From This Moment (34 page)

When the door closed behind the lawyers, Ernest walked the entire length of the room, scanning to be certain no one else lingered. When he was convinced he was alone, he picked up the telephone and asked the operator to connect his call. It was answered promptly on the second ring.

“She was over here again today,” Ernest reported.

“What did she want?”

“I have no idea, but she was alone. No sign of Romulus.”

“Good.” The satisfaction bleeding through the telephone line was annoying.

“No, it’s not good,” he snapped. “She’s still poking around where she has no business. You need to get her out of Boston. If you can’t do it, I’ll take care of her myself.”

The voice on the other end of the telephone uncoiled like a snake. “If you touch one hair on her head, I will turn you in. I swear it, Ernest. You are to leave her alone.”

“If I go down, you go down. That’s the way it’s always been.” He disconnected the line without waiting for a reply.

Dusk had fallen by the time Stella reached the street where Evelyn lived. Gas-lit lamps created pools of light in the darkness, but there were few people on the street and she quickened her steps, anxious to get home.

Gwendolyn’s photograph still chafed against her side, but she dared not take it out until she was safe behind the solid walls of Evelyn’s townhouse. Maybe she was being paranoid, but it felt like someone was watching her. A glance over her shoulder showed two men in dark wool business suits following her. They’d been on the trolley with her. It didn’t matter that one of them was old enough to be her grandfather and the other carried a parakeet in a birdcage, they worried her.

Evelyn’s house loomed like a safe haven at the end of the block. She was only a few yards from safety, and she clenched the cold iron key in her fist. The first thing she would do once inside would be to turn on every electric bulb and light every kerosene lantern until the place was illuminated like a Christ
mas tree. Terrible things lurked in the darkness. She wished Romulus was here. She wanted someone to lean on, and beneath Romulus’s irreverent sense of humor was a man whose strength she desperately needed.

No, she didn’t. No matter how badly she longed for him, she didn’t need Romulus, and it was time to quit imagining that she did. But wasn’t it strange they were both going through such terrible calamities at the same time?

She paused. Or was it?

Michael Townsend had disavowed any knowledge of who had initiated the injunction against
Scientific World
, but how likely was that? As the attorney general, he probably had the power to find out anything he wanted. Romulus had been the first real ally she’d had in Boston, but the moment the injunction had been filed, his attention had been fractured and his help began unraveling.

Then there was the bizarre letter purportedly from London that had threatened the revocation of her copyrights. She’d recognized it as a counterfeit, but the legalistic tone was something a good lawyer could cobble together.

It was frightening. Someone had been trying to scare her for months, and she couldn’t put it down to simple paranoia anymore. It was real. The men following behind her made her nervous, and she hurried to Evelyn’s door. She vaulted up the short flight of steps with her key in hand.

Something wasn’t right. When she’d left the house this morning, the lace shade over the front-door window had been securely closed. Now there was a sliver at the bottom. Someone had been inside.

The housekeeper and her children had gone to visit family, so the house should have been empty all day. Could the gauzy lace covering have been disturbed by air currents in the house? It had never seemed drafty inside the house before.

The two men following her were drawing closer. She inserted her key into the lock and twisted the knob. She stood in the partially opened doorway and listened.

The front of the house was dark, but a light glowed in the kitchen. The scraping of a chair being moved and the swish of fabric were unmistakable.

“Hello?” a voice called from the back of the house. “Stella?”

She almost doubled over with relief. It was Evelyn, silhouetted in the light coming from the hallway. A larger figure moved behind her.

“Clyde?” Stella asked.

“Yes, we’re home,” Evelyn said. “We’re having dinner in the back. Will you join us?”

“I’ll be there in a moment.”

Thank heavens she wouldn’t need to be alone tonight. Normally she didn’t fear anything, but that was before she saw the dark, mottled bruises on his sister’s throat. She scurried to her bedroom to slip Gwendolyn’s photograph beneath her mattress. It wasn’t the sort of image anyone should see without warning.

Evelyn was already preparing a plate by the time Stella arrived in the kitchen. It was a simple meal of sliced bread, cheese, and salami. Evelyn’s smile was radiant as she handed over the plate.

“Is Clyde better?” It was the only thing she could think of that would cause such exuberance, but a glance at Clyde showed him to be standing politely and looking to Evelyn for interpretation.

“There has been no change in his hearing,” Evelyn said. “But things are going well. No matter what happens, we are going to be all right.”

And with that, Evelyn crossed the floor to where Clyde stood and slipped her hand in his. The way he smiled down at her, only the tiniest curving of his mouth but tenderness blazing in his eyes . . . well, this was unexpected. The warmth between
these two could heat the entire house. It was almost embarrassing to be standing here and intruding, but Evelyn straightened and smiled at Stella.

“Please, you must be hungry. We’ve already eaten six links of salami.” Evelyn scribbled something on a pad of paper and handed it to Clyde, who read it quickly.

“Evelyn scarfed down five links all on her own,” Clyde said. “I barely had one.”

Evelyn burst out laughing. “What a liar.” But her eyes sparkled, and given Evelyn’s trim waistline, Stella had no doubt it was Clyde who had put the largest dent in the salami.

Over the next twenty minutes, Stella made her own dent in the bread and cheese as she listened to Evelyn recount their time at the White Oak Health Resort. Every few moments, she stopped to scribble a note to Clyde, who read them and usually responded with a couple of words, but mostly what he did was watch Evelyn. With his fingers gently tracing Evelyn’s wrist, he gazed at her with a fondness that took Stella’s breath away. If a man ever looked at her like that, it would be hard not to melt on the spot.

She’d always heard that tragedy could tear people apart or draw them closer together. It seemed that Clyde and Evelyn had decided to be the type who emerged from the firestorm stronger and more resilient than before. She envied them, and could only pray that her parents would find a similar path out of the darkness.

After the last of the cheese and salami had been finished and the plates scraped clean, Evelyn asked Stella how things had been going.

Should she tell them? This evening had been lovely, an unexpected island of joy amid the days of stress. She hesitated to spoil it with what she’d learned today, but she needed their advice. It was a certainty that Gwendolyn had been murdered,
but Stella couldn’t trust the police, the medical examiner, or even the district attorney. Boston was a tight-knit community, and most of these men socialized together, ate meals together, and sparred at the same athletic club.

But she could trust Evelyn and Clyde. Since Romulus was no longer interested in helping her, they might be the only two people in Boston she could trust.

“I found a photograph,” she said. “It is proof my sister was murdered.” She retrieved Gwendolyn’s picture and relayed how she’d found it buried deep in a file labeled
Jane Doe
.

“The medical examiner lied to me,” she said. “Rupert Lentz is a friend of Romulus’s, and he looked us both in the face and lied.”

“He is a friend to
Scientific World
, as well,” Evelyn said, her brow furrowed as she scribbled out her words for Clyde. “He reviews our articles relating to medicine and anatomy. I’ve always found him to be a fine man.”

“I gather he never performed an autopsy on one of your family members? And botched the job horribly?” She felt bad about the scorn in her voice, but how many months had been wasted because of a shoddy postmortem report?

And
shoddy
was the best possible term for what he’d done. It was far more likely to be a case of fraud or outright collusion in a murder.

“I think I should bring an official complaint against him, but I don’t know how to do that. To whom does he report? It seems the government leaders of Boston are such an insular group of people, I don’t know how to move forward without stumbling into someone related to Gwendolyn’s case.”

Evelyn looked troubled. “I’m afraid it’s even worse than you realize. Did you know that Rupert Lentz is the attorney general’s son?”

Stella gasped. “No!” She’d seen a picture of his son on his desk that day, and there had been no resemblance to the medical examiner at all.

“Well, his foster son,” Evelyn clarified. “Rupert was orphaned at a young age and was sent to be raised by his grandmother. He is from a humble background. I believe his grandmother was a housekeeper to a wealthy family up in Marblehead, the same village where Michael Townsend came of age. In any event, the housekeeper died when the boy was only eight or nine, and he had nowhere to go. Michael Townsend got word of it and took him in. He raised the boy as his own, and even paid for Rupert’s college. I gather the two of them are still quite close.”

Perhaps this was the explanation for the missing photograph on Michael Townsend’s desk. She’d bet her bottom dollar the attorney general had a picture of Rupert Lentz on his desk, and for some reason he didn’t want her to know of his connection to the man who had performed Gwendolyn’s postmortem.

It made her even less eager to trust the legal system to handle Gwendolyn’s case. She had only a single photograph to prove Dr. Lentz had falsified the report, and all it would take was a lit match to burn this inconvenient photograph to ash.

“What about the press?” she asked. “If I took all this information to a reporter and made it public, wouldn’t that force the government to address the issue?”

Evelyn shrugged but wrote down the question and handed it over to Clyde, who shook his head vehemently the moment he read it.

“If a journalist gets wind of this, you will lose control,” he warned. “They will take your information and run with it in whatever direction they want. Wait. Hire a private detective, someone who works for
you
, not a newspaper.”

His suggestion had merit. Frankly, she was at the end of her
rope and was ready to hire a professional who could devote his full attention to the case. Just as Romulus had no more time for her, Clyde and Evelyn were at a delicate stage of their marriage. They didn’t need her as a third wheel while they took their first tentative steps toward building a new life together. It was time to turn to a professional for help.

“Do you know of a private detective you would recommend?”

Evelyn looked a little amused. “It depends on the strength of your intestinal fortitude.”

“It’s rock-solid,” she replied. “I want the best.”

Evelyn stated that Riley McGraff was the best investigator in the city. He used to work for the Boston Police Department, but they’d fired him for being “intolerable.” Stella had already met a few Boston police officers, none of whom seemed to have attended charm school, so Mr. McGraff must really make an impression.

“I’ll call on him tomorrow,” Stella said, already feeling a renewed rush of energy from having a plan in place.

Riley McGraff was as unpleasant as Evelyn had led her to expect.

He lived on the top floor of a five-story building, and the private detective’s apartment doubled as his office. The front room smelled of cigar smoke, fried oysters, and a sour mood. Riley McGraff sat behind a cluttered table in a room crowded with cabinets too overstuffed with paperwork to close properly. He was unshaven and had black eyes that matched his shaggy hair. Spread out on the table before him was an exotic game of solitaire that must have used at least three decks of cards. A pair of cats constantly meandered around his legs.