Murder on Black Friday (21 page)

And yet, at the end of this term, he would be taking a train to San Francisco, and from there, a steamer to China.

Will had betrayed no hint since Sunday of any lingering disquiet from their conversation in his mother’s garden, and neither of them had spoken of it. He’d asked her to forget about it, and Nell was trying to, or at least pretending to. It helped that she’d been occupied all day, with little time to ruminate on anything other than their inquiries into Philip Munro’s death. Not so last night, when she’d lain awake in the dark, replaying his softspoken, heartstopping request for a kiss.

It was the first time in the year and a half of their acquaintance that either of them had given voice to that which went unspoken between them. Part of Nell—the prudent, rational part, the part she showed the world—wished Will had never asked for that kiss. The other part—the young woman curled up in her too-big bed, waiting for the sheets to warm—ached to give him what he’d asked for, and more.

“Ye sure it won’t cost me nothin’?” Eileen asked as she laced up the boot. “I haven’t a copper penny to me name, ‘cept what ya gave me th’other day.”

Propping a hip on the edge of his desk, Will said, “Dr. Sayre’s expenses and anything else not covered by the medical school will be borne by me. All you’ll have to worry about is recuperating, and I’ll make sure you’ve got plenty of help with that.” Will’s plan was to invite the renowned bone surgeon to Boston to demonstrate his technique for repairing clubfeet to the students and faculty of Harvard Medical School, the operation to be performed on Eileen.

“I know you’re probably worried about losing your job because you won’t be able to work for a while,” said Nell as she deepened the shading on the front-view drawing. “Perhaps if Mrs. Hewitt speaks to Miss Bassett on your behalf, she’ll consider—”

“Och, it don’t matter no more,” Eileen said. “I’m done with the Bassetts, and good riddance.”

“You quit your job?” Nell asked.

“I’m fixin’ to.”

“But I thought you said they were the only people who would employ you.”

“On account of me leg.” Having secured the boot, Eileen gave her foot a good stomp on the carpeted floor. “But if I ain’t gonna be a cripple no more, or not so bad of one, maybe I can get me a better job, a payin’ one. Father Gannon, he wants me out of there. He don’t like...some of what I told him in confession.”

Will gave Nell an interrogatory little glance, as if unsure whether it would do to question Eileen about something as delicate as her private communications with her priest. Reasoning that the girl wouldn’t have brought it up if she hadn’t wanted, on some level, to talk about it, Nell asked, “Do you mean your confession this past Sunday?”

Eileen nodded as she smoothed her skirts down, taking her time about it so as not to meet their gazes. “Not the bit about the surgery. Father was all for that. But I told him other things, things that happened Friday, and he said I’d been blackmailed into sinning, on account of lyin’ is a sin—not just outright gum, but...th’other kind, where you know a thing but keep it to yerself.”

“Gum?” Will asked.

“Lies,” Nell said. “He’s right,” she told Eileen. “That kind of lie is a sin, too.” Never mind that Nell’s own lies of omission about her checkered past should guarantee her eons in Purgatory, if not worse.

“I did both kinds,” Eileen said without looking up. “The regular kind and the keepin’ it to yerself kind. I did me penance, but my soul still don’t feel altogether clean, like it oughta. I think it’s ‘cause...” She glanced up at them, then down again. “It was yerselves I lied to, and now, with the two of ya bein’ so kind and all, I feel like the howly father wants more from me than just a string of hail Mary’s. I think He wants me to undo my sin.”

“By telling us the truth?” Nell asked.

Looking up cautiously, Eileen nodded again.

Will said, “What you told us the other day, about Miss Bassett sending you for the key to her father’s bedroom, and being with her when she discovered her father’s body, was that...?”

“That happened,” Eileen said. “What I...left out was what happened before that.”

“When Miss Bassett first came home from her errands?”

“No, before she left—only I ain’t so sure it was errands she went out to do, exactly.”

Not wanting anything omitted from Eileen’s account this time, Nell said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning? Presumably Friday started out like any other day. When did things start changing?”

“When Miss Bassett heard the newsboy yellin’ ‘Extra,’ and sent me out to buy a one.”

“In the early afternoon, then,” Will said.

“Aye, it was just as I’d finished cleanin’ up from lunch. She had me bring the paper up to her da, and then I was holed up in the kitchen fer a spell, ironing the wash. I heard footsteps comin’ down the stairs, real slow and heavy, so I knew it was himself, and not one of the sisters. I looked down the hall and saw him headin’ out the front door in a good suit of clothes. Wasn’t often I saw him that way, turned out all proper. Most days he just kept to his room in his shirtsleeves—sometimes just his nightshirt all day.”

“Was he gone long?” Will asked.

Eileen frowned as she thought about it. “An hour? Maybe a little less. I was makin’ me way up the service stairs with a stack of pressed linens, and I heard him on the landing of the main stairs—that landing with the big tall window that has them cracks in it?”

“The one you can see from the front hall?” Nell asked.

“That’s right. There’s a door on that landing that opens onto the service stairs, and it ain’t very thick. It’s painted to look like mahogany, but it ain’t, and ya can hear right through it when’s somebody’s talkin’ loud on th’other side. Mr. Bassett, he had that big, deep voice, don’t you know, and was goin’ on about how he’d been ruined. Miss Bassett was there, too, and she was tryin’ to shush him.”

“The elder Miss Bassett?” Nell asked, just to make sure.

“That’s right. She sounds a lot different than Miss Becky, so I knew it was her. Mr. Bassett’s voice was shakin’ so hard, it almost didn’t sound like him. I knew it was wrong to stand there and listen, but if you’d heard him...” Eileen shook her head. “I liked him. Low-spirited as he was, he was always kind to me, never troubled me fer much. He’d ask me how I was gittin’ along, and were his daughters workin’ me too hard. And here he was, carryin’ on like that. I tell you, my heart bled for him.”

“What did he say?” Will asked.

“He’d been to see some fella, and he was mad about somethin’ the fella had done. He said, ‘He did it on purpose—on
purpose
.’ He kept repeating that bit—‘on purpose.’ He called the fella some names I don’t want to say, which struck me odd, ‘cause he wasn’t the type to swear, ‘specially in front of his girls. Miss Bassett, she was askin’ him to get hold of himself, but he was only gittin’ more worked up. The worst of it was when he started cryin’.”

“Crying?”
Nell asked.

“His voice had that wet, sobby kind of sound. I heard him say, ‘He admitted it. He laughed about it.’ Then he started in about somethin’ else this fella had said. I couldn’t make it out too good, on account of the cryin’, but it had to do with Miss Bassett comin’ to see him, and things she said to him.”

“Said to Mr. Mun— the other fellow?” Nell asked.

“I think so. It was kind of hard to follow, ‘cause of all the cryin’. Mr. Bassett says, ‘I told him it’s a foul lie, that you never would of said such a thing. Tell me he’s just makin’ it up.’ Well,
then
she
starts cryin’, and she says it’s the truth. And Mr. Bassett, he starts bellowin’ somethin’ fierce. Took the Lord’s name in vain, and I never thought I’d see the day he done that. He asked her did anybody else know, and she said...I think it was Kathleen?”

“Catherine?” Will asked.

“Catherine,” Eileen said with a nod. “Miss Bassett, she says, ‘Me and her talked about it Wednesday night, but she won’t tell, ‘cause she don’t want nobody to know.’ Then Mr. Bassett starts in about how this fella didn’t just ruin
him
, he ruined his whole family. He says the fella ruined him just to prove he could, and that he’d...I think he said the fella would ‘give the fifty thousand back’ if Mr. Bassett...it sounded like ‘if I were to give my blessing’.”

“It means allowing Becky to marry,” Nell said.

“Miss Becky’s gettin’ hitched?”

“Not anymore. What happened then?”

“There was more cryin’ and talkin’, and then Miss Bassett says, ‘Don’t worry, Papa. I’ll take care of it. Everything will be all right.’”

“Take care of what?” Will asked.

Eileen shook her head. “I’m tellin’ you what I could make out. She told him he should go lie down in his room, and that she’d fetch me and have me bring him a brandy. Sometimes, when she’s lookin’ fer me, she takes the service stairs, and sure enough the door flies open, and I’m face to face with her. Mr. Bassett was shufflin’ away, he didn’t notice, but Miss Bassett knew right off I’d been earwigging. She asked me what I heard, and I said not much, but she didn’t believe me. She told me if I ever repeated any of it, she’d sack me with no references, and no one else would want me, on account of me leg.”

Nell said, “I can’t imagine Miriam Bassett making a threat like that. She’s...I suppose you’d say self-contained, but she’s never struck me as cruel. Not that I don’t believe you, but...”

“She wasn’t herself,” Eileen said. “She was scared. I could tell. I told her I wouldn’t say nothin’ to no one, and then I brung Mr. Bassett his brandy. He was sittin’ on the edge of his bed with his head hangin’ down, all red-eyed. I asked him was anything wrong, but he didn’t answer me.” Sadly she added, “It was the last time I saw him alive.”

“Where was Becky when all this was going on?” Nell asked.

“Out.”

“Out where?”

Eileen shrugged. “She goes out visiting sometimes. There’s a couple of young ladies in the neighborhood she’s friendly with. Or sometimes she shops without buyin’ nothin’. Miss Bassett went out after that, too. She had me to help her change her clothes. She’d been wearing that drab old frock she does chores in, and she needed me to lace her up tighter and button her into her striped walking dress.”

“Yellow and pink stripes?” Nell asked. “With a ruffled skirt?”

“That’s right. She put her bonnet and gloves on, too, so I knew she was goin’ out.”

“Did she say where she was going?” Will asked.

“Nah.”

“Did you notice when she returned?”

“Yeah, I was scrubbin’ the floor in the front hall when she come in. She never even looked at me, just raced up them stairs, white as a sheet. A minute later she calls down to me to fetch the key to her da’s room from the butler’s pantry, so I did.”

“And the rest is as you told us the other day?” Nell asked. “Unlocking the room and finding Mr. Bassett with his wrists cut?”

“Aye...” she said hesitantly. “‘Cept for one more thing I kinda...didn’t mention, and one...well, one real lie, the outright kind.”

“Let’s hear the outright one first,” Will said.

Eileen literally covered her face in shame. “You remember when you asked me if I’d found a note and I said no?”

“You did find one?” Nell asked.

The girl lowered her hands enough to meet Nell’s eyes, and nodded. “Miss Bassett asked me to look for one. I found it on his pillow and gave it to her.”

“Did she give you any indication of what it said?” Nell asked, knowing what the answer would be, but not wanting to assume.

Eileen shook her head. “Sorry. She started tearin’ up when she read it, but she didn’t say what was in it. She told me I must keep it their secret, about there bein’ a note, otherwise I’d get the sack and all that, and then she went to her room. I heard her sobbing past candle lighting.”

“And you never saw the note again?” Will asked. “When you cleaned her room, perhaps?”

“Sorry, no.

“What was the lie of omission?” Nell asked.

“The keepin’ it to yerself kind? It was about Miss Bassett’s dress, the one she changed into to go out. After she come back and had me fetch the key, I noticed...” Eileen glanced at Nell and Will, then lowered her voice along with her gaze. “I was standin’ behind her when she unlocked the door, and...it was buttoned wrong.”

“Her dress?” Nell asked.

Eileen nodded. “It buttons down the back, and there was a button that got skipped—you know, so there’s a little gap, and then the rest of the buttons are one buttonhole off? The thing of it is, she was buttoned up perfect when she left the house. I should know. I did it meself.”

“Which would suggest,” Nell said, “that, between leaving the house and coming home, she removed her dress and put it back on.”

“Which, in turn,” Will said, “would suggest how Miss Bassett meant to ‘take care of’ the problem of her family’s impoverishment without condemning her sister to a loveless marriage—a marriage to the man with whom she may, in fact, have been smitten herself.”

“She offered herself in Becky’s stead?” Nell asked.

“He’d apparently been trying to seduce her all summer. According to Harry, he’d become obsessed with having her...on his own terms.”

“But would he have accepted a Bassett mistress in lieu of a Bassett bride?” Nell asked. “Would Miriam have been worth fifty grand to him?”