City of Secrets (2 page)

“I will, of course, have to review the Pinkerton report before I can proceed,” he said in the pompous tone he used to intimidate undersecretaries of embassies. “How much time, by the way, did the Pinkertons consume in their fruitless search?”

“It wasn’t precisely fruitless,” she conceded, “as you will see from their report. I had suggested to them myself that Teddy might have joined the army, as we had only just heard the news of the declaration of war against Spain, and it is just the sort of quixotic gesture he would make. They spent several weeks vainly attempting to find his name in the army lists before it occurred to Oli—to an agent there to trace Teddy from the drafts on his bank account in St. Louis. That was how they discovered that he had gone to Pittsburgh, then to New York.”

He didn’t miss her hesitation and waited a moment before he spoke again.

Finally she said, “I should tell you, Mr. Grant, that the Pinkerton agent who originally took my case is still in my employ and will be glad to ... will report to you after you have had an opportunity to study his agency’s findings.”

Why was she so prickly about that, of all things?
Grant didn’t know, but he did know when questioning would not only be useless, but would probably set him back. He said only that he would look forward to comparing notes and asked instead, “Why would your husband have gone to New York to begin with?”

“I don’t know. He has no friends or family there. I can only assume he met someone who invited him, for what purpose I cannot imagine.”

“He never wrote to you, to set your mind at ease?”

“He would not have expected me to be concerned.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have my husband on a leash, Mr. Grant. I don’t question his movements, and I make him feel welcome when he does come home.”

“Had he gone away for such a length of time before?”

“No.”

“Yet still he did not write.”

“I didn’t say that. He did write, twice. You’ll find it noted in the Pinkerton report. Once from Pittsburgh and once from New York.”

“Did he mention any names in those letters?” Grant found that he was having some difficulty pronouncing Edward Malcolm’s name. “Perhaps of people he met in his travels?”

“No, he spoke only of ‘a fellow he met on the train’ or ‘a gent who recommended a hotel’ ... people of that sort.”

“Do you still have the letters?”

“No. I burned them. They were mainly of a—of an intimate nature. I told the detectives the facts they contained, but I didn’t consider the rest to be anyone’s business but my own.”

“Did he ever ask for more money?”

“He didn’t have to. The St. Louis account was his own, so 1 could not stop his drawing on it, even if 1 had wanted to take such harsh measures. In any case, he stopped making withdrawals, and it was some time before it was discovered that he had sailed for London. Here he apparently fell in with a group of radical anarchists.”

Grant raised an eyebrow at this unexpected turn. “Had he expressed any strong political convictions before?
”

She hesitated again but said at last, as if by way of compromise, “He hadn’t expressed any such convictions to me—that is, he always seemed more interested in people than in politics, and whatever opinions his friends had
he made his own. That is why he got on so well with everyone.

And that is why, my beauty, you will eventually shed that mask of yours. There are already tiny cracks in it, and the more you talk, the more you are going to reveal of yourself.

As if she were conscious of his mental processes, if not his exact thoughts, she moved her gaze from him to the wall behind his desk. A vein had begun to pulse in her temple, but it would take a good deal more pounding to break down her defenses. And Grant was reluctant to be any cruder than he had been already.

“What are your plans now, Mrs. Malcolm?” he asked, more gently.

“I’ll be in London for two weeks—I’m staying at the Savoy, by the way—and then I’ll go on to Paris.” She looked at him again and explained, “It seems to me that if I make myself conspicuous in places where Teddy has been or is likely to turn up, he may try to contact me.”

“What are you telling people about him? I imagine there have already been questions about your traveling alone.”

“Yes.” She frowned, and he guessed that natural curiosity on the part of chance acquaintances irritated her even more than having to lie to satisfy it. “I’ve let it be known that my husband has been in India on business and that we will be meeting in Naples when his ship docks there in late summer.”

He gave her a skeptical look, but she smiled slightly and said, “I—that is, my agent and I—have worked out all the details, Mr. Grant, even down to learning the steamship schedules through the Suez Canal.”

“I trust you have written all this down for me. I should not wish inadvertently to contradict you.”

She indicated the thick envelope she had left beside him on the desk. “You’ll find it—”

“In the report. Yes, somehow I thought I might.”

He tried to think of something else to ask that was
not
in the report, but his mind went blank suddenly. Or perhaps it had been wandering for some time, diverted by the two or three soft strands of chestnut hair that escaped from her coiffure and blew gently about the back of her long, lovely neck. He had tried not looking at her face, but the moment his
eyes drifted downward, his imagination began drawing vivid pictures of the shape of her legs under her satin-smooth skirts.

“Perhaps I’d better leave you to it, then,” she said.

Good God, how long had he been staring at her?

She smiled, as if to make it clear that she was aware of having regained the advantage. “To read the report, that is.”

She rose gracefully and held one slim hand out to him. He
took it automatically and was conscious of being slightly surprised at how firm her handshake was. For a woman pining away for a lost lover, she was remarkably in control of herself.

In fact, she held onto his hand just a fraction too long, until he raised one eyebrow questioningly at her. She was smiling, once again in the way his imagined duchess had smiled at the dustman. She said, “We haven’t discussed your fee, Mr. Grant.”

“I beg your pardon. I thought my assistant—”

“He did. He also explained that a minimum toward expenses was required, and I gave him a large check toward any you may incur—within or without reason. In return, I don’t expect you to
like
me—”

“Mrs. Malcolm—”

“—nor to explain this strange antagonism you seem to have conceived toward me. My motives, Mr. Grant, are none of your concern. Your only business, for which you are being so well paid, is to find my husband. Whether or not we like each other should not enter into our transaction, but I trust we may at least be civil in our dealings. That is, if you can refrain from cross-examining me every time we meet?”

At a loss to respond to this unexpected attack, Grant could only nod. And only then did she release her grip on his hand.

He escorted her downstairs, where her maid waited for her at the door which opened onto a quiet back street, rather than directly onto crowded Whitehall. She pulled her veil back over her face and stepped into a waiting hansom cab, letting the maid climb in and close the door before she looked back at him.

“Good-bye, Mr. Grant. I trust you’ll have something to report to me shortly.”

He started to lift one hand to wave it after her and was absurdly disappointed when she made no corresponding gesture. She did not even smile, and she looked away so quickly that she would not have seen him raise that superfluous hand in any case. He lowered it again and thrust it angrily into his pocket.

Maddie held her breath until the cab turned a corner, until she could no longer feel the keen eyes in that stony face boring into her. Then, very slowly, she let out a long breath and closed her eyes. She had not expected this to be such a physical strain. Every muscle in her back and shoulders was stiff. Tentatively, she opened her eyes and moved her head to
look at the watch pinned to her bodice. Less than an hour! She would have thought she’d been tied to that chair in Devin Grant’s office for days.

“Is everything all right, ma’am?” her companion asked. Maddie smiled and tried to sound more confident than she felt.

“Yes, thank you, Louise. Everything went nicely.”

Louise’s small “humph” and the look in her pale, myopic eyes suggested that she saw through Maddie’s bravado. Anyway, Maddie insisted to herself, the morning had seemed to go well until her foolish outburst at the end. What had possessed her to become so belligerent, particularly when she had up to then succeeded in answering the man’s impertinent, and increasingly personal, questions truthfully, if not with complete dignity? She did not think she had revealed any more than he genuinely needed to know, but obviously he had probed more deeply than she realized when he was doing it. And he had left her feeling stripped to the soul.

Even if she could explain it to herself, she could not even hint at her uneasiness to her devoted maid, who was a worrier at the best of times. Maddie had long ago learned that news, good or bad, must simply be announced to Louise, and matters of opinion, especially where there was any cause at all for pessimism, should not be broached at all at the risk of causing Louise to lose what little sleep she enjoyed at night.

At bottom, Maddie had a considerably more hopeful disposition than did Louise Drummond, but her view of the world was not obscured by rose-colored glasses either, and despite her carefully laid plans for the campaign she was embarked on now, she was still uncomfortable with any kind of subterfuge. Furthermore, despite the experience that told her most men responded like uncritical lapdogs to her smiles and melting looks, it was all too obvious that Devin Grant was not like most men.

She was not precisely certain wherein the difference lay. He was certainly better looking than the average man of his sort, although not, Maddie supposed, in a style that would have appealed to her when she was a girl. He was nothing like Teddy, who was handsome in a clean-cut, very American way, and who possessed charm in abundance. Devin Grant good deal taller than Maddie, which was admittedly a treat for a change, and he could not be much older than thirty, although his face already showed faint lines around the mouth and eyes. His hands, though strong and capable looking, were rougher than one would expect from someone who worked in
an office all day, and his dark hair and mustache looked as if they were infrequently trimmed. And those eyes.... Maddie shivered just to remember how they had bored into her as he threw those unexpectedly penetrating questions at her.

Why
did he want to know such things? Why did it seem that he already knew a good deal too much?
Her mind kept going back to his strangely hostile questions—and to her defensive answers. Their encounter had resembled the cautious circlings of wild animals around each other before a battle for supremacy. More often than not, Maddie had not known how to respond to his unanticipated questions and so had reverted to her habit of saying the first thing that came to her mind, which may have been exactly the wrong thing to persuade him to take her case. The fact remained, of course, that he
had
taken it. She would have to hope that it was because he really believed he could find Teddy.

To help me find Teddy,
Maddie corrected herself. She was uncertain, too, of why she had hesitated to tell him everything. She could hardly expect him to help if she kept such obvious information as Oliver Drummond’s work on the case a secret from him.
I don’t trust Devin Grant,
she admitted to herself.
Why should I? He doesn’t trust me either. And it’s his job to prove himself trustworthy, not
mine.

She sighed, not entirely satisfied with her reasoning but feeling a little more in control of herself now that she was away from Devin Grant’s disturbing presence. She raised her veil again and looked out the window of the hansom cab—one of those blessedly anonymous little black carriages available for hire all over London—as it turned into Trafalgar Square. The driver, apparently a born Londoner, maneuvered smoothly in the congested traffic, among the narrow horse-buses and wayward bicyclists and snobbish private broughams, in the direction of the Strand. Maddie had once thought St. Louis a good-sized city, but it was a mere village compared to the hurly-burly of commercially prospering London in the last year of Victoria’s century.

This was Maddie’s first trip abroad, and she often forgot the worldly pose she had adopted for the purpose of her journey when gazing as wide-eyed as any other tourist at the marvels she found around every corner. She was not entirely unsophisticated as a traveler, her father having taken her often on his business trips to San Francisco and Seattle and the wilder parts of the American West, where his fur business had its roots. And she had honeymooned in New Orleans. But even that elegant old city on the river was a babe compared to London. When they were there, Teddy had promised to take her to Mexico and Europe and India—anywhere she wanted to go. Maddie smiled at the memory of all the reckless promises Teddy had made her during that blissful honeymoon. That was the only one she would have held him to, but she had taken too long to make up her mind where to start, and there had always seemed to be so much to do at home, separately and together, that somehow nothing ever came of that promise.

Their horse was clopping along at a steadier rate now, as the cab climbed the slight slope of the Strand. Maddie looked out to see men in the almost universal uniform of long frock coats and top hats and women in the neat pastel caps and white aprons of housemaids, or the straw hats and shirtwaists of office typists, hurrying along the pavement, carefully avoiding the curb where they might be splashed with mud from passing horses’ hooves. A trio of young bloods were finding it a lark to test which of them could escape with the fewest spatters while coming closest to the source of the mud, and Maddie jumped when one of them inadvertently stepped into the street, narrowly missing the passing cab and collecting a fine sprinkling of coffee-colored mud on his immaculate white spats.