Band of Sisters (48 page)

Now the waiter removed Drake’s cold, untouched coffee. Drake tamped and lit another cigarette, cursing himself again for his boasting, wishing he could will the train to pick up speed, desperate to reach Belgadt before Curtis did, and wondering for the twentieth time who else was in the game.

As the train drew closer to Penn Station, Drake decided he’d have enough time before the morning train to Cold Spring to make it home and pick up a peace offering for Belgadt—or a bargaining chip for his life.

Despite her dread and fear, Maureen had fallen asleep sometime after the downstairs clock bonged eight.

She woke when someone tried her door—once, twice. Then came a half grunt and steps faded away. A door down the hallway opened and closed. A lock clicked, and all was silent. She waited for the clock to strike the half hour and then one.

Breathing slowly in and out, she waited until it struck one thirty, then two, and two thirty. Maureen rose, threaded the slender lock-picking tools through her wig, pushed the small vial of acid deep into the lining of her cloak, and pocketed in her uniform a small flashlight. She moved silently down the stairs to Curtis’s empty room, carefully pulling the door behind her. Glimpsing through the drawn draperies, she caught no reflection of light outside Belgadt’s study.

Maureen waited another thirty minutes before slipping from the room. She hesitated by Belgadt’s door, registered his soft but steady snore, then crept down the stairs, keeping to the wall. No lamp burned in the hallway below. But as she stepped onto the main floor, a male voice not fifteen feet away demanded through the dark, “Who’s there?”

Maureen’s breath caught. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“I say, who’s there?” The voice demanded again, this time more forcefully and identifiable as Collins.

Her heart in her throat, Maureen nearly stepped forward, but from the end of the hallway came the swoosh of a door as it swung open. A pale light shone on slippered feet.

“It’s just me, sir—Nancy,” a second voice whispered.

“What the devil are you doing down here, creeping about the house this time of night?” Collins demanded gruffly, but the feet stepped quickly forward.

Maureen pressed her back against the wall and slid round to crouch at the side of the stairs.

“Mrs. Beaton told me you’d be keeping watch tonight,” Nancy simpered, “and I thought you might like a sandwich and a cup of coffee to keep you company.”

“You did, did you?” Collins sounded pleased. “You stayed up all this time just to fetch me a snack?”

“I couldn’t sleep, that’s all,” came the coquettish reply.

“Well, seeing as how I’m not sleeping either, how about
you
keep me company?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” The giggle in Nancy’s voice was muffled by the door’s soft swoosh.

Maureen peeked round the corner of the stairs and saw the pale light bob beneath the door as if going downstairs toward the kitchen.

In less than a minute Maureen slipped through the study door, closed it behind her, and pulled the flashlight from her pocket.

The targeted wall held five life-size portraits. How she would lift even one from its hanger to open a safe on the wall behind, Maureen couldn’t imagine. She forced the panic down, forced herself to breathe again.
Finding the safe is the first thing. One step at a time.

She tipped the corner of the first painting. Finding no safe behind, she tipped the edge of the second, the third, and the fourth. “This is it, then,” she whispered as she pulled back the corner of the last. But there was only wallpaper.

How can that be? He was surely headed for this wall!

She thought back to the moment Belgadt’s eyes glimpsed the wall. She pictured him in his overstuffed chair beside the fire, imagined again the conversation. She tiptoed across the room, sat in the chair herself, looked up as Belgadt had done when speaking to Curtis, then rose and headed for the wall.

She stepped around the long, ivory-inlaid credenza that ran beneath the portraits, ran her hands along the seams of the wallpaper, hoping for an unseen edge. But there was nothing.
Think, think! The house is riddled with hidey-holes. The tunnel was hidden by a bookcase, its lever in the andiron. If there’s a safe, it must be accessed by something in plain sight—something normal or useful.

She swept her light over the wall and then the credenza again, slid open its doors. She pushed, hoping to glimpse the wall behind, but it was too heavy to move—unnecessarily heavy.

Maureen ran her hand over the sideboard’s end, then the opposite end. She stepped back, frustrated, and ran the light over the entire piece once more.
Something’s not right. What is it?

Then it registered. The piece was not entirely symmetrical, at least not inside. The doors opened in the middle of the piece, but there was more than an extra hand’s breadth of storage space on one side than the other. And yet the interior wall was solid. Maureen ran her fingers along each interior edge. No buttons or levers, no indentations to gain a handhold.

She closed the doors, running her light round the edges of the piece, letting her fingers follow. Just beneath the back corner on the short end, her palm caught a tiny, raised button she could feel but not see. One press and it popped the outside end panel open.
So here you are, you hide-and-seeker!

Maureen sat back on her knees, studying the lock.
My “hairpins” won’t do for this, more’s the pity.
She pulled the small vial of acid from her cloak. Holding her breath and bracing the light against the base of the credenza, she twisted the cap and released the stopper.

Maureen prayed that Collins was busy with Nancy, that he’d stay in the kitchen below stairs, that his nose would not pick up the unusual scent. She’d never prayed so many prayers in all her life. And now she prayed that Someone was listening.

She was not prepared for the number of ledgers Victor Belgadt had accumulated or for the extent of his “property holdings.” She knew there was no time to decide which were the most pertinent, the most incriminating.

In the end she creased random pages near each book’s spine, then swiftly, quietly, tore two or three from each one. She folded the lined pages into tight rectangles and forced them through the lining of her cloak.

Maureen hid the ledgers behind books in the bookcase’s far corners, on shelves as high and low as she could reach so they would not all be in the same location. Belgadt might discover someone had been there, but he would not be so quick to find what she hoped the police—or better yet, Curtis and Joshua—might find when Belgadt was arrested.

She closed the safe door, no matter that a hole had burned through its metal large enough to pull out the lock. She closed the wooden panel of the credenza. Then she swept the light across the carpet, making sure no sign of her work remained, and turned toward the fireplace’s andirons.

Olivia had vowed to do everything possible to honor her sister’s wishes and maintain her privacy. But Dorothy needed medication and medical attention. It was the middle of the night, and she tossed and turned as her fever raged. Olivia was certain her sister had lost ten pounds in the last month, and the dark circles beneath her eyes had deepened. But Dorothy had made her promise not to call for the doctor again, nor alert the staff.

“There’s nothing they can do, and the fever will pass. It always passes,” Dorothy had weakly protested.

Olivia wrung the cloth into the china bowl on the bedside table and wiped her sister’s brow.

“Drake,” Dorothy mumbled, nearly delirious.

Drake is the one who got you into this. Why isn’t he the one suffering? Perhaps I should regret or feel shame for such a thought—a wish, in fact—but I don’t. He might as well have put a gun to her head.

And then Olivia wept silent tears of anger and frustration for Dorothy, the sister who’d thought she was marrying a prince—someone who loved and cherished her, someone who wanted to father a child with her.
My precious Dorothy, you wanted children nearly more than life itself. There will be no children now nor ever.

And where is Drake? He’s been gone at least ten days with no word—no letter or telephone call, no telegram.
Dorothy had said he’d left after giving her a peck on the cheek and a casual “Business trip—nothing to worry your pretty head. I’ll be back in a few days. Don’t give away the furniture while I’m gone.”

It was a petty but serious remark, reminiscent of his displeasure upon learning that Dorothy had contributed her last year’s overcoat and gloves to the Immigrant Aid Society, still desperately in need of warm clothing.

Olivia forced herself to mentally berate Drake, to focus on fury he so richly deserved. But into the back of her mind crept images of Curtis as they had done constantly of late: Curtis smiling. Curtis offering to help her find Maureen. Curtis sitting beside her in church. And then Curtis telling her he was going away with Maureen and Joshua, asking her to keep it all a secret, guaranteeing they would be back within the week. But none of them were, and the days were passing.

With each day, Katie Rose shredded the remnants of her sister’s reputation anew, grinding both Joshua and Curtis into the dust, casting them as fools lusting after a woman’s skirt.

Dear God, was I a fool to believe him?

The clock in the hallway had just bonged four when Maureen heard footsteps outside the study door. The knob turned as she dropped behind a hearthside leather chair. A light played slowly over the room, flicked off, and the bearer closed the door.

Maureen lay still until she heard the scrape of a chair outside the door and the faint, off-key hum of a satisfied Collins.

With two hands she gripped and pushed the andiron. One bookcase slid behind the next, and Maureen slipped through the opening. Running her hands above the lintel as she’d seen Harder do, she found the small lever. Barely a touch, and the bookcase slid closed, clicking into place.

Maureen stood in the cold dark and buttoned her cloak, praying that Collins had not heard.

She pressed against the stone wall, swept her light down the steeply spiraling steps, and took them one at a time.

How far she descended she could not guess but was certain she’d burrowed at least two floors beneath the main floor of the house, into an under cellar of sorts—where the stairs stopped short, hit a rough landing, and turned a sharp corner. She shone her light ahead. The path shot forward, tunneling through the dark.