Seven for a Secret Page 16

  Too topsy-turvy to continue fighting, I sat down and ate. The stew proved one of Val’s standards, veal with beer gravy. It was perfect. Of course it was. I began reading the Herald upside down, as I’d missed it that morning, my eyes at once drawn to THE TERRIBLE STORM. Sixty men from the doomed packet ships had been killed in the gale, and ten vessels foundered, amounting to upward of half a million in damages. Possibly, we were at war with Mexico. Possibly, with Great Britain. Sighing, I turned the paper over to reveal an advertisement for imported Turkish leeches. That was better. At least leeches aren’t lethal.

  “Why were you looking for me?” I inquired when we’d both pushed our bowls away and commenced staring at nothing.

  “When?”

  “This afternoon, when you went to my ken while I was at the Tombs. What did you want?”

  Valentine rubbed at the bags beneath his eyes with a sweep of his fingertips, yawning. “Oh. Nothing. Just passing the time.”

  That was about the dustiest thing I’d heard since leaving the courtroom.

  “I actually want to know.”

  “I actually just told you. Christ’s left nut, you can be such a sack of drowned kittens, Timothy. Oh, excepting when you’re antagonizing murderous culls or transporting corpses, presumably all because you’ve developed some sort of death wish.”

  “That’s a vile thing to say, and you know it,” I choked out. “I’m not the one with the … Moving her body was—”

  Stopping seemed best at this juncture. My throat had inconveniently grown splinters. Val opened his mouth, but then wisely shut it again and instead poured a generous pair of whiskeys.

  “It was horrible,” I finished when he’d sat down again.

  “I know it was,” he said quietly. “That took a mountain of nerve, and I’ll not forget it. Ever. Now, tell me what happened, and don’t be gripe-fisted about the details.”

  I did. From Val’s disordered bedroom, to the encounter with Sean Mulqueen, to the long walk through the cold with a body in my arms, to the trial and the unexpected appearance of Silkie Marsh. When I was through, half the whiskey bottle was gone, and I’d finally begun to feel warm again. Val leaned back in his chair, drew another toward him with his boot toe, and put his feet up, looking as perplexed as I’d ever seen him.

  “My turn, then. I’ve a bit of good news,” he said. “First of all, your lay worked. A couple of hours ago, after I’d been to your ken, a news hawker ran screaming to one of my copper stars about a dead woman in an alleyway. The roundsman carted her back to the Prince Street station house and sent for me.”

  Thank God, I thought. My imaginings since leaving her there had conjured nothing save ghoulish body snatchers and corpse-scavenging rats the size of chickens.

  “The roundsman was Glazebrook, which is a rich streak of luck. He is as lumber-brained as they come. If Glazebrook could locate his own arse in the dark without a candle, I’d be considerably surprised. Naturally, I took over the case. So as it happens, thanks to you, I’ve had a perfectly valid chance to study her over.” Val flicked a vesta against the tabletop and pulled a cigar from his loose shirt pocket. “Dead since about dawn, according to the coroner.”

  That figured. She’d been barely cold when I’d arrived. “What else?”

  “She wasn’t raped, for one. For another, there’s no bruising on her body, so whoever caught hold of her did it neat and fast. Obviously, she was strangled, and strangled something fierce—I’d not think a moll would be capable without a struggle that would leave other marks, so we’re after a man, and a ruthless one. Neck was nigh crushed.”

  “With the tie from your dressing gown.”

  “Dainty touch there.” A crooked smile formed. “That means one of two things. Either hushing her was unplanned and he used whatever he could lay hands on, or someone wants me to dance at my death.”

  “Don’t joke about hanging. And it must be the former—that he used whatever he could. No one save us knew she was there. Not even Piest. And even apart from my moving the body, you must have an alibi,” I argued. “Who was keeping you company this morning?”

  My brother grew distracted by a smudge of soot on his sleeve. After contemplating it, he looked up.

  “Actually, I was alone,” he reported. “Taking the air along the Battery. Seemed a flash day for a stroll.”

  The most enormous silence I have ever heard spread between us. In seconds, that silence had spread over the entire United States, past Texas, and on to Oregon.

  When Val is lying, he looks at something irrelevant, and then he looks you bright as brass in the eye. He’d never tried it on me before. But I’d seen it done a hundred times. An invisible hand took hold of my guts and squeezed.

  “My God,” I whispered. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing. Why should—”

  “You’re never alone.” I gripped the cup of whiskey with both hands and watched the caramel-colored liquid tremble in concert with my fingers. “You’re here, or at your police station, or at the Liberty’s Blood saloon, or at a Party meeting, or at a race or a boxing match with your pals, or annoying me. You loathe being alone. The only time you’re ever alone is when you’re asleep—no, ninety-nine percent of the time you’ve company in bed as well.”

  “Well, I was alone early this morning, so you can stuff that wheresoever you like.”

  I stared at Val’s face, aghast. His was deliberately blank. “I can’t credit it. I can’t. You actually killed that woman.”

  Val’s lip snagged viciously, destroying the unsettling expression of neutrality. “Dry up, you stunted little weed, I did nothing of the sort. I was putting myself through a few paces down Battery Park way.”

  “Wading through the remains of a snowstorm.”

  “Timothy, I’m a grown man, not a hothouse lily.”

  “Valentine, tell me,” I begged him. “If someone saw me, if I made a single mistake, if you’re suspected, you’ll have to give an account of yourself—”

  Valentine actually snorted. “Thank you kindly for explaining the intricacies of our judicial system, my Tim. And all this time, I’d supposed we still decided guilt by whether or not people with millstones round their necks sink or float.”

  I sat forward with my hand to my snakeskin-textured brow. That my brother is impossible is a principle akin to daylight following nightfall. But apart from a single ghastly secret that ought never to have been one, I’ve always known all there is to know about the man. Unfortunately.

  “You lie to plenty of other people, but never to me. Why start now?”

  He pulled his thumb along a seam in his tailored black trouser leg, considering. “Because you are being a rash on the hindquarters?”

  “Val, consider how helpful it was the last time I failed to grasp a significant event in your personal life.”

  A sharpish flinch crossed my brother’s face. But then he threw up his arms to their full wingspan and linked his hands behind his head in a neat little gesture of unconcern.

  “My alibi is unimportant and will never be presented in court,” he announced pleasantly around the cigar.

  The steel bands encircling my stomach loosened a fraction. “Bully. What is it?”

  “Irrelevant. Also uninteresting, and no longer the topic of our conversation.”

  “Did it have anything whatsoever to do with Mrs. Adams’s death?”

  “Did someone replace your brain with a parrot’s?”

  “Was it illegal?”

  Frowning, Val thought it over, the deeply scored bags beneath his eyes contracting. “Now, that’s a maybe. Could well have been. Probably so.”

  Though hardly surprising, I couldn’t call that piece of news helpful.

  “So you’re telling me that although you are never alone, you have no alibi for the morning a woman was strangled in your bed, because you were doing something else that was criminal.”

  Val grinned, a look on him that’s always carnivorous somehow. “Young Timothy Wilde, copper st
ar, solves another mystery. We’ll put it in the Police Gazette.”

  My fingers squeezed themselves into angry, helpless little balls.

  “It would give me tremendous pleasure just now to tell you I hate you,” I hissed.

  “Better let fly, then. It’s all bob to me.”

  I don’t hate my brother, though I think he expects me to. But I’m often pretty tempted to punch the airy, uncaring expression right off his mouth. I’ve done it before and will doubtless do it again, though I tend to come off the worse in such matches. But on this occasion, my head descended to where I’d folded my arms on the table. It seemed a likely place to settle while I worked out whether I wanted to drink all the whiskey in Manhattan or throw Val out his firehouse window.

  “None of this makes sense,” I protested to my boots in despair. “You didn’t strangle the murdered woman in your bed, but you won’t tell me where you were at the time. No one save us knew she was there, but someone found and killed her. Some sort of struggle knocked over your bedside table and your painting, but there are no signs on Mrs. Adams’s body of having resisted attack. Varker and Coles have good reason to want revenge on us—and on Julius too, for that matter—but no reason to hush someone who’s worth a mint to them alive. Were Delia and Jonas dragged off somewhere? Are they the reason the furniture was disarranged? And just where in sodding hell does Silkie Marsh come into it?”

  A humorless laugh sounded from the other side of the table. “I can tell you that much, Tim. Where she comes into it is where we start to worry.”

  “Just how bad would it be if you presented this alibi to a jury?”

  “About as bad as you’re supposing. So we won’t.”

  Breathing deliberately through my nose in an effort to slow my heartbeat, I tried for several minutes to calculate what ought to be investigated first. That is, apart from investigating Val.

  “You’re right, you know,” I heard my brother remark at length. “I never noticed I hate being alone, but I do. My thoughts are very … loud.”

  Lifting my head, I set my chin on my arm.

  “That was good, earlier,” I murmured. “What you did for the Irish family. I didn’t mean to rag you. You probably saved their lives.”

  “Dead men can’t vote,” Val pointed out blankly.

  “Neither can girl kinchin.”

  “You calculate they’ll recall me fondly when that kid’s in her grave?”

  “I don’t care what you say. It was still top marks.”

  “You should see me on Sundays, when the crowds come,” he sneered. “Then I do it in choir robes and a halo.”

  “Mrs. Adams said she’d been kidnapped before, Val.” My voice fell still lower, and I let my temple list to one side. “That writing. God, that writing. You saw it.”

  As many as I love I rebuke and chasten, be zealous therefore and repent.

  “I saw it,” he answered, also hushed.

  “What does any of it mean?”

  Val stood, dousing the cigar stub in his empty whiskey glass. He arched his back in a lazy stretch and then angled his head at the bunks along the wall. “Get a little sleep. We’ve a great deal of work ahead.”

  I stifled a yawn. “I don’t need—”

  “You’re obviously past clear thinking, mulling over whatever happened to Lucy Adams long ago and far away from here. Have a rest. Keep arguing with me and I’ll make your face more of a burnt soufflé than it is. I don’t want that kind of challenge. I’ll wake you in a couple of hours.”

  What Val said carried weight. He knows me, and I was drifting, facts flying past my lidded eyes in chaotic swarms, and I unable to pin any down. Part of my befuddlement was shock seeping out of my bones. And part of it was probably whiskey. Still, I’d never have obeyed that order, not with—as he’d said—so much to be done.

  If not for a tiny suspicion hovering at the back of my mind.

  So I removed my boots and crawled into a bunk. For five minutes, I listened to the muted rustle of Val reading the Herald. And then the quiet puffs from his lighting another cigar. Slowly, my breath evened out. Then it deepened. My fingers relaxed, and my eyelids stopped nervously fluttering. For a quarter of an hour, perhaps, I drifted in a cotton-headed reverie, the hissing and popping of the firewood my only indication time was passing. For all appearances dead to the world.

  I wasn’t, though.

  So when the creak of the door met my ears—the sole indication that silent feet had exited catlike down the stairs—I did the only sensible thing. I threw on my boots again, laces flying through my fingers.

  And I followed.

  eleven

  We wonder that the stones of old Bunker Hill do not cry out, when the Union, cemented with the dearest blood of our fathers, is thus publically assailed. But on the whole, this mad folly of the silly fanatics, will operate better than the sly, underhanded works. The people can see their designs, and shun them. It will work out its own cure; in a few years, these ravings will be forgotten, and the men who uttered them will have been consigned to an unlamented oblivion.

  —“REGARDING ABOLITIONISM,” THE NEW YORK HERALD, FEBRUARY 17, 1846

  Widely spaced bootprints in the snow, those of a man determined to reach his destination with efficiency, proved my breadcrumbs through the forest when I’d exited the engine house. A tiny jewel box of a one-horse cutter flitted past me, the black stallion’s footfalls muted as sleigh rails skimmed the packed grey powder. Ward Eight is well maintained by comparison to my dung heap of the Sixth, and so sporadic gas lamps shone down upon shuttered shop windows and ice crystals dripping from awnings like so many salivating fangs. Muffled strangers hastened past. A butcher with a tweed coat, an Irish peasant clad in the soft, tilted hat and corduroy breeches he’d worn when he stepped off the ship. I followed the path of the footmarks quiet and quick as I could. Before long, however, I reached the wide intersection of Mercer and Houston, and all possibility of tracking disappeared in the riotous snow heaps edging the roadways.

  Thankfully, my brother is unnaturally tall. His high black hat bobbed steadily along Mercer, and the pearl head of his stick gleamed in reflected light from the snow. Avoiding a trio of free-roaming pigs and a man scattering white ash with a shovel, I followed Valentine across Houston.

  My mind felt slick, frictionless as the ice beneath my boots. What business could my brother have, plunging into Ward Fifteen? At its center is a tranquil little park called Washington Square, saturated with greenery in the summertime and serene in its frosted winter repose, where Mercy Underhill had once flown whenever her mind was unsettled. At the thought of Mercy, a thorny twinge struck me that I wasn’t writing the most heartening letter ever set to parchment. The sensation required considerable quashing. But quash it I did, for Val had no call to visit the rowhouses of Washington Place, nor the quaint Dutch Reformed Church, nor New York University with its parapets and pale students rushing about on stalklike, hose-covered legs.

  No, Val’s business is of a more visceral cast, generally speaking. And so I glided along behind him. Half sick over what I might discover.

  He turned left on Amity Lane, just before the square. Bare elms with eerily frost-crusted branches were now our only observers. We passed several mews, the backs of the buildings inscrutable, shriveled ivy vines crawling up the brickwork. I kept my distance now, hugging the shadowed wall. A dog howled, longing for the moon’s return, for the clouds lay thickly over us, a smothering weight that could come crashing to earth at any moment.

  Val pushed open a whitewashed gate. When he’d shut it again, I crept forward, putting my eye to the slats. A path had been shoveled through the snowfall between the house and the alley. Pulling a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door at the top of four wooden steps and went inside.

  I don’t want to know, I thought.

  But I had to know, of course. So I crossed the yard and tried the door. He’d left it unbolted.

  Carrying a leaden weight in my belly, I went inside.
>
  I found myself in a darkened hall littered with umbrellas and boxes and overboots. Val’s were propped neatly in a corner. Further along, light spilled through a doorway, pooling on the hardwood.

  I walked down the corridor and into the unknown.

  The second I passed the threshold, an enormous arm hooked round my throat. I shoved myself backward, but to no avail. My assailant planted his feet and then swept a boot against my ankles, sending me sprawling to the floor.

  Stars burst before my eyes. Then I shook my head, clearing it.

  “Was that really necessary?” I gasped.

  My person seemed unharmed, but a mouthful of carpet isn’t high on my list of ways to spend an evening. Twisting onto my back, I glared up at Valentine with lovely visions of pummeling him to a pulp clouding my sight.

  “Was it really necessary to trail me as if I were some kind of wounded deer?” Val snapped.

  We were alone in an empty parlor. Eerie doesn’t begin to describe it. More crates lined the walls, two valises and a steamer trunk resting on a dining table alongside a single pair of men’s kidskin gloves, far too small to fit Valentine’s hands. Why my brother and I were staring daggers at each other in a set of rooms someone appeared to have just moved into was beyond my fathoming. A pair of sky-blue armchairs flanked the fireplace, and the windows were hung with coral damask. But very few furnishings were in evidence. The hulking object draped with a cloth before the window could only be a piano, I surmised.

  Not that a piano was comforting. Val doesn’t play the piano.

  “Where in bloody hell are we?” I rolled to my feet.

  “Are you aware of just how oafish your bird-dogging skills are?” My brother stood with his arms crossed, looking tragic. “I told you I’d wake you in an hour or two. And so you charge after me like a riled steer. Can a man run a single errand in peace?”

  “Not while you’re still lying over where you were this morning.”

  “Because murdering helpless molls is just my style. You vile little tadpole.”