Fallen Women (21 page)

She wrote quickly. Beret was an efficient correspondent, and her prose was devoid of flowery words. She wrote Maggie, her housekeeper, that she would be staying in Denver indefinitely and would telegraph when she was ready to return. She asked the woman to cancel all social engagements. Then she wrote to her assistant at the mission, saying much the same thing, although she inquired after some of the women who were staying there, asking if they had found employment, gone back to husbands, whether they had healed in body if not in spirit. She asked both women to forward any correspondence to her uncle’s house.

As Beret finished the second letter, William came into the room with the dinner tray and set it on a small table beside her uncle’s chair. “Judge Stanton has his dinner in here when he is working. He prefers to sit in the chair. I hope that will be satisfactory,” he said.

As the butler turned to go, Beret said suddenly, “William, I’d like to talk to you for a moment. Will you sit?” The butler looked uncomfortable, and Beret added, “Or stand, whichever you choose.”

He remained in place, not looking directly at her. “What can I do for you, madam?”

“I’d like to ask you about my sister.”

“A shame what happened to her.” William studied the fire.

“Indeed it was. A shame and a shock. But that’s not why I want to speak with you. As you know, I am working with Detective Sergeant McCauley in trying to apprehend Miss Lillie’s killer. The detective is of the opinion that the same man murdered both Lillie and the prostitute whose body was discovered on Holladay Street. I think that most likely he is right. It is difficult to imagine two different men perpetrating such ghastly crimes. Still, it is in my mind that my sister was murdered by someone who knew her.”

William jerked his head around so that he looked directly at Beret. “Someone she knew? Surely not, madam.”

Beret shrugged. “It is only conjecture. But it must be considered until we have eliminated everyone with whom she came in contact.”

William nodded, and clasped his hands behind his back.

“Who among Lillie’s acquaintances disliked her?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Of course you could. I am not talking about your employers, of course. I know you would not betray them. And there is nothing to betray,” she added quickly. “I mean the others of their social set. I will keep our conversation confidential. You needn’t worry that I will tell my aunt we discussed this.”

“Thank you, madam.” William relaxed a little, although he still looked uncomfortable.

“You could help find her killer,” Beret coaxed.

William thought that over. “If she was killed by someone she knew, could it not be a man she met at that…” He cleared his throat. “At that house of assignation?”

“That’s possible, of course, but unfortunately, we will never know the names of the men she met there.” Beret looked down at her hands, not sure whether to confide Lillie’s situation to William, but it was likely he knew. Little got past servants. “My sister was with child. It is probable she was in that state before she entered Miss Hettie’s House of Dreams. That means the father of her child must be someone she knew, perhaps one of the young men of my aunt’s social circle.”

If he were shocked by the revelation, William did not show it. After a pause, he said, “I did not like Mr. Summers. He was overbearing and peremptory, although Miss Lillie seemed to care for his company well enough. I myself thought it unseemly. He came here once when Mrs. Stanton was away—he seemed to be aware she was not present. Miss Lillie took him into the parlor and said they were not to be disturbed. I distinctly heard the key turn in the lock. When she emerged fully an hour later, her clothes were mussed.”

Although she had come to realize that Lillie had changed, Beret was still shocked to think her sister had been so brazen. To steady herself, she lifted her fork and picked at a vegetable on her plate. The servants generally did not work on Sundays, and Beret was aware that William must have forgone his day off. Cook would have prepared her dinner the night before—cold roast beef, beans, potatoes, bread, a pastry—but Beret was not hungry and wished it were only soup. “Then something improper must have taken place.” She tried to hold her voice steady.

“If you say so.”

“Did my aunt know?”

“
I
didn’t tell her.”

“But did she know?”

William went to the fireplace and placed another log on the fire, adjusting it with a poker. “Madam was very angry about something. I heard her tell Miss Lillie, ‘He might as well be your father.’ She said Miss Lillie had disgraced them. ‘Disgrace,’ that was the word she used. Your sister left not long after that.”

Beret looked up from her tray. “Her father? But surely Joseph Summers was not much older than my sister.”

“Not Mr.
Joseph
Summers, Mr. Evan Summers.”

“He came
here
?” Beret set her fork on her plate, the vegetable on its tines uneaten, and rose, her back to the butler, while she composed herself. Mae, the maid at Miss Hettie’s, had said the elder Mr. Summers had been a customer, but the idea that he had pursued Lillie in the Stanton house unnerved her. Of course, she should have known better. Her work at the mission had taught her otherwise. Still, her own sister engaged in such an unspeakable act with a married man who was old enough to be her father and in this very house was vile. There was so much about Lillie that Beret didn’t understand. “He must have seduced her.” When William didn’t respond, Beret turned. “Is that not so?”

William took a deep breath. “I could not say he was the seducer.”

“Oh.” Beret rose. She had learned a great deal about Lillie in the past two weeks, but had her sister been that shameless? The images of Lillie as both an innocent and a harlot fought inside Beret.

“I must help in the kitchen,” William said.

He turned to go, but Beret touched his arm. She took control of herself and said, “This is not easy for me, William, for either of us. Are you saying that my sister pursued Mr. Evan Summers?” When William refused to answer or even look at her, she added, “Please. If I am to find out who killed her, I must know what happened, even if it distresses me. I will not hold it against you.” She seated herself and glanced at the dinner, but she could not eat now.

William considered what Beret had said. “May I sit, madam?”

Beret indicated the chair next to her and pushed her tray aside.

“Miss Lillie…” he began, and stopped, looking down at his hands.

“Yes,” Beret said when he did not continue.

“The truth is, madam, she was wild, and her standards, well, they were not what Mrs. Stanton would have wished.”

“Her standards?”

William looked into the fire. “Madam would be displeased if she knew I—”

“Oh, bosh, William. Mrs. Stanton won’t know we talked. I have no intention of telling her. I am trying to find out who killed my sister.” Despite what she said, however, Beret hoped William would deny Lillie had been the aggressor.

William turned to her and said fiercely, “She was not a good person, Miss Lillie wasn’t. She entertained men on the servants’ day off, when Judge and Mrs. Stanton were away. She took gifts from them—jewelry, laces, a fur cape. They are up there still in her room—
your
room. It’s no surprise to me she ended up on Holladay Street.” Abashed at his outbreak, William stood. “I shouldn’t have spoken as I did. Beg pardon, madam.”

As the butler rose, Beret told him, “Wait. You are not dismissed. What do you think turned my sister into such a woman?”

“She was always such.”

Beret was confused. “Always? What do you mean,
always
?”

“She was like that as a girl. I saw it when you came to visit many years ago, when Mr. and Mrs. Osmundsen were alive, and later, when it was just you and your sister and your husband.” He pronounced “your husband” almost with distaste. “Perhaps you did not see how she flirted and pouted to get her way and punished those who wouldn’t give it to her. You never saw how she was, you most of all. You were blind to her imperfections.”

Beret shook her head. “No, you are wrong, William. My sister was not like that back then. She was as sweet a girl as ever lived.”

“Yes, madam,” he said, opening the door. “I must be wrong.”

“One more thing,” Beret said, and William stopped. “Did my husband … did Mr. Staarman visit my sister here?”

William looked away. “Do you really want to know, madam?”

“I do.”

“Yes, he did.”

“On more than one occasion?”

“Yes.”

“Did my aunt and uncle know?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Beret was crushed. She almost could not breathe, and she felt faint and was barely aware that the butler had left her. Teddy had done this. William was wrong about Lillie. She had been a perfect child until Teddy ruined her. Beret was desperate to believe that. Teddy had seduced her in New York, and after Lillie fled, he had pursued her to Denver and forced himself on her. Beret knew from her work at the mission that women who had been raped or seduced sometimes turned wanton—from guilt or shame. Some even ended up as prostitutes, because they had no choice. But Lillie had had a choice. She could have lived with her aunt and uncle, or with Beret, if one of them had only apologized. Kindness and goodness, not deceit, had once been her nature. If that had changed, it was Teddy’s fault.

But was it? Could William be right? Beret shook her head as if to rid herself of the possibility that Lillie had been willful and selfish all along. She picked at her dinner, cutting a piece of the roast, but she could not eat. She tried a bite of potato, but it stuck in her throat, and she swallowed several times to get it down. She thrust the tray aside and went to her uncle’s liquor cabinet and took the stopper from a decanter of port, pouring a little into a glass and drinking it, relishing the raw taste of the liquor. She was weary and returned to the chair, and in a moment, she dozed off.

She awoke when William knocked on the library door, then entered softly and picked up the tray. When Beret sat up, he asked, “Are you finished, madam?”

“Yes, please don’t tell Cook that I wasn’t hungry,” she said, then added, “You might as well retire, William. I’ll sit here only a little longer, then go upstairs.” William left, and after a few minutes, Beret thought to thank him for his confidences. She opened the library door, but the lights were dim, and there was no sign of the butler. Except for one or two lights, the house was quiet, and Beret quickly returned to the warmth of the library, turning her back on the dark and silent house.

Chapter 13

Beret felt lethargic and sat down again in her uncle’s chair. She did not fall asleep this time but sat in a kind of stupor, considering what she had learned about her sister in the time she had been in Denver.

Lillie had come to the Stanton house as soon as she left New York. She’d lived with her aunt and uncle some nine months. Then she’d abruptly fled to Miss Hettie’s. Or had the departure been abrupt? As distasteful as it would be to her aunt, Beret would have to press Varina for information. Beret was sure that her aunt knew more than she had told. She had kept things to herself rather than distress Beret—or perhaps to avoid showing herself in a poor light. Had Varina forced Lillie out when she discovered her niece was pregnant? Had Varina even known Lillie was pregnant? After all, Miss Hettie hadn’t known, and Lillie had been as much as five months along when she was murdered.

Then there was the question of the identity of the baby’s father. Since Lillie had been pregnant before she entered the House of Dreams, the father couldn’t have been a john but instead must have been someone she’d known when she was living in the Stanton house—Evan Summers, perhaps. He might have been the married man Lillie had talked about, the wealthy gentleman she believed would leave his wife and marry her. Or, as Mick had suggested, was that just a fantasy Lillie had told Elsie, a lie to impress the other girls? Or perhaps young Joe Summers had fathered the child. Lillie could even have been intimate with other men, as William had suggested. It was possible that she couldn’t even identify the father.

Or was he Teddy? Beret felt tears come to her eyes as she realized Teddy was most likely the father of her sister’s child. It was odd, she thought, that in all their years of marriage, she had never conceived. But her sister had. Could Lillie have been so craven that carrying Teddy’s child was an act of revenge against Beret?

Beret found herself faced with too many questions, none of them with answers. She sighed as she sat up and looked around the room. The fire had died out, and she herself had turned down the lamp. She did not want her aunt and uncle to find her sleeping in the library. She should rouse herself and go to bed. But she leaned back in the chair and sat a little longer, and in a moment, she heard a door open into the hall and footsteps come toward the library. William might have decided to linger until she retired. But William moved noiselessly. She would not have heard his footfalls. It was Nellie, then, or another of the Stanton servants returning after a day off. Beret was not concerned.

And then she looked up to see Jonas enter the room. She watched through half-closed eyes as he crept to the fire, but when he saw it was dead, he did not add a log. Instead, he picked up a blanket resting on the back of a chair and started for her, and as he came close, she caught the smell of whiskey. She sat up and said, “Hello, Jonas.”

He stopped, startled, as if caught in some wrongdoing. “I seen you through the window and thought you needed covering up,” he said quickly.

“You covered me another night.”

Jonas did not answer.

“Sit a moment.”

“Not me. I got to fetch the judge.”

“It’s early yet. I heard the clock strike midnight only minutes ago.”

“Then I got to hitch up the horses. Mrs. Stanton don’t like it if I’m late.”

Beret moved her feet from the footstool and sat up straight, because she felt vulnerable. “Have you told Mrs. Stanton what transpired in Hop Alley?” she asked.