Then the pressure vanished. A small, sweet miracle. The world came back. I sucked in air, and it hissed between my teeth. My forehead felt wet. I tried to rise or speak up. My body wouldn’t obey.
A hand, gentle and insistent, settled on my shoulder. “Rest,” came a voice—Jay Harrington’s—and I wondered whether he was speaking to me or to Sarah or to both of us.
Chapter Ten
Truth
By the time two policemen in uniform arrived, I felt well enough to stand, though the right side of my head was still bleeding, and Pinkerton kept telling me to sit down. I refused and insisted on hearing Wilder’s confession.
He quickly named his three accomplices and detailed their wrongdoing. As we thought, they had only meant to find out from her where her husband’s money was hidden or to hold her for ransom if she would not tell. He had simply crammed the fabric meant to muffle her cries too far down her throat. He had no experience in this, after all. Once she went silent and he removed the gag to check her, it was already too late, and there was no saving her. At least he had the decency to cry while he told us how they’d killed her from sheer stupidity. I knew it wouldn’t help Jay Harrington to know the details, nor did it help me. But at least justice would be done. He had pretended to hang her to cover the crime; now, he would hang in earnest.
Three days later, my head still buzzing from time to time, I went to Sarah Harrington’s funeral. She had been a much-loved woman, and there was a large crowd of crows to lose myself in. She had sisters, cousins, friends, all there to lament her untimely passing, seeking comfort in the mourning crowd. Tears and howls abounded. I didn’t cry, but the melancholy that had descended upon me when I saw her dead body only deepened as I saw her laid to rest.
Having stepped into Sarah’s life, however briefly, I felt a kinship with her. I knew it wasn’t possible that she could know that we had gotten justice for her, but I hoped for it anyway. Her killer had been found. He would pay with his life for hers. I wondered whether his death would balance the scales in some way. I didn’t feel bad about the part I’d played in leading to Wilder’s death; he deserved the punishment, and I had no doubt he would have killed me too, if he’d had the chance, if it would have saved him.
After the service, as the dead woman’s real friends and family sought comfort in one another’s familiar company, I could no longer pretend I belonged. I wasn’t sure where to go, so I headed back to the office. It was a long walk, but I had nowhere else to be.
When I climbed the stairs and opened the door to the inner office, Pinkerton sat there in a small puddle of light from the desk lamp, bent over his ever-present ledger.
“Welcome,” he said. “Talk a while?”
“Sure.”
My bones seemed to hum with fatigue, and my mind wouldn’t stop racing. When Pinkerton brought out the bottle of whiskey, I didn’t protest. I’d never liked the taste of whiskey to start with, and I hadn’t gotten used to it. The burn didn’t agree with me. But I liked the sleepy feeling in my limbs afterward, and the burn I dealt with. It felt like a kind of penance. Perhaps, I told myself, I should feel penitent.
Pinkerton poured me a glass.
“One for yourself too,” I said.
“Don’t care for the stuff. But you need it. Drink up.”
We sat in silence a while. I wasn’t wearing the dead woman’s dress anymore, but a grateful Jay Harrington had donated several of her gowns to our costume closet, not wanting anything in the house to remind him of her. I could see them from where I sat. I had nothing to say really. But I enjoyed being in the company of one of the few people in the world who understood how I was feeling in that moment and why. Often, that had to be enough.
I wasn’t surprised when he eventually broke the silence, only by how he chose to do it.
“Lie to me,” said Pinkerton.
So we were to play a game. I wasted no time beating around the bush or questioning his motives. I said, swallowing hard, “I have no regrets.”
“Lie. So, then, what is your biggest regret?”
“Charlie.”
“In what way?”
“I never should have married him. My parents forced me to.”
“Aren’t you innocent, then? Since you were forced?”
“I could have found a way,” I said. “There are always choices. I could have run away. Spat in his face. Starved myself. Jumped in the river. Anything.”
“Given up the baby?”
A lead weight plunged from my throat to my belly.
“Baby?”
“Oh, Warne,” he said with not a little sadness. “I knew from the beginning you were leaving something out. Didn’t take a genius. There are many reasons a woman might want a husband but only one reason she might need one.”
“There was no baby.”
“Lie.”
“There wasn’t,” I said, “in the end.”
I tilted the liquid in the glass, trying to center myself, trying to focus. My voice was softer as I confessed, “Not a live one, anyhow.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Me too,” I said simply.
“Not Charlie’s, then?”
“No,” I said. “A young man named Paul. A good friend.”
Even after all this time, I could see Paul’s face clearly in my mind. A wry smile, a noble nose, eyes that danced with warmth. I’d trusted him and no one before or since. Six months we’d known each other, at the theater in St. Louis. A stagehand and an actor’s daughter. Six months, and that was all.
“You don’t strike me as the type to get carried away in the moment, even at a young age.”
“He was consumptive,” I said. “A lunger.”
He nodded. “So you knew you’d lose him.”
“Yes. He knew he’d die of it. I wanted him to be happy for a moment. He was. We both were.”
He lowered his head as he spoke, and I couldn’t read the emotion. Disapproval? Wry humor? Titillation? “So your favor to him was to surrender your womanly virtue?”
“As I told you when you hired me,” I said, “someone has to be first.”