Seven for a Secret (13 page)

It took me an hour to find a black secondhand coat with tails of a length that didn’t make me look like a kinchin of twelve or an undertaker, sold to me by a bleary-eyed old Yidisher tailor who likewise lacked stature. The coat, as predicted, was made of cotton. It took me all of half an hour to discover the secret store of liquor in Bayard Street and to write out a ticket. I honestly can’t recall how I went about doing that. The deciding factor had something to do with a neat assembly line of spotless new canning jars, and the sorts of vegetables that actually grow in February.

•   •   •

The next day,
February 16
—my sole weekly day of freedom—Charles Adams was due back. So I set out for Val’s house at dawn, struggling shin-deep through gaps in sidewalk-clearing etiquette. The snow was a dull grey by that time. Littered with frozen newspapers, chicken bones, liquor bottles, worse. The light in the streets I passed through seemed the color of regretful ghosts.

Knocking at my brother’s door, I received no answer. But I was due back at home shortly to receive an illustrious visitor. So I announced my presence by stamping my overboots on the straw rug in the hall and then went in anyhow. The door was unlocked.

“Mrs. Adams,” I called out.

No response.

“Miss Wright, we must see what we can do about getting you home.”

Nothing.

“Valentine!” I attempted, annoyed.

I didn’t find my brother. I didn’t find Delia Wright or Jonas Adams either. What I did find sent a shock through my chest as if someone had bashed my exposed heart with a pine plank.

I never wrote out a police report regarding that February morning. Thank God. But if I had done, it would have gone something along these lines:

Report made by Officer T. Wilde, Ward 6, District 1, Star 107. On the morning of February 16, I arrived at the residence of Captain Valentine Wilde to escort Lucy Adams, Jonas Adams, and Delia Wright to their home in West Broadway. Upon finding the rooms empty, initiated a search and noted signs of a violent struggle in the master bedroom of the house.

I discovered the corpse of Lucy Adams in Captain Wilde’s bed, in a state of considerable disarray, with a cord wrapped tight around her neck.

As for Delia Wright and Jonas Adams, they had vanished without trace.

eight

They know too well which side their bread is buttered on
ever
to give up these advantages. Depend upon it—the Northern people will never sacrifice their present lucrative trade with the South,
so long as the hangings of a few thousands
will prevent it.

—
THE
RICHMOND WHIG,
1835

F
or at least
ten seconds,
I couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at.

There was Val’s little walnut bedside table, upended and its crystal decanter of some spirit or other—whiskey, from the woody scent—smashed into a hundred dreamlike shards upon the floor, as if a society woman’s diamond necklace had exploded. That much I understood. There was Thomas Jefferson rendered in dramatic brushstrokes, gaping up from the floor. I could manage that too.

Then I forced myself with every ounce of willpower I own to understand the central figure in the landscape and felt my legs turn willowy.

Lucy Adams’s golden skin had gone blue at her lips and her fingernails. Her motionlessness was final, permanent—she looked as if she’d never moved at all. There was a cord wrapped twice about her neck, ends dangling, and it took me less than an instant to understand it was the brown silk tie from Valentine’s dressing gown.

It was suddenly necessary to place one hand at the edge of the bed while the other grasped my own knee. In the back of my mind somewhere, in a place that wasn’t plunging like Niagara Falls, I wasn’t keen to lose sureness of step anywhere near a carpet of malicious glass shards.

If I only shut my eyes for a moment,
I thought madly,
this will go away.

I was mistaken. When I opened them, I spied one of the vilest things I’ve ever before witnessed.

Her eyes were likewise wide open. But that was quite usual, I’d recently found, for the violently dead. She was dressed in her underthings—corset undone and sagging low, chemise unlaced, most of her chest exposed though the flimsy silk shift was still draped over her sprawling shoulders. Neck bruised purple and still darkening. I’d seen that before too, as a copper star. Twice. In an evil brothel in Orange Street it took me three weeks to dismantle permanently.

But I also thought I saw scratches running along her chest. Not new scratches—these were bloodless old ridges like the footprints of dry creekbeds, done long ago. Years, if not longer. Silvery ridges of healed-over skin, probably long forgotten by their owner. Why I should still be able to see them puzzled me. Then I realized the scratches were knife scars. And not ordinary knife scars either.

Knife scars I could read, running in two lines across her breast.

as many as I love I rebuke and chasten

be zealous therefore and repent

Whatever expletive I meant to employ is lost to time, for it burst against a closing throat.

There are moments when I simply stop seeing things clearly. After reading that phrase carved years before into Mrs. Adams’s flesh, there was nothing but the horrible floating sensation of a fever dream, all sparkling black periphery and melting shapes. I was in a badly directed stage panorama where Mrs. Adams spoke fragmented scraps of Shakespeare while swallowing knife after knife after knife, points protruding from her full belly. When I pleaded with her to cease, I found that my mouth was missing. From nose to teeth proved merely sealed-over skin.

That all made equally as much sense as a strangled Mrs. Adams in Val’s bed with writing carved into her, though.

“Pull yourself together,” I hissed, swallowing an enormous portion of brandy.

The sick feeling receded in time with my thudding heartbeat.

I sat in Val’s parlor, staring down at his oaken desk. Outside, the sky was brightening mercilessly. Burning the safe, private holes away. A minute had passed, perhaps. Maybe two.

I needed to do something, and quickly, for there was no sign of my brother and nothing about this made sense. Nothing. Not money, not love, not politics, not God, not any of the reasons I’ve decided people kill each other. Mrs. Adams dead was not only tragic. It was incomprehensible.

You need to move,
I thought.
Fast.

Here’s the wretchedest thing about what followed after: I didn’t even think twice about it. Once I realized what that body meant, the shadow its shape would cast, I set to. With vigor and willpower. It would be pretty admirable to say that I ruminated over the moral implications of taking an obviously murdered corpse away from where I’d found it.

I can’t, though. Because I knew in my bones Val hadn’t done this. No matter how morphine crazed or black minded.

And even if he had done, I was not about to watch my brother hang.

The blood flowed back into my shock-numbed hands. I knew
exactly
what to do. Supposing there was time.

Racing into the bedroom, I found Mrs. Adams’s blue dress crumpled in the corner. I carried it to the bed and drew my fingers gently down her eyelids, closing them. Next I returned Val’s brown silk tie to its robe. Swift as I could, I dressed her not-quite-cold form, inwardly cursing the intricacies of female costume.

It needn’t be perfect,
I repeated over and over again.
It need only be finished in time.

As I closed the buttons over her neck, the admonishment stared back at me obscenely.
Love. Rebuke. Chasten. Repent.
I thought about how frightened Lucy Adams had been when her sister and her son had been taken. How her world had split visibly—ruptured and commenced wildly hemorrhaging.

I’ve been kidnapped before, after all.

“You can’t hear me,” I murmured when I’d got my breath back and was winding her up in a blanket. “But if I ever meet the dog who did that to you, I’ll leave some marks of my own in his hide.”

For convenience’s sake, I opened the front door of my brother’s lodgings before lifting Mrs. Adams. Her face was visible within the grey wool, but little else. I walked down the stairs, carrying her narrowly enough in my arms that her head rested on my shoulder and her feet wouldn’t snag on the banister rail. When I reached the ground floor, I made an about-face toward the rear exit, hoping to God someone or other had shoveled it clear.

I reached for the doorknob with my freer arm, the one supporting Mrs. Adams’s knees. The frosty air seared the sweat into my flesh as if the skin were burning. Little rivulets of molten lead creeping down my neck. Kicking the door shut behind me, I crossed the yard. After my brief waking nightmare, and my words to Lucy Adams in Val’s room, nothing hurt as it ought to. Not while I was about a very specific and important task.

It would hurt, though, I suspected. Later. I suspected my absolute failure to protect her and her family would hurt a great deal.

Leaving the tiny back courtyard behind me at a gate tinged with gore-colored rust, I entered the alleyway that would take me through rear yards and away. Here the snow was half-melted, but not shoveled, salted, or sprinkled with ash or Rockaway sand. Twice I staggered, and once I caught Mrs. Adams’s gorgeous fanfare of curls on a nail thrusting savagely from a discarded door frame, only noticing when a tendril tore away.

I’d have hated myself for that. But I hadn’t the time.

Broome Street borders Val’s dwelling to the south. It was populated with newsboys piping out headlines, chestnut vendors, sleighs gliding by in the snow. Our incessant street advertisements, all the howling posters plastered to boards suspended above the sidewalks, seemed maudlin and hysterical in the delicate light. As I walked, I peered out from beneath the brim of my hat, studying passersby. Expressionless, meanwhile. Functioning exclusively as a conveyance and a spyglass.

An adroit-seeming oysterman looked me over as he approached. His cart was glass fronted, boasting trays of oysters on ice, racks of ginger beer, and a steaming pile of hot peppered biscuits that would be sold within half an hour. He squinted at me. Resting my cheek against Mrs. Adams’s hair, I began talking, just loud enough to be heard.

“Don’t fret yourself, dear, you’re merely overtired. A fainting spell is nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll soon have you home.”

The oysterman huffed sympathetically. And then we’d passed each other, each man vanished from the other’s vision in a fraction of a moment. Tens of thousands of other strangers—the strangers on the harmless days who watch me sip coffee and visit the barber and buy the
Herald
when I haven’t a corpse with me—have glimpsed me once and never again. I hoped to Christ he was of their sort. A unique encounter, fast and unrepeatable.

I struggled onward for several more blocks.

I am a conveyance. And a spyglass. Nothing more.

When I knew my legs were near to faltering and reminded myself that falling with a body in my arms would effectively derail my plans, I turned into the next alley. Hoping. Maybe praying, a little, if prayers can be released into the air like Mercy’s letter, without any designated address. There are too many avidly worshipped gods around here to risk offending one of them.

But either one of them heard me or I was in luck.

From the instant I’d understood my role in the tragedy, I’d dreaded the appearance of a large rubbish bin. Either I would
make myself
do it,
actually throw Mrs. Adams away as if she were a gnawed chicken leg as I’d seen done to helpless others, or I would have to pass it by and admit to myself that my fastidiousness meant more to me than my surviving kin. Neither seemed an agreeable option. I know that bones aren’t people—bones bearing soon-to-be-dissolved flesh still stitched over them aren’t legacies, aren’t keepsakes, aren’t even a decent approximation of the torch that once burned within the sum of their parts.

Still. A rubbish bin. There is such a thing as honor, after all.

But here before me, in an alley in Ward Eight near to the Hudson, was my answer.

The shanty in the passage clearly housed newsboys. They’d built the tiny structure of river drift, mismatched planks joined to honest branches and logs. It was covered in paper, layer upon layer of newsprint. Eight or ten of them, if they arranged it right, could probably sleep in a huddle within, all shivering against one another until they vibrated themselves to sleep.

Well, at least I’d be giving them a headline.

I left her there, gently curled into herself. She wouldn’t be suffering from the cold. It was the tiniest mercy I could think of, but by then my muscles shook like the laundry rags fluttering in the wind above me, and so I thought of it again and again.
She isn’t cold.

She isn’t ever going to be cold anymore.

The rest of my journey back to Val’s house must have been uneventful. I don’t recall it, though. None of it imprinted upon my memory. The Hudson could have been on fire, and I’d never have registered the fact.

I closed Valentine’s door. Just breathing. For a moment only, I came apart as if I’d been constructed of loosely looped cotton string. After the shuddering gasp had passed through me, I stepped firmly into the small foyer.

Tasks,
I thought.
More tasks.

Not a single object in Valentine’s rooms escaped my scrutiny. A few things struck me as odd. For instance, whoever had knocked over the table hadn’t agitated the rug beneath. Nothing had been taken, so far as I could tell. No rooms disturbed other than the bedroom. And even the bedroom wasn’t disturbed in any great fashion. His morphine tinctures and their complementary morphine-tablet brethren were safe in their brown glass apothecary bottles, waiting to serve whether a sip of sugary venom or a swift-swallowed poison pill seemed better planning, neatly aligned in his carved curio case with the butchered thirteen-segment
DON’T TREAD ON
ME
viper carved into the lid. Deeply familiar, those bottles, harmless as bullets. The knives in the kitchen were neatly slotted in their pine stand, save for one resting on the table. It was perfectly clean, though, so I imagined it must have been set there to dry. The ladies had remembered to water the rosemary bush in the window.