What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  “She’s awake. Colleen is awake.” Prudence stood in the doorway, tears streaming down her face. “She’s awake, and she remembers.”

  CHAPTER 18

  A corked brown bottle of laudanum sat on Prudence’s bedside table. She had found it waiting for her yesterday evening when she returned from Mrs. Dailey’s boardinghouse in Danny Dennis’s hansom cab.

  Jackson answered her ring, polite and distant, but with an ill-disguised curiosity in his flat yellow eyes. She had waited until Danny and Mr. Washington were out of sight before climbing the steps to her front door; when Victoria’s butler looked out into the street they had vanished. It wasn’t his place to question where she had gone or how she had gotten there, but the need to know was easy to read in the purse of his thin-lipped mouth.

  “Mrs. MacKenzie is in the parlor, miss. She asked that you join her there as soon as you got home.”

  She’d answered with a nod, then gone straight up to her room. Where she’d seen the laudanum bottle and knew it had been placed there by Victoria. Knew the direction her stepmother had decided to take in their undeclared war. Knew, too, as she touched the brown bottle with one tentative finger, that if she let even a single drop of the lovely liquid trickle down her throat, she was as good as doomed. A Prudence addicted to laudanum was a Prudence under Victoria’s complete control. So strong a word as addicted was never used when referring to the ladies whose lives were ruled by the drug, but Prudence needed the stark truth of it to keep up her guard. Laudanum was an enemy that had to be fought every day and every moment; there was no truce with it, no halfhearted tolerance.

  Prudence had taken a deep breath, then pulled the cork from the bottle and measured out a dose into the spoon left conveniently for her use. She stirred the laudanum and a small amount of water in her night glass, poured the mixture into the pot of violets sitting on her dressing table. The odor of the drug hung in the air; she left the unrinsed glass with the spoon inside it in plain view beside the recorked bottle and lay down on her bed fully clothed.

  Twenty minutes later she heard a soft knock, the click of her bedroom door opening. Victoria’s sweet perfume overlay the lingering scent of laudanum. She heard her name whispered, then the door closed again. She wasn’t hungry; Mrs. Dailey had insisted on more tea and sandwiches before she and Geoffrey left Brooklyn. She would lie on her bed and think; let them believe downstairs that she’d sunk into a laudanum-induced slumber and slept through dinner. Disarm your opponent by encouraging him to believe he’s on the verge of winning, the Judge had told her, the grin of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat lighting up his face, then pounce when he least expects it.

  * * *

  Breakfast the next morning was a silent meal, Prudence hardly raising her eyes from her coffee cup, eating the food served her with feigned indifference. Victoria chattered over her morning letters. Donald shoveled eggs, bacon, toast, and fried potatoes into his mouth as fast as he could chew and swallow, washing everything down with large gulps of heavily sugared and creamed coffee.

  “I hope you’re rested, my dear,” Victoria purred. “I’m sure our recent contretemps upset you more than you realized. I myself had a terrible headache from it.” She sliced open an invitation, clucked happily to herself, then set it aside. “We’ll have to replace Colleen as soon as possible. I’ll write to the agency this morning.”

  “Shall I deliver the letter for you?” Donald asked. The waiting rooms of domestic employment agencies were more often than not full of desperate young women hoping for an interview.

  “I’ll send Jackson or Mrs. Barstow,” snapped Victoria. More and more lately, Donald had the self-satisfied look about him of a cat who’s been too well fed.

  “Will you spend a quiet day at home, Prudence? I’m sure Dr. Worthington or Mr. Hunter will let us know when poor Colleen has passed on.”

  “Yes, I think I shall. I’d like to finish up in my father’s study.”

  “Have you found anything interesting?” Donald’s eyes glinted for a moment with an emotion she couldn’t identify.

  “I haven’t really looked,” she answered. “I believe there are photo albums on one of the lower shelves and the desk drawers are rather full.”

  “I didn’t mean that you should hurry yourself unduly, my dear.” A slime of egg yolk had hardened into a streak of yellow across Donald’s chin.

  “It may take me a while to sort through whatever’s there and box up what I find.” She sounded disoriented and confused even to herself.

  “I’ll send Clara in to light the fire. You can burn what you don’t intend to keep.” Victoria’s smug look told her there wouldn’t be much to discover. “I know I was reluctant to let you do this at first, Prudence, but I think now that it might be a good thing after all. It’s terribly painful, but it’s also the way we let go.”

  What was she talking about? Not a single item of the Judge’s clothing had been removed from closet or drawer. His expensive jewelry hadn’t been touched. Even the massive gold watch lay where he had placed it the last time he took it off. Donald. It was all for Donald. A tailor would be summoned to the house. Alterations would be made. The gold timepiece would be nestled into Donald’s vest pocket, its worked chain stretched across his chest. The thought of it made Prudence want to pound her fists on the table like a child having a temper tantrum.

  She stood up, knocking over her half-empty coffee cup, stared at the brown stain spreading across the tablecloth. Without another word to her stepmother or the man who was planning to possess everything the Judge had once enjoyed, she left the room. I’m walking in my sleep, I’m walking in my sleep, she reminded herself, leaving the dining room door open after she had passed through.

  “It’s the laudanum,” she heard Victoria hiss.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I left a bottle beside her bed, and when that one’s empty, another will take its place. She’ll do the rest herself.”

  * * *

  What Colleen had remembered was the feel of a fist in the small of her back as she was propelled forward, lost her balance, and fell with terrifying speed down the narrow stairwell. Nothing to hold on to to break her fall, nothing to soften the hard edges of the steps against which she tumbled. She’d heard someone scream, and realized it was her own voice echoing down into the floor below. Then nothing. Nothing at all until she awoke in the softest bed she’d ever slept in, Miss Prudence sitting beside her, every muscle in her body aching as though some evil child had beaten her senseless with a baseball bat.

  She had wept with the pain and the gentle kindness being shown her, fallen asleep again within minutes of awakening. Asleep, not unconscious. There was a difference, Dr. Worthington had explained, not holding out much hope for natural sleep when he’d first examined Colleen. When Prudence left, Mrs. Dailey had been sitting at the maid’s bedside, rosary beads slipping through her fingers as she counted off the decades, head nodding in rhythm with Colleen’s breathing. She’d have a nice bowl of hot soup waiting when the child woke up.

  “I’d hoped for more,” Geoffrey said on the ride back across the Brooklyn Bridge. “I’d hoped that she might have glimpsed her attacker’s face as she fell.”

  “She was certain it was a fist, though. She said she’d been punched often enough growing up to know when she was being hit.”

  “You were hit, Miss MacKenzie. Struck across the back of the knees hard enough to make them buckle.”

  “Prodded. I could feel the point of the cane or the umbrella, whichever it was. Even through my skirts.”

  “It’s the similarity that’s bothering me. An attacker grows comfortable with a certain type of assault. He does the same thing over and over again. It becomes his modus operandi and one of the tools police use to track him down.”

  “Are you saying that the same man who came up behind me on Fifth Avenue pushed Colleen down the stairs in my home?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then it can�
�t be a stranger. It has to be someone I live with every day.”

  “I said once before that my money was on Donald Morley.”

  “Colleen was barely halfway down the stairs when she was struck. Whoever it was turned around and disappeared onto the first floor.”

  “Is there another staircase down into the basement?”

  “No. But there is a back door that opens on to the courtyard and the stables.”

  “I know you believe that you’re being warned off, that somehow your visits to Maurice Warneke and Dr. Worthington threaten your assailant, but his intent was clearly much more vicious where Colleen is concerned. He wanted to kill her.”

  “It’s such a muddle, Mr. Hunter, and it’s getting worse every day.”

  “Most cases start out simple, and end up with more twists than a hangman’s rope.”

  “When we first talked, in Mr. Conkling’s office, all I wanted was to rid myself of Victoria’s hold over me. That was the simple beginning, I suppose. Then we began doubting the truth of my father’s death. And Charles’s. Now these attacks that seem to be coming out of nowhere.”

  “Pandora’s box.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel. If I’d never challenged Victoria, would all these other evils have been released out into the world?”

  “You’re not responsible for anyone else’s actions but your own, Miss MacKenzie. You didn’t cause evil to happen.”

  “That’s something, at least.”

  “Stay with the simple beginning for the moment. We have to prove Victoria’s direct involvement. Once we have that, everything else will fall into place.”

  “I’ll find what we need,” Prudence told him. “We already know that my father hid the notebook in a place where no one but me would think to look for it. He’s left enough evidence behind for us to build a case on; he was too good a lawyer and too experienced a judge not to have figured out a way to bring Victoria to justice.

  “He was passionate about the law, Mr. Hunter. You had to have known him the way I did to comprehend that. I don’t pretend to understand how he could bring himself to do what he did for Billy McGlory; I can only tell you that he loved my mother more than life itself. He knew McGlory would never admit to the briberies; only by providing a list of the men who had paid the saloon keeper to have the charges against them dismissed could justice be served. Someone on that list will break, will confess to what happened. Once that information is out in the open, Victoria will be seen for the blackmailer she is. The rest of what we need has to be hidden somewhere in the house, somewhere he felt confident I would find it, but no one else. He would have known I could never surrender his study to Donald Morley without a fight, so that’s where I think I’ll find what else he left for me.”

  “I thought you’d already searched the study.”

  “That was a week ago, Mr. Hunter. The day after Charles’s funeral. I had only just weaned myself off the laudanum, remember. For the second time. Colleen brought me two letter cases. One contained the ten letters to my mother I told you about. The other one was a jumble of odds and ends I couldn’t imagine my father ever throwing together like that. He was too organized a man to have left crumpled papers and unopened envelopes lying about. When I took a close look at them, I discovered they belonged to Donald. He’d been using my father’s desk, dumping his things into one of the drawers. Victoria must have cleaned it out, and he hasn’t even realized that he’s missing anything.” She threaded the fingers of both hands together as tightly as she could. “I remember the feelings that came over me that day. I tried to recall what happened right after my father died, and I couldn’t. Not the details. I was floating in a fog of laudanum then; I can’t trust what little I do remember. It’s been gnawing at me ever since that I didn’t do a thorough search, that I let my emotions overwhelm me.”

  “It takes a long time for opium to work its way out of the body. Some say that once awakened, the craving never leaves you. That’s what laudanum is, opium by another name.”

  “My father told me about the opium dens on Mott Street. He said they were the most hellish places on earth, and that if he could, he’d deport every Chinaman who sold it.”

  “In one form or another, opium is everywhere. Your harmless laudanum is a prime example.”

  “I could weep, Mr. Hunter, except that it wouldn’t change anything. I have no idea how much of what happened after my father’s death is lost forever in a laudanum haze. Or dream. That’s what it feels like, you know. Like a dream. Nothing is painful, nothing is important enough to grieve over. You float heavenward. For as long as you have that brown bottle in your hand, you have safety. You retreat to a place where no one can reach you.”

  It was on the tip of Prudence’s tongue to tell him that she’d put all of that behind her, that she’d come out of the laudanum haze stronger for having had to fight its seductive power alone and in secret. Not yet, my child. It’s a battle that’s never quite won, a war that never ends. The easy release of laudanum would tempt her for the rest of her life. The victory she could and would claim would be the downfall of Victoria. That I swear to you, she promised her father.

  * * *

  Even now, sitting at the Judge’s desk, the study door closed, just thinking about the cloud of laudanum in which she had floated made her yearn for the same oblivion that had cost her so many memories. Prudence could picture the small corked bottle upstairs on her bedside table, feel the weight of it in her hand, smell the alluring bitterness masked with honey when the cork was pulled out. What was it Geoffrey had said? Once awakened, the craving never leaves you. He was right. Geoffrey Hunter was right. Laudanum’s siren call would never be entirely stilled; it was as much a part of her now as the blood that flowed through her veins.

  Memories surged up as Prudence opened first one desk drawer, then another. It was as if the wood that had so often felt the touch of the Judge’s hand now released something of him into his daughter. Clara had come and gone, leaving behind the small fire into which Victoria had suggested her stepdaughter toss whatever she didn’t want to keep. She would have to concentrate, rein in the mind that was racing in all directions looking for clues to explain why everything had changed so completely two years ago. Three, she corrected herself. Victoria had had an intimate relationship with the Judge for at least a year before the marriage took place.

  She wondered if the concierge at the Dakota, Mrs. Markham, had told them everything she knew about Victoria. Playing the stenographer, Prudence had remained mute, had allowed Geoffrey to ask all the questions. Geoffrey. When she wasn’t exercising strict control over her thoughts, Prudence called him Geoffrey. She liked the sound of his name, liked the feeling of warmth that poured over her whenever she thought of him that way. She whispered it aloud. Geoffrey. She felt strength in the name, in the man. Something else, too, something she was reluctant to acknowledge. Concentrate, she admonished herself. Concentrate. And from somewhere far off she heard the faintest whisper of a voice. The suggestion of a chuckle. Love is like laudanum. Once it gets hold of you, there’s no getting away from it.

  Prudence emptied the contents of the desk drawers into the large wastebasket where she had nestled her cat a very long time ago. On its side, softened with layers of linen napkins filched from the dining room, the wastebasket had made a very respectable house for the long-suffering animal who loved his young mistress as faithfully as a dog. Barnaby. Barnaby the cat. She hadn’t thought of him in years. She smiled to herself as she sat before the fire, the first handful of papers in her lap. She would read each of them carefully, searching for strange marks that might indicate another code, trying to imagine a giant puzzle whose many pieces she had to find.

  An hour later the wastebasket was empty and she was no closer to finding anything of value than when she sat down. Almost nothing had been written by the Judge; nearly everything she had read was scrawled in Donald Morley’s practically illegible hand. Unbeknownst to her, he had been using the study for weeks n
ow, perhaps even since just after her father’s death. Geoffrey had told her that Cameron remembered seeing Victoria pitching handfuls of paper into the fireplace. How she must have laughed to herself at setting Prudence the same task, but with worthless notes and scribbled lists and advertisements ripped out of the newspaper. Nothing of worth, nothing of value, nothing that would indicate a man’s serious reflections.

  She put the wastebasket back where it belonged and sat down at the desk. It had been as she was about to leave the attic that she had remembered the hidden drawer. Perhaps the same magic of memory could be made to work again. She tried to recall the hours spent in this room with the Judge, pictured him sitting at his desk, herself opposite, heavy law books lying open between them. Walk backward, she told herself, walk backward through time. She ran her fingers along every inch of each of the drawers, searching for a joint that was a shade too wide, for a spot in the wood that would give way beneath her fingers. Nothing. Nothing but a splinter she pulled from her finger, a drop of blood tasting of iron. It was hard to give up hope, the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

  The shelves that had been full of books last week were nearly empty. True to her word, Victoria had ordered her husband’s extensive law library boxed up. Filled packing cases were stacked around the walls, each box meticulously labeled. Prudence wondered which fortunate firm or law school was supposed to be the recipient of such a fine collection. She was determined that not a single one of the Judge’s books would leave the house.

  Where would I hide something that I feared someone close to me would destroy? Prudence asked herself. If I were my father, where would I put what was most valuable to me? There was a safe in his dressing room, but that was too obvious. If Victoria didn’t know or hadn’t found the combination, she would have had it forced open as soon as the gate was closed on the family vault. If I were my father, what would I do? They’d played hiding games so often when she was a child that it grew to be second nature to try to best one another. A single concealed cache would not be enough to satisfy the Judge’s obsession with security. He would create a diversion somewhere, a false place of concealment to lead a searcher away from the greater prize. And he would know that Prudence could not be fooled.