Murder in Chelsea (10 page)

“How old was she?” he prompted. “About Mrs. Brandt’s age? Or older, like Mrs. Keller?”

“Like Mrs. Brandt, I’d guess, from her voice. She had a real nice voice.”

“How was she dressed?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, real pretty. Her dress was kind of reddish, only not flashy. Stylish, it was.”

“Did she say anything else?” Malloy asked.

“She thanked me for my help. She said she guessed her friend’s little girl wasn’t here, and she walked away. She seemed real disappointed, and I was sorry I wasn’t able to help her. Please don’t tell Mrs. Keller, will you?”

“We won’t,” Sarah said. “But thank you for telling us.”

With a last, apologetic look, the girl scurried away.

“I don’t think it was Anne Murphy,” Sarah said. “I thought maybe she’d come back trying to get more information, but this was someone else.”

“Young and stylish,” Malloy said. “Could have been Emma Hardy.”

“If Emma was looking for Catherine here, she must have seen Anne at some point and found out what Anne had done.”

“I wonder if Emma has a temper,” Malloy said.

Sarah thought about how she might react if someone she trusted had lost Catherine. Would she be angry enough to stab that person? “I know how I’d feel, but Emma had already left her child for nearly a year.”

“That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be mad about not being able to get her back. Even if she didn’t care about Catherine, as long as she had her, she’d always be able to get money from Wilbanks.”

“Would she have known Wilbanks was dying? That could have made her more desperate, too.”

“Yes, she might think this was her last chance to get a settlement out of him or something. In fact, she wouldn’t even need Catherine. She could just tell him he’d never see her again unless he gave them the money, and then she could leave town without producing the child. So maybe she wasn’t as desperate as we think.”

“If she was devious enough to think of that,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I would have, but then, I don’t want to think Catherine’s mother is anything but kind and loving and frantic to see her again.”

“Just keep thinking that. Meanwhile,” he said, taking her arm, “that attorney is waiting for us, and I’m dying to find out what he wants.”

They took the elevated train up Third Avenue. The tracks lay three stories above street level, and riders amused themselves by looking into the windows of the tenement buildings only a few feet away as the train rolled past. This time of day, the El wasn’t too crowded, so they easily found seats for the relatively brief ride that could have taken hours in the traffic-choked streets below.

When they emerged from the covered stairway at the Fifty-ninth Street Station, they might have been in a different city. Here no street vendors hawked their wares and no bedraggled children or mangy dogs raced down the sidewalks. Tree-lined streets ran between rows of well-kept houses. Decorative wrought-iron fences separated the tiny front lawns from the sidewalk. The people who lived here never had to worry about dodging the landlord or going to bed hungry.

Michael Hicks lived in a red brick town house with lace curtains. A maid admitted them and took them right upstairs to the formal parlor, where company would normally be entertained. A well-dressed man whose thinning hair and thickening waist marked his entry into middle age stood to welcome them, and to Sarah’s surprise, a woman stood beside him.

Neither was smiling, since this wasn’t a social call, and the woman looked as surprised to see Sarah as she was to see her. The woman’s gaze swept her from head to foot, taking Sarah’s measure as women did, judging and categorizing her in an instant. For a moment Sarah regretted not having dressed for the occasion. Then again, nothing in her current wardrobe would have indicated she was anything other than a midwife to the working class of the city. Besides, she’d long since stopped caring about such things as appearances. These people would soon have reason to judge her on who she was, not what she wore.

“Mr. Malloy,” the man said. “I am Michael Hicks, and this is my wife, Lynne.”

The two men shook hands, and Malloy nodded to Mrs. Hicks, then said, “And this is Mrs. Brandt,” which was all they had decided to reveal at this point, although their host looked more than curious.

Hicks was too well mannered to leave guests standing while he interrogated them, so he invited them to be seated, and Mrs. Hicks offered them refreshment and rang for the maid to bring it. When the girl had gone to fetch it, the four of them sat for a long moment in silence. Only then did Sarah notice how tense the Hickses were. She and Malloy were anxious, of course, but she hadn’t expected Hicks to be, and she hadn’t expected Hicks’s wife at all. Yet when she met Mrs. Hicks’s eye, she saw her own anxiety mirrored there.

“Are you Mr. Wilbanks’s daughter, Mrs. Hicks?” Malloy asked, breaking the awkward silence.

“Yes, I am.” She was an attractive brunette who wore her age well, but Sarah was fairly certain she was not someone Carrie would have called young and stylish. “And you must be the woman who has the little girl.”

“Your sister, yes,” Sarah said, wanting to see her reaction. She winced slightly, and Sarah realized she couldn’t blame her. How would she have felt to learn her father had a young child by a mistress?

“
Half
sister,” Hicks said, “and I’ll ask you not to distress my wife. She is already upset enough over this situation.”

“We’re not here to distress your wife,” Malloy said, not bothering to hide his impatience. “We’re here because you sent for me, and I’d like to know why.”

“Very well. First, I must apologize for not saying more in my message, but I couldn’t be sure who might see it. Mr. Wilbanks asked me to meet with you to see if we could come to some compromise about the child.”

“Her name is Catherine,” Sarah said.

Mrs. Hicks cried out, as if in pain, and turned on her husband in a fury. “You should have told me!”

“I couldn’t,” he said in dismay. “I knew how hurt you’d be.”

She turned back to Sarah. “He named her after my mother! He was carrying on with that actress all those years, and then he named her child after my mother
while she was still alive
!”

“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said honestly.

“How could he have been so cruel?” she asked of no one in particular.

Sarah decided she would ask him herself if she ever got the opportunity.

“Lynne didn’t know about any of this until yesterday,” Hicks said.

“But you did,” Malloy said.

“Yes, but I didn’t find out until after Lynne’s mother passed away a little over a year ago. My father-in-law confessed the whole sordid story to me then, but only because he wanted to do something for the child.”

“Are you the one who advised him to marry Emma Hardy?” Malloy asked. Apparently, he had no qualms about distressing Lynne Hicks, no matter what her husband might desire.

“
Marry
her?” Mrs. Hicks echoed in horror.

“That was
his
idea,” Hicks said quickly. “He wanted to know how to legitimize her birth and give her the same advantages you’d had in life. I had to tell him that marriage to the mother was the only way to do that.”

For a moment, Mrs. Hicks looked like she might burst into tears, but a rap on the door signaled the return of the maid with a tea tray, and like the good hostess she had been trained to be, she reined in her emotions and went through the motions of seeing to the needs of her guests. By the time the maid was gone and they’d all been served with tea no one really wanted, the tension in the room had eased considerably.

“What kind of compromise does Mr. Wilbanks have in mind?” Malloy asked.

Hicks glanced at his wife, as if trying to gauge her tolerance for the subject. She apparently gave him some sort of silent consent, because he said, “First of all, he would like to see the child. To make sure she’s all right, you understand.”

“And if we bring her to him, how do we know he’ll let her go again?” Sarah asked.

“He does have every legal right to keep her,” Hicks reminded her.

“Which is why I asked. I know you have no reason to wish the child well, but I love her dearly, and I don’t want to see any harm come to her.”

“You can’t think my father would harm her,” Lynne Hicks said.

Sarah was glad to see her defending her father’s integrity, no matter how angry she might be with him at the moment. “I don’t think your father would harm her, but someone already murdered her nursemaid, and it might have been somebody close to him who didn’t want him to find the child.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop calling her ‘the child,’” Mrs. Hicks said. “I’ll have to get used to hearing her name eventually. Catherine. There, I’ve said it. Now you may say it, too.”

“Thank you,” Malloy said with just the slightest trace of sarcasm. “Do either of you have any idea who might have wanted to keep your father from finding Catherine?”

“No, we do not,” Hicks said.

“Really?” Malloy said. “Because I’d expect Mr. Wilbanks’s other children to be the ones most likely to want to get rid of an extra heir to his fortune.”

Sarah winced at the baldness of this statement, but Malloy actually looked pleased when Hicks responded with outrage.

“How dare you make an accusation like that!”

Mrs. Hicks looked merely annoyed. “If you’re trying to accuse me of murdering a woman I never met just so I’d inherit more of my father’s money, you’re wasting your time, Mr. Malloy. I’m not going to inherit anything from my father no matter how many illegitimate children might crawl out of the woodwork.”

Malloy gave Sarah a questioning look. Luckily, she knew the explanation, or thought she did. “Your father already made a settlement on you.”

“He called it a gift, when I married. He said the idea of a dowry was too old-fashioned, but there was no reason to make me wait for my inheritance when we could make good use of it getting started in life,” she said, glancing at her husband.

“And as you can see, we’re quite comfortable now,” he said. “We don’t need or want any of David Wilbanks’s money.”

“What about your brother?” Malloy asked. “Did he get a settlement when he married, too?”

Sarah had expected another angry response, but instead the Hickses exchanged an uneasy glance.

“Ozzie receives an allowance,” Hicks said.

“And is he going to inherit something?”

“He will inherit everything,” Mrs. Hicks said.

“Unless your father decides to leave some of his fortune to Catherine,” Malloy said.

“Ozzie would never hurt anyone,” Lynne Hicks said.

“Ozzie would never have the
courage
to hurt anyone,” Hicks added, earning a glare from his wife.

“Gilda would, though,” Mrs. Hicks said.

“Who’s Gilda?” Malloy asked.

“Ozzie’s wife,” Hicks said. “They haven’t been married two years yet, but she’s already impatient to get her hands on the old man’s money.”

“Didn’t she have a dowry?” Malloy asked.

“She didn’t need one,” Mrs. Hicks said with a trace of bitterness. “She’s a Van Horn.”

“One of the Knickerbocker families,” Sarah told Malloy, a distinction her own family bore. The families who had originally settled New York City in the seventeenth century enjoyed a unique social position in the city to the present day.

“They’ve lost most of their money,” Hicks said, “but they’re still the Van Horns. Mr. Wilbanks wanted some old society to go with his new money. He wanted Ozzie to be accepted in the best homes.”

“And is he?”

“I suppose,” Mrs. Hicks said.

“We don’t see Ozzie and Gilda much,” Hicks said.

“My brother is much younger than I, and we were never close,” Mrs. Hicks added.

And perhaps Gilda Van Horn didn’t consider theirs one of the best homes in the city, Sarah thought.

“Does Ozzie know about Emma Hardy and Catherine?” Malloy asked.

Sarah looked at him in surprise, because of course they already knew that Ozzie Wilbanks had gone to see Emma Hardy at least twice before she disappeared.

“I can’t imagine Mr. Wilbanks has told him anything,” Hicks was saying.

“Could he have found out some other way?” Malloy asked.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Hicks said. “Mr. Wilbanks wants to see the little girl.” He glanced at his wife. “Catherine.”

“We may be able to arrange that,” Malloy said. He didn’t look at Sarah so he didn’t see the black look she shot him. “But he needs to understand we aren’t going to make any permanent arrangements until we know who killed Miss Murphy and why.”

“What kind of permanent arrangements does Father want to make?” Mrs. Hicks asked her husband. “He can’t take care of a child. He’s dying!”

“That is my concern as well,” Sarah said.

“That’s everyone’s concern,” Hicks said, not quite meeting his wife’s gaze.

“Does he think I’ll take her?” Mrs. Hicks asked, obviously appalled by the idea. “The child he conceived while my mother was dying?”

Her husband wisely did not reply to that.

“You don’t need to concern yourself,” Sarah said. “I love Catherine as if she were my own. I would have adopted her before now, but I’m a widow, and a single woman can’t adopt. But before we knew who her parents were, I became her legal guardian. She is welcome to stay with me for the rest of her life.”

“I’m sure she is,” Hicks said, “now that you know who her father is.”

“I’m not the least bit interested in his money,” Sarah said.

“Aren’t you?” Hicks said with a knowing smile.

Sarah glared at him, trying to think of the proper retort, but Malloy beat her to it.

“I should have introduced Mrs. Brandt better. We know who Catherine’s father is, but you don’t know who Mrs. Brandt’s father is. He’s Felix Decker. Even the Van Horns would be happy to get an invitation to his house.”

Their surprise was almost comic, but Sarah couldn’t enjoy it. “Mr. Hicks, you still haven’t told us why you sent for Mr. Malloy today.”

“Yes, I did,” he said. “Mr. Wilbanks wants to see the child.”

“And what’s the rest of it?”

“The rest of what?”

“The threat,” Malloy said before she could. “If we don’t let him see Catherine, what will you do?”