MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER

by Cynthia Peale

  She tried again. “I was wondering if you—ah—ever had any dealings with Mary Flaherty?”

  He’d been smiling at her—a bit too familiarly?—but now his smile faded, and as his finely chiseled features subtly changed expression, his eyes became cold. “Dealings, miss? How d’you mean?”

  “I mean—” Well, what did she mean after all? She could hardly put it to him plainly. “I mean, did you know her?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “How well?”

  “Not well. I knew who she was.”

  “Did you ever speak to her?”

  “Yes, miss. Now and again, I did.”

  The Irish were reputed to be a mysterious race, hard to fathom. She didn’t know any Irish well except for Desmond Delahanty. I should have asked him to accompany me, she thought; Garrett will never tell me anything on my own.

  “But you weren’t—ah—friends with her?”

  What was it she saw in his eyes? Contempt? Surely not. “No, miss.”

  “So you wouldn’t know about any—ah—particular friends she might have had? Apart from here at the Bower, I mean.”

  “Particular friends? No, miss. I—” He broke off, as if he’d been about to tell her something and had thought better of it.

  “What, Garrett? Please tell me.” Do you know that Inspector Crippen suspects you? she thought.

  “Well, I was goin’ to say, I don’t think she was a friendly sort of girl, if you know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Well—” He lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug. He was wearing a faded, tattered jacket and mismatched trousers, but even his ragged clothing, even his extreme thinness (and why did not Cook feed him up along with the reverend and all the Bower girls and the occasional tramp?) could not detract from his striking good looks. In another lad, those looks might have made his fortune, but for him they were no help at all. Oh, Garrett, she thought, life is so very unfair. Help me to keep it from being even more unfair to you than it has been already.

  “You mean, she gave herself airs?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Thought she was too good for most of the people here?”

  “That’s it. She never would have bothered with the likes of me.”

  She’d have done better if she had, Caroline thought.

  “You didn’t like her?”

  Again he shrugged, as if the matter were of no importance. “I suppose I didn’t. What of it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. And you weren’t here on Sunday, of course.”

  “No, miss.”

  “You don’t really have any contact with the girls here, do you?”

  He looked faintly puzzled. “No, miss. It’s not my place to do that.”

  “Of course not. So you don’t know any of them particularly well, do you?”

  “My ma would have my hide, miss. She thinks it’s bad enough I work here. She says—” A faint flush rose to his thin cheeks. “She says they’re bad, these girls.”

  “So you’ve never become friendly with any of them?”

  “No, miss.”

  “You didn’t know Bridget at all?”

  “No, miss.”

  “Never spoke to her?”

  “No, miss.”

  He was getting restless under her questioning; no doubt he wanted—needed—to be about his work.

  “Thank you, Garrett. I won’t keep you. Oh—just one more thing.”

  He had turned away with a respectful nod to her. Now he stopped short, but he didn’t turn back.

  “Garrett?”

  He faced her. “Yes, miss?”

  She was scrabbling in her reticule, where she kept a small store of useful pamphlets, timetables, and the like. “Can you—could you just read this railway schedule for me? I seem to have forgotten my spectacles.”

  He looked at the little scrap of printed paper she held out to him, but he didn’t take it. “I don’t read, miss.”

  She felt a little stab of astonishment even as his admission told her what she wanted to know. “You mean, you can’t? You never learned?”

  Some people would have been ashamed to admit it, but he was not. He regarded her coolly, and with dignity.

  “That’s right, miss. Most of us don’t, at home. Only Michael, in the primary school. He’s learning.”

  “I see. Well, thank you anyway, Garrett.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  As he made his way out of the kitchen, she watched him go. There was a settlement house in the North End, with classes in reading and writing English. Perhaps she could persuade him to sign up. His limp was one thing; not to be able to read was far worse.

  Or perhaps he could read after all. Perhaps he’d lied to her.

  As he’d lied about Bridget. Liza had said that Garrett and Bridget had had words—that Bridget had been afraid of him, had complained that he was harassing her.

  Was that true? It must be true. Why would Liza make up such a thing?

  So while Garrett might deny harassing Bridget—probably he would, in fact—why would he deny ever speaking to her at all?

  “And you believe him, Caroline?” Ames asked.

  “I don’t know what to believe. But that he can’t read—yes, I believe that.”

  She sipped her tea, thought about taking an iced lemon cookie, and decided against. Her warm-weather wardrobe, such as it was, would never fit if she didn’t lose ten pounds. She hadn’t worn it last spring because she’d still been in mourning for her mother. Now, with the passing of another year, she was sure she’d have to take every single item to the dressmaker to be let out.

  She had come home from Bertram’s Bower half an hour ago, a little later than usual, and both Dr. MacKenzie and her brother had been quick to tell her they’d been worried about her. Never mind what she’d been able to learn at the Bower, Ames said, the city was a dangerous place just now.

  “I saw a man being set upon in the Public Garden as we came home,” he told her. “Poor chap—he’d stopped to ask a lady if he could assist her, and she started to scream about the Ripper. In no time, half a dozen men had tackled him. Lucky the fellow got away with his life.”

  “Chadwick did us all a bad turn with his mischief-making,” MacKenzie said.

  “He might at least have warned us,” Caroline replied indignantly. “Do you know, Addington, I feel as though he—well, as though he betrayed us somehow. I mean, how could he come here to dinner, and sit among us all for the entire evening, and not warn us what he’d done?”

  “He did warn us, in a way,” Ames said. He was standing at his usual place by the hearth; as he spoke, he stared into the simmering flames as if there he would find the answers that eluded him.

  “How do you mean?” Caroline asked.

  “Well, he told us about the theory that the Ripper had escaped to America. To Boston, in fact.”

  “That is hardly the same as warning us that he was about to set the city on its ear and throw people into a panic. Really, Addington! The nerve of the man! To write such an irresponsible piece—and in that trashy newspaper.”

  He half turned to throw her a smile. “No, it isn’t the same. But still, it gives Crippen something more to chew on. Perhaps it will deflect him from the Irish boy. Who else did you speak to at the Bower besides Garrett O’Reilly?”

  She recounted her interviews with Matron Pratt, with Liza and Katy, with Cook. When she finished, they were silent for a time. Darkness had long since fallen; the shutters on the lavender-glass windows were closed, keeping them safe against the night.

  Suddenly, involuntarily, Caroline shivered—so violently that MacKenzie, noticing as he noticed everything she did, took a crocheted afghan from the sofa and offered it to her.

  “No—no, I am not cold, Doctor, thank you.” Just the opposite, in fact; what with the fire and the closed pocket doors, the room was uncomfortably warm. She wished she could unbutton the long, tight sleeves of her dress and loosen the high collar that, j
ust now, threatened to strangle her; she wished she could be rid of her corset, remove the binding whalebone stays that constricted her waist.

  And yet, so warm, she shivered—with fear, with dread of what the dark might bring. Yes, Matron was right to be strict with the Bower’s girls, and tonight she must be stricter still. Tonight she must forbid them—literally on pain of death—to leave the safety of the Bower, to venture out into the shadowy, menacing streets of the South End, where lurked a nameless, faceless shadow of a man who had killed two of them already, and who might kill a third.

  Like Jack the Ripper.

  No. Impossible. It was too horrible even to contemplate—that here in Boston, this sane, safe, neatly compact and tidy little city, was harbored the homicidal lunatic who had terrorized all of vast, dark London three years before.

  Ames approached the tea tray, took a brandy snap filled with whipped cream, and sat down. “We had a talk with Professor James this afternoon,” he told Caroline.

  She brightened. She liked Professor James, particularly since he had once confessed to her that he preferred the sensation novels of Diana Strangeways to the weightier works of his brother Henry.

  “Was he helpful?”

  Ames shook his head. “I don’t know yet, but it is always enlightening to talk to him all the same. If nothing else, it helps me to sort out my own thoughts.” He swallowed the last of the confection and sipped his tea. “And in fact I have been thinking, Caroline”—when do you not, dear brother?—“about what it is that connects those two girls, Mary and Bridget.”

  He’d set down his cup, and now he ticked off his points one by one on his long, slender fingers.

  “Both were Irish. They were roommates. Is either of those facts pertinent to their death? Or—”

  He cocked his head at her. His eyes were fixed on her, but she realized that he did not see her. He had the look that he wore when he was sorting something out in his mind—his clever, even brilliant mind. Caroline had long since accepted the fact that of the two of them, Addington was the brilliant one. She didn’t much care. Brilliance in a woman would be a hindrance.

  He was speaking and she was missing it.

  “… the fact that they were both residents of Bertram’s Bower? Is that what connected them?”

  “I don’t know, Addington.”

  “No. Nor do I. But consider: If it is Bertram’s Bower that connects them, then we must take into account not only the Bower itself, but its surroundings.”

  Restless, he got to his feet and began to pace.

  “But perhaps more to the point,” he said on his second turn back and forth from the shuttered windows, “has it struck you that Agatha Montgomery is the only person we have encountered who seems to believe that Mary Flaherty was a paragon of—well, I can hardly say virtue—but of many other admirable qualities?”

  “You mean, Agatha was the only person who liked her,” Caroline said.

  “Yes. That is exactly what I mean.”

  “Perhaps Bridget liked her too.”

  “Perhaps she did. But no one has told us that, and Bridget, now, cannot tell us either. So as far as we know, Mary Flaherty was heartily disliked by all who knew her.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Caroline said.

  “It might be significant, don’t you think?”

  He had paused by the fire, but now he started to pace again.

  “Consider what we have,” he said. “We have a number of people who disliked Mary Flaherty. The girl Verna more than disliked her, she threatened bodily harm to her. But in light of the fact that she is ill, unable to rise from her sickbed, I believe we can safely eliminate her from our speculations.

  “Then we have the other girls at the Bower. Apparently none of them liked Mary, but we have discovered no one there who seems capable of carrying that dislike to the extent of murder.”

  “Garrett?” murmured Caroline.

  “Yes. Then we have Garrett O’Reilly. Whom Crippen seems to have settled upon as his perpetrator.”

  “But, Addington, he cannot—”

  “I know. He cannot read, and so undoubtedly he did not concoct that ciphered note. Which in any case Crippen does not believe has anything to do with Mary Flaherty’s death. But you have told us, Caro, that Garrett denied speaking to Bridget, while the two girls you spoke to insist that he did. So that leaves him with a cloud of suspicion hanging over him, despite Delahanty’s and Martin Sweeney’s vouching for him.”

  “I don’t believe that he is capable—” Caroline began.

  “Possibly not. But the cloud is there, and there it will remain until he is cleared. Now. Who else do we have to consider? Matron?”

  “She is certainly strong enough,” MacKenzie offered. “And filled with—how would you describe it, Ames? Hate?”

  “Yes. She is that—filled with hate for the very girls who are in her not-so-tender care. But why would she do it? Why would she be moved to kill not one but two of them?”

  “If she’d learned that Mary was in the family way, and thus might bring disgrace on the Bower, perhaps she thought to eliminate her.”

  Ames snorted. “And Bridget as well? That is going a bit far, is it not, even for a woman like Mrs. Pratt. To risk not one but two murders, thus twice putting her own neck in jeopardy? I agree with you, the motive may have been there, but still. She is hardly a sympathetic figure, but whether she is a murderess—hard to say.”

  “The typewriter salesman,” MacKenzie said. “Remember that he had an argument with Mary the day before she was killed.”

  “Yes. I think we cannot eliminate him—or not, at least, until we have a chance to speak to him. A traveling salesman already has points against him, given the reputation of the breed.”

  Caroline shifted in her chair. Her shoulder was aching again, undoubtedly because of the weather. She’d ask Margaret to get her a hot water bottle tonight, and she’d retire early and read a Diana Strangeways in bed.

  “We still don’t know very much about Mary,” she said. “Perhaps the person who killed her is someone we never heard of—someone from her past, someone with a longstanding grudge against her.”

  “Yes.” Ames nodded. “That may be our answer after all. But then, once more, we are left with the question of why that same person—if it was the same person—killed Bridget also. I am convinced that the two deaths are connected, so this hypothetical person must have known both girls. And they had different backgrounds, so they probably did not know each other before they came to the Bower. No, I do not believe that our man is someone from either girl’s past. He is someone who knew them both here and now, and for whatever reason found it necessary to … eliminate them both. I believe absolutely that Mary’s condition led to her death—someone wanting to get rid of incriminating evidence, if you will. Mary and her unborn child being the evidence. But the second girl …”

  “Who may have known about Mary’s condition,” MacKenzie offered.

  “Yes. Probably she did. And so to silence her—”

  “You are forgetting Nigel Chadwick’s theory,” Caroline said. She heard the bitterness in her voice; she couldn’t help it. All the triumph of her dinner party had vanished, replaced by righteous anger at Chadwick’s betrayal.

  “Jack the Ripper? Here in Boston?” Ames’s mouth curved into a sour smile. “An interesting idea, but despite all the journalistic to-do, not likely.”

  “Why not likely?” MacKenzie asked. “The method is the same, the type of victim, the locale—”

  “The South End of Boston is not Whitechapel, Doctor.”

  “No. But still, it is the haunt of a number of dubious characters—riffraff off the rails, single men in rooming houses—”

  “Some of the houses there are very fine,” Caroline said in a small surge of hometown pride. “Just as fine as any in the Back Bay. It is just that—well, the district never quite caught on. And the population there is not all riffraff. There are a number of churches in the South End, and all
of them well attended. Why, the Reverend Montgomery regularly preaches every Sunday to an overflow crowd. He is a splendid preacher, so they say; I’ve never heard him myself.”

  The Reverend Montgomery. She hadn’t told Addington all that Katy had said about him. It was hard to believe, but still—

  “Addington,” she began.

  “For the moment, I think we must continue to believe that the two deaths are connected,” he said. Something was nagging at the back of his mind, but he could not call it up. “Or that Bridget knew something, perhaps, about the murder itself. The only other possibility is that she was murdered in copycat fashion to muddle the case. Which, I grant you, is a distinct possibility, but hardly helpful.”

  Caroline tried again. “Addington, about the Reverend Montgomery—”

  “Yes? What about him?”

  “One of the Bower girls told me this afternoon that he—”

  But how could she say it? It was too awful to think about, let alone speak of in mixed company.

  She’d caught his attention, however, and he stared at her, waiting, his expression one of wary anticipation.

  “Yes, Caro? That he what?”

  “I can’t believe it. It is too grotesque—”

  “Grotesque? What are you talking about?”

  “Katy told me that she’d seen the reverend—oh, I don’t know what to call it! Molesting seems too strong a word, but—she said she’d seen him with one of the Bower’s girls—and with Mary too—behaving in a—an improper way. A too-familiar way, I mean. And she said—as I’ve told you—that Mary threw herself at him in a most forward fashion. She even saw Mary coming out of the rectory one time, looking—disheveled. And I wonder if—”

  She broke off at the sound of the door knocker and, a moment later, Margaret hurrying to answer. Let it not be Inspector Crippen, she prayed.

  The pocket doors slid open. Margaret appeared, followed closely by the bulky, imposing figure of Cousin Wainwright.

  Caroline’s heart sank. Cousin Wainwright might be even worse than Elwood Crippen. Undoubtedly he had come to reprimand Addington—to warn him once again to stay clear of this case. Her face felt stiff as she smiled at him. She’d promised to deal with him, and she hadn’t. Well, now she would.