From This Moment (5 page)

As anticipated, every woman in the office eagerly accepted, reaching for their paperwork and hastily assembling it into files and noting a date on the tab. Stella waited patiently for all six women to hand over their day’s work.

“I don’t know how you can stand that man,” Janet said. “Mr. Palmer is just so odd. No matter how hard I try, I can’t warm up to him, so thank you.” She turned over her notes from the School Board meeting to Stella.

Stella nodded but said nothing as she carried the stack of files down to the archives, where she would turn them over to Ernest Palmer, the city’s archivist.

Ernest Palmer was the butt of jokes throughout City Hall, but she liked him anyway. Stella suspected that his overly large eyes, magnified by the thick spectacles he wore, might be part of the reason people teased him. Ernest worked in the basement archives all day, and who wouldn’t be odd if they never saw the sunlight? He smelled of camphor, continually pushed his thick eyeglasses up his nose, and talked incessantly to anyone who visited the archives, usually about his passion for the history of typography. He could rattle on for hours about the beauty of Garamond type or the challenges of italic font. Mr. Palmer was especially eager to talk to the stenographers, for he assumed they must share his passion for the printed word.

Stella always enjoyed chatting with Ernest. She had no interest in long-winded discussions about typography, but she liked people who had a passion for something, even if it was as pedantic as the beauty of a typeface. The eccentric Mr. Palmer would have fit in quite well with the crowd she’d run with back in London, as artists had a high tolerance for unconventional people.

She dashed as quickly as possible down to the basement, her heels clicking on the marble steps. At the stroke of five o’clock, people would come pouring out of their offices, leaving her precious little time for her most important task of the entire day: skimming the notes typed up by her coworkers.

She stood in the vacant corridor outside the archives, flipped open Nellie’s file, and scanned the neatly typed transcript from the Board of Taxation meeting. Names of the attendees were always typed near the top of the page, and Stella read them quickly, but there was nothing of interest here. She closed the folder and moved on to the next.

Her offer to carry their notes downstairs was not motivated by kindness. Rather, it let Stella quickly learn the names of every government official who had been at City Hall that day and in what capacity. She skimmed the notes of her coworkers every day, on the lookout for the name of the man who might help her unlock the clues to Gwendolyn’s murder.

In Gwendolyn’s many letters to her, the one person she’d mentioned as wholly trustworthy was a mysterious man she’d referred to only by his initials, A.G. He was the man in whom Gwendolyn confided when she first discovered evidence of graft at City Hall.

I thank the Lord I had an ally I could trust with the evidence of corruption I had found
, Gwendolyn had written.
He is wonderful, possibly the most valiant man I’ve ever known. He knew exactly how to handle the evidence I turned over to him.

Gwendolyn went on to report that he was in a sensitive position in the government and she hesitated to name him, referring to him only by his initials. She said he was an idealistic man who had long been frustrated by the rampant corruption in the government and was quietly mounting a campaign to root it out.

Stella was almost certain A.G. worked at City Hall, for
Gwendolyn knew him well and trusted him implicitly. So lavish was her praise that Stella suspected her sister was half in love with the enigmatic man.

It bothered her that Gwendolyn would not confide A.G.’s full name. It seemed peculiar, especially since everything she said of him nearly glowed with admiration, portraying him like a crusading archangel from the legends of old.

I love feeling useful,
Gwendolyn had written her.
A.G. and I are a team, and I’ve already seen some of the men I’ve named brought up on criminal charges. We are making a real difference in Boston.

Toward the end, Gwendolyn began to suspect her work was putting her in danger. In her final letter, Gwendolyn wrote that she feared for her life. She sounded almost embarrassed as she wrote it.
I hope I don’t sound too melodramatic, but should something strange happen to me, please consider it foul play.

A woman of Gwendolyn’s swimming abilities drowning in five feet of water qualified as
strange
. So did the stonewalling Stella had received from the medical examiner’s office and the Boston Police Department.

Stella’s chief objective in working at City Hall was to discover the identity of A.G. As soon as she found Gwendolyn’s mysterious ally, he would be able to tell her everything Gwendolyn had learned and provide his perspective on exactly what had happened to her sister that cold December night.

It was why Stella skimmed the notes of every meeting taking place at City Hall. She flipped open the next file in the stack, and her eyes widened in pleasure. Andrew Gaines, director of the Parks Department, had been in the building today.

He was a possibility. Director of the Parks Department was a powerful position in the city. He controlled huge swaths of
public land and was instrumental in designating routes for the subway. He was someone Gwendolyn would have encountered in the course of her work. And being associated with such an idealistic job was the kind of thing that would have appealed to Gwendolyn.

So far, Stella had found fourteen men connected with City Hall whose initials matched A.G. She kept the names of all fourteen men on a scrap of paper taped to the underside of her desk drawer. Soon she would begin seeking them out to determine if they could be Gwendolyn’s man.

After skimming the other files, she found no additional men with the proper initials, so she opened the door to the archives to turn over the files. “Good afternoon, Mr. Palmer.”

The archivist was hunched over a newspaper at the front counter, and he barely glanced up as she entered. Which was unusual. Normally he pounced on her the moment she walked through the door to chat about whatever oddities he was obsessed with that day. She set the files on the front counter, but he still didn’t look up. Whatever was in the newspaper he examined so studiously had caused furrows on his brow, and she was worried about him.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

He grimaced and stood upright. “There is going to be an auction of old printing presses and typefaces in Philadelphia. The announcement says it is the largest collection of antique printing equipment to surface in the past decade.”

“Well, that’s wonderful . . . isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “The auction is next month. I don’t know if I should go. I can’t afford a set of antique type, and seeing it go to someone else would be unbearable.”

Her colleagues upstairs would have laughed at the despair in Mr. Palmer’s voice, but Stella understood. “You still ought to
attend,” she said. “It will be like visiting the Louvre. You can’t buy any of the artwork, but just having the chance to admire it is worthwhile, don’t you think?”

A few of the tension lines eased on Mr. Palmer’s forehead. “There is going to be a complete collection of Caslon type on display. Including the Hebrew and Greek fonts. Can you imagine what a labor of love it must have been for William Caslon to create fonts in three different alphabets? I’ve never seen a complete set of Caslon fonts before, they are
that
rare.”

He continued to ramble about the eighteenth-century gunsmith who had given up his profession to design a new form of typeface. Stella did her best to pay attention, but she needed to get back upstairs and record Andrew Gaines’s name onto her slip of paper. Still, she sensed Mr. Palmer had no one to share his obsessive interests with, and he seemed so lonely down here in the archives all by himself. She listened to him gush about the brave gunsmith who had ventured into the risky world of typeface design, driven by nothing more than a craving to create beautiful text. Against her will, Stella began developing a reluctant admiration for the long-dead typographer.

Ernest abruptly stopped. “Hey, it’s Tuesday,” he said. “Aren’t you going to call your parents?”

Stella glanced at the telephone in the corner. Ernest had generously allowed her to use the telephone in the archives to call her parents each Tuesday afternoon. It was far better than trying to place the call from a crowded pharmacy or hotel lobby, where it was always so noisy it was hard to hear. Whenever Stella called, she needed to listen hard for clues about her mother’s condition. A hitch in her voice, a change of cadence . . . these were the signs her mother’s stability was wavering again.

“Not today,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment this evening I can’t miss. Might I call them tomorrow?”

“Sure thing,” Ernest agreed before turning back to his newspaper.

As she walked back up to her office, she hoped Mr. Palmer would go to the auction. Life was too short to hold back from the pure elation that could be found from the pursuit of a dream.

Of course, the irony was that Stella’s entire life was now completely devoid of passion, art, or anything else she had once cherished. That was okay, though. Until she found out who’d caused Gwendolyn’s death, the rest of her life would be held in suspension. Only after she exposed a murderer would she be free to try to gather the frayed threads of her world and weave them once again into a thing of beauty and meaning.

She trudged back up to her empty office and recorded the new name on the list taped beneath her desk drawer.

Now came the hardest part of the day. After weeks of trying to make contact, she had an appointment with Freddie McNeill. The prospect sent a chill straight down to the marrow of her bones, for Freddie was the waterman who had found Gwendolyn’s body floating in the river.

And he had information she needed to know.

3

S
tella drew a fortifying breath as she descended the staircase at City Hall. Was there anything more distressing than learning the details of your sister’s final moments on earth? Or seeing the place where her body had been pulled from the frigid river?

But it had to be done. The police had lost patience with her and no longer took her appointments. They insisted Gwendolyn’s death was an accidental drowning, but that didn’t make sense. When they were children, Gwendolyn had laughingly challenged the neighborhood boys to see who could swim across Windmill Pond the fastest. It was half a mile to swim the length of the pond, and Gwendolyn always won. She was a strong swimmer who would not have drowned in five feet of water.

For Gwendolyn to die by drowning was morbidly ironic. While Gwendolyn loved frolicking in the water like a dolphin, Stella had always been terrified of water, too afraid to even learn how to swim. And yet it was Gwendolyn who had drowned.

Freddie McNeill was the city waterman who rowed the
Charles River each day, scooping out muck that built up in the city’s inflow and drainage pipes. Without regular raking out, the pipes got clogged with sludge that could cause pressure difficulties at the pumping station. It was a messy job and best done at low tide, which meant Freddie was often the first person out on the river each morning.

And on a cold, drizzly morning in early December, Freddie McNeill had been the first one to spot the beautiful dead girl floating facedown in the freezing river.

Stella pulled her shawl tighter as she headed outside. Boston in early spring was chilly, and getting to the wharf where Freddie had asked her to meet him was going to be a challenge. Huge sections of the city’s streets were ripped up for subway construction, causing the streetcars to be rerouted and more crowded than normal. She needed to get all the way to south Boston within the next hour. As she scurried down the impressive steps in front of City Hall, she almost missed the tall man leaning negligently against a lamppost.

The instant she spotted Romulus she averted her face.

“Miss West,” he drawled casually.

She ignored him and headed north on Court Street, but he pushed away from the lamppost to follow alongside her. She should have known he wouldn’t be discouraged so easily, but she still had no intention of confirming his suspicions that she was the artist he was looking for. There were probably dozens of women named Stella West in the country.

“I like your shawl.”

She kept marching straight ahead without breaking stride. Perhaps if she ignored him he would leave her alone.

“William Morris?”

She glanced at him in surprise, for the ornate tapestry of her shawl was indeed from the great designer William Morris.
The extravagant shawl was out of place with her bland clothes, but it had been chilly this morning and she’d succumbed to the temptation to wear it. Wasn’t it just her luck that Romulus White seemed to have a keen appreciation for textile design and felt compelled to comment on it. She didn’t even know if William Morris’s fabrics were available in the United States, for this shawl had been a gift from the artist himself shortly before he died.

She walked faster, but Mr. White kept pace with her. “It’s a spectacular shawl,” he said. “It gives you a wonderful medieval flare, like Eleanor of Aquitaine striding down the streets of Boston.”

She fought to keep the smile from breaking onto her face. It would only encourage him.

The crowds were terrible at the next intersection due to an overturned wagon that had dumped hundreds of turnips across the cobblestone street. A policeman directed traffic, but Stella was trapped beside Romulus until the officer let them pass.

“I should properly introduce myself,” he said. “I’m Romulus White. I’ve admired your work ever since I first saw it on display at—”

She cut him off, desperate to avoid anything that hinted she was anything but an ordinary stenographer. “Romulus. What an unusual name.”

“My mother goes through periodic phases with historical eras,” he admitted. “For a while, she was enchanted with Roman mythology and couldn’t resist foisting the name of Rome’s founder on me. I’m grateful I wasn’t born during her medieval phase or I’d have been named Beowulf.”