Summer of Dreams (13 page)

She sat at the same desk where Gwendolyn had once worked. She was meeting the same people Gwendolyn had once known. And in the course of this tedious, mind-numbing work, she expected to learn who had killed her sister.

She had been on the job for six weeks, but even on her best days she struggled to keep pace with the deluge of notes she needed to type, and now the bee stings slowed her even more. She couldn’t afford to lose this job, for it provided a front-row seat to everything and everyone Gwendolyn had known during those final months before she’d died under such mysterious circumstances.

“Well, if you don’t hurry up, I think you should be reported to management,” Nellie said. “We have a professional reputation to maintain.”

The clattering from the typewriters trickled off as other stenographers sitting nearby eavesdropped. In an office where women were measured by the speed at which they could type, Stella wasn’t surprised she was the object of derision.

“Don’t be catty,” Janet Davis said. Janet was the youngest and the only friendly stenographer here. “I’m sure Stella is trying her best.”

“She should try harder,” Nellie said. “I could type faster than Stella after only a week on the job.”

“You’re right,” Stella said agreeably. “I wish I could be as good as you, Nellie. I could practice for years, decades . . . oh heck, I could practice for an entire geologic epoch, but I doubt I’d be close to how famously good you are.” She flashed Nellie a wink no one else in the office could see, but it was enough to infuriate Nellie.

She turned her attention back to her typewriter. She didn’t care what her coworkers thought of her. They had no power over her job—but the men at her next meeting did. The officers of the Boston Transit Commission held their meetings in
a large auditorium so members of the public could attend, for the subway project attracted a lot of spectators. Hundreds of people usually attended the meetings to argue over funding, traffic disruptions, and subway routes.

She didn’t spare Nellie another glance as she headed out the door to her next meeting. Members of the Transit Commission sat at a conference table at the foot of City Hall’s raked auditorium. Stella took her seat at a small table off to the side, where she would dutifully use the stenotype keys to make a shorthand transcript of every word spoken. The auditorium’s seats were already packed, and it seemed to be a rowdy bunch today.

Boston was the first city in America to attempt the construction of an underground subway, and it had profound implications for property owners throughout the city. As streets were excavated for the subway, the city’s water, sewer, and gas lines all needed to be pulled up and re-plumbed. Streets would be excavated, traffic diverted, and businesses would struggle to survive during the months their customers could not reach their stores. Despite the political and economic quagmire, construction of the subway was careening ahead at an astonishing pace.

Not long ago, recording these meetings had been Gwendolyn’s job. Now it was Stella’s.

Gwendolyn had learned something dangerous while working here. Throughout Stella’s years in London, she and Gwendolyn had carried on a lively correspondence, and in the months before her death, Gwendolyn wrote that the subway project was drenched in graft and corruption. Gwendolyn wrote that she practically had to hold her nose to sit in the same room with certain corrupt officials during their meetings. Stella suspected it was one of those crooked government officials who’d ordered Gwendolyn’s death.

At each meeting, she scrutinized every person who attended. Was it possible to spot corruption on a man’s face? The great
artists had always been able to endow the villains of history with signs of wickedness. Perhaps it was a dissipated expression or a beady gaze. She only wished life were as easy to interpret as great art, for the businessmen and engineers who attended these meetings seemed competent and professional, with no glaring signs of corruption.

The meeting commenced, and her fingers moved across the keys of the stenograph machine, tapping out the phonetic code to produce a transcript of every word spoken. The bee stings made each keystroke hurt, but she couldn’t stumble, couldn’t slow down. These meetings were always loud, boisterous, and fast, but they were her best chance of spotting the corruption Gwendolyn had discovered.

The transit commissioner stood to deliver his report of growing discontent about the “sandhogs” hired to excavate the tunnels. Many of the sandhogs were Italians, and members of the Irish unions were snapping mad. When the commissioner insisted the Italians would continue to be employed, a tomato came hurtling through the air from somewhere deep in the auditorium. The commissioner ducked in time, and the tomato splatted on the blackboard behind him, leaving a wet, seedy stain.

The tomato sparked a chorus of hoots and jeers as various Italian and Irish observers rose to their feet. These meetings were always contentious, but this was the first time Stella had seen flying vegetables.

“Officers, clear the room of protesters,” the chairman ordered.

More than a dozen policemen swarmed the room. It took a while to clear the rowdy spectators, as some refused to leave and needed to be hauled away.

Stella took advantage of the time to rest her aching hand. It throbbed from the past half hour of vigorous typing, and
she savored the lull. About a dozen spectators remained after the rabble-rousers had been cleared, but only one man caught her attention.

He stared straight at her. Tall, dark-haired, with a firm jaw and a beautifully sculpted face, he was an outrageously handsome man. And the way he lounged in his seat, with one arm casually draped across the back of the neighboring chair, suggested the easy confidence of a man born to power. Beneath his fine black suit he wore a vest of lavender silk shot with threads of gold. Only a man of immense confidence could wear such a color and still appear to be the most masculine man in the room. The half smile on his mouth as he stared at her was disconcerting.

Stella was accustomed to male appreciation, but this sort of scrutiny was uncomfortable. The way he watched her . . . was it possible he knew her from London? She’d always accepted that these public meetings were putting her at risk of exposure, but the artistic set she’d mixed with in London were unlikely to appear at a municipal government meeting in Boston. And the frumpy dress she wore looked nothing like the spectacular ensembles she’d flaunted in London.

She risked a second glance at the man. He still stared at her. They had never met, she was sure of it. She would remember a man with such a flair for style.

A gavel banged, and the meeting was recalled to order. The transit commissioner resumed his position at the podium, looking a little haggard after the hectoring. “If there are no more concerns about employing Italians on the project . . .” The commissioner let the sentence dangle, hope in his eyes. A single hand rose, and the commissioner reluctantly acknowledged him. It was the man in the lavender vest.

“Your name, sir?”

“Romulus White of
Scientific World
.”

Stella gasped, and it echoed in the half-empty auditorium. A handful of men swiveled to stare at her, but she disguised the blunder with a cough, covering her mouth and turning away to hide her face.

Was his presence here merely a coincidence, or had he come to continue his pursuit? It seemed impossible to believe, but if he had managed to track her down to her boardinghouse, he could probably find her at City Hall, too.

And that would be a disaster. Her mouth went dry and she held her breath, waiting for his question. If he dared mention anything about her skills as a lithographer, it would be impossible for her to explain what she was doing here.

Romulus stood. “Berlin is about to break ground on a subway system,” he said. “Their plan is designed to cover the city on radial lines, which seems far more efficient than our design of mirroring existing street patterns. Have you interviewed the Berlin engineers?”

Stella breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently his attendance at this meeting was entirely coincidental, for innovative engineering projects were regularly featured in the pages of
Scientific World
. The conversation droned on for almost an hour, and Stella did her best to record every word, the clacking of the stenograph keys keeping pace with the discussion.

At the close of the meeting, some of the remaining spectators mingled with Transit Commission members. Stella put the stenotype machine back into its leather box, still aware of Romulus White, who chatted amiably with the Director of Public Engineering, but she sensed him repeatedly glancing her way. Surely it was because she was the only woman in the room, for he couldn’t possibly know who she was.

Or perhaps that was wishful thinking. As she left the room, Romulus was close behind and gaining on her. The hallway was crowded, with voices and footsteps echoing off the vaulted
marble ceilings. If she reached the elevator ahead of him, she could escape to her third-floor office where the public was not allowed to follow. She was almost at the elevator when a voice called out from across the hall.

“Miss West!”

Her heart plummeted, for now it was a certainty that he knew who she was. She couldn’t let him catch her. If what she suspected was true, any one of the men milling about in this lobby could have been involved in Gwendolyn’s murder. At all costs, she must avoid anything that drew attention to her.

“Miss West . . . Stella, wait.”

She slipped inside the crowded elevator, its brass doors closing before he could catch her.

She sighed in relief. She had escaped.

Stella worked hard the rest of the afternoon, transcribing her shorthand notes into a transcript that would be filed in the official record in the archives. At precisely fifteen minutes before the end of the workday, she looked up and scanned the room. “I’m heading down to file my work in the archives. Would anyone like me to take their notes, as well?”

As anticipated, every woman in the office eagerly accepted, reaching for their paperwork and hastily assembling it into files and noting a date on the tab. Stella waited patiently for all six women to hand over their day’s work.

“I don’t know how you can stand that man,” Janet said. “Mr. Palmer is just so odd. No matter how hard I try, I can’t warm up to him, so thank you.” She turned over her notes from the School Board meeting to Stella.

Stella nodded but said nothing as she carried the stack of files down to the archives, where she would turn them over to Ernest Palmer, the city’s archivist.

Ernest Palmer was the butt of jokes throughout City Hall, but she liked him anyway. Stella suspected that his overly large eyes, magnified by the thick spectacles he wore, might be part of the reason people teased him. Ernest worked in the basement archives all day, and who wouldn’t be odd if they never saw the sunlight? He smelled of camphor, continually pushed his thick eyeglasses up his nose, and talked incessantly to anyone who visited the archives, usually about his passion for the history of typography. He could rattle on for hours about the beauty of Garamond type or the challenges of italic font. Mr. Palmer was especially eager to talk to the stenographers, for he assumed they must share his passion for the printed word.

Stella always enjoyed chatting with Ernest. She had no interest in long-winded discussions about typography, but she liked people who had a passion for something, even if it was as pedantic as the beauty of a typeface. The eccentric Mr. Palmer would have fit in quite well with the crowd she’d run with back in London, as artists had a high tolerance for unconventional people.

She dashed as quickly as possible down to the basement, her heels clicking on the marble steps. At the stroke of five o’clock, people would come pouring out of their offices, leaving her precious little time for her most important task of the entire day: skimming the notes typed up by her coworkers.

She stood in the vacant corridor outside the archives, flipped open Nellie’s file, and scanned the neatly typed transcript from the Board of Taxation meeting. Names of the attendees were always typed near the top of the page, and Stella read them quickly, but there was nothing of interest here. She closed the folder and moved on to the next.

Her offer to carry their notes downstairs was not motivated by kindness. Rather, it let Stella quickly learn the names of every government official who had been at City Hall that day and in what capacity. She skimmed the notes of her coworkers every
day, on the lookout for the name of the man who might help her unlock the clues to Gwendolyn’s murder.

In Gwendolyn’s many letters to her, the one person she’d mentioned as wholly trustworthy was a mysterious man she’d referred to only by his initials, A.G. He was the man in whom Gwendolyn confided when she first discovered evidence of graft at City Hall.

I thank the Lord I had an ally I could trust with the evidence of corruption I
had found
, Gwendolyn had written.
He is wonderful, possibly the most valiant man I’ve ever known. He knew exactly
how to handle the evidence I turned over to him.