Femme Fatale (27 page)

“The truth will not be caught sometimes, Pink, and sometimes is not worth the price of catching. So to find a murderer, you are convinced that you must also hunt my true mother among these theatrical folk, a quest I gave up before you were born. It’s an unlikely relationship. You have confused your obsession to solve the mystery of myself with the trail of a story worthy of reporting in your newspaper.”

Pink’s eyes lifted to challenge Irene’s assertion.

“Yes,” Irene went on, “by the time I was five or six, I saw that where I came from didn’t matter. It was where I was going. By ten years later, Professor Marvel, the Walking, Talking Encyclopedia, had not only schooled me, but he had found me a singing teacher, and I had found my true voice. No matter what I did, I was no longer a disciple of Terpsichore, or some future Little Sure-Shot. I was a singer, and from then on my days in the amazing arts of sensational theater were numbered. I sang my way out, note by note, a ‘lonely orphan girl.’ ”

Irene’s apologia, if indeed that was what it was—an explanation for being what she had been and had become—ended on that final, cutting note. She had quoted what Elizabeth Cochrane, also known as Nellie Bly, had signed herself on the key letter to the editor that began her journalistic career.
Lonely orphan girl
.

We were all that, we three. I due to the death of my mother at my birth and my father’s death before I turned twenty. Irene for having been birthed indeed as Athena, from some mysterious thought rather than a mortal man and woman who could be
named. And “Nellie Bly,” the creature Elizabeth Cochrane eventually created on the death of her father that left her mother and siblings unprovided for, save by her own workaday efforts.

Perhaps Irene should amend Pink’s phrase to “poor brave little lonely orphan girl.”

“Is it my past,” Irene asked, “that you pursue? Or your own?”

“Too many of us are orphan girls,” Pink said. “I pursue the social customs that make us ashamed of our origins.”

“There is a difference between shame and discretion,” Irene said, “and until you learn it, you will hurt other people rather than help them.”

“Blame me for Madam Sophie’s death, if you will. It was
your
deliberately foggy past that set me on this path.”

“No. It was my deliberate decision to use you as I could to save my dear ones that made you so resentful. You are a strong young woman, Pink. You will go far. Just try not to do it on other people’s pain.”

“I cannot believe that you are so indifferent to the fate of your own mother! Have you no heart?”

“It is better than being all heart, and having no conscience. We owe the present, not the past.”

I was utterly lost during this contretemps. Perhaps it was because I had a much more boring past than either of my companions. I sighed. Surely, the unconventional Englishman, Quentin Stanhope, had taken note of that very fact and discreetly retreated in the face of this lamentable lack.

I was a Woman With No Past, and therefore, dull. Irene, apparently, had danced, shot, and sang her way to present fame and fortune, which was sadly stalled because circumstances had forced her to become anonymous. Life was not fair.

“Miss Pink,” I said, reverting to my governess mode, which was dull but effective. “You owe Irene and myself more than an apology. You owe us an explanation, so that we may undo any ill you have done.”

“Not even you, Irene, can bring the medium back to life!” she burst out, truly contrite.

“No,” said Irene, “but we can find out who killed her. If you are wrong, Pink, and she has no connection to me, still her death was sudden and undeserved and merits solving.

“If she died, as you think, because she was related to me, or knew who was, it was still an evil, senseless death. ‘Each man’s death diminishes me.’ That was written by a sixteenth-century poet, a man whose life combined great self-indulgence and great holiness. You see? Nothing is ever simple, ever clear-cut. And those words are as true today as they ever were.

“Use my past as a goad, if you think you do so for the common good, Pink. But you need no fancied relationship to me or my past to make me care about Sophie’s passing. In principle alone, it’s an abomination that is not to be tolerated. If you are right that this murder relates to me or my past, then it is an abomination that is not to be tolerated, but it is no worse a crime to me because I might be a cause. No murder is acceptable, to any civilized person. I would still want to find who had killed her.”

“Exactly,” I said in my sternest tones. Then I looked at Irene. “Can we?”

“Ah, Nell,” Irene said, once we were alone again in our hotel room. “Can you understand why I don’t wish to solve the mystery of my mother?”

“Of course. She was no doubt a scandalous woman. I am sorry, Irene, but it is likely you share the same miserable past that Godfrey does: you were conceived in shame and secrecy, sin and error, and it is best left thus, and unsaid.”

“Such conceptions are rarely that simple, Nell. If Pink is right, and she may be, my . . . secret birth could cause deaths today. That is a notion I cannot accept.”

“You know, Irene”—I leaned near and whispered—“I used to think as a child, quite fancifully, of course, that perhaps I did not have a mother who perished at my birth, but was an . . . offspring of the Prince of Wales, or a Gypsy fortune-teller, who left me on the parish steps, and then I had been adopted by my kindly father.”

Irene regarded me with the utmost attention during this confession, and then cackled like a hyena afterward. Like a soprano hyena, I might add.

“We are
all
foundlings, Nell, in our own imaginations! Even the child of the most fortunate birth sometimes imagines a lurid past! Pink is unearthing the capacity of the human mind to deceive itself, that’s all. ‘I am so much more uninteresting than everybody thinks!’ the little voice speculates. Well, Nell, in your case, you are more interesting than anybody thinks, which is why Quentin is so taken with you.”

“He is? Truly? Quentin taken with me? No.”

“You know it’s so, though you dare not admit it, not even to yourself. It’s amazing how much we will not admit to ourselves, much less anybody else. Just as I know that Pink’s quest into my past will unearth truth, though I dare not admit it. Well! There is no stopping a daredevil reporter, so we must steal the march on her. We will follow the trail she has cut through this wilderness of American antecedents.”

“I don’t want to know,” I wailed.

“Nor do I. I was not lying. I have forgotten most of my youth, probably for good reason. Pink is forcing me to revisit it. It may not be pretty and it may not be what I wish to remember. If I have a mother who can eventually be identified and named, I despise her, Nell. There is no point in finding her, except that I may have a specific name to hate.”

“Irene! She is your mother.”

“Is she?”

“A mother is sacred.”

“Is she?”

“She should be.”

“We all should be more than we are.”

“Agreed, but until we are, what are we to do next? Perhaps Godfrey should join us?”

“No! I want no one else to know of this until I understand it myself.” Irene sighed deeply, and a single breath of hers could resonate to the back wall of an opera house. “I would never voluntarily stir up my own past, Nell. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my theatrical origins, silly as they were. It’s that I believe that the present is all that matters.”

I considered what secrets an inquiry into my late mother’s early life might unmask. Probably nothing, but then again . . . I preferred her to be a faint tintype in a velvet-lined case that, closed, would fit in the palm of my hand. A mother was a notion alien to me, as it must be to Irene. I could indeed sympathize with her instinct to leave well enough alone.

Unfortunately, Pink Cochrane and Nellie Bly had never done any such thing in their entire conjoined lives.

20.

The Show Must Go On

The wearing of mourning is a time-honored institution. . . .
To be sure there is no inherent quality of consolation
in the black garments themselves—they are merely a silent
but appropriate expression of grief
.

—
THE DELINEATOR
, 1891

Once Irene had decided to investigate her own past, there was no holding her back.

That very day we returned to Union Square on a round of revisiting the persons she now knew had shared her mostly unrecalled childhood.

This time she intended to squeeze every droplet of memory out of them.

And this time we were three again: Irene, Pink, and me.

Numbers were no match for fate, however.

At Tiny Tim’s boardinghouse, we found him gone, indefinitely.

“What wonderful good fortune!” trilled Mrs. McGillicuddy in answer to our inquiry for him. “He was offered a long-term tour of the West with Balambo, the Levitating Levant. After years of not working, can you imagine that!” A frown darkened
her excitement. “I will have to advertise for another tenant, of course, and Timothy was such a quiet resident . . . for a former drummer.”

“Imagine that,” Irene remarked tartly as we descended the brownstone’s exterior stair. She caught my eye with a look that Miss Pink, busy hunting up a gurney, couldn’t notice. As a “New Yorker” Pink seemed determined to show us that we were on her ground now and she knew it like no other.

I understood Irene’s unspoken message: could Tiny Tim’s sudden decampment be too timely to be accidental? Had he fled for some reason, or had someone seen to his swift removal from the scene?

Someone with power or money. Or both.

“Where to next?” Pink was asking impatiently at the gurney’s gaping door.

“The matinee and Madame Salamandra. The New Fourteenth Street Theater and drive like the Devil!” Irene tossed this last aside to the coachman high on his seat.

Had I not read Dr. Watson’s horribly biased account of Irene’s first brush with Sherlock Holmes and her hasty wedding to Godfrey—with Sherlock Holmes in disguise as an impromptu witness! (something I doubt even bride and groom knew)—I would have never known that her parting instruction parodied Godfrey’s command to the driver on their wedding day.

Pink, of course, thought nothing of Irene’s call for speed. New York streets were so clogged with pedestrians and vehicles of every description that making time through them required the patience of a Job. No wonder New Yorkers had taken to setting steam locomotives on tracks high above the city streets, to huff and puff above the madding crowd, adding to daily reek and din. The “El” the lofty track for these demon engines was called, perhaps a shortening of the word “elevated,” but I couldn’t help hearing it as the Cockney version of the road to “ ’ell.”

Our timing was impeccable. My trusty lapel watch, recovered
from the scene of my greatest distress during our recent Paris adventure, read half past three. Surely the matinee program would be ending as we arrived, and that was indeed the case.