Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (22 page)

“She laughed,” spoke up Sylvia. “In your face.” Then Sylvia laughed—”Ha, ha, ha!”—a hoarse, rude sound very unlike herself.

I turned and looked at my friend. When the terrible
laughter ceased, her face was pale and radiant as a candle flame, her eyes larger than usual and glistening.

“I hear her voice,” Sylvia said. “What is that? An apology? Oh, Mr. Barnum, she is ever so sorry!” Sylvia burst into tears.

“Drink this,” I said, handing Sylvia a cup of tea. “Steady yourself.” I put my arms around my sobbing friend.

“She did laugh!” Mr. Barnum said, amazed. “And then she gave me the invitation to the circle and said if I came I would hear interesting things.”

Sylvia twisted and turned, sat back on the settee, and put her hand to her face.

“Why, I’m weeping! What is happening, Louy?”

“I have no idea,” I said, “but you seem to have had some sort of fit.”

“I give you my word, I did not harm Mrs. Percy,” Mr. Barnum pleaded.

“He did not,” said Sylvia, her voice growing strange again.

“Oh, no more of this!” I cried to Sylvia in exasperation.

“My word of honor,” said the showman. “And now we must end this interview. I have some last visits to make before my departure. May I accompany you somewhere, ladies?”

We rose in unison and went back into the hall, where Mrs. Moony handed us our coats and hats, evidently much pleased that we were leaving and she could restore her parlor to its clean and unused condition.

“My gloves, Mrs. Moony,” said Mr. Barnum, putting on his top hat and searching his coat pockets. “I’ve only one glove. Where has the other got to?”

“Is this it?” I pulled from my own pocket the glove I had discovered yesterday on the floor at Mrs. Percy’s house.

His stormy expression returned. “Give me that!” he said, grabbing it.

“Why were you at Mrs. Percy’s house yesterday?”

The front door was open and an icy wind blew at us, rustling the peacock feathers in the vases of Mrs. Moony’s hall.

“Curiosity, Miss Alcott. It is how I made my first fortune,” he said angrily.

“You were looking for something. Did you find it?”

Mr. Barnum’s gray eyes glared; his eyebrows moved up and down as he considered his reponse. “I did not,” he said after a long pause. “I wanted to find an example of Mrs. Percy’s forgery, a letter or check, to help prove my case against Eddie. I found the safe, but it was already opened and completely empty.”

“That is how you heard me shouting from the cellar,” I said. “You were upstairs, not in the street. Why did you not tell this to Constable Cobban?”

“Breaking and entering, Miss Alcott. A man about to go to the courts for bankruptcy cannot afford even minor transgressions of the law.”

Oh, how I wanted to believe him.

Outside, snow crunched underfoot, a soothing, familiar sound, and there was a smell of roasting chestnuts in the air and of wood fires from the thousand hearths of Boston. It was a day meant to reassure that all was as it should be. But it was not.

R
EADER
, I
ADMIT
feeling great discomfort over both discoveries: that Eddie Nichols was still free and that Mr. Barnum had dropped that glove discovered at Mrs. Percy’s house. I hoped with all my heart that Mr. Nichols was my enemy and not Mr. Barnum, for I had developed an affection for the showman. Undoubtedly one had locked me into the cellar, and the only comfort was that my adventure had been meant as a warning, since if either had wished to harm me it would have been easy enough to arrange for the beam to fall on my head rather than across the door.

That was small enough comfort, however. I was being told in a very indiscreet way to mind my own affairs.

“Are you well, Louy?” Lizzie asked me that evening, as I sat sewing before the hearth. “You are making the most awful face.”

“I have been thinking of the séance at Mrs. Percy’s house.”

“An awful business. I cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs.
Percy, though.” Lizzie picked up the sleeve and resumed her stitching. Have I mentioned how fine her stitches were? I watched in wonder as she placed fifteen stitches to the inch, each as even as the one before. I watched, and thought.

A log crumbled and burst into sparks in the hearth, and that little explosion seemed an expression of this situation: There had been violence, and then little sparks of momentary illumination, and then…nothing. I was at a standstill, and though I spent another hour going through my notes about the séance, I found no pattern pointing to a solution, only two names that appeared over and over—Nichols and Barnum.

But what of Mr. and Mrs. Deeds? Mrs. Deeds had wished to buy the pearl collar, but Mrs. Percy had asked too high a price. It seemed obvious to me that Mrs. Deeds had earlier business with Mrs Percy. “I recognize that diamond brooch,” Mrs. Percy had said at the séance; perhaps it was another stolen item Mrs. Deeds had purchased after a quarrel over the price; perhaps years of enmity had built up?

In my heart I hoped time would prove her guilty of the crime. Such greed, such lust for luxury when so many others went hungry and poorly clothed in the dead of winter, such rapaciousness surely were excellent motives for murder.

And what of the disappeared cook, Meh-ki? Was it guilt or fear that had made her go into hiding? It certainly wasn’t uncommon for servants to wish their employers dead, especially when a safe and theft are also involved, but the two very brief glimpses I’d had of the small woman seemed to reveal a timid personality, not a violent one.

I finished just one shirt that evening. I still had many to sew before I could collect my fee from the reverend and make
the final payment on Lizzie’s music portfolio and series of lessons. I felt the Slough of Despond begin to fall over me, that blackness of mood that arrives from a sense of stagnation and hopelessness.

No, I told it. Soon it will be Christmas, and I am with my sister and writing stories and earning my living, and I will not give in to this. But the mood pushed back; it wrestled with me.

“Bedtime,” said Lizzie at ten o’clock, folding her sewing into the basket. The hearth logs had burned down to embers and the sitting room was growing cold. “Will you come up, Louy?”

“I think I will write some first,” I said, giving her a good-night kiss on her forehead. “Sleep tight.”

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she finished.

I took a single candle up to my attic room and sat before the desk, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders for warmth. The wind whistled through loose boards; a flake or two found their way to my place and landed on my page, blurring a letter here and there. I sat shivering, rereading the pages of “Agatha’s Confession.” And a new thought came to me. The story was essentially about three people: Agatha, Philip, and Clara, for in a love triangle what other characters are required?

Ah. One other person is needed, always, someone who can secretly carry letters back and forth and make unseen arrangements. A maid. Suzie, a voice whispered in my head.

Suzie? I whispered back.

A cold draft made my candle flicker. Mrs. Percy could not have made herself clearer had she been trying, though of
course it was but a draft that flickered the flame, and the next morning the Slough of Despond had been driven back by a new optimism that Suzie, whether she knew it or not, held the key to this mystery.

“You again,” she said gloomily, when I pulled my chair up outside her cell the next day.

“I’ve brought you something,” I said, holding out the raisin cake I had purchased at a little shop around the corner.

Suzie reached greedily for it through the bars and had to break it in half to pull it back through her barrier. She began to eat immediately, cramming her face as children do.

“The slops here is something awful,” she said between mouthfuls.

“The menu and accommodations are not designed for comfort as much as for the encouragement of repentance, I agree. But are they treating you well enough?”

Suzie snorted and tossed back her disheveled hair. “I had a bath and a change of linen, if that’s what you mean. Don’t know as I’d call that well, since I didn’t do nothing to be here.”

“Miss Dear, it is nonsense to plead complete innocence of all that happened at Mrs. Percy’s,” I said gently. “Items of dubious provenance were found in your room, and I wonder if you might not have pickpocketed Mr. Phips’s watch during the séance. It is missing, he says.”

“It fell out of his pocket and I forgot to give it back to him.” She studied the ceiling.

“Help me, now, Miss Dear, and I will speak on your behalf. Let us be honest with each other.” I leaned closer.

“How honest?” asked she, also leaning closer.

“Completely. Let’s begin with a simple question. How long were you employed by Mrs. Percy?”

“Six months.”

“Was she a good employer?”

“She were fine. Paid well, not as demanding as some. Friendly sometimes. I think she’d been in service herself. Can always tell a woman who’s come up the hard way. They aren’t as bad as those born to it.”

“And did you smoke opium with her?”

Suzie snorted again. “Hell—I mean heavens, no. My mother smoked the pipe and I saw what good it did her. And Mrs. Percy weren’t no fiend, if that’s what you’re thinking. She smoked maybe once a month, no more. ‘For sweet dreams,’ she would say. Most the time she took one of those little brown pills. ‘Not as hard to break the habit,’ she said. ‘The stomach dissipates the properties of addiction.’ Them were her words. She were knowledgeable.”

A guard came clanking down the hall toward us, his keys rattling on the large chain at his waist.

“Constable Cobban has said I might speak with the prisoner,” I informed him somewhat prematurely, as I had not yet asked Cobban. The guard scratched his head and walked away, muttering something about ladies in the courthouse.

“Prisoner!” moaned Suzie.

“And for longer a prisoner if you don’t answer all my questions,” I warned her, for I could see that under that tough exterior she was truly frightened, and fear can be a great motivator for the truth. “Now tell me where you were that night before and the morning of Mrs. Percy’s murder.”

“With Eddie, the sod, the cad. I’ll…I’ll tear his hair, I
will, when I get out of here, him leaving me high and dry like this.” She made fists of her hands and banged them against her legs.

I abstained from reminding her that according to Constable Cobban’s report she had already lightened Mr. Nichols of a chunk of hair and scalp.

“Say,” she said, looking at me now with suspicion. “How did you know I was away that night?”

“Because your shoes were wet from having been walking in the snow. You hadn’t had time to dry them before the fire. And your hair was patted flat from your hat. I thought at first you had been napping. I realized later you had been out, and just returned. Did you often spend nights with Mr. Nichols?”

“Often enough. Mrs. Percy knew. She didn’t mind, long as the parlor got dusted. Like I said, she come up the hard way herself. She weren’t a lady of pretension, like that Mrs. Deeds. I’ll bet she’s never had her hands in the washbasin, not even to scrub her own—”

“Miss Dear,” I interrupted, “was Mr. Nichols with you all that night and morning, right up to the time of the séance?”

Suzie knit her brows again in concentration. “He went out an hour or so before I left his rooms. Said he were going for a pot o’ tea and a bun. Never brought one back to me, though. He were a selfish man.”

An hour or so. Could he have been to Mrs. Percy’s home and arranged the murder in that short a time? For I was convinced the more I spoke with Suzie that she had not been involved in the murder, nor even at home when it would have occurred, else she would have gone to Mrs. Percy’s defense.
She seemed fond enough of her employer to avoid easing her out of this life.

I leaned even closer, my face just a few inches away from the bars separating me from Suzie and Suzie from freedom. “Now think, Miss Dear. Mrs. Percy would have mentioned a name now and then, anything a little unusual or out of the ordinary.”

Suzie groaned and grasped the sides of her iron cot and rocked back and forth a little, thinking. “So many names.” She sighed. “Names were her business, weren’t it?”

“Think,” I prompted.

“Well, most names that come up were live people, you know, customers. But right before that last séance she talked a bit about a dead ‘Emily’ somebody. Would you bring me another cake? And a pork pie?”

“How do you know this Emily is dead?” I asked.

“’Cause Mrs. Percy said so, and she went to visit her in the cemetery. Up in the Granary on Beacon Hill.”

She will scour the cemeteries for information about her clients, Mrs. O’Connor had told me, when I first quizzed her about the ways of a crystal gazer.

“Do you remember a last name, Suzie?”

“It were Phips. Mr. Phips’s wife.”

My heart sank. Another dead end, I thought. Mrs. Percy had most likely visited the grave just to confirm dates of birth and death, to be able to quote the epitaph at the séance and make her performance more convincing.

“I will bring you two pork pies,” I told Suzie Dear. “Now keep up your courage.”

I thought to go to the Beacon Hill cemetery to see what Mrs. Percy had seen, but the wet weather had soaked my stockings and feet, thanks to my great hurry of the morning, which had led me to quit Auntie Bond’s home without a layer of fresh and dry newspaper in my boots. Home I must return, or risk catching a cold, and then risk passing that cold on to Lizzie, whose constitution was not as strong as mine. So for Lizzie’s sake I delayed that visit to the cemetery, a choice that was to prove ironic, indeed.

For when I arrived back at Auntie Bond’s, the place was in an uproar!

“Oh, Louisa, you’ve a message from Reverend Gannett! And he sent it by messenger, not post! You know what that means!” Auntie Bond wrung her hands and hopped from foot to foot in nervousness. She held all reverends in very high esteem and feared their wrath and disapproval, and since I was living under her roof she felt she shared my guilt.