A Deadly Affection (13 page)

A wealthy clientele. I looked back up at the doctor's sketch. Hauptfuhrer's well-to-do patients could afford to pay for whatever their hearts desired—including, it occurred to me, a newborn child. I remembered the gossip years ago when a close friend of my mother's announced after years of barren marriage that she was pregnant. People had hinted at an extramarital affair, but while I was drawing on the floor one night behind the sitting room sofa, I'd heard my mother confide to my father that the woman wasn't pregnant at all—she was only pretending to be, intending to take her maid's unborn child as her own. Four months later, the friend departed to Europe for the remainder of her “confinement,” taking her lady's maid with her. In the fall, she returned with the babe in her arms and a wet nurse in place of the maid.

There were undoubtedly other women of means who were unable to conceive. Women who could pay handsomely for a discrete adoption. Perhaps the doctor hadn't been so selfless after all. Perhaps he'd been using his connections to supply illegitimate babies to society women who were ashamed of their infertility and wanted to avoid the stigma that would accompany a baby of unknown pedigree, earning himself a substantial income on the side. In which case, the list of potential murder suspects would include not only the women on the left side of the doctor's list, but on the right side as well.

For the doctor's rich clients would have expected absolute secrecy for their money; if he threatened to disclose their children's identities for any reason—whether at the request of a remorseful birth mother, for a medical intervention, or even in an attempt to extort more money—one of them might have taken steps to silence him. Since Hauptfuhrer's baby transfers had presumably never been approved in court at a public hearing, they would have no legal force and likely would not hold up should a birth mother seek to reclaim her child—meaning that disclosure might even cause an adoptive family to lose a beloved son or daughter. Surely, that was motivation enough to commit murder.

It seemed a real enough possibility. But again, without a key to the names, I didn't know how to test it. I was staring down at the newspaper, agonizing over how to unlock the mystery of the list, when the simple answer occurred to me: the newspaper society pages. If Hauptfuhrer's adoption clients were the sort of people I suspected they were, they would almost certainly have published birth announcements, in which case determining the identity of the adopting families—including the one who had taken Eliza's baby—might be as simple as checking back issues of the
New York Times
.

I pulled the crumpled list from my waistband. All I had to do was compare the initials in the third column with those of parents who'd announced a birth around the same dates. If I could find enough matches to defeat an assertion of coincidence, I'd have something solid to show Maloney. I was wide-awake now, vibrating with excitement. I couldn't wait to test my hypothesis. Unfortunately, the library didn't open for another eleven hours. I threw a log on the fire, returned to the chair, and bounced back up again. Crossing to the bookshelves, I ran my finger along the titles, looking for something to distract me. I finally selected a book on Robert Scott's discovery expedition into Antarctica and carried it back to the chair.

The minutiae of polar expedition preparation proved to be a powerful soporific, and a half hour later, I had closed the book and laid my head back against the armchair. As disjointed images flitted through my mind, dredged up by the events of the day, I found myself reliving the old Simon fiasco. It had taken me years to fully overcome the shame that it had caused me. It wasn't until I was in medical school that I'd come to fully accept my physical stirrings as normal and to understand that I'd done nothing perverse. My only real error, I'd realized then, was in thinking that any man had the power to make me feel happy and complete, and I'd resolved never to make that mistake again. I had no intellectual quarrel with romantic love; I just didn't see it in my own future. Experience had left too bitter a taste in my mouth. It would be enough, I had decided, to find a man with compatible interests and values with whom I might peacefully coexist.

As time went on, however, the sexual question had continued to haunt me. The act itself, the stuff of poetry and peepshows—what was it really like? How did it feel to have another person enter your body, to share, as it were, your very tissue? The question hung over me like the proverbial albatross, too awkward to discuss but too large to ignore, until finally, I could bear it no longer.

I decided to undertake a scientific study of the matter. After much consideration, I selected a studious young man in the class ahead of me with whom I shared a mutual regard. He was shy, fit, pleasantly deferential, and open to progressive ideas. The weekend before his graduation, I obtained some rubber sheaths from a local midwife and engaged a room at an inn two towns away under a false name. On the appointed evening, we shared a light dinner at the inn before retiring to our room upstairs. At my direction, we undressed beneath the light of a sputtering gas lamp, then turned out the light and lay side by side on the bed. I waited for indescribable excitement to overtake me—but nothing like it ever arrived. I had little desire to touch him; I was, in truth, somewhat repelled by the bumpy pallor of his skin, which looked fish-belly white in the filtered streetlight. Having come this far, however, I felt obliged to carry through. It was a good thing he couldn't see my face when I touched his engorged penis, for I'll admit that I experienced a moment of extreme indecision. I pushed through it, however, and after some struggle with the sheath, the deed was carried out.

I had expected the pain of penetration. What I had not anticipated was that it would come as a welcome distraction from the feelings that threatened to swamp me as his damp, alien body pumped furtively, apologetically above me. A few silent thrusts, a stifled groan, and it was over.

Later, as I braced myself under the scalding shower in the women's dormitory, I felt both disappointment and relief: disappointment that the experience had been so unfulfilling, relief that the act had been stripped of its festering allure. My experiment had simply proved that forbidden fruit was sweeter in the imagination than on the tongue. The sexual act itself, I saw now, was emotionally and morally neutral: it was like a baseball bat that, when used for its intended purpose, was a highly effective tool but, if taken up by the wrong hands with the wrong intent, could inflict serious harm. I felt freed at last from its pull—and from any need to experience it again, until my time for childbearing had come.

The last log fell with a hiss in the fireplace. I opened my eyes and stared into the fire's remains. It was the not knowing, I decided now, that had pushed me into Simon's arms those many years ago. That, and the loneliness. I had thought to achieve with him some magical union that would take all my pain and emptiness away. But it could never happen again. I didn't believe in that kind of magic any more.

“I'm off to the library,” I announced the following morning at breakfast, bolting the rest of my tea.

“More research?” asked my father, cocking an eyebrow.

I walked around the table to kiss my mother's cheek. “Yes, the professor's asked me to help him with a new project.”

“That man takes advantage of you.”

“Getting published would be good for my career too,” I reminded him.

“So he's going to put your name on it this time?”

“Well, he might.”

“Good God,” he groaned. “Not that same old carrot.”

“Just be sure you're back by eleven,” my mother said.

“Why, what's at eleven?” I asked her.

“Oh, Genna, you haven't forgotten? Monsieur Henri is coming to fit your dress!”

I had completely forgotten. “Oh, bother. Why can't I just wear the damask and lace I wore for New Year's?”

“Yes, why can't she?” my father echoed, slicing himself a piece of ham. “Just think of all the starving children we could feed with the money we'd save.”

“She can't wear the same dress twice in one season,” Mother said placidly.

“No, of course not,” Father said. “I'm sure the earth would stop spinning if she did.”

“I'll be back by eleven,” I told my mother, “but do you think we could skip the tea and cookies, just this once? I'm going to be awfully pressed for time.”

“Now, Genna, you don't want to offend Henri,” said Mama. “You know how he likes his madeleines.”

Clearly, the day's priorities had already been set. “Well, I won't be eating them,” I retorted. “Not if I hope to fit into that torture chamber he calls a dress.” Monsieur had chosen pale blue net over darker blue satin for my gown, insisting that I was too young for the heavy brocades currently in vogue with the older, unmarried set. Although I rather liked the décolleté bodice and short puffed sleeves of his final design, I acceded reluctantly to the tiny, breath-defying waist, and drew the line at a hem of heavy black jet. It would be hard enough dancing with a corset strung tight as a bow; I didn't intend to kick chain mail around all night as well.

Dresses were the last thing on my mind, however, as I hopped off the streetcar thirty minutes later and trotted across Seventy-Eighth Street toward the Webster Public Library. This was my favorite of all the branch libraries springing up around town. Smack in the middle of the Bohemian neighborhood, it was like a school, Czech street fair, and natural history museum rolled into one. With its self-service stacks, extensive hours, and liberal borrowing policies, it was a far more inviting place than the stuffy subscription libraries of my youth. But more importantly, for my current purposes, it had a special department for helping teachers pursue individualized courses of study. Retrospective periodicals being considered essential to scholarly pursuit, this department contained an abundance of back issues of the daily and illustrated newspapers, which I hoped would contain the answers I was seeking.

As I turned the corner onto Avenue A, I spotted the prominent steps and oversize lanterns that characterized the new Carnegie libraries, symbolizing the users' ascent toward enlightenment. A long line of children was snaking toward the entrance from the school across the street. I hurried to get there ahead of them and pushed through the door. As usual, the reading tables were filled to capacity under the hanging lamps, generating a noise level more commonly associated with playgrounds than libraries. A lecture was taking place around one of the display cases, while a few feet away two tots were rolling what appeared to be a coconut across the floor. I'd read that Mr. Carnegie's decision to donate sixty-five libraries to the city was based on his calculation that a great metropolis needed one library for every seventy thousand residents. When I visited the Webster branch, I often wondered if this ratio hadn't undershot the mark.

Skirting an exhibit of preserved reptiles mounted just inside the door, I climbed the stairs to the periodical room. Although it was quieter up here, none of the tables were empty. I claimed a seat between two bearded gentlemen reading foreign newspapers, then carried the doctor's purloined list to the desk and enlisted the librarian's aid in locating the issues I needed. I brought these back to the table and placed the list of initials beside them. I intended to begin with the January and February issues from 1887, searching for the mysterious
L. F.
who, if my theory was correct, had adopted Eliza's baby.

This task proved more difficult than I had expected. The older papers didn't have a well-organized society section, and birth announcements were sprinkled haphazardly through the end pages. A half hour of searching yielded only three announcements, none of which was posted by a woman with the initials
L. F.
I found a Patricia Fallon who announced the birth of a baby girl on January 19 and eagerly scoured the paragraph for her husband's name in the hope that he might be the
L.
in question, but it was a disappointing
Frank
. I was about to give up on
L. F.
and switch to another pair of initials, when I flipped the page of the second February issue and gasped so loudly that every head at my table turned.

In the center of the page, set off by an elaborate floral border with a beatific infant at one corner, was a birth announcement containing the initials I'd been looking for. Not that “L. F.,” I thought. It couldn't be. I read the paragraph two more times before I could even allow myself to entertain it, and still had to check the next two issues to be sure there was no other, less-fantastic candidate. I returned to the announcement and stared down at it in disbelief. I couldn't have been more astonished if the subject in question had reached up and socked me in the eye.

If my theory was correct—and the congruence of dates and initials seemed too striking for it not to be—Eliza's baby had been adopted by Mrs. Lucille Fiske, wife of the traction king Charles Fiske, whose fortune from his rapidly growing streetcar company was said to rival that of the Schwabs and Vanderbilts. As I and all of society knew, the Fiske baby had been named Olivia, after her paternal grandmother. I didn't need a newspaper to tell me that she had been raised like a princess—that she was, in fact, the closest thing to royalty we had in America. I knew that she was tall and slender and twenty years old, and that she was currently being courted by Andrew Clearings Nichol Terrence Williams, eighth Earl of Branard.

I needed corroboration. Counting back from the date of birth, I hurried back to the librarian's desk and requested more issues from the autumn of 1886. In the second October issue, I found it. A single, innocent sentence among the hodgepodge of society notes: “Mrs. Lucille Fiske sets sail on the Steamer
Deutschland
today with her sister, Mrs. Adriana Monroe, for an extended visit to Egypt.”

Egypt. A place where she would be unlikely to see anyone she knew. A place where she could wait out her “term” in solitude until Dr. Hauptfuhrer wired to say that the baby was about to arrive. My whole body was tingling with excitement as I carried the newspapers into the washroom, ripped out the two notes, and slipped them into my bag. I returned the issues to the nice librarian, trying not to look guilty, and asked for another batch.

• • •

An hour later, I was pondering the results of my search as I jolted home in a hansom cab. I'd found three more matches for the initials on the list, enough to convince even Detective Maloney, I hoped, that my theory was worth investigating. I planned to look for more at the next opportunity, but already, my head was swimming with possibilities. I was acquainted with three of the four adoptive families I'd uncovered that morning and knew that one of them, the Backhouses, had recently suffered financial reversals. I wondered if a cash-strapped Thomas Backhouse could have been blackmailing Dr. Hauptfuhrer, threatening to reveal his activities to the authorities. Perhaps it was he who'd entered the doctor's office yesterday morning, intending to collect but becoming embroiled in a life-or-death struggle instead.

Or I supposed it could have been Hauptfuhrer who was doing the blackmailing. His clients' desire for secrecy would, of course, have given him considerable leverage. Perhaps, finding himself in need of funds, he had threatened to expose one of them unless she handed over more money, forcing a peremptory strike. I looked down at the doctor's list, now covered with my penciled notations. Suddenly, it seemed I had more suspects than I knew what to do with.

At least I had discovered where Joy was. I knew the Fiskes; I'd danced at their cotillions and enjoyed their extravagant feasts. Though some of the old-timers disapproved of Charles, considering his business manipulations ungentlemanly and his oversize mansion pretentious, my father and he had always gotten along. I knew they went to breakfasts together with the mayor around election time, and shared stock tips in the sauna at the Metropolitan Club. Father admired the man's directness, not to mention his extensive gardens and the good sense he'd shown in setting his house back from the street. And I believed that Mr. Fiske, on his part, was grateful for my father's support among established society.

Whatever one thought of Charles Fiske's iron-handed business practices, it was hard to imagine a more advantageous situation for Eliza's daughter. The Fiskes had power, wealth, and connections; they could give—had given—Olivia everything a mother could want for her child, and more. I thought Eliza would be happy if she knew. I was not as sure, however, that it would be wise to tell her, considering everything that had occurred.

The cab had turned onto my street. Checking my pendant watch, I saw that I had only five minutes before Monsieur Henri was scheduled to arrive. I lifted the speaker tube from the armrest and instructed the driver to pull up at number 7, then hopped out and handed up the dollar fare. It was Wednesday, baking day, and the scent of ginger cookies greeted me in the entry. I sniffed the air with interest. Perhaps an almond cake, as well. There was no time now to eat, however—and besides, I still had to squeeze into that dress. I threw my hat and bag on the side table and continued down the hall to the staircase, where Mary was brushing off the steps.

“Mary, have you seen my mother?” I asked her.

“Yes, miss, she's in the conservatory. She said you're to pick out the jewelry for your gown and bring it to her boudoir for your fitting. She said she'll meet you there.”

I thanked her and started up the stairs, eager to get the newsprint off my hands and to fix my hat-tousled hair. But before I'd even reached the top, the doorbell rang. I turned back down with a sigh. “I'll get it, Mary. You'd better go tell Mama that Monsieur Henri has arrived.” Smoothing my hair with my fingers, I descended to the front door and pulled it open, bracing myself for Henri's effusive greeting.

But it wasn't Henri standing on the threshold. It was Simon Shaw. Or rather, Simon Shaw transformed. I stared in mute amazement. He was dressed in impeccable morning attire, his coat a fine blue wool, his collar faultlessly pressed, and his tie in a perfect Windsor knot.

“Well, can I come in,” he asked after several seconds had ticked by, “or did you want me to use the servants' entrance?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, stepping back. “You took me by surprise. I was expecting someone else.”

He walked past me into the hall, removing his scarf and gloves. I laid these on the console and led him into the drawing room.

He stopped inside the door, glancing around the room. “I always wondered what it looked like in here,” he mused. He made a frame with his fingers and squinted through it. “All I could ever see from the street was a patch of ceiling and a bit of that chandelier.”

“Won't you sit down?” I asked stiffly, indicating one of the two matched chairs by the piano.

He lowered himself onto it. His muscular frame looked out of place in the fringe-skirted armchair, despite his well-tailored clothing.

“So you really did become a doctor,” he said, nodding at my graduation picture on the piano. “Just like your father always wanted.”

“Just as I always wanted,” I corrected, perching on the chair beside him.

“That's not how I remember it.”

I clasped my hands in my lap. “Mr. Shaw, as I said, I'm expecting another visitor at any moment, so perhaps you ought to tell me why you've come.”

He leaned back, stretching his legs over the flowered carpet. “You were seen leaving the doctor's office.”

I swallowed a gasp, willing my face to remain impassive. “I beg your pardon?”

“They put out a pretty good description. Joe Brady had seen you at the Isle of Plenty and made the match. It occurred to him you might have been tampering with evidence. He came to me before he went to Maloney. For some reason, he seemed to think I'd care if they threw you in jail.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

He shrugged. “You can tell me what you were doing there. Or not. It's up to you.”

I shifted in my seat, studying his face, trying to figure out what he was up to. “If I had been tampering with evidence, which of course I haven't, why on earth would I tell you? You'd only pass it along to your good friend Detective Maloney.”

“I'm not interested in doing Maloney's job for him.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Let's just say I don't see you as the evidence-tampering type. I'm curious to know what would make you act so out of character.”

“Well, if I ever were to break the law,” I replied cautiously, “I'm sure it would only be because I felt I had no other options.”

“I'm not talking about breaking the law. I'm talking about sticking your neck out for somebody else. That isn't like you.”

I felt myself flush. There was my answer; he had come here to pay me back for ridiculing him in front of his peers, and to prove to himself that he could still lord it over me, if he chose. I jumped to my feet. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”