Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (12 page)

I stitched and occasionally rested my eyes from the close work by staring into the flames of the hearth, thinking, and resisting the impulse to whistle. The evening paper was on the floor at my feet, folded to the page with the death notices. Mrs. Percy’s obituary occupied a full quarter of the page because she had been a woman “of singular interest,” as the
journalist had described. I had read it, of course, despite Mr. Phips’s concerns for my emotional well-being.

The journalist had used far too many words to describe her gifts as a medium and a crystal gazer, and revealed that she was originally born in New York City. She had been a vocalist for some years, touring in the United States and England, but had been forced into early retirement by an inflammation of the throat. She had married Mr. Percy, a Chicago banker, upon her retirement, but Mr. Percy had, for a weakness of the lungs, relocated to Havana.

In other words, I thought, her husband had wearied of her, abandoned her, and resettled in a tropical clime. No doubt he had moved the family finances with him.

There was, the death notice said, some confusion over the manner of death and a suggestion that it might not have been natural. Ah. Hence Mr. Phips’s concern that I not read the article. Young women, in his philosophy, should know nothing of murder and the darker deeds of the world.

Mrs. Percy, the reporter continued, was survived only by a stepbrother, Mr. Edward T. Nichols of Cleveland, who was visiting his sister in Boston. Mr. Nichols was also a cousin of Phineas T. Barnum, and involved with him in several business ventures.

What strange connections were revealing themselves!

Something Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said to me chimed through my thoughts as I sat before the fire that evening. He had been explaining his theory of the universal mind, of which he said, “Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. History, Louisa. Just imagine, you might have the exact same thought that Plato once thought.”

“Or Sappho,” I had added, and Father had harrumphed, for he had no great fondness for lady poets, ancient or otherwise.

And then Mr. Emerson had said, “Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises.”

As you have guessed, reader, I jotted his words in my journal and memorized them, even though at the time I was young enough that I had no fine understanding of them. I knew someday I would.

That evening Mr. Emerson’s words returned to me, and I saw that they were so true that their opposite would also be true: What emotion the killer of Mrs. Percy had experienced, I too might experience, and the facts, however strange, that had led to her death were still there, had in fact now become part of history, and thus were available for discovery. Each fact would flash a light on what base, death-dealing men have done. Moreover, whatever crisis had led to Mrs. Percy’s death was part of a larger crisis, a failure of moral behavior not just at the individual level but at the national level.

I felt exhilarated.

But would I ever have the courage to reveal to Mr. Emerson that I had used his Transcendental philosophy to begin to untangle a murder?

My latest run of thread had come to an end. I bit it with my teeth, carefully placed the needle in its case for the night, and smoothed the sleeve I had been seaming. The fabric seemed different, I realized. Much too light for a winter shirt.
Your imagination, I told myself. You are daydreaming too much, finding mystery in everything.

T
HERE WAS A
letter from Uncle Benjamin in the morning mail. Lizzie and I had been sitting in the back parlor working on the reverend’s shirts, and she had just voiced a desire to purchase one of Mr. Singer’s new sewing machines to make the sewing go faster.

“It is such drudgery,” she said, sucking a finger that had just been pinpricked, for though she was a nimble little needlewoman, Lizzie sometimes was bored and careless when faced with hours and hours of seams to sew.

“If we could afford a Singer machine we wouldn’t need to take in sewing,” I pointed out. “But if it will make you feel better, I’ll confess to writing a new story that I may sell, and if Mr. Leslie purchases it, I’ll get you a new packet of needles.”

Lizzie made a face.

“And a new dress,” I added hastily, already sorry for having teased her.

“I’d rather have more sheet music, dear, if you don’t mind,” said my musical younger sister.

Auntie Bond poked her head in through the doorway and held out the little silver tray on which mail was placed.

“All from Walpole,” she said.

“Hurray!” shouted Lizzie, throwing down her sewing. “Marmee and Father and Abby. Do you think she is still painting the mountains of New Hampshire, or has she decided on a different subject for her canvases, Louy?”

“Still the mountains,” I guessed. Whereas Anna, the eldest, had a talent for acting and singing, and Lizzie was musical, Abby was an artist, and in her time second only to the great Turner himself, or at least that was the family’s opinion of her landscapes.

“I have a letter from the darlings, and one from Uncle Benjamin as well. Let us take a break and read them as we walk in the garden,” I suggested. “The air will do us good.”

“It’s snowing, Louy!”

“Even better,” I insisted.

Dressed in coat, hat, gloves, and galoshes, I paced back and forth in front of Auntie Bond’s row of holly bushes, the only patches of green left in the snow-covered garden. Uncle’s letter did not reassure.

Three words leaped off the page and into my speculations. The first was
magazine
, and with a thrill of excitement I wondered if it was some of my own stories, published anonymously, that Uncle and Cousin were reading. The thought gave me goose bumps of delight. There is nothing a writer enjoys more than learning her stories are being read, even if she cannot, at the time, acknowledge them as her own work because of the “fantastical stuff” and “wayward females” in those stories. I must, I thought, get back to my desk and finish “Agatha’s Confession.” First, though, I must ponder the other words in Uncle’s letter that had caught my attention, words having to do with Phineas Barnum.

Forgery
was the second word. I remembered Mrs. Percy, Eddie’s stepsister, at her séance table, her bracelets clanking as she forged written messages from the dearly departed.

The third word that repeated and repeated in my thoughts that evening was
revenge.

I
T IS HARSH
to have to think of a new acquaintance, and an acquaintance for whom one is beginning to feel a certain affection at that, as a homicidal maniac.

But Mr. Emerson’s theory of the universal mind argues against much coincidence, and I knew what he would think if I relayed to him that a man had been cheated of a great fortune by a scoundrel of a cousin who was also related to a forger, and that the forger had then turned up dead.

Still, I found it difficult to reconcile homicidal tendencies with the playful twinkle in Mr. Barnum’s fine gray eyes. Maniacs are many things, but rarely playful, and murderers, at least the few I have met, have dreadfully blank stares rather than twinkles. I decided to put the letter aside and think about it later. I also knew what Mr. Emerson would say about that: “Procrastination, Louisa, is an enemy of both self-reliance and self-preservation.”

A quick glance out the window revealed that the bright
evergreen leaves of Auntie Bond’s rhododendrons were flat and relaxed rather than curled up at the sides; it would be a mild winter day.

“Lizzie, would you enjoy another morning off from stitching shirts?” I asked my sister, who was sipping her tea.

“I could almost dread these hours away from the sewing room,” said she with a little smile. “Such strange things occur. But yes, who would not desire more time at the piano and less time seaming? But where are you off to, Louy?”

“To pay a condolence visit,” I said, “to Mr. Edward Nichols.”

“Have I met this gentleman?” asked Auntie Bond, frowning and looking vague.

“I hope not,” I said, “since he seems to be a ne’er-do-well of the worst order. But his stepsister has passed away.”

“Well,” said the sweet lady, “even miscreants deserve the occasional word of kindness. But do keep your feet dry, Louy.” Do you see, gentle reader, why the Alcotts loved Miss Bond so well that we included her in our greatly extended family?

It was still early, so I spent the next hour outside the pantry door, trying to perfect the trick Mr. Barnum had described, of looping wire around a bolt so that the door might be bolted from the outside. I chose this location in case the trick actually worked: If the door locked, I could enter from the porch and undo the bolt. Once, it almost worked. I held my breath as the wire-captured bolt squeaked half an inch behind the door, but the wire stuck and the bolt would move no farther. It would need to be greased. Why hadn’t I checked Mrs. Percy’s door to see if the bolt had recently been greased?

“Louisa,” said a startled Auntie Bond, who had just come up behind me, “why are you kneeling before the pantry?”

“I dropped something,” I told her, unwilling to reveal that I was practicing a trick of locking and unlocking doors.

Sylvia accompanied me on my errand that morning, arriving ten minutes early at our prearranged meeting spot in Boston Common, and dressed very austerely, for Sylvia at least, in a plain brown frock and overcoat, and a hat without a single silk flower on it.

“Has Miss Snodgrass’s plain style of costume become a fashion?” I asked her after giving her a kiss in greeting.

“I am engaging in a simpler plan of trimming,” she said. “One more befitting a woman of modest means.”

“But, Sylvia,” I protested, “you are dizzyingly wealthy.”

“I may not always be so. I may, in fact, marry a man of modest rather than excessive income. I may need to learn economy, at least until his fortune has been made.”

“Well,” I admitted, “Father would approve, but I am not certain I do. You looked lovely in silk and cashmere, and you enjoyed it so. That kind of luxury seemed a small vice, and small vices often save us from larger ones.”

“You worry that I am falling into vice, Louy?”

I was worried that she was falling in love, but that I chose not to reveal.

Mr. Nichols, according to the paper, was spending a brief residency in Boston in Mrs. Klegg’s Boardinghouse on Chandler Lane, an alley in a very unfashionable part of town near the harbor, far from the stately old homes of Beacon Hill or the smart new mansions of Commonwealth Avenue. If Nichols had profited from his association with Mr. Barnum, it
would appear he had already exhausted those profits. Nor did his relations with his stepsister seem to have been particularly close, if he slept in a boardinghouse instead of her home.

“Should we be walking here unescorted? I fear that women of modest means must pay much more attention to propriety than those of dizzying wealth,” Sylvia complained when we had progressed from broad avenue to narrow street to cramped lane. Cats and dogs prowled through piles of refuse in the gutters, and a group of thin children clambered around our knees, begging for pennies. I had given them all I had in my reticule, and Sylvia did likewise, yet they followed, pulling at our coats and gloved hands.