Death on Beacon Hill (25 page)

On a heavy sigh, Will said, “Here’s the problem, Miss Pratt. Mrs. Kimball and Miss Gannon were both shot with a high caliber revolver—a forty-four or forty-five—that uses metal cartridges. There aren’t too many of those around. Unfortunately, one of them is Mr. Pratt’s Lefaucheux.”

Vera cocked her head, frowning. “No, it was...wasn’t it Mrs. Kimball’s own gun that was the murder weapon? A Remington something...”

“I’m afraid not,” Nell said soothingly. “It was definitely the Lefaucheux, or a gun very much like it.”

“And Emily was in possession of the Lefaucheux when Mrs. Kimball and Fiona Gannon were killed,” Will said.

“But...that, that doesn’t prove she’s guilty,” Vera said. “I mean, why on earth would she have done such a thing? She had nothing against Mrs. Kimball—she admired her, in a way. And she considered Fiona a friend.”

“My best guess,” Nell said, “is that the five thousand had whetted her appetite, and she went to Mrs. Kimball’s when she thought no one was home in search of more sources of income—the necklaces, or perhaps even the Red Book.”

Vera looked puzzled. “Red Book?”

“It’s...something from which she could potentially have extracted a good deal of money,” Will said.

Nell said, “She knew how to get into the house undetected from hearing your father mention the garden entrance. So she stole upstairs, but it turned out Fiona was home, and that was when things started going wrong.”

 Vera stared at nothing, looking increasingly stricken. “Emily, Emily...” she whispered shakily. “Oh, my God.

To get to Boston Common from the Pratts’ house, Nell and Will had merely to walk east along Beacon Street and cross Charles, which divided the Public Garden from the Common. Nell had been in the sprawling, pastoral park hundreds of times—the Hewitt home on Colonnade Row faced it—but rarely at night. Even with the ambient light from street lamps to illuminate the tree-lined brick walkways, it often felt as if they were strolling, arm in arm, into a black abyss. Nell was very glad of Will’s company.

Not eager to spend the rest of the night wandering aimlessly along these paths, Nell asked Will, “If you were to take a lady for an evening stroll in the Common, where would you go?”

“That new fountain near the Park Street wall,” he said, “the one Gardner Brewer donated. There’s something about flowing water that incites a certain...tranquil intimacy.”

The sound of running water grew louder, but not unpleasantly so, as they neared the Brewer Fountain—a monumental, triple-tiered bronze replica of one created for the Paris World’s Fair. It loomed before them, its sheets of cascading water shimmering in the amber gaslight from the lamps along Park Street.

At first Nell thought there was no one else around, but then she noticed, through the veil of water, a dark form on the other side of the fountain—two forms, she realized as she and Will circled the stone pool at the fountain’s base. A gentleman and a lady were sitting next to each other on the edge of the pool, their backs to the water. Even in the dark, Nell could make out the lady’s
chapeau Chinois
of black straw. She drew in a steadying breath.

Will patted her arm as they walked up to the couple. “Good evening.”

Isaac Foster, looking oddly distracted, stood and tipped his hat to Nell. “Miss Sweeney...Hewitt.” Will bowed to Emily, who sat with her head down, a handkerchief twisted in her gloved hands.

Nell said, “Your aunt told us you’d be here, Miss Pratt. I hope you don’t mind that we... I say, are you quite all right?”

Emily dabbed at her cheeks with the handkerchief and looked up. Her eyes were a bit too bright, her nose ruddy. “I’m fine.” She smiled unconvincingly. “I’m pleased to see you, Miss Sweeney. Won’t you sit with me?” She patted the spot next to her that Foster had just vacated.

Nell sat carefully, tucking her voluminous skirts away from the spray.

“Lovely evening for a walk.” Foster said, but his smile looked forced.

“It is,” Will said, “and I wish I could say that’s why we came here, but unfortunately that’s not the case.”

Turning to Emily, Nell said, “Miss Pratt, do you remember my mentioning Fiona Gannon’s uncle, Brady, and how he’s convinced his niece didn’t kill Virginia Kimball?”

Emily nodded, her expression guarded.

“It turns out Mrs. Kimball was killed with a high caliber revolver that fires metal cartridges—a gun like your father’s Lefaucheux.”

Emily’s eyes widened slightly. She looked toward Dr. Foster.

“Perhaps,” Will told her, “you’d feel more comfortable discussing this with just Nell and I.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Emily said. “I...I’ve just told Isaac...Dr. Foster everything. There’s n-nothing he doesn’t know.” Her chin quivered; her eyes brimmed with tears as she lowered her face into her hands.

Foster sat next to her and rested a hand on her back. “Is this necessary? You can see how upset she is.”

“I’m afraid,” Will said, “that it’s either us or the police. Miss Pratt, I know you’re distraught, but if you tell us what happened, and why, perhaps...perhaps we can get you the legal help and...other help you might need.”

“L-legal help?” she rasped.

Foster said, “Do you think it will come to that? I can’t imagine her father pressing charges.”

Nell and Will exchanged a look.

“Why don’t you tell us what you’ve just told Dr. Foster, from the beginning?” Nell suggested. “How did the subject of the gun come up?”

“We...we’d been talking for qu-quite a while.” Emily glanced at Foster, who gave her a little smile. “And I...I felt it only right to tell him that I’d be resuming my travels at the end of this month. He, um...I don’t remember exactly what he said, but—”

“I said it was my understanding that her father had cut her off,” Foster said, “and I wondered aloud how she proposed to fund such a trip. A rather rude inquiry, I suppose, but faced with the prospect of losing Miss Pratt’s company just when I’d gotten to know her, I felt justified in making it.”

“I b-blurted out the truth,” Emily said. “About w-watching my father pass that gun around at the ball and, and thinking about the money he paid for it. My God, twelve thousand dollars... Aunt Vera and I could have spent
years
overseas with that kind of money. She told me what he’s budgeted for Cecilia’s wedding.”

“Vera did?” Nell asked.

Emily nodded, the handkerchief clutched tight in her fist. “Ten thousand dollars. Plus another five for the gown, and eighty thousand to build that grotesque chateau. Yet he begrudged me a few spare thousand to travel with, which meant I was left with two choices—marital enslavement to some man, or a life sentence of spinsterhood under their roof, like poor Vera.”

Emily fumbled in her reticule for her cigarette case.

“Not another one,” Foster sighed.

“Under the circumstances,” Will said as he produced a match and lit it, “perhaps we can save the reprimands for a more suitable time.”

Watching Will lean forward to light Emily’s cigarette, Nell realized she hadn’t seen him smoke since that morning, in Isaac Foster’s back garden.

Emily’s cigarette trembled as she drew on it. “I confess, I got pretty worked up, watching him show off that damned gun. Vera kept bringing me brandies to calm me down. She said, ‘Now, don’t be getting any ideas,’ but the tipsier I got, the more...ideas I seemed to get. Finally I just...” She shook her head helplessly. “I just did it. I got my hands on it, hid it in the folds of my dress and took it upstairs to my room. It was the queerest thing, almost as if I were watching someone else do it. I woke up at noon the next day with a deuce of a morning head, appalled at what I’d done. By then, my father was on a tirade about the missing gun. I went to him to make a full confession, but he started bellowing about me being just another problem to deal with, and why couldn’t I be more like Cecilia. He’d already started drinking, and he said some things...called me some things...things he had no business calling me. So I just turned around and went back upstairs and tucked the gun away under my mattress.”

Nell said, “And that evening you followed him to Mrs. Kimball’s.”

Emily nodded as she expelled a cloud of smoke. “I felt so guilty, listening to him accuse her of taking the gun. I’d half convinced myself to give it back, but later that night, Vera and I were talking over a bottle of sherry, and she told me some things about my father...how he’s always had mistresses, even when he and my mother were first married, and how he cheats his clients out of money—as if he needed any more! This was the same man who’d lectured me since birth about propriety and responsibility, who continues to insist that I give up everything I love to become a proper, insipid little Brahmin matron. His hypocrisy sickened me.”

“So you decided to sell the gun,” Nell said.

Emily nodded as she tapped her ash onto the ground. “I brought it to a master gunsmith with a good reputation. He told me it wasn’t Stonewall Jackson’s gun at all. It was virtually worthless. I told Aunt Vera I should give it back to him, but let everyone know it was a fake, just to embarrass him. But then she said something. She said, ‘Too bad for Mrs. Kimball that she
doesn’t
have the gun. Orville would pay her just to get it back, and more than a measly five-hundred, too.’ She just said it in passing, but it got me thinking.”

“Yes, I imagine it would,” Nell murmured.

“I stayed up all night thinking about it,” Emily said. “The next day, I told Fiona that Mrs. Kimball’s maid had quit, and perhaps she should offer herself as a replacement. I told her about the blackmail. I said if she got the job, and if she was willing to handle that end of things, as Clara had, she could save a great deal of money for her shop.”

“She didn’t know at the time about your plan to sell your father back his Lefaucheux?” Nell asked. She knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it from Emily.

Emily shook her head. “I thought it would scare her off. As a matter of fact, she was fairly balky a couple of weeks later, when I suggested it, but she wanted that shop so badly that she finally agreed. I didn’t want to send a note, because I wasn’t sure I could duplicate Mrs. Kimball’s handwriting well enough, so Fiona went directly to my father and laid out the deal. He paid up the next day. Fiona and I split the money.”

“And the first thing you did,” Nell said, “was book passage for Liverpool.”

“That very afternoon,” Emily said.

“Vera didn’t mind not being included?” Nell asked.

“Mind?” Emily said on a burst of incredulous laughter. “She went mad when she ran across that ticket and realized what it meant—I mean completely out of her wits. She was shrieking, sobbing... I half expected foam to come spewing out of her mouth.”

Nell and Will stared at each other. This didn’t sound much like Vera’s account.

“I’d never seen her fly off the handle like that.” Emily shook her head as she crushed her cigarette underfoot. “I didn’t know she had it in her. Part of me was actually impressed. Finally, a strong human emotion from docile little Vera Pratt. But it was also pretty unnerving. She was screaming things about Fiona and me...things I’d never thought to hear out of her mouth. She was incensed that we were ‘hogging all the money.’ She said she thought we’d had an understanding.”

“You offered her part of your money?” Nell asked.

“A great deal of it, actually, but she said it wasn’t enough to finance her travels with H.P.B. She said she’d been forced by virtue of being a portionless old maid to live under her brother’s thumb as if she were a child, and she knew we all thought she was naïve and gullible, but that she was a lot smarter than she let on. She said H.P.B. was the only one who realized that, who took her seriously and respected her as a person. I calmed her down eventually. Regardless of what she may think about herself, she’s really pretty malleable.”

Nell and Will mulled that over to the silvery rushing of the fountain.

“Are you all right, Emily?” Foster asked softly.

She nodded. “It’s just...I’m not used to feeling ashamed.” She sniffed, and wiped her nose with the handkerchief. “As much as I needed that money, and as justified as I felt, doing the things I did...it doesn’t feel remotely as if it was worth it. I used to take such pride in having principles and ideals. Now...”

“Now you’ve had a taste of humility,” Foster said with a smile. “You’ll be an even better person for it, believe me.”

She gave him a watery little smile in return.

Will said, “May I ask you, Miss Pratt, why you didn’t return the Lefaucheux to your father once he’d paid the five thousand?”

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t,” she said. “When I went to fetch it from under my mattress the next morning, it was gone. I suspected it had been pinched by the chambermaid who does my room—I can’t bear her, and the feeling is mutual—but there was no way I could question her about it without giving away the fact that I’d had the gun. Vera and I tore my room apart, and then the rest of the house, but it was as if it had disappeared into thin air. That day went by, and then the next, and the next. I’d never seen my father so out of sorts. I knew why, of course. He thought Mrs. Kimball had taken his five thousand dollars but kept the gun. Then he showed up with that black eye, and I just knew it had something to do with this mess.”