What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  Geoffrey looked from one devoted face to the other, assessing strength of character as well as the multitude of wrinkles. They had both worked hard all of their lives, and now, thanks to the generosity of the man they had served, both had come to a place that should be free of care. Except that the Judge would not stay in his grave. And his daughter Prudence needed them.

  “Roscoe Conkling said something,” Geoffrey began. Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure he would continue.

  “I think you’d better tell us, Mr. Hunter.” Cameron reached out a hand to Kathleen Dailey.

  “He said he thought Thomas Pickering MacKenzie had been murdered.”

  The Judge’s former housekeeper let out the breath she had been holding. “That’s why she had to get me out of the house so quickly. She couldn’t have done it with me keeping an eye on her and watching out for him. I’m only surprised she waited as long as she did. The witch.”

  “We’ll have to prove it, won’t we, Mr. Hunter? She’s not perfect. She must have made a mistake somewhere. We’ll have to find that mistake and use it against her.” Cameron might have been a New York City detective summarizing a case.

  Mrs. Dailey got up and walked into the room where Colleen lay. She stood for a moment by the bed, listening to the girl’s shallow breathing. When she returned to the parlor there were two red spots of pure Irish anger in her cheeks.

  “She’s tried to kill Colleen.” It wasn’t a question. “The girl knows something, and the witch decided it was too dangerous to let her go. Servants talk about their employers; they’ve precious little else in their lives. So Colleen’s mouth had to be closed before she could say anything.”

  “That may be jumping to a conclusion that isn’t supported by facts or evidence,” Geoffrey Hunter cautioned.

  “Tell us what to do, Mr. Hunter. We’ll find your evidence for you.”

  Mrs. Dailey’s smile was as thin lipped as determination and purposeful resolve could make it. She’d smile that smile at the foot of the scaffold the day Victoria MacKenzie was hanged.

  CHAPTER 16

  September 14, 1875

  My most darling Prudence,

  If you are reading this, it is because your dear father has decided that you are now of an age to need a mother’s particular guidance. I left that time to his discretion, and also left to his good judgment whether or not he wished to read the missives I have penned to my only daughter.

  He would not let me speak of my leaving; he could not bear it. So when I had written as much as my poor strength allowed, I bundled together my letters to you and placed them in the topmost drawer of the rosewood chest in which I have always kept my most intimate garments. He will have found the packet there himself, for I know my husband well. Thomas would not allow anyone’s hands but his to touch what has lain next to my skin. Finding these letters has undoubtedly caused him pain, but that could not be helped.

  A year may have passed before he opened the drawer. Perhaps two. But I see him in my mind’s eye deciding finally that he must sort through what I have left behind. The jewelry is uppermost in his mind, for every piece goes to you, and many of them are too valuable to be left in an empty room. He must take them to the bank vault to keep them safe for you. When he sorts through the jewel boxes, he finds these letters. I sense his bewilderment and his hesitation. The note I have placed securely beneath the ribbon that ties them together is clear. He will have followed my instructions because he has loved me so well and so deeply that every wish of mine was granted.

  And so here we are, my dear child, you and I together, mother and daughter. You are of an age that I trusted him to choose as appropriate. The letters are numbered. I think they are best read in order, though not all at once.

  Imagine that we are sitting on the veranda of the Staten Island house together, I on my chaise longue, you in the white wicker swing that hangs from the ceiling. Mrs. Dailey has brought us cool lemonade and fresh baked petits fours. We sit in silence for a while, content to let the summer breeze waft over us.

  Then one of us speaks, one of us asks a question. The other smiles, considers it, frames a careful, honest answer. And so we pass the afternoon as happier mothers and daughters will do, in deep and private conversation, touching on matters privy to women, laughing softly, sipping our lemonade, licking the thick, sugary, pastel icing from the petits fours.

  Prudence laid the letter on her dressing table, very gently placing on top of it the silver-backed hairbrush that had been her mother’s. The Judge had given it to her on her twelfth birthday. She sat looking at herself in the mirror, searching for features that were like Sarah’s, wondering as she had so many times if she really did look like her. People always said a daughter resembled her mother, whether she actually did or not. It was a polite fiction no one questioned.

  She held up a tinted photo of Sarah taken shortly after her marriage, when she was close to Prudence’s own age. It was a studio portrait of a winsome and reflective young woman posed against a velvet drape. Dressed in a light-colored, tight-bodiced afternoon dress decorated with loops of black braid, falls of frothy lace falling from funnel sleeves, Sarah held a white lily in her hands, a broad gold wedding band clearly visible. Her hair was parted in the center, smoothed back over her ears, gathered into heavy ringlets that seemed to be tilting her head under their weight. She looked straight into the camera lens, pale eyes drinking in the photographer’s lights, delicate mouth curved in the barest suggestion of a smile, a lady keeping her thoughts to herself.

  I have her eyes, Prudence decided, all shades of gray, depending on the time of day. Sometimes with hints of green when it’s late at night or I’m very angry. Her hair, too, not light enough to be blond, but such a pale shade of brown that there’s no good way to describe it. Sarah’s face was a perfect oval, small chin, high cheekbones, unfurrowed brow. Prudence’s chin was more determined, the oval squared off at the jaw when she set herself to do something she knew Victoria would oppose. She did look like her mother; she really did. And if Sarah had been strong enough to fight the consumption to her last breath, then Prudence came by her strength naturally. Sarah had not known the meaning of the word surrender. Neither, vowed Prudence, neither will I.

  She opened Uncle Tom’s Cabin and took out the pages of the notebook she had found and hidden in the only way she thought safe. The house was quiet, the servants gone to bed, Victoria in her room suffering a vicious headache from the strain of this afternoon’s accident. She had declared Colleen to be an impossibly careless girl who had no thought for her employer’s delicate sensibilities. She would certainly not be taken back if by some miracle she managed to survive. Donald, presumably annoyed by the disruption of his comfortable routine, had gone out for a late supper, telling Jackson not to wait up. Which meant he wouldn’t return until morning.

  Prudence wedged a chair beneath her bedroom doorknob and put the pages of the notebook in order. She had inked a number on each of them before cutting away the binding, wondering even as she did so why it seemed necessary to take such extraordinary precautions. She had always disliked everything about Victoria and despised Donald, but until this afternoon she had not had a visceral, physical fear of either of them. That changed when Colleen plummeted down the servants’ staircase to land in a bloody, twisted heap at the bottom. Pushed. Unless or until there was evidence to disprove it, Prudence would believe that Colleen had been the victim of deliberate violence.

  Prudence herself was valuable to Victoria only if she were alive, and that, she believed, was the real reason behind the laudanum. Not to make it easier to bear her grief, but to ensure that she remained in the passive half light of a drugged euphoria where Victoria could control her. Unfortunately, anyone in whom Prudence confided, anyone who was seen to be loyal to her, was expendable. She was sure that was the word Victoria would use. Expendable.

  Every time she tried to reassure herself, she felt a presence at her back, a warning draft that skipped up her spine and set her to shiv
ering. Like now. She reminded herself that she was the daughter of two strong parents, and she let her thoughts dwell briefly on Colleen, lying in a bed fighting for her life. She had to believe that Colleen’s will was intact, though her body had been badly battered. Geoffrey had managed to remove Colleen from danger, and as long as Victoria and Donald believed she was dying or dead, no further harm would come to her.

  Dead. They had to convince Victoria that the maid had died. And soon, Prudence thought, before Victoria could become suspicious and demand the address of the place where Colleen had presumably been taken. Victoria didn’t leave loose ends untied; Prudence’s determined opposition to taking Colleen to Bellevue had caught her stepmother off guard, but that wouldn’t last. She would want to assure herself that whomever she had persuaded to push Colleen down the stairs had succeeded in killing her. Somehow, once she was certain Victoria had been fooled, Prudence would find her way to Mrs. Dailey’s Brooklyn boardinghouse; she wouldn’t remain cooped up in this mansion that she had begun to think of as a prison.

  Circumstances were changing Prudence MacKenzie; she caught herself standing aside watching the girl she had been and the woman she was becoming. She liked what she saw.

  She was important enough for someone to want to harm her. What an odd thought. She knew she had not imagined the prodding point of a cane against her legs as she stood on a busy and dangerous street corner. Nor had she been mistaken when she’d touched the valve that regulated the gas flow to the wall light by her bedroom door and felt it wobble in its seating. With a few twists she’d been able to tighten it, turn on the fixture, and smell no leakage. Both gaslights, she reminded herself, both gaslights had been tampered with.

  She’d known fear and panic on Fifth Avenue, and she’d spent all of Saturday night waiting for the smell of escaping gas. But except for this dread of some unknown evil she believed emanated from her stepmother and her stepmother’s brother, Prudence was less frightened of life and loss than she could remember ever having been before.

  Everything changed when Colleen fell. Was pushed. Prudence saw the incidents with the hansom cab and the slowly escaping gas not as attempts to kill her, but as warnings. She was getting too close to someone’s truth. Her visit to Dr. Worthington had stirred up the embers of a case that had never been anything but cold. She wondered if she and Geoffrey had been followed to Warneke and Sons. Colleen was nearly killed on the same day she had taken a message from Prudence to Geoffrey Hunter. If the girl had secrets, the former Pinkerton would get them out of her. Everyone knew they excelled at interrogation.

  She had told Colleen to be careful, that they were being watched, but she had not been able then to imagine the consequences of the threads she was following, the knots she was determined to unravel. There was an excitement to puzzling out the truth of people and events; it reminded her of the evenings she had spent dissecting case histories with her father. What else was she to do with the skills those hours had taught her? Her next challenge was the notebook written in code that she had found in the attic.

  She had stared at its pages repeatedly since she’d pried it out of the secret drawer of the rolltop desk. Every mark on every page had been made by her father. Of that she had no doubt. But the combination of numbers and letters was indecipherable, though she thought she had finally detected a pattern. What the notebook contained seemed to be the briefest possible record of every major case Thomas MacKenzie had argued or adjudicated once he rose to the bench. Initials instead of names. Dates expressed in numerals. Other sets of numbers that repeated themselves so often, she was sure they were codes for a type of crime and the verdict, perhaps also a fine or length of imprisonment.

  She had no idea why this record of defendants and cases was important, only the conviction that her father would not have gone to such trouble to conceal it unless there was some great secret hidden away for no one else but his daughter to find.

  Prudence brought the oil lamp from her bedside to the dressing table, where the notebook pages could lie in a pool of bright yellow light between it and the lamp by which she had examined her face. She turned up the flow from the reservoir; the kerosene sputtered slightly and the flame flickered. There was a moment’s dizziness as she bent too near the clear glass chimney. She held her breath, waved away the sudden updraft of smoke and odor of burning oil. She could feel the heat on her cheeks, but she had to have light, had to be able to make out the faintest marks on the papers before her. Something was hidden there, some message she had to find and decipher.

  The first few pages looked as though the Judge had not worked out his code before penning the lines that were frequently scratched through and rewritten. The sets of numbers Prudence thought must be dates were frequently blacked out or rearranged, page after page of blotches until finally her father seemed to have settled on a pattern that pleased him. Clearly a pattern, but one of which she could make no sense. What she took to be numbers indicating months, days, and years did not fall into recognizable sets of dates when she tried to separate them or match one against another.

  She wrote out a string of numbers from one to thirty-one, another set from one to twelve, and a third set from the year the Judge had begun to practice law. Over and over she replaced a number he had written with one from her list, crumpling and throwing into the fireplace one sheet of letter paper after another. Nothing made any sense at all. No matter how many times she tried, she could not make a set of numbers unscramble itself into a recognizable date that fit logically into what she knew had to be a chronology of cases. She only gave up when her eyes began to tear from working too long and too close to the kerosene lamps.

  When she looked at herself in the mirror again, she saw a smoke- and ink-smudged face staring back at her, bleary features around which hung wandering wisps of pale brown hair floating in the updraft from the gas lamps. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was admit defeat, but this code had purely done her in. Mr. Hunter would have to find some ancient expert from the war days who could crack it. Prudence could do no more.

  Wearily, she gathered the sheets of paper on which her father had recorded his secrets, scattered them once again between the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and replaced the volume in her bookshelf. She stirred the fire to reduce to ash every bit of paper she had burned, then turned off the lamp on her dressing table, placed the other lamp beside her bed, and lowered the flame until there was only the faintest hint of light in the room. It felt safe to open the drapes in the near darkness; she would not be outlined in the window to anyone who happened to be passing by in the street below. Fifth Avenue was usually deserted this late at night except for the occasional carriage returning homeward from a restaurant or a private ball.

  The sight of the empty street awoke a feeling of bittersweet nostalgia, a calming prelude to dreams. Say good night to the world, her father had said when he came into this very room to tuck her in. Say good night to Mama, Prudence. She’s watching over you from heaven. She had believed, when he twitched back the drape for a moment and moonlight flooded across her bed, that her absent mother was indeed hovering beside her bed. Even now she had a sense of Sarah in the darkness that she never had in daylight. Only now Sarah was not alone. The Judge stood behind her, one hand resting on his wife’s shoulder.

  * * *

  Donald Morley hadn’t set foot inside Billy McGlory’s Armory Hall since the day Victoria married the Judge. She had warned him off in terms he didn’t care to dispute. The day he paid his fifteen cents and walked into the Irishman’s saloon was the day he’d never get another penny from her, the day she’d throw his clothes out into the street and lock her doors against him. She meant every word of it. Victoria didn’t make idle threats, just promises she always kept. He’d never in his life be able to have things as soft on his own as he did feeding off his sister’s teat, and he knew it. He wasn’t as smart as she was. He was bigger, stronger, and he could beat a man to death with his bare fists if he had a mind to, but he cou
ldn’t come up with the kinds of schemes that were second nature to Victoria, the very best of which had been her capture of the Judge.

  “We need to retire,” she’d told Donald. “You’re too stupid and I’m getting too tired to keep on the way we’ve been doing. It’s time to get out of the game for good, before one or the other of us makes the mistake that’ll end it in a way we don’t want.”

  “What’s that?” he’d asked curiously. It was the first time she’d said anything about quitting.

  “In jail or hanging at the end of a rope.”

  “I’d rather be shot,” he said thoughtfully. “But only by somebody with good aim. I don’t want my throat cut. I don’t like the gurgling sound.”

  She’d snorted at him the way she always did when she wanted to let you know what she really thought of you, but it didn’t bother him. Nothing Victoria did or said could hurt because he knew deep down that nothing could ever come between them. Nothing and nobody. Which is why, when she told him that the only solution she could see was to marry some rich and respectable man of a certain age, he too thought it a fine idea.

  It never entered his head for a moment that marriage might change her, that she might start to take respectability seriously. She’d hopped in and out of too many beds for him to suspect that the power of money would make her think seriously about turning herself into a lady. Sow’s ear into silk purse. When she wanted it, Victoria was a bitch in heat; it just so happened that most of the time now she had other things on her mind. She didn’t seem to miss the wild life they had led, but Donald did. He missed it dreadfully. Playing the gentleman for too long made him restless and careless. He just had to keep Victoria from finding out what he was doing.