I stared out the window at the empty dark. The invisible countryside sped by me. I told myself to stop fixating on such things. After all, I doubted the other operatives thought of themselves this way. I couldn’t imagine someone like Jack Mortenson, grim and resolute, letting even a trace of remorse for the things he’d done cloud his mind. But I was not Jack Mortenson, nor was I meant to be.
I wondered, not for the first time, whether my experience as an investigator had changed me or whether this was the woman I truly was. All my life, I’d done what my parents told me to do, up to and including my disastrous marriage. I’d thought myself a good girl then, quiet and dutiful, always ready to obey. Perhaps I was disguised even from myself.
The woman I’d become since Pinkerton hired me—excited by subterfuge, capable of any and all lies, slipping into and out of identities like dresses—was she the real me?
Had I been her all along, and the good girl I thought myself the real disguise?
Chapter Twelve
A Little Life
Mere hours after I returned from Chicago, I found my position so changed, I felt I was in a dream. From my solo ride of anguish and confusion, I went to the most extraordinary spectacle: a Christmas party at Allan Pinkerton’s house.
I had only ever seen the outside of the boss’s house, and that only a few times. He was not a man who advocated mixing pleasure and business, for obvious reasons. I remembered, years ago now, tailing him home while I practiced my surveillance skills. He had returned all three nights to this tidy clapboard house on Randolph. Now, I suspected he had known of the surveillance and simply refrained from mentioning it to me out of politeness. I wondered what he thought of me, then and now. He was not a man given to great displays in my experience.
When I entered, the party was in full swing. I took the measure of the room quickly and located the boss surrounded by smaller figures. Two boys and two girls.
His children. There was one girl in her teens, looking somber but excited, and two slightly younger boys, who seemed antsy and uninterested in the goings-on. Then there was a much smaller girl, pink-cheeked to match her pink dress, flounced and ruffled within an inch of her life.
I had never thought of Pinkerton as a father, though I knew he had a family. I knew also, from office gossip, that there had been a handful of tragedies and not all of his children had survived to the present day. But there was never any reason for him to talk about them, either the living ones or the dead. After all, I was the one who was tested when we played truth or lie; he never told me stories in return, and so I knew next to nothing about him. Strange, considering he was probably the person who knew me best in all the world.
Then the music began. It was inexpressibly odd to hear a reel being played while looking at the faces of men I’d only seen acting criminal, not to mention the petite women and round-cheeked children scampering about among them. The fiddle soared, the man with the bow sawing away with great vigor, and for a while, I only watched his face. The music faded away. His expression told the tale. Perhaps that was another skill I could add to my repertoire, this silent pantomime, this kind of energy.
Then I let my gaze slide away from the fiddle player, surveying the room, and what I saw astounded me.
Allan Pinkerton had grasped the hands of his smallest daughter, the pink one, and was scampering in circles in an uneven, galloping gait. You could have knocked me down with a feather.
It put a smile on my face. So he was a man after all and not a machine for solving crimes. Perhaps we could all be like that: intellects in real bodies, living our lives as full people. Perhaps there was hope for me after all.
A familiar voice behind me said, “He’ll always be theirs, you know.”
Familiar—and unwelcome. I knew who it was without turning. “I don’t know what you mean, Mortenson.”
“You know it very well, Kate,” he said. He stood at my left shoulder, and when I didn’t turn to look at him, he took two steps to face me, head-on.
Not moving, I corrected him. “Mrs. Warne.”
“Was there ever really a Mr. Warne? Can it be proven? Or is it a fig leaf to conceal your lifelong solitude?”
There was a small reddish stain on his starched white collar, just to the left of center, and I fixed my gaze on it. Angry and exhausted, I wanted so badly to tell him the entire truth about Charlie, about how our marriage started and how it ended. A tale of blood and wrongdoing. Maybe that would silence his taunts. But I did my best to emulate Mrs. Borowski, her even temperament, and the calmer soul within me prevailed. If I told, the truth would only become a cudgel he could use against me. The best I could do was give him nothing.
Instead, I said, “I assure you, I’m a true and happy widow.”
He was dogged. “And were you a happy wife?”
“Happier than yours, I’m sure,” I said. In truth, I knew he was not married, nor had he ever been. But the silence that greeted my rejoinder suggested I’d struck home.
At that moment, Graham DeForest swept to my rescue in a festive moss-green frock coat and contrasting burgundy vest, a cup of punch borne high through the air in each hand. He bowed and handed mine over, smiling broadly under his impeccable mustache.
“Welcome back!” he cried. “Just in?”
“Just.”
“Wouldn’t be a shindy without you.”
I inclined my head royally. “My pleasure, kind sir.”
He stepped back and inspected me, nodding in approval. I was wearing the only dress in my closet that wasn’t wrinkled and musty from disuse, a striped mint-green taffeta with pagoda sleeves.
Then he looked at our cups and at Mortenson—just seeming to notice him now, though of course, he wasn’t—and said, “Sorry, Jack, didn’t think to get you one.”
“I don’t drink spirits.”