Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“It is a distinct possibility,” said Holmes.

“And it must have been Rebecca Lorne, whom Clover liked and trusted and who I also relied upon in the days after . . . after . . .” rasped Adams. “It would have to be Rebecca Lorne because she would have been the only one who could have taken the glass between the visits of the doctor and the police lieutenant.”

“She almost certainly took the glass away with her,” said Holmes, “but she is not the only suspect if it was murder rather than suicide. There is another.”

Adams stared so hard at Holmes that the detective felt almost burned by the historian’s gaze.

“Clifton Richards, Miss Lorne’s . . . cousin . . . may have been involved,” said Holmes. “He may have been in the house and gone down the back way, the servants’ stairs, and out of the house even as Rebecca Lorne rushed up the main stairway to warn Mrs. Adams.”

“To warn her,” Adams repeated dully. He managed to focus his eyes on Holmes’s face. “Who killed my wife, Mr. Holmes? I beg of you . . . if you know, tell me.”

“I’ll know for a certainty in the next few weeks, Mr. Adams. Which is why I need to ask a favor of you.”

Adams may have nodded an infinitesimal bit.

“I’ve convinced John Hay and Cabot Lodge to move the visit to the Chicago World’s Fair up a couple of weeks for the actual opening on May first, arriving in his private car perhaps a day or two early,” said Holmes. “And Senator Cameron has his private yacht . . . the Great Lakes Yacht, I believe they call it . . . ready to anchor just off the pier of the Exposition.”

“Going to the wretched Exposition will help reveal my Clover’s murderer and bring him or her to justice?” said Adams.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go along with Cameron, Hay, the Lodges, and the rest. Although I saw the Philadelphia World’s Fair and it was a monumental bore.”

Holmes actually smiled.

As he prepared to leave, Adams gripped his arm and said, “But why would they kill Clover? Why would anyone want to harm that witty, sad, lonely, darling woman?”

Holmes settled back into his seat, sighed, and reached into his upper inside jacket pocket to pull out a small blue envelope still tied in pink ribbon. It had been opened. Holmes removed the handwritten letter and held it so that Adams could put on his glasses and read it across the wide desk.

Henry Adams read his own handwriting for half a moment and then let out an inarticulate noise and lunged for the letter.

“No,” said Holmes, folding it, and putting it back into his jacket pocket. “I can’t allow you to tear this up the way you did the card earlier.”

“That’s my property!” snarled the small historian.

Holmes nodded. “Legally it is, sir. Even though it was in the possession of another person.”

“Why would Lizzie . . . how did you . . . why would she give you that most intimate of letters? My greatest folly?”

“She didn’t give it to me,” said Holmes. “She doesn’t know I have it. I had to borrow it. When my investigations are done, I shall return it to where she kept it hidden.”

“Investigations . . .” hissed Adams in contempt. “Reading other people’s most private mail. Sneaking into boudoirs in the night. Stealing . . .”

“I assure you that I shall return it in the next few weeks,” said Holmes. “Mrs. Cameron shall never know that I had taken the letter from its hiding place. I simply needed to know for sure what Rebecca Lorne and the so-called Clifton Richards were using to blackmail Mrs. Adams.”

“Blackmail?” It sounded as if Henry Adams were going to start laughing wildly. “Then I did kill Clover Adams. I was the cause, alpha and omega, of my darling’s death.”

“No,” said Holmes. “It was my duty in solving this case to find and read this letter, Mr. Adams, but I assure you that I took no pleasure in doing so. And I found no evil there. It was a note from a terribly sad man who had been essentially abandoned by a wife lost to melancholy not merely in the previous months but for years . . . a midnight love letter to another woman, one he knew well and admired much. It was folly, Mr. Adams, but exquisitely human and understandable folly.”

“We went to the Camerons’ house on the evening of December fourth,” said Adams, speaking as if mesmerized, his eyes unfocused. “Two days before Clover . . . before her death. Lizzie Cameron had been ill and Clover had been unusually distraught about the illness. She knew . . . we all knew . . . that a major source of Lizzie’s illness lay in the travesty of her marriage to Don. Clover felt bad about that as well. That night we took Rebecca Lorne with us . . . it was warm, I remember, not feeling like December at all.

“To cheer Lizzie up, Clover had brought along a large bouquet of yellow Marechal Niel roses—not easy to find in December in Washington—and she and Rebecca took the roses up to Lizzie’s sickroom. Do you know the language of flowers, Mr. Holmes?”

“Only bits of it.”

Adams smiled with no humor. “In the language of flowers so popular these days, the yellow roses signified ‘I’m yours, heart and soul.’ This is what she gave Lizzie Cameron less than forty-eight hours before her death.”

“She was giving that message to you,” Holmes said softly.

Adams shook his head. “If Clover knew about my . . . my mad, impulsive letter to Lizzie of the previous July . . . that letter . . .” He pointed at Holmes’s breast pocket. “And begged to know if it was true . . . if Rebecca Lorne had tantalized her with the knowledge of that letter, or even of the possibility of its existence . . . and if Lizzie did not deny it . . .”

Holmes reached across the desk and touched Adams’s forearm, squeezing it very softly. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Adams. You know Clover’s good heart. Her flower-language expressions to her sick friend were almost certainly just that—an act of love and generosity.”

But Holmes knew that there had been a confrontation of sorts over the letter from Henry Adams that night. Clover had asked Lizzie Cameron if it was true . . . if such a letter from “my Henry” existed. Lizzie had been sick and in a foul mood and, while ridiculing the entire idea, had also gone out of her way not to deny. She even teased Clover and Rebecca Lorne for wanting to see “such a curious document”. Holmes knew all this because, besides liberating that letter from Lizzie Cameron’s hiding place of letters taped to the bottom of her dresser drawer, he’d also borrowed her private 1885 diary long enough to read entries from the first week of December. The diary had been put back in place—at some risk to Holmes’s agent in these matters—but he would keep the July letter, and other letters taken from other homes by the same dirty means, until events of the next few weeks were settled.

Holmes could see and feel Adams approaching his personal breaking point. This was the man who, after his wife’s death, had fled to the South Seas with an artist friend for three years and more than 30,000 miles of aimless wandering. This was the man who had sworn the great sculptor Saint-Gaudens to secrecy and then had him build that mausoleum for the living inside the extraordinary memorial not to his wife’s memory—but to the memory of his own grief.

Standing, his hat and cane in hand, Holmes paused and removed another slip of paper from his jacket. “Hay gave me this, although all your friends know it, Adams. Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . began a letter to her sister Ellen shortly after you left that Sunday morning to visit your dentist. I know you remember the words but it might help find perspective to hear them again:

If I had one single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express. God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour . . . Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even .