Murder On Astor Place

Sarah felt as if someone had clawed her heart out. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Was that what had driven her to flee? The thought of having her child torn from her, taken away, never to be seen again? No wonder she had been so desperate. Sarah had blamed it on passion, but she hadn’t understood that Maggie had made the only choice she could if she wanted to keep her child.

Mrs. Decker drew a ragged breath and turned back to Sarah. “I would have done it. I would have done anything to save her. You must believe that, Sarah.”

Anything except let her marry the man she loved, Sarah thought, but she didn’t say it. Recriminations wouldn’t bring Maggie back, and in all fairness, her mother hadn’t been the one who decided what would become of Maggie and her child. Someday she would have to face the person who had, but not today. Today, she had to comfort her mother and herself.

“I believe you, Mother. Any woman would, to protect her child.”

Even a woman as shallow and self-centered as Francisca VanDamm, she realized as she watched her mother’s lovely face crumble beneath the weight of her grief.

FRANK DOVE FOR the body, grabbing the dangling legs and lifting, relieving the pressure of the rope around the neck, but even as he did so, he knew he was too late. The body was already stiffening, and he could feel the chill of death even through the man’s clothes. After a moment, he let go and stepped back in defeat, looking up into the face of death.

Harvey had not gone peacefully. Frank could see the scratch marks on his throat where he had clawed at it while it choked the life out of him. The reaction was instinctive, no matter how much someone might want to die. No matter that he had been despondent enough to make a noose and tie it securely and mount the stool and slip the rope around his neck. Still, when the stool tipped over and the rope cut into the living flesh, the will to live overtook the will to die for at least a few seconds, no matter how futile the effort.

Frank wanted to cut him down. That was always the first thing anyone wanted to do, and Frank felt the urge especially strong when he remembered Harvey was a man his own age, a good man whose only sin had been trying to help a girl he loved. But Frank knew that before he cut Harvey down and afforded his body some measure of dignity, he had to look at everything first to make sure it was as it should be.

The stool was there, turned over just as it would be if he’d kicked it. The rope was tied securely to a hook on the wall, then dropped over an exposed beam. The bloated face and bulging eyes told of death by strangulation. Frank could even imagine a motive or two. Harvey might have blamed himself for Alicia’s death and been unable to bear the guilt any longer. Or perhaps he and Sarah Brandt had been wrong, and Harvey really was the father of Alicia’s child. Perhaps he was even her killer, although Frank was almost certain he wasn’t. Still, he’d been wrong before, and any one of those explanations would have accounted for Harvey taking his own life.

Except he hadn’t taken his own life.

A less skilled investigator might not have known that, of course. A less skilled detective, someone who would be investigating a death in the country for example, might have missed it completely. But Frank saw it at once, the first clue that didn’t fit. The rope mark on Harvey’s throat. The rope mark that went straight around his neck, the way it would if someone came up behind him and put a garrote around it and twisted and twisted until he was dead. The rope from which he was hanging would have left a completely different mark at a completely different angle, and Frank was willing to bet that when he cut Harvey down, he would discover no mark at all underneath it, because Harvey had already been dead when he’d been hoisted up over that beam. And when he turned the stool upright and set it beneath Harvey’s feet, he was certain of it, because there was a good six inches between Harvey’s dangling toes and the stool he had supposedly stood on when he put the noose around his neck.

Frank spent most of the next hour summoning the other servants, questioning them about what they had seen and heard, and sending someone to fetch the local police, such as they were. Frank figured his own investigation would be the deciding factor in the case, since the local authorities might have never encountered a murder, so he made it as thorough as he could. None of the servants had seen or heard anything untoward, but one of the gardeners had noticed a young man riding by earlier in the day. Why he thought it was a young man he couldn’t rightly say, except that was the impression he got. All he could really be certain of was that it was a man. Since Frank had already decided Harvey’s killer was a man, this was hardly startling news.

When he’d finished with the servants and laid Harvey’s body out decently, Frank remembered his original reason for wanting to see the groom in the first place. He could no longer question Harvey about Alicia VanDamm’s diary, but he could at least search the man’s room to see if his theory was true.

Harvey slept in a room adjacent to the stable. It was remarkably neat, just as the stables themselves. Harvey’s meager possessions were hung and stacked and stored, each in its proper place, and his bed was tightly made, blankets tucked just so. Searching the place was the work of a few minutes, since the furnishings were so sparse. And just as Frank had suspected, Harvey hadn’t been very imaginative about selecting a hiding place. A loose floorboard underneath the bed came up when Frank pried it with his pocket knife, and beneath it he found the book that Sylvester Mattingly had hired Ham Fisher to find.

It was a slender volume, bound in red leather with gilt edges. Frank only had time to open it and recognize the girlish penmanship inside when he heard the local police arriving outside. He hastily slipped the book into his coat pocket and went out to meet them.

WHEN SHE STEPPED out of her mother’s house onto Fifty-Seventh Street, Sarah was surprised to see how late it was. She’d wasted most of the afternoon taking tea with her mother’s friends, and then she’d spent the rest of it salving old wounds with her mother. At least she finally felt at peace with one of her parents. She hadn’t been able to ease her mother’s grief at Maggie’s death, but they’d been able to share it for the first time without recriminations, something they’d never done before.

If she felt better about her own family’s relationships, she was more confused than ever about the VanDamms’. Sarah had known instinctively that her mother would be able to understand Francisca VanDamm. They had been born and bred in the same world, so their values and beliefs would be similar. What Sarah hadn’t counted on was having her mother suggest such a horrible possibility for Alicia’s existence.

As she reached the corner, Sarah looked for oncoming traffic, and only then did she notice how dark the sky had become, much darker than it should have been for this time of day. As she marveled, she heard the rumble of distant thunder. A storm was brewing off the ocean. Mrs. Elsworth had been right, and here was Sarah, on the other end of town with no umbrella and an even bigger mystery to solve than she’d had this morning.

She thought of Francisca VanDamm and wondered if going back to question her again would be a waste of time. Most likely, especially because she probably wouldn’t admit Sarah again. The midwife in her had served the woman’s purpose in giving Mrs. VanDamm medical advice, so what possible interest could she have in seeing her again?

But someone else in that house also knew what had happened sixteen years ago and how Alicia had come to be born. And that person probably also knew how Alicia herself had come to be in the same situation, the bastard child sent away to the country to bear her own bastard child in secret. Sarah was sure that if she could just find out how all of this had happened, she would know who had killed Alicia and why.

As thunder rumbled overhead, Sarah turned her steps up Fifth Avenue, back to the VanDamms’s town house.

FRANK WAITED ON the train station platform while the well-dressed passengers from the city disembarked. They carried newspapers and umbrellas and looked around for the carriages that were to meet them. Not many people were returning to the city at this time of day, so Frank had a car practically to himself, except for a couple of ragged, barefoot boys.

“Candy, mister?” one of them asked, offering him an unappetizing bit of sweet. The boys boarded the train in the city, usually sneaking on without paying the fare, and sold candy to the wealthy men traveling to their homes in the country.

Ordinarily, Frank would have refused. These boys were the worst guttersnipes, homeless ruffians who were always in trouble with the law. Frank certainly had no reason to show one of them a kindness. And he had absolutely no intention of eating anything they sold.

But then he looked into the boy’s eyes, something he never allowed himself to do, and he saw the vacant hopelessness of a child abandoned by his family and tossed away like so much rubbish. Alicia VanDamm’s diary