He finally looked up politely. “Of course. It would be my pleasure.” A benign smile appeared on his face. Poor Andrew. It was a strain to be associating with her déclassé friends. What a sport he was.
Outside, one of the Cutters’ motorcars stood idling by the curb. The driver opened the back door, and Birdie scuttled in, followed by Andrew. Before the driver shut the door, Allene mouthed “Thank you” to Andrew, who rolled his eyes at her.
As soon as the door shut, Allene all but galloped inside to the library.
With Birdie and Jasper gone, she felt herself wanting to tie herself in any way she could to last evening, even if it meant embracing the most morbid of thoughts. She would allow death to be a constant companion for as long as necessary.
Inside the library, books filled the oak shelves floor to ceiling. She took to the rolling ladder to access the top shelf of books, which were hers alone. She pulled out a thick leather tome and nestled it against her bosom as she descended the ladder one handed.
At the library desk, she ran her fingers over the embossed cover.
The Organic Chemistry of Nitrogen
by Nevil Vincent Sidgwick
She flipped with easy familiarity to the page she wanted. Chapter nine, “Cyanogen Compounds.”
She sighed and let her fingertip run over the chemical formula for cyanide. By God, it was a thing of beauty and simplicity. One nitrogen and one carbon atom married together with three bonds. Not one, not two. Cyanide demanded a trifecta of irresistible gravities. Such a thing of dark beauty created from the basic matter of life present in all living creatures.
Her mother hadn’t understood why Allene loved this book so, even though the attraction was her mother’s fault. Allene was named after her maternal grandmother, but it was only at an evening party when she was a girl of eight that she had understood her namesake.
A wizened old German professor had been perusing the books in Father’s library, brandy clutched in one arthritic hand. Elsewhere in the house, there were conversations over politics and vapid discussions on the business of railroads. Boredom had driven Allene to her safe place, but the old man clearly had the same intentions. He discovered her hiding beneath the library table when he nearly stepped on her fingertips. She was reading a book of nursery rhymes.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I am Professor Hoffman. What is your name?”
The questions were gently asked, but there were angles and points to his German accent that made her shrink deeper under the table, gathering her blue faille dress around her stockinged ankles.
“My name is Allene,” she finally whispered.
“Allene, eh? Your name comes from chemistry. And I am a chemist, so we are already good friends. Come, I will show you.”
He had spoken without fear—unlike the Germans around the city today, who might be dragged away by the American Protective League for their unpatriotic names and accents. Allene had been too curious to stay hidden. He pulled a stub of a pencil from his coat pocket and drew on a sheet of paper taken from her father’s study.
“One carbon atom bound to two others, each with a double bond. That is you, Allene. You are a pretty thing in a chemist’s world.”
The drawing resembled an angular butterfly. After that party, she had learned everything she could about chemistry, and then in secret once her father had announced that it was unwomanly to study the sciences. He didn’t want to raise a Marie Curie in the Cutter family. That was a decidedly Polish thing to do.
So when Allene now looked with longing over her chemistry book, she paused over words like tautomeric and aromatic diamines and pyridinium. Like jewels, there were rings and chains, and compounds broken and made anew with heat and pressure. It was a fairy dance of creation and destruction, wooing her.
She licked her lips. Cyanide. She knew little of its effect, only that it was a poison. But she knew precisely where cyanide was kept in the house. She would make a mental list of everyone who had access to it.
Which included herself, of course.
Allene was closing the book hastily when a rectangle of paper fluttered out from beneath the cover and fell in gentle arcs to the floor. She picked it up, frowning. She didn’t recall putting any notes in this book. The paper was folded thrice, and she unfolded it only to find two words written in beautiful penmanship:
You’re welcome.
What on earth did it mean?
CHAPTER 5
Jasper woke up in his room, the faint flavor of last night’s champagne rancid on his tongue. He remembered the car and the wordless driver dropping him off in front of his tenement, all too happy to speed away from the Bowery.
His head pounded.
No—a fist pounded. On the door.
“Wake up! It’s already seven o’clock, boy. You’ll be late for work.”
Jasper turned and groaned. Morning light squeezed around the edges of the curtains, weaker than whey but still stinging his eyes. Several piles of textbooks lay next to his floor mattress, acting as a nightstand. He’d accidentally toppled them to the floor when he flipped over on his bed. He cursed. Wasn’t it a Sunday?
Oh, right. He worked on Sundays, rest be damned. His uncle pounded again. Jasper growled, “I’m up, I’m up.”
He pulled on his trousers and rinsed the sleep from his face in the diminutive bathroom. Last night. Good God, last night. There was the scent of Allene’s perfume and the look of gladness in her eyes that she couldn’t hide when she saw him. Birdie and all her astounding beauty by his side; jealous glances from the gents at the party. Lounging in Allene’s room like they were careless children pretending to be older than they were.
But other thoughts flitted through his awakening mind as well: Florence’s broken body; the scent of almonds; the flat, shocked looks on Allene’s and Birdie’s faces at the thought of murder.
What in the deuce happened last night?
Florence Waxworth was dead as dead. Right now, she’d be lying in the morgue at Bellevue. In the pathology building. The very building he was assigned to clean on Sundays.
Lord help him.
He peered down the hallway. The scrolled wallpaper was coming down from the ceiling, as if some unseen hand were dog-earing it bit by bit. The strong scent of paint thinner and whiskey permeated the air and worsened his nausea. Copies of the Times lay on the floor, where Jasper had dropped them after scanning them with dread, anxiously awaiting General Crowder’s announcement of the next draft. Photographs of Oscar and their parents rested facedown on the bureau after he’d bumped them with an errant elbow and never bothered to right them.