Murder in Murray Hill (Gaslight Mystery)

by Victoria Thompson

  “Why would he want to frighten me? My daughter was kidnapped! We’re the victims here.”

  “Of course you are,” Sarah said. “I’m sure there’s some misunderstanding, but Mr. Malloy can straighten it out.”

  Frank frowned at her hopeful expression. He wasn’t sure he could straighten anything out. “As I told you, I’m no longer working for the police department, but I’ll do everything I can to make sure Miss Livingston isn’t arrested for anything.” If necessary, he’d have Livingston take her someplace out of town to keep her hidden while he got this sorted out. But first: “Do you remember the detective’s name?”

  “He said Broghan, I think. Something like that.”

  Frank nodded. “Did he speak with Grace?”

  “Oh no. I wouldn’t allow it. She’s . . . well, she’s very fragile, I’m afraid. She cries if anyone even looks at her, and she hasn’t left her room since I brought her home. Daisy says she . . . Well, she’s had several baths since she’s gotten home. She says she can’t get the smell of blood off her.”

  “Do you think she’d see me?” Sarah asked. “I’d like to see for myself how she’s doing and, well, I’m a nurse. I’d like to make sure she wasn’t injured. She might be too embarrassed to say so if it means you would send for a doctor.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Livingston said. “You are one of the few people I think she would agree to see. I hate for her to be all alone up there, but she says she can’t bear how sad I am, so she always sends me away. I’ll go up and ask her, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He hurried out, leaving them to kick their heels in the stiffly formal parlor.

  “Do you really think she’s injured?” Frank asked.

  Sarah’s lovely face hardened. “I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised, and she wouldn’t want to explain to a doctor that she’d been assaulted.”

  Frank wanted to punch someone, and for the first time, he regretted that Milo Pendergast was beyond his grasp.

  Mr. Livingston was smiling when he returned. “She’ll see you, Mrs. Brandt. I told her you’re a nurse and that you want to make sure she’s all right. That persuaded her, I think.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Livingston,” she said, rising from her seat. “If you’ll tell me where her room is . . .”

  “Daisy will take you,” he said as Daisy followed him into the room with the tea tray.

  Leaving the two men to manage for themselves, Sarah followed Daisy up the stairs to the floor above. The girl hesitated outside one of the doors.

  She turned to Sarah, a desperate look in her eyes. “You can’t let them take her to jail. She’ll die if they take her. I know it!”

  “I’ll do everything I can for her,” Sarah promised, wondering exactly what that might be if Broghan made good on his threat to come for Grace. Malloy would know what to do, though. They’d keep her safe.

  Daisy knocked, and a faint murmur bid them enter. Daisy gave Sarah a last, pleading look and scurried away, leaving Sarah to open the door herself.

  “Miss Livingston?” Sarah said, sticking her head in to test the waters.

  “Mrs. Brandt, I’m so glad you’ve come,” Grace said. She was in her narrow bed, propped up on an elbow.

  Sarah came in and closed the door. “How are you feeling, Grace?”

  “I . . . I don’t really know,” she said, her red-rimmed eyes filling with tears. “I thought I’d be happy to escape from that horrible place, but I don’t feel happy at all.” From what Sarah could see, she wore a plain nightdress, and she had a freshly scrubbed look about her. Her hair, still damp, had been braided and lay over her shoulder.

  “Of course you don’t feel happy. You’ve been through a terrible experience. It’ll take a while before you feel normal again.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever feel normal again,” she said, her voice breaking on a sob.

  Sarah hurried over to her, perching on the edge of her bed and taking the girl in her arms. Grace wept for a while, great racking sobs, as she clung to Sarah like a lifeline. When she was too exhausted to weep anymore, Sarah laid her gently back against the pillows and poured her a glass of water from a carafe on the bedside table. Grace drank it gratefully, then sank back into her pillows.

  Sarah took a moment to look around the room. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a girl’s bedroom so plainly furnished. The lack of color and feminine touches disturbed her. Why would a young woman deny herself even the slightest trace of female indulgence?

  Before she could do more than just wonder, Grace said, “Are they really going to put me in jail for killing that man?”

  “Who told you a thing like that?” Sarah asked in outrage.

  “My maid. She overheard the policeman who came here telling Father. Can they really put me in jail?”

  “Mr. Malloy and your father are discussing how to keep you safely at home,” Sarah said with as much truth as she could manage. “It would certainly help if you could tell us what happened, though.”

  “What happened?” she asked in alarm. “You mean all of it? I couldn’t possibly! I don’t want anyone to know what happened to me in that place.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. You’d never want your father to know, for example. You don’t want to see how much it would hurt him.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But what I’ve learned from living through some tragedies myself is that when you keep them inside of you, they just get bigger and more awful until they take over your thoughts and your emotions. But if you talk about them, if you let them out, every time you do, they get smaller and weaker and lose their power to hurt you anymore.”

  “But I couldn’t! Who would I tell? No one wants to hear things like that.”

  “You’re right, no one does, but some of us are willing to hear them if it helps someone else. I’m willing to hear your story—as much of it as you want to tell me. If you tell me, I promise I won’t judge you or blame you or even be shocked. I’ll be angry, I’m sure, at the man who hurt you, but not at you. You couldn’t help what happened to you.”

  “But I went out and met him. I went to his house with him. I should never have written those letters. It’s all my fault!”

  “Why did you write the letters?” Sarah asked gently.

  “What?”

  “Why did you start reading the ads in the newspapers in the first place and then decide to answer them?”

  Her face twisted with some inner agony. “It seems so ridiculous now!”

  “I don’t think it was ridiculous.”

  “But you don’t know what my reasons were.”

  “I think I do. Try me.”

  “I . . . I wanted to be married. I wanted to be like other women. But look at me. I’m not pretty, and I’m not charming. Men never look twice at me. But when I read those ads, I thought . . . Oh, it sounds so stupid!”

  “You thought there were men who were as anxious for a wife as you were for a husband. Maybe they weren’t handsome or charming, so they had a difficult time winning a woman’s heart in the usual way.”

  “It even sounds stupid when you say it like that. Men don’t have a difficult time. They’re the ones who do the asking. They’re the ones who decide. If a man wants a wife, all he has to do is look around. It’s only ugly women who don’t have a choice. That’s what he said.”

  “Who?”

  “Him. Pendergast.” She spat the name like it left a vile taste in her mouth.

  “I wouldn’t put much stock in anything he had to say.”

  “He said so many hurtful things. Things I can’t even repeat. In some ways, his words hurt more than . . . than the other things he did. He told me I was ugly and stupid and no man would ever want me and I should be glad he—” She clapped a hand over her mouth to hold back the awful words.

  “Did he really think you should be grat
eful he’d chosen to abuse you?” Sarah asked gently.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded her head, her hand still over her mouth.

  “Grace, Pendergast was a liar, among many other things. Nothing he said was true.”

  She turned her face away, and after a minute, she lowered her hand. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “Do you remember what happened yesterday? Do you remember how he died?”

  She turned back, her muddy brown eyes shining with fury. “Yes.”

  “Oh, Grace, did you see who did it? Do you know who cut his throat?”

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly calm and more confident than Sarah could have imagined. “I did.”

  8

  Frank and Livingston sat in silence for a few MINUTES after Sarah left with the maid.

  Finally, Livingston said, “They won’t really arrest her? Put her in jail? I don’t know how she’d—”

  “I don’t know what Broghan might do, but I think we’d better plan for the worst, at least until we can figure out what’s going on. Do you have a place you could take her? Somewhere out of the city or at least a place where she’d be away from here?”

  “When my wife was alive, we sometimes spent time at the shore. I’d rent a cottage and—”

  “Do that, then. Take Grace away as quickly as possible. Today if you can. Meanwhile, I’ll try to find out what the police are planning to do, and see if we can locate this fellow, Andy.”

  “Who’s Andy?”

  “He worked for Pendergast as some sort of servant, I think. He’s missing, though, which makes me think he’s involved in Pendergast’s death.”

  “Do you think he’s the one who killed him?”

  “I won’t know until we hear Grace’s story, if she remembers at all. Or until we find Andy and question him.”

  “But you aren’t with the police anymore, Mr. Malloy. Why would you do this for us?”

  Frank opened his mouth to reply but found he had no answer.

  Livingston smiled sadly. “I’m a businessman, Mr. Malloy. I’ve learned that men seldom do anything that is not in their own self-interest. I’ve been successful by learning to judge what men want and figuring out a way to benefit from helping them achieve it.”

  “I had promised you I’d find your daughter” was all Frank could come up with

  “Yes, you did, and perhaps you felt honor bound to follow through on your original plan when Pendergast arranged the meeting with your young lady. But Grace is found, so your duty is discharged.”

  “I don’t see it that way, not if she might end up arrested and charged with murder.”

  “A horrible possibility for me as her father, but not something that would affect you in any way. No, Mr. Malloy, don’t protest. You may be a kind person at heart, but I can’t depend on your kindness if I want to protect my daughter. You told me you had left the police department, but you did not say you had taken another position. Allow me to offer you one. I would like to hire you as a private investigator to find out what happened to this Pendergast and ensure that my daughter isn’t prosecuted after all she has already endured.”

  Frank’s mind was racing. Livingston had no way of knowing why Frank had left the police department, and he’d be justified in thinking Frank would need a job of some kind to replace his old one. Frank was just getting used to the idea that he no longer needed to worry about such things, and while the idea of never again having to earn a living was appealing, the prospect of having nothing to do with himself weighed heavily. This was probably the real reason he was so eager to keep working on Grace Livingston’s case. The surge of emotion he felt at Livingston’s offer was certainly proof of that. He didn’t examine the emotion too closely, because he thought it might be joy, and that was hardly an appropriate feeling to have, considering the seriousness of Grace Livingston’s situation. “I haven’t really had time to consider my future employment, but I will accept your offer. I can’t promise the police won’t do something really stupid, but I can help you protect Grace from the consequences. I’ll also do my best to figure out who really killed Pendergast to clear Grace’s name completely.”

  • • •

  Did you say you killed Pendergast?” Sarah asked, trying not to let her shock show on her face.

  “I must have. I was with him. His blood . . .” She shuddered and covered her mouth again, this time as if to keep from being sick at the memory.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  “I remember pieces of it. I see things, a scene like a photograph and then another one, but nothing makes sense.”

  “What do you see in these ‘photographs’?”

  “He . . .” She shook her head, shuddering.

  “All right, let’s start with earlier in the day. Do you remember waking up that morning?”

  Grace nodded. “It was . . . the same as all the other mornings. I woke up, expecting to be home in this bed, but I wasn’t. I was in a nightmare that wouldn’t end.”

  “Where were you?”

  “In the cage. The one upstairs.”

  “You know about the one in the cellar?”

  She shuddered again. “Oh yes. That’s where he put me first, after . . .” She closed her eyes.

  “You don’t have to tell me everything if you don’t want to, but remember what I told you about sharing your burdens with others.”

  Grace lay there, staring at Sarah for what felt like an hour. She studied Sarah’s face for something. Sarah wasn’t sure what Grace was looking for, but she stared back, trying to let Grace see only kindness.

  Finally, Grace said, “He invited me to his house to meet his mother.”

  Sarah nodded. “Mr. Malloy had been investigating your disappearance, and he’d found out that was how he got women into his house.”

  “He brought me there. The house looks respectable from the outside.”

  “Perfectly respectable.”

  “But when we were inside . . .” She closed her eyes again.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Grace.”

  “I was so stupid.”

  “He lied to you. He tricked you. He took advantage of your innocence.”

  She shuddered again, but when she opened her eyes, Sarah saw determination in them. “He hit me. Across the face. As soon as we were in the house, he changed into a different person. Nobody had ever hit me, Mrs. Brandt.”

  Sarah nodded, understanding how shocked she must have been.

  “He made me take off my clothes. Right there in the hallway. When I didn’t do it fast enough, he hit me again. He said terrible things to me, how ugly I was and how no one would ever care about me.”

  “That isn’t true. Many people care about you, Grace.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. She stared at something Sarah couldn’t see. “Then he . . . he raped me. I was screaming, begging him to stop, but that seemed to please him somehow. I thought it would never end. And then he dragged me down to the cellar and locked me in this filthy cage and left me in the dark.” Her eyes, when she turned back to Sarah, were haunted with the horrors she had endured. “I was . . . naked. Naked and . . . and bleeding. And all alone with the rats and the spiders, and no one came for days. It seemed like days at least. I think it was two days. I didn’t have anything to eat or drink, and I thought I was going to die there and no one would ever know what happened to me. My poor father . . .” Her voice broke on a sob and she wept for a bit.

  Sarah marveled at how cruel Pendergast had been, and how calculating. He must have worked out how to break the women’s spirits so they would be more malleable and completely under his control. Violating Grace would have completely terrorized her, and locking her in that horrible place with no food or water would have crushed her.

  When she’d composed herself again, Sarah said, “You don’t have to go on if you don’t wan
t to.”

  “You’re right. It helps to talk about it. I didn’t think it would, but it does. I wasn’t sure anyone would even believe me.”

  “I saw that cellar.” Sarah thought about the woman she’d found in that cell, but she’d wait to ask Grace about her.

  Grace nodded. “After I had given up all hope, Andy came and brought me some food.”

  Sarah decided to feign ignorance. “Who is Andy?”

  “Didn’t you find him?”

  “No, although we did find a room in the attic where it looked like a servant lived. Is Andy Pendergast’s servant?”

  “I suppose you’d call him that.”

  “He was kind to you?”

  Grace’s eyes widened. “Oh no! He brought me food, and by then I was starving, but he wouldn’t give it to me until I . . . until I did something for him. I refused at first. I just couldn’t bear the thought of . . . of doing what he wanted, so he left the tray sitting there, just out of my reach, taunting me. And then he left. The rats came and ate the food, and I had to watch them. I was so hungry and so thirsty, and I had to watch them.”

  Tears leaked out of her eyes, her silent weeping somehow more awful than the sobs that had racked her before. Sarah squeezed her hand, which seemed to give her courage.

  “He came back. A long time later, he came back. He had another tray, and this time I . . . I did what he wanted, even though it made me sick. But I didn’t want to die, Mrs. Brandt.”

  “Of course not. You were brave to do what you needed to in order to survive.”

  “I didn’t feel brave. I felt like a coward.”

  “You survived. That took courage, Grace.”

  She seemed to be considering Sarah’s words, weighing the truth of them. Then she said, “Pendergast came later. He told me I was being a good girl, and he was going to let me come upstairs. I was grateful. I can’t believe how grateful I was to that man, but I was so frightened in that cellar, in the dark with the rats. You can’t know how frightened I was.”

  “Of course you were. That was his plan, to terrorize you.”

  “And he told me if I was good and did everything he said, he would let me go. So I was . . . good.” She closed her eyes and turned her face away.