In novels, the heroine has never truly done anything wrong; in novels, heroines languish in their chamber indefinitely, sipping spring water. By eight, as Lennart Falk began to thump into Irina again, Dulcy had found and eaten all five crackers she’d stowed in her bag, as well as some pistachios left from the Butte trip. She cracked the door and smelled roast beef and sugar and shrill perfume, not the best mix.
She shut the hall door quietly. Someone outside was making crooning noises, calling out, but the wind warbled the sound. The heat was pounding out, Eugenia catering to the nitwit again, and when she heard the crooning again, something very close to Maria , Dulcy lifted the window. A group looked back up at her, and Margaret gave an embarrassed wave.
“Rapunzel,” said Lewis. “Take the stairs.”
???
She should not have done it—this behavior was not bereaved—but the whole town seemed to be out, and no one would notice her. Within an hour, after whiskey cocktails at the Albemarle, she was tipsy enough to drop fully into the role of a worldly widow and admit what she’d heard in the hotel. Samuel covered his face, but one eye drooped. Margaret blushed, but Lewis only shrugged. “I imagine he needed to wind down,” he said, and explained that the photo Lennart Falk carried looked nothing like the bloated face of this dark-haired woman—a different nose, different cheekbones, different neck—
“Hard to tell about the eyes,” said Samuel.
“Stop it,” said Rex. He dropped his head.
—and Falk had been sick, though there was already vomit in the Hruza’s bucket. There was no matching the photo, but the girl Falk sought had broken a leg as a child, and Gerry sent a summons to James Macalester, and the doctor sent a summons back: his machine was not portable, whereas this body had been in constant motion for weeks. Gerry decreed that they could dispense with the coffin or the hearse, and he had his men use a delivery cart for the three-block trip from Hruza’s to the hospital, and so the town was treated to billowing sheets (the wind, again) and dead blue feet.
The hospital was a Victorian labyrinth. Macalester kept specimens of amputations, growths, and fetuses, and Falk was sick to his stomach again. In the lull before the beginning of the long green crackle of the machine, while Macalester tinkered with the equipment, Gerry and his men made more bad jokes. The body was rolled into position (or part of the body: the woman had been sliced in half), and Hubie Fenoways did something and said something that made Falk retch one more time and swing at him.
It took an hour for the image to resolve. Hubie left, and Samuel and Lewis took Falk and Rex out for another drink. This body’s legs had never been broken. Macalester had heard what Hubie had done, and Hubie would be fired, dead mother or no. Gerry couldn’t prevent it.
“But what do you mean?” asked Margaret. “What did Hubert Fenoways do?”
The men looked away, and Dulcy started to go hot at the hairline. Rex, who had been sick, too, buried his face in his hands, so that only his floppy forelock stuck out. Lewis finished his glass of water and pulled a notebook and a pen out of his pocket. He drew the outline of a woman, and then he drew slashes across the body.
“This was how the body was cut up by the train or by a man,” said Lewis. “This is where Mr. Falk had been told to check for a broken leg. And this is where Hubie put his fingers.”
Dulcy scraped a speechless Margaret off the bench and pushed her toward the door. “Who did he think she was?”
“Wait for us, Maria,” said Lewis, pulling out his wallet. “Don’t do a runner.”
“Leda Remfrey,” said Samuel. “You might have read about her back in January.”
“No,” said Dulcy. “I probably wasn’t here yet, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Sorry,” said Samuel. “Of course. The father had been a suicide, and the daughter might have run, might have jumped—”
“Jumped,” said Lewis, dropping coins on the table. “Her fiancé was a renowned prick, the kind of man any sensible woman would escape.”
No one had apparently ever said prick in front of Margaret, who buckled again. “I’ve been told she poisoned her father and stole one hundred thousand dollars,” said Rex.
This came out in an elided blur. Rex tilted, and his pomaded head left an oil stain on the wallpaper. “Jumped,” said Lewis again. “The father was an eccentric in business with the fiancé, a newspaper man named Maslingen; the father came out of a window at the Butler in Seattle. He’d lost some money, but he didn’t bother sticking around to spend it, so perhaps it really was lost. There’s no evidence the daughter knew, either. Jumped.”
“What about the poison rumor?”
“I heard she saw him fall,” said Samuel. “So it does seem redundant. And I heard it was more money, but who knows? Everyone lies.”
“I’m completely fuddled,” said Lewis. “I need to sleep.”
At the Elite, Margaret curled up in a lobby chair, and Samuel promised to walk her home. They’d dragged Rex this far, and Samuel argued with Lewis: they couldn’t physically get him home, but they couldn’t in good conscience expose him to his mother’s wrath. As they started in on Irving—couldn’t he tuck Rex into a staff bunk?—Dulcy made for the stairs. She was dizzy, but some sense of self-preservation was intact, and she turned on the landing to see that Lewis was right behind her.
“Do I make you nervous?”
She grinned. “You know, you do.”
Samuel was calling for him. “I’ll give you a head start,” said Lewis.
Dulcy laughed and ran up, then slowed. The curtains at the end of the hall billowed away from Leonora Randall’s open door—Miss Randall, who loved her privacy and her heat. Dulcy walked slowly down and found that the curtains gusted inside the room, too, every window open over a mess. Leonora had three trunks—she’d traveled heavy, in the parlance of Irving—and the staff had muttered when she’d refused to have her things put away or the trunks removed, which made her rooms cluttered and hard to clean. Now someone had opened all three, and every drawer, shredded the upholstery, tossed all of it into a mound in the center of the room with the torn pages of the violet-laden scrapbook.