body — against him. Then he pressed his mouth upon my lips.' The girl grimaced, as if she wanted to spit.
'And then?' I asked.
'I tore myself from him, but there was nowhere to go. I didn't know how to escape from his roof. He motioned me to calm down, to be quiet. He told me it would be our secret and said we would just watch the fireworks now Which is what we did.'
'Did you tell anyone?'
'No. That is when I lost my voice: that night. Everyone thought I had caught the fever. Perhaps I had. My voice came back to me the next morning, just as it did this time. But I have told no One until this day. After that, I would not consent to be alone with Mr Banwell again.'
A long silence ensued. The girl had evidently come to the end of her immediately conscious memories. 'Think of yesterday, Miss Acton. Do you remember anything?'
'No,' she said quietly. 'I'm sorry.'
I asked her permission to convey what she had said to Dr Freud. She agreed. I then informed her that we should resume our conversation tomorrow.
She seemed surprised: 'What else do we have to converse about, Doctor? I have told you everything.'
'Something more may occur to you.'
'Why do you say that?'
'Because you are still suffering your amnesia. When we have uncovered everything connected with this event, I believe your memory will come back to you.'
'You think I am concealing something?'
'It is not concealment, Miss Acton. Or rather, it is something you are concealing from yourself.'
'I don't know what you are talking about,' the girl replied. When I was a step from the door, she stopped me with her clear, soft voice. 'Dr Younger?'
'Miss Acton?'
Her blue eyes had tears in them. She held her chin high. 'He did kiss me. He did — propose to me by the lake.'
I hadn't realized how anxious she was over the possibility that I too, like her father, might not credit what she told me. There was something indescribably endearing in the way she used 'propose' instead of 'proposition.' 'Miss Acton,' I replied, 'I believe every word you say.'
She burst into tears. I left her, wishing Mrs Biggs a good afternoon as I passed her in the hallway.
In a private corner of the saloon at the Hotel Manhattan,
George Banwell sat with Mayor McClellan. The mayor remarked that Banwell looked as if he had been in a fist- fight. Banwell shrugged. 'A little problem with a filly,' he said.
The mayor withdrew an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Banwell. 'Here's your check. I advise you to go to your bank this afternoon. It's very large. And it's the last one. There won't be any more, no matter what. Do we understand each other?'
Banwell nodded. 'If there are additional costs, I'll bear them myself.'
The mayor then explained that Miss Riverford's murderer had apparently struck again. Did Banwell know Harcourt Acton?
'Of course I know Acton,' Banwell replied. 'He and his wife are at my summerhouse now. They joined Clara there yesterday.'
'So that's why we have not been able to reach them,' said McClellan.
'What about Acton?' asked Banwell.
'The second victim was his daughter.'
'Nora? Nora Acton? I just saw her on the street, not one hour ago.'
'Yes, thank God she survived,' answered the mayor.
'What happened?' asked Banwell. 'Did she tell you who did it?'
'No. She's lost her voice and can't remember a thing. She doesn't know who did it, and neither do we. Some specialists are looking at her now. She's here, in fact. I've put her up at the Manhattan until Acton gets back.'
Banwell took this in. 'A good-looking girl.'
'She certainly is,' agreed the mayor.
'Raped?'
'No thank heavens.'
'Thank heavens.'
I found the others in the halls of Roman and Greek antiquity at the Metropolitan Museum. While Freud was engrossed in conversation with the guide — Freud's knowledge was quite astounding — I fell behind with Brill. He was feeling better about his manuscript. His publisher, Jelliffe, had at first been as mystified as we had been, but then recalled that he lent his press the previous week to a church minister, who was publishing a series of edifying biblical pamphlets. Somehow the two jobs must have been merged together.
'Did you know,' I asked Brill, 'that Goethe was Jung's great-grandfather?'
'Rot,' said Brill, who had lived in Zurich for a year, working under Jung. 'Self-glorifying family legends. Did he get to von Humboldt too?'
'Yes, actually,' I replied.
'You would think it would be enough for a man to marry into a fortune without having to invent a lineage for himself.'
'Unless that's why he invents it,' I said.
Brill grunted noncommittally. Then, with a strange lightness, he pulled back a forelock of his hair, revealing a wicked scrape on his brow. 'You see that? Rose did that last night, after you had all left. She threw a fying pan at me.'
'Good Lord,' I said. 'Why?'
'Because of Jung.' 'What?'
'I told Rose about the remarks I made to Freud concerning Jung,' said Brill. 'It sent her into a rage. She told me I was jealous of Jung, that Freud values him, and that I was a fool because Freud would see through my envy and think worse of me for it. To which I replied that I had good reason to be jealous of Jung, given the way she was looking at him all night. In retrospect that may have been a false note, since it was Jung who was looking at her. Do you know she has the same medical training I do? But she can't get a job as a doctor, and I can't support her, with my four patients.'
'She threw a frying pan at you?' I asked.
'Oh, don't give me that diagnostic look. Women throw things. All of them, sooner or later. You'll learn. All except Emma, Jung's wife. Emma merely hands Carl a fortune, mothers his children, and smiles when he cheats on her. Serves his mistresses dinner when he brings them into the house. The man is a sorcerer. No, if I hear another word about Goethe and von Humboldt, I just may kill him.'
Before we left the museum, there was nearly a crisis. Freud suddenly required a urinal, just as he had at Coney Island, and the guide sent us to the basement. On the way downstairs, Freud remarked, 'Don't tell me. I will have to go through endless miles of corridor, and at the end there will be a marble palace.' He was right on both counts. We only reached the palace in the nick of time.
Coroner Hugel did not get back to his office until Tuesday evening. He had spent the afternoon at the Acton house on Gramercy Park. He knew what he would write in his report: that physical evidence — hairs, silk threads, shreds of rope — now proved beyond doubt that the same man who killed Elizabeth Riverford attacked Nora Acton. But the coroner cursed himself for what he had not found. He had scoured the master bedroom. He had pored over the rear garden. He had even crawled through it on hands and knees. As he knew he would, he found broken branches, trampled flowers, and plenty of other signs of flight, but nowhere the proof he sought, the one piece of hard evidence with which he could expose the perpetrator's identity.
He was exhausted when he reached his office. Despite the mayor's command, Hugel hadn't circulated to his staff the offer of a reward to anyone who found the Riverford girl's body. But he could hardly be blamed for that, Hugel told himself. It had been the mayor who ordered him to go directly to the Actons' house rather than back to the morgue.
In the hall, he found Detective Littlemore waiting. Littlemore reported that one of the barracks boys, Gitlow, was on a train to Chicago. He would be there by tomorrow night. In his usual chipper spirits, Littlemore also
