Murder on Black Friday

by P. B. Ryan

“Do you know anything about his relationship with the Bassett sisters?” Nell asked.

  Sophie groaned. “The younger one was after his money. God knows that’s the only reason a Bassett would agree to marry a parvenu like Philip.”

  “Yes, but you’re from one of the old Brahmin families,” Nell said, “and my understanding is that you would have married him in a heartbeat.”

  “As I’ve already pointed out,” Sophie said, “I am a fool. Becky Bassett, her idiot chatter notwithstanding, is actually rather shrewd. Certainly not the type to let messy emotions get in the way of an advantageous marriage. For all I know, she may have detested Philip. I’m fairly certain she was nothing more to him than a pretty young blonde with a good name. She’d get the money, he’d get the name. A match made in heaven’s countinghouse.”

  “What about Miriam?” Will asked.

  “Miriam.” Sophie said it as she might have said, Pig Dung. “Miriam Bassett is not entirely what she seems.”

  A popular refrain, that. “How do you mean?” Nell asked.

  Sophie stood, smirking, and sauntered back to the fainting couch. “She likes to make herself out as the epitome of moral purity, but I assure you, it’s all an act. I’ve known her since she was sixteen, and one thing she’s not is pure.”

  “Did she know Mr. Munro then?” Will asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Sophie said as she settled back on the couch, spreading her skirts out prettily. “I met her through him. We’d been...involved, he and I, for a couple of years, but he was still at Harvard, so I didn’t find it odd that he hadn’t proposed to me yet. I assumed, once he’d graduated and was earning a decent living...” She looked away in evident disgust. “I assumed wrong. One day, after we’d been...well, suffice it to say he was feeling relaxed, a bit too much so, perhaps, he told me he’d decided to steal Miriam Bassett away from Chet Langdon.”

  “Chet...?”

  “Her beau. Excellent family, wonderful prospects...” Sophie waved a listless hand. “Everything that sort thinks is important. Chet was due to leave on his Grand Tour soon, so Philip planned to pounce while he was away.”

  “He told you this,” Nell asked, “even though you and he were...?”

  “It was when I first realized he thought of me not so much as a lover, but as a sort of chum who was conveniently free with her favors. It was an eye-opener, and not a pleasant one.”

  “No, I don’t imagine so.”

  “He rhapsodized at great length about Miriam’s many assets—her breeding, her beauty, but most of all, her virtue. She was the perfect Brahmin bride for a high-reaching upstart such as he, and he was determined to wed her. He’d been wooing her with every romantic trick at his disposal, he told me, redoubling his efforts every time she rebuffed him. Rebuffed him! Here I was, dreaming about the day when he would finally get down on one knee before me, and this absurd little mouse was showing him the cold shoulder.”

  “So Munro thought she’d come ‘round once this Chet fellow was safely overseas, eh?” Will said. “Out of sight and out of mind?”

  “That was the idea, but he was in for a surprise.” Sophie sat forward and lowered her voice, although they were the only people in the room. “Right after Chet left for Europe in June of eighteen-fifty, Miriam came to see me, which was rather unexpected. We knew each other, but we weren’t exactly what you’d call friends. She was several years younger than I, and we had nothing in common.”

  “Except for Philip Munro,” Nell said.

  “Not for long.” Sophie chose a lemon kiss from the plate and sat back, smiling. “It took Miriam forever to come to the point. She was shaking like a rabbit. She told me I was the only person she could think of to consult about a particular matter, because of my—how did she put it?—’familiarity of a certain nature with gentlemen.’”

  “She knew about you and Munro?” Will asked.

  “She knew about me, because I was never quite as discreet as I might have been back then. It wasn’t widely known, at the time, that Philip and I were lovers, but everyone seemed to know that Sophie Cabot was no blushing maiden. Nevertheless, imagine my surprise when Miriam finally screwed up the courage to ask me how she could tell if she was in the family way.” She popped the little confection into her mouth, grinning like a cat.

  Nell said, “She and Chet...?”

  Sophie smiled as she washed the kiss down with a sip of coffee. “Evidently, and now he was in Europe, and Miriam, in her pathetic naïveté, was trying to figure out if she was going to have to cable him home for a hasty wedding. She’d taken no precautions, of course—hadn’t even known they existed.”

  “Was she with child?” Will asked.

  “She was too mortified to discuss the particulars of her own situation,” Sophie said. “Just wanted the basic information, which I gave her. She thanked me and left, whereupon I promptly called on Philip and told him what any female in my position would—that his darling Miriam of the spotless reputation was, in fact, carrying Chet Langdon’s baby.”

  “But you didn’t know that for sure,” Will said.

  “Let us just say I assumed it from the nature of our conversation.”

  “You assumed what you wanted to assume,” Nell said.

  “Don’t we all? It seemed to do the trick, in any event, because Philip abandoned the idea of courting her. In fact, whenever he spoke of her afterward, it was in the most deliciously scathing terms.”

  “I gather she wasn’t actually pregnant,” Nell said, “if she didn’t end up marrying Chet.”

  “Actually, she left that fall for Miss Finch’s in New York, which is where she spent the entire school year—or so we were told.”

  “You don’t believe it?” Will asked.

  “She may have done,” Sophie said with a shrug. “Girls either finished up there, or at Payne’s, here in Boston. I encouraged Philip think she was off spawning Chet Langdon’s bastard. When she came home in the spring of ‘fifty-one, Chet wasn’t in the picture anymore. I’ve no idea why it ended.”

  “Was she still active in your social circle?” Nell asked.

  “No, she more or less turned her nose up at the rest of us after she came back from New York—kept to herself and dried up into a tiresome old maid.”

  Nell said, “We heard a rumor that she’d been pursuing Mr. Munro over the past few months—notwithstanding his engagement to Becky.”

  Sophie paused with the little cup halfway to her mouth. “Who told you that?”

  “Someone in a position to know,” Will said.

  Lowering the cup, Sophie murdered, “I’ll be damned.”

  “Does it seem credible to you?” Nell asked.

  Sophie seemed to ponder that. “Philip had a way of making females lose perspective. And he was an insatiable swordsman. I knew about the other women, but I always knew I was the one he came back to.” Setting the demitasse aside, she asked, with patently feigned indifference, “Was he sleeping with her?”

  “Apparently not,” Nell said. “What we were told—and it isn’t necessarily the truth, or the entire truth—is that she was in love with him but resisting his physical advances—that she wanted to be his wife, not his mistress.”

  Sophie nodded. “That makes sense, knowing Miriam. I can’t imagine she was very keen on the idea of Philip’s marrying her sister.”

  “From all accounts, she found the prospect devastating.”

  “She must have been horribly jealous,” Sophie mused. “Jealousy can drive people to rash acts, even violence. Have you considered the possibility—“

  “We’re considering all possibilities.” Will stood, shaking out his frock coat. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mrs. Wallace. Miss Sweeney and I appreciate it greatly.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Sophie said as she rose off the fainting couch, “I’d be more than willing to testify in court as to Miriam’s...deficits of character, the pregnancy worries and all that. Whatever it might take to secure a murder conviction.”

  Or
to deflect suspicion from herself, Nell mused as Sophie walked them to the front door—from herself, or from her husband.

  “What did you buy Friday?” Nell asked as Sophie held the door open for them.

  The other woman regarded her blankly.

  “On your shopping trip, when your husband was napping.” Nell gave Sophie what she hoped was a disarmingly friendly smile. “It’s a marvelous time to be looking for hats and boots and such, because all the new autumn styles are in the shops. Did you get anything good?”

  “Nothing at all, actually. You know how sometimes you want everything you see, and other times nothing strikes your fancy? This was one of those other times,” she said, and closed the door.

  Chapter 10

  “Eileen!” called Becky Bassett for a second time, her voice muffled by the door with the peeling black paint. When at last she opened it, she greeted Nell and Will with a sheepish smile and an apology for making them wait. “The girl does the marketing on Monday afternoons. I always forget. I’ll be calling her name till I’m hoarse in the throat, and Miriam will say, ‘Becky, you little nit, don’t you remember? It’s Monday afternoon. She’s not even here.’ And I’ll feel like an absolutely ninny. But here I am, with my ghastly manners, letting you cool your heels on the front porch. Come in, come in! You’re here to see Miriam, I suppose?”

  “And you as well,” said Will, who had the green folio tucked under his arm.

  As they entered the front hall, Nell saw, through the open doorway to the right, a coffin on a board balanced between two tall-backed chairs. Noah Bassett was laid out in the suit of clothes Dr. Tanner had chosen for him, his mouth in a sort of slack grimace that made him look very unlike the genial fellow he’d been in life. Pots of lavender were scattered about the room, sweetening the murky smell of death.

  Becky had on the same frock she’d been wearing Saturday, augmented with a white muslin collar and the weeping cuffs she’d been sewing during their prior visit. She led them into a large, high-ceilinged dining room, where her sister and Dr. Tanner sat at a too-small table, nursing cups of tea. The floor was naked wooden planks, save for a crumb cloth under the table, and the furnishings sparse, making the space seem even more cavernous than it was. Yellowed oilcloth shades covered the windows, casting an amber patina over the room and its occupants. For a brief moment, as the black-clad couple turned their gazes toward the doorway, Nell was put in mind of one of those old, thickly varnished Flemish paintings of domestic life.

  The minister stood and bowed to Nell, a sheaf of papers in his hand, and explained that they’d been going over his eulogy for tomorrow’s funeral service. Nell complimented Miriam’s mourning gown, a well-tailored black dress with jet buttons, and asked if it was the one she’d been dyeing during their last visit, although she knew it wasn’t.

  “I’m afraid I had to give that dress to the rag man,” Miriam told her. “It didn’t take the dye properly.”

  Will waited until everyone was seated, then lowered himself into the chair next to Nell’s and placed the folio on the table. “We found this in an iron closet in Philip Munro’s office, and we thought you’d like to have it. It contains documents relating to your late father.”

  Becky eyed Will and Nell nervously, as if afraid they’d tattle about her blurting out the connection between Noah Bassett and Munro.

  “Thank you,” Miriam said. “I, er... Philip advised my father from time to time on financial matters. I didn’t think to mention it the other day because, well, we weren’t really very well acquainted with him. It was just a business relationship, you know, not personal.”

  Bristling at the bald lie, Nell said, “We know he was engaged to Becky. I’d say that’s fairly personal.”

  Tanner sighed and looked toward Miriam, who stared at Nell with a half-open mouth, her face pinkening in the golden halflight. Wheeling on her sister, she said, “Did you tell them about...?”

  “No!” Becky yelped in her childlike voice. “I didn’t, I swear it.”

  “It was only a matter of time before it came out,” Tanner told Miriam in a low, gentle voice. “Candor is always the best policy. Regardless of how you felt about the man—”

  “I had no feelings of any kind toward Philip Munro,” Miriam said tersely. “The simple fact is that he and my sister were never engaged.”

  “Well, not officially,” Becky said, “but we—”

  “Not at all, not in any way.” Turning stiffly to Nell and Will, Miriam said, “My father would not permit an engagement, therefore no engagement existed. Our family’s dealings with Philip were strictly limited to the counsel he gave Papa. I say again, it was purely a business relationship.”

  “And, it would seem, an ill-advised one,” Will said. “On Munro’s advice, your father borrowed fifty thousand dollars against this house in order to buy gold.”

  Becky sucked in a breath. Tanner closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Miriam’s only reaction was to gaze glumly down at the table.

  Nell said, “Your father turned to Mr. Munro out of desperation. But if he was in financial straits before gold fell, afterward...well, he was destroyed. Not only penniless, but crushed by debt he could never hope to pay.”

  “I...I’ve no doubt Philip felt he was acting in my father’s best interest,” Miriam said. “I assume he invested in gold on behalf of the other gentlemen he advised. Why, he was ruined himself—otherwise, why would he have taken his own life?”

  “He didn’t,” Will said. “At least, we don’t think he did, in part because he had no reason to. He sold everyone’s gold late Friday morning, his own and that of his clients, at a colossal profit—with the lone exception of your father, even though he knew the market was about to collapse.”

  “He knew?” Tanner said. “How could he have known?”

  “He couldn’t have known,” Miriam scoffed. “No one knew.”

  Nell said, “The Secretary of the Treasury, George Boutwell, was an old friend of Mr. Munro’s. Secretary Boutwell sent him a coded telegram Friday morning, warning him that it was time to sell.”

  “He...he did it on purpose?” Becky asked. “Mr. Munro ruined Papa on purpose?”

  Tanner slumped back in his chair, shaking his head. “My God, why would he have done such a thing?”

  “To punish Papa for not letting us marry,” Becky said, as if it were obvious.

  Miriam said, “If it’s true that he meant to...to hurt Papa, perhaps—”

  “Hurt him?” Becky sprang from her chair, eyes wide with outrage. “He meant to destroy him. He did destroy him. Papa killed himself because of what that man did to him.”

  “If...if it’s true,” Miriam said, “perhaps it was guilt that drove him to take his own—”

  “Guilt?” Becky said. “He was incapable of guilt. He was a monster. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “Becky,” Tanner said softly.

  Miriam said, “Honestly, Becky...”

  “How can you defend him?” Becky shrilled. “Why are you defending him? You despised him.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “If you didn’t, then why did you raise such a fuss when we asked Papa for his permission to marry? Why did you call him the things you called him? You’re the reason Papa wouldn’t let us get married, and now you’re talking as if we should feel sorry for him.”

  “I’m just saying we might try to understand—”

  “Understand? I understand that Papa’s lying in there—” Becky stabbed a finger toward the parlor “—in a coffin because of Philip Munro. And you’re sitting in here making excuses for him.”

  Miriam stood, quivering. “That’s enough, Becky.”

  “You make me sick,” Becky spat out. “I don’t know who I hate more right now, you or him.”

  “Get hold of yourself.” Miriam grabbed Becky’s arm.

  Becky hauled back with her free hand and cracked her sister across the face with stinging force. Miriam cried out, her head whipping to the side, as Tanner leapt fro
m his chair. Becky gasped and backed away, as if stunned by what she’d done, then lifted her skirts and fled from the room. A moment later, the front door banged behind her.

  “Let her go,” Tanner said as Miriam started after her sister.

  “But—”

  “She needs to collect herself. And so do you.” The minister lowered his fiancée into her chair and nudged her chin to the side to inspect her reddened cheek. “Can you move your jaw?”

  “I’m not hurt, just...” To Nell and Will, she said, “Becky’s not herself. Please don’t judge her. It’s grief that’s done this to her.”

  Grief? Nell said, “You’ll forgive me, Miss Bassett, but it’s been my impression that Becky and your father weren’t particularly close.”

  Tanner, standing behind Miriam with his hands on the back of her chair, said, “If that’s true, it might even amplify her grief. It can be confusing and difficult, saying goodbye to someone with whom one should have enjoyed a strong familial bond, but didn’t.”

  “Was there some kind of antagonism between them?” Nell asked.

  “There wasn’t much of anything between them,” Miriam said. “My father just never...took to Becky. It wasn’t her fault. She was a lovely child. It was just one of those things.”

  Tanner said, “I’ve often thought perhaps he blamed her for the illness that claimed Mrs. Bassett’s life.”

  “What?” Miriam seemed not just taken aback, but bewildered by the notion.

  “Was it not shortly after Becky’s birth,” Tanner asked, “that your mother became unwell? She wasted away for two or three years before she passed on, and that’s a painful thing to watch a loved one endure. Perhaps your father felt that she’d been depleted by bearing a child at her age.”

  “Mamá was thirty-eight,” Miriam said. “That’s not so very old.”

  Old enough, Nell thought, especially given her history of difficult pregnancies.

  “It affected you, too,” Tanner told Miriam, “your mother declining when Becky was so young. Your father once told me he thought you would have been a happier person if you hadn’t been forced to take on Becky’s care and rearing when other girls your age were larking about and flirting and just being young. He said girls are supposed to be looking for husbands when they get out of finishing school, not playing nursemaid to little sisters and sick mothers. He admitted his melancholia only made matters worse for you. It troubled him that you never laughed, that you seemed to feel as if everything and everyone was your responsibility. He said it was high time someone took care of you.” With a tentative little smile, Tanner added, “I told him I meant to remedy that situation.”