plenty of money, I guess he’ll do whatever it takes to catch the killer.”
To Frank’s surprise, she frowned as if she didn’t agree.
“You don’t think so?”
“He didn’t say anything, one way or the other, when I mentioned it to him,” she admitted, “and I didn’t want to press him. He was still very upset.”
“How could you tell?” Frank asked, honestly wanting to know.
She shrugged one shoulder, a distinctively feminine gesture that Frank found far more appealing than he should have. “He’s very reserved by nature. Most men are, I think, but men in his position must be even more so. Cornelius VanDamm probably wouldn’t shout if his house was on fire, but when I saw him the other day, he looked as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all, and his eyes were… well, they were haunted. There’s no other word for it.”
“Then he’ll pay whatever it takes to find the man responsible.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Why?” Frank challenged, not liking her theories at all. “You can’t think he doesn’t want the killer found.”
To his surprise, she didn’t protest. “It’s not that so much as… He might be afraid of the scandal.”
“How much more scandal could there be? His kid was murdered.”
“Does anyone know that? Anyone except you and I and the police, I mean? I haven’t seen anything about it in the papers, have you?”
Frank really hadn’t had time to look. “So?”
“So he’s been able to keep the circumstances of her death a secret. He probably has a story he’s been telling to explain her death, a tragic accident perhaps, since the truth would be too awful to admit. The funeral will be private and no one will ever know the truth… unless the killer is caught.”
This made absolutely no sense to Frank. “What’s the shame in getting murdered?”
“The shame is in the circumstances. She had run away from her home, which is bad enough, but the reason she ran away is even worse. I’m assuming that she really was with child.”
Frank nodded grudgingly. The medical examiner had confirmed that at once.
“How far gone was she?”
Frank shifted uneasily in his chair. He’d never get used to discussing such topics with a female he hardly knew. “Almost six months, they said.”
“Then her family must have known. That’s why they sent her to Long Island, to keep her out of sight since her condition would soon be obvious.”
“But they wouldn’t’ve been able to keep it a secret once she had the baby,” Frank pointed out.
“Of course they would. They’d simply spirit the child away someplace and return Alicia to society as if nothing had happened.”
“Their own grandchild?” Frank scoffed. Nobody could be that heartless. “What would become of it?”
“Maybe a servant would adopt it, or maybe they would give out some story about a distant relative who died and left her child in their care. Who knows? The important thing is that no one would ever know the truth. Alicia’s reputation would be safe so she’d still be able to marry well, and the family wouldn’t lose their place in society. But with her running away, they’d have a much more difficult time making up a story. They’d have to invent excuses for her disappearance, which would be hard to explain, and now with her death, the situation is even more delicate. If the truth came out, that she was pregnant and living in a boardinghouse alone and her parents didn’t even know where she was, they’d become a laughingstock. I’m very much afraid they might think that was too high a price to pay for justice.”
“Are you saying they’d let their daughter’s killer go free just to protect their reputation?”
For a long moment, she didn’t speak, and Frank thought his skepticism must have shown her how ridiculous her theories were, but then she said, “In some ways, rich people
“You know this for a fact?” He very much doubted it, but she nodded.
“From my own personal experience. With my own father. He’s a close friend of Cornelius VanDamm.”
Well, he’d known she came from money. He’d known she and Mina VanDamm were friends. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but still, he had a difficult time believing she’d come from the same stock as the VanDamms. “What’s his name?”
“Felix Decker.”
Frank tried not to show his surprise. Felix Decker was definitely one of the Four Hundred socially elite in the city. His family had been here since before the flood, and he was probably richer than God. Was it possible Decker’s daughter could be sitting here with him in a filthy room in the basement of police headquarters? “Felix Decker’s daughter is a
She leaned back in her chair and smiled at him. It was a bitter smile, full of pain and wisdom dearly earned, and suddenly, Frank knew things about Sarah Brandt he had no desire to know.
“I had a sister,” she began, telling him a story he knew he didn’t want to hear. “Her name was Maggie. She was three years older than I, and I adored her. She was beautiful and smart and so strong. Too strong, as it turned out. She didn’t approve of the way our father treated his workers. He was too cruel, she thought, but she couldn’t convince him to adopt more humane methods. She began spending time at the shipyards. She was especially interested in proving to my father that it would be in his own best interest financially to treat his workers better. Since my father’s only concern was his financial best interest, she stood a good chance of changing his mind if she could prove her theories. But while she was going over his books, she met one of the clerks and fell in love with him.
“Peter was a beautiful young man, and I think he truly loved my sister in return. He must have, because he stayed with her even after… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Maggie and Peter fell in love, and they wanted to marry, but of course my father refused to allow it. His daughter would never be allowed to marry a penniless clerk. She was to be the bride of some millionaire’s son or perhaps even of an English Lord. My father had great hopes. He simply failed to realize that Maggie could be as stubborn as he.
“She refused to stop seeing Peter, so my father fired him, turned him out without a reference and blackened his name everywhere, so the only work he could find was as a common laborer. He thought this would be the last he’d hear of Peter, but Maggie had conceived a child. She thought when she told our father about the baby, he would relent and allow her to marry, but instead, he tried to send her off to Europe. In fact, we thought she did go to France, but she’d manage to escape from the ship before it sailed, and she found Peter. They were married, and by the time we discovered what had happened, she’d vanished.
“I begged my father to find her and at least help Peter find a decent job, but he said she’d made her choice, and she could live with it. I think he expected that once Maggie had a taste of poverty, she would come crawling back to him and beg forgiveness, but of course, she didn’t. The next we heard was one night when Peter sent us word to come to her because she was dying. My parents were out for the evening, but I went. They were living in a rear tenement on the Lower East Side. On the fifth floar.”
Frank winced. This would be about the cheapest lodging available. The rear tenements were built in the court- yards behind the regular tenements, cut off even from what little light and air were available in the crowded streets of the city.
“I found her in a back bedroom, a room with no windows, hardly bigger than a closet. She was lying on a straw mattress on the floor, and she was bleeding to death.”
For a moment, Frank thought he was going to be sick, but he swallowed down the bitter bile and forced himself to listen to the rest of Mrs. Brandt’s story without betraying his weakness.
“The baby had come, but they were too poor for a doctor or even a midwife. Most of the time Peter couldn’t find work, so they were surviving by renting out the other room of their tiny flat to lodgers who slept in rows on the floor. Five of them. They were all there that night, snoring in the front room while Maggie died in the back. I don’t know how she stood it, the filth and the grinding poverty and the lack of privacy. Nothing in her life had prepared her for that, but she bore it all somehow. Perhaps it was her pride that kept her going.
“But even her pride couldn’t protect her anymore. I was just a girl then, only seventeen, so I didn’t know how to help her or what to do. Nothing would have helped by then, though. She was so weak, she could hardly speak, but she begged me to take care of her baby. I promised I would, even though her baby was already dead. And then she was gone, too.”
