Murder in a mill town (26 page)

Nell and Adam gaped at him.

“Is that what Duncan means to do, then?” Will asked. “Carry out his misguided interpretation of the Old Testament?”

Adam looked pained. “I’ve no idea. I don’t know how things ever came to this pass. It never occurred to me that he would become this desperate, this bereft of reason, but it should have. It’s my job to look into the hearts of men. I feel as if I’ve failed him—and you, Nell.”

“It isn’t your fault,” she said. “And I’m sure the police will have Duncan in custody soon.”

“I hope, for his sake as well as yours, that they get to him soon. Well...” Adam lowered his umbrella, the rain having finally ceased, and folded it up. “You’ve obviously got things in hand for the time being. I’ll see you tomorrow night, then, Will? Durgin-Park’s?”

“Hm? Oh, yes,” Will said distractedly. “Say, do me a favor, old man, and drop Nell off at one forty-eight Tremont, would you? I’ve got someplace I’ve got to be.”

Nell looked at Will. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction.

“Oh. All right. Of course. More than happy to.”

Will got out of the hack, held the door open for Nell, and handed her down. “Good night, then.” He didn’t smile, barely met her eyes.

“Good night.” She took her umbrella from him and accompanied Adam to the other hack as he climbed back into his.

Adam opened the door and held out his hand. As she reached for it, she heard an anguished wail, footsteps on the wet pavement...

She turned, along with Adam, to find a man sprinting out of the darkness—hatless, wet—his arm outstretched, his eyes wild.

“Duncan,” she whispered.
Oh, God, no.

“Viper!” he screamed. “Deceiver!”

He raised his hand; metal glinted in the lamplight—a gun.

“Duncan, no!” Adam grabbed Nell.

Will leapt on Duncan like some great black hawk, coattails flapping. He struck, flat-handed, at Duncan’s forearm—a blur of movement.

Duncan cried out. The gun clattered to the ground. Will kicked it away.

They grappled. Nell couldn’t see much in the dark, but she could hear the scuffle of feet, the grunts of pain as punches found their mark. It wouldn’t last long; Duncan’s fights never did.

She crossed herself, thinking,
Please, God, don’t let Duncan kill him.
But when the decisive blow came, it was Duncan who hit the ground, whirling from the impact of Will’s fist so that he landed facedown. His head struck the pavement with a thud Nell felt in her bones.

He blinked, tried to rise, then slumped back down, unmoving.

Will knelt over him, took his carotid pulse. “He’ll be all right.” He looked toward Nell, his hair hanging over his forehead, blood trickling from his nose, one cheekbone badly abraded, and then toward Adam. “Would you be so kind as to go inside and fetch Detective Cook?”

It took the dazed priest a moment to respond. “Oh. Yes. Of course.” He sprinted up the walk.

Will wiped his bloodied nose with the back of his hand, dragged his fingers through his hair.

“H-here.” Nell rushed forward with her handkerchief. “Let me—“

“I’ve got my own.” Standing, he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his nose with it.

“Will, I...” What did one say when one’s life had just been saved?

“Don’t mention it,” he said without looking at her.

“I can’t let you see him, Miss Sweeney,” Detective Cook told Nell the following evening when she tried to visit Duncan in the City Hall holding cell where he’d been detained since the previous night.

“I must. I need to speak to him, explain some things.” Like the fact that she had no relationship with Harry—but nor did she, anymore, with Duncan. In the eyes of the church, they were man and wife and always would be, but in her eyes their marriage had ended eight years ago. She had to put that in plain words, make him come to terms with it.

“Your brother didn’t come to till around noon today,” Cook said, “and when he finally grasped where he was, he started raving, sobbing...”

Sobbing?

“The guards couldn’t take it,” Cook said. “They gagged him and put him in a straight waistcoat.”

Nell just stared at him.

“The prison chaplain from Charlestown came for a visit, and your brother had a conniption. He kicked and thrashed, hurled himself against the bars... Split his forehead open and just kept at it.”

“My God.”

“The Black Maria’s coming to take him back to Charlestown in about an hour. Maybe in a day or two, if he’s got his wits about him, you can visit him there. Right now you’d best go home and try to put him out of your mind.”

Nell walked back to Colonnade Row in a desolate trance, her shawl drawn snugly around her to ward off the chill of the evening, remembering how Duncan had looked ten years ago, the first time Jamie had brought him around—so tall and golden, with those eyes that saw right through her and that boyish grin. She tried to reconcile that Duncan in her mind with one who raved and sobbed and threw himself against the bars of his cage. The pain and confusion of it rose in her throat and squeezed, made her eyes prick with tears.

Don’t cry,
she commanded herself.
Not here on the street, for pity’s sake.

Nell rarely cried; there was little to be gained from surrendering to despair. Yet sometimes, as now, despair was a force of nature that would not be denied.

She would close the door of her room as soon as she got home, she decided, and bury her face in a pillow and soak it with tears, then rinse her face at the wash stand and get on with things. But no sooner had she walked through the front door of the house than Mrs. Mott materialized in the entrance hall. “There’s a gentleman waiting for you in the music room. A Reverend Beals.”

“Oh.”

“Mrs. Hewitt is in the solarium with
the child. She thinks she can teach her to paint. She instructed me to tell you that you may have the rest of the evening to yourself, if you wish.”

“Thank you,” Nell said, but the housekeeper had turned and was already walking away.

 She found Adam sitting on the piano bench, laconically picking out a tune on the big, darkly polished Steinway—a dirge, from the mournful sound of it.

*   *   *

“I waited for him at Durgin-Park’s for about forty-five minutes,”
Adam
said as he handed her down from the hack that had just let them off in front of the Revere House. “When he didn’t show up, I came here. I knocked, but he wouldn’t let me in—told me he was busy—but I knew what he was doing. I could smell it right through the door.”

“You know what opium smells like?” she asked as he paid the driver.

“My ministry takes me to all sorts of places.” He escorted her across the hotel’s marble-floored lobby toward the front desk. “I knew about the morphine—Harry brought it up Tuesday night. Will told me it was just for pain relief, and to keep himself from going into withdrawal. He said, ‘If I ever get hooked on gong again, do me a favor and put a bullet in my brain. It’s quicker.’”

“My key, please,” Nell told the fleshy little desk clerk with as much nonchalance as she could summon.

“Here you go. Have a lovely evening, Mrs. Hewitt...Reverend.”

Adam didn’t look at her as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said as they walked down the hall to Will’s room. “But I never asked them to leave a key at my disposal, nor to call me—“

“Don’t. Please,” he said, exasperation creeping into his tone, as if he wished she would just stop lying to him.

“But—“

“This is it,” he said as they drew up in front of Room 2D. He’d been right; she could smell that distinctive scorched-treacle odor right through the door.

She slid the key into the lock, then hesitated and knocked. “Will?”

Silence. She turned the key and opened the door.

“Oh, Christ, not both of you,” Will muttered.

It took her a moment to locate him in the dim, smoke-hazed room. Although the sun had yet to set, he had the curtains closed. Aside from a waning fire on the hearth, the only real source of light was a little spirit lamp on a lacquered Chinese tray laid out with opium paraphernalia. The tray sat on a low table in front of the couch on which Will reclined in a collarless shirt and trousers, braces dangling, hair uncombed, a cigarette hanging limply in his hand. Ugly abrasions marred his left cheekbone and unshaven chin, and dried blood was crusted in a nostril. Nell suspected he hadn’t washed or changed since last night.

“Will, why are you doing this?” Nell asked.

“I’m a hop fiend, Cornelia. It’s what we do.” His eyes were heavy-lidded, glassy, and his voice had that drowsy-thick quality that it only got when he’d been “rolling the log” for hours.

“How many bowls have you smoked?” she asked.

“Not nearly enough.” Will took a final puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out, then lifted a little pen knife and a bamboo smoking pistol from the tray and proceeded to scrape bits of opium dross off the pipe’s egg-shaped ceramic bowl. He said, “Adam, if you’ve got any business at all wearing that collar, you’ll get her the hell out of here.”

Adam unfastened his clerical collar and tossed it onto a chair.

“We came to talk sense to you,” Nell said. “We care about you. We hate to see—”

“Oh, Christ,” Will growled as he scraped. “Well meaning friends who care what becomes of me. The bane of my bloody existence. Go away, Miss Sweeney. You, too, Father.”

“We’re not leaving,” Adam said.

“Then I shall.” Will snapped the pen knife shut and hauled himself to a sitting position with some effort. “I shall go back to Deng Bao’s, where they let me smoke my gong in peace.”

“Here, Nell, give me that.” Adam took the key from her and used it to lock the door from the inside, then slipped the key in his vest pocket.

Will’s gaze cut to the desk in the corner. Adam noticed, and fetched Will’s key
as well.

“Suit yourself.” Will stretched out on his side on the couch, which was upholstered in leather, but with spiral-carved wooden arms fitted with padded armrests. He lay his head on the armrest and used a spindle to scoop a little daub of opium paste from a wooden box. Holding the opium just above the flame of the lamp, he twirled it until it bubbled and seethed, then kneaded it upon the roof of the pipe bowl.

“Just two days ago,” Adam reminded him, “you asked me to kill you if you ever took up this habit again.”

“I won’t hold you to that.” Will rolled the opium into a little nugget on the end of the spindle, seated it in the bowl’s small aperture, and leaned over the spirit lamp. Keeping the opium in place with the spindle, he watched it vaporize while inhaling its fumes in one long draw.

Smoke fluttered from his mouth; his eyes drifted shut. The pipe rolled out of his hand and onto the tray as he went utterly limp on the couch—a six foot plus rag doll.

Nell said, “I’d like to take everything on that tray and burn it—whatever’s burnable—and throw the rest into Boston Harbor.”

“He’ll be furious.”

“Because we didn’t put a bullet in his brain instead?” she asked as she bent over the tray, sorting the flammable from the nonflammable. “It takes him up to twenty minutes to rouse from an opium stupor. That’s how much time I’ve got to destroy this—or as much as I can—because once he’s awake again, he can be remarkably alert.”

“What about that?” Adam pointed to Will’s morphine and related accoutrement on the nightstand.

She shook her head. “He’ll suffer
from withdrawal sickness without that, and he needs it for pain—although he might try cutting down his dosage.”

“If he had any real backbone, he’d go without it altogether. I used to take it for my leg—I injected myself, just as Will does—but I gave it up when I realized I was becoming dependent on it.”

“The circumstances that led to Will’s addiction were extraordinary,” Nell said. “He escaped from Andersonville with a terrible bullet wound, and it took nine months for him to make his way north through enemy territory. I...well, of course I have no idea what’s wrong with your leg. I’m sure it’s quite painful, but—“

“Syphilis.”

It took a second for Nell to realize that she was staring with her mouth open. “Oh. Oh, I’m...so sorry.” And so astounded that he’d just come out with it, to a female, calling it “syphilis,” no less, rather than the somewhat more delicate “blood-poison” or “French pox.”

“I’ve shocked you,” he said. “I thought, since you were a sort of nurse—“

“Yes, of course. I’m not shocked, just, um...” She couldn’t keep from glancing down at his bad leg.

“It’s just started to affect the bones and joints, and my vision isn’t what it used to be. I had a seizure a few months ago, and I get the most godawful headaches. Of course, you’re familiar with the late-stage symptoms.”

“To some extent.” Enough to know that dementia, blindness and paralysis were what Adam had to look forward to unless the disease was brought under control. “Can’t they do anything for it?”