Louisa and the Crystal Gazer Read online

  “This is how the bolt was locked from the outside,” said Barnum. “The killer hooked the loop around the bolt before leaving the room. He shut the door and locked it. Then, he carefully pulled the wire he had already placed around the bolt, and the bolt slid into place, in effect locking the room from the outside.” Mr. Barnum began tugging on the piece of wire. “He carefully…” He tugged a little harder. The wire came through the door, unlooped, and the bolt was still open rather than closed.

  “He would have brought thicker wire,” Mr. Barnum said crossly.

  Cobban snorted.

  “Try again with the wire, Mr. Barnum,” I suggested.

  He tried again, a second, third, and fourth time, and each time the bolt stayed stubbornly in place and the wire slipped out again with the loop pulled straight.

  “Well, it works in theory,” he finally said.

  “In theory, the Earth might be flat,” Cobban said.

  I do not know why men must always outdo one another with an act or a comment. Even noble Father and kind Mr. Emerson, during a discussion of self-reliance or the Over-soul, will get that gleam in their eyes and it will be understood that a challenge has been issued and accepted, and they will argue back and forth till one of them simply runs out of breath.

  “May I come back out?” Sylvia asked in a small voice. “I think someone is in here with me.”

  “Quickly!” I said, frightened for my friend, for if Mrs. Percy’s death had been a planned murder, as Mr. Barnum’s theory suggested, then this house might still contain secret dangers. “Undo the bolt, Sylvia!”

  There was a rattling and a squeak; the door swung open and a very pale, trembling Sylvia rejoined us in the hall. “I think I heard something in there,” she whispered, her eyes large as saucers.

  Cobban’s nightstick was already swinging from his hand. “A person?” he asked. “Did you see him? Where? Behind the curtains?”

  “No, actually it was more of a voice,” said Sylvia, fanning herself. “Mrs. Percy’s voice, I think. She said, ‘Peace! I require peace!’ At least, I think that’s what she was saying. Of course, it could have been ‘lease’ or ‘please.’ What do you think it was, Louy?”

  An overactive imagination, I thought. “You must have overheard a conversation from the street,” I said. Outdoors, the air was thin and light with that transparency that comes at the beginning of a storm, when sound travels well. Undaunted by Sylvia’s trembling, I strode into the room and pulled back the curtains, revealing the broken windows.

  There, staring back in at me, was a face so pale, so ghastly, that when Sylvia screamed I was half tempted to scream along with her.

  “I do beg your pardon,” said Miss Amelia Snodgrass.

  Constable Cobban crossed the room in three strides and stood next to me, staring out the window. “You would be Miss Snodgrass,” he said, recognizing her from the description we had given of her brown coat and hat.

  “And you are?” She tilted her head.

  “Constable Cobban. Will you come in, Miss Snodgrass? The front door is still open, I believe.”

  “I cannot. I am in a hurry, you see.” She turned, but Cobban reached through the broken glass and grasped her arm.

  She gave him a livid look of disdain, but he would not relinquish his hold on her.

  “I insist,” he said. “Mr. Barnum and Miss Alcott will come round and help you up the stairs. They are icy.” For a young man his voice could be quite authoritative. We three did exactly as he said, and a minute later Miss Snodgrass stood with us inside Mrs. Percy’s red-papered sitting room. The ferns were wilting from the cold and a lack of water, but the air still smelled sweet and sickly heavy, despite the broken windows.

  “I was merely walking past. What right have you to detain me?” Miss Snodgrass exclaimed, lifting her chin high and throwing her shoulders back. Her hair was even lighter in color than Sylvia’s, and I couldn’t help but think that here before me was the ideal of femininity Father had so often described, blond and of medium rather than tallish stature, with small, fine features. A very handsome woman, indeed, yet dressed like a drudge. “I often walk this way. It is a public street,” she said.

  “You were standing in the garden outside the room where she was killed,” Cobban corrected.

  “Killed?” she asked in a shaking voice.

  “So it seems,” Cobban said. “Moreover, items are missing from her rooms.”

  “Items?” Miss Snodgrass’s hand went to her throat.

  “Jewelry. Money.”

  “You have gone through her rooms?” Miss Snodgrass was now so pale, her voice so weak, that I sighed and rose, knowing I should begin looking for smelling salts. There must be a vial somewhere in the bureau. But Sylvia was one step ahead of me. “Here, Louy,” she said, taking salts from her own reticule.

  “It distresses you that we have searched Mrs. Percy’s personal items?” Cobban asked, though the answer was already plainly visible on Miss Snodgrass’s ashen face.

  “Did you find…letters?” she asked. And then she swooned.

  The next half hour was spent fetching glasses of water and a compress from the pantry, no easy chore, since the maid, Suzie Dear, was still missing and Mrs. Percy’s housekeeping arrangements had been haphazard at best. The glasses were in a drawer, not a cupboard, and the compress lint was in a basket, not a drawer. Marmee would have set this pantry to rights in a couple of hours, and as she worked I knew what her discussion would be: how a pantry and a kitchen often indicated a woman’s state of mind, and the mistress of this pantry was in a very bad state of mind, indeed.

  Very bad, Marmee, I told her in my thoughts. She’s been robbed and murdered.

  “What were you doing in the garden?” Cobban asked Miss Snodgrass as I returned with the glass of water. I could tell from his voice that he had asked this question several times and was growing impatient.

  “I…I…I,” Miss Snodgrass stuttered, and did not answer. At least she is not an accomplished liar, I thought. If she does answer, we can accept it as truth.

  “I…I was hoping to encounter someone. A chance encounter.” She blushed, her white face now turning crimson.

  Now I understood—both this and her earlier reference to letters. She had been looking for someone who seemed to be avoiding her, someone to whom she had written letters, probably of an indiscreet content, and thought both the letters and the person might be discovered here.

  I wondered if Mrs. Percy’s stepbrother, Mr. Nichols, was a particularly handsome young man. Mr. Barnum, sitting in a deep armchair in what appeared to be a rapt state of attention, cleared his throat and tapped his fingers disapprovingly on the carved armrest.

  Constable Cobban seemed to understand as well. “Go home, Miss Snodgrass.” He sighed. “I may have more questions later for you.”

  “You are certain that Mrs. Percy was murdered?” I asked when the door had shut behind the brown costume of Miss Snodgrass.

  “Yes. Her stepbrother’s testimony about her health is not to be denied,” said Cobban. “She was of a strong constitution, and her use of the drug was not so abundant as to endanger her health.” Cobban sat on the edge of the crystal gazer’s settee and studied the carpet. It was a new carpet, a new settee, in an expensive, newly appointed home.

  Crystal gazing must offer a good living, I thought. Was that why Mr. Barnum had taken an interest in the subject? Perhaps he had come here looking for a new attraction for the American Museum, only to be very disappointed by that dismal first performance of which even a beginning amateur such as myself could find the methods of the “apparitions” and other parlor tricks. He must have been very disappointed, indeed.

  “There’s more than the stepbrother’s testimony.” Cobban looked up.

  “The thefts,” I said.

  “More even than that. Have you seen a dead person—that is, a person who died peacefully more or less in their sleep?”

  I had. Making visits with Marmee last winter, I had come across
the body of old Mrs. Witherington, asleep in her bed, dead at the age of eighty-three. Surprisingly, at her great age there had been no evidence of disease or damage other than her dowager’s hump and her swollen joints. Her face had been peaceful, exactly as the old adage goes; she looked as if she were merely asleep.

  Mrs. Percy’s face had not been at all peaceful. The mouth had been contorted, the eyes wide with shock or horror.

  “Well, I’m down to the harbor to find our Suzie,” Cobban said. He stood and put on his wide-brimmed hat, though he was still indoors and etiquette required that he remain bareheaded till he stood directly in front of the door by which he would leave. One of the qualities I admired about the young constable was his almost total disregard of etiquette.

  “May we come with you?” I asked.

  “Miss Louisa!” Mr. Barnum protested, his spiky black eyebrows moving up and down with disapproval. “The docks are no place for a lady!” For a man who had stitched together the top half of a stuffed monkey and the bottom of a fish and called it a mermaid, he could be, I thought, very obstructionist.

  “If you find Suzie, I think it would be well to have a woman with you,” I said to Cobban. “She looks the hysterical kind, I think. And I don’t understand why Suzie, if she had murdered her employer, let us sit in that waiting room for so long instead of just telling us to go home. Wouldn’t she have tried to remove us if she knew her employer was dead?”

  “She wasn’t thinking clearly,” insisted Cobban.

  “I’ll come, too,” spoke up Sylvia. She gave the young constable another sideways glance.

  For the third time we quit Mrs. Percy’s waiting room.

  “I’d like to see the cook’s room again,” I said.

  “Female curiosity?” asked Cobban, with a knowing smile.

  “Perhaps something more,” I said, but did not specify. I wondered how Mrs. Percy had treated her cook, and the room itself would tell me much of that relationship.

  We found the bedroom just off the kitchen, a large corner room with several curtained windows, a rug on the wood floor, and a tile stove with a large bucket of coal next to it. It was a fine room, comfortable and convenient. From it, I would have guessed that relations between cook and employer were amiable. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

  “Satisfied?” asked Cobban, revealing a masculine indifference to what lace curtains and a thick carpet can say about the management of a household.

  “Yes.” I said. We returned to the front hall and went back out that front door, leaving behind the dim and dreary aspect of a house too expensively furnished and too poorly lighted, leaving behind the nuances of emptiness behind all those heavily closed doors. It was a very, very big house for a woman and a single servant and a brother who visited occasionally, and a sense of Mrs. Percy’s isolation and loneliness pierced me like an arrow: to die alone like that, behind a locked door, and perhaps violently.

  We went into the bright afternoon winter, the white-and-silver streets and the bustle of humanity on those streets, and as we passed through Mrs. Percy’s white wicket gate I had a strong sense of leaving behind the true Slough of Despond, of which Mr. Bunyan wrote: …for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place. And this is the reason of the badness of this ground.

  Thank you, Father, I thought, for reminding me to read Pilgrim’s Progress. Where else could I have found such an apt description of the confused souls who seek their dead and lost ones in hired parlors, and of the woman who lived so well off those fears and doubts?

  At the corner, Mr. Barnum tipped his top hat and went off in the opposite direction. “I will write to your father, if I may,” he promised jovially. “I still await Mr. Alcott’s response.”

  Cobban’s silence was so pointed that Sylvia felt compelled to explain. “He has offered to hire Mr. Alcott for speaking engagements,” she said.

  “Father will not agree, of course,” I added.

  But young Constable Cobban’s mouth went very tight as he repressed a smile, obviously enjoying the same bizarre vision that I’d had of Father onstage seated between a magician and a contortionist.

  Cobban and Sylvia locked eyes and then looked furtively away from each other.

  “One other thing,” Cobban said. “We still haven’t found the pipe she used. Searched all over that room. Seems strange, don’t it?”

  “Many things about this affair seem strange,” I said. We three walked in companionable silence then, concentrating on keeping our footing on the slick sidewalks and thinking our own thoughts.

  The docks were busy that afternoon. There was some ice in the harbor, and the commercial vessels had weighed anchor farther out, so that an entire fleet of smaller boats rowed back and forth, loading and unloading. The sailors and dockworkers rushed to and fro, and the women who gathered in places where the laborers sought amusement had themselves gathered in taprooms and coffee shops for gossip and talk of the town.

  I did not like to think of Suzie Dear in such a place as the Sailors’ Arms. She was young. She still had choices ahead of her that could lead to a happier and healthier life.

  “She lay low yesterday,” Cobban said. “But she’ll be hungry by now, and feeling less worried about it all. She’ll be out and about and probably wearing some of Mrs. Percy’s jewelry on herself, if I’ve got this right.”

  He had it right. We found Suzie in the fourth taproom, sitting at a little table, surrounded by other women at various ages and stages of their lives. Two looked as young and pretty as Suzie, with smooth faces, thick hair, and slender arms. Three were middle-aged and already thickened and wrinkled; a sixth woman was in her fifties, white-haired, slack-jawed, dressed in little more than rags. They could have served as a Currier illustration of the downfall of woman.

  Suzie Dear giggled when she looked up and saw us. “Some tea, ladies and gentlemen?” she asked, and then almost fell off her chair, so hard did she laugh. Her hair had come undone and fell over her eyes and shoulders in riotous black curls. Her companions fell into similar bundles of mirth. There were several empty gin bottles on the crumb-strewn table.

  “None today, thank you,” I said, though I knew she was laughing at me and all those she deemed respectable, predictable, fussy, and boring. It did hurt my feelings a little, but I remembered the times that I and my sisters had secretly laughed at some very pompous matron or a tut-tutting gentleman.

  “Miss Dear,” I said gently, “could we speak in private for a moment?”

  Constable Cobban had no such niceties in mind. “Stand up,” he ordered. “Put your coat on.”

  Suzie fell into another fit of the giggles and did not stop laughing until Cobban pulled her from her chair. Standing now, she struggled into a much-worn woolen coat with a ragged fur collar, her heavy gold and silver bracelets clattering and clinking. I recognized those bracelets. Mrs. Percy had worn them.

  The collar of Suzie’s coat rolled under, and Cobban reached up to straighten it.

  “Here, now!” shrieked one of Suzie’s companions, and the others began to shout and push in protest. For a moment I feared there might be a riot, but the publican, seeing what was up, shouted, “Drinks on the house!” and Suzie’s friends fled her to seize their free glasses at the bar.

  “Am I under arrest, then?” asked Suzie Dear in a small voice. She sucked her bottom lip.

  “You are,” Cobban said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Thieving Maid Speaks

  “SHE GAVE ME the bracelets,” Suzie insisted. “They was gifts.” She lifted her hands before her face and rattled the gold and silver bangles on her wrists.

  Suzie had sobered up fairly quickly once she was placed behind bars in the Boston jailhouse. This was a gloomy place of which I had more than a passing acquaintance, but I won’t go into those details now, patient reader. Suffice to say that I already knew that
in Suzie’s cell the walls were unadorned except of graffiti, the floors bare except for stains I chose not to speculate about, and that the only window was so high up on the wall that even on tiptoe Suzie would not obtain a view of the streets below. Moreover, even that very high window was barred, so wherever light entered the room—from the gas lamp in the hall, or the sunset outside the window—it entered in thin, guilty strips. A more doleful place I’d yet to find, except for the city morgue, several floors beneath our feet. Mrs. Percy, downstairs, would probably happily change places with Suzie, if she had a choice. She didn’t.

  “Not according to Mrs. Percy’s brother, Mr. Nichols, they weren’t gifts,” Cobban said. He sat next to me in a straight-backed chair, looking in at Suzie through the bars.

  “Mr. Nichols? Pggh.” Suzie screwed up her mouth and spit onto the floor. “That’s what I thinks of him.”

  “You should use the cuspidor,” said Sylvia, pointing to a bucket in the corner. Suzie ignored her.

  “The feeling is probably mutual, since you murdered his sister and absconded with her cash and jewels,” Cobban said.

  “I didn’t murder no one, and didn’t ab…absco…make off with the goods. Not I. I learned my lesson last year.”

  When Constable Cobban had half pulled, half pushed Suzie Dear into the building, another constable, sitting at a desk and reading the afternoon newspaper, had looked up and winked at her.

  “Suzie, is that you? I thought they rode you out of town on a rail. How have you been?” he asked jovially.

  “Go bugger yourself,” the girl had told him.

  “Get her for soliciting?” the man had asked Cobban.

  “No. Theft and murder.” Cobban was standing awkwardly, bent at strange angles in various places since Suzie, in her wooden-heeled boots, was trying to stomp on his feet.

  “Whew!” The other man let out a long whistle. “You’re in for it, Suzie.”

  “They was gifts!” she insisted a few minutes later, staring forlornly at us from behind the bars.

  “You are bleeding,” I said to Cobban, gingerly touching the long scratch Suzie had left on his face. “Perhaps you should go look to it.” He made a noise very much like a horse snorting with exhaustion at the finish line, and stood.