The Fifth Heart (65 page)

“The scene is forever branded into my brain,” said Adams, “but I remember no water glass on the floor.”

“The bottle of poison was on a table some distance from where Mrs. Adams had lain on the carpet before you carried her body to the couch,” said Holmes, tapping his lips with two steepled forefingers. “All agree on that. And yet there had been a spill of the chemical near where your wife’s body had been lying. Your housekeeper commented that the lethal liquid had discolored the edge of the carpet and a bit of the polished floor. Her people had cut the carpet’s nap and re-finished the floor-board to get rid of the stains, she said.”

Adams’s temples and cheeks grew flushed again. “My housekeeper had the temerity to talk to you about . . .”

Holmes held up both hands, palms outward. “There was not much of a police investigation, sir, but the servants did have to give statements to the police while you were in your darkest hours of mourning. I understand that you spent two days and nights alone with the body and did not later announce the time or fact of Mrs. Adams’s funeral on December nine so your surviving Three Hearts friends could attend. At any rate, this information about the stained carpet and floorboard were in Lieutenant Hammond’s notes.”

“What’s the importance of any of this?” shouted Adams.

“There was, lying near Mrs. Adams’s body, a water glass that had obviously been the vessel from which she drank the poison, still lying there when Dr. Hagner arrived with you,” said Holmes. “The stains on the carpet and floorboard must have come from the residue of the terrible liquid that remained in the glass when Mrs. Adams dropped it. Yet the glass was gone when Detective Hammond arrived about half an hour later.”

Holmes leaned forward, his gray eyes as piercing as a predator’s. “Someone removed that glass in that half-hour interim,” he said softly. “Your housekeeper, Mrs. Soames, told the police three days after the death that there were only eleven small water glasses in the cupboard off the kitchen where they were usually kept. The glass had come from a set of twelve.”

Adams finished the brandy. “Who? If not the servants, who would have removed the glass . . . the mythical glass I do not even remember seeing? The police?”

“They say they did not, sir.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t understand the significance of a water glass or . . . or the vial of cyanide,” managed Adams. “Why does it make any difference?”

“It would be easier to
make
someone drink from the glass than from a vial,” Holmes said.

Adams’s dark eyes seemed to recede in their sockets. “Make them drink? Someone might have forced Clover to drink that terrible, corrosive, painful, deadly poison?”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “More than that, there is the time involved. Were there usually water glasses left in her bedroom?”

“No,” said Adams, his voice totally flat. “Clover hated rings on the furniture.”

“In the adjoining bathroom?”

“No,” repeated Adams. “There are glasses in our bathrooms, but not those small water glasses. And Clover’s was . . . still there . . . when I looked in her bathroom some days later.”

“From the time you left to see your dentist to the time you turned around and came back because of the commotion Miss Lorne was making as she came out of your front door”—began Holmes and noticed when Adams did not interrupt or contradict him—“it would have been very difficult for Mrs. Adams to go downstairs through the annex to the kitchen where the water glasses were stored . . . and to avoid being noticed by Mrs. Ryan, your chief cook, who was working in the kitchen at the time . . . and then to carry it upstairs and
then
to walk the length of the second floor to her darkroom and the special locked cupboard where she kept her photographic developing chemicals, then to return to her bedroom to take the poison.”

Adams shook his head like a man in a bad dream. “You’re suggesting that . . . someone else had carried up the glass and poison vial and was waiting somewhere upstairs, hiding nearby, listening, waiting for her to be alone even while I was talking to Clover before I left to see my dentist?”

“It is a distinct possibility,” said Holmes.

“And it must have been Rebecca Lorne, whom Clover liked and trusted and who I also relied upon in the days after . . . after . . .” rasped Adams. “It would have to be Rebecca Lorne because she would have been the only one who could have taken the glass between the visits of the doctor and the police lieutenant.”

“She almost certainly took the glass away with her,” said Holmes, “but she is not the only suspect if it was murder rather than suicide. There is another.”

Adams stared so hard at Holmes that the detective felt almost burned by the historian’s gaze.

“Clifton Richards, Miss Lorne’s . . . cousin . . . may have been involved,” said Holmes. “He may have been in the house and gone down the back way, the servants’ stairs, and out of the house even as Rebecca Lorne rushed up the main stairway to warn Mrs. Adams.”

“To warn her,” Adams repeated dully. He managed to focus his eyes on Holmes’s face. “Who killed my wife, Mr. Holmes? I beg of you . . . if you know, tell me.”

“I’ll know for a certainty in the next few weeks, Mr. Adams. Which is why I need to ask a favor of you.”

Adams may have nodded an infinitesimal bit.

“I’ve convinced John Hay and Cabot Lodge to move the visit to the Chicago World’s Fair up a couple of weeks for the actual opening on May first, arriving in his private car perhaps a day or two early,” said Holmes. “And Senator Cameron has his private yacht . . . the Great Lakes Yacht, I believe they call it . . . ready to anchor just off the pier of the Exposition.”

“Going to the wretched Exposition will help reveal my Clover’s murderer and bring him or her to justice?” said Adams.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go along with Cameron, Hay, the Lodges, and the rest. Although I saw the Philadelphia World’s Fair and it was a monumental bore.”

Holmes actually smiled.

As he prepared to leave, Adams gripped his arm and said, “But why would they kill Clover? Why would anyone want to harm that witty, sad, lonely, darling woman?”

Holmes settled back into his seat, sighed, and reached into his upper inside jacket pocket to pull out a small blue envelope still tied in pink ribbon. It had been opened. Holmes removed the handwritten letter and held it so that Adams could put on his glasses and read it across the wide desk.

Henry Adams read his own handwriting for half a moment and then let out an inarticulate noise and lunged for the letter.

“No,” said Holmes, folding it, and putting it back into his jacket pocket. “I can’t allow you to tear this up the way you did the card earlier.”

“That’s my property!” snarled the small historian.

Holmes nodded. “Legally it is, sir. Even though it was in the possession of another person.”

“Why would Lizzie . . . how did you . . . why would she give you that most intimate of letters? My greatest folly?”

“She didn’t give it to me,” said Holmes. “She doesn’t know I have it. I had to borrow it. When my investigations are done, I shall return it to where she kept it hidden.”

“Investigations . . .”
hissed Adams in contempt. “Reading other people’s most private mail. Sneaking into boudoirs in the night. Stealing . . .”

“I assure you that I shall return it in the next few weeks,” said Holmes. “Mrs. Cameron shall never know that I had taken the letter from its hiding place. I simply needed to know for sure what Rebecca Lorne and the so-called Clifton Richards were using to blackmail Mrs. Adams.”

“Blackmail?” It sounded as if Henry Adams were going to start laughing wildly. “Then I did kill Clover Adams. I was the cause, alpha and omega, of my darling’s death.”

“No,” said Holmes. “It was my duty in solving this case to find and read this letter, Mr. Adams, but I assure you that I took no pleasure in doing so. And I found no evil there. It was a note from a terribly sad man who had been essentially abandoned by a wife lost to melancholy not merely in the previous months but for years . . . a midnight love letter to another woman, one he knew well and admired much. It was folly, Mr. Adams, but exquisitely human and understandable folly.”

“We went to the Camerons’ house on the evening of December fourth,” said Adams, speaking as if mesmerized, his eyes unfocused. “Two days before Clover . . . before her death. Lizzie Cameron had been ill and Clover had been unusually distraught about the illness. She knew . . . we all knew . . . that a major source of Lizzie’s illness lay in the travesty of her marriage to Don. Clover felt bad about that as well. That night we took Rebecca Lorne with us . . . it was warm, I remember, not feeling like December at all.

“To cheer Lizzie up, Clover had brought along a large bouquet of yellow Marechal Niel roses—not easy to find in December in Washington—and she and Rebecca took the roses up to Lizzie’s sickroom. Do you know the language of flowers, Mr. Holmes?”

“Only bits of it.”

Adams smiled with no humor. “In the language of flowers so popular these days, the yellow roses signified ‘I’m yours, heart and soul.’
This
is what she gave Lizzie Cameron less than forty-eight hours before her death.”

“She was giving that message to you,” Holmes said softly.

Adams shook his head. “If Clover knew about my . . . my mad, impulsive letter to Lizzie of the previous July . . .
that
letter . . .” He pointed at Holmes’s breast pocket. “And begged to know if it was true . . . if Rebecca Lorne had tantalized her with the knowledge of that letter, or even of the possibility of its existence . . . and if Lizzie did not deny it . . .”

Holmes reached across the desk and touched Adams’s forearm, squeezing it very softly. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Adams. You know Clover’s good heart. Her flower-language expressions to her sick friend were almost certainly just that—an act of love and generosity.”

But Holmes knew that there had been a confrontation of sorts over the letter from Henry Adams that night. Clover had asked Lizzie Cameron if it was true . . . if such a letter from “my Henry” existed. Lizzie had been sick and in a foul mood and, while ridiculing the entire idea, had also gone out of her way not to deny. She even teased Clover and Rebecca Lorne for wanting to see “such a curious document”. Holmes knew all this because, besides liberating that letter from Lizzie Cameron’s hiding place of letters taped to the bottom of her dresser drawer, he’d also borrowed her private 1885 diary long enough to read entries from the first week of December. The diary had been put back in place—at some risk to Holmes’s agent in these matters—but he would keep the July letter, and other letters taken from other homes by the same dirty means, until events of the next few weeks were settled.

Holmes could see and feel Adams approaching his personal breaking point. This was the man who, after his wife’s death, had fled to the South Seas with an artist friend for three years and more than 30,000 miles of aimless wandering. This was the man who had sworn the great sculptor Saint-Gaudens to secrecy and then had him build that mausoleum for the living inside the extraordinary memorial not to his wife’s memory—but to the memory of his own grief.

Standing, his hat and cane in hand, Holmes paused and removed another slip of paper from his jacket. “Hay gave me this, although all your friends know it, Adams. Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . began a letter to her sister Ellen shortly after you left that Sunday morning to visit your dentist. I know you remember the words but it might help find perspective to hear them again:

Holmes folded the note and set it away next to the blue-paper letter. “She wrote that note, Mr. Adams,
after
she had learned of the possible existence of your July letter to Lizzie Cameron. She had already forgiven you.”

Adams stood and turned his unfathomable gaze toward the detective. “When must I see you next, Mr. Holmes? What new hell awaits me . . . all of us?”

“Chicago,” said Holmes. He let himself out quietly without calling for Hobson the butler.

M
y plan for opening the Chicago World’s Fair part of our tale was to explain why Henry James—against all his instincts and habits—would accompany Holmes on this part of the detective’s adventure. But the odd truth is, I don’t know why James did so.

We all know individuals who shield their thoughts better than others, but both Sherlock Holmes and Henry James have been the most difficult minds to penetrate in my long experience both of knowing people and of entering the thoughts of characters. Holmes’s tight grip on his secrets and modes of thinking is understandable: the detective is a self-made gentleman with a base and secret history from the London streets and the majority of his life has been one long, dangerous high-wire act of exercising both his astounding intellect and indomitable will. Holmes’s mind and heart—what there is of a heart—work in ways both too alien and difficult for most of us to understand. Or to bear if we
could
understand them.