Oh Danny Boy (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #5)

As I walked home along Seventh Street, I sensed that I was being followed. I turned around, but saw nothing but housewives returning home with their shopping, children playing, fathers coming home from work. But the feeling didn’t go away until I reached the busy area of the university with its noisy throngs of students. I crossed Washington Square and looked back at the entrance to Patchin Place before I walked up to my front door and let myself in.

I had scarcely sat down at my kitchen table when there was a thunderous knock at my front door that set my heart racing again.

“Who is it?” I called.

“Who else would it be?” came Sid’s voice.

I opened the door and saw them both standing there, beaming at me.

“Why the secrecy?” Sid asked.

“Because I thought I was being followed home,” I said. “No matter. My vivid Irish imagination, I expect.”

“Come over to us for dinner,” Gus said. “Then we can keep an eye out for suspicious individuals skulking in the alley. We’re getting really good at it, Molly. We’re turning out to be brilliant detectives.”

“You’ll never guess where we’ve been today,” Sid burst out as she took my hand and led me out of my house. “Go on. Ask us.”

“Where have you been today?” I asked, with sinking heart.

“To Newport, Rhode Island, to track down the mysterious young man who had a pash on Letitia Blackwell.”

“You went all the way to Rhode Island?”

“It wasn’t that far. A couple of hours by train,” Sid said. “And a pleasant journey at that along the ocean.”

“And you managed to locate the young man?”

Sid pushed open their front door and dragged me inside. “Absolutely,” she said. “Gus was amazing. She knows everybody, you know. We only had to stroll along the seafront for five minutes before she had located an old friend from Boston. Five minutes after that we had heard all the gossip about what was going on in each of the cottages.”

“Cottages?” I asked, confused.

Sid laughed. “That’s what they call them—their cottages. The fact that all the houses have at least twenty-five bedrooms doesn’t strike them as absurd. Newport is where the rich and famous spend their summers.”

We went through the kitchen and out to the conservatory at the back. There was a jug of lemonade and glasses waiting on the wicker table. Sid motioned me to sit.

“So what about the boy you were hunting? Don’t tell me he’s among the rich and famous?” I asked, as she handed me a glass of lemonade.

Gus looked pleased with herself. “Not a Vanderbilt, but the house is pretty impressive, wouldn’t you say, Sid?”

“Definitely not a pauper,” Sid agreed. “And his mother actually went to finishing school with Gus’s mother, so of course we were invited in for lunch.”

“And you met him?”

“No, because apparently he’s volunteering at a camp for poor city children out on a lake somewhere. His name is Harold Robertson, by the way. He’s the despair of his industrialist father because he shows no interest in going into the family business and only wants to do good. He’s studying divinity and works among the poor in his spare time. She showed us a picture of him—chubby and adorable, like an overgrown choirboy.”

“Did you find out anything about Letitia?”

Gus nodded. “He had told his mother about this wonderful girl who came to help out at the settlement house, and he said what a pity it was that she was engaged to someone else because she’d be the sort of wife a minister should have.”

“But the mother had never met her,” Sid added. “She said he arrived home quite disgruntled on the day when Letitia must have gone missing. He said they were supposed to go out to Coney Island together to plan the children’s outing for the next day, but Letitia never showed up.”

“And he’s now at a camp by a lake for the summer?” I asked.

“So we gather,” Sid said.

“Far from New York?”

“In the wilds, I believe,” Gus said. “Harold’s mother said it was horribly primitive, and she couldn’t understand what made him do it as she’d brought him up to expect the best.”

“Why do you ask, Molly?” Sid asked, with her usual great perception.

“Because Letitia is not the first girl to disappear after a planned trip to Coney Island. I know of another girl who went there to meet a boy and never came back.”

“You don’t think—you can’t possibly think that Harold Robertson…” Gus exclaimed.

“I’ve never met Harold Robertson, so I don’t know what to believe. I’m trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle, and so far I’ve remarkably few pieces. Now I have a name, a missing girl, and a planned trip to Coney Island. They all fit very nicely.”

“So you think he could have lured Letitia to Coney Island and then what? Killed her? Hid the body?” Sid was looking at me, her expression half horror, half excitement.

“Possibly not hid the body,” I said.