Murder on Waverly Place (7 page)

“But surely they won’t go back to the way things were before just because Mr. Roosevelt leaves,” Mrs. Ellsworth protested.

“Mr. Malloy is afraid they will,” Sarah said, recalling what he had told her. “That’s why he was in such a hurry to solve Tom’s murder. He knew Roosevelt was going to resign soon, and then he might not be allowed to work on the case anymore.”

“Oh, my,” Mrs. Ellsworth said with a frown. “Is he afraid he might lose his job?”

Sarah knew that was a possibility. Roosevelt had singled Malloy out several times to work on cases involving wealthy murder victims. Some in the department would be envious of that special treatment, and they could hold it against him. But Sarah thought that wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen. “He might be, but I think he’s more afraid of having to go back to the way things were before all the reforms.”

Mrs. Ellsworth nodded. “He’s changed a lot since he met you.”

Yes, he had, Sarah thought, and she had changed, too. She’d never thought she’d be able to love again after losing Tom, and she’d certainly never thought she could love a policeman.

 

 

 

M
AEVE HAD OBVIOUSLY WANTED TO HEAR ALL ABOUT THE séance the moment Sarah had walked in the door, but she knew better than to discuss it in front of Catherine. She had to wait until Catherine was tucked snuggly into bed and she could slip downstairs to find Sarah in the kitchen, still cleaning up after supper.

“I’ll do that,” Maeve said, taking the dishtowel from Sarah’s hand. “Sit yourself down and tell me everything that happened!”

Sarah did. Maeve listened attentively, asking only the occasional clarifying question. When Sarah was finished, Maeve sat down across from her at the kitchen table and considered what she had heard for several moments.

“Well?” Sarah prodded after a while.

“Well, what?” Maeve asked in surprise.

“What do you think? Was any of it real?”

Maeve shrugged. “It’s easy enough to change your voice and pretend you’re somebody else.”

“But she sounded like a
man
,” Sarah protested.

“Like I said, actors change their voices all the time.”

“What about the baby crying?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to see the room. There’s ways to do that, though. Have you ever seen a magician?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you think he really makes things appear out of thin air?”

“Of course not. It’s a trick.”

“Madame Serafina probably knows some tricks, too.”

Sarah frowned. “I’m sure she does. The truly amazing thing wasn’t that we heard a baby cry but that she knew about the baby in the first place, or rather that Yellow Feather or whoever it was knew about it.”

“Did you talk about Maggie and her baby while you were waiting with the other people?”

“No, I’m sure we didn’t. Why would that matter?”

“She might be able to overhear what people are talking about while they’re waiting. That would be a good way to get private information about them.”

“She wouldn’t have heard us talking about Maggie. In fact, my mother even asked Madame Serafina if she needed to know who we wanted to contact. Madame said no, so she knew nothing about us before we arrived.”

“I doubt that,” Maeve scoffed. “People know a lot about Mrs. Felix Decker.”

Sarah hadn’t thought of that. “I suppose that’s true.”

“And didn’t you say your mother’s friend was the one who told her about this and invited her to come? She probably told Madame everything she knew.”

“But she didn’t know about Maggie’s baby. Nobody knows that except our family.”

“
I
know,” Maeve reminded her.

Sarah laid a hand on Maeve’s arm where it rested on the table. “You’re family,” she said, remembering how Maeve had recently risked her life to help solve the mystery of Tom Brandt’s murder.

Maeve blinked at her in surprise. “Oh,” was all she could manage for several seconds.

Sarah hurried on before Maeve’s emotions got the better of her. “So you see, Madame couldn’t have known about Maggie’s baby.”

“Maybe it was a lucky guess. Lots of babies die. I’m sure somebody else in the room could’ve thought it was a baby in their family, too, if your mother hadn’t spoken up first.”

Sarah hadn’t thought of that. “You’re probably right.”

“I wish I knew more about this séance business. I could explain to Mrs. Decker how they do it, and she’d be cured of ever wanting to go back.”

“I’m hoping she’s already cured.”

“Well, if she’s not, ask her to take me along next time. At least I could pretend I believe in it.”

“I could’ve pretended I believed in it if I’d wanted to,” Sarah protested, pretending to be insulted.

But Maeve was shaking her head. “You’re an awful liar, Mrs. Brandt.”

“Some people would consider that a compliment,” Sarah reminded her.

“Yes,” Maeve agreed with a grin. “Some people would.”

 

 

 

M
RS. DECKER ARRIVED THE NEXT DAY WITH A NEW PICTURE book for Catherine. She didn’t mention Maggie or the séance, and Sarah believed she had put it all behind her. The next two weeks passed uneventfully. Sarah delivered a few babies, and her mother chanced to visit when she was out, so they hadn’t seen each other again. Then one day, her doorbell rang.

Catherine and Maeve hurried to answer it. Sarah thought it would be a summons to another delivery until she heard Maeve call.

“Mrs. Brandt, there’s a policeman here to see you.”

She didn’t sound alarmed, but Sarah knew this couldn’t be good news. She hurried out of the kitchen and through the front room that served as her medical office into the entry hall. She found the girls staring at a handsome young man in a blue uniform. He held his hat in both hands in front of his chest, and he was staring at Maeve with more than a little interest.

“Officer Donatelli?” Sarah asked in surprise.

He looked up. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Brandt,” he said, suddenly all business. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Detective Sergeant Malloy sent me to fetch you.”

“What for?” she asked in surprise. She hadn’t heard from Malloy for weeks and she knew he’d never send for her unless it was something very serious.

“There’s been some trouble . . .” He glanced meaningfully at Catherine, who was listening intently to every word.

“Maeve, would you take Catherine upstairs?” Sarah asked, worried herself now.

Plainly, neither girl wanted to miss hearing Officer Donatelli’s news, but they obediently marched up the stairs. When they were safely out of earshot, Sarah asked urgently, “Is Malloy all right?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he hastened to assure her. “He just . . . Well, it’s your mother, you see.”

“My mother!” she echoed in alarm. “Has she been injured?”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you. She’s fine, just fine. It’s just . . .”

“What is it!” she demanded impatiently when he hesitated.

“Well, I’m sorry to say that there’s been a murder.”

“Who was murdered? Someone I know?”

“I don’t know if you do or not, but it happened at a séance.”

“A séance! At Madame Serafina’s?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s it, on Waverly Place.”

“And my mother was there?” Sarah asked, almost wailing in despair.

“I’m afraid she was. That’s why they called for Detective Sergeant Malloy. She asked for him special.”

Of course she had. She knew he would handle everything with the utmost discretion. If he could. If anyone could. What would happen when the press found out that someone had been murdered at a séance attended by a half-dozen socially prominent citizens, one of them Mrs. Felix Decker?

“And he sent me to get you,” Officer Donatelli was saying. “He wanted you to make sure your mother gets home all right.”

Sarah sighed wearily. “I’ll get my things.”

4

D
ETECTIVE SERGEANT FRANK MALLOY COULDN’T BELIEVE it. He’d managed to keep Sarah Brandt from becoming involved in a murder investigation for weeks, and now she was summoning
him
to one!

At least that’s what he’d been told. They’d sent a uniformed officer out to track him down where he was investigating a warehouse robbery over near the docks this morning. They’d told him somebody’d been murdered at a séance, and Sarah Brandt was there and demanding he be brought in to investigate. That sounded like Sarah. Imagine his surprise when he arrived at the house to find not Sarah at all but her mother, Elizabeth Decker.

“I couldn’t give the police my real name,” Mrs. Decker explained to him the moment they were alone. He’d immediately taken her to what appeared to be some sort of office to interrogate her in private. “Do you know what the newspapers would do if they found out I was present at a murder?”

“But nobody would think twice about your daughter being at one,” Frank said with a weary sigh.

“Exactly.” Mrs. Decker gave him an approving smile. “And she’d already been here with me the first time I came.”

Why was Frank not surprised? “Tell me what happened here,” he said, not feeling at all like smiling.

Mrs. Decker sobered instantly. “We were having a séance in that room where the . . . the . . .”

“The body,” he supplied when she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“Yes, where the body is. We were seated around the table, holding hands.”

“Holding hands?” he echoed in surprise. He had seen the room with the table where the body was, but nobody had mentioned holding hands.

“Yes, it increases the bond to help the spirits communicate with us.”

“Maybe we should sit down,” he suggested, feeling a headache starting to form behind his eyes.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Malloy. I’m afraid I’m still suffering from the shock of seeing her lying there—”

“Over here,” Frank said, taking her elbow and directing her to one of two straight-backed chairs that had been placed in front of the desk that sat in the center of the room. The top of the desk was bare and slightly dusty, as if no one ever actually used it. He seated Mrs. Decker and took the other chair, turning it to face hers. “You were sitting around the table holding hands,” he reminded her.

“Well, I guess we weren’t exactly holding hands,” she clarified. “We were holding each other’s wrists, but it has the same effect, doesn’t it? In any event, Madame Serafina—she’s the spiritualist—she was talking with the spirits, or rather Yellow Feather was talking with them—”

“What’s Yellow Feather?” Frank asked, confused already.

“He’s Madame’s spirit guide. He’s an Indian warrior who died in battle over a hundred years ago.”

Frank was having trouble following all this. “Is he some kind of ghost?”

“No, I told you, he’s a spirit guide. He comes when Madame calls him, and then he speaks through her.”

“What do you mean, he speaks through her?”

“He uses her body. It’s his voice, though, very obviously. Her body speaks but a man’s voice comes out.”

Frank had a lot of questions about that, but he decided to save them for later. “All right, so this Indian spirit is talking through her. Then what happened?”

“We were all asking questions, and Yellow Feather was getting very agitated. He was shouting, and there was some music—”

“Music?”

“Yes, we could hear music playing, although I confess I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I was too distracted by what Yellow Feather was saying.”

“But there was a lot of noise in the room?”

“That’s right, so we didn’t notice . . . Or at least
I
didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until Mrs. Burke screamed.”

Frank gaped at her. She had been sitting in a room, practically holding hands with perfect strangers and talking to ghosts, and she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? He was really beginning to understand where Sarah had inherited her intrepid disposition. “Didn’t anybody notice somebody going up behind this woman and sticking a knife into her back?” he asked in amazement.

“How could we? It was pitch dark.”

“All this was going on in the dark?”

“Oh, yes. The room must be dark to decrease distractions when you’re contacting the spirits.”

Frank stared at her for a long moment, trying to judge her sincerity. Plainly, she was telling the absolute truth, no matter how ridiculous it sounded to him. “Then that would explain how someone could sneak into the room.”

“Oh, no, it couldn’t,” Mrs. Decker protested. “There’s only one door to the room, and it was closed tightly the entire time. We would have noticed immediately if someone opened it because light would have come in.”

That was good. The number of suspects would be limited to those in the room. “So one of the . . .” He couldn’t think of what people attending a séance would be called. “One of the other people in the room killed her, then.”

“Oh, no, that’s impossible,” she assured him confidently.

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because,” she reminded him, “we were all holding each other’s hands. No one could move without someone else noticing.”

Frank definitely had a headache now. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I see.”

“Mr. Malloy,” Mrs. Decker said, leaning forward and looking him straight in the eye. “I’m very much afraid that Mrs. Gittings was killed by one of the spirits.”

 

 

 

F
RANK LEFT MRS. DECKER IN THE OFFICE, JUST IN CASE some reporters showed up to nose around. He was surprised they hadn’t gotten the scent of this already. It had all the makings of a scandal. High-society ladies and gentlemen attending a séance with a beautiful spiritualist and one of them ends up murdered. Frank could probably write the story himself, if he’d been so inclined. But he was more inclined to keep Mrs. Decker’s name out of the newspapers if at all possible. He didn’t like
Mr.
Decker much, but he owed the man for helping him solve Tom Brandt’s murder, and he genuinely liked Mrs. Decker. He’d have to send for Sarah, though. If the cops who’d been called in to investigate before he got here told any reporters who was present at the séance, they’d give Sarah’s name. It would be a good idea if she was actually here, and then she could get her mother out without drawing suspicion to Mrs. Decker. He’d send Gino Donatelli, the one patrolman he could trust not to talk to the press.