What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  And maybe he’d tease out that bit of memory that wasn’t quite sure about the identity of the figure he’d glimpsed struggling along behind poor Charles Linwood through the snow just south of Union Square.

  Maybe the exercise and the effort of remembering would let him sleep without dreaming tonight. Would be enough to hold the nightmare at bay until the mystery chose to reveal itself.

  CHAPTER 4

  Charles Linwood was interred in his family’s crypt nine days after he died in Union Square Park. Curiously, the well-respected mortuary firm of Warneke and Sons stored Linwood’s body just as it had been delivered to them for two full days without beginning to prepare it for visitation and preservation. Then Charles’s father requested a private viewing of his son. Warneke Sr. had to make a decision.

  The wound on the back of the late Mr. Linwood’s head had not been what killed him, but it had been brutal enough to render him unconscious. The blizzard did the rest. Bits and pieces of bark and snow-soaked wood embedded in the dead man’s skull were enough to satisfy the New York City Police Department, but Maurice Warneke had examined and prepared hundreds of bodies for burial. He wasn’t convinced that one or more falling tree limbs could do the kind of damage he would have to repair or disguise before Linwood could lie in his open casket.

  Warneke had seen head wounds made by falling down stairs and by being pushed down stairs. He had filled in the deep grooves where a fireplace poker or a brass-tipped cane battered fragile bone. He had worked and sighed over the bodies of women beaten to death by the fists of their husbands. The mortician knew the marks of willful violence and the signs of accidental trauma. He wondered who hated young Linwood so viciously that he snuck up behind him in the midst of a blizzard and knocked him unconscious into the snow. Where he froze to death.

  Warneke had no evidence to support his suspicion. Nothing but years and years of commiserating with the dead, of listening to the stories their silent bodies told, of doing the best he could to restore them to something like wholeness before they were lowered into darkness. He might be wrong. The tree limbs might have fallen with the force of a human arm, might have been driven by the wind to angle into the most vulnerable part of the dead man’s skull. At least one blow had struck precisely where neck joined head to spine.

  No one else seemed in any doubt. So be it. Nothing would bring the young man back to the life he should have lived. His father wanted to sit beside his son, look at the calm face of a soul gone peacefully to its rest, be able to reassure the corpse’s mother that all was well, that their child was with God. So Maurice Warneke picked out the pieces of bark with his best tweezers, washed the blood from the wound, and combed Charles’s hair into the style he wore in the photograph supplied by his father. He brushed some color onto his cheeks, pegged his mouth shut, drained his blood, pumped his body full of preservative fluids, and let it go. Decision made.

  Everybody died. Justice was a myth. Consolation was the best that could be hoped for.

  * * *

  Charles’s casket was taken directly from Warneke’s premises to Trinity Church, where it lay open for an hour before the service began. Mourners who would ordinarily have come to the Linwood home to pay their respects had been unable to negotiate many of the residential streets in the days immediately following the storm. Now they stood for a few silent moments looking down at the young man’s perfectly composed face before whispering the ritual phrases of condolence to his parents and his fiancée.

  Geoffrey Hunter was one of the last mourners to enter the church; he’d only made it in time by the happy accident of being able to step into a hansom cab in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel moments after its previous occupant descended. He and Charles had been classmates at both Phillips Academy and Harvard, friends since the day nine-year-old Geoffrey arrived at Phillips five months after the war ended. He was the only Southerner to enroll that year.

  As he stood in the central aisle of Trinity Church waiting to pay his respects to the body of his dead friend, Geoffrey remembered their long-ago first meeting. Neither he nor Charles had ever forgotten it. Do you remember? How many times had they laughed together over Geoffrey’s bravado and Charles’s ability to lie with absolute conviction?

  Both boys had known from an early age that a certain kind of harassment had to be met head-on if life was going to be worth living. It didn’t matter where you were when the incident occurred. You dealt with it.

  “Hey, Reb,” someone hissed during morning prayers.

  Without missing a beat of the Our Father, Geoffrey stood up. Before any of the boys around him realized what he meant to do, he laid the hisser out flat with a tight fist and a protruding middle finger knuckle. Stepping smoothly back into his place he kept on praying. Not a single one of the teachers saw what happened. Charles Linwood, whose delicate good looks and curly blond hair made him the butt of many a bully’s cruel joke, told the headmaster that he’d been right next to the new boy throughout the morning service. He’d swear on the Bible that Geoffrey hadn’t budged, certainly hadn’t left his place to bloody anyone’s nose.

  By the end of the day the headmaster knew he’d been bested by two students who shouldn’t even have liked each other, let alone become allies. One of them was a New Yorker whose lawyer father had championed the Abolitionist cause, the other the scion of a defeated Southern clan whose wealth had once rested on the backs of its hundreds of slaves. With nothing in common except their loneliness, Charles and Geoffrey quickly and permanently became the best of friends.

  Being a pragmatist, the headmaster got even by watching their every move until they graduated, making their lives a living hell for the smallest infraction. The boys counted him a worthy opponent, one of the more intriguing challenges of the school.

  As Geoffrey’s turn came to bid his friend a final good-bye, he leaned over the casket and unobtrusively slid a playing card into the pocket of Charles’s frock coat. The ace of spades, highest card in the deck, their secret sign to one another that a prank was about to be played, a girl’s defenses had been breached, the head of school had left himself open yet again to student satire.

  The ace of spades was also a warning against danger as well as a good luck piece. Neither of them ever went anywhere without that special card in an easy-to-reach pocket. Charles had taken his card out and laid it on the bar the last time they’d had drinks together. Do you remember? What had they been talking about? His soon-to-be wife, of course. Charles had had little else on his mind these last few months. As if wrestling with a premonition, he’d slid his ace of spades toward his friend.

  “I may need your help, Geoffrey,” he’d said.

  “You know I’ll come running whenever I see this.” Geoffrey had raised his glass. A toast, a promise, a salute to his friend’s new happiness, an end to his loneliness.

  Where had that card gone after Charles repocketed it? The undertaker who prepared and dressed the body wouldn’t have known its importance. He would have discarded it, perhaps without mentioning it to the grieving family. Perhaps only Geoffrey knew that Charles could not be buried or trundled into the Linwood vault without a brand-new ace of spades in his pocket. Just in case there were games to be played wherever he’d gone or dangers to brave with his lucky card.

  Sleep well, Charles, Geoffrey thought. And when you wake up and feel the card in your pocket, spare a smile for the comrade you left behind, your other half who will miss you every day of his life. Geoffrey and Charles had known from their first meeting that they were brothers in spirit if not by blood; nothing had come between them in all of the years they had known one another to weaken that bond.

  I’m burying a part of myself that I’ll never be able to reclaim, Geoffrey mused. He wasn’t sure he believed in an afterlife, but it helped assuage the pain to imagine his friend opening his eyes in some other world, knowing immediately who had placed the playing card in his pocket, taking the first steps into eternity not quite alone.

  As he turned fro
m the casket, as he embraced the man who rose from his pew to receive the loving warmth of his son’s closest friend, Geoffrey’s eyes fell on a slender figure draped in the black widow’s weeds to which she was entitled as fiancée if not yet wife. Prudence was her name, though he had never actually met her. Strange, that, when he and Charles had been so close.

  For someone who had not been formally introduced, he knew a great deal about Prudence MacKenzie. Knew that she was frighteningly intelligent for a woman, that her father had indulged her to the point of teaching her the law as if she were a son. There was a stepmother who had somehow contrived—Charles’s word—to marry the Judge and outlive him into a happy and wealthy widowhood. Prudence didn’t like her stepmother, and there was something worrying about laudanum. He couldn’t quite remember exactly what that was. Charles had been concerned, though, concerned enough to mention it over a casual drink and a cigar in the Gentlemen’s Smoker of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

  “You must meet Prudence when this is over,” Charles’s father whispered, following the direction of Geoffrey’s gaze. “Charles was certain you would like one another.”

  He thought she inclined her head the merest fraction of an inch, as if she had recognized him, knew him to be the friend about whom she had heard so much. But he could have been mistaken. It might have been a breath of air wisping against the mourning veil.

  “There’s something else, Geoffrey,” Mr. Linwood continued, his voice pitched so low that Hunter had to strain to make out what he was saying.

  “What is that, sir?”

  “Are you still living at the Fifth Avenue Hotel?”

  “I am.”

  “Then with your permission, I’ll call on you tomorrow morning. Early. Before breakfast. And please don’t mention my visit to anyone.”

  “Can you tell me what it’s about, Mr. Linwood?”

  Charles’s father hesitated. He looked into the dark eyes of his son’s best friend and made up his mind. “I saw you place the card in Charles’s pocket. That was well done, Geoffrey.”

  “It goes all the way back to early days at Phillips Academy. It was the way we communicated with each other.”

  “Charles trusted you like no other. You were the brother he never had.”

  “And he was mine, Mr. Linwood.”

  “He died with the ace of spades clutched in his hand, Geoffrey. Somehow he found the strength to reach into his pocket and pull it out. The police said it had frozen to his fingers.”

  Whatever else Charles’s father had been about to say was cut off by the rolling peal of Trinity Church’s pipe organ. The service was about to begin.

  * * *

  Geoffrey heard hardly a word of the eulogy preached in honor of Charles Linwood. All of his attention was focused on a mental image of his friend’s hand curled tightly around a wet and wrinkled ace of spades. Charles’s last conscious act meant something. What message was he sending to the only person he could be certain would understand its urgency?

  Geoffrey worried the mystery like a dog a bone, but he got nowhere. The Pinkerton training clicked in, as it always did when there was a puzzle to solve. More information; he needed more information. And until he got it, presumably tomorrow morning from Charles’s father, he was only muddying the waters. Think clearly and don’t speculate in a vacuum, he reminded himself.

  In the meantime, the best thing Geoffrey could do was extend his condolences to the bereaved fiancée. A few moments of conversation could reveal a great deal about someone, and after today it would be difficult if not impossible for him to see Prudence MacKenzie socially. She and her stepmother were already in mourning for the Judge. Charles’s death had now doubly excluded her from New York society for at least another year. Some women seldom if ever left their homes during those initial twelve months, preferring a kind of living death to the condemnation of their neighbors.

  If Charles expected his friend to safeguard Miss MacKenzie and come to her aid when she needed assistance, Geoffrey had to manage an introduction. Right now Prudence MacKenzie’s part in all of this was as much a mystery as why a branch had chosen to fall from its tree at precisely the moment Charles opted to sit beneath it.

  Try though he might, Geoffrey hadn’t been able to get the coincidence out of his mind. He didn’t like coincidences, didn’t usually believe in them.

  He decided he’d think about the meaning of the ace of spades and the coincidence of the curious twist of fate later, after the funeral.

  * * *

  They extolled the virtues and talents of Charles Linwood, then closed him into his expensive, satin-lined box, and carried him down the aisle of Trinity Church to one of Warneke’s best funeral carriages. The interment was to be private, so leavetakings at the church portico were prolonged and tearful.

  His duty paid to Charles’s parents, Geoffrey Hunter looked around him one last time, thinking to find Charles’s Prudence and extend his condolences, but he couldn’t pick her out of the crowd of veiled, black-clad women. Moving through the mourners, he saw faces he recognized from his days at Phillips Academy and later at Harvard. Nods were exchanged, handshakes given, promises made to get together soon. They were all strangers; the only one Geoffrey had cherished from those long-ago days was gone.

  He murmured his good-byes, edging away from the church steps. One final searching perusal of his fellow mourners. This time he caught the gleam of pale eyes fixed on him from beneath a widow’s veil thrown back over a small, brimmed bonnet. She’d been watching him as he made his way through the crowd; he was easily one of the tallest men there. The intensity of her stare bore into him like pinpoints of gray fire. It was the face of the fiancée whose likeness Charles had carried in his watch case. The gray eyes whose piercing clarity his friend had described so many times. Soft gray eyes that turned to steel when she was angry. Yes, Charles had laughed, she does have a temper. So did her father, the Judge.

  Prudence MacKenzie stood ramrod straight between a slightly older woman dressed in widow’s full mourning and a man whose heavy facial features had twisted themselves into a mask of angry frustration. Geoffrey immediately knew who they must be. The stepmother and her brother, about whom Charles had at first shaken his head, then chided himself for speaking. It didn’t do to wash dirty family linen in public, even if the public were one’s best friend and the family hadn’t been married into yet.

  The stepmother held tightly to one of Prudence’s arms. Geoffrey could see her lips moving as she leaned toward Prudence, who shook her head and tried unsuccessfully to wrench her arm free. The black veil cascaded down, hiding the young woman’s face, but not before the gray eyes shot one last look of entreaty across the crowd. The heavyset uncle by marriage took the other arm, and the threesome began moving toward the line of waiting carriages, Prudence plainly being unceremoniously hustled along.

  Geoffrey acted. Didn’t stop to consider what he was doing or why, just moved quickly and efficiently to cut them off.

  “My very dear Miss MacKenzie,” he said smoothly, lifting his top hat politely, reaching out to clasp her hand in both of his. For a moment, Geoffrey thought the ploy might not work, then the stepmother’s brother let loose Prudence’s right arm and she seemed to fold herself toward him. The small gloved hand gripped his so tightly, he couldn’t have shaken it loose if he had wanted to.

  “How very kind of you,” she murmured.

  “Mrs. Linwood is asking particularly that you share their carriage.”

  “Miss MacKenzie will not be going to the cemetery,” the woman beside her declared.

  “I mustn’t disappoint Charles’s mother, Victoria. Not today of all days.” Prudence’s voice was low, but insistent.

  “My compliments, madam. Sir. Allow me to present myself. I’m Geoffrey Hunter. I would have had the honor of being Charles’s best man.”

  A sob came from behind Prudence’s black veil. Somehow, in the polite confusion of introductions, she managed to free herself, so that before anyone was awar
e of it, she had wound both hands around Geoffrey’s arm. Seconds later they were moving together toward where the Linwood parents were being helped into their carriage.

  “Is she watching us?” Prudence didn’t dare look.

  “They’ve turned away. Toward their own carriage. Will they follow?”

  “Probably. She’s determined not to let me out of her sight.”

  “This way then.” Geoffrey snapped open a black umbrella against the first patterings of spring rain. All around them other umbrellas bloomed until the steps of Trinity Church and the row of carriages appeared as islands in a sea of bobbing black circles. “If they look for you, they won’t be able to tell us from everyone else. Around to the side door.”

  They picked their way along the sidewalk in the crowd of other mourners, eyes cast down to find and keep their footing between half-melted drifts of snow. It took only a few minutes to reach one of the church’s small side doors, but to Prudence it seemed like forever. Not until she stood in the dimness of the still-emptying sanctuary did she feel safe.

  “We’ll give them until we hear the last carriage leave,” Geoffrey Hunter said, “then we’ll go out through the door that opens onto the old graveyard. I’m sure the path has been shoveled but there’s still so much snow piled up alongside that no one will notice us.”

  “That was cleverly done.” Roscoe Conkling stepped from behind one of Trinity’s fluted stone columns, his voice pitched low enough to reach them but not an inch beyond. “My compliments, Geoffrey.”

  “Mr. Conkling.” Geoffrey’s eyes never stopped sweeping the aisles and pews of the church.

  Tears of impotent rage still glittered on Prudence’s lashes, but her lips were set in a grimly determined line. She had flung back the face veil so that it hung slightly askew from the hat pinned above coils of light brown hair.