Laura Lee Guhrke (28 page)

Her rambling faded away into silence as Mick opened the outer envelope and found a smaller one inside. Without touching it, he dumped it out onto the table. He could see Sophie’s name and address written on it in printed characters. Using a pencil, he turned it over, then looked at Sophie sharply. “How do you know it’s from the killer? You haven’t opened it.”

She shook her head. Her face pale, she said, “I couldn’t. It was. . . it was too much. When I touched it, I almost blacked out.”

Mick noticed that as she spoke, her hands began to shake. He could hear the fear in her voice. Whether her statement was true or not, she clearly believed it. He reached into his desk and pulled out a pair of gloves. After putting them on, he carefully slit the
envelope with his letter opener, pulled a letter from inside, and unfolded it.

Mick had seen many sick things in his career, but this had to be one of the sickest. He read the letter through twice. As the killer outlined in lurid detail what he was going to do to Sophie if she continued to interfere with his plans, Mick’s rage against this lunatic became a hot, hard knot of fire in his belly. No matter what he had to do, he was going to get this sick bastard.

“What does it say?”

Mick didn’t answer her question. Instead, he asked one of his own. “Did you get any impressions from, it?”

She lifted her hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “Hate. Evil. Danger.”

“Nothing specific?”

“I think . . .” She frowned, staring at the letter. “I don’t think this is some prankster who’s been reading the papers. The author of this letter is the same person who tried to kill you and who did kill Jack Hawthorne. I’m certain of it.”

“Anything else?”

“I sense one other thing.” She looked up to meet his gaze. “This person is a man.”

That much was evident from the sick things in the letter, but he didn’t say so. She hadn’t read the letter, and it wasn’t necessary that she should.

“Yes. A man somehow connected with you. A friend or—”

“What?” He looked at her across the desk, shaking his head. “That’s not possible.”

“I’m certain of it.”

“I don’t believe it. All my friends are police officers.”
Mick shook his head, refusing to accept that. “An officer doing a brutal murder like that to a fellow officer? No.” He held up the letter in his gloved hand. “An officer writing sick garbage such as this? No. You’re wrong.”

She looked at him unhappily. “I didn’t say it was an officer, but it is someone connected with you. What does the letter say?”

Mick looked at her. The hand she held out to take the letter from him was shaking, her dark eyes were filled with fear. There was no way he was going to let her read what this madman planned to do to her after he finished cutting up the next policeman. “It doesn’t say anything important,” he answered as he put the letter back in its envelope. “It’s just vile trash. He’s just using you to taunt Scotland Yard.”

“You’re lying to me.”

He looked across the desk at her. Meeting her gaze straight on, he said, “No, I’m not.”

“Then let me read it.” She watched him shake his head, and she made a sound of frustration. “Mick, I have a right to read it. It was addressed to me.”

“I don’t give a damn what your rights are,” he shot back. “You’re not a police officer, this is evidence, and even touching it scares the hell out of you! You’re not reading it!”

Sophie leaned back in her chair. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” She pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. Behind her hand, she whispered, “Oh, God, I knew it.”

Mick stood up. “I’m sending a pair of constables home with you. They are going to keep watch over you day and night until this is resolved.”

“Why?” Sophie also stood up. Studying his face, she said, “Why do I need somebody watching me? He’s threatening to kill me, too. Isn’t he?”

Mick didn’t answer, and she slammed a fist on the desk between them in her own burst of temper. “If this involves having guards on me, I have a right to know what I’m being threatened with! What does the letter say?”

He circled his desk without answering, walked past her, and opened the door. “Stover!” he shouted down the hall. “Get in here!”

When the clerk came scurrying around the corner, Mick said, “Get a constable to take Miss Haversham home. Tell him to stay with her every single minute until I can get there. Then send for a fingerprint man to go up to the meeting room. And send the CID surgeon, too. Go!”

“Yes, sir.” Stover raced away to obey Mick’s orders, and Mick returned his attention to Sophie. “That Dalrymple affair is tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Why?”

“You’re not going.”

“What? I have to go. If I try to get out of it, Mother will drag me there, and your constables won’t be able to stop her, believe me.”

“Even if you’re in danger?”

“Am I?” she countered. “How are you going to convince her of that without showing her the letter?”

Mick had no intention of debating the issue. “You’re not going.”

“Mick, I would love to get out of this ball, believe me. But Mama will make my life a misery if I don’t at
least put in an appearance. And I hardly think some crazed maniac is going to shoot me and cut my heart out in the midst of a ball, do you?”

“Christ, Sophie, don’t say things like that!” he said savagely, thinking of the letter. “Don’t.”

“You really do believe something could happen to me?”

“Nothing is going to happen to you. If you insist on going to that ball, I’m going with you.”

She groaned. “That’s even worse. My mother’s purpose is to find me a suitable husband, and your presence is going to make her very unhappy. I hate it when my mother is unhappy.”

“Too bad.”

Unexpectedly, she smiled. It was a rueful one. “I think things have turned around.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now, it seems, you’re
my
guardian angel.”

Fifteen
 

Sophie decided not to tell her mother anything about the letter, though she did tell Aunt Violet that evening as they were getting ready for the ball. She immediately wondered if she’d made a mistake in doing so.

“Oh, dear.” Violet pressed a hand to her heart and leaned back against the vanity table in her room. “Oh, heavens! Your life in danger? What are we going to do?”

Sophie patted her aunt’s arm and put on a brave face. “There’s not much we can do but carry on as usual.”

Violet ignored that. “Perhaps we should leave London. Brighton, perhaps. Or the country house of some acquaintance, although—”

“Auntie, I’m not leaving London. Mick needs my help to find the killer. I’m going to help him.”

“Did he ask for your help?”

Sophie didn’t reply to that question. Instead, she patted her aunt’s arm and said, “We’d best be getting downstairs. We’re already quite late as it is.”

Violet did not move. “Did Michael ask for your help?”

“No,” she admitted, “he didn’t. But he’s going to need it.”

“Sophie, my dear, this is not the same as knowing the old coster on the corner is going to die of heart failure tomorrow! If this fiend has threatened you, we must leave London at once.”

“Auntie, please don’t fret. Mick is not going to let anything happen to me.” She paused and closed her eyes for a brief instant, remembering the strength and reassurance of his arms around her earlier today. “He’s going to watch over me as much as he can, and there’s some sort of bodyguard watching the house.”

“Bodyguard?” Violet’s voice rose on a frantic note. “Is it as bad as that?”

There was no point in sugarcoating things, since two constables were patrolling the house at this moment, and Mick was waiting downstairs to escort them to the Dalrymple Ball. “Yes, Auntie, it’s as bad as that.”

Violet sank down on the padded bench in front of her vanity table. “And to think it was I who encouraged you to take your premonition to the police in the first place. I am the one that encouraged you to watch over Michael. If anything happens to you, I will never forgive myself.”

Sophie looked at her aunt, and Violet’s expression of misery and concern was hard to bear. “Oh, Auntie,
please don’t!” she cried, wrapping an arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “Everything is going to be all right. You’ll see.”

Violet reached up to her shoulder and grasped Sophie’s hand tight in her own. “Of course it’s going to be all right, darling,” she murmured, but her words sounded dismal and unconvincing. Sophie decided the best thing was a distraction.

“Auntie, you have to help me. Mick is going to the ball with us, and—”

“You mean he’s watching over you?”

“Yes, but Mick isn’t my main concern just now. Auntie, what am I going to tell Mother? She’s going to see Mick the minute we arrive, and I have to think up a plausible story.”

“Sophie, your mother has the right to know the truth.”

“She’ll insist I go home with her to Yorkshire. You know she will. I’ll refuse, and there will be a big row about it.”

“Yorkshire doesn’t sound like a bad idea just now.”

“Auntie, you know I can’t leave. I have a duty to do what I can to help the police.”

“Yes, dear, I understand your sense of responsibility. But don’t you think this might be carrying your sense of obligation too far?”

“No, Auntie, I don’t. Please don’t try to change my mind.”

“Very well.” Violet stood up, facing her niece with a resolute air. “But I insist you tell your mother the truth.”

Sophie knew her aunt was right. Mother deserved
to know what was happening. “Very well,” she agreed. “When we arrive at the ball, I’ll take her aside and tell her everything.”

Violet smiled and hooked her arm through Sophie’s. “If Michael is waiting for us, we’d best get downstairs. I’m sure he’s pacing by now, wondering why on earth it takes women so long to get dressed.”

Sophie laughed as they left Violet’s bedroom, and started down the stairs. “Well, at least Mick can’t get so impatient that he leaves without us. Uncle Maxwell would have done so by now.”

“Dear Maxwell never did understand the concept of being fashionably late.”

They entered the drawing room and found that Mick was indeed waiting for them, but he wasn’t pacing. In fact, he was playing dominoes with the colonel. Occupied with tallying the last score, he did not notice they had come in, but Miss Peabody did.

“At last!” she cried, clapping her hands together with delight, making the two men look up from, their game. “Sophie, dear, how lovely you look! Doesn’t she look lovely, Josephine?”

Sophie didn’t hear Miss Atwood’s opinion. She was staring at Mick. In his black evening suit, white shirt, and white silk waistcoat, he was more handsome than ever. Looking at him did funny things to her insides, and she couldn’t seem, to catch, her breath. He was looking straight back at her, his blue gaze like liquid fire as it flowed over her, starting at the white gardenia in her hair, pausing briefly at the low neckline of her gown, and continuing down over her hips and legs to her pink satin shoes. In that moment, something inside
her opened and bloomed like a flower, something that bloomed for him, and no one else.

Miss Peabody spoke again, but it took Sophie a moment to realize it. She blinked, turning toward the older woman, and tried to regain her composure. “Hmm? What?”

Miss Peabody laughed. “You’re not nervous, are you, dear? I know how you hate dancing. I just wanted you to take a turn so we can see your dress.”

She made a spinning motion with her fingers, and Sophie did a slow turn.

“Your gown is beautiful, Sophie, dear,” Miss Atwood said and smiled.

Sophie patted the appliqué of rose pink beaded flowers along one side of the skirt, feeling quite self-conscious. “It isn’t too ornate, is it?”

Miss Atwood and Miss Peabody both hastened to reassure her on that point, but it was to Mick she looked, hoping he would say something. He did, but given the way he was looking at her, it was not what she expected.

“I think it’s time for you to tell me why you hate dancing.”

“Because I’m hopeless at it.” She laughed to cover the painful admission that she could not do something most young ladies did quite easily, and she regretted for the first time in her life that she’d never practiced enough to dance well.

He shook his head. “I don’t believe you. No woman is hopeless at dancing. If she is, then her partner is to blame.”

“Remind yourself of that when I tread on your feet.”

He laughed. “If you do, I’ll simply lift you off the ground and carry you around the ballroom floor.”

The image those outrageous words evoked gave her a heady feeling, as if she’d been drinking champagne, and Sophie suddenly wished for the first time in many years that she was a different person. That wish startled her.

She thought she had come to terms with being considered an oddity or a freak. She’d thought she had become resigned to her fate of spinsterhood, she thought she had accepted the fact that she would never find a man who loved her as she was.

Now, looking at Mick, she knew she hadn’t accepted the truth about herself at all. Because what she really wanted was just to be a woman, an ordinary woman, loved by a man. And though Sophie could often see the future, she knew there was no hope for a future like that.