Chapter 15
“I felt it shelter to speak to you.”
Emily Dickinson
“Cab!” Marigold was up and out of her seat, moving instinctively to embrace him like a long-lost friend before she knew what she had done. “What a surprise!”
“I hope not an unwelcome one?” He smiled at her before nodding politely to Wilkerson. Behind Cab, naturally, was Isabella, looking entirely inscrutable.
“Of course not.” Marigold tempered her excitement. “I’m just surprised. Isabella didn’t tell me you were coming.” A glance at her friend showed not a trace of remorse on Isabella’s face—she looked as smug as a cat in cream.
“Oh, didn’t I?” Isabella said airily. “I had a business proposition I wanted to talk through with my lawyer, so naturally, he came to me.”
“Naturally.” Marigold recalled herself to her manners. “Mr. Wilkerson, may I introduce you to two very dear friends of mine? Mrs. Isabella Dana, I believe you’ve already met, when she came to pick me up in her carriage. And Mr. Jonathan Cabot Cox, of the law firm Armory, Dana, and Cox.”
Wilkerson’s manners saw him rising politely, but he made the typically male social blunder of speaking to Cab before he acknowledged Isabella. “A fellow would have to be from far away from Boston not to know the name Cox, not to mention Cabot. How do you do, Mr. Cox?”
Cab, being the gentleman he was, nodded briefly in acknowledgement before he too introduced Isabella. “Mrs. Dana—Mr. Wilkerson.”
“How do you do,” Isabella said with some ice. Her second impression of Wilkerson was going the way of her first—not favorable.
But Wilkerson still knew how to charm. “Pleasure’s all mine, ma’am. Any friend of my friend Miss Manners’s is a friend of mine.”
It was a bold thing to say to people who were already her dear friends. “Not so fast, Mr. Wilkerson. For we are not friends but professional acquaintances.”
“Then not friends, yet,” he laughed. “But I have my hopes up. I’d ask you to join us—” Wilkerson turned his charm on the others. “—but I’m afraid my time with Marigold is limited and we do have important things to discuss.”
“Indeed,” Marigold seconded before Isabella could get that martial look in her eye.
“It is lovely to see you, Cab. To see you both. But I made this appointment with Mr. Wilkerson in order to give an interview in the hopes that the exposure will help identify the unfortunate young woman who was found in the lake.”
“Marigold here’s got some wild theories,” Wilkerson added.
Before Marigold could even object to such a thing, Isabella came immediately to her defense. “Miss Manners here,” Isabella began with some disdain, “has rather considerable experience with such things. I don’t believe I’ve caught your byline in any of the major papers, Mr.…?”
“Wilkerson, James,” he smiled, stepping closer in a manner that some might take as being cozy and confidential, but also looming a bit, as if his height might somehow intimidate Isabella into being more pleasant.
It did not. “Good to know” was all she said, but she lofted an eyebrow in a manner that told Marigold that Isabella was about to have Mr. Wilkerson thoroughly investigated.
“And we won’t keep you,” said Cab graciously. “Always a pleasure, Marigold.”
“Cab.” She hoped her smile said what she felt she could not.
“I’ll be in touch, darling. I’ll be heading to Boston tonight.” Isabella made it sound like a warning, before she and Cab withdrew—though only to a table across the room, where Isabella kept a not-very-surreptitious eye on Marigold.
“That your fella?” Wilkerson asked when they were all seated again.
Marigold had her pat response at the ready. “Mr. Cox is a very old, very dear friend whom I esteem greatly.”
“You know him from those Misery Island murders?”
“Ah. So you know about my connection to the Great Misery Island murders?” Although her story for The Argosy had not yet been published, the murders had been widely and luridly reported in Boston’s tabloid press, so it would make sense if a journalist for one of those same tabloids remembered her name.
Wilkerson’s smile was just a little smug. “I like to know who I’m talking to. I asked around.” He knit his hands together on the table, touching his signet ring again in that small gesture of pride.
She felt her polite smile slipping into crocodile-infested waters. “And where is around? The offices of the Boston Evening Journal?”
He was unabashed, setting his elbows on the table to lean in toward her in a confidential manner.
“Journalistic privilege,” he said with a wink.
“Never give up your sources. But you weren’t hard to find.
And Cox too. His name was prominent—solved the case, didn’t he?
But Cox is a Boston name that people know. ”
“Is it?” Marigold set herself to annoy Mr. Wilkerson. “Rather it was Mr. Cox who helped me in the matter. Mr. Cox acted as my attorney, as well as representing several other parties interested and involved in the events that took place on Great Misery last spring.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure, it sure made for a ripping tale.”
Marigold agreed sweetly. “Then let us get on with telling this tale, so that someone somewhere will recognize this poor dead young woman and help us put a name to her.”
“Say the word.” Wilkerson took out his notebook.
“Words, actually,” Marigold demurred as she drew her typewritten sheets out of her pocketbook. “I’ve already done your work for you. All you have to do is submit it.”
He read her title out loud. “ ‘An Appeal to the Populace’?”
Marigold had pecked it out on her doughty typewriting machine last night—in a vain attempt to assuage her guilt that she had not yet used the machine for any of her classwork.
“You’re the one who said the American people want something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, and awaken their conscience.
Someone out there knows something, and you’re going to help me awaken their conscience. ”
He sat back and regarded her for a long moment before he seemed to make up his mind. Finally, he smiled, giving her the benefit of the full butterboat of his smile. “Well, I guess it might be worth a try.”
“I promise you,” Marigold swore. “It will be.”
The moment Mr. Wilkerson donned his stylish hat and took his leave, Marigold went in search of a very different sort of man.
The comparative differences between Cab Cox and James Wilkerson could not have been more pronounced.
Cab would have moved his seat rather than gaze at his reflection in such a manner.
And if there had been no reasonable way to move his seat, he simply would have had the self-discipline not to stare at his own reflection like Narcissus enthralled.
The very important fact of the matter was that there was really only one man in Boston whose discretion and know-how she could safely rely upon—and that person was Cab.
She found him with his head bent toward Isabella in earnest conversation. “I hope you will forgive my intrusion.”
“Not at all,” Isabella responded immediately, scooting her chair over to make room, as if she had wished for just such a result. “Do come sit with us.”
Cab, who had immediately risen from his chair—and also, she noted, swept up the notes he had been making, stowing them into his suit coat pocket—added, “Please do,” as he held a chair for her.
“Thank you.” Marigold seated herself, even as she said, “I can only stay a short while—I’ve already missed one afternoon class. I had asked for Isabella’s assistance with some matters regarding a murder at the college—”
“Yes,” Cab nodded his immediate understanding. “Isabella has filled me in on all the particulars.”
“Has she?” Was that what Cab had been taking notes on? “What do you think?”
“About who might have killed such a girl? Well, according to my reading about murders in Massachusetts in the Journal of the American Statistical Association published last September—” Cab’s steely intellectualism came to the fore.
“—rural areas, like Wellesley, have the least resistance to the homicidal tendency.”
“The homicidal tendency?” Marigold had not imagined that there was such a thing. “But this is not a rural area—this is Wellesley College, bastion of enlightenment and learning.”
“And in opposition to the statistics, in such a community of academic women, one might expect some rivalries to turn sour in one way or another—poisonings or a push down the stairs. But strangulation—” He shook his head so that his hair fell across his forehead in that near-perfect way. “That’s a man’s method.”
“Don’t count the women out,” Marigold felt compelled to say. “Wellesley women are well known for their stout, athletic constitutions. And in any academic community there are contentions and rivalries—was it any different at Harvard?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Why should it be different just because we are women? Old Alva Hatchett was as homicidal a person as I should never hope to meet again.”
“True,” Cab acknowledged. “But the statistics regarding the rate of murders within the state definitely point to a preponderance of perpetrators being men of low character and sensual impulses.”
“Cab, what a font of interesting and useful information you are.” Judging from Isabella’s very satisfied expression, Marigold did not doubt that the murder was not the only thing she had filled in.
“I’m having dinner with Essie Waters tomorrow,” Isabella supplied, “to sort out what information we can from her clothes.”
“Thank you. I so appreciate your help,” Marigold assured her.
“Both of you.” Despite her present annoyance with her dear friend, Marigold was mindful of the fact that she could not be everywhere, nor know everything or everyone at once.
She had to rely upon others to help her investigate—especially since she was not supposed to be investigating at all.
“I have another point on which I would like to ask your help, Cab.”
“Name it.”