Beacon Street Mourning

by Dianne Day

  I was determined to help this young man, whether he wanted help or not. He, at least, could be saved. He could have a future. Augusta Bingham Simmons Jones—however many other names she may have had—must not be allowed to ruin every single life she’d ever touched.

  From the shadows where I sat, I spoke his name gently, knowing he would not expect it.

  He turned around, not so gently, and with something I did not expect: the flash and report from the muzzle of his gun.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HIS SHOT WENT wide; he hadn’t aimed but had fired his gun in a reflex action. I had my revolver in hand beneath my cloak, and I was fairly certain I could see him better than he could see me—though behind my heavy black veil it was like seeing through a glass darkly.

  I could have fired back but I didn’t want to, for a lot of reasons. They all raced through my mind: with a small gun I should shoot to kill or not at all; my first shot would give away my location and if I missed I’d be sorry I’d given myself away; I didn’t want to kill Larry Bingham. The cloak was voluminous, it relied on its many folds to keep the wearer warm and had only one point of closure, at the collar. I held the revolver ready with my finger on the trigger. A revolver has no safety, and with one sweep of my arm, the cloak would fall back. Yes, I could wait.

  “Where are you?” Larry called out in a hoarse voice. “I didn’t mean to shoot! Honest, I didn’t mean it.”

  Something in the quality of his voice rang like a warning bell in my mind. I didn’t move.

  “I know you didn’t mean to shoot,” I said, injecting warmth into my voice, although it is difficult to feel truly warm toward someone when you are holding guns on one another.

  “Show yourself!” he pleaded—and I thought: Ah! So he cannot see me after all.

  “Please,” he said, “let me see you.”

  “Soon,” I said, “you’ll see me soon. You know your mother’s dead, Larry?”

  “Dead! Yes, dead. I know. I did it, I know! I did it did it did it!”

  “You shot your mother?” I took a step forward. I hadn’t meant to move, it was involuntary, I was drawn by his confession, not wanting to believe it, hoping I’d misunderstood what he said.

  Larry didn’t reply. He stood on the back steps, the arm with the gun still raised, out in front of his body, in the dim light looking like a dark cutout of a man up against a dark cutout of a tall house with doors and windows. Everything was outlines and shadows.

  I took another step, encouraged by his silence and wanting to be able to see the expression on his face so that I could use that as a clue to how I might proceed.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”

  He raised the arm with the gun higher, though it trembled visibly, and pointed it at me. “You know why,” he said. “Because you’re evil, you had to die. You’re a thing from hell now, you stay away from me!”

  Omigod! In a flash I understood: To Larry I loomed like a specter in that huge black cloak, for I am a tall woman; with the hat and the long black veil, coming out of the dark of night, I must have seemed a terror to behold. He thought he was seeing the black, vengeful ghost of his mother.

  I said no more. I stood stock-still perhaps twelve feet away. I was afraid if I spoke or moved even a fraction of an inch, he would empty all his shots into me, even if he did think I was a dark ghost.

  “I’m not doing it anymore, you understand, you got that?” Larry was weeping desperately. “All my life, that’s all I was good for. I was a boy, I could do all the dirty things, the nasty things. You taught me, you know you did, you made me do it. I stole for you, I hurt people for you, I killed for you, I even went to jail for you, and did you care? No, you didn’t, you just said I’d get out in a couple of years because I was a kid. I got out all right, but you don’t know—”

  Larry broke off, sobbing. The arm with the gun had begun to droop, and as he swiped at his streaming eyes with his other hand I tensed my muscles, wondering if I could run at him, catch him off balance, bring him down.

  But then I remembered why I had my gun—I couldn’t run anymore, my legs weren’t strong enough yet.

  “You don’t know!” Larry’s voice rose to a scream. “What they do to you in jail, it’s horrible, they hurt you!” Now his voice came back down to a normal pitch, and was somehow all the more eerie for its seeming normality. “They hurt you like you hurt me, like you made me hurt other people. I didn’t want to do it anymore when I got out.”

  He noticed his gun was dropping and he brought it back up, stood taller, seemed to gather himself—then slowly he moved his gun arm straight out to his side. “I got that poison for you the one time. The one last time, because you said it was so important and I wanted to do it for you. But then I made a mistake, one lousy mistake, and you treated me like dirt.

  “Maybe I am dirt,” he said firmly, “but you’re not going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  Larry Bingham crooked his elbow, bringing the gun to his temple, and shot himself through the head.

  TWO DAYS LATER Michael returned from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut with a whole briefcase full of information about Augusta née Bingham—for that was her maiden name—Simmons Jones. He was obliged to share the material with Detectives McLaughlin and O’Neal without delay, for it illuminated and confirmed Larry Bingham’s disjointed confession, which I had written down for them in all the detail I could recall.

  As it happened, the detectives themselves had begun to look into Augusta’s past, for as they went around our Beacon Hill and Back Bay community on their interviews, not a soul had had much good to say about “the new Mrs. Jones,” and this made them suspicious. They surmised she might have made an enemy here or there, but like me, they had not suspected her son.

  The only bad part about Michael having dug up all this information was that he had to tell the detectives about our private investigation agency, so that they could understand not only why Michael and I had taken so much on ourselves but also how he’d had the expertise to pull it all together. Of course, Michael didn’t say anything about having the names and addresses of all Augusta’s relatives, which had made everything a good deal easier. That, along with public records and newspaper archives in the towns concerned, had done the job.

  Augusta Bingham had two sons out of wedlock at an early age, possibly incestuously. Her one and only advantage was that she was from a “good” family determined to cover up their sins, and part of the cover-up was to act as if nothing unusual had happened, Augusta continued with her lessons and so on. The family arranged to have the older boy raised by an aunt and uncle and passed off as their son, her nephew. (Presumably this was the nephew I rather narrowly escaped being forced to marry—though nothing could make me believe Father would really have forced me if it had ever come to that.)

  But when the younger boy was born, Augusta had refused to part with him; instead she ran away from her home in New Jersey and went to live in a small coastal town in Connecticut, taking her baby with her. This baby grew up to be Larry Bingham. Whether Larry Bingham would have been different if he had been raised, like his older brother, by someone other than his mother is impossible to know.

  What is known from reports of the Simmons family (into which Augusta married when Larry was eight years old) was that Larry was always a peculiar child. He had few playmates, animals shied away from him, he was the sort to pull the wings off flies and legs off beetles and to delight in their deformity, and so on. He got in trouble at school. He stole; often he stole the way a cat kills, to take the prize home to Mother. When he was sixteen years old he was sentenced to prison for having set fire to an abandoned house. Unfortunately, a man had been in the house and burned to death; Larry claimed he didn’t know the man was in the house and so had received the minimum sentence.

  Also around this time, Mr. Simmons died after a lingering illness.

  After Detectives McLaughlin and O’Neal made note of that, and remarked on my father’s al
so having had a lingering illness, Michael told them about the benzene.

  The chemical analysis of that bottle of Dr. Zahray’s Hercules Tonic for Males came back the same day Michael returned from his trip. The chemical that was present without authorization, as it were, in the tonic was benzene. It just so happened that the “cleaning fluid” in that large brown bottle I’d found in Augusta’s room was also benzene. Father’s symptoms were consistent with long, slow poisoning by benzene.

  A maliciously clever woman, she had put it in the tonic that Father had consumed by the truckload in his futile attempt to please her sexually. Only God knew what else she had put it in—other than his food at the hospital.

  The Simmons children in Connecticut subsequently had their father’s body exhumed and examined. He had died of arsenic, probably from rat poison, also in a long-drawn-out manner.

  I never told anyone, not even Michael, about Sarah Kirk and the digitoxin. I said I was satisfied to know about the benzene and did not want Father’s rest disturbed. There was no need to take it further.

  In April, Dr. Searles Cosgrove began quietly to close down his practice. In May, he left Boston. Martha Henderson told me that Anna Bates went with him as a private nurse in charge of the semi-invalid Mrs. Cosgrove. Some people never learn; I suppose that is because it does seem there are always some people who get away with it.

  Then again, some do get caught; and that is where Michael and I are continuing to make our contribution. We are still the J&K Agency … we are still partners. But still I have not married him.

  AFTERWORD

  AN AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have attempted to be as accurate as possible in my fictional re-creation of Boston in the year 1909. Streets, landmarks, and public buildings when mentioned by name are for the most part real places that did exist then (in which case they are described as they were then in historic photographs), and may still exist now. Examples are the two hotels mentioned by name, the Parker House and the Vendome.

  There are, however, a few exceptions: Great Centennial Bank is my own creation. Pembroke Jones House is my fictional amalgam of the handsome houses that still stand on Beacon Street in the location described, where they have stood since the early nineteenth century. Boston Priory Hospital is fictional; but Mount Auburn Cemetery is still, and always, completely real.

  —D.D.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DIANNE DAY spent her early years in the Mississippi Delta before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. She now lives in Pacific Grove, California, where she is at work on a novel of suspense based on the life of Clara Barton. Fremont Jones has appeared in five previous mysteries: The Strange Files of Fremont Jones, which won the Macavity Award for Best First Novel, Fire and Fog, The Bohemian Murders, Emperor Norton’s Ghost, and most recently, Death Train to Boston.

  If you enjoyed

  BEACON STREET MOURNING

  you’ll want to read

  Dianne Day’s

  newest book

  CUT TO THE HEART

  a historical thriller based on

  the life of Clara Barton

  Coming soon in

  Doubleday hardcover

  APRIL

  1863

  I confess I am confounded, literally speechless with amazement! When I left Washington everyone said it boded no peace, it was a bad omen for me to start. I had never missed of finding the trouble I went to find, and was never late—I thought little of it.

  —from the unpublished diary of Clara Barton,

  dated “April 7th, 1863, Tuesday”

  ONE

  HILTON HEAD ISLAND

  Here,” I said, just loudly enough to be heard over the cries of seagulls and their bass counterpoint, a continuous throbbing hum that comes from all the unseen life hidden in these marshes. I raised my hand until I felt the boat slow, then pointed a finger to indicate that I wished us to move deeper into the cover of the seagrass, which even now at high tide loomed above my head.

  I gave my directions serenely, without turning to look my man Jack in the eye; he was at the moment out of favor with me. I had no need to look—I could feel his sullen acquiescence behind me just as easily as I felt the small boat creep into the grasses at the merest pointing of my finger.

  I know Jackson obeys me only because he fears me. I’ve given this man a home and work to do for which I’ve paid him wages, even back before Emancipation, when he was nothing but contraband. He didn’t understand the value of money, so I taught him how to spend it wisely. Yet if he was not afraid of me he’d run away in a minute.

  I can’t allow the man to run. I need him because he’s strong, healthier than most, and he knows these Low Country marshes so well that he can navigate the creeks even on a dark night—a skill they say must be learned from an early age or it cannot be acquired. Then too, I need to keep him close because he’s seen too much. If I let him leave he’ll carry tales—and his tales would be of only one side, the more gruesome side, of my work. Of course that gruesome aspect is why he fears me, and so I must let it be; but sometimes it pains me to be so misunderstood, even by a poor black man.

  Jackson can’t be expected to comprehend the grand purpose, the noble aim of my life’s work. How could he, with his lack of education, understand when my own professional colleagues did not? No one else has my clarity of vision, not to mention the sheer level of my skill. They could not keep up with me; therefore they excluded me.

  I am accustomed to feeling alone.

  Yet after all I’ve done for Jackson, one would think the man could give me devotion, if not love. Not so. Instead, he has so little sense that he mourns after his former owners, who abandoned him. I deserve better.

  I have always deserved better than I get; such is all too frequently the curse of having a brilliant mind.

  Jackson called me a monster not two hours earlier this day. He was talking to a woman outside the freemen’s clinic in Beaufort, and I overheard him say that word, monster, an appellation I truly abhor. Of course I had to put a stop to that kind of talk right away, and I did. As a result, his fear of me has been reinforced, and that is a good thing.

  Even as I raised the spyglass to my eye and trained it on the military settlement at the northwest end of Hilton Head, I wondered fleetingly if my man Jack had loved that woman. She was pretty, if one measured her looks only in comparison to her own kind. A pity I could not have saved her head, as it was the most attractive part of her, but I had no use for it.

  The parts I can use are in my black bag, here in the bottom of the boat not far from Jackson’s bare feet. He knows all too well what is in the bag. I do not think he will call me a monster ever again. I have taught him a lesson.

  “Jackson,” I said politely, as I generally do him the honor of calling him by the longer version of his name, “can you move us any closer without our being seen? I’d like to know what’s going on over there.”

  Some kind of ruckus had arisen over at the military base. I couldn’t quite make out what. Though I doubted if it could have any relation to the matter that had brought me here spying this day, any disruption of normal routine on the post was interesting and bore watching.

  “Yassuh,” Jackson said and pushed off, using his long oar like a pole.

  The boats these Gullahs fashion are sharp-prowed and flat-bottomed. They part the tall sea grasses with a swish that can be eerie or silky, depending on one’s mood. My mood was silky this afternoon, despite that brief disruption to take care of Jackson’s woman friend. Dismemberment, the way I do it, is hard, exacting work—but in its wake it leaves a sense of the greatest satisfaction.

  I returned my attention to the activity captured in the glass.

  For some months now Hilton Head Island has been headquarters for the Union Army’s Department of the South. All the sea islands to the south of Charleston were abandoned by the plantation owners about a year ago, when Union ships found their way into Port Royal Sound—the white gentry just took off. They left alm
ost all their possessions behind them: mansions, furniture, field slaves and all. On the mainland near the coast it was the same—every house in the rich old town of Beaufort had been left empty of people but fully furnished. And everything—everything—including the abandoned field slaves, became contraband. Beaufort and all the sea islands, as far south as Savannah, all were seized and occupied by the Union without so much as a single shot having been fired.

  As for me, I came here to the Low Country by luck, at one of those times in life that reinforce the truth in aphorisms such as: It is always darkest before the dawn. I’ve always been a lucky man, though I do not mean with gambling and cards; rather I am supremely confident that luck will in time make things break my way. I do not believe in a loving God who watches over us, because I am a scientist; but Lady Luck is the goddess who takes a special care of me.

  Therefore I was not at all surprised to soon find, through my spyglass, the small figure of the very woman for whom I sought over there on Hilton Head. In town I had heard that she’d arrived, and I’d said to myself: Ah, she has come to me.

  She stood on the long veranda that runs across the whole second story of the former plantation now known as Headquarters House, looking down on that ruckus of unknown origin. I could not see her features, but by her dark hair, slight stature and neat appearance in a wide-skirted black dress I knew her. Her identity was further confirmed by the simple fact of her standing there, as if she had every right to be the only woman in a company of soldiers—she alone among the hardest of men.

  I sharpened my focus, yet still could not make out her face.

  Never mind—from secret observation at Fredericksburg four months past I remembered her well: Her face was piquantly pretty, with an indentation at the point of her chin; her eyes were large, dark and lustrous; her cheekbones wide and prominent. Before Fredericksburg, at Antietam (the first time she got in my way), I’d lingered long enough to learn her name: Clara.