Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II (39 page)

Clem stared at him for what seemed like several seconds before finally saying something completely unexpected, “So I have access to the Lacy Group Building? The one across from the Ridgeleigh Bay Building?”

Twenty-Eight

IT WAS THE middle of the day, and Evelyn was alone in the parlor of their rooms at the Black Swan Inn. She had retreated there on purpose, hoping to find the solitude lacking at home. Since Billy’s death, she had felt meek and frightened and almost always on the verge of tears. Not even her father’s insistence that she be pulled from the field elicited any protest from her lips.

Evelyn had known that the coming war would bring grief. She had thought of Hugh’s dangerous mission and believed herself ready for the worst. But nothing had prepared her for watching the life seep out of her friend. She was not ready. She was frightened, terrified that it might happen again.

She sat at what had been Verity’s desk with a stack of letters before her. Gabriel had agreed to let her remain active, but only in the most secure of positions. So she was given the tedious task of searching discarded correspondence for any suspicion of a code. Most of the letters had been retrieved from the waste bins of loyalists, typically by servants in the secret employ of the rebels. Some of the more cautious burned their letters, so even the ashes from the hearth were searched for remnants of paper. Evelyn had everything from a perfectly intact letter only slightly crumpled to scraps of burned correspondence pieced together as best as possible.

Evelyn sighed heavily and wished for the hundredth time that Verity was still in Philadelphia. But that gifted woman had moved on to set up a spy network in New York City. Three-Five-Five, their fledgling clandestine endeavor, was maturing at a rapid pace and would now be employing its innovative methods throughout the colonies. She was proud of Verity, but she missed the older woman’s sharp eye, common sense, and uncommon strength.

Evelyn got up, sighed dramatically, and pulled a large tome from the shelf. The book was a well-worn family Bible that Cara had purchased at the booksellers. It was Verity who had told them that the Bible was the most likely source for code encryption, because it was the one book most people owned.

Evelyn set it beside her just in case she detected a pattern in any of the letters. She shuffled the papers and separated them out into piles, initially based on author. Their acquisition of such letters was haphazard at best, so it wasn’t unusual to have several letters all from different people or a few from the same person and one or two more from someone entirely different. Rarely did they have a complete chronological correspondence. It was all really just a fishing expedition, looking to see if they could land a big catch. Evelyn had never known it to yield anything really important.

Nevertheless, she dutifully began a methodical search of the letters. Before she had left, Verity set up a checklist of sorts to lead agents through the process of decryption. The precise and systematic method comforted Evelyn by diverting her brain, that would, whenever given time to think, return stubbornly to that bleak afternoon when she had followed Billy to his last rendezvous.

“Evelyn… she is false.”

His words played over and over in her mind. Was he speaking of her? Or trying to tell her of someone else? It hurt Evelyn’s heart to think he might have been referring to her. She wasn’t blind. She knew how he felt. Did he believe her to be a false friend? Someone who had cruelly ensnared him without ever intending to return his feelings? Had this driven him to betray their cause?

She couldn’t believe this of him. She
wouldn’t
believe this of him. If he was working outside their network, Evelyn was sure it was because he believed himself to be helping in some way. He would not think she had played him false. She had never given him any reason to suppose her feelings for him were more than sisterly, but she didn’t delude herself into thinking that his actions had nothing to do with her. His need to prove himself, his vanity and hurt pride had made him vulnerable. But he was no traitor; she was sure of it.

She shook herself and tried again to concentrate on her task. Once the letters were compiled by author, she looked over the dates and city of origin; oftentimes this was where the pattern was set.

While flipping through a pile written by one Doctor Jeremiah Robbins, she came upon a document very unlike a letter. There was a date but no salutation, and the text consisted of the closely written sentences of a report. She turned it over in her hands and noted that it had been torn apart and then carefully pieced back together again. Some bits were missing, leaving holes here and there, but it was mostly complete. The cramped writing was, at first, difficult to decipher. It took her at least half an hour to read little more than four paragraphs. After finishing, she sat back in her chair and stared blankly at the page before her.

Evelyn held in her hands a report on the examination of the body that was pulled from the Schuylkill River many weeks before. The local government had given Doctor Robbins the task of identifying the poor soul who had drowned.

Except that she hadn’t drowned. She had been brutally tortured and then killed with a knife thrust to the heart, a mode of murder that made the hair on the back of Evelyn’s neck rise. Was it a coincidence or a pattern?

She sat there staring at the paper. Something was off; a piece of information floated just outside her reach. She squinted in concentration and read through the report again, stopping at the corpse’s description:

General Appearance: female, middle aged… of average height… slender build… features unidentifiable…

Special markings: missing right fourth toe, possibly postmortem, slightly raised port-wine triangular mark on left hand…

Triangular mark on left hand! Evelyn jumped to her feet with a sharp intake of air. It couldn’t be! She paced agitatedly around the small room. She had seen her! At least two or three times a week at the market, just this Tuesday past, in fact. There was no way she could possibly be the dead woman, but there couldn’t be two such women with that distinctive mark.

Evelyn went to Fancy’s desk and grabbed the stack of maps that were neatly situated under a brass paperweight. She strode into the bedroom and dropped them down upon the large canopied bed in the center of the room. Doctor Robbins lived on Walnut Street and Seventh, almost directly across from the South-East Square. It wasn’t unusual for a physician to have a residence close to Pennsylvania Hospital on Eight Street, but his house was also located at the center of the South-East loyalist camp.

Mister Thornton had sectioned off the city by loyalist strongholds. There were the Cherry Alley and Arch Street Camps in the north central part of the city, the Market Street Group in the north near the docks, the Queen Street Camp in the far southern part of Philadelphia, and another at Spruce and Forth Streets. These, along with the South-East Group, were the main loyalist camps in the city. They were kept under almost constant surveillance by the patriots.

Evelyn placed the maps by loyalist groupings. Within each group were several maps tracing movements, meeting places, and drop locations in that particular section of the city. Mostly, the loyalists stayed within their home sections, handing off to another camp’s operative only when absolutely necessary. She found these crossover maps for each group; maps that documented loyalist movement when they had to pass information along to another part of the city.

Removing the other maps to a stack on the dresser, she studied only the crossover activity. Most of it seemed to converge on the Cherry Alley camp. As she moved them around the bed rearranging them in different orders, Evelyn looked for a commonality and found one.

All of the crossover operatives were noted entering a bakery, ostensibly to buy a meat pie for lunch or dinner, an act so ordinary as to elicit little notice or comment, certainly not suspicion. The fact that a crossover was infrequent further obscured what was right before their eyes: a pattern, one that led to a small neighborhood bakery next to a tidy little lodging house.

“Ho, Evie,” a gentle voice said from the doorway.

She jumped nonetheless, so deep in concentration she had not heard Jimmy come in.

“Your father said I might find you here,” he continued, entering the bedroom and looking down at the maps she had spread out. “What is this?”

She swallowed and forced back the tears that had started in her eyes, saying, “I think I’ve found Billy’s killer.”

*

Hershel picked his way along King Street, attuned to the general bustle of the docks. He liked it here. The River Thames had brought many a great ship pass his view in London, but the concentrated activity of the Docks of Philadelphia always presented him with a feast for the senses.

Along this busy shore, he often played a little game with himself. In the space of a few blocks, he would walk along as if on his way to an appointment. Then, finding an appropriate stopping place, turn to look back, taking note of what his senses had registered and what had escaped his notice. It was good training, something he had put into practice when first arriving as a young man in London. It helped to focus his mind and eye even when his thoughts were occupied with other matters. He knew that the brain stored away information, much more than it revealed, sometimes to sit for days or even years until something, some trigger, called it forth again.

But today was not one of those days. His avoidance of the usual obstacles along the broad wharf was almost automatic. He didn’t stop to look back, but kept his eyes glued in front of him thinking about what he had learned.

Hershel never really left off investigating, although he had been retired for three years before they sailed for America. Cara, as well, had sold her thriving dressmaking business, and they settled into a comfortable London life of modest luxury and intermittent travel. His services had been called into action a few times during this period, even once or twice when they were off on one of their jaunts. Cara had been his partner in all these adventures, and nothing had given him greater pleasure than to share his passion for crime solving with the woman he loved. The fact that she was often a step or two ahead of him never failed to elicit his feelings of being the luckiest man in England.

But with the couple’s removal to the colonies, the pattern of their life changed drastically. He knew that there was no question of them staying in London. Even though Odette never asked them to come, Cara would not be separated from her. Hershel would never dream of being an obstacle to their friendship, yet since their arrival, he all too frequently felt disengaged from his wife. With Cara often involved in assignments that did not include him, Hershel sometimes felt adrift.

Difficult though it was, the changing character of his marriage was easier to accept than the impending revolution. Hershel wasn’t a monarchist by any stretch of the imagination. He didn’t believe in the inherent right of some to rule over all others. He was, however, an Englishman to the marrow of his bones, and the thought of taking up arms against other Englishmen left him cold and sickened.

As much as he admired men like Franklin, he found the average patriot to be rather brutish, often deeply mired in their sense of entitlement for the new land. His sympathies for the loyalist cause, however, had gradually eroded over the course of the last few months. He was often appalled at their arrogance. They gave no ground and saw no merit in any argument but their own. The colonists had reason to be dissatisfied with their treatment, and the Crown’s haughty dismissal of their concerns left him bitter and confused. If you deny your people their rights, what can one expect but revolution. It was now inevitable.

He knew it was coming even before leaving London. Twenty years before when he had stumbled onto a crazy conspiracy that had changed his life, he learned that the American Revolution had to be fought. That it would bring forth a new world. Now he was being told that the revolution was flawed. Slavery had led to a country irrevocably divided and eventually so consumed with the fruits of commerce as to leave behind any semblance of a social contract.

Odell’s plan made sense in the grand, far-fetched scheme of the universe, but it was almost too much for Hershel. The political maneuvering was frustratingly slow and left him feeling useless and depressed. That is why he had spent most of his time investigating the explosion at the Blue Anchor Tavern and the identity of the Godfather.

Hershel was returning now from a meeting that had yielded some eye-opening new information. He had sought out this informant weeks prior, but found her absent from Philadelphia on what her associates had labeled an “extended leave.” He couldn’t begin to know upon what new venture she had embarked, but felt certain that it was as lucrative as it was illegal.

“Well, Sally,” he had said upon greeting her, “you look well rested. That ‘extended leave’ must have done you some good.”

To which she had cackled in her rather sinister way. “Dear, dear, Mister Gordon, my extended leaves always do
me
good.”

They sat in the captain’s cabin of a particularly fine schooner. It was at least twenty years old, yet so well-preserved it seemed almost new. Word around the docks was that Peg-leg Sally had inherited it from a famed pirate, having been his favorite mistress. Hershel didn’t believe it for a minute. Sally was nobody’s mistress but her own. Of that, he was certain. He knew her wealth to derive from smuggling, fishing, and slaving. Most of her trade centered on the West Indies and up and down the Atlantic Coast. She was smart and careful, also ruthless. A fact he never forgot for a moment in her company.

“I was wondering if you might help me out with an investigation I’m running,” he asked in his blunt way.

She shook her head in mock frustration. “I’ve told you how many times, Hershel? You can’t go about requesting information as if it were free.” She grinned at him, displaying the large gap between her two front teeth. “I mean, I like you and all, but we ain’t friends, and I only help out me friends.”