CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
Leona continued to pace, stopping once to place a log on the fire.
Much of the blame she laid at the feet of Henry Caldwell-Jones.
They might have weathered better stupid gossip if it were not for their financial problems. She’d never trusted that man.
It’d come as no surprise to her the day Gil arrived home, devastated by the emptied safe in their shared office, with Henry’s abandoned wife and the shadow of debtors’ prison looming over him.
At least Grandfather’s first loan had kept them from the worst of it.
Her toe struck the little leather book her husband had uncharacteristically dropped, and she bent to pick it up.
He’d filled it with numbers, though not columns of calculations, going back and forth across the page.
She sighed in frustration at her inability to understand what the number meant.
They were still spending, still paying the bills as if Caldwell-Jones hadn’t emptied the coffers.
Despite Gil’s fears, they hadn’t ended up in debtors’ prison yet.
She still didn’t know what they owed, what their financial situation specifically was, because he’d apparently written it all down in code.
She couldn’t pace any longer as it did nothing to dissipate the fear and anger fueling her. She went upstairs to the study and pulled the key from its hiding place under her blouse. Kneeling, she unlocked the drawer. Inside were scraps of paper and notes, old journals, and letters.
She sipped from the flask she kept there, feeling better as the whiskey whistled through her.
She emptied the drawer of everything until she reached the bundle at the bottom, wrapped in sturdy paper and string.
A small tear in the paper revealed blue wool.
She wondered if the smell of wood smoke and gunpowder were another phantasm.
Drinking deeply, she rubbed the rough cloth between her fingers.
Beneath the packet was another, much smaller one.
A traveling army attracted all sorts of commerce, notably the photographers and their studios.
From their first months together—Jack, herself, Hank, Victor, and the boys.
She’d kept one of Luke and Jared, and the rest she’d sent back to their families.
Jack appeared stern in the picture, uniform neat, kepi tilted back, musket angled up across his lap, one hand supporting the barrel.
His curling blond hair was too long and tucked behind his ears.
Made lieutenant in the field toward the middle of the war when theirs went down at Fredericksburg.
The early pictures showed them trying to look hard, ready for a fight.
In the later pictures the endless fighting and marching, short rations, and tempers showed in the hungry, haunted eyes staring back at her.
Gettysburg had ended the war for her. She’d been wounded and discovered, though it was true, at least in the regiment, nearly everyone knew by then that she was a woman. Jack, Victor, and Hank had kept the secret because she’d proved her mettle under fire, fought and bled with them, for them.
She’d already loved Jack madly but hid it behind sarcasm or silence. A soldier first, she couldn’t survive otherwise. She and Jack were barely speaking over an argument, though she could never recall what it was about, just before the battle began.
When the little hospital she’d been sequestered in had come under enemy shelling, Jack appeared at a run, bursting through the door and throwing his body over her to protect her (she would never have let him do this in the field). He’d shouted in her ear, I love you ! I can’t live without you !
Marriage had come after the war, after the sounds and smells had receded. Leona had drowned them out with laudanum and which she took for the blinding headaches the bullet had left behind.
Jack was nothing like Gil. Jack was the kind of man who.
.. he was...she took another hard pull on the whiskey flask.
He had a generous and open personality. Garrulous, sometimes to a fault.
Smart. Men wanted to follow him because he was sharp and fought like the very devil when the bullets zinged about their heads.
They had come through so much together, how could he be dead?
Her second marriage had occurred, she sometimes feared, to put the constant nightmares of Jack stumbling home, broken and burned by the wrecked train, to rest.
Then she couldn’t see the photograph anymore as her eyes had filled with tears.
She wiped at them to dig deeper into the drawer once more, far to the back.
She pulled out her old kepi and put her finger through the bullet hole there.
It matched the scar on her head, where the bullet had scored her skull.
Tucked into the hat, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, lay a small brown bottle of laudanum.
***
T ONIGHT WAS AMONG THE longest she’d ever passed.
She rested her aching body on the divan, turning Gil’s notebook over and over in her hands.
The thought of lying awake in her cold bedroom oppressed her.
In need of distracting herself from the dark bottle upstairs on the desk, she brought her diary to the kitchen table.
She fed the fire in the stove and filled a pan with milk to warm.
Her mind buzzed, thoughts stinging hard as they careened from one to another.
Sleep, sleep , whispered the bottle above.
She had to plan to be ready. God damn Geneva Van Wyn.
Lovely oblivion .
“No,” she said aloud. Elbows on the table, she clasped her hands in prayer and leaned her forehead against them. “Help me, Grandmother. Help me, Ada. Oh, God, help me, Jack.”
Snow tapped against the windowpane, but the musty scent of stagnant water told her the mad clock had gone out of true again.
Wiping the blade of the knife with the hem of her shirt, she staggers and stumbles, lost, bloodied, confused—she’ll never get back to camp, never see home again ....
The awful stink of burned milk drew her from the unfurling memory.
She jumped up and pulled the scorched pan from the top of the woodstove and brought it outside to cool on the steps.
The crisp frigid air brushed against her face.
A dusting of sparkling snow lay on the ground, lit by the first tentative rays of the rising sun.
What if the police went to the Frosts’ house, but they had already made a run for it?
Rushing back up the stairs to the bedroom, she worried about Gil’s reaction when he returned and found her not there.
But she couldn’t dally until he arrived because he would only forbid her to leave the house.
Not if the Frosts and Mrs. Drew tried to leave town.
The door opened and shut downstairs as she stripped off her nightdress, and her heart fell to her stomach.
She listened hard. No, not Gil, Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy arriving.
Leona washed and dressed in a hurry as they murmured.
Shivering, she buttoned her boots, the heavy silver hook cold in her hand.
In the mirror, she practiced a smile more Minotaur than good housewife. The heavy gray bags beneath her blood-shot eyes only enhanced her monstrous aspect. She forced herself to count to ten and smiled at her reflection again. Shook her head. No good.
She’d left her best coat and warm gloves at the Frosts’ house along with her reticule. As she pulled on her second best, she spurred herself to move forward. To make sure the guilty birds did not fly.
“I’m going out.” She sailed through the kitchen with her head tilted beneath the narrow brim of the hat so they couldn’t see her face. “I don’t know when I’ll return. Mr. Gladney isn’t at home, and I don’t expect him at any specific time.”
“Take your shawl,” Mrs. McCarthy said. “The wind is sharp, m’um.”
Leona turned back at her worried tone. Mrs. McCarthy brought the shawl to Leona, concern in her eyes. For a moment, Leona wished hard for everything as it was. Regret cut through her like the sharp wind in Mrs. McCarthy’s warning.
***
L EONA WATCHED THE DARKENED house from across the street.
It was early for people who stayed up late speaking to spirits and plotting extortion.
A mailman came whistling down the street and shoved letters through the slot in the door.
The door swung open. Shaking his head, he grasped the door handle and pulled it closed.
A carriage arrived and an elderly woman got out.
She knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, turned and left.
Leona covered her head with the shawl as she went up the steps.
She knocked as loud as she could and stepped back, prepared to run.
Had they escaped? Or had the police taken them away?
She pushed the unlocked door open, her skirts brushing the envelopes and cards on the rug.
The hair on the back of her neck rose, scalp tingling with the sense of danger in the air.
The ripe stink of blood and the uneasy quiet that comes after a battle hovered around her.
She swallowed the sudden rush of fear, afraid to call out, her throat locked up around the words.
Creeping down the hall, she entered the kitchen.
“Mrs. Drew?”
Slumped over the table, her head in her arms, a teacup spilled out beside her.
A dark liquid lay about her feet, far more than one could expect from an emptied cup.
Leona closed her eyes and opened them again.
Her stomach quivered at the proximity of blood and piss.
She hadn’t imagined it. No phantasm this time. Mrs. Drew was dead.
Leona approached, eyes on the book on the table, the pencil tucked within its pages.
She flipped it open. It was not the blackmail ledger.
When she touched Mrs. Drew’s shoulder, no warmth remained.
Her unpinned hair lay across her shoulders.
She’d dressed for bed. Leona leaned her against the chair back.
A brutal cut slashed across her throat. The blood had flowed down her dressing gown and to the floor.
Her eyes were still open. Leona let her back down.
I ’ m only surprised no one has ridden themselves of your rotten influence. Permanently.
Benedict Van Wyn’s words. Had he returned and—oh, no. But he might have hired someone to do the deed and perhaps take away the book where his sins and the payment for them lay.
She left the kitchen, heart pounding. Her body broke out in a sweat of near panic.
By the signs of the drying tea and the amount of blood, could she assume the killer had gone?
A dark smothering fear overcame her, tinged with scrub pine and brackish water.
She leaned her hand against the wall to anchor herself and willed the memory of two other deaths away.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, listened to the silence, and moved on.
The carpeted staircase muffled her footsteps.
The second floor held the seance parlor, a water closet, and two bedrooms, all empty.
She bit down hard on her lower lip as she approached the seance parlor.
The smell of blood grew stronger. Her breaths came in sharp, short pants.
She whimpered as she pushed open the door. The gas lamps glowed, hissing faintly.
Jesper and Iris. Hands tied behind their backs, rope holding them in the two chairs they occupied.
Both gagged. Both dead. Jesper’s throat cut, like Mrs. Drew’s, the font of blood darkening his white shirt, the flood at his feet.
A silk scarf knotted around Iris’s bruised throat told Leona she had not died as quickly as her brother.
A puddle of pearls and a few brooches lay in her lap.
Leona moved closer. Some of it was Daphne’s jewelry.
A robbery gone badly or a murderous opportunist? The killer had gone, evidently, but where was Millie?
Leona backed out of the room, and the panic seized her.
Running up the next flight of stairs, she called for Millie.
She opened every door, looked under beds and into closets.
But Millie wasn’t in the upper part of the house.
Leona ran back down to the first floor and searched.
She had to steel herself to enter the cellar but nothing but bare earth floor and thick spiderwebs inhabited the place.
She turned in a circle, not knowing what to do next.
The clatter of a carriage pulling up outside almost caused her heart to stop as another appointment arrived. Leona glanced around the dank cellar as footsteps moved through the house above her head. A full-throated scream issued from the throat of the new arrival.
“Help! Police! Murdermurdermurdermurder!”
What if the police found her here hiding in the cellar? A rustic wooden door with rusty hinges stood unlatched. She opened it and slipped out. Maybe this was how Millie escaped? What if the killer had taken her with him? Or had Millie killed them?