Dearest Winnie, [it read]
The Borden family is in our proverbial grasp. As long as no one peers into the Spirit Box, we are safe. Snatch it while you can and we shall be done with this dreadful business!
I deeply regret having to procure the African potion to settle the Borden Affair, but the medical investigators were too dull-witted to see past the frightened look on Jonathan Borden’s face. It was, indeed, the perfect crime!
Let Livermore be your paramour forevermore. My duckling! My fine apparel of warm enswathed womanhood! I shall be yours until the last trumpet sounds.
Doodles
Underneath was a crude line drawing of a man in a top hat and monocle with exaggerated lips puckered up for amorous activity. Three X’s captioned the drawing. Sarah felt a shudder go through her skeleton thinking of Livermore being capable of such feelings. And worse, being the recipient of them.
Lizzie rubbed her chin. “Doodles? I never would have guessed. Not a logical extraction from either of his names.”
Sarah nodded, tears forming in her eyes. “The man killed my father.”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, staring at her compassionately. “I can only imagine that feeling.”
The Widow Borden snatched the Spirit Box from Lizzie’s hands and held it aloft as if it were some accursed thing. “You have plagued my life lo these last few years, haunting my nights and making my own parlor a place of fear! Be done with you!” And she smashed it upon the ground under her foot. It splintered into shards and the sea shells rattled off into the grass. “Contact Joseph Coffin immediately!” she announced. “There is a will to process!”
“Lizzie Borden,” Sarah said, placing a congratulatory hand on her cousin’s back. “You have done fine work here tonight. Mother, we must reward our girl detective with a most excellent and hearty meal and an evening’s delightful banter with our wonderful family. Even Tom Crank can join us if he chooses, despite his culpability in this affair!”
Tom snuffled nervously. “I’d be most obliged. Poor Tom’s a-cold!” And he pulled his thread-bare jacket tighter around his frame.
“Consider it done,” Mrs. Borden said, holding up the will in a tight fist. The entire family, Lizzie, Homer, the Judge and Mrs. Mason and Deputy Wixon—all except for the inert Elizabeth Wingate and poor shivering Tom—joined in with a healthy burst of laughter and applause.
8. An Evening’s Recap
The scene at the factory office had been chaotic. The Fall River police had approached Livermore directly, despite their fear of his stature and influence. When the coterie of officers and the arresting lieutenant entered his office and announced their charge, Livermore had cried out, “God’s wounds!” and tried to spear one officer with a large fountain pen from his desk. As a result, he had to be tumbled to the ground and his hands tied behind his back with a shackle. As they dragged him through the lobby of the textile administration building, employees who were so used to seeing him cross the marble floors in an ermine coat and stately top hat, now saw him frog-marched like a snarling beast, his obscene curses echoing off the ornate marble ceilings.
Lizzie and Sarah went once to the county prison to see Livermore in his cell. He sat in the furthest corner, swathed in shadow. His eyes pierced the darkness to hit them directly with a cold shudder.
“The hag and the harlot!” was his only exclamation.
Lizzie shot back with, “Perhaps, Doodles, you will be joining Mr. Tweed in chambers more suited to men of your industrious disposition.” From the shadows, they could hear Livermore choking with rage and vengeful curses.
Then Lizzie and Sarah retreated to the local apothecary to relax over a few mugs of medicinal syrup water, Mr. A.E. Dobbs attending.
“How did you know that the will was in the curio?” Sarah asked excitedly.
“It was very simple,” Lizzie Borden replied. “From the start I suspected that Wingate was a fraud. The rapping on the table top can be achieved quite effectively by snapping one’s toes, and I did notice that Mrs. Wingate had on pad foot slippers, the type you can cast off quite easily just by lifting your foot. She also walked with a pronounced slant towards the left, showing that it was her left foot that was employed in the toe snapping.”
“Marvelously perceptive,” said Sarah, enthralled.
Lizzie laughed. “The credit for the discovery of the source of the trumpet blasts I give to Homer Ulysses Thesinger, Boy Inventor. I was not surprised to see Thomas Crank of Rodman Street involved. That poor boy can be easily led by wolves into walking off a cliff. Fortunately, the law has overlooked his breach of conduct and he is now at home nursing his wounds. For his role in the affair, I shall honor him with a stipend that will offset his college education, advancing his status in life far beyond what a bobbin boy in a mill would accomplish.”
“That is very generous of you,” said Sarah with a broad smile. “Poor Tom is merely a follower and was exploited by Wingate as much as my mother. We bear him no ill will.”
Mr. Dobbs, polishing his glasses behind the counter, joined in with fascination. “But Lizzie, you still didn’t tell us how you knew about the curio?”
Lizzie smirked knowingly. “When Homer announced that the King Philip was coming to enact his revenge, Wingate ran for Widow Borden’s Cabinet of Curiosities. I found it quite significant that she grabbed the Spirit Box. I couldn’t see how the Box would have been of any interest to Wingate. She no doubt wanted to keep whatever was in the box from being destroyed.”
“Brilliant,” Mr. Dobbs beamed. “It is like something that Edger Allen Poe’s detective Dupin may have deducted. You must allow some writer of mysteries to use that particular ruse in one of his imaginative stories.”
Sarah Borden nodded in agreement. “So at that point,” she said, “you knew that Wingate was only after the contents of the box, and that she had no other interest in my mother’s spiritual well-being.”
“Yes,” Lizzie explained, “and that she was in the employ of Thisbalt Ajax Livermore was obvious from the picture of her that was in his drawing room, proudly displayed on his mantelpiece. I knew there was a connection between the two.”
A dark look came across Sarah’s face. “But my word, Lizzie. Didn’t your father hand over all his money to Livermore?”
“That is the beauty of the machinery I had set into motion,” Lizzie smiled. “My father invested everything he had, so much so that when Livermore was exposed as a murderer, the Livermore Mill went into the hands of the investors. My father is now the de facto owner of the Mill! His fortune has quadrupled with one investment.”
Sarah lifted her mug of syrup water and saluted her newly found friend. “Lizzie Borden, you are truly a girl detective of the finest order!” Sarah exclaimed.
Lizzie nodded. “Yes,” she said. “And a girl detective is what this world needs most at such challenging times as these.”
The two Borden girls, joined by A.E. Dobbs, Pharmacist, engaged in hearty laughter and good company, sipped their syrup water and through the smoky glass of the apothecary front, watched the sun settle down on the quieting twilight of Fall River.
About the Author
Richard Behrens is the co-founder of Nine Muses Books and author of the Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective series of mysteries. He is a contributor to The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden and Victorian Studies as well as The Literary Hatchet, both available from PearTree Press. He is a regular lecturer on eccentric Victorian women and silent film comedy and often gets confused about what century he lives in. A native New Yorker now living in New England, Richard is working on several more Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective mysteries including two novels: The Minuscule Monk (2015) and The Wilmarth Immovables (2016) as well as a new short story collection.
Website: http://www.ninemusesbooks.com
Blog: http://www.lizziebordengirldetective.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/l
izziebordengd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizzieBordenGirlDetective
Series Profile: https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/18895
Author profile: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ninemusesbooks
More Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective
Stories by Richard Behrens
Available from Nine Muses Books
Lizzie Mini #1: The Agitated Elocutionist
Lizzie Mini #2: The Forlorn Maggie
Lizzie Mini #3: The Purloined Curio
Lizzie Mini #4: The Melancholy Scion
Lizzie Mini #5: The Sculling Boat
Coming Soon from Nine Muses Books
Lizzie Mini #6: The Calamitous Catamount
Lizzie Mini #7: The Perpetual Engineer
Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective:
The Minuscule Monk (2015)
Lizzie Borden: Girl Detective:
The Wilmarth Immovables (2016)
Available from PearTress Press
Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective (2010)
also available as e-book on Smashwords
includes:
The Forlorn Maggie
The Purloined Curio
The Exhausted Amenuensis
The Traumatized Metallurgist
The Melancholy Scion
Available Summer 2015 on Smashwords
from Nine Muses Books
THE MINUSCULE MONK (2015, Nine Muses Books)
Miss Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts is a girl detective and the most remarkable young woman in Victorian New England. Many years before her infamous arrest and trial for the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother, she pursued a career as a private consulting detective. The Miniscule Monk chronicles a most singular episode in that hidden history.
When a dead body mysteriously appears in the basement of her father’s furniture store, 17 year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden immediately takes on the case. Accompanied by an eccentric millionaire who campaigns to extend the vote to animals; a Boston terrier trained to sniff out crooked politicians; and a boy detective who believes the entire universe to be inside his own head, Lizzie follows a trail of taxidermy tools and Civil War bushwhackers to the Miniscule Monk, a legendary gunslinger whose mummified body will bring a punter’s pot to anyone who can deliver it to the New York gangster who has been posting a bounty on the Monk for decades. With such high stakes, everyone has a motive for murder, yet everyone seems innocent. Or perhaps, as Lizzie suspects after attending a dinner party with non-existent food and meeting a horse that has turned into its opposite, none of it is even real.
Lizzie Borden the Girl Detective of Fall River is at her most spirited in The Miniscule Monk, a comic mystery that paints a portrait of Fall River at the height of its splendor and its most infamous citizen at the start of her most excellent career.
Now Available on Smashwords
from PearTree Press
LIZZIE BORDEN: GIRL DETECTIVE (2010, PearTree Press)
Introducing Miss Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, a most excellent girl detective and the most remarkable young woman ever to take on the criminal underworld in late 19th century New England.
Many years before her infamous arrest and trial for the murders of her father and stepmother, Lizzie Borden pursued a career as a private consulting detective and matches wits with a crooked spiritualist, a corrupt and murderous textile tycoon, a secret society of anarchist assassins, rowdy and deadly sporting boys, a crazed and vengeful mutineer, an industrial saboteur, and a dangerously unhinged math professor—none of whom are ever exactly what they seem to be.
In these five early tales of mystery and adventure, Lizzie Borden is joined by her stubborn and stingy father Andrew; her jealous and weak-chinned sister Emma; her trusted companion Homer Thesinger the Boy Inventor; and the melancholy French scion Andre De Camp. Together, they explore Fall River’s dark side through a landscape that is industrial, Victorian, and distinctly American.
You have met Lizzie Borden before, but never like this!
Includes the following stories:
The Forlorn Maggie
The Purloined Curio
The Exhausted Amanuensis
The Traumatized Metallurgist
The Melancholy Scion
PRAISE FOR LIZZIE BORDEN: GIRL DETECTIVE
“Lizzie Borden: Girl Detective, is clever and appealing. Every story brings the reader to the streets and characters of Fall River as if you were there with them and of course Lizzie Borden. Congratulations to Richard Behrens for his Victorian creativity and imagination.”
Len Rebello, Author of Lizzie Borden: Past & Present
“In Lizzie Borden: Girl Detective Richard Behrens skillfully captures the essence of historic Fall River, bringing the city to life through the adventures of the youthful, intrepid sleuth, Lizzie Borden. The fictional Lizzie is an absolutely delightful character; she is fearlessly cunning, charismatic, and thoroughly enchanting! A must read for all those intrigued by Fall River history, mystery and, of course, Lizzie Borden.”
Michael Martins, Curator of the Fall River History Society / Co-Author of Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River
“This is a fun read and you’ll see Lizzie in a whole new light. It is well written and has lots of unique historical details that make it feel very rich and authentic.”
Jill Dalton, writer/performer of Lizzie Borden Live!
“This is Lizzie Borden as you never imagined her; lively, intrepid and clever as a budding detective on the hunt! The stories are a magic carpet ride to another time – old Fall River in all its glory. The settings, the clothing, the language all showcase a young Lizzie Borden against a background of mystery and intrigue with some twists and turns along the way. Move over Nancy Drew, and make room for Miss Lizzie, Girl Detective- so much fun, it’s nearly criminal! “
Shelley Dziedzic, Editor of Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts
The Agitated Elocutionist Page 4