Smoke and Mirrors

by Casey Daniels

Just as he was earlier today, I reminded myself, when Jeffrey Hollister leapt out of the shadows and went for his throat so quickly and with such force that Andrew did not have time to defend himself.

  ‘So what do you think, then?’ Bess, too, had bent over, the better to peer at Andrew, and her beard scratched my ear. ‘Done in by some heartless ruffian, no doubt. It’s a shame, isn’t it, Miss Barnum, what some will do to get their hands on other people’s money.’

  It was, indeed, yet something told me this was not the case.

  To prove it to myself, I laid Andrew’s hand aside and fingered the silver watch tucked into a pocket in his waistcoat. ‘The assailant didn’t take this,’ I pointed out to Bess.

  ‘Could be he didn’t have time. How about money?’

  It was a legitimate question. Feeling a ghoul, I put my hand in the pocket of Andrew’s sit-down-upons and came out with a small stack of coins. ‘I can’t believe they would have taken the rest and not this, too.’

  ‘Then not robbed.’ Bess thought this over. ‘Was he the type of man someone might want to kill? By which I mean, was he a rogue? Or dishonest? Was there maliciousness in the man?’

  When I shook my head, my curls brushed my cheeks. ‘Andrew was kind and thoughtful, a real gentleman.’

  ‘Yet real gentlemen …’ Bess gulped. ‘I cannot say, for I do not know for sure, Miss Barnum, but I’m thinking a real gentleman does not usually find himself set upon and murdered in a public place.’

  She had a point.

  Thinking it all through, I went over the scene that had unfolded earlier in the day. ‘There was something he tried to show me earlier,’ I told Bess, because as my confidante in this matter I thought it only fair for her to know my thought processes. ‘He took a paper from his pocket and made to press it into my hand.’

  Once again, I was obliged to bend nearer and, as she had so favorably done before, Bess held onto my skirts. I had just reached into the pocket of Andrew’s coat when I heard a commotion from downstairs in the direction of the front door. My head came up; my heartbeat raced.

  ‘My brother? So quickly?’

  I did not need Bess to answer. I knew better than to think any mortal could have made the trip all the way from Fifth Avenue here to the corner of Broadway and Ann Street so swiftly. But then, if there was anything my brother had shown the world in the thirty-two years he had been on it, it was that he was not just any mortal.

  No sooner had I had the thought than I heard the pounding of footsteps on the stairs, and that’s when I made up my mind.

  I had not given Andrew Emerson time to tell me what he wanted or how I might help him when he was alive. I would not let the opportunity pass again.

  Swiftly and efficiently, I went through Andrew’s pockets and found not one but two pieces of paper. I closed my fingers over both and stood and, in unison, Bess and I stepped away from the body. She had just finished smoothing my skirts back into place when my brother appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Evie! And Miss Buttle! What idiot left you two here all by yourselves? And … my goodness!’ Phin had a high, sloping forehead and apple-round cheeks that gave some people the mistaken impression that he was perpetually cheerful. His halo of curly hair was the same indeterminate color between brown and honey as mine. When he spied Andrew’s body in the sea of blood, his jaw slackened and his blue eyes popped.

  ‘This is awful. It’s terrible.’ Mr Dewey was behind Phin on the stairs and my brother shot a look his way. ‘We must get poor Mr Emerson removed as quickly as possible. Why isn’t that being taken care of? Where is the night watch?’

  ‘Mr Gable has gone for the constable, Mr Barnum,’ Dewey told him.

  ‘That’s good. That’s very good. And Miss Buttle …’ He turned her way. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Consoling me,’ I broke in, because I knew Phin did not cotton to the thought of the oddities having free rein of the museum. If patrons thought they might see our human oddities walking freely through the building, they might be equally inclined to think they might bump into them strolling the streets of New York. And if that were to happen, or so Phin thought, why would anyone pay the admission price to look at them here?

  ‘Miss Buttle has been so kind as to keep me company while I waited for you,’ I told Phin. ‘She saw I was upset and has provided me much comfort.’

  ‘That’s good. That’s very good.’ Phin made a quick bow in Bess’s direction, effectively dismissing her. ‘Thank you, Miss Buttle. You may leave us now.’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ The look I sent Bess spoke volumes. ‘Good night.’

  Our Bearded Lady disappeared the way she’d come, into the Waxworks Room, and Phin slipped an arm through mine and marched me past a display of butterflies under glass and toward the skeleton of a horse displayed not far from where Bess had accessed a stairway to take her to her room.

  ‘You should not have had to see this,’ he said.

  ‘I could hardly help it since I found poor Andrew.’

  Phin’s gaze flitted again to the terrible scene. ‘What does it mean? How could it have happened? And why?’

  I had no answers for him, or any to satisfy myself for that matter and, until I did, I knew better than to speculate. My brother was older than me by eight years and, since the death of our father when I was but seven, he saw himself as a paternal figure in my life. This was surely to be commended and I have been perpetually grateful for his charity. Phin was the one who took me in when I had no place else to go. He was the one who, over the objections of everyone from Mr Dewey to Charity, his own wife, insisted on giving me the opportunity to work at the museum and earn my own keep.

  Still, I had no illusions. As kind-hearted as he might be, Phin was still Phin and always would be. He was mercurial and he could be frenetic. He was so quick-thinking that often those of us who were not so intellectually well-endowed were left scrambling to keep up with his thought processes. Phin was loud, he was charismatic and he was a wizard when it came to attracting – and keeping – the public’s attention. Yet he could be overblown and so quick to jump from one idea to another that he often left me shaking my head in wonder.

  Any mention of Andrew’s plea for help would have surely sent him on a tear to discover the source of Andrew’s distress and I wasn’t ready for that. Not until I had more information.

  To that end, I made a show of getting my handkerchief from my reticule and, at the same time, tucked away the papers I had purloined from Andrew’s pocket.

  ‘He was here earlier today,’ I told Phin because I knew he would hear the same report from the man who had been at the door that morning and I did not want it to look as if I had any reason to keep Andrew’s visit a secret. ‘Mr Emerson stopped to see me.’

  ‘Did he?’ Phin considered this. ‘Came all the way from Bethel? Just to see you? What did he want?’

  ‘Just to catch up on old times,’ I said, and really, I wasn’t surprised at how easily the lie fell from my lips. I had, after all, been lying to the world for some time now. ‘The mill burned, you know. Just last month. Mr Emerson and I chatted for a bit, then he went on his way.’

  ‘Much alive, it is to be presumed.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘He seems to have returned.’

  I, too, had thought of this but, unlike Phin, I reasoned I knew why: Andrew was waiting to see me. He hoped to ambush me a second time so that he might once again plead for my help.

  He never had the chance.

  ‘Perhaps he hoped to see you,’ I told my brother. ‘As a courtesy.’

  ‘Or because he had something to ask me!’ Phin’s eyes sparked. ‘To ask for your hand, perhaps.’

  ‘No.’ This was one thing I could not lie about. ‘Put it out of your mind, Phin, for there is no chance of it. There was never more than friendship between Andrew and myself.’

  ‘But you never know, eh?’ When Phin tried to get me to smile, he was never shy of a tease. His look was sly. ‘You mig
ht grow to love a man like Andrew Emerson.’

  I let my gaze wander again to the terrible scene. ‘Not any longer.’

  ‘No. No. Of course not.’ Phin’s expression sobered. ‘I am sorry, Evie.’ He patted my arm. ‘I know he was a dear friend and—’

  A racket from downstairs cut short Phin’s words and he raced to the stairway and peered over the bannister. ‘It’s the constable,’ he said. ‘He’ll want to hear what you have to say, I believe, for it may have some bearing on Mr Emerson’s last hours.’

  The constable in question was a man named Slater whose waistcoat was a bit too snug over his round belly and whose shoes looked to need a good cleaning. Though he had certainly been told why he had been summoned to the museum, all thoughts of corpses and murders and mysterious circumstances seemed to fly out of his head the moment he was introduced to my brother.

  ‘Marvelous place!’ Slater had small, dark eyes and they darted over the exhibits surrounding us at the same time as he pumped Phin’s hand. ‘Been meaning to bring the missus, but what with the cost and all …’ He looked imploringly at my brother and I knew what was bound to happen.

  Phin has a charitable soul.

  And I – or so I have been told – have less than I should of womanly patience.

  ‘We would appreciate your help in the matter of Mr Emerson’s death,’ I told Slater, stepping forward. ‘Surely there is something you can do to find his murderer.’

  Slater’s dark brows slid slowly up his forehead. ‘And what’s a woman to do with this matter?’ As if I were invisible, he addressed this question to Phin. ‘Surely she cannot be involved in either your astonishing establishment, Mr Barnum, or in the unfortunate circumstances that have befallen this young man.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re wrong there.’ Phin stepped to my side and slipped an arm through mine. ‘This is my sister, Miss Evangeline Barnum; she is as intelligent as any man in the room and more commonsensical than half of New York. She does have an interest in this matter, sir, as she is my aide-de-camp, so to speak. She was also a friend of Mr Emerson and the one who discovered his body.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ Slater’s gaze slid from my brother to me. ‘You saw what happened?’

  ‘No. I came from my office and walked here to the Portrait Gallery and—’

  ‘So there was no one who saw what became of this young man.’ Slater swept past us and studied Andrew’s body, but not before he took a gander at the mermaid and chuckled with delight at having the opportunity for a private audience.

  When he was done, he whirled to face us. ‘Must have been an accident,’ he announced. ‘For surely there’s no other explanation.’

  ‘If so, what caused the peculiar wound?’ I asked, going to the constable’s side so that I could point out the injury. ‘And why is there no trace of the weapon anywhere at hand?’

  As if he would surely find it if he looked long enough, Slater did a quick turn around the area.

  The monkeys in the Happy Family cage did not take kindly to a disturbance at so late an hour and, as they had when I left my office, screeched and jumped to the front of the cage. Slater leapt back.

  ‘Well, how about those critters, then?’ he asked no one in particular. ‘Seems to me they’re vicious, and no doubt, this man here—’

  ‘Andrew Emerson,’ I told him.

  ‘This Andrew Emerson here, he got too close, and one of these wild creatures became aroused at the intrusion. Animals such as this are unpredictable.’

  ‘They are, indeed,’ I told him. ‘And as far as we have been able to ascertain, they are far more intelligent than most give them credit for. But they are not devious. Not as a human being might be devious. And they are not malicious. They do not use weapons, and if they did, they would not be so duplicitous as to hide them after.’

  It took Slater a minute to work through my logic. One minute is generally all Phin gives anyone to catch up with what’s happening around him.

  ‘You need to find the perpetrator,’ he told Slater. ‘Get a move on, man. We cannot have people think the museum is dangerous.’

  ‘Ah, well, as for that.’ Slater’s beady eyes lit up and he walked around the body, peering at it but not getting too near. ‘We might certainly be able to keep the word from traveling about, if you get what I’m saying, Mr Barnum. There’s none need to know what happened here. Not the newspapers or the public, if you get my meaning.’

  Oh, Phin got his meaning, to be sure, and I already knew what my brother was thinking. A murder would add to the notoriety of the establishment. The news would bring even more crowds. If Slater thought to keep it secret at the cost of admission for him and his missus, he had a great deal to learn about P.T. Barnum.

  ‘What’s this, do you suppose?’ Slater asked, forgetting his dreams of free admission when he saw the bruising on Andrew’s neck. ‘It looks as if someone tried to strangle him before he knocked Mr Emerson on the head.’

  Drat it all. I was counting on Slater not to notice and, now that he had, I had no choice but to speak the truth.

  ‘The injury has nothing to do with Mr Emerson’s murder,’ I told the constable. ‘It happened earlier today. You see, Mr Emerson had an encounter with Jeffrey Hollister and—’

  ‘Hollister!’ Phin’s eyes flashed lightning. ‘I will not tolerate the man causing dissension here. If he attacked Mr Emerson—’

  ‘He thought he was defending me,’ I told Phin. ‘And he did no real harm.’

  ‘No real harm, eh?’ Squint-eyed, Slater did another turn around the body. ‘So you say someone here at the museum—’

  ‘Jeffrey Hollister,’ Phin said. ‘Our Lizard Man from Borneo.’

  Such appellations are usually enough to take a person aback, and Slater was no exception. He chewed over the thought for a moment before he said, ‘And this Lizard Man, he attacked our victim?’

  ‘He did.’ I tried to wave away the implications of Slater’s question, but it was clear he would not listen. ‘He meant no harm.’

  ‘But he did harm, didn’t he? Or Mr Emerson here would not be bruised and battered. And if I am any judge …’ Thinking, Slater pressed his lips together. ‘It looks to me as if this Hollister fellow came back to finish the fight.’

  ‘But there is no proof of that.’ I did not know how I could be clearer but, as it turned out, it didn’t matter. Before I could explain, Slater asked Phin where to find Jeffrey and Phin sent an attendant up to the fifth floor of the building where our oddities had their rooms.

  Waiting, I hugged my arms around myself and fought to control my rising panic. ‘Mr Hollister can get angry,’ I felt obliged to point out. ‘But he calms quickly enough. You cannot think—’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of what I can and cannot think, Miss Barnum,’ the constable told me. ‘We will need your testimony, of course. What you saw this morning. How this Hollister fellow tried to kill Mr Emerson.’

  ‘But he didn’t!’ I stomped one foot. Surely it was a childish way to draw attention, but since Slater wasn’t listening anyway, it hardly mattered. ‘Mr Hollister—’

  ‘Is gone, sir.’ The attendant was back from upstairs, breathing hard when he reported the news to Phin. ‘He isn’t in his room, and his few things are packed and taken.’

  ‘Aha!’ Slater swept toward the stairway. ‘Absquatulated, has he? We have our man, if I’m not mistaken, and this proves it. We will find him, Mr Barnum. I swear to you, we will find this Jeffrey Hollister and we will bring him to justice.’

  THREE

  When our father, Philo Barnum died, my brother, though he was but fifteen years of age, was charged with the difficult task of providing for the family – my mother, my four sisters, and me in addition to himself. It should come as no surprise that Phin was a clever boy just as it is no revelation to those of us who know him well that he has never been fond of physical labor. Faced with putting food on the table, he worked with his head, not his hands. He ran a lottery scheme and sold cherry rum to soldiers. He eve
ntually owned a newspaper, a boarding house and a book-auctioning business.

  Still, opportunities came slowly. That is, until the year 1835, when at the age of twenty-five he was apprised of a woman named Joice Heth, a slave who not only claimed to be one-hundred-and-sixty years old but who told the story of how she had once been the nursemaid of none other than the infant who grew to be General George Washington. Like all right-thinking people, my brother is firmly against the abomination that is slavery. He does, however, have an unerring sense of what the public not only wants but what it is willing to pay to see. He purchased the services of Joice Heth, advertised her as, ‘the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the world,’ and put her on display at the theater Niblo’s Garden in New York City. Just as with the Feejee Mermaid, the curious arrived by the thousands.

  And they made my brother very rich.

  So it was that six years later, when Phin purchased the five-story building that housed Scudder’s American Museum along with its contents, I was not surprised. He reopened the establishment and added his own flair to the more mundane displays of rocks and gems and shells and fossils – his human oddities, mummies, Ned the Performing Seal, a loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which the disciples of Jesus had once gathered. The museum was a wonder, to be sure, and its glories were not merely confined to inside its walls.

  The exterior of the building was painted with gigantic portraits of some of the animals that lived inside – lions and bears and elephants. Banners and flags fluttered in the breeze, the worst musicians Phin could find played on a balcony above the front entrance (so as to encourage people to go inside and so escape the disharmonies, he said), and the entire building was illuminated with the new and amazing limelight that was impossible to ignore or resist.

  Indeed, Barnum’s American Museum glowed like a beacon there at the southern end of Manhattan, and it drew guests by the thousands.

  And they made my brother even richer.

  As worried and weary as I was, as much as the weight of sorrow sat on my shoulders and bunched in my stomach, I couldn’t help but consider these facts when my brother’s carriage turned into the drive that led to Phin’s house on Fifth Avenue.