What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  Prudence felt a hand reach out and close firmly over her arm. She nearly screamed at the frightening force of it, then she recognized the face of the man looking worriedly down at her.

  “This way, Miss Prudence,” James Kincaid said. He caught her at the bottom of the stairwell when she stumbled at the unexpected sight of him. “I have a message to deliver upstairs, then I’ll be right back.”

  “It’s all right, miss. You’ll be safe with us. I promise.” Mrs. Barstow stepped out of the shadows.

  Prudence struggled against the arms reaching for her. “I have to hide until it’s safe to leave this house. I have to get away.” She could feel the iron control she’d tried to impose on herself slipping away, could hear the panic in her voice.

  “You have to believe us, miss. We’re on your side in this,” Kincaid promised.

  “Are they coming for me?” Prudence asked.

  “Yes, miss. They’re on their way. Mr. Morley sent me on ahead to tell Mrs. MacKenzie to get you ready. They’re probably right behind me.”

  “Go, Mr. Kincaid,” Mrs. Barstow said. “Take Miss Prudence away from here. I’ll deliver your message to Mrs. MacKenzie. She won’t question it. That should give you enough time to get away.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I’ll tell her I broke a heel off my shoe on the way to Central Park, so I had to come back. I’m ashamed to admit that she thinks I’m her creature. She doesn’t trust anyone completely, but she won’t be suspicious of me. I’m sorry for that, Miss Prudence.”

  “Mr. Hunter,” Prudence said. “We have to find him.”

  “We will, miss,” Kincaid said. “I have a plan. But right now the important thing is to get you into the carriage.”

  “One more thing, Kincaid, then I’ll be ready.” She recognized the voice in her head reminding her to keep her secrets, but for the first time in her life, she ignored its warning. Prudence tore out a page from the housekeeper’s small notebook that lay on the kitchen table and scribbled the address of Mrs. Dailey’s boardinghouse in Brooklyn. “If it goes badly for you, Mrs. Barstow, if Mrs. MacKenzie threatens you, there’s a safe place you can come to.” She thrust the paper into the housekeeper’s hand, closing the arthritic fingers over it. “She can be vicious when she’s crossed, and unpredictable. Look what she did to me.”

  “You can trust me, Miss Prudence. I swear it on my sister’s soul.” Mrs. Barstow crossed herself. “I won’t tell anyone and I won’t break my word.” She nodded to Kincaid. “Go quickly,” she urged. “I’ll be all right. It’s not me they’re after.”

  She pressed a clean linen napkin to hold against her forehead into Miss Prudence’s hand. Then she slipped the tiny housekeeper’s notebook into the pocket of her black dress. The piece of paper with Mrs. Dailey’s address written on it fluttered to the floor. Mrs. Barstow never felt it drop from her fingers.

  * * *

  Kincaid hurried Prudence to the stables, picking her up in his strong arms when she tripped on the cobblestones and would have fallen. He wrapped a blanket around her, picked up the linen napkin when she dropped it. “Hold this against the cuts,” he reminded her, pulling down the shades to conceal her presence inside the carriage.

  “They won’t know you’re gone until they open the library door,” he said. “Mrs. MacKenzie will wait until Dr. Yarborough and his attendants arrive before unlocking it. But we have to leave right now. We can’t risk running into them.”

  “I don’t know where Mr. Hunter is,” Prudence said. “He was supposed to go back to the mortuary parlor and then look for Ned Hayes or the reporter who’s searching the Herald‘s archives for him. He could be anywhere.”

  “Try not to worry, Miss Prudence. I told you I had a plan.” Kincaid closed the carriage door and checked to be sure it was tightly fastened. Then he quietly led the big grays out of the courtyard and into the alleyway, leaving one of the large double doors open behind him. That was part of the plan.

  Moments later, the carriage had cleared the alleyway and merged into the traffic on Fifth Avenue. Its destination was Danny Dennis and his cab stand at Broadway and Wall Street.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Are you sure you weren’t followed?” Danny Dennis asked, unfastening Mr. Washington’s nosebag. A sprinkle of oats fell to the pavement. Danny was moving as fast as he could. He didn’t doubt for a moment that the whole MacKenzie affair was coming apart.

  He’d been shocked at the sight of Miss Prudence’s bloodied forehead and the ripped gown only partly concealed by the blanket she held around her shoulders. As Danny listened to Kincaid recount the story of what had happened that afternoon, he knew he’d have to keep a tighter rein on his temper than he’d ever had to do on Mr. Washington. The Irish were notorious in New York City for their love of the drink and the violence of their quick rages. Danny had conquered the drink, but there were days when his temper still got the better of him. Today was likely to become one of them.

  Kincaid shook his head. “Nobody saw us leave. I made sure of that. This Dr. Yarborough has a judge in his pocket. The commitment papers were being signed without any kind of examination or hearing.”

  “This is what we’re going to have to do.” Danny Dennis leaned into the carriage to speak to Prudence, gesturing Kincaid to join him. “Listen now. I’ll locate Mr. Hunter, and I may need the help of some of the other hansom drivers to find him, so it’ll be up to Mr. Kincaid here to get you safely out to Brooklyn, Miss MacKenzie.”

  “I need to speak to Mr. Hunter. He’s as good a lawyer as he was a Pinkerton. He has to block that court order, Mr. Dennis. I have no legal rights until he does.”

  “We can’t risk your staying in Manhattan any longer than it takes to get you to the bridge, Miss Prudence. I’ll find him for you and I’ll tell him everything. You have my word on that.” Danny thought she looked as battered and exhausted as a bare knuckles boxer after a bad fight. No wonder she wasn’t arguing with him.

  She’d told him and Kincaid what had gone on in the library, everything she could remember. He hoped she hadn’t held anything back. Mr. Hunter had to know everything or he’d be working with one hand tied behind his back. He knew Miss Prudence sometimes liked to play her cards as close to her vest as her father had done. If you could say such a thing about a lady. But now wasn’t the time to keep quiet about anything.

  Danny crossed himself as the MacKenzie carriage rolled away. James Kincaid was a good man and a fine coachman. He knew his horses and he wasn’t afraid of pushing them to their limits if he had to. Danny had had a quiet word with the two hansom drivers who pulled their cabs out into the stream of vehicles surrounding Miss Prudence’s carriage. They’d follow along as far as the Brooklyn Bridge, just in case.

  It never hurt to stack your deck.

  * * *

  “Where in the world is Jackson?” complained Donald Morley. “I had to use my key to let myself in.”

  Two heavily muscled men in the white uniform of hospital orderlies stood beside him, one of them holding a straitjacket, the other a sheaf of documents for Mrs. MacKenzie to sign. Dr. Yarborough was a stickler for having all the required forms properly filled out.

  “They’ve all gone.” Victoria set down the small overnight case she’d packed for her stepdaughter. The less this removal looked like a kidnapping, the better. “I’m afraid I couldn’t persuade your patient to take her laudanum. She became hysterical. I had to lock her in the library, but she may be dangerous. I heard glass breaking in there.”

  “We don’t take any chances,” the attendant holding the straitjacket said.

  “Where is Dr. Yarborough? Didn’t he come with you?”

  “He’s sent instructions up to the clinic, Mrs. MacKenzie, and he said to tell you he’ll be there as soon as he can get away.”

  Victoria signed the papers she was handed, a cluck of annoyance sounding deep in her throat. For the kind of money she was paying that quack, the least he could do was show up in person. S
he handed Donald the key to the library. “Show them where it is,” she ordered. “She’s made so much trouble for me this afternoon that I don’t want to see her again.”

  “We’ll have her in the jacket and calmed down in no time,” one of the attendants assured her. “We have laudanum with us. On Dr. Yarborough’s orders. It’ll make the trip upstate easier on her.”

  “She won’t take it. She’ll fight you.”

  “She’ll be in the straitjacket, ma’am. She won’t have a choice.”

  * * *

  “She’s not there, Victoria. The room’s empty.” Morley’s voice cracked as Victoria swept past him angrily.

  “Must I do everything myself? Can’t you do one single thing right for a change?”

  One of the white-suited attendants stood guard in the library doorway while the other continued to search the room for the patient who had disappeared. The smell of kerosene from the broken lamp was strong; fragments of glass crunched beneath Victoria’s shoes.

  “She must be here. The door was locked and I had the key. Both keys. She couldn’t have gotten out.”

  “I’ve checked the windows, ma’am. They’re all locked. She didn’t leave that way.”

  “There must be another key. Someone else in this house must have another key,” raged Victoria. She tugged on the bellpull, than realized there was no one downstairs except Mrs. Barstow to answer it. “She had to have had help. Someone must have heard her and let her out.”

  “Do you want us to search the house, Mrs. MacKenzie?” the man with the straitjacket offered. He thought he’d seen a door to the back courtyard of the house standing slightly open at the end of the hall. He hadn’t thought anything about it until now. “She might still be on the grounds. Is there a garden outside?”

  “I want answers, not guesses,” Victoria snapped, “and I want them right now.” She circled the room slowly, examining every shelf, looking for whatever it was she was sure she had missed. There were only two possibilities. Either Prudence had been helped by one of the servants who had disobeyed her orders, or another key had been hidden somewhere inside the library. And if that were so, then what else remained hidden? What else had the Judge kept from her?

  “Victoria?” Donald took a tentative step toward his sister. You never could tell what she’d say or do when she was in one of her moods.

  “Go out to the stable and bring Kincaid in here. I want to know what he’s been doing.”

  “He brought you my message, Victoria.”

  “I know that, you idiot. He might have heard her. He might have been the one to let her out.”

  “Did you ring, Mrs. MacKenzie?”

  “Is Kincaid downstairs?”

  “He left to go back to get Mr. Morley right after I brought you his message, madam.” Mrs. Barstow shook her head. “He must have misunderstood you, sir,” she said to Donald. “I’m sure he told me you expected him to deliver a message and that you were waiting for some papers to be delivered. But he was definitely supposed to go back for you. He’ll be mortified, sir, if he got it wrong.”

  “Did you come up here to the library again, Mrs. Barstow?”

  “No, Mrs. MacKenzie, I didn’t. Just that one time. I thought I’d have a quiet cup of tea in my parlor, but I did see the strangest thing when I glanced out the window.”

  “What was that?”

  “Well, it was so odd that I hesitate to say.” She was dragging it out as long as she could. Every moment of delay counted. “As I said, I was making myself a cup of tea and I glanced out the window. I thought I saw Miss Prudence stumbling across the courtyard and then out through the carriage gates. It was so strange that I put the kettle down and went outside to see for myself what was going on. There was a young woman lurching along the alleyway, not toward Fifth Avenue, but in the other direction. It couldn’t possibly have been Miss Prudence.”

  “Go after her,” Victoria ordered.

  Dr. Yarborough’s two orderlies ran out the front door to the carriage waiting at the curb. One of them climbed in, the other hoisted himself up beside the driver, who whipped up the horses and turned the vehicle away from Fifth Avenue.

  Watching from the open doorway of the MacKenzie mansion, Morley wondered how many of Yarborough’s patients made a run for it. They’d catch her. She didn’t stand a chance alone and on foot. Stupid of her to run away from Fifth Avenue where the crowds were. It just showed she wasn’t thinking clearly. He went back inside to tell Victoria that they’d have her straitjacketed and dosed within minutes. Nothing to worry about.

  * * *

  “Mr. Jackson. What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same question, Mrs. Barstow.” He stood foursquare in front of her in the main hallway. She’d nearly cried out when she saw him.

  “I broke my heel on the way to Central Park.”

  “Who’s there?” Donald Morley stepped into the hallway from the parlor. “Jackson, is that you?”

  “Yes, sir.” What was going on? He’d counted on no one being home except the Judge’s daughter.

  “You can join the search now that you’re back.”

  “Sir?”

  “Come in here. Mrs. MacKenzie will explain it to you. Tea, Mrs. Barstow?”

  “I’ll have it for you in a few minutes, sir.” She edged past Jackson.

  He glanced toward the stairway to the second floor, and then followed Morley into the parlor.

  “Miss Prudence has been unwell,” Victoria began. “I’m sure you’re aware of that, Jackson.”

  It would have been inappropriate to comment, so he didn’t. This was not the time for a misstep.

  “We decided she needed to be under a doctor’s care. Unfortunately, she suffered a complete breakdown this afternoon, resulting in hysteria. Somehow she managed to get out of the house without my knowing it. Mrs. Barstow was the last one to see her. I regret to say that she was fleeing the doctor’s attendants. They’ve gone after her, of course. A very sad situation, but one I’m sure will be remedied when they catch up with her. Which they will.”

  “I suggested to Jackson that he join the search. He knows the neighborhood far better than Dr. Yarborough’s orderlies.”

  “I’ll be glad to help, sir, in any way I can.”

  Victoria looked at him, a frown creasing her forehead, her mouth pursed as if she’d bitten into something spoiled or sour. She didn’t trust him. There was too much about Jackson that was murky, contradictory. He had served them well enough, and been paid outlandish sums for some of what he’d done, but that didn’t make him anything more than a hireling. He should disappear when he’d outlived his usefulness. Which Victoria thought was probably sometime in the very near future.

  The problem with people like Jackson was that they were unpredictable. Eventually they began thinking for themselves and then spiraled out of control. It was a short step from conspiring to torment someone to taking that same person’s life. The next logical thing to do in a mind twisted by the delight of inflicting pain. Donald was like that. Victoria rode him mercilessly to keep him in line. If Jackson took that final step, if he killed Prudence either accidentally or because the act gave him pleasure, it would be the end and the ruination of everything Victoria had been working for. She could almost feel him tugging to break free and she wondered what past crime was eating at his self-control.

  She caught Donald’s eye; he had a speculative look that was easy to read. Jackson’s days were numbered.

  * * *

  The only sound in the kitchen was the whistle of water coming to a boil in the kettle. Mrs. Barstow had taken a plate of sliced cake from the pantry, a small platter of sandwiches from the cold larder. No matter what was going on in the house, Mr. Morley was never off his feed.

  She sensed Jackson’s presence in the doorway, but kept her back turned to him. The sooner she got the tea tray ready, the sooner she could carry it upstairs. He’d be gone on the search for Miss Prudence by the time she got back, and not a moment to
o soon. Something about the way the butler looked at her in the hallway had jarred her already unsettled nerves. She wasn’t afraid of him, but there were times when he reminded her of Billy, cold as ice when he wanted to be. Unforgiving, too.

  “What is this, Mrs. Barstow?” Jackson scooped up a piece of crumpled paper from the clean floor, read it, then held it out to her.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered, pretending to barely glance at it. “I’ve a tea tray to prepare. I’ll thank you to get out of my way.” Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it was the page Miss Prudence had torn from her housekeeper’s notebook. How had it gotten on the floor? Could she grab it out of his hand and tell him it was no business of his?

  “Whose address is it?”

  “I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s a page from your housekeeper’s notebook, isn’t it?” Jackson seized Mrs. Barstow’s arm, spun her around until he could hold her tightly against his body. He plunged his hand into the side pocket of her skirt, brought out the small notebook, let her go. “Here,” he said, opening it to where a page had been ripped out. He flung the notebook to the floor, held what she was denying any knowledge of where she could read it. “You helped Prudence MacKenzie get away, didn’t you? She couldn’t have done it by herself. I want to know if this is where the Judge’s daughter thinks she can hide. You’re going to tell me.”

  Mrs. Barstow blanched and made a futile grab for the bit of paper. He struck her across the face with the back of his hand, an angry, savage growl drowning out the steaming kettle. The housekeeper fell against the cook’s table, one hand upraised to ward off the next blow.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time, and then I’m going to beat it out of you,” he said. “You’ll tell me, in the end. But I’ll break your arms and knock the teeth out of your jaws before I’m done with you.”