A Deadly Affection

by Cuyler Overholt

  “This came for you by messenger, miss, while you were downstairs.”

  Dr. Summerford was written in cursive lettering across the front. I turned it over. The back was blank. “Thank you, Mary.” I carried it up to my bedroom and slit it open. Inside, I found a single piece of paper containing three handwritten sentences:

  Please come to the shop tonight at midnight. It’s urgent that I speak with you. The door will be open.

  Elizabeth

  I sank into my desk chair. What could possibly be so important as to require a midnight rendezvous? I wondered if something had happened during Maloney’s visit that Eliza was anxious to tell me about. Or perhaps it concerned Dr. Huntington’s examination on Thursday. That would explain the midnight assignation; presumably her mother would be asleep by that hour, making it possible for us to speak privately.

  Although I certainly wanted to speak with her, I balked at the idea of going out alone in the middle of the night. It would be a dangerous proposition under the best of circumstances, but now that I suspected someone wanted to do me harm, it struck me as downright foolhardy. Besides, I doubted the new guard Maloney had installed would let Eliza come down to the shop at midnight. I would go see her first thing in the morning instead, I decided, slipping the letter under my blotter.

  As I straightened up the papers on my desk, however, the letter continued to nag at me. Eliza had called the matter urgent. I doubted she would have made such a request lightly. What if something had happened that required my immediate attention? I worried too that despite a lack of evidence, Maloney might be planning to haul her back to police court at any moment to slap her with a second murder charge. If that were to happen, I might never have another chance to speak with her.

  I pulled the letter out again. If Lucille really had sent someone to kill me, he would likely wait for the police to stop making extra patrols around my house before he tried again. He wouldn’t, in any event, expect to find me out on the streets at midnight. And if I went, I needn’t be defenseless; I could take Father’s pocket pistol with me.

  But it wasn’t only Lucille’s henchman I was afraid of, I admitted to myself. A small part of me worried that I might be wrong about Eliza, that it was, in fact, she who had murdered Miss Hauptfuhrer and who’d been chiseling away at my window the night before. Though I could think of no rational reason for her to want to kill me, a private midnight meeting would give her a perfect opportunity to do so.

  Still, I didn’t see how in good conscience I could let fear of Eliza keep me from going. As both Simon and Maloney had reminded me, I was the one who’d gotten her out of prison, insisting that she posed no threat. Just yesterday, I’d told Simon it was safe to keep her out. How, then, could I justify cowering at home? If I believed she was dangerous, I should tell the authorities so immediately and help them put her back behind bars before she could harm someone else. But I didn’t believe she was dangerous, not really. I crossed to the window and gazed down at the street. I had made the decision to stand by Eliza, and stand by her now I must.

  • • •

  So it was that at twenty minutes to midnight, a few moments after I’d seen the patrolman stroll past the drawing-room window, I slipped out the front door and started down the street behind him. The lights were extinguished in the houses along the block, blurring the familiar facades and creating shadows in every corner. I scurried down the sidewalk at a half trot, nervous as a rabbit out of its burrow, glancing behind me every few seconds to be sure I wasn’t being followed.

  My book bag hung over my shoulder, heavy with the weight of Father’s pistol. I’d found the gun nestled in its case in the top drawer of his nightstand, next to a thin cartridge already filled with round-nosed bullets. I had never used a gun before, but the cartridge was obviously designed to fit into the cavity in the handle and slid in with a satisfying click. The pistol was a pleasingly compact thing, no longer than my hand, with straight, modern lines and an engraving of a rearing colt on its rubber grip. It had a hidden hammer that would keep it from firing if I dropped it, and a large safety hook that I trusted would prevent me from shooting myself in the foot. Although I didn’t expect to have to use it, knowing it was in my bag made all the difference in the world.

  Up ahead of me, the officer had reached the intersection and was turning left on Madison to continue his patrol around the block. I arrived at the corner a few moments later and turned in the opposite direction. As an additional safeguard, I had decided to forego my usual route across Ninety-Second Street and take Madison down to Eighty-Sixth instead, which was likely to be more populated at this hour. Although the blocks along Madison were largely residential, enough people were trudging up from the streetcar terminus at Eighty-Sixth Street to provide at least a modicum of company. I walked quickly with my ears cocked and my hand pressed over the lump in my bag, arriving a few minutes later at Eighty-Sixth Street.

  As I’d hoped, the thoroughfare was still humming with late-night traffic. Further east, I could see the glowing heart of the German commercial district, lit up by thousands of tiny incandescent bulbs on the shop signs. As I drew closer, the sidewalks began to fill with couples on their way home from the theater and brewery workers coming off their shifts. Although the old eel seller was gone from the steps of the Yorkville Casino, I could hear a brass band playing inside as I went by, and see dancers wheeling past the upstairs windows.

  It was with some reluctance that I turned right onto Third Avenue, leaving the theater lights and music behind. Here, under the El tracks, the sidewalks were empty, the barber shops and bookstores and singing clubs all locked up for the night. Even the tenements looked unusually forlorn, shorn of their daytime bustle. A cluster of milk bottles stood forgotten on a stoop, their caps popped off by frozen cream. Darkened windows stared blankly at me from both sides of the street, blind to my passing.

  It didn’t help my nerves when, a few minutes later, a freezing rain began to fall, flying sideways under my hat brim and bouncing off the pavement against my ankles. I turned up the collar of the plain cloth coat I’d worn to discourage robbers, wishing now that I’d worn something more substantial. Although a few headlamps were making their way up the avenue from downtown, I couldn’t see another soul out on foot. I slipped my hand inside my bag, feeling the reassuring shape of the gun.

  I had just crossed the Eighty-Fourth Street intersection when the freezing rain stopped as quickly as it had begun. I looked up to see black storm clouds breaking up overhead, combining with smoke from the electric generating plant to turn the sky a bruised, purplish-yellow. After the steady clatter of the sleet, the street now seemed preternaturally quiet. As I continued quickly onward I could hear nothing but the sound of my own footsteps, clicking against the wet pavement and echoing off the building walls.

  Suddenly, I became aware that the echo had broken out of synchrony. Was that someone behind me? I swiveled around to look, but there was no one there. I started again toward the next intersection. I was halfway to it when my twitching ears picked up the faint sucking noise of flat soles leaving wet pavement, perhaps twenty feet back. I picked up my pace, tightening my grip on the pistol. To my horror, the other steps quickened in response.

  Without turning for another look, I leaped off the curb and ran diagonally across the avenue, pulling the pistol from my bag. The sighting nub caught on the inside of the bag, resisting my tug. I jerked it free, too forcefully in my haste, causing the gun to bobble in my hand. I struggled to secure a grip but couldn’t quite hold on. The gun dropped from my hand, landing with a clatter on the paving stones.

  I stooped in midstride and peered down at the street, straining to make out the blue-black pistol against the wet paving stones. I thought I spotted it a few feet ahead and lunged toward it. As I did so, my left foot kicked something small and hard. I caught a glimpse of gleaming metal as the pistol skidded the rest of the way across the street and slid through t
he sewer opening in the curb, landing with a faint splash in the catch basin. Groaning in frustration, I pulled myself upright and followed it across to the opposite curb, jumping onto the sidewalk and running across the north side of Eighty-Third Street toward the shop. Simon’s man should be keeping watching on the stoop up ahead. I searched for his figure in the darkness as I drew closer, ready to cry out for help—but the stoop was empty.

  I hesitated, heart hammering, not sure whether to run across to the Brauns’ shop or to continue on in search of help. Just then, the door to the bakery opened on the other side of the street and two men stepped out onto the sidewalk, carrying sacks of old bread. I nearly cried out in relief. One of the men turned to lock the door as the other put down his sacks to light up a cigarette. Emboldened by their presence, I spun around to confront my pursuer.

  The wet sidewalk glistened, silent and empty, behind me. Scanning it from one end to the other, I thought I saw a movement near the entrance to an alleyway, some fifteen yards back. I cautiously retraced my steps. But the alleyway was empty when I arrived. I peered down it toward the dark yard at the other end, straining to hear over the pounding of my heart. I could see indentations in the slush, but it was impossible to tell if they were fresh, or even footprints. I had no intention of following them in to find out.

  Glancing behind me, I saw that the bakers had picked up their sacks and were moving away down the sidewalk. I crossed the street and hurried in their wake to the Brauns’ shop. A light was burning somewhere in the back. When I tried the door, it swung open. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, watching from inside for any sign of a pursuer. When none appeared after several minutes, I began to wonder if it might have been just a petty criminal hoping to snatch my bag. Or then again, I thought with chagrin, the whole thing might have been a figment of my imagination, which admittedly had been working overtime since I’d seen the jimmy marks on my window.

  I checked my pendant watch. It was now three minutes before midnight. “Eliza?” I called quietly, peering through the door behind the counter. “Eliza, are you there?” I heard no response.

  The counter hatch had been left open. I passed through it and continued silently into the back room. Everything was as clean and tidy as the last time I’d seen it, except that the door to the meat locker now stood ajar. The light appeared to be coming from inside it. I stepped around the door and looked in.

  The locker was about ten feet wide by fourteen feet long, filled with slabs of waxen-looking beef that hung from iron hooks along either side. Blocks of ice behind the meat dripped through a wood slat grid onto the brick floor below. The light came from a gas ceiling lamp that hung above the narrow, central aisle.

  “Hello?” I called, although the aisle was empty and there was no other place for a person to stand. The air from inside was damp and cold and held the scent of decaying flesh. I started to back away.

  Suddenly, a tremendous blow against the middle of my back threw me forward onto the floor. I landed on my knees on the rough wooden slats, gasping for breath as the locker door slammed shut behind me. I scrambled to my feet and turned around, ignoring the pain in my back as mindless fear overtook me. I grabbed the lever handle on the door and yanked up on it.

  It didn’t move. I tried again with both hands, using all of my strength, but still the handle wouldn’t budge. Whoever pushed me in must have locked it from the outside. “Let me out of here!” I cried, banging on the door with my fists. “Let me out!”

  I pressed my ear to the door but could hear nothing from the other side. I straightened. Had someone been behind me on the street after all? Had he followed me into the store and pushed me in? I didn’t see how it was possible; even if someone had been hiding in the alley, it would have taken him time to reach the shop and sneak in behind me, longer than the few seconds it took me to walk from the front room to the back. Had it been Eliza, then? Had she lured me here just to push me in? I put my ear back to the door. “Eliza?” I called. “Are you there?” I heard nothing but the steady dripping of melting ice.

  I looked around for something to wedge under the door handle to force it open. The drainage slats were thin enough, but looked too soft and brittle for the job. I glanced up at the iron hooks, but they were welded onto the iron racks, which were bolted in turn to the ceiling. My gaze dropped to an overturned crate in the middle of the aisle. A box of matches on top suggested it was used as a step for lighting the overhead lamp. Perhaps it would be sturdy enough to use as a bludgeon. I carried it to the door and whacked it up against the handle from below, but only succeeded in breaking it into pieces.

  I dropped the dangling pieces to the floor. “Help!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Someone help me, please! I’m locked inside!” I held my breath, praying for some response. But the outside world slumbered on, as oblivious to my predicament as the insensible meat all around me.

  I sank onto the floor and sat back against the door, hugging my scraped knees. Who had done this and why? Were they hoping to kill me? It was cold in the locker, cold enough, I supposed, to produce symptoms of exposure if I was left in here long enough. I took a quick inventory. Though my legs and torso were fairly dry, the rain had soaked through my hat to my head and shoulders, and I could already feel a chill seeping through the sleeves of my thin coat. It would be seven or eight hours before Mrs. Braun came down to open the shop and found me inside. Long enough, conceivably, for the cold and damp to take their toll…

  I squeezed my knees more tightly against my chest, tamping down rising panic. If I were to die in the cooler, who would benefit? The more I thought about it, the less inclined I was to suspect Eliza. Even assuming she could have persuaded the guard to let her come down alone at midnight, if I turned up dead on the premises, she would be the obvious suspect. I doubted she would willingly back herself into such a corner. Besides, she would gain nothing from my death, and would lose her staunchest supporter.

  Lucille Fiske, on the other hand, would accomplish two things at once: she would get rid of me and my suspicions, and she would lay another body at Eliza’s door, clinching the presumption of Eliza’s mental instability and ensuring that she was convicted for the murder of both Hauptfuhrers. I had let her know at the ball that Eliza was my patient. Considering her interest in the case and her ample resources, she probably also knew that Eliza had been released. It would have been simple enough for her to sign a letter in Eliza’s name asking me to go to the shop, then send a henchman to push me into the locker when I arrived. I didn’t know how her man had managed to open the shop door, but I supposed he could have found a way. The more I thought about it, the more I felt it had to have been her. As far as she was concerned, I wouldn’t even have to die so long as I was found in the locker, the apparent target of a woman whose sanity was already in doubt. It was a simple yet cunning strategy—exactly what I would expect from Lucille.

  A shiver rattled through me, raising goose bumps all over my body. I found myself reviewing the progressive symptoms of exposure: first, the shivering, as the brain attempted to raise body heat, then foggy thinking and loss of body functions, followed by gradual paralysis as body temperature continued to drop, and finally, death. I had a vivid image of my body sprawled out on the slats in the morning, stiff as one of the carcasses hanging above me. I won’t let it come to that, I thought angrily, pushing myself to my feet.

  With a fresh burst of zeal, I sidled behind the hanging meat, trying not to touch the greasy ribs as I searched for some hidden means of egress. But there was no window, no chute, no opening of any kind save for a small vent in the ceiling for lamp fumes and a sink-size drain in the floor. I tried shouting again, keeping it up for several minutes in case someone was trying to follow the sound of my voice, but no rescuer arrived at the door. A more violent shiver wracked through me.

  I kicked the crate pieces aside and started doing scissor jumps in the aisle, swinging my arms up and down as
best I could in the narrow space. I continued until I’d warmed up, then stopped to rest, starting up again when I felt another chill coming on. This worked well, but was more tiring than I’d expected, and I soon switched to a high-stepping march to save energy. After doing this for what seemed an eternity, I checked my watch and found that only a single hour had elapsed.

  When the shivers came back, I reluctantly started up again, trying to pace myself as conservatively as possible and still stave off the chills. But it was becoming harder and harder to maintain the necessary level of activity, and soon, despite my best efforts, I was shivering pretty much constantly. The next time I checked my watch, my fingers were so stiff it was hard to work the latch. It was a little past three o’clock. I had four more hours still to go.

  Deciding I needed a short rest, I slid onto the floor slats and leaned back against the door, trembling from head to toe. I really should cover my head, I thought dully, to slow the loss of body heat. It was several seconds before I recalled that I was already wearing a hat. I noted this mental lapse with a strange sense of detachment. At some point, I felt my head falling toward my chest and jerked it back up, unable to remember the last few minutes. My teeth were chattering now, and my shoulders locked up under my ears. My body seemed to have taken on a life of its own, contracting in violent spasms that were impervious to my efforts to resist. I found myself thinking of how Nanny used to bundle me and Conrad in thick towels after bathing us in the kitchen laundry tubs, then plunk us in front of the stove to dry. The shimmering heat rolled off the cast-iron stove in waves, vaporizing the water on our skin and hair, turning Conrad’s cheeks a cherry red. He looked just like an angel then, I thought dreamily, with his silky hair and bright blue eyes. Sometimes, he’d climb into my lap, and I’d rock him from side to side with my chin on his head, stealing the warmth from his solid little body, tickling him now and then just to hear his belly laugh. I could almost hear his laugh now, and his voice, calling to me. Calling my name…