by Amy Stewart
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
Historical Notes
Read More from the Kopp Sisters Series
Learn More About the Kopp Sisters
About the Author
Connect on Social Media
Copyright © 2021 by the Stewart-Brown Trust
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stewart, Amy, author.
Title: Miss Kopp investigates / Amy Stewart.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Series: A Kopp sisters novel ; 7
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050871 (print) | LCCN 2020050872 (ebook) | ISBN9780358093114 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358093091 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358093008 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.T49343 M55 2021 (print) | LCC PS3619.T49343 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050871
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050872
Cover illustration and design by Jim Tierney
Author photograph © Terrence McNally
v1.0821
To Elizabeth Anderson
1
THAT FLEURETTE EMERGED from her first assignment unscathed, her dignity intact, her virtue unassailed, and her pride in place was, she felt, a triumph, and a sign of further good fortune to come. Having carried out the job in secrecy, with her sisters knowing nothing of her whereabouts, her success tasted all the sweeter.
She emerged from the blazing lights of the hotel lobby into the blue and frigid night, an absolute dream of a coat swishing luxuriously around her legs as she walked, a fur collar tucked under her chin. What a picture she must’ve made. She felt the eyes of strangers on her, but she didn’t dare return the glance. Her instructions were to get out quickly, without attracting attention or raising suspicion. Still, she couldn’t help but thrill over the notion that someone was watching her rapturously, wondering about this vision of a woman who swept so gracefully out of the hotel.
If she was making too much of the moment . . . well, she deserved to, didn’t she? There hadn’t been any good moments in quite a while. They’d been through such a dark winter—the whole family, all of the Kopps—and Fleurette had wondered how she’d ever come out on the other side of it.
That was why this night, this small victory, shimmered as brightly as it did.
Her instructions were to wait for Mr. McGinnis to come around in his automobile. His motor was already rumbling toward her in the dark. She wished she could have just a moment more to herself, there on the sidewalk, under the tender pool of light cast by the dance of a gaslit lantern.
She looked like a woman with someplace to go, and she certainly felt like one, for the first time in ages. It was a shame that Mr. McGinnis was merely coming to take her home.
Couldn’t she instruct him otherwise? Where did other people go at this hour? To the theater, and dinner after? To one of the massive dancing halls in the city? To the top floor of a very chic building, where women who were dressed just as beautifully as she looked out the windows to the rooftops beyond and held lightly on to the fragile stems of their Champagne glasses?
It was a lovely dream, but it dissolved as Mr. McGinnis emerged from his hulking black machine to help her into her seat.
As he opened the passenger door, he grinned down at her cheerfully—no one, Fleurette thought, was as full of mirth and goodwill as a rosy-cheeked young Irishman like Peter McGinnis—and, taking her arm, said, “That was one for the books, Miss Kopp. The fellow was a champ about the whole business, and you handled him just right. Didn’t flatter him, but you didn’t put a load of guilt on him, either. That’s just the way to do it.”
He ran back around to take his place behind the wheel and closed the door, sealing them in just as the swirling wind brought a fresh smattering of snow.
She said, “He was a gentleman and a professional. I hope they all will be.”
Mr. McGinnis glanced over at her, still grinning, but something about his eyes suggested that they might not all be quite so gentlemanly. He seemed to brush the thought away as he reached into his coat for his wallet.
“Now, let me see, I have a note, what did Mr. Ward say again . . .”
“Twenty dollars,” pronounced Fleurette, taking quite a bit of pleasure in it. To be able to command such a sum, for not even an hour’s work!
Again Mr. McGinnis’s eyes dashed uncomfortably across her face, but his smile stayed bright and pleasing. “Twenty it is. Buy yourself a nice dress.”
“It’s to go toward the funeral,” Fleurette said. She tucked the bills into a little beaded purse, one she hadn’t carried since before the war.
“I was sorry to hear about your brother,” Mr. McGinnis said. They were rolling through downtown Paterson by now, toward home, or what passed for a home for Fleurette at this particular moment. “I would’ve been there to pay my respects, but—”
“But Mr. Ward was there to represent the firm, and we were touched that you thought of us.” Fleurette said this a bit briskly and wished she hadn’t brought it up. The condolences were hard to hear. They were only rote phrases, issued by people who could look at her tragedy from a great distance, but didn’t have to live inside of it as she did.
Mr. McGinnis must’ve taken her meaning, because he drove along in silence for a minute. Then—being the kind of man who couldn’t stand to let a lady sit mutely, staring out the window—he said, “Well! You’re in the family business now, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean by that?” Fleurette said sharply.
He looked a little stung, having expected a warmer reply. “Oh—I was only thinking—investigations, and legal matters, and . . . ah . . . detective work and the like.”
Fleurette pulled her coat around her. “It’s nothing to do with my family, and don’t you say a word to them about any of this. It isn’t their concern what I do. And don’t forget to leave me at the corner. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“But I have to see you in!” Mr. McGinnis looked stricken at the idea of a woman leaving his auto unaccompanied.
“You can watch me go in from here,” Fleurette said, as they arrived at the end of the street.
They parted cordially, Mr. McGinnis sending his regards to her sisters and Fleurette warning him once again to stay mum.
Francis and Bessie’s house sat just four doors down. The kitchen light was still on. As she walked up, Fleurette could see through the curtains that Bessie sat
alone at the table, looking over a newspaper.
She went in through the kitchen door and dropped a kiss on Bessie’s cheek.
“Put this toward the funeral bill,” she whispered, and pressed the money into her hand.
2
THE FUNERAL FOR which Fleurette was now paying in installments had been the bleakest affair imaginable, held graveside on an icebound January afternoon.
No one thought of waiting until fairer weather: the waiting had gone on too long already, because Norma had to be summoned home from France. The armistice had passed by then, the war had concluded, and Norma’s duties were at an end, as far as anyone in the Kopp family knew, but nonetheless she’d been lingering in Paris. It had required an increasingly frantic series of letters, postcards, telegrams, and appeals to her former commander at Fort Monmouth to even locate her, much less to secure passage home at a time when every ship returning to the States was already overfull.
Owing to that delay, three weeks had passed from the day Francis’s heart stopped beating to the day he was put into the ground. It was an unbearable length of time for the rest of them to wait. Funerals are for the living: they allow a beloved to be sent on his way decently and quietly, no matter the circumstances of the death itself. During the three weeks in which they were deprived of that opportunity, the Kopps lived in a state of agitated and unrelenting misery. Sending Francis to his grave wouldn’t bring an end to their suffering, but it would be like dropping an anchor. It would hold them in place. It would give them something—a ceremony, a gravestone—to fix their tears to.
When the day of the funeral did at last arrive, Fleurette had turned up at the cemetery pinched and pale as an invalid, and still harboring a little death-rattle of a cough. In an effort to stifle it, she’d secreted away a tin of horehound tablets somewhere on her person, but they were well beyond her reach, as she was swaddled in the mufflers, scarves, and cloaks of half a dozen strangers, all of whom had thrust those garments upon her as she alighted from the carriage alongside the family plot. The way she stood unevenly, swaying among the mounds of gray snow, led everyone in attendance to fear that she might faint from the cold, so soon after her illness.
But it wasn’t the weather that made her unsteady. It was the sight of a freshly dug grave, black and bottomless. It looked exactly like the very thing it was, a portal for the dead to pass through. She shuddered to even think of going near it.
The more she looked around, the more foreign and otherworldly it all seemed: the coffin, the strange red carpet placed underneath to protect it from the snow and dirt (as if it were not about to be consigned to snow and dirt forever), the crowd of neighbors and old acquaintances gathered around, the minister with his black book and dignified whisper, the rickety wooden chairs placed graveside, and beyond all that, the row upon row of stone markers under which Paterson’s deceased resided.
It had been Francis’s wish, whispered in Bessie’s ear years ago as they sat together through the interminable funeral service of a neighbor, to skip the formalities when his time came, and to be remembered only at a simple graveside ceremony. Bessie had honored his wish. They would stand outside in the cold, stamping their feet to bring the feeling back into their toes, for as short an interval as was required to pay their respects.
The three sisters, by unspoken assent, stood clustered together for whatever brief remarks the minister would deliver. Fleurette took the center, flanked on either side by the familiar bulk of her siblings.
Her remaining siblings.
Constance stood to her left. She had a look about her like she’d been kicked in the gut and hadn’t yet got her wind back. Her features sagged in a way Fleurette had never seen before. That very definite chin of hers had weakened and sunk into the folds of her neck, the great dark half-moons under her eyes had further settled, and there was now a weight pulling the edges of her mouth downward.
On her other side was Norma, stalwart and grim as always, her chin tucked into her regulation muffler and bits of hair escaping from a smart Army cap. She wore her uniform because she’d only just stepped off her ship the night before and couldn’t be bothered with trying on the dress Fleurette had dyed black and tailored for her.
Bessie sat apart from them, inscrutable behind her veil. Fleurette understood now why widows wore veils at funerals. It was to give them a place to hide, a private room where they could retreat into silence and solitude.
Even her children couldn’t reach her. Fleurette watched as Lorraine tried to lift her mother’s veil, but Bessie only shook her head and pulled it down again. The children had to content themselves with sitting silently alongside her, each of them holding one of her hands, until even that was too much and she withdrew her hands to the inside of her cloak. Still each child clung to her, Frankie taking her elbow and Lorraine pinching a bit of fabric near her knee.
Fleurette herself could hardly bear to speak to anyone, but it was her duty to keep those in attendance away from Bessie. That was what Bessie had asked of her that morning: keep everyone away until the coffin was in the ground. She would face her fellow mourners after the burial, but not before. She feared she’d be sick if she had to say a word to anyone. Fleurette and her sisters were obliged to speak for the family so she didn’t have to.
A lady approached—she might’ve been a neighbor or a churchgoer or a member of one of the innumerable committees on which Bessie served, they all looked the same in their long coats and fur hats—and Fleurette steeled herself.
“You must be the actress,” the lady whispered. “Bessie’s told me all about you.”
Fleurette nodded at this and coughed a little. “I was on the stage,” she croaked, “but I took ill last fall.”
She patted Fleurette’s arm, whoever she was, and made a sympathetic face. “I had hoped you might sing for us today. Bessie always says what a beautiful singing voice you have.”
“I couldn’t,” Fleurette said, and coughed again as if to prove it.
The lady leaned closer. She smelled of a lilac perfume, applied heavily to cover the scent of mothballs coming off her black dress.
“I heard he dropped dead at his desk,” she whispered. “It wasn’t that awful Spanish ’flu, was it? Wouldn’t it be just his luck to sit out the war and then the influenza comes all this way to get him?”
It was no wonder Bessie didn’t want anyone near her! Was this how people talked at funerals?
“It wasn’t the ’flu,” Fleurette said. “His heart stopped beating. It was weak but nobody knew it. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”
* * *
THE MINISTER PRONOUNCED his brief words over the casket, words that neither Fleurette nor her sisters could recall even a moment later. Then all at once the service was over, and the murmur of conversation started again.
Fleurette had expected to feel it in her bones when her brother went into the ground, forever banished from her life, no longer of this Earth but in it. But the lowering of the casket wasn’t part of the ceremony. It was merely a job to be completed after. Most people turned their backs before the winches were secure, before the oiled wooden box began to groan and shift. There wasn’t even a moment’s pause to absorb the import of what was happening.
Instead she faced another round of pleasantries. People milled around, chatting like guests at a party. Before, they’d all been blank faces, unrecognizable and indistinguishable from one another, but now a few of them came into focus.
Norma stood off to one side, talking to the Wilkinsons, who had lived next door to Bessie and Francis since their respective houses were built.
Surrounding Bessie was a group of ladies with whom she volunteered at the library, including Mrs. Westervelt, mother-in-law to Robert Heath.
That meant that Mr. Heath had to be there, too. Fleurette hadn’t seen him since before the war. After he lost the election, and the new sheriff fired Constance, he dropped out of sight. Fleurette never knew why he’d slipped out of their lives. Perhaps it pained Con
stance too much to see him demoted from sheriff to ordinary mortal. But he would turn up for their brother’s funeral. Of course he would.
Then where was he? She looked around for Constance and saw him at her side, the two of them walking down a little gravel path, their heads bowed together in conversation. They walked easily, as old friends. In their long black coats they were nearly identical from the back, save the difference in their hats.
* * *
WITH AN OLD familiarity born of long nights spent waiting out a fugitive, and of afternoons spent going from house to house interviewing witnesses, Constance nodded at Mr. Heath when she spotted him through the crowd. She matched his stride as they took a turn around the cemetery.
“I didn’t see you once during the war,” Mr. Heath said.
“I was here, mostly. Down in Washington for a while, and sometimes away on assignment, but for the most part I stayed in Paterson.” Constance said all that in a rush, although she knew he wasn’t asking about her every location. He wanted to know why they hadn’t spoken in so long.
But he knew perfectly well the reason. Constance had been utterly crushed by the disastrous election of 1916, and the very public and humiliating loss of the only job she’d ever held or cared for. She’d recovered her dignity, eventually, and found even better employment for herself during the war—but her last association with Mr. Heath had simply wrecked her, and those painful memories were reason enough to stay away.
Besides, she’d always carried a small burden of guilt over his defeat. He’d lost the election in part because the public had turned against her. The newspapers were perfectly awful in their portrayal of New Jersey’s first lady deputy. He’d always been stalwart in his defense of her, but he’d paid a price for it.
What could she possibly say to him now? And what did they have in common anymore?
“Well, I was in New York, mostly,” Mr. Heath said. “Cordelia’s father got me hired on at a plumbing outfit. They sold pipe fittings. It was my job to count them.”