Death on Beacon Hill (11 page)

“So at the moment she was shot, she must have been standing...”

“Approximately where her feet are in my picture,” Nell said. “In the middle of this open area in front of us. And she would have been facing the corner between the bed and the doorway.”

“She was shot at close range in her right temple and fell to the left, onto her side, which means whoever shot her must have been right next to her on this side.” Will pointed to a spot on the drawing just to the right of where Fiona would have been standing.

“If Mrs. Kimball had shot Fiona from the doorway, she would have fallen backward, in the direction of the window. And unless she’d been looking toward the painting for some reason, the bullet would have struck her in the forehead, not the temple.”

Will said, “I’ve been thinking...what if there was an intruder of some sort—say, a jewel thief.”

“In the daytime?”

“Just ruminating out loud here. Mrs. Kimball and Fiona come home and surprise him. He’s already determined the famous diamond necklaces to be paste.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t a thief at all,” Nell said. “He could have been one of the men who bribed Skinner—or even some thug hired by one of those men. It wasn’t the diamonds he came for, it was the Red Book. Perhaps he found it, perhaps not. The open safe would suggest that he did.”

Will crossed to the safe and tried to insert a key from the big silver ring. It didn’t fit, but the next one did. “This safe could have been opened by Skinner after he’d been called to the scene,” Will said. “Maybe he’s the one who found the Red Book.”

“Maybe.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Will said. “There’s an intruder—either a thief or a powerful man with something to hide. He ends up shooting both women...”

“Why?”

“So they can’t identify him. Or perhaps because Mrs. Kimball threatened him with her own gun. In any event, after shooting them, he sets it up to look as if the maid had been caught in the act.”

Nell nodded slowly as she thought it over. “How did this intruder get into the house without being seen? He wouldn’t have just walked up to the front door, and there was no sign of the other doors having been broken into.”

Will rubbed his jaw for a minute, scowling contemplatively. “All right, then, what if things started out, well, more or less as Skinner proposed. Fiona set about stealing Mrs. Kimball’s necklaces, but she had a gun with her.”

“A gun that’s forty calibers or higher.”

“Right. Mrs. Kimball comes home, pulls out her own gun, and threatens to send Fiona to prison. Fiona panics and fires, hitting Mrs. Kimball in the chest. Horrified at what she’s done, she turns her gun on herself.”

“Then what happened to it?” Nell asked.

“Fiona’s gun?”

“Yes. Wouldn’t it have been found in her hand, or near it?”

Will frowned as he contemplated that. “Perhaps Detective Skinner took it.”

“Why would he do that, when it would just make it harder to prove that only Fiona and Mrs. Kimball were involved? He would have loved having that gun there.”

Will conceded with a disgruntled sigh. “Speaking of Skinner, he didn’t strike me as a dim-witted man. He had to know Fiona’s killer was standing right next to her, not across the room.”

“And he had to know Mrs. Kimball couldn’t very well have gotten up off the floor, mortally wounded, walked up to Fiona without being noticed, and put the gun to her head. He knew his version of the murder was fundamentally flawed. He must have suspected there was a third person involved. But with half the rich toffs in Boston throwing money at him...”

“How many, altogether?”

“Four that I know of, not including Orville Pratt. Mr. Thurston, Horace Bacon...”

“I know the name. His wife is a friend of my mother’s.”

“He’s the judge she bribed to get you out of jail. Then there’s a banker named...” Nell scoured her memory. “Swann—Weyland Swann. And a Dr. Foster from Harvard.”

“Isaac Foster?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“I know
of
him. He’s a third-generation surgeon from one of the oldest Boston families. Hmm.” Will looked around the room as he drew on his cigarette. “Either it was very crowded in here that afternoon, or those men are hiding sins other than murder.”

“At any rate, Skinner took the money and fed the inquest jury a story designed to incriminate Fiona while directing attention away from his, er, benefactors.”

“No wonder he was so willing to let Orville Pratt expunge this house of all evidence,” Will said, smiling as he added, “God forbid it should be scrutinized by some pink-cheeked little Irish governess who can’t seem to resist the temptation to meddle in homicides.”

“Not to mention a certain rakish card sharp with the same curious affliction.”

Will grinned as he crushed his cigarette out in the vanity tray. “You think I’m rakish?”

Nell rolled her eyes. “Let’s finish up here. I need to get home to Gracie.”

They searched the upper two floors of the house, finding them virtually devoid of furniture, save for a bedroom on the fourth floor that had clearly been Fiona’s. It was a cozy room with a small fireplace, two lace-curtained windows and a worn but cheerful floral rug covering most of the plank floor. In another time, it would have been occupied by one of the higher-ranking servants—a housekeeper or butler. Fiona had evidently earned it by virtue of being a domestic staff of one.

Tacked onto the walls were pages torn out of magazines, scores of them, mostly from
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, featuring illustrations of the latest fashions in ladies’ accessories. There were fans, slippers, shawls, collars, gloves, and reticules, but the majority were of hats, and of these, many had notes scrawled on them in pencil:
Need felt, velvet and moleskin for hat, one long ostrich feather and pompom for trim; Braiding and a broom feather; Rosettes and feathers, plus tulle or ribbon to fall from back.

This room had obviously been searched, but cursorily as compared to the rest of the house. Clothes were strewn about, and an old sea chest dumped onto the floor, but the narrow bed was left untouched; clearly, Skinner had not seriously expected to find the mysterious Red Book in the maid’s room.

Nell and Will sorted through the contents of the sea chest: a handful of dime novels, stacks of magazines tied with string, a notebook filled with the names and addresses of wholesale suppliers, another with instructions for trimming bonnets, and seven thick scrapbooks containing carefully pasted fashion illustrations. Judging from the dates on the magazine pages, the twenty-one-year-old Fiona had started keeping these scrapbooks when she was twelve.

Nell and Will retraced their path through the house, pausing this time to scrutinize any papers lying about—correspondence, bills, shopping lists... With no revelations forthcoming, and Nell already late in getting back to Colonnade Row, Will relocked the house and escorted her down the front steps.

“Will you be taking Gracie to the Public Garden this afternoon?” he asked.

“The Commons. She wants to sail her toy boat in the Frog Pond.”

“Perfect. I’ve got a new boat for her—a Chinese junk.”

Nell halted at the bottom of the steps and turned to face him. Shanghai and Hong Kong had been haunts of his at one time. Loath as she was to inquire into his travels... “You’ve been gone just a little over a month. That’s not enough time to go to China and back.”

Will laughed. “I should say not. It takes a hundred days or more just to get there from Boston. Half that long from San Francisco, though. Which is where I bought the junk, by the way.”

“Really?” The trip from the east coast to the west had always been a lengthy one as well, whether overland or by ship, but the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific had connected their tracks last month, to much fanfare.

He smiled. “I made it a point to be on the first train from Omaha to San Francisco. Four days from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean—not bad, eh?”

“Couldn’t resist taking part in history?”

“Couldn’t resist taking part in a high-stakes poker game I’d been invited to by some rich Californians who never know when to fold.”

“Ah. Of course.” Nell wished now that she had obeyed her instinct and not asked where he’d been. San Francisco was notorious for dissolution—murder, thievery, gambling, prostitution, and of course, opium. The air in the Barbary Coast was said to be thick with it; the same in the Chinese quarter. There’d been a time when Will had been helpless to resist its lure.

Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Will said, with quiet sincerity, “I’m not the same man I was when you met me. You’ve...” He looked down, frowning as if unsure of his words. Meeting her eyes, he said, “I’ve changed. You do realize that.”

“Yes.”

He nodded thoughtfully, ran a hand through his hair. “So, um, I don’t suppose you’d have any objections to my coming by the Frog Pond this afternoon?”

“Why should I mind?” she asked with a little smile, hoping to lighten the mood. “We’re courting now, aren’t we?”

He led her to his waiting phaeton, chuckling as he took her hand to help her up into the seat. “Rakish. I like that.”

“I’ve something rather momentous to communicate,” announced Orville Pratt halfway through the elaborate dinner
à la Russe
he hosted the following evening, instantly silencing the ten other people seated at his long, damask-draped dining table. There should have been one more guest, so as to make an even dozen around the table, half gentlemen and half ladies, but the client Mr. Pratt had spontaneously invited two days ago had failed to appear, leaving the chair to Nell’s left awkwardly empty.

The only sound in the Pratts’ sumptuous dining room was a muted clinking as four footmen in scarlet and gold livery cleared away the roman punch with which the diners had refreshed their palates between the roast course and the upcoming game course: Canvasback Duck with Currant Jelly and Giblet Gravy, served with Madeira according to the neatly penned menu propped up between Nell’s gold-plated charger and that of the absent guest to her left.

Winifred Pratt, seated at the opposite end of the table from her husband, waved her hand to capture his attention through the forest of candelabras separating them. “Perhaps some champagne with which to toast the exciting news?”

Mr. Pratt fixed his frigid gaze on her, the bruising around his left eye only adding to an aura of vexation held perennially in check. He was a tall gentleman, very fit-looking for his age, who wore his sterling-bright hair combed straight back from a brow so expansive as to suggest a colossal skull housing a brain of monstrous proportions. He and his wife might have belonged to different species altogether.

Pratt nodded to his butler, a stocky, taciturn fellow, who signaled the footmen, who retreated from the room, leaving an expectant hush in their wake. Winifred looked around the table and mimed an eager clapping of her plump little hands. Vera Pratt—Mr. Pratt’s spinster sister, Nell had learned, who lived with her brother’s family when she wasn’t serving as Emily’s companion in her travels—caught Winifred’s eye and cast her a quizzical look, prompting her sister-in-law to whisper, “Be patient, for heaven’s sake.”

Winifred’s gaze was slightly out of focus, her cheeks shiny-pink; she’d had at least one refill of every wine or liqueur served so far. Her elder daughter, Emily, started to say something to her, then just looked away with an expression of weariness.

Emily Pratt, fresh off her tour of Europe, was a brown-eyed honey blonde whose taste in clothes utterly confounded Nell. The dress she had on tonight was similar to yesterday’s funeral attire in the simplicity of its design, but the plum Shantung silk from which it had been made gave it a lushly romantic air. Her unbound hair, which fell in waves just to her shoulders, formed a corona of burnished bronze around her face.

If Emily defied the current fashions, her younger sister, the blue-eyed, golden-haired Cecilia, embraced them with a passion. Cecilia’s gown, a frothy construction of pink tulle festooned with ribbon embroidery, was a creation of the celebrated Parisian modiste Charles Worth, of whom—as she’d confided to Nell before dinner—she was a private client. All her evening dresses—three dozen new ones each year—came from the House of Worth. She owned fifty-eight silk shawls made by Gagelin et Opigez, also in Paris, and had just ordered a dozen more. Her mamá was forever pestering her to pass some along to Aunt Vera, but she loved just looking at them all. Her day dresses, hats, gloves, footwear and underpinnings came mostly from Swan & Edgar and Lewis & Allenby in London.

Warming to her subject, Nell’s manifest disinterest notwithstanding, Cecilia had described the care that went into her specifications when purchasing new clothing and accessories. She studied every issue of
Godey’s
and paid minute attention to the newspaper descriptions of gowns worn by European royalty—especially those of that international icon of elegance, and Mr. Worth’s most famous patron, the empress Eugénie. Not since Cecilia was a young girl had she permitted her mother to choose her frocks. Everything she wore, she told Nell, she ordered to her own exacting standards—except, of course, for her jewelry, such as the almond-sized diamond nestled in her cleavage, and the matching, if slightly smaller, ear bobs, which she owed to “the thoughtfulness of Mr. Hewitt.”