Murder between the Lines

by Radha Vatsal

  Kitty turned away from the river to a shady path that wound its way toward the club’s golf course.

  “The example of America must be a special example,” the president had said in his rousing speech in the aftermath of the Lusitania tragedy. “The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not.”

  The clack of hedge cutters jolted Kitty from her reverie. A gardener trimming bushes with a ferocious pair of blades scowled as she walked by.

  She came across a groundskeeper shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow outside a two-and-a-half-story yellow-brick building. With its tiled roof and arched windows reaching all the way to the roofline, it looked formal, but the layout didn’t seem right for a residence. “What is this place?”

  “It’s the stables, miss.”

  “Is that so?” Kitty smiled to herself. Some horses had all the luck.

  A couple strolled along arm in arm. He was big and burly in his formal attire; she was about half his size and wore a lavender gown with muttonchop sleeves that overwhelmed her petite form.

  “I don’t know what we’re doing here,” the woman said to her companion before her words were drowned out by the sound of touring cars crunching down the gravel drive.

  Kitty hurried back to the party, where the band had begun to play, and chose an inconspicuous position beside a pillar on the terrace from which to observe the goings-on.

  The lawns soon filled with gentlemen in dark suits and ladies in wispy organza gowns. Pearls glowed around necks; diamonds sparkled on languid wrists. Silver trays bobbed up and down as waiters made their way through the crowd, proffering bubbly drinks and savory appetizers. Children darted between the grown-ups’ legs.

  Bang! “You’re dead, Willie!” A gunshot went off. Kitty searched for the source of the sound.

  One of the boys had fired his toy pistol.

  “I’m not Willie,” his playmate cried indignantly.

  “Are too.”

  “Why don’t you play Cowboys and Indians?” Kitty suggested.

  The boys stared at her in confusion. “Why would we want to play that?”

  “Look at us,” the first one demanded, “and tell me who looks like Kaiser Bill and who”—he stuck his hand in his pocket and assumed a debonair pose—“resembles King George.”

  Kitty laughed. No one seemed to care for the German kaiser these days. She wondered whether he was as bad as the press made out.

  The boys ran off, continuing their battle, and she found herself drawn to another conversation. Two men, one with a chest full of medals, discussed the details of the Morgan shooting. How Mr. Morgan’s attacker panicked and fired when he saw the 250-pound banker charge toward him—and then found himself pinned below the massive financier, who toppled forward when the bullets hit his groin and thigh. How the Morgans’ butler had conked the fellow in the head with a lump of coal after Mrs. Morgan pried away his guns. The would-be assailant was in police custody.

  “Wouldn’t you know, he’s German,” the man with the medals said. “Thank goodness he’s safely behind bars,” the other replied.

  “Doing a little eavesdropping, were we?” Hotchkiss startled Kitty by materializing noiselessly beside her.

  “I’m just doing my job.” She felt her cheeks flush.

  “Aren’t we all?” Tiny moon-shaped gold cuff links flashed from under his cuffs as he clasped his hands together. “Would you like me to help you put names to faces?”

  “That would be wonderful.” Although Kitty and her father went to parties from time to time, they didn’t hobnob with New York’s high society, and it would be important for her to identify the most important guests in her article as well as to say who was wearing what.

  “The woman with the turban”—he nodded toward a striking figure in iridescent Turkish-style pantaloons—“is Mrs. Poppy Clements. She’s the wife of Mr. Clement Clements, the theater producer, and is a playwright herself. The handsome buck to her left is Justice Stevens, a cad of the first order.

  “He’s with his grandmama,” Mrs. Basshor’s secretary continued with a smirk, as a good-looking fellow with an old lady on his arm made eyes at all the pretty girls going by. “She’s richer than Croesus, and he has to keep on her good side.” He turned to another cluster of guests. “Those over there are the Goelets in conversation with the Burrall-Hoffmans.

  “Mrs. Wilson Alexander is behind them in red and blue. Mr. Wilson Alexander has the white beard. There’s John Parson with the glasses. Miss Winnie Slade is wearing a wonderful bracelet—do you see those emeralds?”

  Kitty nodded. She wished she could take notes, but Miss Busby had forbidden her from writing anything. “Notepads and pencils staunch the flow of conversation, so it all stays in here.” She had tapped her temple.

  “And… Oh no.” Hotchkiss pretended to take cover. “Here comes Hunter Cole with his wife, Aimee.”

  Kitty spotted the couple she had seen wandering about the grounds stop to speak to the turbaned Mrs. Clements.

  “What’s wrong with them, Mr. Hotchkiss?” she said, surprised that he would be so indiscreet in front of a reporter.

  “Have you seen her dress?” The secretary sneered. “He’s a bully, and she’s a nobody—but, of course, you didn’t hear me say that.”

  Kitty watched the couple for a few moments; when she looked up once more, the secretary had vanished.

  What a strange man, she thought to herself before she stepped out onto the lawns.

  Kitty felt the urge to mingle. These were people whom a girl in her position might be expected to know, that is, if her father took more trouble to socialize. Realizing that she didn’t have to wait to be introduced because she was there on business, Kitty approached the first lady she saw heading her way—Mrs. Goelet. The older woman seemed amused by the young reporter and was soon joined by the inquisitive Mrs. Burrall-Hoffman. Kitty had no illusions that the women were interested in her for her own sake. From their remarks she could tell that what they really wanted to know was how someone who dressed well and spoke well could be there to work, and that they wouldn’t mind a mention in the Page’s Social Scene column.

  “Isn’t she delightful?” Mrs. Basshor joined the group and took Kitty’s arm as well as the credit for her being there. “I told dear Frieda Eichendorff that her husband’s paper must send someone other than that beanpole, Helena Busby, who usually comes.”

  Kitty didn’t care to hear Miss Busby described so disparagingly, but this was hardly the moment to leap to her boss’s defense.

  Mrs. Basshor beamed at her friends. “The fireworks will start in fifteen minutes or so.” Her smile hardened as she turned to Kitty. “I look forward to your description, my dear. Don’t let me down.”

  The women drifted away to find their husbands, and Kitty returned to the terrace, pleased with the results of her first foray into social reporting. She hadn’t gone into journalism to become a society columnist, but she had to admit that the profession had its pluses: one could speak to whomever one wanted, for starters.

  Given her lack of formal training, Kitty realized that she couldn’t afford to be choosy. Moreover, the skills she required today—to observe, ask questions, come forward when necessary, and disappear into the scenery when not—were all skills required for any good reporter, even a newswoman.

  A sudden flurry of movement caught her eye. A feminine voice, shrill enough to be heard above the din of the party, called, “I’m sorry!”

  A figure in a lavender gown with muttonchop sleeves pushed her way through the guests.

  “She bumped into me on purpose,” Mrs. Cole hissed to her heavyset husband as they made their way toward the terrace.

  A Conversation with the Author

  What inspired you to write Murder Between the
Lines?

  I knew I would like Murder Between the Lines, which is the second novel in the Kitty Weeks mystery series, to start a few months after the events of the first book, A Front Page Affair. I also thought I would anchor it to President Wilson’s second marriage, which took place in December 1915. As I was browsing through the papers to see what else was going on at the time, I came across the headline “Girl Somnambulist Is Frozen to Death,” and it caught my eye at once. I immediately thought that this was an occurrence that would fascinate Kitty.

  That article described a situation similar to the one that takes place in the book—the girl, said to be a sleepwalker, goes out at night lightly clad and is found the next morning frozen to death. If I recall correctly, she was also a boarding school student and her sleepwalking was put down to too much stress on her nerves caused by studying, and that was it. There was no crime—it was just an incident that happened.

  So, I asked myself, what if foul play had been involved? And I built the character of Elspeth Bright around that and gave her her own backstory. She’s a completely fictional character inspired by a death, and an explanation for that death, that I thought Kitty would find very unsatisfying and would motivate her to dig deeper.

  As an aside, when I was reading about suicide reports of young women during the 1910s, I noticed that whatever stress they were facing was often attributed to too much time spent reading and/or studying.

  How has Kitty grown between A Front Page Affair and Murder Between the Lines? Will she change over the course of the series?

  In A Front Page Affair, Kitty is new at the Ladies’ Page. She’s an apprentice, like an intern today. Over the course of the first book, Kitty learns a lot—she learns that she’s able to investigate situations that trouble her and that she’s willing to take risks for what she believes in. She continues to build on those traits in the second book. As we see from the way Georgina Howell reacts when they first meet, Kitty’s work is now well-known, even though she isn’t personally known by name. She becomes someone other girls look up to—but that’s a problem, because while she appears to be independent (and in many respects, she is independent), she relies on her father financially and emotionally. When Georgina approaches Kitty for help, Kitty realizes there’s not much she can do if some trouble should befall Georgina.

  As the series continues, she will continue to evolve. (She’s still just nineteen years old in this book.) We’ll see how she balances her ambitions for her career with her relationships. As her understanding of the society and politics around her deepens, the problems she has to solve become more complicated. It’s all part of her coming-of-age story, which mirrors the more general coming-of-age story of women at this time. Women were fighting to be taken seriously, to be considered full citizens, and to be given the right to vote.

  You attended boarding school in Connecticut for two years. What was it like? Did it influence how you conceived Westfield Hall?

  I grew up in Mumbai, India, and came to boarding school in Connecticut for the final two years of school. One thing led to another—I went on to college at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, then to graduate school at Duke, where I met my husband.

  Coming to the United States so young, on my own, was definitely a life-changing experience in more ways than one. I was sixteen when I arrived. I’d had what I would say was a privileged upbringing in India, and then suddenly, I was in a new environment away from the support of my family. What I saw was a situation that in fundamental ways was the same as the one I’d left—there were “insiders” and “outsiders,” but in India, I was on the inside, and here, I was on the outside. And, like Kitty, I think it made me a better observer, and it taught me not to take anything for granted.

  I wasn’t aware of any kind of hazing going on at school, but what I did draw on in terms of conceiving Westfield Hall was the sense of the small, enclosed world that a boarding school creates. Everybody knows everyone’s business, it’s hard to hide, problems can get magnified, and because you live there, there’s no place to escape.

  The sense of Westfield being its own world is also reinforced by its general layout, which is similar to the boarding school I attended. We had a low stone wall surrounding the campus, a pond, a main building, and some separate buildings, but basically, the school wasn’t part of the town—it stood apart from it.

  Can you say more about the strong female characters in this book?

  Well, there’s Kitty, Miss Busby, Miss Lane, and Mrs. Belmont, for starters. Growing up, my family was very female-dominated, and my great-aunt especially was a petite, fearless woman who was very much involved in culture and politics. Watching her be herself without any self-doubt made a huge impact on me. The women I read about from the 1910s—like Anne Morgan, who appears in A Front Page Affair, and Alva Belmont here—remind me of her in that they never seemed afraid to speak their minds, they set lofty goals, and they certainly don’t seem to apologize for being who they are. I find those characters very refreshing, and we see them in different ways reflected in Miss Busby and Miss Lane and, of course, in Kitty. But Kitty is coming of age in a rapidly changing world, and she does have doubts about her place in it. What’s fun is seeing how she responds to her doubts and everything else that’s thrown at her.

  Do you have the entire Kitty Weeks series plotted before the books are written, or does it unfold with each book separately?

  I’ve had the general arc of the series planned from the beginning, with three parallel but related tracks: it’s a coming-of-age story for Kitty; a coming-of-age story for women, who win the right to vote in 1920; and it’s a coming-of-age story for the country, which goes from being essentially a second-tier nation at the start of World War I to a leading player at the end of it. The series feels Edwardian when it starts, and modernity starts creeping in as it progresses. I haven’t plotted each book down to the last detail, but I have a rough idea of how the books will all play into the larger narrative.

  Do you hear back from readers? How do you stay in touch?

  I do—and I love hearing the feedback. It ranges from people who have really enjoyed the working girl and journalism angle, to suggestions of books set in the period that I might be interested in, to questions about what will happen to Kitty in the future. Readers mostly connect with me through my website, www.radhavatsal.com, and sometimes via Facebook. I always try to answer every message I receive, and I enjoy staying in touch. I also send out a newsletter with historical trivia and updates. Staying in touch with readers keeps me going!

  Acknowledgments

  As they say, it takes a village. Many thanks to my family and friends, near and far, and also fellow readers and writers who I’ve met recently and who have made the first year of being in print so rewarding. We’re in touch via email, Facebook, my newsletter, and in person—you know who you are.

  Particular thanks to Anna Michels, my editor at Sourcebooks. It’s a pleasure and privilege to work with someone who is so thoughtful, thorough, patient, and understanding. Kitty Weeks and I are grateful to be guided by such a steady hand. My sincere thanks also to Shana Drehs for her input. Liz Kelsch in publicity, Heather Hall, and the rest of the team at Sourcebooks have all been a pleasure to collaborate with. Liz has made working on book promotion something I look forward to!

  I feel very fortunate to be represented by Mitch Hoffman at Aaron Priest, who brings more to the table than I could have asked for and who has tirelessly helped me make sense of the challenges facing a working writer—which is no small feat. And thank you to Kathy Daneman for her efforts and hard work on A Front Page Affair.

  Neither this book nor the series would be possible without Daniel Welt’s invaluable advice. I can’t thank him and our daughters enough for their good humor, love, and unfailing support even when I appear to be missing in action.

  About the Author

  Photo credit: Juliette Conroy

  Radha Vatsa
l is the author of A Front Page Affair, the first novel in the Kitty Weeks mystery series. Her fascination with the 1910s began when she studied female filmmakers and action-film heroines of silent cinema at Duke University, where she received her PhD from the English department. She was born in India and lives with her husband and two daughters in New York City.

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