Murder between the Lines

by Radha Vatsal

  “Not to worry. May I give you a ride home?” Kitty offered.

  “No, thanks.” Elspeth Bright shook her head. “I’m just a short walk away—and besides, I love this weather.” A light flurry of snow had begun to fall, and it scattered around her pale figure like a Christmas scene in a Viennese globe.

  “I’ll telephone you next week.”

  “Perfect. I don’t go back until the new year. Can you believe it—1916? I’ll be eighteen and off to college in the fall.”

  “I’ll look forward to our next meeting.” Kitty held out her hand.

  “Likewise, Miss Weeks. And who knows? By then, I may have some news that will surprise you.”

  “Now you really have my attention.”

  Elspeth Bright smiled. “Merry Christmas, Miss Weeks.”

  “Merry Christmas, Miss Bright.”

  Kitty crossed the street and climbed into the waiting Packard. A cloud seemed to have lifted. She felt light and optimistic and full of hope for the future.

  Chapter Three

  Julian Weeks had invited “old friends” to Christmas dinner, and Kitty, who couldn’t recall when she last met any of his acquaintances from his travels in the East, waited with anticipation for the arrival of the Lanes, a brother and sister pair, whom he had known in China. The Weekses’ spacious apartment in the New Century building on West End Avenue was looking its best—the fire had been lit, and Kitty had decorated the Christmas tree in the corner with ornaments and candles. She went around putting a match to every candle so the tree blazed bright.

  “I don’t see why you set such store by this German bonfire,” Mr. Weeks remarked.

  “A Christmas tree isn’t German,” Kitty replied. She wore a gauzy yellow gown and a pearl bracelet that her father had presented to her that morning. She had given him a Waltham automobile clock, advertised as a perfect gift “for the man who has everything.”

  “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularized it, and what were they?”

  “All right, all right.” Kitty laughed. “It’s a German tradition. You’ve made your point.”

  Ever the contrarian, Mr. Weeks enjoyed confounding received wisdom. He referred to Santa Claus as “the Dutchman” and had gleefully informed Kitty that poinsettias had nothing to do with Christmas—they were a Mexican shrub brought to the United States by an American ambassador of the same name.

  “If it were up to you,” Kitty said, stepping back to admire her handiwork, “we wouldn’t have any traditions at all.”

  “It’s not the traditions I mind,” he replied. “It’s not knowing their past that’s dangerous.”

  “I beg your pardon. How is not knowing that Christmas trees are German or poinsettias Mexican a danger to anyone?” Sometimes, she felt, her father pushed matters too far.

  “They are our enemies—”

  “They’re not supposed to be our enemies.” Kitty felt combative. The United States was not at war with anyone, neither Germany nor Mexico.

  “What they’re supposed to be is neither here nor there. You read the papers, my dear. You see what’s happening—”

  “Pancho Villa and his bandits have been making mischief, and German spies are up to no good. What does that have to do with tradition?”

  Mr. Weeks sighed. “One day, you will understand me.”

  “I don’t think I will.” Kitty kissed the top of his head. Her father’s heart was in the right place, but she thought he often argued just to needle her.

  They had a drink together and watched the snow start to fall again before the Lanes arrived at seven on the dot.

  “What a lovely place you have here.” Sylvia Lane looked around. A smattering of freckles dusted her pert nose, and she wore her shining red hair in an elegant chignon, a shahtoosh shawl draped carelessly over her smooth shoulders. “Much nicer than being stuck in a hotel. Don’t you agree, Hugo?”

  “Absolutely.” Hugo Lane projected the casual ease of a world traveler. He looked in his midforties, about ten years older than his sister. “We haven’t made any permanent arrangements, but Sylvia is keen to set up our own place soon. Thank you for inviting us.”

  “Have you moved permanently to the city?” Kitty asked.

  “That’s our plan, as of the moment.”

  Kitty served mulled wine from a cut-glass bowl, and together, they discussed the Lanes’ time in Russia.

  “I don’t think we ever told you”—Miss Lane brushed away a strand of her hair and turned to Kitty’s father—“but for a month, I filled in for the grand duchesses’ regular tutor.”

  “For the Russian princesses?” Kitty said, amazed.

  “For the Romanov girls, yes. The Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Maria.” Miss Lane gestured in the air. She had a delicate build, like a porcelain doll.

  “What was it like?” For Kitty, the words grand duchesses conjured up visions of balls and palaces and splendor on a scale that would dwarf mere mortals. Anna Karenina, Vronsky, troika rides on wintry nights.

  “Let’s just say that my sister is a teacher,” Mr. Lane said. “And I don’t think those girls do much learning.”

  Mr. Weeks asked about the mad monk Rasputin, and Mr. Lane replied that he had become the tsarina’s favorite by keeping Grand Duke Alexei’s hemophilia in check and that the tsar was playing with fire by resisting changes that would give his people more say in the government.

  “They’ll bring him down if he’s not careful.”

  “Really, Hugo?” Julian Weeks sounded skeptical. “The Romanovs have ruled that country for three hundred years.”

  Hugo Lane grinned. “So they keep reminding us.” The dynasty had celebrated its third century in power with great fanfare just two years ago.

  Sylvia Lane mentioned the sinking of the Japanese liner Yasaka Maru and wondered whether it might lead Japan to join in the war on the side of the Allies. Mr. Weeks told them about Secretary Daniels’s report in which the naval secretary maintained that in order to catch up with other fleets, the United States would require the construction of new vessels to the tune of one and a half billion dollars.

  Kitty kept quiet and listened. There was so much going on these days that it was hard to keep up with it all. She made sure everyone’s glasses were filled and that Mrs. Codd, their cook, was on track with dinner.

  They dined at nine on fish soup, roast beef, rack of lamb, Brussels sprouts, and green beans with almonds. Grace, the Weekses’ maid, served sorbet, candied pecans, and plum pudding doused in rum for dessert.

  Kitty woke up early the next morning, groggy from the full meal and late night. The Lanes had left after eleven. Kitty pulled back the curtains herself, since Grace and Mrs. Codd had taken the twenty-sixth off. Looking out the window, she noticed that some of yesterday’s snow had melted away. Kitty slipped into her dressing gown and padded off to the kitchen to prepare tea for herself and coffee for her father.

  “Thank you, Capability.” Mr. Weeks was reading the newspaper at his usual spot at the table when Kitty brought in the tray. “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

  “You seem to know the Lanes very well.” She had noticed their use of one another’s first names.

  “I told you we’re old friends.”

  Kitty’s gaze wandered across the front page of the Sentinel.

  “I think we’ll be seeing more of them.”

  She didn’t hear a word her father said. Sandwiched between the headlines 7,200 MEN NEEDED FOR MARINE CORPS and TO FREE THE SEAS AND CURB ARMAMENTS MUST BE CHIEF AIM OF PEACE was another that made her pay attention. At first, she thought it was just a curiosity, but only when she finished reading GIRL SOMNAMBULIST IS FROZEN TO DEATH did Kitty grasp its significance.

  • • •

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Mr. Weeks said.

  “How many scientists’ daughters do you think li
ve on the east side of the park and attend Westfield?” Out of respect for the family’s privacy, the article didn’t mention names.

  “Tell me what happened, Capability.” Her father set his paper aside.

  “It’s the strangest thing. It says she was last seen by her family at Christmas Eve dinner. That was on Friday. Yesterday morning, she didn’t come down to breakfast, and she wasn’t to be found in her room. The family started to look for her outside, since she was known to be a sleepwalker. The chauffeur discovered her body about half a block away from home, just inside Central Park. She was wearing only her nightclothes, coat, and boots in the middle of winter. There were no signs of any struggle. Her body was half-covered by snow drifts, and the medical examiner ruled that death was due to exposure.”

  “How bizarre.”

  “Apparently, too much schoolwork affected her mental health… I can’t believe it. I met with her on Wednesday. She was young and so full of hope.” Kitty thought back to the afternoon at Tipton’s. “She had news, she said, news that would surprise me. She seemed to be in perfectly fine spirits.” Other than the awkward encounter with her neighbor, Elspeth Bright had shown no signs of distress. If anything else had been troubling her, Kitty had completely missed it.

  Chapter Four

  Kitty trudged along behind Mr. Weeks. Fresh air and exercise. That was his solution to her distress. As though he couldn’t understand how the unexpected death of someone almost her age might lead Kitty to question the certainty of her own existence. Fresh air and exercise in Central Park, no less—although they wouldn’t be near the area where the girl somnambulist had perished.

  “Lace up your skates,” Mr. Weeks said, sitting on the edge of a bench and tying his. He waited for Kitty and then stepped onto the frozen pond. Why this sudden enthusiasm for ice skating when they could just as easily have taken a walk instead? Although it was still early, there were half a dozen or so other skaters out, and church bells rang in the distance. Kitty and her father glided around the pond a couple of times. In her dazed state, she felt rather like a somnambulist herself.

  “Oh, hello!” Miss Lane floated up to them, her brother beside her. “Fancy seeing you here! Thank you again for a lovely evening.” Her complexion glowed from the exertion, and she wore a neat fur hat that set off her lustrous red hair to perfection.

  Talk about coincidences, Kitty thought. She and her father never went out this early on a Sunday morning. She looked at him and then at Miss Lane, then back at her father again. His face was impassive, as usual.

  No. If there was any interest, it came from the woman.

  “Will you join me, Miss Weeks?” Miss Lane held out her arm. She chattered on while her brother and Julian Weeks skated side by side, but Kitty was in no mood to be cajoled into light conversation. She gave short, quick answers, then, so as not to seem rude, said she was feeling tired and that she would sit down and watch.

  “Are you sure?” Miss Lane asked.

  “Positive.” Kitty made her way to a bench and untied the laces to her skating boots.

  Mr. Weeks and Mr. Lane made space for Miss Lane, and the trio skated around and around, while Kitty sat alone, thinking.

  • • •

  “Guten Tag, Herr Musser.” Kitty arrived at work early and went straight to the paper’s archives, known to staff as the morgue.

  “Guten Tag, fräulein. To what do I owe the pleasure of such an early visit?” The grizzled archivist and his team of young men filed and indexed every story the Sentinel printed so that reporters could use them for reference. “Did you miss Herr Musser over the weekend? ‘Where is my old friend,’ you asked yourself? Or perhaps you have a question that you believe only I can answer.” He grinned as he spoke, his English heavily accented, although he had lived in New York most of his life.

  “You read my mind, Mr. Musser. I was wondering if you happen to know who reported the piece on the girl somnambulist.” Kitty often came down to the basement to chat in his native German, and he would regale her with tidbits from obscure articles.

  “Let me see.” He stared at the pile of papers in front of him. “When was that?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Oh, yes.” He called to his assistants in the back. “Lewis, you know who wrote the somnambulist story?”

  “Page one?” a voice replied.

  Kitty nodded.

  “Yes,” Musser shouted.

  “Phineas Mills.”

  “Phineas Mills,” Musser told Kitty. “He’s a new fellow. Why are you interested?”

  “I’d like the name of the girl who died.”

  “She was a sleepwalker?”

  “So they say.”

  Musser stroked his walrus mustache. “It’s a terrible affliction. My sister had it. We used to wake up in the morning and find cheese and bread crumbs scattered all over the kitchen, and she had no memory of getting up at night, let alone eating the next day’s breakfast.”

  Kitty thanked the old man and headed upstairs, hoping that Mills would be on the early shift. A glass partition on the sixth floor separated the newsroom and its “real” reporters, all men, from the rest of the Sentinel’s employees. As in a gentlemen’s club, women weren’t allowed to even set a foot inside.

  Kitty knew the procedure: she knocked on the pane of glass and waited until one of the reporters noticed her. He called out something to the other men.

  A few minutes later, Mr. Flanagan, a reporter with whom she had worked previously, stepped out, trailing the odor of cigarette fumes. “What brings you upstairs today, Miss Weeks?”

  “I’m here to see Mr. Mills.”

  “Uh-huh. For anything in particular?”

  “He covered a story that I’m interested in.”

  Flanagan raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t a bad sort, but he had no patience for female reporters and believed they didn’t possess the rationality to write an objective account of events. “Back to your old ways, Miss Weeks?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Flanagan. I just thought I might know the victim.”

  “I see… You know what comes of that. First, it’s sympathy, then it’s curiosity, and then, the next thing you know, you’re knocking at doors, asking one too many questions—”

  Kitty interrupted him. “All I want is a name, sir.”

  “That’s how it begins.” The reporter turned on his heel and sauntered back inside, the odor of one too many cigarettes wafting out again.

  A few minutes later, a curly-haired fellow appeared. “I’m Mills. You’re looking for me?”

  Kitty introduced herself. “I heard you wrote the piece about the scientist’s daughter—the girl somnambulist who died?”

  “Yes. That was terribly sad. She was so young.”

  “Would you mind telling me her name?”

  Mills jangled the contents of his pocket. “The parents wanted to keep it quiet.”

  “I think I might have known her.”

  No response. The jangling continued.

  “Was it Bright?” Kitty couldn’t contain herself any longer. “Elspeth Bright?”

  A pause. And then, “That’s right.”

  “Oh.” Kitty crumpled. Up until that point, she had been hoping—not very optimistically, but hoping nonetheless—that she had made a mistake.

  “I’m sorry,” the reporter said. “Was she a friend?”

  “An acquaintance, but I liked her. She had so much promise.”

  Kitty could hardly believe that the girl who had been ready to show the men at Cornell what she was capable of was dead. She felt the loss more deeply than she would have imagined.

  “She was about to turn eighteen.” Mills exhaled. “What a shame. Frankly, I had no idea that sleepwalking could be so dangerous. But the medical examiner confirmed that she died of exposure, and how else would a young woman with her home just paces away freeze
to death?”

  Kitty slowly made her way downstairs, where Jeannie Williams waited for her.

  “Miss Busby wants to see us.”

  The two girls headed to the alcove.

  “So, ladies, what do we have for this coming Saturday?” Miss Busby held out her planner. “I hardly need remind you that it will be the first of January.”

  Kitty remained silent.

  “Jeannie’s covering New Year’s resolutions,” Miss Busby went on. “Everyone loves those. How about you, Miss Weeks?”

  “I do too,” Kitty replied.

  Miss Busby glared. “I’m not asking what you like to read, Miss Weeks. I am asking what you plan to write for this weekend.”

  “Of course.” Kitty smiled apologetically.

  “Pull your head out of the clouds, young lady. I expect some ideas from you tout de suite.”

  Back at her desk, Kitty flipped through old interviews, hoping for inspiration. She turned to Journalism for Women, Arnold Bennett’s excellent guide on the subject. When at a loss, she found it spurred her creativity. Mr. Bennett observed that in the early years, the “sole subjects deemed worthy of a newspaper’s attention were politics, money, and the law… Formerly, newspapers had a morbid dread of being readable.” But things had changed, and now the “aim is to be inclusive, satisfying the public curiosity and at the same time whetting it; for the more the public knows, the more it wants to know. And it refuses any longer to make a task of newspaper-reading. It demands that it shall be amused while it is instructed, like a child at a kindergarten.”

  So, he advised, reporters should wake up in the morning and come up with ideas like “Queer Ways of Sleeping” or “How to Economize Space in a Small Bedroom.”

  Or, Kitty thought, why not disorders of sleep? Why not somnambulism, its causes, effects, and remedies?

  “For New Year’s Day?” Miss Busby didn’t sound pleased when Kitty suggested the idea. She tapped her pencil on her desk in annoyance. “How is it relevant? No, give me something festive, Miss Weeks. We are looking forward to, not dreading, what lies ahead of us.”