Victoria Thompson - Murder On GramercyPark

“I… I don’t remember. It was so horrible. I think I just ran out.”

“Didn’t you take the money Blackwell had gotten to give Calvin?”

“Certainly not! I’m not a thief,” Potter insisted, offended. Apparently, he felt he could commit murder but still maintain some integrity by not stealing from the dead man.

“Then what happened to the money?”

Potter looked genuinely baffled. “I have no idea. Probably one of your policemen took it. Or one of the servants. How should I know?”

Frank sighed. “All right, so you ran out. Where did you go?”

“Back to my flat. I… I waited awhile. Then I was going to go back to discover the body. I didn’t want… Well, I certainly didn’t want Letitia to find it.”

“Of course not,” Frank said. He’d proven he’d do almost anything to protect Letitia Blackwell from unpleasantness. Unfortunately, he’d also just proven he hadn’t killed Edmund Blackwell.

SARAH HAD MANAGED a few catnaps during the night but nothing approaching real rest. Since the room was warm, she’d appropriated Dudley’s blanket and made herself a crude pallet on the floor. She could have slept even in such uncomfortable conditions, but Dudley kept waking up from pain or thirst all night. She’d changed his bandages once when he’d opened one of his sutures, and just when she’d finally dozed off the last time, the landlady had come pounding on the door, demanding to know if Sarah wanted some breakfast brought up.

The next time Malloy needed a nurse, he could just hire one.

Dudley woke up moaning as the landlady delivered the breakfast tray.

“He ain’t going to die, is he?” she asked Sarah. “I don’t need nobody dying here. It’s bad for business.”

“I’ll do my best to see that he doesn’st,” Sarah assured her. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way.”

The sarcasm was wasted on the landlady, who just nodded her approval and left.

Sarah checked Dudley for fever. He seemed warm, but not too bad. No signs of serious infection yet, but it was still early. “You need to eat something,” she told him when she’d examined his bandages. “Do you think you could manage it if I help you?”

“I don’t… I’ll try,” he said. “It hurts, though.”

“I don’t want to give you any more medicine until you’ve tried to eat,” she explained. “The medicine always makes you fall asleep too quickly.”

He nodded and closed his eyes against the pain while she pulled the chair closer so she could feed him. Sarah had asked for soft foods, and that’s what she’d gotten. Milk toast and something that might have been porridge.

He managed to swallow a few bites, and then he said, “Was I dreaming, or did you tell me that it was Mr. Potter who tried to kill me?”

“You weren’t dreaming. He’d lost his watch fob in the struggle with you, and I found it last night, under your bed. Mr. Potter realized he’d lost it and came back looking for it. Since he thought you were dead-that’s what Mr. Malloy told him-he thought it would be safe. Instead, he got caught.”

She didn’t see any point in telling him how she’d fought and overpowered Potter. She wasn’t interested in impressing him, in any case.

“He was here?”

“Yes, you slept through the whole thing. Mr. Malloy took him away.”

“And did you say that Potter had killed Dr. Blackwell and that poor boy, too?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Dudley closed his eyes and shuddered slightly.

“If the pain is that bad, I can go ahead and-”

“No, no, I’m fine,” he assured her, opening his eyes and managing a strained smile. He swallowed a few more bites before he said, “Don’t let Letitia come here. I don’t want her in this place.”

Sarah couldn’t tell him that Letitia still thought he was dead, so she was unlikely to try to visit him at all, but of course, Malloy would soon be informing her that her husband’s killer had been caught and Dudley was, in fact, alive. Sarah couldn’t help wondering if Letitia would then even want to visit Dudley. Sarah knew that if the man she loved had been lying grievously wounded, nothing could have kept her away, but she couldn’t imagine that sort of devotion from Letitia Blackwell. But maybe she was doing the woman an injustice.

“I’m sure she’ll want to arrange for a better place for you to stay when it’s safe to move you,” she said, hoping that, at least, was true.

“She will, but she probably won’t think of it herself. She’s really quite naive about things. That’s why she needs someone to look after her. Blackwell never took proper care of her.”

Which was, of course, why you felt obligated to commit adultery with her, Sarah thought, but of course she didn’t say that. “Oh, yes,” she said instead, not above a little shameless gossiping, even if it involved a dead man. “You started to say something last night about her being afraid of Dr. Blackwell. Was he abusive to her? Did he hurt her, I mean?”

“Not that I know of,” Dudley said, taking another bite. When he’d swallowed, he added, “But there are other ways to hurt someone besides hitting them. He had forced her to give up the morphine. You can’t imagine how horrible that was for her.”

Sarah could well imagine it, having seen others going through the same agonizing process.

He swallowed another bite. “And then he made her speak at the lectures, even knowing how terrified she was. She did it for him, because she was so grateful to him, but he never appreciated it. No wonder she turned to the morphine again.”

“I suppose she was also concerned about her husband finding out about you and the baby,” Sarah suggested.

Dudley frowned as he swallowed the next bite. “I don’t think she was afraid of that so much. Blackwell paid hardly any attention to her at all, except that he…”

“That he what?” Sarah asked, trying to appear only mildly interested.

“Well, he disapproved of the morphine use. Actually, I don’t think he cared about Letitia’s health as much as he was worried that if she was taking the morphine again, it would reflect badly on his cure of her. He suspected that she was using it again, but of course he never found any proof because she was careful not to keep it in the house.”

“Is that what she was so afraid of?” Sarah asked. “That he would find out and make her stop again?”

“It would have killed her,” Dudley said, growing agitated. “You must understand, she just couldn’t go through that again.”

“I understand completely,” Sarah assured him. Few people could endure such an ordeal even once.

“She tried to describe the pain to me, but I don’t think I can even imagine what it was like. She was simply terrified he’d put her through that again. She was so terrified that I even thought…”

“What did you think?” Sarah prodded when he hesitated.

He smiled sheepishly. “You’ll think I’m a cad.”

Sarah already thought so, but she said, “You can’t shock me, Mr. Dudley.”

“I hate to admit it now, since I know it wasn’t true, but I was actually afraid that Letitia might’ve killed Dr. Blackwell herself. That’s how frightened she was that he would discover she was still using morphine.”

“Oh, my, that is unchivalrous of you,” she agreed, even as a chill stole up her spine at the very thought.

“If you could have seen her that day when she came to Mr. Fong’s, you’d forgive me for believing it, though,” he defended himself. “She was on the verge of hysteria. She’d quarreled with Blackwell, you see. He’d accused her of using morphine again. She’d denied it, of course, but it was an ugly scene. And she knew that when the baby came, she wouldn’t be able to get out for several weeks. She’d have to keep the morphine in the house then, and if Blackwell found it…”