Death Angel

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Are you expected, sir?” the young housekeeper asked when she opened the door to Mike, Mercer, and me.

“No, ma’am. I’d like to see Ms. Sorenson,” Mike said.

“She’s not in at the moment.”

“We’ll wait,” he said, trying to charge past the petite woman.

“I’m afraid I can’t admit you until she returns.”

“How is Miss Dalton doing today?” I asked.

“Very well, thank you.”

“Perhaps I could just talk with her for a few minutes? The gentlemen can wait in the living room.”

The housekeeper didn’t know how to respond.

“She invited us to stop back,” I said. “She really did.”

“But you’re police, aren’t you? You’re not going to agitate her with talk about Lucy?”

“I won’t do that. I promise.”

Reluctantly, she pulled back the heavy door and let us in. I motioned to Mike and Mercer to stay put and let the housekeeper lead me through to the dayroom. This time, Lavinia Dalton was sitting in a wing chair, wearing a long-sleeved dress with a chenille sweater around her shoulders. Her cheeks were rouged, her hair had been curled, and the sapphire suite of jewels had been replaced by pink stones on her fingers and earlobes. She looked as though she might have been expecting the Duchess of Cambridge.

Again there were two nurses attending the elderly woman, one of whom had been working on our earlier visit. I introduced myself, and they offered me the chair opposite Lavinia’s sunny window seat.

“Hello, Miss Dalton. I’m Alexandra Cooper.” Although her eyes looked bright, it was obvious she had no recollection of seeing me just a day before.

“Pleasure, my dear. Is Archer keeping you waiting?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, returning her warm smile with one of my own. “I just came to talk with you.”

“How lovely.”

One of the nurses spoke over my head. “Miss Lavinia’s very happy today. After lunch, we’re going to take a walk in the Park,” she said, pointing to the wheelchair. “It’s her very favorite thing to do.”

“It’s one of my favorite things, too.”

I had just promised not to ask questions about the heartbreak of Baby Lucy’s disappearance. But here was a perfect opportunity-without Sorenson’s censorship-to see what nuggets Dalton’s long-term memory had that might give us guidance.

“Where do you like to go inside the Park?” I asked.

“Gardens, my dear. I love the gardens. But they’re so far away I can never get to them.” She looked out the window so wistfully.

The nurse spoke. “Don’t you remember, Miss Lavinia? We went with the car to the Conservatory Garden just last week. It was all so beautiful.”

“Yes, yes, it was,” Dalton said. But I had no good reason to believe her mind had been able to capture that recent memory.

“Do you like the Carousel?” I asked.

She lifted a hand-such a fragile-looking wrist, encircled by gold bangles-and pointed. “Since I was a child, dear, I’ve loved the Carousel. You can see it there, can’t you?”

It was just south of the 65th Street Transverse, and I was able to see the roof of the building, which was more than a hundred years old.

“Do you know, dear, that the first time I rode that Carousel,” Lavinia Dalton said, perking up as she talked with her hands, expressively and so clearly in the moment of a long-ago time, “it was powered by a live animal? And I couldn’t see him anywhere, but I could hear the noises he made. The neighs of a real horse.”

“How funny.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Of course I do.” I had no idea what she meant.

“When Miss Lavinia was a little girl,” the nurse said, “the Carousel wasn’t run on electricity, like it is now. And in a hole beneath the platform where the beautiful painted horses sit… Am I right, Miss Lavinia?”

“You’re exactly right. The poor animal was in a hole in the ground.”

“There was actually a live mule, chained to a harness, which is what made the Carousel go around.”

“And the operator who took our nickels, he would stamp his foot, and that’s how the mule knew when to start and stop the Carousel,” Lavinia said. “I bet you didn’t know that, young lady.”

“You’re absolutely right, Miss Dalton.” But now I knew she had a sharp image and details of something that had happened more than eight decades ago.

She reached for her cane and asked the nurse to help her to her feet so she could stand and look out the window, leaning her other arm on the windowsill.

“And there’s the Lake where I used to ice-skate. And rowboats, of course. I was courted in rowboats, even though my father didn’t allow it.”

“That must have been fun.”

“More fun than you can imagine. And worth the paddling I’d get from time to time. Come stand beside me, missy.”

I moved next to her.

“This is my home,” she said to me, looking up to make sure I was taking it all in. “And when I was a little girl, my father used to tell me that he built this Park just for me. The sheep grazed in the meadow right below my bedroom. At night, with my windows open, I could hear the noise from the band shell. John Philip Sousa and all his marches. There’s an angel-a glorious angel right over there. Do you know her?”

“The Angel of the Waters,” I said.

“She was there to look out for me,” Lavinia Dalton said, grasping my hand in hers. “I believed that, you know? She’s my very own angel.”

A death angel, to be sure.

“I was glad other people loved the Park, of course. But I was so badly spoiled, missy, that I actually believed it was all designed for me.”

Lavinia Dalton grew tired quickly. She reached out her arm to the nurse, who stepped her backward and reseated her in the chair.

“Did you ever play in the rooms upstairs?” I asked. “When you couldn’t go to the Park, when the weather was foul?”

“The gymnasium?” she asked, clutching the ornate silver handle of the cane between her hands. “There’s a wonderful gymnasium upstairs.”

“No longer, Miss Lavinia,” one of the nurses said. “It’s not there anymore.”

“There weren’t many children in this building when I was growing up. And that was the only place to meet them. There’s the croquet court and the tennis, too, downstairs.”

“Gone a long time,” the nurse said, shaking her head at me.

Lavinia Dalton was so firm in her insistence of describing the past that she tapped her cane on the thickly carpeted floor. “Papa objected to my doing sports, so it was hard for me to play with the others at croquet. But the gymnasium was on the tenth floor, and there was the great dining room up there as well.”

“Dining room?”

“Oh, yes, missy. A grand hall where all the families could eat if it was their cook’s day off, or there was company.”

The nurse shrugged her shoulders and gave me a look that suggested she didn’t know whether Lavinia’s memories were sound.

“We hardly ever went there-public rooms-because Papa had such a fear of germs. Immigrants and their plagues, he used to say. Never wanted me mixing with other children, for fear they were being raised by foreigners who brought every illness with them from Europe.”

“The tenth floor?” I asked. “I didn’t know the Dakota had a tenth floor. I was hoping you’d tell me about the ninth floor.”

She looked at me with a mischievous grin, almost whispering. “You won’t tell Papa, will you?”

It was as though she had taken a literal step back into the past.

“It’s wondrous up there”-talking in the present tense, as though she still visited the servants’ quarters. “It’s my happiest place to play, when I have to be indoors.”

The nurses both seemed bemused, as though they had heard this all before.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I’ll take you up when I’m feeling stronger, missy.”

“Tell me why you like it up there.”

“Don’t you always like best the places you aren’t allowed to go?” Lavinia Dalton said, with a conspiratorial grin. “I certainly do.”

“It was staff quarters, you understand,” one of the nurses said.

“Papa doesn’t like me to be with some of the common people,” she said, then waved her hand in the direction of one of the nurses. “Not them, you see. These girls are professionals. Papa’s nurses always have rooms in the house, don’t you, dears?”

“But the cook and-?”

“And the housemaids and the laundress and the chauffeur, well, they’ve got all these wonderful nooks and crannies upstairs,” Lavinia Dalton said. “And they’re all wee and such.”

“Wee?” I asked.

“The rooms are small, not all ostentatious like this, missy. Nothing in them a child can break or damage. Nobody to tell you to keep away from the porcelain or not to put your fingers on the windowpane. No one to remind you the carpet came from Kathmandu and the vase is Ming dynasty.

“Somebody always has sweets up there for me, and a child of their own sneaked in from home if they had to work a holiday or weekend. A child I could play with to my heart’s content and then run downstairs to Papa the minute my nanny hears that Papa has come home.”

“It sounds wondrous indeed, Miss Dalton. And who’s up there now?”

That was a major gaffe. I wanted to know about the present day-about the figure in the ninth-floor window that appeared in the photograph-but Lavinia Dalton was in another place, happily reliving moments from her childhood.

“There’s no one up there now, Ms. Cooper,” Jillian Sorenson said, startling me out of my seat. Her footsteps had been muffled by the thick Oriental carpet, and I hadn’t heard her approaching. “Nothing but a bunch of dark and dusty rooms.”

“What, Jillian?” Lavinia asked, as though snapped back to today. “What’s dusty?”

“Nothing at all to trouble you, Lavinia,” Sorenson said. “Miss Cooper has to be leaving now.”

“Yes, yes, I do.” That was the first moment at which I noticed the older housekeeper, Bernice Wicks, standing behind Jill Sorenson.

“It’s a beautiful day, Lavinia,” Sorenson said. “Take a rest and then you’ll go to the Park for an hour.”

I was walking past Dalton’s social secretary. “How rude of you to take advantage of Lavinia when I wasn’t here to protect her.”

“I wasn’t trying to take advantage of her at all. A piece of evidence came to our attention this morning and-”

“Evidence about Lucy?” Sorenson asked.

“No, no. About the body found in the Lake last week,” I said, but Sorenson’s remark had done the damage.

“Lucy?” Lavinia Dalton said. She had heard the child’s name loud and clear. “Where’s Lucy?”

The brightness was gone from her eyes, as though a curtain had descended in an instant.

“You’re going to rest for a while, Lavinia.”

“Has she come down from the ninth floor yet? Is Lucy playing up there with Bernice?”

“I’m right here, Miss Lavinia,” Bernice Wicks said, coming around me to comfort her longtime employer. “Been here with you all day.”

The young housekeeper had been right to worry about Lavinia Dalton’s agitation. In my brief visit, I had lifted her from the muddled perception of today’s events to a happy series of memories from her childhood and now landed her in the heartbreaking territory of Baby Lucy’s disappearance. The distress I had caused the kind old woman was conspicuous.

“Lucy must be upstairs playing with the children,” Lavinia Dalton said, an exaggerated tremor now visible in the right hand that she held out to Jillian Sorenson. “You must bring her down to see me. I promised she could go with me to the zoo today.”