Murder in Chelsea (11 page)

But Hicks just shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. It’s obvious to me that nothing I say would convince you to act against what you see as the child’s best interests. I commend you both. Catherine is fortunate to have found such courageous protectors.”

Sarah wasn’t going to let a little flattery distract her. “And if we agree to allow him to see Catherine, will you give your word that we can have her back again?”

“I will inform Mr. Wilbanks that she is safest in your custody, at least for the time being. And, Mr. Malloy, when you identify the person who killed Miss Murphy, we can discuss Catherine’s future.”

6

B
Y THE TIME THEY LEFT THE
H
ICKSES’ HOME,
F
RANK
felt like he could cheerfully strangle someone. Anyone. He was pretty sure he hated all rich people, except maybe Sarah’s mother, and even she could be pretty annoying at times.

“What time does Brian get home from school?” Sarah asked as they walked aimlessly down the street in the general direction of the El.

Frank needed a minute to catch up with her thought process. His son had been the last thing on his mind. “I don’t know exactly, but my mother usually has him home by four, I think.”

“I’d like to go see him.”

“Right now?

“It will be after four by the time we get to your place.”

Frank frowned, thinking about the reception they’d likely get. “Do you really want to see my mother?”

“I really want to see Brian.”

When she turned to him, he was horrified to see tears in her eyes. She never cried. “Maybe I should just take you back home so you can rest.”

“No. I don’t need to rest, and I don’t want to go home. It will be hours until my parents arrive, and if we go now, Mrs. Ellsworth will be over to find out what’s going on, and I just can’t face her questions yet. I want to see Catherine, but I don’t want to spoil her visit with my mother by showing up all upset and upsetting her. But if we go see Brian, I can put my arms around a child, and he’ll be happy to see us, and maybe I can play with him and forget all of this for a while.”

He couldn’t argue with her reasoning, and the idea of seeing his son was certainly appealing. “All right. Let’s go.”

They took the Third Avenue El down to Ninth Street and walked over to the building where Frank lived with his mother and son.

Although he knew it didn’t make any difference to Sarah, Frank couldn’t help feeling ashamed of the neighborhood and the tenement building where he lived. The predominately Irish part of the Lower East Side was clogged with street vendors and housewives bargaining for their wares. This time of day, people were getting what they needed for their evening meals. Some were buying things to prepare, and those with a few cents extra were getting something already prepared.

Their progress was slow as Frank led Sarah through the throngs. Finally, they reached his building. Inside, the open front door cast little light into the windowless hallway and up the stairway, but Frank’s flat was only on the second floor—the most desirable location since it was above the noise of the street but with not too many steps to climb. Those on the fifth floor paid much less rent.

Someone was making cabbage. Someone was always making cabbage. The smell was probably a permanent part of the building.

When they reached his door, he took a deep breath to brace himself for his mother, and opened it. “Ma! It’s me. I’ve brought Mrs. Brandt.” There, she’d been warned.

Frank never knew what alerted his deaf son, but Brian always knew when his father was home and came running to greet him. This time he emerged from his bedroom, where he’d probably been playing. He couldn’t hear Frank’s warning, so the sight of Sarah was a very pleasant surprise. He threw his arms around her skirts and gazed up at her adoringly.

She was telling him how happy she was to see him, even though she knew he couldn’t hear a word of it, as she lifted him into her arms.

“You’re getting so big! I don’t know how much longer I can carry you,” she said.

Brian was signing to her, his little fingers flying with the words he’d learned at the expensive school Frank sent him to. She couldn’t understand his signs any more than he could understand her words, but neither needed help understanding how happy they were to see each other.

“What’s he saying?” she asked Frank.

“He’s telling you what he did at school today,” his mother said from the kitchen doorway. A fireplug of a woman who had never been pretty and whom life had treated harshly, she stood drying her hands on her apron. As usual, she was scowling, but he also noticed she looked a little scared, although what she had to be scared of, he had no idea.

“Hello, Mrs. Malloy. I’m sorry to barge in on you this way, but we were nearby, and I asked Malloy if we could see Brian for a few minutes. I hope you don’t mind.” Sarah gave his mother her best smile.

His mother didn’t smile back. “I guess you’ll be wanting supper.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said as if his mother had graciously invited her, “but we can’t stay long. We have an appointment later.”

“An appointment,” she sniffed, looking at Frank as if to say, “Who do you think you are to have
appointments
?”

“If you’ve got some coffee, I’m sure Mrs. Brandt would like some,” he said, pretending not to notice his mother’s disapproval. “I know I would. And don’t worry about supper for yourself. I’ll go out and get something for you and Brian before I leave.”

“Coffee,” she said in a tone that indicated she thought it an unreasonable request. “I’ll make some.”

Sarah carried Brian into his bedroom, where they would communicate in that mysterious way people had where words weren’t necessary. Brian instinctively knew who loved him, and he gave his love unconditionally in return. Frank followed his mother into the kitchen to make peace.

“I know you just got home, and I didn’t want to bother you,” he said while she scooped coffee beans into the grinder with the jerky motions of the put-upon. “But Mrs. Brandt is having a tough time of it right now. Catherine’s parents have turned up, and they want her back.”

She’d started working the grinder, but she stopped and turned to him. “Catherine? The little girl?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you’re here? Just to see the boy?”

“Yes, I told you—”

“I know what you told me. Who are they, these parents, and where have they been all this time?”

Frank gave her a brief version of the story while she finished making the coffee. She periodically registered her outrage with an astonished glance, but she made no comment until he’d finished. “So she took Catherine to her parents’ house until we can get this all sorted out,” he said.

“Those people don’t deserve the child.”

Frank sighed. “The Deckers haven’t done anything—”

“Not
them
,” she snapped. “The
girl’s
parents. What kind of man carries on with an actress when his wife is dying, and what kind of woman gives her child to a stranger and leaves town for a year?”

At last, something Frank and his mother could agree on. “Which is why Mrs. Brandt doesn’t want to turn the child over to them, not to mention the fact that she loves Catherine like she was her own. Besides, we don’t know who killed the nursemaid or why, and until we do, Catherine might be in danger, too.”

“Well, of course she is. You don’t have to be a detective sergeant to figure that out!”

Frank couldn’t argue with that. “So when Mrs. Brandt started crying in the middle of the street and asked if she could see Brian, I couldn’t say no.”

She made a derisive sound, but before he could figure out what she disapproved of this time, she said, “Go to your son. He sees little enough of you as it is. I’ll let you know when the coffee’s ready.”

Frank found Sarah sitting on Brian’s narrow bed, watching him play with his wooden train with tears in her eyes.

“He’s going to wonder why you’re crying,” he said.

She blinked furiously as Brian jumped up to greet him and show him his train. When Frank looked back at her a few minutes later, she was smiling serenely, all trace of her misery banished.

A while later, his mother summoned them to the kitchen for the coffee, and Brian joined them. He got a cup like everyone else, but his contained milk with just a spoonful of coffee. Frank noticed with surprise that his mother had set a place for herself, too, and she joined them.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Malloy,” Sarah said, taking her seat at the table.

“Francis told me about your troubles. You mustn’t let those people take the child from you.”

Frank turned to Sarah, ready to rush to her defense, but she straightened up in her chair, a frown marring her lovely face. “But they’re her natural parents. Don’t you think they have a right to her?”

His mother made that derisive noise again. “People like that don’t have a right to anything. That actress woman, she can’t care anything for the girl. What kind of mother leaves her child like that, not even knowing where she is? A woman like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep a cat!”

“You’re absolutely right,” Sarah said with a trace of her usual spirit. “But her father—”

“Making a baby don’t mean a man is a father. If he really cared about giving her a good life, he would’ve married her mother
before
he made her instead of trying to make up for it later.”

Sarah turned to him, the color high in her cheeks. “She’s right. I shouldn’t feel sorry for them.”

Frank didn’t know what was stranger, his mother giving Sarah advice or Sarah taking it. “No, you shouldn’t.”

Sarah turned back to his mother. “When I found her, she’d been abandoned, and she’d been frightened so badly, she couldn’t speak for months. Heaven only knows what she saw or heard.”

Someone pounded a little too enthusiastically at the door, startling all of them except Brian, whose attention was on trying to figure out what Sarah was talking about. His grandmother started signing to him while Frank got up to answer the knock.

“Has it been hard to learn to sign?” he heard Sarah asking his mother as he left the room.

Frank opened the door to a beat cop who had a message to him from Headquarters. He’d expected to just leave it for Frank’s eventual return and was surprised to find him at home.

Frank read the message as he walked back to the kitchen.

The two women looked at him expectantly. “Emma Hardy wants to see me.”

* * *

S
ARAH WANTED TO RUN TO THE ROOMING HOUSE WHERE
Emma Hardy was staying, but Malloy wouldn’t tell her where it was.

“Are you sure you want to meet this woman?” he asked her for at least the hundredth time in the last two blocks. Well, maybe he’d asked her more like three times, but it seemed like a hundred.

“Of course I want to meet her. She’s Catherine’s mother.”

“And that’s exactly why you shouldn’t meet her. What if she cries and tells you how much she misses her daughter and how much she loves her? What will you do then? Give Catherine back to her and wish her good luck?”

Sarah tried to stop, but the surge of bodies around them kept moving forward, forcing her to go on or be knocked over. She grabbed Malloy’s arm and pulled him into the alcove of a shop doorway, where they could concentrate on talking. “You’re right to be concerned. An hour ago, I might have done just that, but your mother made me realize I can’t.”

“My mother is crazy.”

“Everybody’s mother is crazy, but what she said was perfectly correct.”

“And it’s just what everybody else has been telling you, too.”

“Yes, but everybody else loves me and wants me to be happy, and they know I’d be shattered if I lost Catherine. I couldn’t trust their judgment. But your mother . . .”

“My mother definitely does not love you.”

“Of course she doesn’t.” Sarah knew Mrs. Malloy was terrified she was going to take Frank and Brian away from her and leave her with nothing, even though Malloy had never shown the slightest inclination to allow Sarah to do anything of the kind. “And she’s not particularly interested in my happiness either, but if she sees that I can’t allow Emma Hardy and David Wilbanks to take Catherine, then I know it’s the right thing to do.”

He still looked confused, but Sarah didn’t have time to figure out why or even discuss it with him.

“We need to get to Emma Hardy. Let’s go!”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m not the one who stopped.”

He took her arm and propelled her back into the flood of pedestrians making their way home for supper. In the press, they had no more opportunity for discussion, and concentrated their energies on arriving at their destination safely.

Malloy stopped in front of one of the large old houses on a street just off Broadway. Its blistered paint and sagging porch marked it as a rooming house. “This is where Anne Murphy lived for most of the time after she left Catherine at the Mission,” he said. “She only moved to the place where you visited her when Emma wrote that she was coming home. Emma wanted Anne to move to a different place so she wouldn’t be easily found.”

“And this is the place where Wilbanks thought Emma lived when she was in plays in the city.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t she bring her lover back with her this time?”

Malloy gave her a small grin. “Let’s ask her.”

Sarah marched up the steps with Malloy at her heels and knocked on the door with as much authority as she could manage. At attractive woman about her own age opened the door. She frowned at Sarah, then looked past her to Malloy.

“Miss Hardy?” he asked.

“Are you Malloy?” she replied.

He nodded.

“And who’s this?” She jutted her chin at Sarah.

“Do you really want to discuss your private business in the doorway?” Sarah asked in the tone that usually made even women in labor obey her.

Emma Hardy blinked in surprise, then glanced over her shoulder. Sarah could see several women gathered in the hallway behind her and making no effort to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping.

“Mind your own business,” she told them, sending them flouncing off. “Come in,” she told Sarah.

When she stepped inside, she noticed the brightly colored posters adorning the walls in the entrance hall. They gave the place a cheerier air than most of the boardinghouses she’d seen.

Miss Hardy pointed to the parlor door, and Sarah went in. More posters hung here, but now Sarah could see they were faded and old. The worn furniture marked it as a common area, shared by all but enjoyed by none. Malloy followed her, and Emma Hardy closed the parlor door behind them.

“Now, who are you?” she asked Sarah.

Sarah smiled. “Mrs. Brandt.”

Emma apparently saw no reason to acknowledge the introduction. She was a striking woman, and Sarah could see why she had caught Wilbanks’s eye, even from the chorus. She’d pulled her dark hair up into a sloppy Gibson Girl knot, but it shone in the fading sunlight like a raven’s wing. Her dark hair contrasted well with her milky skin, still smooth and clear. She wore a dress of deep burgundy, which might be the “red” dress Carrie had described. It hugged her womanly curves. Her large, dark eyes probably looked mysterious when she wanted them to. Right now they just looked angry.