An Untimely Frost, page 15
On the way to the theater, the horse and carriage trotted past a park, where she saw a boxing ring set up beneath the canopy of new green leaves. The broadside nailed to a tree was an exact replica of the one put up by the Irishman in Vandalia.
She was struck by the sudden, irrational notion that the boxer was following her. She dismissed the idea with a laugh. It seemed she was growing paranoid since becoming an agent! There was no logical reason a group of pugilists with broken noses and cauliflower ears would follow her from town to town. The truth was simpler and much less forbidding: Like theater troupes, boxers went from place to place in search of new audiences and new revenues. It was inevitable that she would run into some of the same groups. Unfortunately, the life of entertainers was neither simple nor easy.
To Lilly’s delight, Pierce and Rose were only too glad to treat her to a meal before the evening performance. They went to a place on Fifth Street called the Café de Paris. The food was excellent, but she was more interested in catching up with what had happened since she’d left the ensemble than with enjoying the culinary fare.
“So, luv, tell us how you like the detecting business.”
“Yes, Lil,” Rose said. “How is your investigation going?”
Happy to comply, Lilly recounted everything from the time she’d gotten off the train in Vandalia. She told them about the missing family, the town’s attitude, the abandoned house, the bloody sheets, and the ghost. She related her discussions with Eloise Mercer, Helen and Virginia Holbrook, the sheriff, the banker, and the attorney. And she told them about her growing feeling that something more than thievery had sent the Purcells running.
She did not mention the warning note that had been slipped beneath her door, or her feeling of being watched at Heaven’s Gate, or her chance encounters with the pugilist. Neither did she mention what a failure she felt she was for not uncovering a single valid lead, and definitely not how she was beginning to fear that Pierce and Robert Pinkerton might have been right that she was not suited to the work. She did not want to worry Pierce and Rose unduly, or to admit defeat just yet.
“Of course I think the ghost story is nonsense,” she said at the end. “But it is spooky to go inside and see such a fine house abandoned with everything just as it was when they walked away. From all appearances, the entire family left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. And that bloody bed . . .” She gave a little shiver.
“Bed?” Pierce asked, his keen gaze finding hers. “Is seeing the bed what made you remember the day Kate was killed? That’s what you meant in the telegram, isn’t it?”
Picturing the room in her mind, Lilly’s heart began to beat faster, and she tried to hide the trembling in her voice. “Yes. If it is blood, and the sheriff assured me it is, it must have been a grisly slaying. When I saw it, everything about Kate’s murder came back with a rush.”
Neither spoke, but Lilly knew the time had come to tell them the things her mind had kept locked away from her for eleven long years. Looking from Rose’s concerned expression to Pierce’s, she related in vivid detail all the remembered horrors of her mother’s murder.
“I still wake up nights reliving it,” she told them. “And I’ve become obsessed with men’s signet rings. Whenever I see a man wearing one, I find myself checking to see if it looks like the one I remember the killer wearing.” She offered a quavering smile. “Still and all, I’m glad I finally remembered what happened. It helps to put the past to rest.”
“It will put it to rest for all of us,” Rose said, casting a glance at her husband.
“Remembering about the . . . baby was . . . disturbing,” Lilly said. She cast a questioning look at Pierce.
“I’m sure it was.”
Her mention of the baby Kate had been expecting ushered in an awkward silence. It was impossible to miss the sorrow in Pierce’s eyes.
Sensing that the two of them needed a moment, Rose said, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to find the necessary.”
When she was out of earshot, Pierce said, “She’s missed you.”
“I’ve missed her, too. She’s the only mother I’ve known since Mama died.” And you’re the only father I’ve ever known.
Pierce had always been there between the men who flitted in and out of Kate’s life, the one constant in an existence spent traveling the country with a fey, flighty mother whose very nature was as changeable and tumultuous as the sea.
Long before Rose had come into the picture, Lilly recalled herself and Kate, accompanied by Pierce, eating at some of the fanciest hotels in the towns they passed through. He’d always let Lilly order whatever she wanted from the menu. Lilly realized now that he’d been wooing Kate. Aching to know the truth of her paternity and figuring this might be the best opportunity she’d have to ask, she took a steadying breath.
“Pierce?”
“Hmm?”
“I’ve often wondered if . . .” She hesitated, uncertain how to phrase the question. “I wondered if you knew if I . . .”
He smiled, a wry lift of his lips. “You want to know if I’m your father.”
“Yes.” It was almost a whisper.
It was his turn to draw a deep breath. The gaze that met hers was steady, unflinching. He reached out and tucked a stray tendril of her dark red hair behind her ear. “I truly don’t know, Lilly. I always trusted that Kate was faithful to me the time we were together, but when I gathered enough courage to ask her, she just laughed and asked me if I really wanted to know. At twenty-six, I decided that perhaps I didn’t. I had faults and trouble enough of my own, and even then, I knew she wouldn’t be happy if I insisted she marry me.”
“You loved her.” It was as much a question as a statement.
He didn’t reply at once. He reached out and covered her hand with his. Its strength and warmth was steadying as always. “A part of me will always love her,” he confessed.
“Didn’t she love you back?”
“For a while.” She saw the need to make her understand in his eyes. “Your mother was like the wind, Lilly. Gentle sometimes, sometimes strong and wild, but always restless, searching for the next good time. You’re like her in many ways.”
“I certainly hope not!” she cried, and Pierce laughed. “I don’t want a parade of men traipsing through my life.”
He smiled. “You’re nothing like her in that way,” he assured her. “But you can be as impulsive and headstrong as she was, something that’s more apparent the older you get.”
“How?”
“Well, the way you change up dialogue to suit your mood when you’re performing, or the way you take impossible jumps when we’re riding horses, or—”
“I see,” she interrupted, understanding exactly what he meant. “So you don’t really know the answer to my question.”
He offered her a self-deprecating smile. “There’s no way I can ever be sure. I will tell you this. In my heart you’re my daughter, and I love you completely.”
Lilly felt her eyes fill with tears and saw the sheen in his. Though far from a certainty, it was enough.
“We traveled the same circuit for about five years,” he said, continuing the story, “and every day was hell for me, seeing her with other men. I only stayed as long as I did because of you. Finally, out of self-preservation, I took a position with another troupe.”
“And met Rose?”
“And met Rose,” he said with a smile. “I adore Rose, Lilly. Kate was the love of a young man, but by the time Rose came along, I’d grown up enough to realize what qualities were really important in a woman. Finding her was like finding home again, something I hadn’t had since I left England.”
There it was again, the infrequent mention of his homeland. All she’d been able to piece together was that as a young man he’d been studying to become a physician, and for some unknown reason, he had abandoned that dream to come to America. He’d never been back to the land of his birth.
“When I met up with Kate again, you were nine. I saw soon enough that nothing had changed. Kate was still Kate, and though I cared for her in many ways, Rose had taught me about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.”
“What did she think about your being in such close contact with Kate again?”
“She knew me well enough to know that I would never betray her. After a year or so, I talked with Rose about confronting Kate again about your paternity. We both felt we could handle things if she said yes, but before I could ask her, she was murdered and I was robbed of the opportunity.”
“What did Rose think about you taking me in?”
“She thought it was a wonderful idea. She knew you would need someone. Who better than a childless woman and the man who believed he was your father?”
“Do you have any idea who the baby’s father might have been?”
“None,” he said with a shake of his head. “Kate was pretty secretive about her liaisons.”
They saw Rose coming back, and the conversation came to an abrupt halt. After Pierce helped her into her seat, he cleared his throat, and said, “About your investigation. I agree that something more than Purcell taking the money is at the root of the folks in town refusing to talk about him. And you could be on the right track about him indulging himself with the women of the congregation. That would be an embarrassment to everyone, something they’d not want some stranger resurrecting. It’s easy to see how your questions might put them on edge.”
His intelligent gaze found Lilly’s once more. “Did anyone in the area come up missing about that time? If so, it might suggest who the victim was.”
“No one I interviewed mentioned anyone.”
“Would you feel better knowing for certain the stains are indeed blood?”
Lilly’s expression brightened. Since Pierce had been studying medicine before the incident that had forced him to leave his native country and come to America, he was still interested in the subject and he made it a point to keep up with all the newest happenings in the medical world. “Are you telling me there’s something I can do to prove it?”
“Indeed there is,” he told her. “Guaiac. It’s a compound made from parts of a West Indian tree called Guaiacum. It’s been used for centuries to treat syphilis, arthritis, and coughs, but they’ve found out that if you use it in conjunction with hydrogen peroxide on stool samples it reacts to blood.”
“Pierce!” Rose admonished with a frown. “This is hardly polite dinner conversation.”
“Sorry, luv,” Pierce told her with a smile. “Just trying to help. Peroxide alone might be a better choice for this, though. And then of course, there’s benzidine, which is used in dye making. It would work, too.”
“Dye making?”
He nodded. “When it comes into contact with blood, it turns blue. The problem is that the stains are so old, I’m not sure any of these compounds would work.”
“Well, I thank you for the suggestion, and it is all very fascinating, of course,” Lilly said, “but the thing of it is that while my curiosity is aroused about what went on in that house, it has no bearing whatsoever on my assignment. My job is to find Purcell and see if he’ll sell, which is how I wound up here. This was the only place mentioned they might have come, because of their daughter’s tuberculosis.”
“And did you find out anything today?” Rose asked.
“Not much of use. Located three Purcell families living here, and I plan to visit them tomorrow. If none of them is the preacher, I have no choice but to go back to Chicago and admit to William I’ve failed—but not before going to Chatterton’s to see Mary Anderson,” she added with a smile, hoping to turn the conversation to a more pleasant topic.
“Speaking of seeing people, did you get in touch with Nora before you left Vandalia?” Rose asked.
“I did,” Lilly said with another smile. “We shared a late dessert after the play.”
“How is she?” Pierce asked. “Still the same fun-loving Nora?”
“Very much so,” Lilly said. “But she’s leaving the theater in a couple of weeks to go to Texas and become a mail-order bride.”
“A mail-order bride! I can’t believe it!” Rose said, placing her palms on her cheeks in incredulity.
“Neither can I,” Lilly said. “But she says she’s tired of living a nomadic life, and she wants a family.”
“Well, she’s a fine woman,” Pierce said. “Whoever this rancher is, he’s lucky to get her.”
Lilly said good-bye to them thirty minutes later and returned to her hotel with depression weighing heavily on her. Tomorrow it would be back to the job and asking questions to which she would receive few satisfactory answers. Back to being alone.
This is what you wanted, Lilly.
As Rose always said, “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.”
CHAPTER 30
Two of the Purcells Lilly located the next day had no connection to the reverend. The first was a little prune-like man whose gnarled, arthritic hands were covered with liver spots and shook with the palsy. He clearly suffered from dementia. After speaking with him for less than a minute, Lilly wondered how he’d found his way to the door. She thanked him and went to her second stop, a young wife with a baby on her hip and a toddler clinging to her skirts.
It was late morning when the driver pulled the rented hack to a stop in front of the third house, her last hope of finding Harold Purcell in the capital. She approached the Greek Revival–style home, torn between thankfulness that her search was nearly at an end and a deep-seated hope that this final stop would prove to be the right one. Either way, she should be finished with her inquiries by noon. Somewhat disheartened, she banged the brass knocker against the Federal blue door that was flanked by narrow sidelights and topped with a transom of rectangular lights.
However this meeting turned out, she would go back to the hotel knowing she had done all she could to find the preacher and his family. In fact, she would celebrate the end of her inquiries by luxuriating in a hot bath with a generous handful of the rose and chamomile bath salts Rose had given her for Christmas. She would treat herself to a nice dinner at Delaney’s French Café and Saloon, which was just down the street from her hotel, and then she would hire herself a cab to transport her to Chatterton’s. Tomorrow she would go back to Chicago and see what new assignment William had for her, if he decided to keep her on. She was so caught up in her plans for the evening that when the door opened, she gave a little start.
The years had not been kind to Prudence Purcell, but there was little doubt in Lilly’s mind that she was indeed staring at the minister’s wife. Though probably in her early fifties, the woman looked much older. Even the red merino Garibaldi blouse worn over a black skirt and belted around her still-slender waist was old, a style more likely to be seen during the sixties. Her blond hair was threaded with skeins of gray. Her delicate features were now drawn and haggard, and the firm lines of her face had given way to sags, wrinkles, and dark pouches that not even a dusting of powder and a touch of rouge could hide. Lilly felt a glimmer of admiration for Prudence’s valiant attempt to hold her own against the encroaching years.
“May I help you?”
There was nothing soft about the voice. The older woman’s tone was all business, almost sharp. “Mrs. Harold Purcell?” Lilly asked.
“Who’s asking?”
Smiling, she extended her gloved hand, where her badge rested. “Lilly Long. With the Pinkerton Detective Agency.”
Prudence’s eyes widened and then narrowed. She withdrew her partially extended hand.
“There’s no need for alarm, Mrs. Purcell,” Lilly said, tucking the badge into her reticule. “I’m only here representing some clients who are trying to contact your husband regarding a business matter.”
The wariness on Prudence’s face vanished. “I see. I’m sorry to say that my husband was”—she paused, as if searching for the right words—“cruelly snatched from the life he so loved several years ago, Miss . . .”
“Long,” Lilly supplied again, taken aback by the news of the preacher’s death. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Purcell. Please forgive me for bringing up such a difficult topic.”
“That isn’t a problem, Miss Long. There is no way you could have known.”
“Do you perhaps handle your husband’s affairs now?” Lilly asked.
“With the assistance of my attorney,” she said with a nod.
“I hate to impose, but would it be possible for me to come inside and discuss the matter with you? It won’t take long, and I’ve traveled some distance to locate you.”
“Certainly, my dear. I was just brewing a pot of tea, and you can join me. Do you mind waiting here for just a moment, while I put the dog in another room? Strangers upset him.”
“Not at all.”
Prudence was back in no time, stepping aside and leading the way to the parlor. “Please make yourself at home. The tea will be ready in a few minutes.”
It was getting on toward noon, and Lilly was glad for the offer of refreshment. From the kitchen, Prudence’s low, soothing voice could be heard as she spoke to the dog.
While her hostess was preparing the tea, Lilly pulled off her gloves and strolled about the room, examining the décor and hoping to find some clue to the personalities of the occupants. The walls were papered with a panoramic landscape, something only the very wealthy could afford. The oak floors gleamed with beeswax and lemon balm. Delicate lace and crisscrossed draperies in heavy bronze-green brocade graced the leaded glass windows, and two crystal chandeliers hung suspended from the ceiling.
The preacher had spared no expense, either in purchasing the house or in its décor, using his ill-gotten money on ornate furnishings reminiscent of those at Heaven’s Gate. This house, too, was stilted and formal, far too elaborate for Lilly’s taste, not to mention it was somewhat depressing. It was as stripped of personality as the Purcell family photograph in her carpetbag.
There were no photographs sitting around the parlor, no portraits on the wall, no knitting bag with a half-finished muffler trailing over the side, and no books that might suggest an outside interest. Only a cabinet of bird’s-eye maple displaying a collection of pistols gave any clue to the homeowners’ personalities.
