by P. B. Ryan
She looked at him.
“He escaped a week ago today,” Will said. “That would fall within the period in which the murders must have taken place. He loathed Bridie sight unseen, and he was furious with Harry for supposedly stealing you away from him. He might have thought he could kill Bridie and frame Harry for it, thus destroying his rival, and then concentrate his attention on you. He knew about Bridie’s blackmail scheme, and he also knew that Bridie was two-timing Harry with Virgil—both credible motives for murder. He got hold of Harry’s scarf—“
“How?”
Will lifted his shoulders. “Stole it from Harry’s office at the mill, got someone else to steal it... Who knows? Maybe Bridie really did take it, and Virgil told Duncan about it in one of his letters. Your visit to Duncan inspired him to put his plan into action immediately—that, and possibly the lack of a moon that night. He went to the White farm the next day and found Bridie—“
“The next day? Thursday? That would have been—” Nell counted it out on her fingers “—five days since she’d been fired.”
“Which was the last anyone in Charlestown saw of either one of them. I’m thinking they ran away together to set up housekeeping at the farm.”
“Bridie’s mother told me she would never just pick up and leave like that, not without telling her. She was convinced of it.”
“Mothers always are. In any event, Duncan went to the farm and found Bridie alone in the house, cooking.”
“Virgil was down at the stream,” said Nell, letting it unfold in her mind, “trying to catch something to go with those johnnycakes.”
“Duncan accosted Bridie, who tried to defend herself with the hot skillet. Perhaps she got a lick in, perhaps not. Perhaps he took it away from her and tried to use it against her. She did manage to get out of the house and run to the stream, probably screaming for Virgil.”
“She must have been a fast runner,” Nell said, thinking of Duncan’s long, sinewy legs.
“Women are often surprisingly fleet, especially barefooted, as Bridie was. Virgil would have been confused to find Duncan out of prison and attacking Bridie, but my guess is he would have tried to defend her—probably with the fishing pole, but it broke.”
“Virgil would have been no match for Duncan no matter how many stone-cutting muscles he’d acquired. And a fishing pole? I’ve seen Duncan, completely unarmed, take on two men with knives, and leave them bleeding in the dirt. It would have been over between him and Virgil in seconds.”
“Assuming Duncan didn’t balk at dispatching an old friend. Do you suppose Virgil simply slipped on those mossy rocks?”
“Either way, it was ultimately Duncan’s doing.” She took a deep breath. “And then he turned to Bridie.”
Nell shuddered, remembering those awful bruises between Bridie’s legs—the same kind she’d been left with herself after Duncan’s final savage attack on her. She thought about Bridie thrashing wildly, clutching at weeds and gravel and mud with her burned hands as Duncan held her head beneath the surface of that deceptively placid little stream.
“When he was done with her,” Will said, “he dragged her into the field and went back to the house. He hung the skillet back on its hook, gathered up the johnnycakes that were strewn about—except that one under the table, which he didn’t notice—and tossed them outside for the birds to finish off.”
“Cleaning up?” she said. “That would have been a first for Duncan.”
“I suppose he didn’t want to leave evidence of an altercation in the house. Perhaps he felt it would draw attention away from the scene he was trying to stage out in the field—that of Bridie being strangled with Harry’s scarf. Or perhaps he thought the skillet business would simply complicate matters. In any event, he grabbed the scarf off its hook—“
“Unless he already had it with him.”
“Right. And he went back out to the field and tied it round Bridie’s neck. He pushed her skirts up to make it look as if the rape and murder had taken place right there.”
“Or maybe just to compound her degradation,” said Nell, who was glad, after all, that she’d tidied Bridie up before the constables came. “And then he came to Boston and turned his attention to me.”
Will looked away, his fingers tightening on the porcelain knob.
“I’ll bet it was Duncan who beat up Harry,” she said.
“A little prelude to the murder charge?”
Nell nodded. “It wouldn’t have been enough, just getting him arrested—or even seeing him hang, if it came to that. That’s too remote, too civilized. I know him. He would have had to get his fists bloody to feel any real satisfaction.”
“You do know him,” Will said. “What do you think? Why is he shadowing you? Does he want to win you back or...?”
“Or do to me what he did to Bridie?” She shrugged. “Even if he just wants me back, he must know I won’t return to him voluntarily.”
“He could be following you around looking for an opportunity to abduct you.”
“Or kill me.” She shivered despite how humid it was inside the little coach. “He could have followed us here. He could be out there somewhere, watching us even now.”
“Yes, but we’re on to him now,” Will said. “Every constable in Boston will be looking for him—and sticking close to you. In a day or two, this will all be over.”
Had they had this conversation an hour ago—before the revelation about her marriage—Nell felt sure Will would have offered her something more in the way of comfort and reassurance, touched her hand...but no such gestures were forthcoming. To be treated by him with such cool civility stung more than it ought to have.
From outside came the clopping of hooves and rattling of wheels over the wet granite-block pavement as a carriage—another hack, Nell saw when she wiped the vapor off the window—pulled up to the curb in front of them. Will opened the window on his side, letting in a rush of cool, clean-washed night air. The rain had lessened considerably, a fact evidently not lost on their driver, who could be heard readjusting his Macintosh and fiddling with his reins.
A man carrying a black umbrella—the passenger from the hack in front of them—headed up the rain-shimmered front walk of City Hall at a swift trot. There was something familiar about they way he moved...that slight awkwardness...
“Adam!” Will called through the open window.
Adam turned, paused, jogged toward them. “Will... Nell.” He called to the driver of his hack, who was about to pull away, to wait for him, then came up close to the window, his face shadowed by the umbrella. “I went to the Revere House, but you weren’t there, and then I remembered you’d planned to meet with that detective tonight.”
“Is something wrong?” Nell asked.
“It’s Duncan. I was at the prison today—I’m there on Wednesdays, you know—and they told me he escaped. I wanted you to know as soon as possible.”
“Detective Cook told us,” Will said. “We think Duncan is the man who’s been following Nell. Cook is assigning some men to guard her, and the constables will be on the lookout for him.”
Adam nodded, slightly winded. “If only I’d known sooner. I didn’t see him Sunday, but I often don’t, so I didn’t think anything of it. When he didn’t show up for Bible study this afternoon, I thought he might be sick. I asked around and found out he’s been gone for a week—ever since the day you visited him, Nell. He bribed one of the guards to get him out of the building.”
“Did you talk to him that day,” she asked over Will’s shoulder, “after I left?”
“Oh, yes. He stayed after Bible study. He was beside himself, kept talking about you and Harry. He kept quoting Leviticus and Deuteronomy on the subject of adultery, saying you deserved to... Oh.” He looked at Nell, wincing because he’d spilled the beans about her marriage to Duncan.
“Will knows,” she assured him, to his obvious relief.
“Deuteronomy...” Will said. “That would be Chapter twenty-two.”
A
dam blinked at him. “Yes,” he said, clearly surprised, as was Nell, that Will knew this.
“‘If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband,’” Will quoted, “‘then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman. So shalt thou put away evil from Israel.’”
Nell and Adam gaped at him.
“Is that what Duncan means to do, then?” Will asked. “Carry out his misguided interpretation of the Old Testament?”
Adam looked pained. “I’ve no idea. I don’t know how things ever came to this pass. It never occurred to me that he would become this desperate, this bereft of reason, but it should have. It’s my job to look into the hearts of men. I feel as if I’ve failed him—and you, Nell.”
“It isn’t your fault,” she said. “And I’m sure the police will have Duncan in custody soon.”
“I hope, for his sake as well as yours, that they get to him soon. Well...” Adam lowered his umbrella, the rain having finally ceased, and folded it up. “You’ve obviously got things in hand for the time being. I’ll see you tomorrow night, then, Will? Durgin-Park’s?”
“Hm? Oh, yes,” Will said distractedly. “Say, do me a favor, old man, and drop Nell off at one forty-eight Tremont, would you? I’ve got someplace I’ve got to be.”
Nell looked at Will. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction.
“Oh. All right. Of course. More than happy to.”
Will got out of the hack, held the door open for Nell, and handed her down. “Good night, then.” He didn’t smile, barely met her eyes.
“Good night.” She took her umbrella from him and accompanied Adam to the other hack as he climbed back into his.
Adam opened the door and held out his hand. As she reached for it, she heard an anguished wail, footsteps on the wet pavement...
She turned, along with Adam, to find a man sprinting out of the darkness—hatless, wet—his arm outstretched, his eyes wild.
“Duncan,” she whispered. Oh, God, no.
“Viper!” he screamed. “Deceiver!”
He raised his hand; metal glinted in the lamplight—a gun.
“Duncan, no!” Adam grabbed Nell.
Will leapt on Duncan like some great black hawk, coattails flapping. He struck, flat-handed, at Duncan’s forearm—a blur of movement.
Duncan cried out. The gun clattered to the ground. Will kicked it away.
They grappled. Nell couldn’t see much in the dark, but she could hear the scuffle of feet, the grunts of pain as punches found their mark. It wouldn’t last long; Duncan’s fights never did.
She crossed herself, thinking, Please, God, don’t let Duncan kill him. But when the decisive blow came, it was Duncan who hit the ground, whirling from the impact of Will’s fist so that he landed facedown. His head struck the pavement with a thud Nell felt in her bones.
He blinked, tried to rise, then slumped back down, unmoving.
Will knelt over him, took his carotid pulse. “He’ll be all right.” He looked toward Nell, his hair hanging over his forehead, blood trickling from his nose, one cheekbone badly abraded, and then toward Adam. “Would you be so kind as to go inside and fetch Detective Cook?”
It took the dazed priest a moment to respond. “Oh. Yes. Of course.” He sprinted up the walk.
Will wiped his bloodied nose with the back of his hand, dragged his fingers through his hair.
“H-here.” Nell rushed forward with her handkerchief. “Let me—“
“I’ve got my own.” Standing, he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his nose with it.
“Will, I...” What did one say when one’s life had just been saved?
“Don’t mention it,” he said without looking at her.
Chapter 21
“I can’t let you see him, Miss Sweeney,” Detective Cook told Nell the following evening when she tried to visit Duncan in the City Hall holding cell where he’d been detained since the previous night.
“I must. I need to speak to him, explain some things.” Like the fact that she had no relationship with Harry—but nor did she, anymore, with Duncan. In the eyes of the church, they were man and wife and always would be, but in her eyes their marriage had ended eight years ago. She had to put that in plain words, make him come to terms with it.
“Your brother didn’t come to till around noon today,” Cook said, “and when he finally grasped where he was, he started raving, sobbing...”
Sobbing?
“The guards couldn’t take it,” Cook said. “They gagged him and put him in a straight waistcoat.”
Nell just stared at him.
“The prison chaplain from Charlestown came for a visit, and your brother had a conniption. He kicked and thrashed, hurled himself against the bars... Split his forehead open and just kept at it.”
“My God.”
“The Black Maria’s coming to take him back to Charlestown in about an hour. Maybe in a day or two, if he’s got his wits about him, you can visit him there. Right now you’d best go home and try to put him out of your mind.”
Nell walked back to Colonnade Row in a desolate trance, her shawl drawn snugly around her to ward off the chill of the evening, remembering how Duncan had looked ten years ago, the first time Jamie had brought him around—so tall and golden, with those eyes that saw right through her and that boyish grin. She tried to reconcile that Duncan in her mind with one who raved and sobbed and threw himself against the bars of his cage. The pain and confusion of it rose in her throat and squeezed, made her eyes prick with tears.
Don’t cry, she commanded herself. Not here on the street, for pity’s sake.
Nell rarely cried; there was little to be gained from surrendering to despair. Yet sometimes, as now, despair was a force of nature that would not be denied.
She would close the door of her room as soon as she got home, she decided, and bury her face in a pillow and soak it with tears, then rinse her face at the wash stand and get on with things. But no sooner had she walked through the front door of the house than Mrs. Mott materialized in the entrance hall. “There’s a gentleman waiting for you in the music room. A Reverend Beals.”
“Oh.”
“Mrs. Hewitt is in the solarium with the child. She thinks she can teach her to paint. She instructed me to tell you that you may have the rest of the evening to yourself, if you wish.”
“Thank you,” Nell said, but the housekeeper had turned and was already walking away.
She found Adam sitting on the piano bench, laconically picking out a tune on the big, darkly polished Steinway—a dirge, from the mournful sound of it.
* * *
“I waited for him at Durgin-Park’s for about forty-five minutes,” Adam said as he handed her down from the hack that had just let them off in front of the Revere House. “When he didn’t show up, I came here. I knocked, but he wouldn’t let me in—told me he was busy—but I knew what he was doing. I could smell it right through the door.”
“You know what opium smells like?” she asked as he paid the driver.
“My ministry takes me to all sorts of places.” He escorted her across the hotel’s marble-floored lobby toward the front desk. “I knew about the morphine—Harry brought it up Tuesday night. Will told me it was just for pain relief, and to keep himself from going into withdrawal. He said, ‘If I ever get hooked on gong again, do me a favor and put a bullet in my brain. It’s quicker.’”
“My key, please,” Nell told the fleshy little desk clerk with as much nonchalance as she could summon.
“Here you go. Have a lovely evening, Mrs. Hewitt...Reverend.”
Adam didn’t look at her as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said as they walked down the hall to Will’s room. “But I never asked them to leave a key at my disposal, nor to call me—“
“Don’t. Please,” he said, exasperation creeping into his tone, as if he wished she would just stop lying to him.
“But—“
“This is it,” he said as they drew up in front of Room 2D. He’d been right; she could smell that distinctive scorched-treacle odor right through the door.
She slid the key into the lock, then hesitated and knocked. “Will?”
Silence. She turned the key and opened the door.
“Oh, Christ, not both of you,” Will muttered.
It took her a moment to locate him in the dim, smoke-hazed room. Although the sun had yet to set, he had the curtains closed. Aside from a waning fire on the hearth, the only real source of light was a little spirit lamp on a lacquered Chinese tray laid out with opium paraphernalia. The tray sat on a low table in front of the couch on which Will reclined in a collarless shirt and trousers, braces dangling, hair uncombed, a cigarette hanging limply in his hand. Ugly abrasions marred his left cheekbone and unshaven chin, and dried blood was crusted in a nostril. Nell suspected he hadn’t washed or changed since last night.
“Will, why are you doing this?” Nell asked.
“I’m a hop fiend, Cornelia. It’s what we do.” His eyes were heavy-lidded, glassy, and his voice had that drowsy-thick quality that it only got when he’d been “rolling the log” for hours.
“How many bowls have you smoked?” she asked.
“Not nearly enough.” Will took a final puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out, then lifted a little pen knife and a bamboo smoking pistol from the tray and proceeded to scrape bits of opium dross off the pipe’s egg-shaped ceramic bowl. He said, “Adam, if you’ve got any business at all wearing that collar, you’ll get her the hell out of here.”
Adam unfastened his clerical collar and tossed it onto a chair.
“We came to talk sense to you,” Nell said. “We care about you. We hate to see—”
“Oh, Christ,” Will growled as he scraped. “Well meaning friends who care what becomes of me. The bane of my bloody existence. Go away, Miss Sweeney. You, too, Father.”
“We’re not leaving,” Adam said.
“Then I shall.” Will snapped the pen knife shut and hauled himself to a sitting position with some effort. “I shall go back to Deng Bao’s, where they let me smoke my gong in peace.”