When Ellen reached the rectory beside the church, she paused for a moment, looking for lights that would indicate one of the priests was still awake. They were out at all hours, bringing Extreme Unction to the bedsides of the dying, hearing last confessions, and slipping the Holy Sacrament between cracked lips. She’d knelt by many a deathbed in Ireland while the priest intoned the prayers to send a soul home to God. They were good men, most of them, holy men, with only now and then a drunk or a womanizer to disgrace the cloth. Tonight the rectory was as dark as the Nolan mansion had been, the faintest of gas lights glowing deep in a hallway.
She patted the key in her pocket again, three times for luck. Before she could take another step forward she heard a scraping sound behind her. Like the sole of a shoe gliding over the rough concrete of the sidewalk, grating against loose pebbles before it came to a stop. Ellen turned to peer down the street, her eyes skipping from one lamp pole to the next, searching the pools of light for shadows that shouldn’t be there. The sidewalk in front of Saint Anselm’s church and rectory was always clean swept, no papers drifting along, no cigar butts nestled in the cracks, no piles of horse dung allowed to remain at the curbside. No one was out this late, no one but she alone. And perhaps a cat or two prowling the alleyways.
Shaking out her shawl, Ellen wrapped it around her shoulders again, tighter this time against the cold and the frisson of fear that had set her quivering. Mick told her she’d nothing to worry about in this part of town; the swells who lived here wouldn’t tolerate what humbler New Yorkers had to put up with. Between the Metropolitan Police and the private agencies rich men hired to protect their homes and businesses, it was safer and more profitable for burglars to keep to other neighborhoods. Being assigned to a lower Fifth Avenue beat was every copper’s dream. She forced herself to smile; her mother said that if you smiled the devil passed you by.
She heard the scraping sound again as she reached for the iron handle of the door that opened into one of Saint Anselm’s side aisles. This time she didn’t pause to look; she yanked open the door and slammed it shut behind her, fingers groping to turn the key in the lock. It wasn’t there. There was no key, no bolt to slide across to bar entrance to whoever or whatever might be outside. Now the scraping sound settled into the steady rhythm of footsteps someone was no longer bothering to soften. She heard them begin to mount the steps.
Before a hand could reach for the door latch, Ellen whirled and fled across the altar to the sacristy. Surely the door to the room where priestly vestments and gold altar vessels were stored would have a key to secure it against intruders. Not until she saw the empty lock did she realize that she was on the wrong side.
Up the center aisle she ran, too frightened to wonder if she were no longer alone inside Saint Anselm’s. She reached the swinging doors leading to the main vestibule. Moments before she pushed her way through them she heard the side door open, felt a cold draft of outside air strike her back. Sobbing now, hiccupping tears and phlegm, she slammed through the thick wooden doors into the vestibule where racks of pamphlets stood against the walls and notices were pinned on every available surface.
She hurled herself against the outside doors, expecting them to open the way they did after Mass when the congregation surged out of the church, but they didn’t move. Her shoulders ached as she thudded repeatedly against the iron studded doors. They didn’t give an inch.
To one side of the vestibule was the dark opening of the staircase that wound up into the belfry. It was her last chance. As she ran toward it, she saw the pale silver gleam of a crucifix in the bottom of the wicker Lost and Found basket. Her rosary. She stopped for a moment to scoop it into her hand, kissed the crucifix. She felt the first steps of the belfry staircase beneath her feet before something or someone knocked her to her knees. Fingers twined themselves into her glorious red hair; the hand that cupped her skull raised her head above the stone steps.
There wasn’t time to gasp out a last prayer before the loud crack, the terrible pain, and the final darkness descended.
CHAPTER 12
The carriage wouldn’t be needed until midmorning, but if he was to hear Mass himself this Sunday, Jack Scully, the Nolan coachman, would have to be at Saint Anselm’s by six o’clock at the latest. There’d be breakfast to eat afterwards and the horses to curry so they’d look their best on the drive up Fifth Avenue to Saint Patrick’s. Mr. Nolan was a fiend about putting on a fine show, though everyone knew he’d started out with a bloody apron over his belly and a butcher knife in his hand. There was no one like a Mick for dressing up fine as a king and putting on airs, Jack thought as he whistled his way down the stairs from his room above the stable. He could say it, being as Irish as Paddy’s pig himself, but God help anyone else who tried to put them down. Being good with the fists was necessary to survival in this new world.
The horses heard his footsteps and his whistling. They stomped their hooves and neighed softly, knowing he’d check their water troughs and hay racks before crossing the yard to his own food and drink. He’d run a firm hand over their withers, touch his forehead to the broad flat spot between their eyes, and whisper something only he and they would understand. Jack Scully was a horseman born and bred; his charges knew he was as much one of them as a two legged beast could be. They loved and trusted him, and he they.
They’d been restless since the first scent of blood wafted through the wooden stable doors in the darkness of the night, but there hadn’t been much of it, and as the wet November air weighed it down, they’d settled again. Only now and then did one of the four huge carriage horses shake his head to rid himself of the hint of metallic liquid tugging at his nostrils. They were used to the smell of vermin blood; human blood, though not unknown, was rarer and therefore more worrisome to them.
“All right, lads, we’re off to the cathedral this morning, so you’ll have to step high and look lively.” Scully poured fresh water into the troughs from the large barrel he kept full and clean inside the stable. He scooped hay from the racks, brought it to his nose, and sniffed appreciatively. A sour smell meant there’d be sick animals to treat, but the horses in Jack’s charge never had to snuffle their way through damp or rancid feed. Grain and hay were as dry and fragrant in November as they were when freshly harvested from the fields. He petted and stroked, chatted and sang softly to each animal so there’d be no jealousy between them and all four would pull together as one later on.
Start the morning right and the rest of the day will take care of itself, his da used to say as he worked the peat bog that was his livelihood. It was an admonition Jack never forgot, not even when he’d traveled three thousand miles and a world away from where he should have been able to stay … if it hadn’t been for the famine … or for what the English did to his people and his country. Poverty ground you into rags and bone, left you no choice but to learn another way to live or find someplace where you stood a chance of struggling back onto your own two legs again. Never mind. Sometimes he thought too much about the past.
He stood for a moment at the stable door, looking and listening, then closed and barred it behind him. He could see lights on in the kitchen windows across the cobbled yard and fancied he could smell strong tea steeping and coffee boiling. Sunday morning meant more than a dish of oatmeal. Rashers of thick bacon and eggs fried so the whites were crisp and the yolks runny. Mounds of potatoes cooked with onions and lumps of sweet butter. Bread fresh from the oven, slathered with jam and honey. He could taste the goodness of it all through the purse of his lips, his mouth watering too much now to whistle.
It was still dark, but the kitchen windows cast light onto the cobblestones that stretched from the rear of the Nolan mansion to the stables. Those windows, lower sash tops level with the pavement, were the only source of daylight in the basement rooms. The house had been electrified, but Mr. Nolan considered one dim bulb hanging from the ceiling more than adequate illumination. He was stingy that way. Gas and oil lamps were good enough if more lig
ht were needed, and keeping the glass reservoirs cleaned and filled would take care of any idle time that might come a servant’s way. A man didn’t become rich by being careless with pennies.
Halfway across the yard someone had forgotten to take in a newly beaten carpet, or perhaps a bundle set out for the ragman had rolled away from the top of the staircase. Jack could just make out the shape of it in the early wintry gloom. He’d pick it up, whatever it was, and not say anything to Mrs. Flynn, saving one of the maids from the housekeeper’s scolding she no doubt deserved. It would be his good deed for the day. The younger servants were always tired, still growing but working as hard and as long hours as the adults. He remembered the despair and the fatigue he’d known when he was fourteen. Only being near horses all day had saved him from taking up the drink. You couldn’t fall into a stupor when there were animals depending on you.
Strange. The rug or bundle of rags had a shape to it that shouldn’t have reminded him of the curves of a woman’s waist and hips, shouldn’t have tapered down to the slenderness of legs. The sudden November gust skittering across the cobblestones shouldn’t have picked up strands of bright hair and waved them in the cold, damp wind.
Holy Mary, Mother of God. It was a girl lying on the ground, a girl who had to be dead or dying from the stillness of her. He ran the last few steps to Ellen Tierney’s body and knelt beside it, knowing as soon as one hand touched the cold cheek that life had left her hours ago. While everyone else in the Nolan household slept, she’d gone to her death.
Poor Ellen. She’d been so happy these last few weeks, with her great secret that everyone with a grain of sense could guess, and a future every other maid in the house envied. A policeman’s wife. She was supposed to be a policeman’s wife, not a body on a mortuary slab.
He crossed himself and gabbled a Hail Mary. It was the best he could do under the circumstances; the priest would give her the last rites. Conditional. In case the soul was lingering. Phrases from catechism classes flashed through his memory as he rose to his feet and sprinted the few yards to the basement stairs and the kitchen door.
Scully’s hand was on the doorknob when he stopped dead in his tracks. Nora Kenny.
Just a few doors down the street at Miss MacKenzie’s. Come from Staten Island as she and her mother had done many a time to help with heavy holiday cleaning. But this time, two weeks ago today, Nora had been found dead in Colonial Park. Five days after that, the man she was supposed to marry had been arrested for her murder.
Kincaid had told him what he knew, which wasn’t much, but coachmen were a closely knit fraternity of men sharing a love of horses and a tolerance for being outside in all weathers. He’d said Miss Prudence and her friend Mr. Hunter had gone to Colonial Park to identify the body and that later, after the funeral, he’d overheard them talking about someone getting the third degree. What was the man’s name? Irish, of course, because Nora Kenny was Irish. Fahey. Tim Fahey, that was it. According to Kincaid, the boyo wasn’t guilty. Miss Prudence and Mr. Hunter had promised Nora’s mother they’d find the man who’d murdered her daughter.
What else, what else? There’d been only a few lines in the newspapers when the Kenny girl was killed, a few more when Fahey was arrested, but none of the details that usually enlivened a crime story. Which everyone had thought a bit strange at the time, but then forgot about when the killing turned out to be another lovers’ quarrel gone bad.
That wasn’t all, though. Kincaid had said something else. It was niggling at the edge of Scully’s memory. Something about the way the body had been wrapped up. Wrapped up. Hessian. Burlap. Like a giant cocoon. He was positive that’s what Kincaid had described. And now Ellen.
Scully wasn’t mistaken. The material he’d touched was the kind of rough burlap sacking used to bag the oats, corn, and barley he mixed and fed the horses every day.
The hair on the back of his neck itched furiously. He’d get word to Kincaid as soon as he could, and leave it to the MacKenzie coachman to inform Miss Prudence. Two Irish maids killed just two weeks apart, both of them enveloped in burlap. If there hadn’t been anything in the papers describing how Nora Kenny was found, then only the man who’d killed her would know about the burlap wrapping.
Jack Scully didn’t like what he was thinking, and he’d never trusted the police. Not in Ireland, and not in America either. He had a feeling Mr. Nolan would be furious if he found out that his coachman had opened his big mouth, but he also knew he was going to find a way to get word up the street to Kincaid.
Now he had to break the news to the butler.
“Mr. Tynan,” Jack said as evenly as he could manage. “Will you step outside into the yard with me for a moment? There’s something I think you’ll need to attend to.”
*
“I’ll have to tell the master right away,” Tynan said. Like Jack, he’d touched Ellen Tierney’s frigid cheek, then drawn his hand back from the feel of death.
Both men knelt beside the hessian-wrapped corpse; both got quickly to their feet. The maid they’d drunk tea with the evening before was plainly dead; terrible damage had been done to her skull, though the side of her face they could see below the forehead was as lovely as always. The bright red hair she’d had to conceal beneath a starched cap spread stiff and blackened with blood beneath her head, a macabre pillow softening her resting place on the cobblestones. She lay on her side, her body wound tightly in a makeshift shroud, neck hidden, only the head showing. A cord had been tied tightly around the bundle. No telling what lay beneath the loose weave of the hessian cloth; it was not their place to look.
“Stay with her, Jack.”
“Will you wake him?”
“I’ll have to now, won’t I?” Tynan blew on his hands against the early morning cold. Mr. Nolan had a fearsome temper, never more so than when something out of the ordinary disturbed the rigid routine he imposed on his household. “There’s no help for it.”
Tynan turned and strode across the cobblestones to the house, leaving Jack alone with his discovery. Light from the kitchen streamed out through the opened door then disappeared again.
To the east, Jack could make out a dark grayness slowly turning lighter. It would be dawn soon, a day poor Ellen hadn’t lived to see. He didn’t dare leave her to fetch himself a coat or a blanket to wrap around his shoulders, so he stomped his feet and beat his arms around his torso. The horses sensed something was not as it should be; he could hear their restless rubbings against the wood sides of their stalls. Mr. Tynan must have forbidden any of the other servants from coming out into the yard; heads bobbed up and down at the windows, but no one climbed the kitchen stairs to keep Jack company. No one dared defy the butler’s orders.
Mick McGuire. Mr. Nolan would have to call in the police, but surely it wouldn’t be Ellen’s beau who came to the house. Hardened though the man must be with what he saw every day walking his beat, he shouldn’t have to look down at the body of the girl he planned to marry. Then Scully remembered that beat coppers might find corpses, but it was detectives who investigated how the victims ended up that way. He crossed himself again, murmured another quick prayer. They’d need to send to St. Anselm’s for a priest, too. The body had to be washed and blessed, prayed over and buried. There were rituals to being born, rites to dying, neat brackets around the daily business of trying to stay alive. He shied away from the obvious questions. He didn’t want to start thinking too hard about who’d killed Ellen, or how or why.
“This way, sir.” Tynan led the procession from the house, an oil lamp in his hand to light the slippery cobblestones.
Behind him marched Mr. Nolan and Mr. Joseph, heavy coats over their nightclothes, faces pale and puffed with sleep and shock. It was almost dawn now, the world outlined in gray, dark shapes gradually becoming recognizable.
“You’re sure she’s dead?” Mr. Joseph’s voice rasped in the stillness.
“Of course she’s dead. Haven’t you seen enough carcasses to know when there’s no life l
eft in them?” Mr. Nolan snapped at his son. He didn’t bother kneeling to touch Ellen’s face. He beckoned to the butler to lower the lamp, then stood where he was, looking down. One slippered foot stretched out to nudge the girl. Dead meat was dead meat, whether human or animal. “What in God’s name was she doing outside the house? Didn’t she know any better?”
“Shall I send for the police, sir?” Of course he should, but Tynan would do nothing without Mr. Nolan’s consent.
“Use the telephone. Tell Cook to get coffee and tea made and served upstairs and down. I’ll wake Mrs. Nolan and Miss Alice, but there’s not to be a word said to either of them about that.” He gestured toward Ellen’s blood matted hair and the open, staring eye. “No one except Scully is to be outside until the police arrive.” He turned his back on the messy business lying in his stable yard. Tynan hurried to light the way to the house.
Reluctantly, Mr. Joseph followed along after his father, looking back more than once at what had been such a lovely Irish girl, now as lifeless as the butchered cattle hanging from hooks in the family’s slaughterhouses.
*
Ellen lay for more than an hour on the cobblestones before the first Metropolitan Police officers arrived. By that time Jack was nearly as frozen as the corpse, but he didn’t dare ignore Mr. Nolan’s orders. No one in that household did.
“Terrible thing to find on a Sunday morning,” Officer Martin said. He rolled back and forth on his hobnailed boots, hands clasped behind him, long dark blue frock coat shielding him from the wintry cold. He’d take a few notes and stand guard over the body until the detectives arrived, which he thought they’d hurry up and do as soon as someone down at the precinct recognized Francis Patrick Nolan’s name.
Fortunately, he’d been on the corner when the boot boy had come tearing out of the Nolan mansion and waved frantically at him. His master had used that new fangled telephone to call the stationhouse, but he’d also sent young Tommy out to find the beat copper. The boy had babbled his message, then sped off back down the street, though when Martin reached the Nolan house, there was no sign of him. Fifteen minutes later Tommy had raced across the cobblestone courtyard, winked and nodded his head at the coachman, then disappeared into the kitchen.
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 12