Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (41 page)

With Holmes’s permission, Weston left the room to wait downstairs. Holmes established himself in the window seat somewhat apart from the rest of us. Unwilling to leave, I took a seat on a straight-backed chair from which I could see the door to the hallway.

Fanny spoke to Miss Rostov. “I don’t even know your names,” she began apologetically. “No one has gotten round to telling me.”

The girl gave her a look as if she was trying to decide how far to trust her. “I am Annie—Antonia Davidovna Rostov. My friend,” she continued, with a slight hesitation before the word, “is Josette—Josephine—LaFreniere.”

“I’m Fanny Stevenson, and these two men are my husband, Louis, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes—whom you’ve met. Now, Antonia,” she went on, gently, “I understand that a doctor has seen Josette.”

Antonia answered in a low voice, “Yes.”

“And has he told you what’s wrong with her?”

“I knew that already—consumption.”

Fanny leaned toward her. “And has he told you how serious her condition is?”

Antonia nodded. “Yes,” she said. She hunched forward in her chair, her hands covering her face, and drew in a long, sobbing breath. “Damn—oh, damn!” she whispered. “I don’t want to cry so loud, she might hear me.” She looked at Fanny, suddenly contrite. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“It’s all right,” Fanny said. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

“I tried so hard, you see,” Antonia said. “I did all of it to save her—just to end up here.” She gave another shuddering sigh. Her eyes welled with tears, and her hands, now in her lap, grasped each other, their knuckles white. “I killed her, didn’t I? Bringing her here. I made her worse.”

Fanny laid her hand on Antonia’s arm. “No, you didn’t.” she said, firmly. “You tried to help, but there wasn’t anything left to do.”

The girl seemed to relax a little. “That’s what the doctor said, too,” she answered, almost reassured, it seemed, to hear Fanny confirm his verdict.

A hollow cough from the bedroom made both their heads turn toward it. “Come,” Fanny said, and Antonia followed her to the room. The door closed behind them.

I moved near Holmes and asked him, in a low voice, “So where is the stage robber?”

Holmes gave a nod toward the bedroom door. “In there.”

It took a second for the meaning of what he had said to reach me. “You don’t mean Miss Rostov?”

“Yes,” he said.

“That girl? Are you sure?”

He turned back to face me. “Yes. You’ve heard her; she has all but confessed.”

I was still skeptical. “Holmes,” I said, “I’m prepared to believe you that she and her friend are here alone. But how do you know the robber hasn’t just deserted them?”

“By the accumulation of evidence.”

“What evidence?”

“There were clues practically from the beginning,” he said, “at the scene of the robbery itself. A tangle of long hairs on a bush. The prints of a small-sized boot in the mud where she had led her horse to drink in the stream. Evidence—broken twigs, tufts of wool from the blanket, a ribbon bow clearly torn from a dress—that she changed her clothing in the clearing.”

“How did you know she wasn’t just there with the robber?’

“The signs indicated that only one person, with one horse, was waiting in that spot,” Holmes answered. “I saw nothing that
suggested the presence of a second person, and neither did the other stage passengers. What Mrs. Bannerman told us also suggested that Miss Rostov wasn’t passing information to a man. And there were the clothes under the bed—on which, on examination, I found another couple of long reddish hairs. And finally, there was her accent—which I noticed at the time, though no one else did.

“Once I was convinced that Miss Rostov was the robber, I was equally sure that she had no male confederate. What man would send a woman out alone to commit a highway robbery?”

“What you’re saying makes sense—but it seems so unlikely.”

“Perhaps, but it’s true. We’ve been watching Miss Rostov for several days. She didn’t know she was being pursued, so it was easy to find her here. She had, as Dr. Jenkins thought, consulted with Dr. Silbermann, who has been coming to look in on Miss Duverger—or, rather, LaFreniere—and told us where they were staying. With the help of the Pinkertons—hired by the bank—and Mrs. Paxton, we have watched them at all hours, and no man has visited Miss Rostov except the doctor.

“I also had Mr. Ingram send a man to St. Helena to make some inquiries. He learned that a young woman resembling Miss Rostov bought a quantity of cayenne pepper from a grocer there and that a similar woman, heavily veiled, hired a horse from a livery stable on the morning of the robbery. Does that put you more at ease?”

I acknowledged that it did, and Holmes fell silent, leaving me to consider what he had revealed and to wonder at the desperate, hopeless courage of the girl in the next room.

It was some time before Fanny came from the bedroom, alone. The gray daylight outside the windows was starting to fade, and a chill draft, borne by the fog, seeped through the window and
played shiveringly, like the touch of a ghost, through the shadowed room. “She had a hemorrhage,” she said to Holmes and me, “but the crisis is past, for now. Annie is asleep, too. She’s exhausted; I don’t think she’s slept in days.”

Holmes, who had been reading a book, looked up. “What is Miss LaFreniere’s condition otherwise?”

Fanny lowered her voice. “It won’t be much longer, I suspect. I’ll be surprised if she lasts the night. Can’t you let Annie stay with her until the end? It seems so cruel to leave that poor child to die among strangers.”

Holmes said nothing, but signaled his assent with a nod and went back to his reading.

Time seemed to settle in the room like the fog itself. I read absentmindedly in a lady’s novel that had been sitting on the table. A maid brought coffee and sandwiches and wine, lit the lamps, and laid a fire in the sitting room, and soon after that, Dr. Silberman arrived to examine Miss LaFreniere. He emerged from the bedroom, trailed by Fanny and Antonia and looking sober. “It’s the end,” he told them. “With luck, she won’t wake up, but if she does and is in pain, give her some laudanum. God bless you both,” he said, and was gone—home to wife and children, perhaps, or to dinner and good wine with his friends.

At Fanny’s urging, Antonia sipped at some coffee and picked apart, rather than ate, a sandwich, and then returned to her chair in the bedroom. Fanny remained in the sitting room, but near enough to the bedroom door that she would hear any change in Jo’s breathing. Revived by meat and drink and the warmth of the fire, I decided to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the sickroom and, with a whispered word to Fanny, left to wait downstairs.

Almost imperceptibly, the evening turned into night. Mrs. Paxton came into the parlor and said good night, trimmed the lamp, and retired to her apartment in the back of the house. The coal fire in the grate burned low. I grew tired, but could not sleep for coughing and thoughts of the scene upstairs. I felt that if I walked out into the street I would see Death beneath the low clouds, brooding over the house and enfolding it, and all of us, in its dark, sheltering wings.

Every hour or so, restless, I lit a candle and climbed the stairs, to look in on Fanny and Holmes. I could hear poor Josette’s harsh breathing and see Antonia seated next to the bed, her bent head silhouetted in the light of the bedside lamp. Fanny looked steadfast and tired, and Holmes looked inscrutable.

The twilight of morning was starting to fill the rooms of the house with a dim underwater light when Fanny came quietly downstairs and whispered that the ordeal was over at last. We waked Weston, who had fallen asleep on the parlor sofa, and Fanny said to him, “Mr. Holmes said to send for the police van.”

I followed Fanny back upstairs to the rooms. Through the bedroom door I could see Josette’s body, as still as a sculpture on a tomb. She was laid out in a fresh dress of some light color, her hair carefully arranged. Antonia, pale and red-eyed, was in the outer room, sitting at the table with Holmes. “There was no one else,” I heard her say to him, “just me. Even Jo didn’t know where I got the money.”

“Where is the money?”

“In the valise in the bedroom.” Her face was without expression, her voice lifeless. “Everything’s there except what I spent. None of it matters now.” She looked around at Fanny and me, and then again at Holmes, and asked, “Is it time to go?”

“When the van comes, yes,” Holmes said.

“We’ll call the undertaker,” Fanny said. “Everything will be taken care of.”

Antonia nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “May I sit with her until we have to leave?”

Holmes nodded, and Antonia walked into the bedroom, bent down and kissed Jo’s forehead, and took her seat in the chair next to the bed.

In a half hour or so, Mary knocked on the door and told Holmes that the van was waiting. Antonia appeared at the bedroom door, in a hat and shawl. She stood a little straighter and squared her shoulders. “All right, I’m ready.”

She left the room with Holmes, and a minute later Weston came in and took the valise. Fanny and I went downstairs and asked Mrs. Paxton to send for the undertakers and a cab, and retreated to the parlor to wait. The morning sun, though it shone bright outside, had not yet taken the chill from the room. Fanny curled against me and shivered slightly. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

“Yes, just tired.”

I put my arm around her and held her close and, as I did, remembered again the long, cold weeks, so far from home, when Fanny had held me as I coughed blood, or hurried to my bedside as I wakened from a fevered sleep, her anxious eyes looking into mine. I thought how tired and despairing she must have felt then, when it seemed more than I could do to keep on with life at all.

The newspapers quickly caught wind of the case, and for the next few days, the
Call
and the
Bulletin
carried front-page stories of “Russian Annie, The Fair Desperado” and the “Parlor House Road
Agent,” with lurid engravings depicting the robbery of the stage and Antonia’s arrest. Holmes was mentioned as a private detective whose fortuitous presence on the stagecoach had brought him into the case and led to the apprehension of the “beautiful bandita.”

With Mrs. Paxton’s help, Fanny made arrangements for Jo to be buried in one of the cemeteries at the edge of town. On the day of her funeral, I was too ill to go out, but Fanny and Mrs. Paxton rode behind the hearse and paid their last respects, with a small crowd of onlookers, as the girl was laid to rest.

When I was recovered enough to see visitors again, Mr. Holmes came by to wish us farewell. Fanny had been fretful and peevish that morning, worrying about my health, the journey, and the fateful meeting with my parents. I had dismissed her fears. She had called me heartless; we had quarreled; and when Holmes arrived, we were sorting books in wounded silence. With an effort, we put on company faces, offered him the sofa, and seated ourselves on a couple of chairs.

He told us Antonia had pled guilty to the robberies and would probably be sentenced to several years in the women’s prison. “Most of the stolen money was accounted for,” he said, “though I understand that Miss LaFreniere had quite an elegant funeral.” He turned to Fanny, who met his look unflinchingly.

After he had left, I asked Fanny what Holmes had meant by his remark. “Did she give you money?”

She paused over the box of books she was packing. “Yes. She paid for the funeral, and for a plot in the cemetery and a headstone, so Jo wouldn’t have to be buried in the potter’s field.”

“With money from the robberies?” I asked, knowing what the answer was.

She turned on me a look like the sighting of a pistol. “Do you care?” she asked. Her anger receded as quickly as it had risen, and a shadow of sadness darkened her face. She looked at the book in her hand, as if retrieving a memory, and then said quietly, “They were all alone, so far away from home—somebody had to do something.”

RHYS BOWEN
(“
Cutting for Sign
”)

Creator of the highly enjoyable Constable Evans and Molly Murphy novels, Bowen had her first play,
Dandelion Hours
, produced by the BBC in London. Since then she has been the author of award-winning children’s books, young adult books, historical romances, and mysteries.

CAROL BUGGÉ
(“
The Curse of Edwin Booth
”)
The author of five novels and numerous short stories, Buggé has received awards and glowing reviews for her poetry, her plays, and her fiction. She has been awarded a fellowship for a residency at the International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland, and her next novel will be published by Kensington Press later this year.

DARRYL BROCK
(“
My Silk Umbrella
”)
The author of the best-selling novel
If I Never Get Back,
Brock writes regularly on subjects dealing with baseball, Mark Twain, and the American past.

STEVE HOCKENSMITH
(“
The Old Senator
”)
Hockensmith is the author of the Edgar-nominated
Holmes on the Range
and, so far, two sequels featuring the “deducifying” Amlingmeyer brothers. He writes regularly for
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.