The Spiritualist (44 page)

“He obviously sees some purpose in it. I’ve told you that.”

“I know. But he swears he’s never said her name. He says she meant nothing to him, so why would he speak of her?”

“I hardly know.”

“She was married, did I tell you that?”

He looked surprised. “No. Evelyn, is there a reason you’ve come to discuss this illusion with me? The prosecutor waits—”

“She was married, but her husband didn’t come after her. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Wives take lovers and run off frequently. You must have known that from your father’s work. No doubt he was asked to investigate such things.”

“Yes, but if you had a wife, and she ran off, wouldn’t you try to find her?”

“Such a hypothetical is impossible for me to answer.”

“You’ve never been married, have you, Benjamin?”

“No,” he said shortly. “Which is why I have no idea of such things. When one makes suppositions based on fiction, one is bound to blunder.”

“You’re right, of course. I feel foolish. I’m not even certain why I came down here. Just to hear your voice, I suppose.”

“Having heard it, are you reassured?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Thank you. I’m so sorry to put you off your schedule. I know the prosecutor awaits… .”

“He does, but you are my first concern.”

I smiled. “I feel much better now. Please, you should go. Don’t worry about me.”

“Then if you’ll excuse me.” He reached for the black case on his desk, and then he paused. “You’ll tell me when you’ve located the cuff link again, or found the gun?”

“The moment I do.”

Then, with an apology for not showing me to the door, he was gone.

I had told Benjamin that I had what I came for, and I did, but it was not what I’d wanted. It was not what I’d hoped for.
“Bodies don’t lie.”
Neither had his. I’d seen it clearly, the way he avoided my glance when I’d asked if he’d ever been married, the involuntary twitch of his jaw. He was not telling me the truth.

I left his office as quickly as I could, not wanting to be there a moment longer than I must. Dorothy’s carriage was waiting in the street, as was the mounted police watchman, at a careful distance behind.

“Home, ma’am?” the driver asked as he took my arm to put me into the carriage.

“No,” I said firmly. “I want to go to the
New York Times
. And quickly.”

R
esearch was the key; if nothing else, Michel and my father had taught me that. Benjamin had said it as well:
“One can find anything,”
he’d told me, and now I meant to see if the archives of the
New York Times
building on Printing House Square held the information I needed.

Steam rose like fog from the grates on the sidewalks above the pressroom of the
Times
; one could feel the thump of the great presses reverberating in the flagstones beneath one’s feet. When Dorothy’s driver let me off, I hurried into the offices, which bustled with people. I asked the man at the front desk for the archives, and he sent an assistant to take me there—a small room downstairs that was covered with shelves from floor to ceiling, and so full of the musty, dusty scent of old paper that I had to suppress a sneeze. He led me to one of the three tables in the room—there were other people there as well, all turning pages of yellowed newsprint, eyes searching the columns for information, and I thought how easy this was, how any clever person might find whatever they wanted about anyone. What privacy we had existed only in our own thoughts.

I hoped to find what I was seeking in a single news item: the account of a murder. I knew vaguely the time frame in which it had occurred. I knew also that it had happened either in Charlestown or Boston—and so whether it would even be in the
Times
depended greatly on its notoriety. I had no other choice; I was bound to this city by law and circumstance, and it was impossible for me to make a trip to Boston.

When the man asked me what months and years I wanted, I thought of my visions. Michel had been coughing, the women were clothed heavily, Adele had been cold, the streets icy. The winter months then, perhaps moving into spring. Michel had been researching Dorothy then, and he had known her for eight months. So I asked for the papers from the winter of a year ago. The pile, when he brought it, looked enormous. I thought it must take me days to go through it.

I began to scan the papers, one after another—the headlines first, and then, past the city news to the news of the country, and then the little notices from other towns.
MURDER IN PORTSMOUTH, MURDER IN SALEM, . . . IN CONNECTICUT, . . . IN BOSTON, . . . IN BOSTON, . . . IN BOSTON… .
There must have been twenty of them. All wrong. Not what I was looking for at all. After two hours of this, I grew tired, and the words began to swim before my eyes; the wavering gaslight and its heavy smell in the unventilated room began to make me feel slightly ill.

I took a deep breath and wished for some water, and then I picked up the next paper—dated January 14, 1856. The headlines seemed to gather together; I turned the first page, and then the next one, and then I saw it, part of a column of news from other cities: body found in charles river.

The back of my neck tingled. I blinked to clear my vision and pulled the newsprint closer.

I had to read the article again. And then the proof of Benjamin’s lie—of the enormousness of it—was stunning. He
had
been married. To Adele. Whose death was so like Peter’s it was remarkable—certainly the same person could have committed both murders. Any lawyer could have seen that, and yet Benjamin had never said a word—not of her, not of the similarity of the circumstances of Peter’s death, nothing. That he had known of Adele’s involvement with Michel was clear as well.

Benjamin had lied to me.

Why? Was it because he wanted vengeance against Michel more than justice? Because my fate had mattered to him only insofar as it allowed me to be used?

No wonder he’d been so angry when Adele’s spirit had appeared at the circle. I remembered his words:
“Did he tell you those things? Did he put you up to it?”

He’d been angry because he’d thought Michel had told me about her. He’d been angry because he believed I’d taken Michel’s side, that he had lost my allegiance, that I was no longer his tool.

Dear God, what a fool I’d been.

But none of it made sense. Why not simply tell me the truth about Michel and Adele? Certainly that story alone, and the similarity of her death to Peter’s, was reason enough to suspect Michel. I would have understood.

And then I had another thought. Could Benjamin have been the one who killed his wife and Peter? It seemed impossible, and yet, he had a motive to kill Adele, and he’d lied to me… . I heard a shuffle behind me. There was a light touch on my shoulder that made me jump.

“Pardon me, ma’am, but are you well? Is there something I can do?” Behind me was the assistant who had brought me down here, looking very concerned.

“I’m fine, thank you,” I told him, smiling so falsely it hurt. “Truly, I am.”

He frowned, but he nodded and moved away, and I turned back to the newspaper. I read the words again, as if they might have changed in the interim to become something less noxious, more bearable, but of course they had not. Benjamin had lied to me, and I couldn’t trust him, and the days were moving inexorably toward my trial. I smoothed the pages, folding the paper carefully, setting it back onto the pile with the others, as if it had not irrevocably changed everything I knew.

Then I gathered my bag and rose. The assistant waited at the door. “I’m finished, thank you,” I said.

“Did you find what you wanted then, ma’am?” he asked politely.

“I found what I needed,” I said.

I
N THE WARM
safety of Dorothy’s carriage I tried restlessly to sort the mysteries surrounding Peter’s death into some kind of order. Benjamin had been married to a woman who had run off with Michel, a woman who had died in the same grisly way as had Peter. I knew from the visions that Adele had not wanted to return to her husband. Was it because he was dangerous? She’d said he hated her. Hated and loved, I remembered. He’d wanted her back, and she didn’t want to go. Why? Was it simply that she couldn’t bear the idea of being removed from Michel?

I didn’t know. Nor did I know whether Benjamin’s determination to bring Michel to justice for Peter’s murder had more to do with vengeance than with truth.

The only thing I did know was that the deaths of my husband and Adele were similar enough that it seemed unlikely to be mere coincidence, and I knew of only two people who had a connection to them both: Benjamin and Michel.

Benjamin had lied to me, and he was manipulating me. I had given him the chance today to tell me he’d had a wife, and he had not. The newspaper article said the police suspected a robbery. Yet I knew the location of Adele’s missing locket. Was it in Michel’s armoire because of the reason he’d stated? Or had he taken it from her to make her murder look like a robbery—the same way he’d taken the cuff link from Peter, a cuff link he claimed to have never seen?

The carriage slowed to a stop. When I looked out the window I saw that we were before the Bennett house. The gray of the rain seemed to soften its edges; the windows were lambent and welcoming, and I thought how that house was like everything else in my life, how nothing about it was as it seemed. I waited for the driver to open the door; when he helped me out, I realized the rain had grown heavier. The black feather on my hat drooped to brush my cheek. I stood there on the walk, staring up at the house, at the window I knew belonged to Dorothy’s bedroom.

“Ma’am?” the driver asked.

I smiled brightly and gave him my hand.

The house was quiet when I entered, though the lights were blazing, the heat rising from the vents along the floor. When I gave my cloak and hat and gloves to Lambert, I asked, “How is Mrs. Bennett today?”

“Quite well, ma’am. Mr. Jourdain is with her now.”

There it was, that little flicker of jealousy. I refused to feel it. I was relieved he was with her; it meant I would not encounter him on my way to my bedroom. Still, I lingered on the stairs. I did not want to see him, not at all; yet I was disappointed when I reached the safety of my bedroom without meeting him.

He could have killed them both
. He had the motive for each of the murders: for Adele, because she had become difficult, and Peter, because he was in the way of the adoption, because he had drawn up commitment papers for Dorothy—

I paced fretfully to the fireplace. There was always a fire lit, whether I was in the room or not. I supposed because the central heating was not strong enough to reach well to the third floor; the heat was like the flutter of a fan, the air warm when you were close to the vents, insubstantial when one stepped a few feet away—

The truth is not always what you want to believe.

The thought winged through my mind, as if someone had sent it there. I looked to the desk, where the notebooks containing the spirit writing were on top, neatly laid out by Kitty. It had been some time since I’d looked at them. I went over and picked them up and took them to the chair by the fire, and then I opened them, poring over the words.

Liars will lead you astray. Do not be tempted.

Tempted by who? Who was the liar? How could I tell?

Trust those sent to guide you.

But if someone had been sent to help me, who was it? Who did the spirits mean? Adele? Michel? Benjamin? Dorothy?

Go farther than you will and be satisfied.

I slammed the books shut and shoved them onto the floor. They were as much a mystery as ever. I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself, to clear my mind.

“Peter had not seemed himself these last months.”

The words came to me like a scent memory—the sudden whiff of a long-ago perfume caught in a breeze, an entire childhood told by the musky sweet tang of fallen apples in the sun. There, not there, a memory left dangling.

“I lost my love for him in that moment. I thought we were confidants.”

I realized that I had forgotten one thing in my quest to solve Peter’s death: his life. I had been—as Michel had so mockingly told me—willingly blind. I had not wanted to face the looming failure of my marriage, and so I ignored anything that might show the cracks. Peter’s disappearances. His distraction. The truth was as I told Ben: I had not known my husband as well as I’d told myself I had.

But someone else did.