a smile that brought a flush to Sylvie’s cheeks, Jasper Davenport strode into the parlor and lowered himself into a chair. “I wasn’t aware we had company. How do you do.”
Helene rose and bowed to him, though he was not her master yet.
“Mr. Davenport,” Meg began, “we are so sorry for your loss.” She stopped short of insisting her father had been framed for the murder. Whoever had killed Hiram, it was obvious his nephew was grieving. It would be crude to make her visit about shifting blame.
“We wish with all our hearts that Hiram was still with us,” Sylvie added.
“I appreciate that, I do. Miss Margaret, it seems you’ve been tended. I’m glad.” He did not comment on the charge brought against their father.
“May I offer the three of you tea and jam tarts?” Helene asked.
Mr. Davenport glanced outside at the lowering sun. “Let’s be respectful of their time, Miss Dressler. They have a walk ahead of them, and the curfew is quite strict.” He turned to Sylvie. “Eli would drive you, but he’s renting his services to others at present. I’ll walk with you.”
Taking his cue, Sylvie and Meg stood to leave.
“Surely that’s not necessary,” Helene said quietly, her tone and posture more submissive than her remark. “We have plenty of space here, do we not? Mr. Sloane would have welcomed them with open arms.”
The suggestion surprised Meg as much as it touched her.
Mr. Davenport jingled some coins in his pocket, his expression thoughtful. “Well, these are special circumstances.”
“We would never wish to impose,” Sylvie said. “Come, Meg.”
“Oh, yes, excellent point, Mr. Davenport,” Helene said, perfectly composed. “These are special circumstances indeed. In light of what is being circulated about their father and your uncle, it is especially Christian of you to open your house to these two orphaned girls. Oh, forgive me, I misspoke. The house doesn’t belong to you, at least not yet. Yet if it did, you’d prove as benevolent as your uncle. Truly, it is an honor and privilege to keep house and cook for you, even as we wait for the will to be found.”
Meg held her breath, marveling at Helene’s outspokenness.
The clock on the mantel ticked away a full minute that felt like ten before Jasper turned and gave a little bow to her and Sylvie. “Miss Dressler will see you settled.”
Meg felt a pang of guilt as Kirstin stoked the fire in the hearth of the bedroom where she and Sylvie would stay. The chamber was draped and carpeted in hues of Prussian blue and mustard, with vases of peacock feathers flanking the fireplace. The mahogany furniture included a canopied four-poster bed big enough for two surrounded by velvet curtains. Adjoining the bedchamber was a white-tiled room with a toilet, sink, and claw-foot tub behind a folding Japanese silk screen. With the water pumps still being repaired, however, there was no water coming through the tap yet. The water they had in the house Eli had hauled from the lake.
“We will pay for the wood,” Meg told the maid, aware that much of Chicago’s cordwood had been consumed in the Great Fire, as the papers were calling it. She stared at the embers and flames Kirstin coaxed to life, then at the glowing tips of the tapers in candlesticks on the nightstands. She would never look at fire the same way again. The same source of warmth and comfort had brought death and destruction beyond description.
“And the food we eat,” Sylvie added, pulling Meg from her dark musings. “Keep a running tab of the expenses we add to the household. In fact, as the cooks have found employment elsewhere, I’d be happy to help in the kitchen. We don’t want to burden you, Kirstin. We intend to pay for any work done on our behalf.”
Kirstin straightened and set the fire poker in the stand with the other tools. “That’s right decent of you, Miss Sylvie, Miss Margaret.”
“I assume Mr. Davenport pays for your services as well, given that your income from Hiram has been cut off?” Meg asked.
“He lets me stay in the house, and that’s no small thing. He’s a decent enough gentleman and lets me take in laundry and sewing from other houses. He’s not a bad fellow to look at either.” She covered her mouth. “Oh, for heaven above. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Sylvie ducked her chin and smiled, an uncharacteristic flash of girlishness. “What can you tell us about him?”
Kirstin screwed her mouth to one side and straightened the cap on her hair. “He came to attend university. Or did he decide to attend after he’d already arrived? As I recall, there was a bit of a rush to get him admitted, since it was so close to when classes began this fall.”
“Anything else?” Sylvie prompted.
“I know he’s five and twenty, with no other family, but little else. Even in his conversations with Mr. Sloane, God rest him, he never said much about himself.”
Meg frowned. “But you had no notice of his arrival? He came unannounced?”
Her sister crossed to the window and drew the drapes. “You know Hiram could have received word and then forgotten.”
“True enough. But you must admit, it’s all rather mysterious. And then Hiram’s death, and the missing will . . .”
“For shame, Meg!” Sylvie flew to the door and locked it, then marched back to Meg, eyes ablaze. “He opens the house to us, after our own father was arrested for Hiram’s murder—” She sputtered and went silent.
Truly, Meg wasn’t ungrateful. “I’m as thankful as you are for the hospitality. But he was prompted by Helene. Could you believe she was so bold on our behalf?”
Sylvie couldn’t.
Kirstin could, after Meg told her what had happened. “That sounds like the way she guided Mr. Sloane—God rest him—for quite some time. Poor Mr. Sloane needed it, but she’s mistaken if she thinks the young sir will appreciate her ‘help’ the way his uncle did.”
Meg agreed. She tilted her head to one side, then the other to stretch out the tension that had been gathering there since Sunday. It was no use. Until her father was acquitted for Hiram’s murder and released from the asylum, she couldn’t relax.
Stephen hadn’t killed Hiram. So who had?
What motive could there be? Who would be better off with Hiram dead? Who was with him that night?
By degrees, a possibility emerged from her exhausted, overtaxed mind. She didn’t like it. It was far-fetched, likely the result of too little sleep and too much stress. Yet if she didn’t at least acknowledge the idea, it would hound her.
“Kirstin.” Meg sat at the writing desk and scraped the inside of her wrist on its edge to relieve an itch. “Does Mr. Davenport believe that once the will is found, it will name him as the primary beneficiary? Do you?”
“I believe so, miss.”
Helene had already said as much, so this was no surprise. The question remained, was this a motive for murder? But the question Meg asked instead was simply, “Where was he the night of the fire?”
The maid looked over her shoulder at the closed door. “Mr. Davenport was studying with classmates Sunday evening at the university, and by the time he arrived home, Mr. Sloane had gone to bed. Mr. Davenport retired shortly after that. When I went to tend the fire in Mr. Sloane’s room, I saw he was gone and went directly to wake his nephew. After that, Mr. Davenport was always with at least one of the servants, trying to find Mr. Sloane.”
Squinting, Meg imagined the course of events. “But was there a stretch of time when no one saw him? Between the time he was studying elsewhere and the time he showed himself here to the staff?”
“Meg!” Sylvie put a fist to her hip and looked down at her. “Listen to yourself. Are you so desperate to shift the blame from our father that you’d place it on our benefactor instead?”
Meg’s temper flared, as it always did when she faced a problem she didn’t know how to solve. “Are you so convinced of our father’s guilt that you refuse to entertain the possibility of his innocence?”
Fire popped i
n the grate. Light and shadow danced over Sylvie’s face. “You’ve been blind to the truth about Father ever since he came home. If you hadn’t refused to take him to a doctor, he might have been helped, or at least placed where he could do no harm. Hiram might still be alive right now.”
The words were a blow to Meg’s gut, for they echoed the self-condemnation she’d already been wrestling. “That’s not fair.” But her rebuttal sounded weak and childish even to herself.
Kirstin rolled her lips between her teeth and let herself out of the room.
“The will,” Meg said. “Can we agree to suspend judgment until we find the will?”
“Mr. Davenport has an alibi.” Sylvie’s voice trembled. “He cannot have done this, even if the will does favor him. Besides, who else would Hiram leave his fortune to other than his great-nephew if no other kin is left? It would be logical, not an indictment.”
Was Sylvie right? Was Meg truly grasping for anything to clear Stephen’s name? “But no harm can come from us helping Jasper search for the will.”
She wished they could talk to Stephen. The trial for Hiram’s murder would be weeks or months away, but the judge had already declared him insane and committed him indefinitely to the Cook County Insane Asylum, where no personal visitors were allowed. They’d been cut off from one another, an amputation of the family.
Sylvie sank onto the edge of the bed and leaned against the curtain gathered at the carved post. “We need to begin planning for our future. No one else will do it for us. We’re on our own, more now than ever before.”
Meg left the desk to sit beside her. While her thoughts realigned themselves, her gaze traced the budding vines in the mosaic tiles surrounding the fireplace. If her hands were free, she would unpin her sister’s hair and take the silver brush from the vanity to untangle Sylvie’s long brown tresses and soothe her nerves.
She tried to flex and curl her hands inside her bandages, but her palms and fingers resisted movement, unyielding in their shrouds. Meg frowned and tried again, until the pain of stretching her ravaged skin begged her to stop.
What a mercy that God was not limited by that which limited her. What grace that His power and presence remained, regardless of whether she felt close to them. She must trust Him for what she could not see. Wasn’t that the essence of faith? Her hands were bound. His were not.
Tomorrow would be better than this.
“All right.” It was determination, more than confidence, that lifted Meg’s voice. She wondered if Sylvie could tell the difference. “Here’s what we’ll do. First thing, we write the insurance company and file a claim for our losses. I still have the money from Bertha Palmer for the two portraits she purchased last week. We have the deed and title to our property. Once the ruins have been cleared away, we will hire a contractor to rebuild.” Meg had enough money to get them started, and by the time more was needed, they’d have it. Somehow.
Sylvie took a deep breath. “Tomorrow we will properly sort through what we have in the way of inventory and make a list of who may want to buy what.” Leaving the bed, she unwrapped the rescued novel from Nate’s jacket and set it on the tea table.
“Most of it is still readable,” Meg told her, rising to stand beside her. The middle of the book still held the photograph of Stephen in his uniform. “We saved what matters most.”
Sylvie ran her thumb over her broken fingernails. “I don’t know if we did.”
A lump wedged in Meg’s throat at the difference between the family they’d once been and the remnant that remained. “We have to keep trying,” she whispered. “I have to try.”
“I know you do. It’s who you are, to hope and pray and love and try. You will call me dreadfully pessimistic, but our futures have never been more fragile than they are right now. I would say that our best chance for security is to marry, but who would marry the daughter of . . . Even if he didn’t murder Hiram, any potential prospects have been killed. Our family name is ruined. No one will have us now.”
Rarely did Meg dwell on the fact that all her peers had married and begun filling their nurseries with children. At seventeen and fifteen when the war ended, she and Sylvie had barely come of age. But as the depth of their father’s wounds became apparent, would-be callers stayed away. So absorbed was Meg in the health of her own family that she did not mourn their absence. What good was a Sunday stroll or a stiff visit in the parlor when her father teetered between life and death, and when her mother wasted away with the stress of it?
Besides, Jane Austen and her sister, Cassandra, had never married. Louisa May Alcott remained unwed. Charlotte Brontë, who hadn’t married until she was thirty-eight, wrote that “there is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her own way through life quietly, perseveringly.”
But Sylvie’s statement could not be ignored. Tentatively, Meg approached it. “Is there, or has there been, a certain young man you pined for?”
Guilt weighted her, that she’d been blind to her sister’s longing for love or security or both. If Meg had noticed, could she have done anything to promote a match? Or would she have selfishly swept the idea away in order to keep her sister as a companion for herself?
Dropping her gaze, Sylvie pushed a greasy strand of hair from her face. “It would not matter if there were.”
A denial formed on Meg’s tongue, but she couldn’t truthfully say otherwise. Instead, she pulled her sister into an embrace, the responsibility she felt toward her younger sibling pouring steel into her spine. “I’ll take care of you,” she told her.
“My dear sister.” Sylvie pulled back and cradled Meg’s bandaged hands, a bruised look on her face. “You cannot take care of yourself.”
Chapter Eleven
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1871
Sitting idle was out of the question.
Determined to ignore the injuries she could do nothing about, Meg set a course to do whatever she could to clear her father’s name. There was only one logical place to start.
Helene Dressler, bless her, had agreed to chaperone her to the temporary headquarters of the police while Sylvie stayed at the house to reconstruct a list of their patrons and vendors. It was just as well. There didn’t seem to be room for one more person in this choked building. The air was thick with the smells of scorched coffee and smoking piles of rubble along the nearby river. Embers continued to smolder and re-ignite, doused by vigilant citizens keeping guard.
Her face florid from the suffocating warmth of the cramped space, Helene fanned herself and Meg. Uniformed officers plowed through the lobby to the closed-off rooms behind it and barreled out again with nary a glance at those waiting on chairs and benches. A harried clerk sat with mounds of paper on his desk and stacks of cardboard boxes behind him.
“Next.” He signaled with a flick of his wrist. Rings of sweat beneath his arms proved he was as uncomfortable as the rest of them.
Meg stepped over mud and leaves to approach the clerk, Helene standing staunchly beside her. “Hello. I’m here to see the police report about the murder of Hiram Sloane,” she began, her hands hidden in the folds of the navy blue cloak she wore.
The clerk peered up at her. “And why is that?”
Meg lowered her voice. “Hiram was my good friend. And my father was accused of the murder. I have a right to see the report.”
“Because you want to contest it, is that right?” The blond young man brushed crumbs from his shirtfront. A brown ring stained his desk near a mug lined with coffee grounds.
Meg disliked him, a reaction that was evidently mutual. Forcing a smile, she tried again. “I can see you’re very busy. My name is Margaret Townsend, and I only want a moment of your time, Mr. . . .”
“Gruber.”
“Mr. Gruber. I would like to see the police report, the medical examiner’s report, the witness statements, and any photographs you have associated with this case.”
Helene nodded for emphasis, standing up even taller.
; The clerk’s eyebrows rose. “I can’t give that permission. I just started this week. The police force is so overworked, you see.”
“Certainly.” Meg willed herself to be patient and convincing. “Please ask whoever has the authority for this type of thing, then, won’t you? We’ll wait right here.”
“Hey,” called the man directly behind her. “How long is this going to take? I’ve been here for two hours already!” Others lifted their voices in complaint as well.
Helene cast a sympathizing look over her shoulder. “As have we, sir. As to how long this will take, that depends on Mr. Gruber, here. Mr. Gruber, how long do you need to find out?”
Straightening his necktie, the clerk pushed back from the desk and disappeared for a quarter of an hour before returning with a file. An extremely thin file. “This is all we can show you. And it doesn’t move from this counter.” He slid it to the end to make room for the next man in line.
Helene opened the folder while Meg looked on. The brief police report had been written so quickly that there were typographical errors no one had bothered to correct. Most of the information Meg had already heard from Officers O’Hara and McNab when they arrested her father.
“Does it say where the body was found?” Helene murmured, scanning the lines with her fingertip.
“There.” Meg gestured to the margin with her bandaged hand. “It says the body was collected with all the others after the fire and brought to a stable on Milwaukee Avenue. Only there did anyone notice he’d been shot.” He must have been so covered with dust and ashes, the wound and blood were not apparent.
It was another dead end. There was no record of who had brought in the body or where it had originally been found. Meg still had no idea where the crime had taken place.
She kept reading.
“Do you see this, Helene?” Meg whispered. “It says Hiram was shot in the back! Who would do such a thing?”
Helene pushed her slipping hat back from her brow and frowned. “Mr. Davenport said he’d been shot in the chest. Maybe that’s what the police thought too, until the medical examiner learned otherwise.” She slid the document to the side, revealing two photographs of Hiram’s body.
Veiled in Smoke Page 12