People like Serafina, powerless people with no money, were terrified of the police.
“Mr. Malloy is right,” Sarah was saying. “People like Mr. Sharpe and… Well, like all the people at the seance, they don’t have to be afraid of the police.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Sarah was searching for an explanation the girl could understand.
“Because they have enough money to buy their way out of trouble,” Frank explained for her.
“Is this true?” she asked Sarah, outraged.
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Even if one of them killed Mrs. Gittings?” the girl asked.
“Probably,” Frank said. “No one wants to protect Nicola except you, and the others would be happy to see him charged with the murder, guilty or not, because that would mean they wouldn’t have to worry about any scandal touching them.”
The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “Mrs. Brandt, you cannot let him blame Nicola for this! He is innocent!”
Sarah turned to him with that expression he hated, the one that said she wanted him to do something he didn’t want to do. “Can you at least question them?”
Frank shook his head. “The boy did it. He’s the only one who could have.”
“No, that is not true!” Serafina cried.
“All the others were holding hands,” he reminded her. “If they moved, somebody would have noticed.”
“But what if one of the people on either side of Mrs. Gittings did it?” Sarah said too eagerly. “One of them could have let go of her hand, and before she could say anything, he stabbed her.”
“He?” Frank asked.
“Mr. Sharpe was on her left,” Sarah said. “He was thinking about doing something dangerous.”
Frank glared at her.
“Mrs. Burke was on the other side of her,” Serafina added. “Mrs. Gittings would not let her come back to see me again until she brought more money.”
“She was selling her jewelry,” Sarah reminded him. “And she was afraid her husband would find out.”
Frank didn’t want to hear any of this. “That’s far-fetched,” he tried.
“There is another way,” Serafina said.
They both looked at her in surprise.
“Another way to what?” Sarah asked.
“To… to free your hand,” she admitted reluctantly.
“What do you mean?” Frank asked, figuring this was some kind of trick, a desperate attempt to cast suspicion on anybody but DiLoreto.
“Please, put your hands on the table,” she said, moving the coffee cups aside as Frank and Sarah each laid their palms on the tabletop.
Serafina reached across with her left hand and took Frank’s right wrist. “Please, hold Mrs. Brandt’s wrist with your other hand,” she instructed him.
Frank took Sarah’s right wrist with his left hand, and she in turn clasped Serafina’s right wrist with her left hand.
“This is how we hold our hands when the lights are on,” Serafina said. “Then I get up and turn out the light and close the door.” She pulled her hands free of theirs, as if she were getting up. “When I come back,” she continued. “Sometimes I do this.”
She kept her right hand off the table, and offered her left wrist to Sarah, who clasped it, and then she clasped Frank’s wrist with the same hand.
“In the dark, you will not see this,” she said, pointing to the way they were both clasping the same one of her hands. “And I have one hand free to…” She raised her hand as if she held an invisible knife and brought it down toward Sarah, who instinctively recoiled.
Frank jerked his own hand away and glared at her. “But nobody would know how to do that except you.”
“Mr. Cunningham knows how,” she said. “He told me he knew that I sometimes keep one hand free. He was very proud he had figured this out.”
“But he was too far away to stab Mrs. Gittings,” Frank said.
“If he figured it out, the others could have, too,” Sarah said.
Frank frowned at her. “The DiLoreto boy still had the best reason to want her dead,” he reminded her. “The Professor said she wanted to get rid of him. They had a fight about it the night before she died.”
“But she said he could stay,” Serafina argued. “I told her I would leave with him if she sent him away.”
The Professor had said the same thing, so that part was true, at least. “But he might have thought if he killed her-”
“No!” Serafina interrupted in frustration. “If he killed her, we would be telling fortunes on the street again.”
“Not if Sharpe set you up in a house like he wanted to,” Frank reminded her.
“But Nicola could not come with me. And if Mrs. Gittings was dead, we would have nothing.”
“Except her money,” Frank tried. “With her dead, Nicola could come back and steal the money-”
“No, no!” she cried. “He stole it before she died!”
Frank and Sarah gaped at her as she clapped a hand over her mouth, aghast at what she had just said.
“Nicola stole the money?” Frank asked, using his police detective’s tone.
Her eyes widened in terror. “It was really our money,” she said. “I had earned it, but she would not give it to us. She would give us nothing!”
“How did he steal it? You said you didn’t know the combination to the safe,” Sarah said.
“We… we made a small hole in the wall so we could watch when she opened the safe,” she admitted. “We were waiting until the end of the month, before she paid the rent, so…” She gestured vaguely.
“So there’d be more money to steal,” Frank offered.
“But it’s not the end of the month yet,” Sarah pointed out.
“After the fight with Mrs. Gittings, we decided we could not wait,” Serafina said.
“Exactly when did he take the money?” Frank asked.
“Yesterday, right after everyone arrived for the seance. The Professor locks the money in the safe, then he comes to the parlor to help me escort people into the seance room. Nicola took the money from the safe when the Professor and Mrs. Gittings were with me and the clients in the parlor and… and he hid it.”
“Where did he hide it?” Frank asked.
“He… In my bedroom,” she admitted reluctantly. “In my carpet bag.”
“Oh,” Sarah said in surprise. Frank glanced at her questioningly. “I noticed that she was very protective of the bag on the trip over here,” she explained.
“So you have it here with you?” Frank asked.
“Yes, but it is mine! I earned it!” she cried, her face crumbling.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to take it,” Frank assured her. “I just wanted to know where it was. So DiLoreto took the money before the seance even started.”
“Yes, that was our plan. Then we were going to wait until they were asleep that night, Mrs. Gittings and the Professor, and we would run away together.”
“Where were you going to go?” Sarah asked.
“To another city,” Serafina explained, leaning forward in her desperation to make them understand. “With the money, we could rent a house and I could do readings and we would not need Mrs. Gittings anymore. So you see, we did not need to kill her.”
“And killing her would just complicate things for them,” Sarah pointed out, earning another frown from Frank. “Why would they want to upset the clients or get the police involved? If they killed her, they were bound to get caught.”
The timing of the theft of the money was exactly right. The Professor had said it was all there when he put in the fees for the seance. Nicola had no opportunity to hide it after the seance started because he was busy making the background noises, and after the murder, the house was full of cops who would have noticed him carrying a sack of money around. And he couldn’t have come back and stolen it later, because Serafina had it with her when she left the house.
