Read A Deadly Affection Online
Authors: Cuyler Overholt
A Deadly Affection
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Copyright © 2012, 2016 by Cuyler Overholt
Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by The Book Designers
Cover image © Judy Kennamer/Arcangel Images
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systemsâexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviewsâwithout permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
Fax: (630) 961-2168
Originally published in 2012 in the United States by Copper Bottom Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Overholt, Cuyler, author.
Title: A deadly affection / Cuyler Overholt.
Description: Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks Landmark, 2016. | ForeWord
Reviews' Book of the Year Award and the Next Generation Indie Book Award
for best mystery. | “Originally published in 2012 in the United States by
Copper Bottom Press” -- Verso title page.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015043183 | (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Women psychiatrists--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. |
Murder--Investigation--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. | New York
(N.Y.)--Social life and customs--20th century--Fiction. | GSAFD:
Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3615.V465 D43 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043183
An excerpt from the next book in the Dr. Genevieve Summerford mystery series
To Larry,
and to the memory of Ida Ruperti Marshall,
aka “SuperGran,” 1900â2001
The first Sunday of 1907 was so bitterly cold that icicles were hanging from the watering trough spouts in front of Mr. Fuller's house, and the sanitation men had resorted to chipping, rather than scooping, the manure from the street. I barely felt the chill, however, as I walked east across town, warmed by long-simmering anticipation. The months of preparation were finally over. Today, my experiment would begin.
I crossed Park Avenue and started down the hill toward the river, rehearsing my opening remarks. The thing was to appear confident but not aloof. My age and sex would be obstacles enough; I didn't want my subjects to think me unsympathetic. I realized that my shoulders had crept up under my ears and pulled them back down. My research was sound, my subjects exactly as I had specified. The project would be a success.
I was rephrasing my introduction for what seemed the hundredth time, and had quite lost track of my surroundings, when the screech of a train announced I had crossed into the tenement district. I glanced up to see the El tracks looming ahead of me over Third Avenue and, behind them, the clock tower of the Hell Gate Brewery, looking like an old Bavarian church steeple, except for the two intersecting beer barrels at its apex. As if on cue, a wagon piled high with empty saloon kegs crashed down the hill behind me and sped past into the intersection, its uppermost barrels missing the El girders by inches.
I followed it across and turned south on the opposite corner, inhaling the pungent aroma of malt and hops. As a child, I'd overheard Nanny tell my brother's nursemaid that you could get drunk just by sniffing the air when they were kegging the beer at the Yorkville breweries. I'd been quite struck by the notion, and although my earnest attempts to prove it never bore fruit, I had been sure that, with the right technique, it could be accomplished, for I'd always believed that in the strange, polyglot neighborhoods that thrived just blocks from my home, all manner of magic was possible. And now, I thought with a hitch in my pulse, if everything went as I hoped, I just might work some magic here myself.
I was halfway down the block when I noticed the gang of street urchins huddled in front of Griesel's Market. My pace slowed as I found myself searching for the little blond boy I'd seen before Christmas, when the local Tammany men had been handing out free turkeys and socks and tobacco on the corner. The shop door opened to spit out a customer, and the boys stepped into the warm draft. I saw him then, standing near the wall in a sleeveless coat and knickers a size too small. I felt the same catch in my breath, the same tug in my gut as before. With the uncanny perception of his kind, he sensed me watching and looked up. His expression shifted from alarmed, to wary, to calculating.
He trotted toward me and stretched out his cap. “Spare a penny, miss?” he asked, limpid brown eyes gazing up at me from under a fringe of dirty, oat-colored hair.
Brown eyes, not blue. Chin a little too pointed; mouth a shade too full. I fumbled in my purse for some change and dropped it in.
“Bless you, miss.” Scooping up the coins with red-tipped fingers, he bobbed his head and ran back to join the others.
I continued to the end of the block and across the street, stepping cautiously through the rutted ice in the intersection. On the other side, I turned to look back, but the gang had already drifted up the street, and I could no longer see the little boy in their midst.
Forcing his gaunt face from my mind, I turned and continued east along Eighty-Eighth Street, passing row after row of drab brick tenements until at last the Holy Trinity Church and Mission bloomed into view on my right. I stopped and gazed up at the soaring, golden-hued bell tower. The complex was Serena Rhinelander's latest gift to the city's exploding ranks of immigrants, built on what had once been her grandfather's summer estate. Designed in the belief that beautiful architecture could raise both the spirits and the morals of its beholders, it was a startling oasis amid the desert of brick tenements, with its elegant facades, arched cloisters, and parklike grounds set luxuriously back from the street. As I started down the path to the parish house, I heard organ music wafting through the open outer doors of the church, where the second morning service was underway. I glanced up again at the bell tower, seeing in its exuberant design a symbol of hope and strength. Armed with the first and praying for the second, I continued up the steps, under the arches, and through the doors of St. Christopher House.
⢠⢠â¢
Spreading my books on the pockmarked desk that Reverend Palmers had filched for me from an upstairs Sunday school room, I cleared my throat and addressed the five women seated before me. “Good morning. I'm Dr. Genevieve Summerford.” I smiled at the grim-faced woman directly opposite but received only a ferocious blink in response. “I'm sure you're all curious to know why the Reverend sent you here,” I went on, “so let me put your minds to rest. You're here because he believes I can help you.”
Still no softening in the wary faces. I glanced around the room, wishing I could have offered them more inviting surroundings. The spot in the parish hall basement had sounded perfect when the Reverend described it, but it was, in fact, far too large for our little group, a cold, shadowy cavern rather than the intimate space I'd always imagined. The flimsy wood partition that separated us from the adjacent kitchen did little to mute the sound of settlement volunteers preparing lunch, and even less to staunch the scent of warming rolls and beef stew that had been slowly infiltrating the room. I knew the women were only here because they'd been told they had to come if they wanted their free tonics and powders to continue. The mouthwatering smells from next door seemed a taunting reminder of this price of admission, so grudgingly paid.
The next line of my notes read “
Things in commonâterrible loss
.”
Terrible loss
. The words suddenly seemed so inadequate. They suggested something measurable, something outside of oneself, when the losses these women had suffered seemed to have penetrated their very cells, keeping their pasts alive and contentment forever out of reach. Suddenly, an unbidden image broke into my own mind: a small boy lying nestled in white satin, holding a lily to his chest with a waxen hand. As if it were yesterday, I saw the unnatural pink of his cheeks, and smelled the flower's reek, and felt again the desperate conviction that if I could just take that lily from his lifeless fingers and hold it in my own, I could make things right again.
I straightened my note pages, blinking the words back into focus. Looking up, I continued in what I believed was a reasonably steady voice, “You have been chosen for this program because you have two very important things in common. First, you have all suffered a terrible loss. Second, you are all experiencing physical symptoms that have no identifiable cause. I believe the two are related. I also believe that, with the proper treatment, you can make your symptoms go away.”
One of the women raised her hand.
“Mrs. Miner?”
“There must be some mistake,” she said. “I already have a doctor. I can't think why the Reverend asked me to come.”
Four years ago, Elizabeth Miner's infant son had suffocated in his crib sheets while she was taking a bath. Her husband, a longshoreman, had deserted her soon after. Since the child's death, Elizabeth had been attending church three or four times a week. According to the Reverend, she'd also become prey to headaches and stomach pains having no apparent cause. Customers at Braun's Meats, the family butcher shop where she worked, reported that her moods had become increasingly unpredictable as well, veering between melancholia and an apparent oblivion to her son's death.
“I'm not an ordinary sort of doctor,” I told her. “I don't bring down fevers or set broken bones. I treat a different kind of injury.” I glanced across the row of taut faces. “Injuries to the mind.”
The tension in the room was suddenly so thick I could have walked to the door without touching the floor. I might as well have said I was going to commit them all to Bellevue. I leaned toward them, determined to make them understand, eager to share the secrets that modern science had revealed. “You see, we've recently discovered that brain cell activity can be altered by painful life events. When a person has suffered a shocking loss, as each of you has, alterations in the brain can produce physical symptomsâthings like dyspepsia or headache or rash. Just the sorts of things,” I added pointedly, “that have been plaguing all of you.”
Mrs. Miner's hands were twisting in her lap, while Florence Bruckner, who'd been having bouts of gastralgia ever since her husband swallowed a fatal dose of carbolic acid, had picked up her handbag and was glancing toward the door.
“I'm not suggesting that your pains are imaginary,” I hastened to add. “The fact that a stomach pain or a headache originates in the mind doesn't make it any less real. But it does make it more difficult to treat. We can't do it with pills or surgery. The only way to cure it is through the power of the rational mind. It takes a combination of knowledge and will.”
Willpower from the patient, “persuasion” from the doctor. That was where I came in. I had only to convince them through the power of my doctoral authority that they could be healed, and those symptoms would disappear. As Dr. Cassell had put it:
Firm authority coupled with appeal to reason will effect the cure.
I'd seen it work where baths and massage and electric shock had failed. And I hopedâno, I
knewâ
that I could make it work here.
I leaned toward them over the desktop. “I know you believe your suffering must set you apart forever, but you're wrong. You can stop the pain, if you let me show you the way.”
I thought I saw longing to believe blooming in their faces. Elizabeth Miner's hands had grown quiet in her lap. Florence was glancing cautiously, curiously at her neighbor, while Margaret Knapp had stopped plucking the cuff of her sleeve and was waiting intently for me to go on. Only Anna Kruger remained as before, glaring at me under her low-slung eyelids. I turned my attention to her. Anna, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, had snuck out of her house one night ten years before to elope with a penniless suitor. As she was leaving her civil ceremony, she challenged her husband to a race across the street, then watched as he was struck and dragged to death by a streetcar. In the years that followed, according to the Reverend's report, she'd become a habitué of Chinatown's opium dens, fond of wearing Chinamen's silks and a long, flowered braid. She was arrested once during a Pell Street raid and again for dancing naked in East River Park, after which her parents washed their hands of her. Now, on her better days, when she wasn't confined to bed by a mysteriously recurring rash, she typed and filed at the church office in return for a room over the parish hall.
“The program is simple but effective,” I said, speaking directly to her. “Each week, I'll present a lecture explaining in greater detail how thoughts and feelings can make people ill. After the lectures, you'll each learn exercises to help you suppress your own self-defeating thinking and develop a more hopeful outlook.”
Anna's black eyebrows rose in inverted
V
s against her mottled skin. “Are you suggesting we can just will ourselves to feel better?”
“Well, yes, that's the gist of it. I'm not saying it will be easy, but if you try, there's every chance you'll succeed.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I've seen the program work for others,” I told her. “I know what it can do.”
She waved an impatient hand through the air. “But how do you know it will work for
us
?”
“I've read your clinic reports. What I've seen suggests that you're all suitable candidates.”
“You've read our reports?” She snorted. “Do you really think you can know a person from some report?”
“Of course, it's only a start. But I believe I know enough, yes.”
She leaned toward me, her dark eyes flashing. “Then I suppose you know I'd rather have my nails torn out one by one than be told how to live by people like you.”
I silently released my breath. Anna had been locked up twice in City Hospital on Blackwell's Island; knowing the facilities there, I doubted her treatment had been an enlightened one. I could understand why she would view all doctors as enemies.
“I don't blame you for being skeptical,” I said evenly. “But I would ask that you keep an open mind.”
“Skeptical?” She barked out a laugh. “Is that what you call it? I thought the word was âsuicidal.'”
I sat back, noting the brilliance of her eyes and the upward thrust of her chin. She seemed determined to bring things to a head. “Would you call yourself suicidal?” I asked.
“You mean, do I think about dying? A dozen times a day.”
I acknowledged this with a nod. “It doesn't surprise me that you'd want to stop the pain.”
“Doesn't it, really?” Her eyebrows snapped together. “Maybe you'd like to watch me do it, then.” She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out a thin, silver instrument. Her thumb pressed against the side, and a narrow, two-edged blade sprang out of the tip. The women on either side of her gasped and pulled back, scraping their chair legs over the floorboards.
Anna turned her free arm over and raised it toward me. “I could do it right now,” she taunted, holding the blade over the exposed wrist. “That would be a certain cure, wouldn't you say, Doctor?”
A brittle silence had fallen over the room, so complete I could hear the stew pots simmering next door. I held her gaze, searching for her real intent. I didn't see surrender in her eyes. I saw a woman who, if she was going down, would go fighting all the wayâa proud woman in terrible pain, who didn't know how to ask for help.