A Deadly Affection (30 page)

“They still have to prove their case,” I reminded her. “Which brings me to the second reason for my visit: Do you remember the letter I told you about in Dr. Hauptfuhrer's files, suggesting you'd inherited an illness from your father?”

She nodded. “The sickness that makes people violent,” she said gravely.

“Yes. I think we ought to have you examined by an expert who can prove once and for all that Dr. Hauptfuhrer was wrong.”

“But you can tell that I'm not violent, can't you?” she asked, watching my face intently.

“The court will want an expert opinion,” I explained. “And it's in your interest to provide it. The prosecution doesn't understand this disease; in fact, very few people do. Dr. Huntington is the leading expert. If he examines you and says you don't have it, no one will be able to argue otherwise.”

“But you don't think I have it, do you?” she persisted.

I hesitated. “I haven't seen you exhibit any of the symptoms,” I said truthfully. “But we have to make sure all the same.”

She let out her breath. “All right, then. I'll see the doctor if you want me to.”

“Excellent. I'll have to bring him to your flat, preferably at a time when your mother isn't here. I think it would be best if she wasn't present for the examination.”

She thought a moment. “Mother goes to the abattoir every Thursday morning. She's usually gone from seven to nine. You could bring him then.”

“Perfect! That should give us plenty of time.” I heard a knock and looked up to see Reverend Palmers standing at the door.

“Good morning, Reverend,” I said, rising to greet him.

“Dr. Summerford!” he heartily rejoined. “What a pleasant surprise.”

Mrs. Braun entered the room behind him, carrying a loaded tea tray. “The doctor was just leaving,” she told the Reverend, setting the tray on the bedside table.

Eliza sat up to tighten her robe, bumping her elbow into the tea tray in the process. The tray bumped in turn against her sketchbook, knocking it onto the floor and dislodging some loose pages.

I stooped to retrieve it. I had gathered up the pages and was sticking them back between the covers when I froze in a half crouch, arrested by one of the drawings. Unlike all the others, which were in pastel chalks, this one had been drawn in charcoal. It was of a lone female figure, rendered in smudged and broken lines, positioned on the lower left side of the page. The figure's nondescript clothes were crudely shaded, while its limbs terminated in shapeless stumps. The small mouth was half rubbed out, and the eyes omitted the pupil entirely, creating an impression of blindness, or perhaps emotional vacuity. What seized my attention most forcibly, however, was the thick line that had been drawn across the neck, essentially severing the head from the body.

“Let me help you with that,” said the Reverend, reaching for the book.

“That's all right,” I said quickly, shooting up a hand to stop him. “I've got it.” I closed the book and stood up, sliding it gingerly onto the table.

“I hope I'm not interrupting,” the Reverend said, looking from me to Eliza. “If you like, I could come back another time.”

“That won't be necessary,” said Mrs. Braun. “As I said, Dr. Summerford was just leaving. Weren't you, Doctor?”

I glanced back at the sketchbook. A corner of the disturbing sketch was still jutting out the side, but not enough to reveal any of the figure. I didn't need to see it, however, to recall the bizarre details. Why would Eliza draw such a thing?

I realized they were all looking at me. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, I'll see you out,” Mrs. Braun replied.

“You needn't bother. I can see myself out.” Collecting my gloves and medical bag from the foot of the bed, I turned back to Eliza with an effort. “Good-bye, Eliza. I'll…I'll come again soon.”

“Good-bye,” she said, her soft eyes as innocent as ever. She smiled. “And thank you again. For everything.”

I was still thinking about the disturbing sketch the next morning at breakfast as my father railed on about the latest blackballing at his social club. Now that he believed my ill-advised experiment had come to an end, he was content to turn his critical eye to other matters. First in line this morning was the split in the club's membership between those willing to accept the crude but coffer-swelling nouveaux riches and those against it. Since he had strong opinions on the subject, I was able to sip my tea and nurse my thoughts in silence.

All night, I'd been struggling to come to grips with what I'd seen, trying to put the sketch into perspective. It was just a picture, after all. It was possible that Eliza had drawn it after her arrest as a sort of cathartic exercise, to defuse the horror of discovering the doctor's body. Or it might have been inspired by a vivid nightmare. It was a woman's figure, not a man's, so it couldn't be taken as a literal depiction of the doctor's murder. I couldn't know its true meaning until I'd had a chance to ask Eliza, and I told myself to put my apprehensions aside until then.

Katie handed me a telegram on my way out of the dining room. It was from Professor Bogard, letting me know he'd be back on Friday and asking if we might meet to go over the completed paper sometime that afternoon. The professor and his paper undulated hazily in my mind's eye, occupants of a world that seemed a thousand miles away. Since I hoped to return to that world one day, however, I had no choice but to finish the paper despite everything else that was going on. I had given the professor my word. Returning upstairs to my desk, I dipped my pen in the inkwell and, trying to shut out the frightful clamoring in my mind, set to work on the final draft.

It was about two hours later when the call came. Working on the paper had allowed me to forget my current circumstances, for a time at least, and to imagine I was back in the relatively safe and predictable world of academia, where the greatest threat was to one's pride. So effective was this illusion that I felt no foreboding when Mary told me I had a telephone call but trotted unsuspecting down to the telephone closet, thoughts of Janet's theory on the narrowing field of consciousness in hysterics still percolating through my mind. I shut the closet door behind me and picked up the dangling handset.

“This is Genevieve.”

Simon's voice came over the wire, sounding strangely hollow. “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Miner?” he asked without preamble.

I thought back. “Yesterday, around noon.”

“Do you know if anyone's seen her since?”

I frowned at the transmitter. “Why? Has something happened?”

“Just answer the question.” He sounded more rattled than I'd ever heard him.

“Reverend Palmers was with her yesterday when I left. And of course, her mother will have seen her since then.”

I waited for an explanation but heard only ragged breathing on the other end of the line.

“You'd better get down here,” he said finally.

Something in his voice was causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. “Down where?”

“Dr. Hauptfuhrer's office. I'll be inside.”

Before I could ask what in the world he was doing at Hauptfuhrer's office, the line went dead.

Twenty anxious minutes later, I stepped out of a hansom cab in front of Hauptfuhrer's building and stared at the scene out front. A black ambulance was parked a little ways down the street in front of two police cars. I stood paralyzed on the sidewalk, experiencing a sickening déjà vu. The building door opened, and I saw Simon standing in the vestibule. I hurried toward him. “Simon, what's going on?”

His face was chalk-pale. “You'd better come in and see for yourself.”

I looked past him into the empty hall, my throat stopped up with dread. Every cell in my body was telling me not to go in.

Simon stepped aside, motioning for me to precede him. I put one foot into the small entry, then stopped as a photographer's flash spilled out of the waiting room. What in God's name…? I wondered.

“Go on,” Simon said.

I forced myself through the entry, across the hallway, and into the waiting room. Three policemen stood in a solid line with their backs to me, facing the row of chairs that lined the back wall. A photographer stood off to one side, inserting a fresh plate into his camera, while an ambulance surgeon and two attendants waited at the other end of the room, speaking in hushed tones. As two of the policemen turned to look at me, I saw through the gap between them to the chair beyond.

I stared at the thing that was sitting on it, uncertain at first what it was.
A person but not a person
was my first thought. It appeared to be a mannequin wearing a high-collared, dark-blue dress and holding a piece of paper in its lap. It was the size and shape of a young woman, life-like in every detail—except that it was missing a head.

A second later, my lagging brain registered the fleshy red stump rising just above the collar and the blood-spattered wallpaper behind it. My gaze dropped reflexively to the floor, searching for the missing piece, locating it near the foot of the chair. Miss Hauptfuhrer's startled brown eyes stared up at me under a neatly pinned pile of blood-soaked hair.

My legs buckled beneath me. I felt Simon catch hold of me and heard him say, “All right, you've seen it. Let's get out of here.” He half led, half carried me out the front door.

I stumbled out into the sunlight and propped myself against the side of the building with both arms, feeling my stomach rise. I waited until the urge to retch had passed, then lifted my head to ask, “Why didn't you warn me?”

“I wanted you to get the full effect, to be clear on what this killer is capable of.”

I straightened, swallowing down bile. “You think Eliza did this?”

“Who else?”

I remembered the drawing in Eliza's sketchbook. The figure had clearly been female, the line slashed unequivocally across her neck. My quivering legs suddenly gave up their struggle to support me, and I sank down to the ground, resting my back against the wall. But it couldn't have been Eliza, a piece of my brain protested; whoever did that to Miss Hauptfuhrer was an animal, a fiend. I looked up at Simon. “You spoke with her at the prison. You must have gotten some sense of what she's made of. Do you really believe she could have done something so vicious?”

He blew out his breath, shaking his head in agitation. “I don't know,” he said finally. “I was willing to believe you might be right about her. But we can't blame this murder on Lucille Fiske. She didn't have any reason to kill the daughter.”

“Maybe the two crimes are unrelated,” I said, desperate for some other explanation.

“The method is the same. The killer was just a little more thorough this time.”

“Not exactly the same. The scimitar is in police custody.”

“Different blade, same result. Any knife large enough to hold with two hands would do, according to the ambulance surgeon. He says it probably took two or three strikes to finish the job. The first must have been deep enough to sever the brain from the spinal cord, since there doesn't appear to have been a struggle.”

I felt my gorge rising again at the thought of Eliza—the same Eliza who'd held my hands and smiled so sweetly into my eyes—hacking away at Miss Hauptfuhrer's neck. But Eliza had had no reason to kill the doctor's daughter either, I reminded myself; her quarrel, if she'd had one, was with Dr. Hauptfuhrer. “What was that piece of paper in her hand?”

“Passages from the Bible. ‘Life's breath returning to God who gave it,' that sort of thing. It was written out in block letters on a piece of plain stationery.”

I tried to make sense of this, but my dazed brain was unable to draw any connections. I glanced over my shoulder at the front window as another powder flash lit up the sidewalk. “How did you find out what had happened?”

“I was at the police station when the call came in. I asked the boys to let me tag along.”

“And she was just…sitting there like that when you arrived?”

He nodded. “The maid found the body on her way upstairs to get the dirty linens, a little after ten o'clock. It hadn't been there when she lit the fires at seven thirty.”

“Do they know how the murderer got in?”

“Right through the front door, apparently. There was no sign of a forced entry, which suggests Miss Hauptfuhrer let her killer in willingly.”

And then sat down and read some scripture, apparently, while her visitor started swinging at her with a knife. I shook my head. “I can't imagine that Miss Hauptfuhrer would have invited Eliza inside if she found her standing at her door.”

“She might have opened the door to talk to her, if she was desperate enough.”

“Desperate for what?”

He shrugged. “For answers about her father's murder. Sometimes the people left behind are so hungry to understand the motive for the killing that they lose sight of everything else.”

“It seems far more likely to me that she would have slammed the door in Eliza's face and run to call the police.” Something in his words, however, was tickling at my memory. The next moment, I had it. “Wait a minute.” I sat up. “Lucille did have a reason to kill Miss Hauptfuhrer! In the newspaper yesterday, it said that detectives were planning to go through Dr. Hauptfuhrer's records with his daughter to search for a motive for his murder. Lucille might have seen it and worried they'd discover something in his files about Olivia having a degenerative disease!”

He shook his head. “They searched the whole house, and nothing else was disturbed. What good would it do to kill the daughter without destroying the files?”

“Apparently, the doctor kept his records in a kind of shorthand. That's why the detectives needed Miss Hauptfuhrer's help; she was the only one who could make sense of them. Without her, the files couldn't reveal anything.”

“You can't assume that Lucille Fiske would know that.”

“Perhaps not, but she would expect the doctor to keep the adoption files in a protected place. She might have worried—quite rightfully, I should think—that Miss Hauptfuhrer would stumble upon them in her search. If she did, Olivia's true parentage and Dr. Hauptfuhrer's concerns about her health might have come to light.”

“I thought you said Lucille's henchman had already left the country. Are you suggesting Lucille killed the daughter herself?”

Frankly, I couldn't imagine Lucille performing the ghastly execution on her own, despite the violent streak I'd glimpsed on the stairwell. “Maybe she found someone else. Or maybe the story about Hagan going back to Ireland wasn't true. For all we know, he's been here all the time, lying low until Eliza's trial is over and it's safe to come out. Not so low, though, that Lucille wouldn't know where to reach him if she needed him for another errand.” I watched Simon mull this over.

“All right,” he conceded after a moment. “So it's theoretically possible that Mrs. Fiske had a reason to kill a second time and someone to do it for her. But once again, you've got no proof. What we do have is a woman who's already been accused of murder, out on the loose within striking distance of the victim.”

“But Eliza's not out on the loose,” I reminded him. “She's under house arrest. There have been guards watching her around the clock. They would have seen her if she went out.”

“Maybe they did,” he said.

“Has anyone questioned them yet?”

“Maloney left a little while ago, just before you arrived.”

“Maloney's at the Brauns'?” I got clumsily to my feet.

“Where do you think you're going?”

“I need to get over there. I don't trust him.”

“We have to talk about how we're going to handle this first. The police want to keep a lid on it for now to avoid a panic. No one knows about it yet except the maid, and I've arranged to send her on holiday upstate with her family. But Maloney, you won't be surprised to hear, is convinced that this was Mrs. Miner's doing. For now, he's confining her to her flat and posting another man outside the door, but you can bet someone from the DA's office will be in court in the morning, trying to get her release order rescinded.”

“Can they do it?”

“Technically, as long as the police can't show that Mrs. Miner violated the terms of her house arrest by leaving her own premises, the prosecution has no grounds to request that the release order be rescinded. I can probably exert enough pressure on Judge Hoffman to hold steady, so long as there's no public outcry. But it seems to me the real question is whether you still want to keep her out.”

His implication was clear: if Eliza had, in fact, perpetrated this atrocity on Miss Hauptfuhrer, then I, as the one who had argued for her release, was directly responsible—and would be for any future harm she inflicted, if she wasn't returned to formal custody immediately.

My first thought was that we had to send her back to the Tombs, just to be on the safe side. But with my next breath, I realized that doing so would have devastating consequences for Eliza if she was innocent. Not only would it be seen as an admission by her doctor that she was a danger to society, but it would also take any pressure off the police to look for another suspect in Miss Hauptfuhrer's murder. If Eliza remained under house arrest, Maloney would have to look for proof associating Eliza with the crime to support a request to rescind her release. In the process, he might uncover the real culprit, thereby vindicating Eliza in both murders.

Simon was waiting for my answer. As I struggled to reach a decision, I felt again the visceral belief in Eliza's innocence that had taken root in me from the start—a belief that had insisted on thriving despite all evidence to the contrary, like a flower blooming in a rain of ash. I couldn't be absolutely certain one way or the other. I would just have to listen to the voice inside me and pray that it was right.