12

FRANK LOOKED AROUND THE VANDAMM ESTATE in Mamoraneck with new eyes. He thought of Alicia VanDamm and wondered if she had been violated in this very house. If what Sarah Brandt believed was true, and Sylvester Mattingly had raped her and gotten her with child, then it might well have happened here, far away from prying eyes and ears.

Frank hesitated a moment before knocking on the front door, wondering if one reason he’d been taken off the case was because of his last, unauthorized visit here. But this time when the housekeeper opened the door, she looked more resigned than outraged at his presence.

“Just like a bad penny, ain’t you?” she said. “You keep turning up.”

“I’d like to look around Miss VanDamm’s room again,” he said, telling only a partial truth.

“You already did that. What do you think, that she came back from the dead and put something there you couldn’t’ve found before?”

“This time I know what I’m looking for,” he replied, concealing his surprise that she didn’t seem to be aware that VanDamm hadn’t authorized his previous visit. Could the woman have neglected to mention it to her employer?

“And what would that be?” she asked skeptically.

“A diary.”

Mrs. Hightower’s eyes grew large in her homely face. “What would you be wanting with that?” she demanded.

“I think it might give me some clues about the identity of her killer. You knew the girl kept a diary, I take it.”

Mrs. Hightower sniffed derisively. “Everybody knew it. She wrote in it all the time. For a girl who never went anywhere or did anything except ride that mare of hers, she sure found a lot to write about, I’ll tell you that.”

“Did you ever read what she wrote?”

“Of course not!” She was thoroughly outraged at the very suggestion. “Nobody would do a thing like that.”

“Not even her personal maid? Maybe Lizzie knows what it said. Maybe Lizzie knows where it is.”

“Not likely,” Mrs. Hightower insisted, “but I guess we won’t see the back of you until we ask her, now will we?”

Frank merely smiled expectantly until Mrs. Hightower finally admitted him.

This time she put him in a small front room where he waited until Lizzie had been summoned.

“Mr. Detective,” the maid said in dismay when she saw him. “Have you found out who killed Miss Alicia yet?” She was wringing her hands in her apron and looked on the verge of tears.

“Not yet,” Frank said, trying to sound kind while knowing he wasn’t being very reassuring, “but I’m hoping you can give me some help. Do you know where Miss Alicia kept her diary?”

“Oh, cor, she kept it locked up, nice and safe, because she didn’t want anybody never to read it but her, but it ain’t there now.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they sent me to look for it right after she disappeared.”

“Who sent you?”

“Why, Mrs. Hightower, who else?”

Who else, indeed. Frank could think of many possibilities, but the truth was probably that Mrs. Hightower would only have acted on orders from the VanDamms. This meant they knew what the diary must contain, and that would explain why they’d ordered Sylvester Mattingly to find it. Now if only Frank could find out what it said, too.

“Can you show me where she kept it?” Frank asked.

“I can, but only if Mrs. Hightower says it’s all right,” she said, glancing nervously toward the door, at which Mrs. Hightower might well be listening.

Mrs. Hightower seemed willing to do anything if it would get Frank closer to leaving, so Lizzie escorted him upstairs to Alicia’s room. She showed him a small chest which he’d searched on his last visit. It held mementos of Alicia’s childhood, awards won in school, some trinkets that had probably held some sentimental value, but nothing that could remotely be called a diary.

By now Lizzie was openly weeping, not making a sound but allowing the tears to flow freely down her face. Frank felt a twinge of guilt and wondered when he had become so sentimental. In other days, he would have been jubilant at the sight of those tears, knowing they would make the person he was questioning more open and forthcoming.

“Lizzie, Mrs. Hightower said Miss Alicia wrote in her diary a lot. Do you know what she wrote about?”

The girl shook her head in silent despair. “Sure and I don’t. She wouldn’t let me see it, not ever. I couldn’t’ve read it, even if she did, of course, but I’d never of wanted to. She wrote in it all the time, and sometimes she cried. I don’t want to know what made her cry. If she had secrets, she should be allowed to keep them, don’t you think?”

Frank didn’t think, so he ignored the question. “Did she have any other place she hid her diary?”

“Oh, no, sir. This was the place. She could lock it up, and she carried the key around her neck so nobody could find it accidental. But when she disappeared, the chest was open and the key was on the table there.” She pointed to the dressing table. “She must’ve took her diary with her. That’s the only other place it could be.”

Frank sincerely doubted this, since Ham Fisher hadn’t found it when he searched her room at the Higgins house, either. He started to ask her if there was anyone else who might know or to whom she might have entrusted her diary when he realized he didn’t have to ask. He already knew: the groom, Harvey.

The stables were dim and strangely silent when Frank entered. He gave himself a moment for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight outside. The familiar and comforting scent of horses and straw and manure assailed him, swamping his senses at first so that he didn’t notice it. But the silence was too great, too complete. Oh, he could hear the horses shuffling in their stalls and the hum of swarming insects and the scurry of rodents in the hay, but something was missing. The place was too still, as if its life force had been sucked out. As if it was empty of human habitation.

Except the other servants had told him Harvey was in the stables. No one had seen him come out, and he didn’t appear to be anywhere else, so he had to be here. Except Frank knew he wasn’t.

“Harvey!” he called into the void. A horse knickered, but no one else responded.

Frank’s nerves tingled as his body prepared instinctively for whatever he encountered. “Harvey!” he tried again, making his way farther into the stable. He glanced into each stall as he passed, seeing nothing amiss. Everything was as it should be except for the oppressive silence that seemed to muffle even his own footsteps. The little mare that Alicia had ridden peeked out at him, blinking her sad, brown eyes. A bay gelding stamped his hoof in the next stall but offered Frank no comment as he walked by.

One by one, he passed each stall until he came to the last one, and that’s where he found Harvey, hanging by his neck from the rafter.


SARAH SHOULD HAVE expected her mother to be entertaining at this time of the day, but she never would have imagined the scene she encountered. The maid hadn’t seemed surprised to see her this time and conducted her to the dining room without even being asked. When she saw who was there, she realized the girl must have simply thought she was another invited guest to the elaborate formal tea party her mother was hosting.

The group of ladies sitting around her mother’s enormous table represented some of the oldest families in New York, and all of them had known Sarah since she was a babe. If that wasn’t bad enough, she saw Mrs. Astor-Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, Jr., matriarch of the Astor clan and designated as “the” Mrs. Astor to distinguish her from the less important Mrs. Astors in the family.

Every instinct warned her to flee, but it was already too late. She was well and truly caught, and couldn’t leave without embarrassing her mother.

“Sarah, dear, what a surprise,” Mrs. Decker said, hurrying to meet her. She did her best to conceal her shock, but only partially succeeded.

“Sarah, is that you?” Mrs. Astor asked. “How delightful to see you! Elizabeth didn’t tell us you were coming.”

“She didn’t know,” Sarah said, smiling as graciously as she could while grinding her teeth in frustration. She needed to speak to her mother alone, not spend hours in meaningless small talk with a group of ladies whose interests were limited to the weather and the foibles of their neighbors.

By then, her mother had reached her and was staring at her anxiously, obviously sensing her agitation. “What is it, dear?” she asked in a near whisper. “Has something happened?”

“No, nothing,” she assured her just as quietly. “I just needed your advice on something.”

Her mother’s lovely eyes lit with surprise and pleasure, but she kept her voice even when she said, “Won’t you join us for tea? I think you know everyone.” Sending Sarah a silent apology that reminded her that her family’s lives were still bound by strict social conventions, her mother reminded her of everyone’s name as the maids brought another chair and laid a place for her with the gold-edged china.

“Tea” was really a meal, served with pomp and ceremony on the best china and silver. The tea itself was poured from a large silver pot into dainty white and gold dinner teacups. Trays of sliced cold chicken garnished with nasturtium leaves, daintily cut slices of ham, and strips of tongue were passed. The bread was cut in thin strips and already buttered. Around the table stood small silver pots of preserves of strawberry and gooseberry and orange marmalade and honey in the comb. Silver baskets covered with lace held slices of golden sponge cake and rich, dark fruitcake, and on another silver tray stood Dresden china cups filled with custard and garnished with a generous amount of grated nutmeg.

Sarah managed to sample each treat as it went by her, but she really wasn’t hungry. She just wanted all these people to be gone. Sarah was seated too far from her mother to even whisper anything about the purpose of her visit, but her mother knew what she was concerned about these days.

After Mrs. Astor had held forth on the advisability of traveling abroad so early in the season-an inordinate number of icebergs had been spotted recently in the North Atlantic in spite of the unseasonably warm weather-Mrs. Decker brought up the subject nearest to Sarah’s heart.

“What a tragedy about the youngest VanDamm girl,” she remarked with creditable nonchalance.

“Oh, yes,” said one of the other ladies. “I heard Francisca is prostrate with grief.”

“She’s been prostrate with something for the past ten years,” Mrs. Astor said. “And I suppose anyone would expire if her parents were going to marry her off to Sylvester Mattingly.”

“It’s true then?” Sarah couldn’t help asking. “They really intended such a match?”

“Oh, I heard the same thing,” someone else offered. “Although I could hardly believe it. If they were in a hurry to marry her off, they should have sent her to England. My son-in-law, Lord Harpster has several quite eligible kinsmen who would be happy to make the acquaintance of an American heiress.”

“Where she could buy herself a penniless nobleman?” another woman scoffed.

While the women debated the merits of marrying off wealthy American girls to poverty-stricken English noble-men just to have a titled lady in the family-a practice that had become so widespread it had a name: Anglo-mania, Sarah considered what she had heard. Apparently, her mother was correct. The VanDamms really had considered marrying their daughter to the elderly attorney, and no one could quite understand why.

After what seemed an eternity of clanking silver and china and meaningless conversation, her mother’s guests were finally forced to take their leave, albeit reluctantly. They obviously sensed Sarah had come for something important and were hoping to catch at least a hint of what that might be. In spite of their best efforts to draw her out, they left disappointed.

When the last guest had gone, Sarah’s mother took her into the parlor, slid the pocket doors closed and turned to face her. “Now tell me what’s happened. Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

“I’m not really sure, Mother,” she said as her mother sat down beside her on the sofa and took her hand. “I heard something today that upset me, and I’m wondering if it might be true.”

“Something about our family…?” she asked with a worried frown.

“Oh, no, of course not,” she assured her hastily, and for a second wondered if her mother knew of something she might have heard. “It’s about Alicia VanDamm.”

Her mother frowned in disapproval. “Oh, my, I was afraid you’d still be worrying yourself about that.”

“I noticed you managed to confirm that rumor about Mattingly for me. Thank you.”

Her mother frowned. “I’m not sure I should be encouraging you in this, and I’m sure I shouldn’t be helping you, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Now tell me, what have you learned?”

“I went to see Mrs. VanDamm today.”

Her mother didn’t bother to hide her surprise. “She received you? You heard Mrs. Astor, Francisca VanDamm hasn’t been out of her bedroom in a decade!”

“She didn’t come out today, either. I think she agreed to see me because I’m a midwife, and she wanted some medical advice.”

“She can’t think she’s with child!” her mother exclaimed. “She’s much too old for such a thing!”

“Of course she is, but she thought I might be able to advise her on her various ailments, so she allowed me to see her. And while I was there, she told me something very disturbing. She said she hasn’t had marital relations with her husband since Mina was born.”

Her mother gaped at her, as shocked as if Sarah had slapped her, and for a moment she didn’t even breathe. Finally, she managed to gasp, “Sarah, really, I can’t believe-”

“Oh, mother, don’t be prudish,” Sarah said, impatient as her mother’s attempt at maidenly modesty. “I deliver babies for a living. Do you think I don’t know how they get made?”

“I’m sure you do, but I simply can’t believe you would discuss such a thing in my parlor!”

Sarah really had been gone too long from this world. She’d forgotten that women of her mother’s station in society might live their entire lives without ever acknowledging the intimacies between husbands and wives. Whatever had made her consider confiding such a thing to her mother, much less expect to receive counsel? And how could she have ever been so inconsiderate?

“I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She rose, preparing to take her leave, ashamed of herself and anxious to be on her way. She knew now to whom she should have gone. Malloy would probably be just as shocked as her mother at her references to intimate relationships, but he wouldn’t let that stop him from helping her figure this out.

But she’d underestimated her mother.

“Don’t go!” she pleaded, capturing Sarah’s hand when she would have gone. “I didn’t mean… I’m afraid I’m just having a little trouble thinking of you as a grown woman. You’re right, of course. I am being prudish. Please stay, and tell me what it is you need advice about, and I’ll try not to be shocked again.”

Her mother looked almost desperate in her need to keep her there, and perhaps she was. Probably she thought that if Sarah left feeling her mother had failed her in some way, she would never return. Sarah didn’t want to believe herself so vindictive, but she had disappeared from her family’s life for years the last time, so perhaps her mother was right to want to keep her here now.

Sarah sat down again, still holding her mother’s hand. “I’m afraid I forget that other people aren’t quite as…” She searched for the proper word. “… as familiar with the more intimate acts of other people’s lives as I am. I’m very sorry that I shocked you, Mother, and hope you won’t take offense.”

Her mother sighed her relief. “I’m really not so prudish as all that, really. It’s just… You are my little girl, you know, and always will be, no matter how old you get. Or how experienced. Now tell me, what is it you think I can help you with?”

Sarah took a moment to gather her thoughts and re-phrase them in a way that would least offend her mother. “I’m sure you know women who, after they reach a certain age, no longer fulfill their marital obligations to their husbands.”

Her mother nodded, determined not to take offense. “Many women find those duties… unpleasant,” she decided after some thought. “Or even uncomfortable. And others simply decide they don’t want any more children, and abstaining from… from intimacy is the only sure way to avoid having them.”

“Mrs. VanDamm said she hadn’t had relations with her husband since Mina was born,” Sarah reminded her. “If that’s true, where did Alicia come from?”

“Perhaps she was confused,” her mother suggested. “She would have been in her early thirties when Alicia was born. She married very young, if I recall. Conceiving Alicia so long after Mina would have been embarrassing. Indeed, I remember how surprised we all were at the time…”

“What is it?” Sarah asked when her mother’s voice trailed off. “What are you thinking?”

Her mother was staring at something across the room but not really seeing it, because her thoughts were far away. “I was just remembering what people were saying then. We all thought… I mean, when there were no other children after Mina and from what Francisca said… I believe we thought that what she told you was the truth, that she had stopped…” She gave Sarah a beseeching glance.

“Sharing her husband’s bed?” Sarah offered.

“Yes,” her mother agreed gratefully. “And she seemed so smug when she told us she was expecting another child, as if she were…” She shrugged helplessly, once again at a loss for words.

“As if she were what?” Sarah prodded. “Guilty, perhaps? Do you think she’d taken a lover, and that’s how-?”

“Heavens, no!” her mother scoffed. “Francisca was much too dull to even think of something like that. No, it was more as if she were sharing a delicious secret with us. She was delighted with herself and with us for being surprised. She thoroughly enjoyed all the attention she received from it, which is why I was surprised when she withdrew to the country shortly afterward. We didn’t see her again until after Alicia was born.”

“I remember that,” Sarah said. “Mina went with her. They took her out of school so she could be company for her mother during her confinement. Mina was terribly angry about it at the time. I thought she was just embarrassed about her mother having a baby, and that perhaps she was a little jealous, too. She always resented Alicia, and I guess that’s why.”

“How odd,” her mother said, considering.

“Do you think so? I’d expect her to be resentful of the new baby who got all the attention, especially since she was just approaching womanhood herself. And for her parents to have produced offspring at that stage in their lives must have been mortifying to a girl her age.”

“No, I mean how odd they took Mina out of school and sent her to the country with Francisca. You said Mina resented the new baby, and in any case, I’d think they’d want to shield a girl of that age from the… the realities of her mother’s condition.”

It took Sarah a moment to understand what her mother meant, and when she did, she had to agree. In a society where pregnancy was barely acknowledged, it seemed unlikely a family would force their adolescent daughter to confront the reality of it at close quarters when she could have been left at school and remained ignorant.

“What could they have been thinking?” she asked aloud. “Could they have been trying to protect Mina from teasing or from being asked embarrassing questions?”

Her mother looked away, as if unwilling to meet Sarah’s gaze.

“You know something, don’t you?” Sarah asked.

Her mother bit her lip and sighed. “Not really, but I can think of one possible explanation, although it does no one credit, not even me.”

“Mother, what are you talking about?”

Mrs. Decker sighed again. “I feel like the lowest gossip to even think such a thing, but it wouldn’t be the first time it happened.” Her mother turned back to her, her eyes bleak with despair and remembered loss. “We sent Maggie to France when it happened to us, or at least we tried to.”

As Sarah met her mother’s tortured gaze, all the awful memories came flooding back. Maggie angry and defiant, refusing to bend to her father’s will, refusing to be hidden away until her baby was born. Maggie, pale and dying, making Sarah promise to take care of the child who was already dead. The pain of her loss was still raw, and she saw her mother felt it, too. Her eyes had filled with tears, and she held herself stiffly, as if the slightest movement might shatter her.

That was when the question formed in Sarah’s mind, the one she’d never allowed herself to consider, the one she would never have dared to ask all those years ago. “What would you have done with Maggie’s child if she’d gone to France the way you’d planned?”

Even though Mrs. Decker resolutely refused to blink, still one tear escaped and cascaded down her pale cheek. “I wish I had thought…” she whispered, her voice ragged with the agony of her losses.

“You wish you had thought what?” Sarah demanded, clutching tight to her fury because she knew she’d never be able to endure the pain if she allowed herself to feel it.

“I wish I had thought to pretend I was with child myself. I could have gone with her. We could have brought the baby back and…”

“And pretended it was our baby sister,” Sarah said, finishing the thought her mother couldn’t.

Her mother covered her mouth to hold back the cry of anguish propriety forbade her to utter.

Sarah felt as if someone had clawed her heart out. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Was that what had driven her to flee? The thought of having her child torn from her, taken away, never to be seen again? No wonder she had been so desperate. Sarah had blamed it on passion, but she hadn’t understood that Maggie had made the only choice she could if she wanted to keep her child.

Mrs. Decker drew a ragged breath and turned back to Sarah. “I would have done it. I would have done anything to save her. You must believe that, Sarah.”

Anything except let her marry the man she loved, Sarah thought, but she didn’t say it. Recriminations wouldn’t bring Maggie back, and in all fairness, her mother hadn’t been the one who decided what would become of Maggie and her child. Someday she would have to face the person who had, but not today. Today, she had to comfort her mother and herself.

“I believe you, Mother. Any woman would, to protect her child.”

Even a woman as shallow and self-centered as Francisca VanDamm, she realized as she watched her mother’s lovely face crumble beneath the weight of her grief.


FRANK DOVE FOR the body, grabbing the dangling legs and lifting, relieving the pressure of the rope around the neck, but even as he did so, he knew he was too late. The body was already stiffening, and he could feel the chill of death even through the man’s clothes. After a moment, he let go and stepped back in defeat, looking up into the face of death.

Harvey had not gone peacefully. Frank could see the scratch marks on his throat where he had clawed at it while it choked the life out of him. The reaction was instinctive, no matter how much someone might want to die. No matter that he had been despondent enough to make a noose and tie it securely and mount the stool and slip the rope around his neck. Still, when the stool tipped over and the rope cut into the living flesh, the will to live overtook the will to die for at least a few seconds, no matter how futile the effort.

Frank wanted to cut him down. That was always the first thing anyone wanted to do, and Frank felt the urge especially strong when he remembered Harvey was a man his own age, a good man whose only sin had been trying to help a girl he loved. But Frank knew that before he cut Harvey down and afforded his body some measure of dignity, he had to look at everything first to make sure it was as it should be.

The stool was there, turned over just as it would be if he’d kicked it. The rope was tied securely to a hook on the wall, then dropped over an exposed beam. The bloated face and bulging eyes told of death by strangulation. Frank could even imagine a motive or two. Harvey might have blamed himself for Alicia’s death and been unable to bear the guilt any longer. Or perhaps he and Sarah Brandt had been wrong, and Harvey really was the father of Alicia’s child. Perhaps he was even her killer, although Frank was almost certain he wasn’t. Still, he’d been wrong before, and any one of those explanations would have accounted for Harvey taking his own life.

Except he hadn’t taken his own life.

A less skilled investigator might not have known that, of course. A less skilled detective, someone who would be investigating a death in the country for example, might have missed it completely. But Frank saw it at once, the first clue that didn’t fit. The rope mark on Harvey’s throat. The rope mark that went straight around his neck, the way it would if someone came up behind him and put a garrote around it and twisted and twisted until he was dead. The rope from which he was hanging would have left a completely different mark at a completely different angle, and Frank was willing to bet that when he cut Harvey down, he would discover no mark at all underneath it, because Harvey had already been dead when he’d been hoisted up over that beam. And when he turned the stool upright and set it beneath Harvey’s feet, he was certain of it, because there was a good six inches between Harvey’s dangling toes and the stool he had supposedly stood on when he put the noose around his neck.

Frank spent most of the next hour summoning the other servants, questioning them about what they had seen and heard, and sending someone to fetch the local police, such as they were. Frank figured his own investigation would be the deciding factor in the case, since the local authorities might have never encountered a murder, so he made it as thorough as he could. None of the servants had seen or heard anything untoward, but one of the gardeners had noticed a young man riding by earlier in the day. Why he thought it was a young man he couldn’t rightly say, except that was the impression he got. All he could really be certain of was that it was a man. Since Frank had already decided Harvey’s killer was a man, this was hardly startling news.

When he’d finished with the servants and laid Harvey’s body out decently, Frank remembered his original reason for wanting to see the groom in the first place. He could no longer question Harvey about Alicia VanDamm’s diary, but he could at least search the man’s room to see if his theory was true.

Harvey slept in a room adjacent to the stable. It was remarkably neat, just as the stables themselves. Harvey’s meager possessions were hung and stacked and stored, each in its proper place, and his bed was tightly made, blankets tucked just so. Searching the place was the work of a few minutes, since the furnishings were so sparse. And just as Frank had suspected, Harvey hadn’t been very imaginative about selecting a hiding place. A loose floorboard underneath the bed came up when Frank pried it with his pocket knife, and beneath it he found the book that Sylvester Mattingly had hired Ham Fisher to find.

It was a slender volume, bound in red leather with gilt edges. Frank only had time to open it and recognize the girlish penmanship inside when he heard the local police arriving outside. He hastily slipped the book into his coat pocket and went out to meet them.

WHEN SHE STEPPED out of her mother’s house onto Fifty-Seventh Street, Sarah was surprised to see how late it was. She’d wasted most of the afternoon taking tea with her mother’s friends, and then she’d spent the rest of it salving old wounds with her mother. At least she finally felt at peace with one of her parents. She hadn’t been able to ease her mother’s grief at Maggie’s death, but they’d been able to share it for the first time without recriminations, something they’d never done before.

If she felt better about her own family’s relationships, she was more confused than ever about the VanDamms’. Sarah had known instinctively that her mother would be able to understand Francisca VanDamm. They had been born and bred in the same world, so their values and beliefs would be similar. What Sarah hadn’t counted on was having her mother suggest such a horrible possibility for Alicia’s existence.

As she reached the corner, Sarah looked for oncoming traffic, and only then did she notice how dark the sky had become, much darker than it should have been for this time of day. As she marveled, she heard the rumble of distant thunder. A storm was brewing off the ocean. Mrs. Elsworth had been right, and here was Sarah, on the other end of town with no umbrella and an even bigger mystery to solve than she’d had this morning.

She thought of Francisca VanDamm and wondered if going back to question her again would be a waste of time. Most likely, especially because she probably wouldn’t admit Sarah again. The midwife in her had served the woman’s purpose in giving Mrs. VanDamm medical advice, so what possible interest could she have in seeing her again?

But someone else in that house also knew what had happened sixteen years ago and how Alicia had come to be born. And that person probably also knew how Alicia herself had come to be in the same situation, the bastard child sent away to the country to bear her own bastard child in secret. Sarah was sure that if she could just find out how all of this had happened, she would know who had killed Alicia and why.

As thunder rumbled overhead, Sarah turned her steps up Fifth Avenue, back to the VanDamms’s town house.


FRANK WAITED ON the train station platform while the well-dressed passengers from the city disembarked. They carried newspapers and umbrellas and looked around for the carriages that were to meet them. Not many people were returning to the city at this time of day, so Frank had a car practically to himself, except for a couple of ragged, barefoot boys.

“Candy, mister?” one of them asked, offering him an unappetizing bit of sweet. The boys boarded the train in the city, usually sneaking on without paying the fare, and sold candy to the wealthy men traveling to their homes in the country.

Ordinarily, Frank would have refused. These boys were the worst guttersnipes, homeless ruffians who were always in trouble with the law. Frank certainly had no reason to show one of them a kindness. And he had absolutely no intention of eating anything they sold.

But then he looked into the boy’s eyes, something he never allowed himself to do, and he saw the vacant hopelessness of a child abandoned by his family and tossed away like so much rubbish. Alicia VanDamm’s diary weighed heavily in his pocket, and perhaps that was what made him pull out a nickel and toss it to the boy. That and the memory of Harvey’s body hanging from the rafter.

The boy gave him a gapped-tooth grin. “Thanks, mister,” he said, handing him a grimy sweet and scurrying away. The boys would probably curl up on an empty seat at the back of the car and sleep, enjoying the rare opportunity to be warm and dry and unmolested for however brief a time. Life on the streets seldom afforded them such a luxury.

As he heard the two boys whispering at the rear of the car, Frank shook his head in wonder at his own generosity. Sarah Brandt would probably have given the boy her last penny. Her influence would ruin Frank if he wasn’t careful.

The train started with a lurch, and the station house receded as the train moved forward into the growing twilight. Frank noticed a flicker of lightning on the horizon. A storm was moving in off the ocean, the perfect backdrop for the reading he had to do.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the book he had found beneath the floor in Harvey’s room. Just as he had suspected, it was Alicia VanDamm’s diary. She’d written her name in the front, along with the date, January 1, 1893. He checked the last entry. March 6, 1896, probably the day she’d run away.

In between, she’d written sporadically. Some days she wrote only a line or two. Others she skipped altogether, but sometimes she went on for pages, and those were the ones marked with the blots of her tears. He remembered Lizzie telling him how she’d cry when she wrote in this book, and when Frank read her words, he wanted to weep, too, at least at first. But soon the rage took him, welling like a tidal wave of fury until he wanted to commit murder instead.

As the rain began to lash the windows of the car, Alicia’s words began to lash Frank’s soul, and when he read her final entry, just as the train pulled into Grand Central Station, Frank knew the truth. He knew that Cornelius VanDamm had killed his own daughter, and even worse, he knew why.

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