Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (30 page)

“And to think schoolboys grow up thinking of him as a hero,” Mr. Barnum said sadly.

“After that original coincidence,” I continued, “the consequences were almost destined, and Mrs. Percy planned the rest. Mrs. Percy was well rehearsed for her séances. I have it here, in my notebook, exactly what she said: ‘Your wife knows your weakness.’ I thought she meant Mrs. Emily Phips. She was referring to Meh-ki. And that statement sealed Agatha Percy’s death warrant.”

“Oh, Louy, you give me chills,” Lizzie said.

“Between the first and second séances they must have had a meeting,” Cobban guessed, “for he let several days go by before the murder.”

“Perhaps he was thinking, meditating,” I said. “Perhaps his soul was trying to find a way out of the situation without resorting to violence, and sadly could not. One may only hope that he at least hesitated before the crime.”

“The night before the second séance, he acts.” Cobban swung his hand through the air and added a melodramatic flair to his voice. Like me, he had a taste for the theater. “He finds her delirious from opium. Perhaps that was why he waited? For that once or twice a month when Mrs. Percy smoked her pipe. He finds her delirious and easily suffocates her.”

“But how did he get into that locked room?” asked Sylvia.

“He came in through the large side window, breaking the pane and unlocking it,” I said. “He made sure the door to the room was locked, and when he left, he relocked the broken window, to try to make it appear that her death had been a self-inflicted accident rather than murder, to make it seem that no one else could have been in the room. The broken glass would have been hidden by the heavy draperies.”

“But the next day we heard him break the pane of glass,” Sylvia said, frowning with confusion.

“Two panes had been broken,” I said. “He merely broke a different pane so that we would hear the glass shatter.”

“I hope I was never a suspect!” said Mr. Barnum, sitting up straighter and putting his thumbs behind his jacket lapels, preening as men sometimes do.

“Never,” I lied. “Of course, what does disturb me is knowing that Mr. Phips must have been watching me, and I never noticed. I should have suspected him sooner. There was, for instance, the problem of the missing pipe.”

“Missing pipe?” repeated Sylvia.

“Mrs. Percy’s opium pipe. It was not in the room where she died. Days later, when I ran into Mr. Phips while buying a new pipe for Uncle Benjamin, Mr. Phips forgetfully confessed that he collected opium pipes. I did not make the connection then. Now it is obvious.”

“Hindsight.” Mr. Barnum sighed. “In hindsight, I never would have entered into business relations with that young cousin of mine, Eddie Nichols.”

“Mr. Phips knew I was getting closer,” I said. “It was no coincidence that he was at the Avery Street Bakery the same day and time as was I, no coincidence that he overheard my conversation with Mrs. O’Connor about Meh-ki’s new employment.” I pushed my cup away. “To think, he arrived at Signor Massimo’s before I did and almost murdered again because I was finishing a cup of tea.”

“The Christmas crowds,” said Sylvia. “They could hide any number of assassins.”

“Now there is a cheerful thought.” Lizzie laughed. “So it was Mr. Phips who locked you in the cellar?”

“No,” I said, wondering how much I should say about that matter. A woman’s reputation is such a fragile thing. But these friends had been through much with me. They deserved the entire story. “It was Amelia Snodgrass. She knew that her stolen necklace had been returned to Mrs. Percy, and she was determined to find it. It was she in the house that afternoon, she who barred the door so that I could not interrupt her searching. She did not wish me harm; she wished only the return of her property. Though if she had asked, I would have helped her search for it. When Miss Amelia Snodgrass is wed to Mr. Wilmot Green, I am certain the society column will
report that she was wearing a family heirloom, an ancient necklace of pearls and diamonds.”

“She stole it back!” exclaimed Sylvia with delight. “Now there is justice!”

“And as you know from that dropped glove, Miss Louisa, I was also in the house that afternoon.” Mr. Barnum blushed with shame, for while he may have stretched the truth a bit for entertainment purposes, he was by nature an honest and law-abiding man. “I had hoped to find examples of Mrs. Percy’s attempts at forging my name. I must have arrived just after Amelia Snodgrass left.”

“And you did me a good deed by alerting Mr. Cobban to my predicament,” I said. “Miss Snodgrass gave me quite a fright, and unnecessarily so, when she bolted that door to protect her secret. I fear that every time she wears the necklace she will be forced to remember her disastrous affair with Eddie Nichols.” The thought brought me a tiny amount of pleasure, I am sad to admit.

“Perhaps Mrs. Deeds has learned her lesson and will acquire her future jewels through more approved and legitimate means,” said Constable Cobban. “I can charge her with nothing now, but I have her name, and she knows it.”

Mrs. Deeds. Her greed had so offended me that I had hoped she would prove guilty of the murder. Well, there was time yet for destiny to deliver a cruel blow to a woman so covetous of the property of others.

The mince pie was finished, and the bottle of champagne. We all stirred, sensing that it was time to rise, to return to our homes, our lives, to put aside this grisly affair and enjoy all there was to be enjoyed, for life is too short to spend it brooding
over crime. The universal mind, Mr. Emerson would have said, delights in delight and should not be left in darkness. Our best instinct is for happiness, and the real fault of crime is that it destroys happiness.

“Of course, the one person to whom restitution can never be made is Mr. Phips’s wife, Emily,” I said, pushing back my chair and rising. “She died believing that her first lover, her true love, had been unfaithful, because that was what Mr. Phips wished her to believe. How sad.”

“Mr. Cobban, shall we fetch the ladies’ wraps?” asked Mr. Barnum, and the two men headed for the coatroom.

“Now, Sylvia, tell me,” I said when the gentlemen were gone. “Have you and Constable Cobban arrived at an understanding?”

“We have,” she said, grinning. “We will wait a year before we talk more of this matter, and not rush in.”

“How wise you’ve become!” I said with relief.

“It was Father’s idea,” she said.

I sighed. “You still believe you are in communication with his spirit?”

“I do,” said my friend. “As is every child who feels a bond with a parent, be he present in life or not. Even if he speaks only in dreams, he is speaking, is he not?” Her eyes gleamed, and I saw that, indeed, she enjoyed something of the presence of the father she had never known, perhaps simply because she wished to.

“But what of the day that Mrs. Percy seemed to speak through you?” I asked. “That was no dream.”

“I cannot explain,” Sylvia said. “We must, I fear, leave that as a mystery.”

“And now, home,” said Lizzie, “to Auntie Bond’s piano and my new Liszt music. I believe it has all been worth it.”

I
FINISHED
“A
GATHA’S
C
ONFESSION
” that evening in my little attic writing room. After her terrible crime of passion Agatha pleads with Philip to forgive her, to be merciful.

As sorry as I was for Agatha Percy, she had sealed her own fate by choosing crime rather than repentance. We must never overcome horror and remorse, for sin found in a person can also be found in a society, and vice versa; we must root out the crime, not our penance. So Mr. Emerson and Father would say, and so say I, if people and nations are to be healed.

Dunreath Place

Roxbury, Massachusetts

February 1887

Gentle Readers,

I had a letter from an old friend recently. She asked if I remembered Dot and if I had ever thought of writing her story. She is too kind to say outright but she gently reminded me that youth is far behind and that what I am going to write, I should perhaps write now, and quickly. The letter seemed an omen, for that same day Father had sat up in bed and asked if I had heard from Dorothy Brownly recently. His mind wanders and he thought, that morning, that I was perhaps on my way to one of those girlhood afternoon activities that occupied my younger years.

In my youth, I struggled to write and publish stories. Now I am known and I may even admit beloved. In the streets of Concord I cannot even mail a letter or purchase yarn without being recognized. That is one of the joys of age and success, though I admit to occasionally yearning for those younger days when I could walk the streets anonymously. A certain anonymity no doubt assisted the events of which I now wish to write. While I have never shied away from telling my readers about my family and my childhood, I have—in part because of the deepest personal reservations—kept silent about many of what used to be called my “adventures.” In part from modesty, and a wish not to hurt the living, I have kept secret many of the most
interesting years of my life, years in which I found myself in the curious role of lady detective.

I do find myself reticent, however, I who have already revealed so much of my life in my fictional works. What mother would wish to reveal to her sweet children that their beloved author, Louisa May Alcott, had knowledge of crime and criminals, and deeds so dastardly that if known they would require a night-light to burn in the hall? Yet knowledge of them I had. For many years of my life, I found myself surrounded by unexplained death and unexpected danger, as well as holding the unusual and unmerited position of being the only person able to reach a satisfactory conclusion to the mysterious events.

I have decided to go through my diaries and reconstruct the events of some of these years. These, then, are the other stories of my youth, of friends and foes who chanced across my path, sometimes gracing it, sometimes causing such distress I would fall into the Slough of Despond and doubt all, even the words on a white page. I begin with the story of my dear childhood friend Dot, and her untimely demise.

I trust you may gain some enjoyment through the reading of these tales.

Louisa May Alcott

I
PAUSED, PEN
in hand, and scratched out the name. It simply did not suit her. I considered following Shakespeare, knowing that my heroine would be as enticing with whatever name God gave her, until I realized that, surely, no reader would become entranced with the lady’s plight were she named Maud or Jo.

“Josephine won’t do,” I said. “People would be calling her Jo, and this woman is most definitely not a Jo. Jo is a homespun name, tomboyish and striving, not given over to frivolity or melodrama. This woman needs a name that is more Italianate, more romantic. Beatrice. Yes, that’s it…. And her rival shall be Therese.”

“And then what, Louisa? Does she give her hand to the faithless painter, Claude?” breathlessly asked Miss Sylvia Shattuck.

I stopped reading and began marking on the pages, crossing out some words and adding others. On some days the phrases came easily; on others each was a struggle. This day was a struggle, since I was already preoccupied with the events to come . . . though I could not yet know how truly and frighteningly eventful the afternoon would become.

Sylvia and I were in the attic writing room in my family’s house on Pinckney Street. She stood beside my piles of manuscript wrapped in paper and string, leaning on the huge ancient desk at which I wrote. Behind her on a ledge stood my favorite, much-thumbed books: my father’s gift,
Pilgrim’s Progress,
and my secret thrill, an edition of Poe’s
Murders in the Rue Morgue.
I have always adored Poe for his prose and the suspense and thrill of his writing. But, truth be told, not so much for the mystery of this story, which I solved long before Poe intended me to, an achievement I credit to my education in my father’s philosophical methods and the influence of my mother’s gift for insight. My parents’ careful education in the
ways of the world has made me particularly apt at arriving at answers to questions of human nature.

The one window in my garret was curtained with muslin, not lace—I prefer a gentle light when I work, and of course my family could not waste money on lace. The floor was bare but scrupulously clean. It was 1854, I was twenty-two, Mother had just lost her job with the charity agency, and Father . . . well, he had never had a talent for earning income. Those years of poverty bleed together in my memory, always overpowered by memories of more important problems. That was the year following the election of President Franklin Pierce, and Father, months later, still grumbled to himself about it. We would see him pottering from library to parlor, from parlor to dinner table, jabbing the air with his forefinger as he lectured President Pierce in absentia. Pierce was a will-o’-the-wisp, a moral deficient, willing to do anything for a vote, including support slavery.