I thought it would probably not be hard to get the truth from him when the time was right. He was an open and honest man, and I hated to think about how misled he was about my identity and my purpose in Springfield. We enjoyed each other’s company so greatly, during those many hours in the store, and I told myself no one was getting hurt. He had no wife; I had no husband. Our flirtation was only that.
Yet I found myself fantasizing, certainly too often, what it would be like for Miss Lincoln to enter into a relationship with Mr. Corwin. How we might sit in front of a fire, drinking warm wine, entertaining each other with outlandish stories. How one of us might reach for the other’s empty glass, set it out of the way, and then reach for the person who’d emptied it. I’d been a married woman, and I knew what a man and a woman did in the dark, but what I had not had with either Paul or Charlie was a romance, and I thirsted for one. I reached for Mr. Corwin countless times in my dreams. Some mornings, it was hard to look at him, knowing how his imagined figure and mine had twisted themselves up together while I slept. And one day, when his hand brushed mine as we both reached to close a display case and he turned crimson, stammering an apology, I knew the signs. He’d been imagining a romance with me—or the woman he thought me to be—as well.
My conversations with Mr. Corwin became more substantive, and one night, he insisted on buying my supper so we might continue talking at a nearby restaurant. We talked so long, the food grew cold on our plates. A few days later at the store, a lady with decidedly thick fingers asked Mr. Corwin to slip a particular ring onto my finger to see how it looked, and he did so cautiously, tentatively, and the air seemed so fraught with possibility, I thought I might burst.
In my next meeting with Lincoln, I shared what I knew about the Vincent and Bronson house accounts, and he set his chin against his fist thoughtfully.
“Bronson,” he said. “Could it be Mr. Martin, the assistant secretary, in another guise?”
“It could be. We have one way to find out.”
“And that is?”
“People tend toward the familiar,” I said. “Would you like to try your hand at clandestine operations?”
He cocked his head, curious.
“Find out their mother’s names. Vincent and Martin. Can you do it without arousing suspicion?”
“Yes.”
We made a plan to meet again in two days, and when the time came, he was so visibly eager, I knew at a glance that he had succeeded.
“Which one?” I said.
“Mr. Vincent. His mother, God rest her soul, was born Emmaline Bronson.”
“Good.”
“Is it enough to prove guilt?”
“No.” I folded my hands in my lap. “But we have a few possible ways forward.”
“Enlighten me.”
“We could confront Mr. Vincent now.”
“Or?”
“We could call in the police. Again, as you might guess, our evidence is slim. Mr. Vincent could claim that the money used to pay for the ladies’ gifts came from any old where, and we couldn’t prove otherwise.”
“So what do you propose?”
“Let me have a conversation or two, and I’m sure we can bring the matter to a head.”
“I trust we shall, Mrs. Warne.”
The only remaining question was whether to approach the mistress or the wife first and attempt to bring her in as a witness in exchange for a lesser sentence. I decided to start with the accountant’s mistress, one Hazel Everette. She was a petite young lady, not very tall at all, but always wearing heeled boots that brought her up to average height. We stood nearly eye to eye, though I had developed a habit of slouching a little in my shopgirl guise. She favored jewelry with a green stone to set off her auburn hair and over time had nearly cleaned the place out of jade and emeralds.
By this point, I had waited on her at the shop already four or five times. After so many weeks, Mr. Corwin had developed enough trust in me to let me watch the shop alone for short periods. On this occasion, he left us two while he walked out to purchase potpies for lunch—especially as I mentioned I was in the mood for the chicken pie from my favorite tearoom, and he’d be such a dear to bring one—so I had the chance to speak freely.
She couldn’t decide between three different sets of jade earbobs and, in the end, decided to take all three.
“A pretty penny,” I said, reaching under the counter for a few small boxes in which she could carry the jewelry away. “All on Mr. Bronson’s account?”
“Of course.”
“He certainly funds you generously.”
She laughed. “I’m worth it.”
“Is he a tycoon?”
“An accountant.”
We’d felt quite sure of the identity of the Bronson account’s real holder, but with this, the last scrap of doubt vanished. “Goodness, I wouldn’t have suspected! An accountant? I can’t imagine that his position pays him enough to afford all this.”
Matter-of-factly, she said, “No, it doesn’t.”
“Do you think he’s doing something untoward to get the money?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Her even, confident tone should have tipped me off, but I went ahead with my planned question. “And don’t you think that’s wrong?”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Whoever do you think gave him the idea?”
I was speechless. I think she took my shock as the silence of an impressed audience rather than an appalled one.
“He even tried to stop a few months back,” she said. “I told him if he did, I’d tell his company and the authorities and the world about what he’d been doing. He’s been even more generous since.”
So I did not enlist her, as I’d hoped, to testify against him. I reported the conversation to Lincoln and asked if he thought we should try again with the wife. He decided instead to confront Mr. Vincent directly, reasoning that a man guilty enough to yield to blackmail would likely collapse under direct questioning.