Murder on Black Friday

by P. B. Ryan

  “Miriam is ruining this pretty dress for nothing,” Nell said. “Vivid patterns are hard to cover up. She’ll never get it entirely black.”

  “An expert on dyeing clothes now, are you?” Will asked with a smile.

  She didn’t answer, merely shoved the silk back into the pot and gave it a stir, for all the good it would do. From the corner of her eye, she saw Will’s smile fade as he deciphered her silence: Someone who’d seen her family succumb one by one to the wretched diseases bred by poverty would have learned a thing or two about making clothes black.

  He rubbed his neck, let out a hefty sigh. “You should tell me when I’m being thick, Nell. I’d hate for you to think ill of me just because I can’t hear what’s coming out of my own mouth.”

  “I could never think ill of you,” she said, poking at the contents of the copper simply to avoid having to look at him.

  “You did when you first met me.”

  “You were a different man then. You didn’t care about anything or anyone, even yourself.”

  “Opium is a demanding mistress,” Will said. “The men she enslaves worship her and her alone—but in return, she purges one’s universe of pain.”

  “And of every other human feeling,” Nell said as she turned to face him.

  “An unholy covenant, to be sure, but it served me well enough.” He smiled in that serenely intimate way of his. “Until I was wrested from the arms of Morphia by a certain willful young Irish governess.”

  “You freed yourself from that poison,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  He looked at her, his head tilted slightly, almost smiling, but in an odd, grave way that telegraphed his response well enough: You think not?

  She looked away from him, unsettled more, as always, by the things that went unspoken between them than by the things they said aloud. Her gaze fell on the hearth rug, which was stained with splashes of dye. Droplets trailed off onto the worn plank floor, ending at a door to the right of the fireplace—the back door of the house.

  Will, having noticed the same thing, opened the door and gestured Nell outside. They followed the trail of dye along a flagstone garden path that detoured around the right side of the carriage house. Leaning drunkenly against it was a dilapidated wooden hut with a tin roof, its door standing open. A willow basket sat on the hard-packed dirt, empty but for a pair of damp black stockings at the very bottom.

  “Miss Bassett?” Nell said.

  Miriam Bassett appeared in the doorway of the drying shed, her pale blond hair wrapped in a kerchief, a dye-spattered apron tied over her brown dress. She was as generous in shape as younger sister, but taller, and with the sturdy, robust look of someone who kept herself active. With both hands she held a dripping black garment that reeked of wet wool and logwood dye. Anyone meeting her for the first time would take her for a maidservant.

  “Miss Sweeney,” Miriam said, seeming a bit dazed, or maybe just tired. Nell had always thought of her as having a distinctive, sharply carved kind of beauty, but this morning, with her puffy eyes, and ruddy nose, she just looked haggard. Looking at Will and then down at herself, she said, “I’m sorry I’m not ready to receive callers yet. I ought to be. The morning has gotten away from me.”

  “I’m sorry for intruding,” Nell said. “Please accept my apologies, and my deepest sympathy. I was very fond of your father.”

  Miriam nodded abjectly and looked down, wringing the garment onto the dirt with dark-stained hands. The interior of the shed was murky, but Nell could make out the freshly dyed items Miriam had just hung up to dry on a wooden clothes crane: a flounced linen petticoat, corset cover, and corset.

  Nell was about to introduce Will when a man’s voice called from the direction of the house, “Miss Bassett?”

  Miriam, suddenly animated, said, “Over here,” as she stepped out onto the flagstone walk.

  The gentleman striding toward them—Reverend John Tanner—was as tall as Will, and not much older, but his spectacles and prematurely silver-threaded hair suggested the kind of dignity one normally associated with advanced years. He was a handsome man in a certain rangy, scholastic way. Like Will, he was clean-shaven, with short-trimmed sideburns, imparting, correctly or not, the aura of the aesthete. His attire—a black frock coat that floated around his lanky frame, black trousers, black vest, black tie, black gloves—was appropriately, if unintentionally, funereal; Nell had never seen him dressed any other way.

  The minister came up to Miriam as if Nell and Will weren’t even there, both hands clutching his hat, an old-fashioned, Quakerish wideawake. “I just found out. Are you all right?”

  She closed her eyes, nodding. “Thank you, Dr. Tanner. Yes, I’m...managing.”

  He frowned at her, squinted into the drying shed. “What in blazes are you doing? Can’t Eileen do this?”

  Miriam unwound the twist of fabric in her hands, which turned out to be a large, fringed shawl. “I sent her upstairs.” She shook out the shawl. “To clean Papa’s bedroom.”

  Tanner regarded her in obvious bafflement.

  Nell said, “It was in his bedroom that...it happened.”

  Tanner stared at Nell a moment, then closed his eyes on a sigh. “That, er, that wasn’t in the paper, just that he...” The minister shook his head. “None of the details.”

  Miriam cleared her throat. “Miss Nell Sweeney...” She gestured from Nell to Tanner. “My fiancé, the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Tanner.”

  “Miss Sweeney and I have met,” Tanner said with a bow. “You’re Mrs. August Hewitt’s companion, are you not?”

  “Her governess, officially,” Nell said. “It’s good to see you again, Reverend—although I wish the circumstances were different. Miss Bassett, Dr. Tanner, may I introduce Dr. William Hewitt.”

  Will bowed to Miriam and shook Tanner’s hand.

  “Dr. Hewitt is Martin’s eldest brother,” Nell told them. “He’s also the surgeon who performed the post-mortem on your father, Miss Bassett.”

  “The purpose of the examination,” Will explained, “was to establish the cause of death. But I’m afraid I can’t finalize my conclusion until I investigate not just his body, but the circumstances surrounding his demise.”

  “There’s nothing much to investigate.” Miriam gave the shawl a final spattering shake, turned, and carried it back into the drying shed. “I came home and found him on the floor of his room, next to the bathtub he kept under his bed. He’d cut his wrists.”

  Dr. Tanner pushed his spectacles up his acquiline nose, whispering something under his breath that didn’t sound very ministerial. He ducked into the shed, hovering over his fiancée as she spread the big square of damp black wool on a wooden rack. “Blast it all,” he said, “I hate to see you slaving away at a time like this. You should be having this conversation inside, in the front parlor, where it’s cool and quiet. I’ll make you a pot of tea.”

  “I’d rather keep busy.”

  “Miss Bassett.” Tanner’s voice was gentle, but tinged ever so slightly with exasperation. “Please.”

  She straightened up, rubbing the small of her back. “Could you do something for me, Dr. Tanner? Papa needs...” Looking down, she said, “He needs a suit of clothes to be laid out in, and I...I can’t bear to set foot in that room, much less go in there and start sorting through his things.”

  “Of course.” He rested a hand on her arm, just for a moment; Nell wouldn’t have been surprised if this was the first time he’d ever touched her. Quietly he said, “But you must promise me that you’ll stop all this. Come inside. I’ll wager you haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

  “There’s a dress in the dye pot,” she said. “I just need to get that hung up and then empty out the pot and clean things up in the kitchen. If you’ll just go up to Papa’s room and pick out some clothes... His best frock coat, you’ll know it when you see it, and his gray trousers—the good ones, not the mended ones—and—“

  “I’ll see to it.” Tanner patted her arm. “D
on’t give it another thought.”

  “While you’re up there...” Miriam glanced through the doorway at Nell and Will, then turned away to smooth out the already smooth shawl. What she said then was spoken so softly that even her fiancé, standing right next to her, had to bend his head to hear her better.

  “Papers?” he asked. “You mean—“

  Miriam closed a hand around his arm and said something else. Will cast an inquiring glance at Nell, who was standing closer to the shed than he. She made a show of peering at her pendant watch while angling an ear toward the doorway, but she couldn’t make out Miriam’s words, just her tone of restrained distress.

  “I’ll take a look.” Tanner was the kind of man whose whisper can be heard half a block away. He exhorted Miriam again, as he backed out of the shed, to abandon her labors and go inside, then nodded to Nell and Will and returned to the house.

  Miriam came out of the shed and bent to retrieve a stocking from the basket. It was an indication of her distracted state of mind that she didn’t seem to care whether a strange gentleman saw her underpinnings.

  “So you came home and found your father in his room,” Will said. “What time would you say that was?”

  Miriam shrugged. “Late afternoon. Four, four-fifteen.”

  “Where had you been?”

  Frowning, she balled up the stocking to squeeze it out. “Running errands. You can’t honestly have any doubt as to how he died, Dr. Hewitt.”

  “I believe he died by his own hand,” Will said. “But before I can officially attest to it, I need a little more information. You came home around three. Did you go directly to your father’s room?”

  Miriam pulled out a clothespin, which she studied pensively. “I, um, yes, I believe so.”

  “Why?” Will asked.

  With a twitch of her shoulders, she said, “If one wanted to see him, that was where one went. He spent his days there, for the most part.” Turning, Miriam retreated back into the drying shed to hang up the stocking. Raising her voice a bit to be heard, she said, “It’s two connected rooms—bedroom in front, study in back.”

  “Is that where he saw to his business matters?” Will asked.

  A pause. “At one time.”

  “And lately?”

  The pause was longer this time. Miriam emerged from the shed looking grim. “My father hasn’t been himself—hadn’t been himself—since my mother passed away back in ‘fifty-three. Then, four years ago, he lost his only son just as the war was ending. I’ve never been privy to his business transactions, but one can only assume he’d neglected them for some time, given...well, our declining circumstances. He slept a great deal. Took a little too much wine at dinner, a little too much port before bed. He craved oblivion, Dr. Hewitt, and one afternoon he just decided to make it permanent. That’s all I can tell you. It’s all I know.”

  Snatching up the second stocking, she squeezed it out and took it into the shed.

  Nell said, “Did he buy gold as an investment, do you know?”

  She draped the stocking over an arm of the crane, tugging and pulling to reshape it, her back to them. “Papa never talked about such matters with the family—nothing having to do with money, ever. He considered it unseemly.”

  “Then you wouldn’t know whether his suicide had anything to do with the collapse of the gold market yesterday?” Will asked.

  “I told you, he’d been melancholic for years. Perhaps the general atmosphere of despair yesterday sent him over the edge—so many men losing everything.”

  “He knew about the gold crash, then?” Nell asked. “Despite his being holed up in his room most of the time?”

  There came a long pause, then Miriam sighed heavily. “The Boston Daily Advertiser printed an extra early in the afternoon, and I took it up to him before I left for my errands. He knew what was happening.”

  “You never did tell us why you went to his room later yesterday afternoon, after your errands,” Will said. “You said you knew you’d find him there, but not why you wanted to see him.”

  A moment passed, and then she came out of the shed, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’d gotten into the habit of checking up on him, trying to wake him if he was napping, seeing if there was anything he needed...”

  “I understand his bedroom door was locked,” Will said.

  “Yes.”

  “That was unusual?”

  “It was. It worried me, especially after I knocked and called to him, and got no answer.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called down to Eileen to fetch the key from the butler’s pantry.”

  “Eileen is a maid?” he asked.

  “The maid. We’ve had to let the others go.”

  “What did you find when you opened the door?”

  Miriam looked off toward the house, the morning sunlight shimmering in her eyes.

  “Will,” Nell said quietly, “perhaps we can continue this some other—“

  “He was lying on his stomach with his hands in the bathtub,” she said in a damp, strained voice. “It’s one of those shallow tin tubs with a wide lip to keep the water from splashing onto the floor—you know the kind. He had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up. His face was resting on the lip—the flat, seat part of it—as if it were a pillow, and his arms...” She illustrated his position by turning her head to the side and raising her bent arms over her head.

  “The knife he used,” Will said. “Was it there?”

  Miriam nodded. “It was the pen knife from his desk. It was on the rug next to him. There was b-blood everywhere—the floor, the w-wall—“ She hitched in a breath and closed her eyes.

  Will reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, but he’d given it to his mother earlier. Nell pulled hers out of the chatelaine on her belt and offered it to Miriam, but she waved it away. Drawing in a tremulous breath, she said, “I’m—I’m all right. I just...I can’t afford to fall apart today. There’s too much to do.”

  “I’d like to see your father’s bedroom, if I may,” Will said.

  “Why? I...I’ve told you everything. I’ve described it all for you.”

  “Yes, but if I could see it for myself, it would help me to—“

  “I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “I’ve answered your questions, I’ve told you everything you wanted to know. That room, it’s...” She shook her head. “I can’t even bear to think about it. It...it was the last place my father was alive, the place where he took his life. I haven’t even been in there. The thought of strangers trooping through it...”

  “You haven’t been in there?” Nell asked. “But you were the one who...found him.”

  “I went no farther than the doorway,” she said. “I was...horrified. Grief-stricken. My throat was sore afterward. But I never stepped into that room. Eileen did, to make sure he was really dead, but I...I couldn’t. I still can’t.”

  “I’ll be with Dr. Hewitt when he’s in there,” Nell said. “We’ll respect the room. We shan’t touch anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miriam repeated. “I just can’t have it. And it should hardly be necessary. I’ve told you what happened.”

  Will looked as if he wanted to press the point, but after considering it a moment, here merely said, “Just one more question if I may, Miss Bassett, and then we’ll leave you in peace.”

  “There was no note,” Miriam said as she lifted the empty basket.

  Will looked at her.

  “Isn’t that what you wanted to know?” Miriam asked.

  “As a matter of fact, it is. Did you look for a note?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if you didn’t even enter the room—“ Nell began.

  “Eileen looked. I asked her to. There was no note.” Miriam tucked the basket snugly up against her hip. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things I need to do. I’ll have Becky show you out.”

  * * *

  Becky prattled on about her father’s final arrangements as she held the front door open
for Nell and Will.

  “Miriam wants to have the funeral Tuesday afternoon. She wants Dr. Tanner to give the eulogy, and of course he’s the perfect gentleman to do it, being a man of the cloth and such a splendid speaker, not to mention having known Papa so well. I wish he could perform the funeral service itself, but Miriam says that would be wrong, because of course he’s a Unitarian, and Papa was a Congregationalist, never mind that he hadn’t been to church in years.” She winced. “Which I’m not supposed to mention, so please forget I said it. Anyway, the service will be at Central Congregational on Newbury, even though Reverend Bingham there has never even met Papa, which seems rather sad to me, but Miriam says that’s the way Papa would have wanted it, and she should know, because she was really much closer to him than I was, so it seems only right that she should have the final say in the arrangements. Not that Papa and I were on bad terms, or anything like that, it’s just that he never sat and talked to me the way he talked to Miriam, so—“

  “So I don’t suppose you’d know anything about your father’s business dealings,” Nell interjected. “Whether he’d invested in gold?”

  “Oh goodness, no, he never discussed such things. Mr. Munro was the only person Papa ever talked to about—“ Becky cut herself off with a groan. “There I go again. Miriam’s right, I’m such a rattle-pate. Please, please, please don’t tell her I said anything.”

  Will and Nell exchanged a look. “About Philip Munro?” Nell asked. “Why aren’t you supposed to talk about him?”

  Becky glanced toward the back of the house and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Miriam doesn’t want anyone to know that he had anything to do with us, even now that he’s dead. You won’t tell her I said anything, will you?”

  “Of course not.” Nell smiled conspiratorially. “If you don’t tell her that Dr. Hewitt and I slipped upstairs for a couple of minutes before we left.”

  Becky stared at her. Will turned and smiled at Nell in a way that she found very gratifying.

  “You want to go upstairs?” Becky asked.