These Shallow Graves (6 page)

Jo knew she only had seconds.

She licked her fingers and pinched the candle's wick. Its flame faded with a hiss, but no smoke. Grabbing the candleholder, she crawled under the desk, cutting her knee painfully on something as she did. She pulled the desk chair into place just as the door opened.

There were footsteps.
His.
They crossed the room slowly. She heard him plump a cushion, then wind the clock.
What's brought him up here?
she wondered. Had he heard her walking around?

Go, Theakston,
she silently pleaded.
Leave.

But he didn't. Instead he walked to the desk and straightened the blotter. “Blast that maid,” he muttered. “I told her not to touch anything in here.”

He was standing in front of the desk. Only a panel of wood separated them. Jo's heart was pounding so loudly, she was certain he would hear it. She could imagine him coming around the desk, pulling the chair out, and peering down at her, his smile oily and triumphant.

Miss Josephine? This is most irregular. Is everything all right?
he'd ask.

By morning, her mother would be fully informed. By lunchtime, the entire household staff would be. He hated to tell tales, he'd say to Mrs. Nelson, their cook—who would tell every other servant in the house—but he was concerned for Miss Jo. She was too forward for a young lady.

After what seemed like an hour but was only a minute, Jo heard him walk to the door and then close it behind him. She let out the breath she'd been holding and crawled out from under the desk. There was blood on her nightgown from her knee. She remembered that she'd seen a box of matches in a desk drawer. She dug them out, relit her candle, and inspected the cut. It was thin but deep.
What made it?
she wondered.

Crouching down, she ran her hand over the floorboards under the desk. Something sliced the skin of her palm, and she sucked in a breath at the pain. Moving her candle closer to the boards, she examined them carefully and saw that a thin, sharp piece of metal protruded from a gap between two of them. One of the boards was shorter than the rest, and scuffed.

Jo was so excited that she sat straight up and whacked her head on the underside of the desk. “Blast!” she hissed.

She grabbed a letter opener off the desktop and wedged its tip under the short board. It came up easily. Underneath it was her father's agenda. The small hollow in which it rested was lined with lead to keep mice out. An edge of that lining was what had cut her.

“Bless your black heart, Theakston,” she whispered. If he hadn't come snooping, she wouldn't have ducked under the desk.

Jo lifted the agenda out and flipped to September 16. Tucked between that page and the following one were ten one-hundred-dollar notes. Jo had never seen so much money, and seeing it now made her uneasy. She knew that her father's business transactions were conducted with checks, not cash.

She put the money on the floor, then scrutinized the page, hoping to find something that would tell her why he'd killed himself. She saw the words
Meeting, VH partners, noon
written in her father's neat hand. That signified nothing unusual.
VH
stood for Van Houten, the shipping firm in which he was a partner. Her father routinely attended business meetings with the rest of the partners.

Lower down on the page was an additional notation:
A. Jamison, 4 p.m.
Jo knew that Arthur Jamison was her father's banker.
Did Papa go to the bank that day to withdraw the thousand dollars?
she wondered.

She looked at the page for the following day, September 17. At the bottom, she saw something that
was
unusual—the very last entry:
Kinch, VHW, 11 p.m.

VHW
stood for Van Houten's Wharf, the site of the shipping firm's docks. Her father always abbreviated it that way. But Kinch? That name meant nothing to Jo. It was so odd-sounding. Maybe it wasn't a person but a ship. That would make more sense, considering the
VHW
notation. Then again, why would her father be boarding a ship at all, never mind at such a late hour? Van Houten's partners didn't inspect cargo; their clerks did.

She flipped to the day before her father died, September 15. The same notation was at the bottom of that page, too:
Kinch, VHW, 11 p.m.
But there was additional writing underneath it. The letters were large and loopy, as if scrawled in haste:
Eleanor Owens, b. 1874.

“Who's Eleanor Owens?” Jo whispered. She wasn't a friend or family member—Jo had never heard her name mentioned. She wasn't an employee, either. Van Houten only had one female employee—the woman who cleaned their offices—and her name was Tillie Polk. If Eleanor Owens wasn't a friend or an employee, who was she?

Then the answer came to Jo and she gasped. “Dear God,” she said aloud, “Papa had a mistress.”

Jo had seen those sorts of women. They drove flashy carriages through the park, wore too much jewelry, and rouged their cheeks.

She wasn't supposed to know they even existed, but Trudy had told her about them. They'd had a friend at school, Jacinta Smyth, who left one day without any explanation.

Trudy did some digging and found out that Jacinta's father had a mistress who'd had his child. When he refused to support the baby, the woman paid a visit to his home—during a dinner party. The resulting scandal was so terrible that the family had to move to Cleveland.

“But why would Mr. Smyth
do
such a thing?” Jo had asked Trudy.

“Because Mrs. Smyth's a cold fish. You can tell by looking at her. Men have to be kept satisfied. They have needs.”

“Don't women?” Jo had asked.

“Only the bad ones,” Trudy replied.

Jo looked at the notation again.
What does the
b
before 1874 stand for?
she wondered.
If it stands for
born,
then Eleanor Owens couldn't be Papa's mistress because she'd only be sixteen years old. At least, I
hope
she couldn't be his mistress.

Then she had an even more chilling thought: Maybe Eleanor Owens was the
child
of her father and his mistress—a child who had come of age and wanted money. Maybe she was blackmailing him and that was why he had all that cash.

“Maybe I'm losing my mind,” Jo said out loud.

Her father was an upstanding man. He went to church every Sunday and dined at home most every night. He sent her mother flowers every week. He was as likely to have a mistress as he was to vote Democrat.

The more she thought about the whole thing, the more outlandish it sounded.

Why was I so quick to believe Eddie Gallagher?
she asked herself.
He's probably one of those reporters who'll do anything to get a story—even if it means making one up. The notations could have something to do with papa's work, and his death might truly have been an accident.

Even as she thought these things, Jo didn't quite believe them. Yet, if her father
had
killed himself, there had to be a reason. What
was
it?

She paged back, reading every entry for the months of September and August, but saw nothing else unusual. She paged forward, too, looking at her father's future appointments. Again, nothing jumped out at her—until she got to October 15.
Kinch, VHW, 11 p.m.
was written on the page.

What does it mean?
Jo wondered.

The clock downstairs struck the hour—three a.m. Jo knew she would be wrecked tomorrow if she didn't get some sleep. She tucked the agenda into a pocket in her robe and replaced the floorboard. As she picked up her candle, she heard a noise from the street—a loud, metallic crash.

Curious, she walked to the windows to see what had caused it. The glow from the streetlamps revealed a woman righting an upended garbage can. She was a ragpicker—Mad Mary. Jo knew her. Everyone did. Mary roamed the city day and night, muttering to herself as she dug through trash and ashes, looking for bones to sell to glue factories, rags used in paper-making, or anything else that might bring a few pennies.

Jo's father, kind to a fault, had always made sure that Mrs. Nelson wrapped up leftovers for Mary if Mary came by during daylight hours. It had irritated Jo's mother, because Mary would sit on their stoop while she ate, then linger to watch the children play in the park. Friends coming to call had to step around the piteous figure in her dirty, threadbare clothing.

Mary finished digging and put her finds in her small wooden cart. There were bells on it, and they jingled softly as she went on her way. Jo turned to go back to her room, but as she did, something else caught her eye—a man.

He was standing directly across from her house, staring up at her father's window—at
her.

Startled, Jo blew out her candle and shrank into the draperies, hiding from view. She stood frozen for a few seconds until she worked up the nerve to peer out again. The man was still there, standing in the gaslight. He was smoking. His clothes were rough. His dark hair was gathered and tied at the nape of his neck. And his face … it must've been a trick of the light, but it seemed to be streaked with something. Dirt? Ash?

As Jo watched, her heart pounding, he flicked the remains of his cigarette into the gutter and walked away. She tried to tell herself that he was only a vagrant, but she knew it wasn't so. He'd been staring directly at the windows—the same windows where her father used to stand night after night, gazing out into the darkness. Watching. Waiting.

In that instant, Jo became certain that Eddie Gallagher had told her the truth. The names in her father's diary and the dark figure watching her house … they had something to do with his death. She felt it in her bones.

She slipped back to the desk, lit her candle again, and returned to her bedroom. After hiding her father's agenda inside a fur muff in her closet, she crawled back under her covers, feeling dispirited. She had found the agenda, but it had given her no answers, only more questions.

With mounting dread, Jo realized she would have to ask her questions of the living, not the dead.

She would have to go to her uncle.

Admiral William Montfort gazed down at Jo with eyes as gray as flint and every bit as hard.

The fearsome admiral had been painted aboard his warship in 1664, only days before he'd taken the colony of Nieuw Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York. His portrait now hung in Phillip Montfort's front hall. The Montfort coat of arms, with its Latin motto, appeared in the canvas's bottom left corner.

“ ‘Fac quod faciendum est,' ”
Jo read aloud. “Do what must be done.”

William Montfort had lived by that motto, and his descendants were expected to as well. Montfort children learned to say it while still in their cradles. Jo took strength from the words now. If the admiral could confront the entire Dutch navy, she could confront her uncle. She had no choice.

People didn't just kill themselves; they did so because they were distraught. If something had been troubling her father so deeply that he wished to end his life, Phillip might know why. The two brothers had been very close.

The decision to speak with him was a daunting one, though; Jo knew it would lead to trouble. Asking questions, demanding explanations—these things always led to trouble. The moment a girl learned how to talk, she was told not to.

“This way, please, Miss Josephine,” said Harney, her uncle's butler. He'd gone to Phillip's study to announce her and had just returned.

“My darling Jo! What a lovely surprise!” Phillip exclaimed as she joined him. He rose from his chair by the fireplace and enfolded her in an embrace.

He looks so much like Papa,
Jo thought, with a stab of pain. Phillip Montfort was older by two years—forty-six to her father's forty-four—and a little taller, but the gray eyes, the shock of black hair, and the smile were the same. And like her father, Phillip had a certain courtly formality about him. He was wearing a three-piece suit even though he was alone in his own study on a Saturday.

“Come and sit down,” he said. “Your timing is perfect. I've just had Harney bring a fresh pot of tea. May I offer you a cup? I'm afraid you've missed your aunt and cousin, though. They're out visiting Madeleine's mother.”

Jo knew that Madeleine and Caroline always paid social calls on Saturday afternoons. That was why she'd picked this time. Caroline's brother, Robert, was away at school.

“I'm sorry to miss them, but to be truthful, I came at this time because I want to speak with you alone,” Jo said, settling herself across from him.

Her uncle's smile turned to a frown of concern. “Is everything all right?” he asked.

Jo decided not to beat around the bush. She took a deep breath, then said, “No, Uncle Phillip, it isn't. I'm afraid I have a difficult question to ask you. … Did Papa kill himself?”

Phillip blinked, taken aback. “Of course not! My goodness, Jo, where did you get such a dreadful idea?”

For a second, Jo was tempted to fib, but she knew better. Like her father, her uncle was no fool. He'd see right through her lie, and she'd only get herself into more trouble. She bravely plunged ahead.

“After I delivered Papa's bequest to Reverend Willis, I delivered Mr. Stoatman's,” she explained. “While I was there, I overheard some reporters talking. They said that Papa committed suicide.”

Phillip's cheeks flushed.
Here it comes,
Jo thought grimly. And it did.

“Josephine Montfort, what the devil were you thinking?” he thundered. “Cavorting through the city unescorted! And to
Park Row,
of all places! What if someone had seen you? Bram or Addie or Grandmama?”

“Grandmama wouldn't have seen me at the
Standard.
She only reads the
World,
” Jo said, trying to soften her uncle's anger with a bit of levity. Grandmama Aldrich was as likely to read the
World
—much less visit its offices—as she was to wear red garters.

“That is
not
funny, Josephine. I'm far too angry for jokes at the moment. In fact, I'm livid!”

Jo flinched. “Please don't shout, Uncle Phillip. I only went to Park Row because I didn't want to go home. I can't bear it there anymore.”

Phillip was unmoved. “That's hardly an excuse!” he said.

“But you don't know what it's like!” Jo argued. “Papa's gone and Mama barely comes out of her room and the blinds are drawn all day and I feel like I've been shut up in a tomb!” A frightening thought suddenly gripped her. “You won't
tell
Mama I went to the paper, will you? She'll never let me out of the house again.”

“That is
just
like you to worry more about having your wings clipped than about the wrongness of your actions,” Philip said, still fuming. “You've always been a headstrong girl, and you've never heeded a scolding. Not about climbing too high in trees—”

“Caro's cat was stuck!”

“Or swimming out too far from shore—”

“I had to rescue Aunt Maddie's hat!”

“Or knocking the Beekman boy off his bicycle!”

“He deserved it! He was bullying Robert!”

Phillip closed his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “What am I going to do with you?” he said. After a moment, he opened his eyes again. “I won't tell your mother. Not this time. Partly because I feel she is somewhat to blame for this, keeping you as confined as she does. But on one condition—you must promise me you will never,
ever
do it again.”

“I promise,” Jo said. “And I'm sorry.” She truly was. She felt terrible for upsetting him. His burdens were heavy enough without her adding to them. “I know I shouldn't have gone, but I did, and then I overheard the reporters talking, and … well, I have to know if they're right. I
have
to, Uncle Phillip. I think about Papa all the time. His death makes no sense to me. He knew better than to clean a loaded gun.
I
know better than to clean a loaded gun.”

Phillip looked away. “We all make mistakes. Perhaps he was preoccupied. Perhaps he only
thought
he had unloaded the chamber,” he said.

He was lying. Jo could hear it in his voice; she could see it in his face. “Tell me the truth, Uncle Phillip. That's why I came to you. Because I want to know the truth.”

“The truth can be a hard thing, Jo. It's often best left hidden,” Phillip said quietly.

“I can cope with hard things. I'm not a child anymore. I'm grown. I'm seventeen years old.”

“Yes, I suppose you are,” Phillip allowed, looking at Jo again. “But when I look at you, I still see the child you once were, and I want to protect that child. From grief. From pain. From all the ugliness of the world.”

“Please, Uncle,” Jo begged.

Phillip's eyes filled with sadness. He suddenly looked old and weary. “My dearest girl,” he said. “How I hoped I would never have to have this conversation. Yes. Charles killed himself. I'm sorry, Jo. I'm so very, very sorry.”