Murder on Black Friday (20 page)

Miriam glanced up at her fiancé, then looked down, coloring slightly.

“You’ll pardon me for saying so,” Will said, “but Becky’s low opinion of Mr. Munro...well, it just strikes me as odd, given that they were betrothed. On the one hand, she called him a monster. On the other, she was furious at being refused permission to marry him.”

“That marriage was to have been her one great righteous act,” Tanner said, “her way of proving that she wasn’t just a spoiled little child, that she could be as practical and selfless as Miriam.”

“She knew Philip didn’t love her,” Miriam said. “All she was to him was a comely young girl with a pristine reputation and one of the best names in Boston. And she certainly didn’t love him. She thought him arrogant and debauched. But he was fabulously rich, and we were growing poorer by the minute. She considered him our salvation. All she had to do was to condemn herself to a loveless marriage for the rest of her life.”

“A pretty girl like Becky...” Nell began. “I’m surprised she didn’t have her choice of well-heeled suitors.”

“Where would she have met them?” Miriam asked. “She didn’t go to dinner parties or balls or the opera. We couldn’t afford a decent pair of gloves, not to mention the gowns and all the rest of it. We sold the horse and buggy years ago, and started turning down invitations. After a while, they just stopped coming. Philip would never have met her if he hadn’t come to the house for that first meeting with Papa about his finances. When he started paying his addresses to her, she considered it a godsend.”

Tanner said, “He talked her into keeping the courtship a secret from her father until they were ready to announce the engagement, but that tactic worked against him. Noah felt as if he’d been deceived, and that was one of the reasons he was so opposed to the marriage—that, and Munro’s reputation. And, of course, Noah knew perfectly well why Becky had agreed to marry him. He told me it was an unacceptable sacrifice on her part. He wanted her to marry for love, as he had, and he knew she could never love Philip Munro.”

“How did
you
feel about Munro?” Nell asked the minister.

“I barely knew him, and I’d be loath to pass judgment if I did. I will admit I thought it was a mistake for Becky to marry him, but I understand her desire to return the Bassett family to their former prosperity.
I
was certainly in no position to do it. My income has never been more than modest, and I’ve no family money.”

“The reason I asked how you felt about Mr. Munro,” Nell said, “is that your name appears in his desk calendar. You had an appointment to see him at twelve-thirty Friday afternoon.”

Miriam turned to gape at Tanner, who stepped back from her chair, hands raised in a pacifying gesture.

“You went to
see
him?” she asked in a tone of utter incredulity.

“I didn’t mention it to you,” he said, “because I didn’t want you to be any more troubled than you already—”

“Why on earth...? Why would you...?”

“I knew how it weighed on you, Munro’s threat to do whatever it might take to force your father to bless the marriage. I thought if I could just go there and talk to him—”

“About
what
? What...what did you talk about?”

Clearly unsettled by her reaction, Tanner said, “Nothing at all, as it turned out. News of the gold crash had started to circulate by the time I got to his office, and he was too busy to meet with me. I told him I’d come back Monday at two.” With a glance at his pocket watch, he said. “That’s where I’d be right now if he were still alive. My plan had been to reason with him, man to man. I wanted him to understand the impact his dogged pursuit of Becky was having on the family, that it was just pride driving him on, and that he and Becky would both be more content married to other people.”

“Content?” Miriam said with an acerbic little laugh. “It was never about contentment, don’t you understand that? It was about money. It was about status.”

“You don’t think I realize that?” Crouching down so that he could look her in the eye, Tanner said quietly, “You must not know me very well at all, Miss Bassett, to think me so obtuse. It’s my fault. I’ve always been a bit too self-contained, too much a slave to propriety, always letting the mind lead the heart instead of the other way ‘round. But believe me when I say that I see, and know, much more than may be evident upon casual observation.”

“What do you know?” she asked unsteadily.

“I know you’re filled with fear. And I know I’d do anything to take that fear away.”

“If you’re worried about losing the house, you needn’t be.” Will slid the life insurance policies out of the folio and handed them to her. “These are worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

“So that’s where they were,” Tanner said as he returned to his seat.

“You knew about them?” Nell asked.

Tanner nodded. “Miss Bassett asked me to keep an eye out for them when I was sorting through Noah’s desk the other day.”

“I’m surprised you were aware of the insurance,” Nell told Miriam, “given your father’s reluctance to discuss financial matters with you.”

“I...found out recently,” Miriam said.

“From him?” Nell asked.

Miriam hesi
tated. “Yes.”

Will said, “Becky knew, too?”

“I told her when I found out.”

“The policies were due to expire within the next few months,” Nell said. “How fortunate for you and Becky that they’re still in force.”

“I don’t feel fortunate,” Miriam said grimly. “Except, perhaps, that Becky didn’t go ahead and marry Philip Munro, thinking we needed his money when we really didn’t.”

Now for the dicey bit. In discussing their strategy
for questioning the evasive Miriam, Will had advocated for a confrontational approach. The more blunt and unexpected the questions, he’d said, the less prepared she’d be with her slippery prevarications.

“What a curious thing,” Nell told her, “for a gentleman to have marital designs on two sisters, twenty years apart.”

Miriam seemed dumbstruck. Tanner turned to stare at her. Clearly, this was news to him.

“Were we misinformed?” Nell asked. “We understood Mr. Munro pursued you rather avidly when you were young.”

“Did he?” Tanner asked.

Miriam fanned out the insurance policies, then arranged them in a neat little stack. “He...made overtures, but I had no interest in them.”

Tanner was studying her with quiet gravity.

Looking up, Miriam said, “Who, um...who told you about...?”

“Mrs. Wallace,” Nell said. “Mrs. Sophie Wallace. She would have been Miss Sophie Cabot when you—”

“I know who you mean,” Miriam said.

“She was most forthcoming with information,” Nell said carefully. “Most forthcoming. She told us about a very interesting conversation you and she had when you were sixteen. If you don’t mind, I’d like to pursue that topic in greater depth.”

“This isn’t really the best time.” Miriam cast a significant, if fleeting, glance at John Tanner.

“I realize that,” Nell said, “and I apologize for the inconvenience, but the subject must be addressed.”

On a capitulatory sigh, Miriam said, “Very well, but I...I can’t stop fretting about Becky. Dr. Tanner, I wonder if you would be so kind as to go look for her. She probably headed west, toward the river. She likes to take walks there sometimes.”

Tanner contemplated Miriam in silence for a moment; she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, seemed to reconsider, then just stood, excused himself, and left.

Miriam shut her eyes when the door closed behind him, and sat back bonelessly in her chair.

Not knowing how long it would take Tanner to locate Becky, Nell came right to the point. “There is some sentiment among those close to Mr. Munro that you may have been involved in his death”

“What?”
Miriam’s eyes flew open; she gripped the edge of the table.

“Mrs. Wallace has volunteered to testify in court that your character is not as unblemished as it seems. In particular, she’s prepared to relate the details of the conversation I mentioned. It will become public knowledge that you feared you were with child out of wedlock at the age of sixteen.”

Miriam’s lips were pale, her face drawn. “This is a nightmare. Dr. Tanner assumes I’m...he assumes I’ve never had a beau, not a serious one. And a minister’s wife must be above reproach, everyone knows that. If he finds out that I was...that Chet and I...”

“Is it true?” Nell asked. “Did you have Chet Langdon’s baby?”

She hesitated a moment before looking away and saying, “No. No, I did not.”

Will looked inquiringly toward Nell, as if wondering whether she believed the denial. Nell shrugged, not knowing what to think. Call it what you will, circumspection or secretiveness, Miriam Bassett didn’t tend to part easily with the truth.

“I was such an idiot,” Miriam said. “Such a naïve little idiot. What must I have been thinking, to trust someone like Sophie?”

“After you confided in her,” Will said, “she went to Munro and told him you were expecting.”

“I knew it. I
knew
she must have said something to him. Why else would he have...” Groaning, Miriam propped her elbows on the table and cradled her head in her hands.

“She wanted him to think you were unworthy of marriage,” Nell said. “That was why he stopped trying to court you.”

“Yes, but you can’t have been too displeased about that,” Will said. “You said yourself, you had no interest in him—at the time.”

Miriam raised her head from her hands. “At the time?”

“We know you’ve been calling on him at night over the summer,” Nell said, “sneaking in through his back door and taking the service stairs up to his—”

“Those visits were entirely innocent,” she said heatedly. “I...I was trying to talk him out of marrying Becky.”

“Why?” Nell asked.

“
Why?
I...I’ve already told you why. It wasn’t a betrothal, it was a...business transaction. Becky deserved better. She deserved a love match, not some cold-blooded union with someone she didn’t even like.”

“That was your father’s reason for opposing the marriage,” Will said. “What was yours?”

“I’m sure I’ve no idea what you mean.”

“Were you jealous?” Nell asked.

“Jealous?”
With a dubious little gust of laughter, she said, “You’re daft—both of you.”

“It must have made you more than a little angry as well,” Nell said, “that Munro was toying with you while campaigning so zealously for your sister’s hand in marriage. It must have stung, knowing he held you in such low regard, when he’d once tried so hard to make you his—”

“Get out.” Miriam stood, knocking over her chair. “I’ve heard enough of this. Get out of my house.” She marched to the door and pointed a quivering finger at it. “Get out right now.”

“Miss Bassett,” Nell began.

“Get out!”
She slammed a fist against the wall for emphasis. “Get out, both of you! Who do you think you are, coming into my home and, and accusing me of—”

Rising, Will said, “My apologies if we—”

“I detest you, both of you!” she screamed, hot color scalding her face. “You’re despicable!
Get out! Get out, damn you! Just get out!”

“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’re willing to have the surgery,” Will told Eileen the next morning as he slid the crude but ingenious boot back onto her right leg. He had given her malformed foot a thorough examination, during which he’d asked Nell to make detailed pencil drawings of it from several angles, to be sent along with his letter to Dr. Sayre in New York.

“Here, let me,” Eileen said as she leaned forward in Will’s big leather desk chair to refasten the boot. “I made this thing, and can’t nobody but me ever figger it out.”

Will’s office at the medical school, across from Massachusetts General Hospital, was rather small, but with two windows to let in the sun—not that there was much to let in this morning, with the sky heavily overcast. The floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the walls were crammed not just with books, but with jars housing an assortment of diseased body parts, worms, and the larval stages of various flies and beetles. Glass-fronted display cases, such as one might use for butterflies, held rows of carefully labeled bullets, both fresh and spent, alongside pinned-up sketches illustrating grisly wounds and dissected corpses. A reconstructed human skeleton wearing Will’s top hat stood to one side of the big, cluttered desk. Eileen had found it all quite sickening, Nell fascinating.

It was strange, being here in Will’s workplace, seeing this side of him—the forensic scientist, the teacher and researcher. She’d found herself marveling at how different he appeared here, in this enclave of medical academia, how changed from his former self, before remembering that this was exactly who William Hewitt had been before the war—a surgeon with a special interest in medical jurisprudence. He seemed completely at home here, in his masculine little office surrounded by his specimens and books; he seemed happy.