Читать книгу The Widow's Secret - Sara Mitchell - Страница 16

An hour later, by the time they left the streetcar to walk the last three blocks, they’d gobbled down three doughnuts each. Leaves swirled about their feet in a lazy shuffle, and in a burst of contentment Jocelyn waved enthusiastically to the driver of an ice-block delivery wagon as he passed by, causing Katya to roll her eyes.

Their innocuous outing had momentarily banished the ugly shadows that swirled around Jocelyn like the leaves; a lightness spread inside her heart until she had to squelch the giddy impulse to skip down the last block like a young girl.

The mailman met them as they reached the front porch.

“Afternoon, ladies. Mighty fine day for an outing. I have a letter here for you, Miz Tremayne. Y’all caught me just before I popped it into your box.” He handed the envelope to Jocelyn.

“Thank you, Mr. Hobbes,” she managed, giddiness transforming into a tangled mix of hope and dread. The letter might be from Operative MacKenzie. He was probably writing to tell her he’d been ordered to California or the Wyoming Territory. She glanced down and all the blood drained from her head.

“Have a doughnut,” she offered the mailman automatically, while the buzzing in her ears intensified so that she scarcely heard her own voice. “They’re fresh, from Bromm’s Bakery.”

“Why, thank you kindly, Miz Tremayne. Ma’am.” He nodded to Katya, then whistled his way down the walk.

Somehow Jocelyn managed to climb the porch steps and unlock the door. She could feel the weight of Katya’s curiosity pressing down on her shoulders; she dropped her cloak onto the hall tree, then wandered into the parlor, the envelope clenched in her hand.

The Honorable Augustus Brock, New York City.

Not Micah MacKenzie, but Chadwick’s uncle, his mother’s brother. Jocelyn’s last memory of Augustus Brock and his narcissistic wife, Portia, was the day of Chadwick’s funeral. Dressed in their hastily dyed mourning clothes, they’d glared at Jocelyn like two black ravens about to pick out her eyes. “He wouldn’t have been driven to commit such an abominable act of shame if you’d given him the child he longed for,” Augustus’s wife proclaimed loudly enough for the rest of the mourners to stiffen into appalled silence.

“Don’t know why Rupert agreed to let his son marry you in the first place,” her husband muttered, his complexion flushed above the high shirt collar. “Who would have thought it—all that brass in your hair and you turn out to be barren. Disgrace to the whole family.”

Jocelyn started violently when a hand brushed her arm, only then realizing that Katya was beside her, waving a piece of paper in front of her face. “Sorry.” She squeezed Katya’s hand, but after reading the words moved away, unable to bear even the loyal maid’s proximity. “It’s a letter from…some people I used to know. Be a dear, won’t you, and…and make us some tea?”

Satisfied to have a task, Katya nodded and hurried from the room. Jocelyn collapsed onto the sofa. Why now? She felt like a puppet whose master delighted in dangling her over a fire. One day, she thought, the flames would leap up and consume her.

Hurriedly, before she yielded to the urge to rip the letter unread into tiny pieces, she opened the envelope and withdrew two sheets of expensive vellum.

To our niece, beloved widow of Chadwick. No doubt this missive will come as a surprise after all these years. It has long been upon my heart, and Mrs. Brock’s, that the family treated you most shamefully in its disregard for your health and well-being after the death of your dear husband. It is with deep regret to know that, perhaps influenced in part by our regrettably Bourbonic conduct, you felt compelled to forsake his name.

Now there was a masterstroke of understatement for you. The entire Bingham clan, including the Brocks, had disowned Jocelyn before the gravediggers finished shoveling dirt over Chadwick’s coffin. One of the Brock cousins—she neither remembered nor cared which—had gone so far as to spit on her, claiming she was nothing but poor white trash, a pathetic creature whose hair and face had embarrassed Chadwick almost as much as her barrenness.

The letter crumpled in her hands. Jocelyn inhaled a shuddering breath, flexed her fingers and forced herself to read the rest of it.

After years of searching, at last we learned of your whereabouts. I thus most humbly beseech you to lay aside the acrimony you justifiably must feel, and to consider the following as an olive branch extended toward you—a gesture of our desire for reconciliation.

It is our wish for you to return to New York for an extended visit, with the express purpose of allowing this family to atone for our shameful neglect. Time has given a far more charitable heart to myself and Mrs. Brock; I plead with you to consider this invitation as one made in utter sincerity. The past, like your beloved husband, is beyond our reach. We must fix our hearts and minds upon hope of a brighter future for us all, in which we can come to better know our dear niece. Even as I write, rooms are being readied for your arrival. Enclosed, as further proof of our goodwill, please find two one-way tickets in our private Pullman, the Aurora (as you may remember) for you and an appropriate chaperone.

Your humble servant and contrite uncle-in-law, Augustus Brock.

When Katya tiptoed in with a tray some time later, she found Jocelyn sitting on the edge of the sofa, bowed at the waist with her face in her hands, the wrinkled vellum sheets lying faceup on the floor.

Micah returned to Richmond a day after the clear, cool autumn days of the past week blew into the Atlantic, driven out by another ill-tempered hot spell from the south. Indifferent to its cloying humidity, he rented a buggy from the livery stable and drove himself directly to the Third District Police Station.

“Operative MacKenzie! ’Bout time you brought your ugly self back to help us poor clods of the Richmond Police.” George Firth, acting sergeant, greeted him with a congenial handshake—and the unpleasant news that “Your little redheaded widow’s got more trouble than a cemetery’s got head-stones.”

“What’s happened? Has she been harmed? Why didn’t someone notify me?”

The sergeant threw back his head and guffawed. “I’ll be…they wuz right, about you and Miz Tremayne. And here I am telling ’em you’re just a high-falutin’ government man, keeping his sticky fingers in our business.”

Heat crept up Micah’s face. He felt like a rube, the target of public ridicule, but he counted to thirty and waited until the other man’s coarse jesting finally wound down. “I’ve been in constant touch with your chief, the Detective Bureau and the mayor, concerning Mr. Hepplewhite’s murder and its possible connection with my case. Mrs. Tremayne is part of that investigation,” he stated evenly. “Now, over the past few weeks I spent three days locked in an airless room, examining approximately $100,000 in fraudulent two-and five-dollar bills, not to mention over $20,000 in spurious coinage. Less than twelve hours later, I caught a midnight train heading west, and I’ve been on the road going on ten days now. I came here straight from the train station, I haven’t had a decent meal or a bath in—” he glanced at the large round clock on the wall across the room “—almost forty hours. So when I ask if Mrs. Tremayne is all right, you might want to let me know—at once.”

“Oh-ho, tetchy today, eh? Fair enough. Now that you mention it, you do look frayed a bit around the edges. Here—Tenner! Fetch Sergeant Whitlock. We got our own gen-yoo-ine agent from the Treasury Department back in town. Fill him in, and let’s watch how fast he hightails it over to the widow Tremayne’s.”

Micah tied the livery horse to a post three houses down from Jocelyn’s home, then checked the time. Seventeen minutes. He’d driven the buggy with imprudent haste through a maze of narrow streets, dodged two streetcars, an oncoming freight train, and clipped the wheel on a curb when he took a corner too fast on the edge of Monroe Park. He’d planned to return to Richmond a week earlier, but duty, not to mention Chief Hazen, bound him with chains he could not afford to break. Sighing, he thrust the watch back in his pocket. Ah, yes. Duty.

Katya’s round face lit up like a harvest moon when she opened the door. But her gestures spoke of urgency as she bustled him into the front parlor.

“Hello, Katya. You’re looking fine.” When the maid rolled her eyes, Micah smiled a little. “It’s all right, I came from the police station. I know about the break-in. Is she home?” he asked, glancing around the room, noticing the absence of a pair of green glass paperweights with flower etchings that had been displayed on the doily-covered table next to the window. A colorful urn in the foyer that had boasted several peacock feathers was also gone.

He started to say something else, but the words drained out of his head when Jocelyn appeared between the fringed draperies lining the entrance to the parlor. “Mrs. Tremayne.”

“Operative MacKenzie.”

She hovered, seemingly uncertain about whether to enter, or perhaps flee up the staircase. Her reception was so contrary to Micah’s expectations that for a moment he floundered in his own swamp of indecision. Then he looked more closely into her eyes and realized that her lack of warmth stemmed from causes other than himself. “I believe we agreed that ‘Mister’ is less official-sounding. What’s happened, besides your home being vandalized?”

“Oh…I’d forgotten. How did you know?”

With a wry look, he gestured to his wrinkled, travel-worn attire. “I went from the train station to the police station to your house as fast as I could. I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. Katya’s back to looking anxious, and you’re looking—” he reeled in the words dancing indiscriminately on his tongue “—subdued,” he finished, and behind him Katya stomped the floor.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Jocelyn said, waving a limp hand at her maid. “There’s nobody else I can ask….”

Micah waited, but when she didn’t elaborate, and a backward glance at the maid revealed her frantically writing in her tablet, he went with instinct. “Here.” He placed his hand under her elbow, exulting in the feel of her despite the alarming fragility that hovered all around her. “Come and sit down. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Anywhere you like.” He sat her down on one end of the luxurious sofa, and commandeered the other end for himself. “Perhaps…what happened the other night? The police report indicated that you weren’t home, so the only damage was to some of your possessions.” And he thanked God for it, though not aloud.

Jocelyn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about that, not right now.”