Dan Simmons: The Fifth Heart

James said nothing. His thought had already turned away from suicide in the Seine toward the soft bed in his hotel room a few dozen paces and a lift ride from where he stood in the darkness.

“In March of eighteen ninety-one, almost exactly two years ago,” continued Holmes, either unaware of or indifferent to James’s very obvious lack of interest, “I had a visit at my bachelor quarters at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street from a prospective client. The distressed gentleman was an American, the topic was murder in the American capital, and his name was Edward Hooper. He showed me three thousand dollars that he was willing to pay me if I came with him to America and solved the mystery of his sister’s death. I accepted only one dollar—as my retainer—but it has taken these three years for me to become active in the . . . mystery.”

“No, I do not know nor have I heard of . . .” began James and then stopped abruptly.

“I believe you knew Mr. Edward Hooper’s sister—Marian Hooper Adams,” said Holmes.

“Clover,” James said so softly that he could hardly hear the two syllables himself. “Clover Adams,” said Henry James. “From the time she was a girl, everyone called Marian Hooper ‘Clover’. It suited her.”

“You knew her well then,” pressed Holmes.

“I have been friends with Henry Adams for . . . many, many years,” said James. He wished he could will himself not to speak of any of this, but this night he seemed under some strange compulsion to break confidences he normally would have guarded with his life. “I was also close to Clover Adams—as close as anyone could be to such an intelligent but unpredictable and frequently melancholic woman. I was a guest in their home the last time I was in America in the early eighteen eighties.”

“You know the public details of her death then,” said Holmes. There was a strange light in the consulting detective’s eye, James thought, but it could have been a reflection from one of the gas lights that still illuminated this section of the Rue de la Paix.

“Her death by suicide ,” James said in a sharper tone than he might have intended. “By her own hand. Six . . . no . . . some seven-and-a-half years ago now. It is ancient history for all but the most closely bereaved such as her husband Henry and her dear friends—a category which includes me.”

“On six December, eighteen eighty-five,” Holmes said quietly. “The date is part of the mystery presented to me by her brother, Mr. Edward Hooper.”

James started to say that he had never had the pleasure of actually meeting Clover’s brother Edward, that Clover and Henry had always referred to him as “Ned”, but instead he heard himself snapping words like a whip. “Death by sad suicide , Mr. Holmes. Everyone agreed to that. Her husband Henry. My particular mutual friend and neighbor to the Adamses, Mr. John Hay. The doctor. The police. The newspapers. Everyone agreed that she had taken her own life. She was of a melancholic nature, you see. All of us who knew and loved Clover Adams had known that. A tendency toward melancholy—and even self-murder—ran in the Hooper family. And she was in a deep, perhaps irrecoverable mourning for her father who had passed away earlier that year. She had been very close to her father, you see, and nothing that Henry Adams or anyone else could do in the months following Mr. Hooper’s death seemed capable of breaking the iron bonds of loss and melancholy that had closed around poor Clover.”

James stopped. He was almost panting from the intensity and exertion of his little speech. He felt like a fool for saying so much.

Holmes reached into an interior pocket of his tweed jacket and removed what looked to be a small white card. Despite his spirit of resistance, James unclenched one hand from his umbrella and took the offered card. It looked like a lady’s visiting card, although it was done in simple white rather than the colorful cards now in vogue in England and America and was embossed with a subtle white rectangle within the rectangle of the card itself. At the top of the card within that plain border, there were five hearts embossed. Four of the hearts had been colored in, in blue, with what looked to have been hasty strokes of a colored pencil or crayon. The fifth heart was left uncolored—blank.

Henry James knew immediately the more general meaning of what the hearts signified. He had no clue as to what the empty heart or the single line of print below the hearts—a single sentence that looked to have been added by a typewriting machine—might mean.

She was murdered.

“When he visited me asking for help two years ago, Edward Hooper, Clover’s brother, said that he had received exactly this card every six December—every anniversary of his sister’s death—since the first anniversary of her odd death in eighteen eighty-six,” said Holmes. “And I notice, Mr. James, that you instantly recognized the significance of the five embossed hearts on the card. Mr. Hooper told me that the four surviving members of the Five Hearts also annually received such a card. This, he said he knew for a certainty, included Mr. Henry Adams, although Adams had never spoken to the others about it.”

“Ned Hooper was not one of the Five Hearts,” James said numbly.

Holmes nodded. “No. And he believed that he was the only person who was not one of the Five Hearts who annually received this note. But, of course, he could not be certain of that.”

“Clover Adams’s death was by her own hand,” repeated Henry James. “It is of no one’s business except her husband’s, and Henry Adams does not speak of that time or that event. He came close to death himself from sheer grief after . . . her actions.”

“What of her brother’s suspicions?” asked Holmes.

“They are misplaced,” said James. “These . . . cards . . . if they are or were actually being sent, are an example only of someone’s sick and perverted sense of humor. As I said, melancholy—and perhaps some not-infrequent sense of persecution—runs in the Hooper family. I have not met Mr. Edward Hooper—I always heard him referred to as ‘Ned’—but I am sure that he was—and remains—mistaken.”

“Mr. Edward Hooper is dead,” said Sherlock Holmes.

“Dead?” James could hear how small the single syllable sounded amidst the carriage and pedestrian background bustle of Paris’s joyous Rue de la Paix at night.

“He attempted suicide this past December—the day after the December-six anniversary of his sister’s so-called suicide—by throwing himself from a third-story window of his home on Beacon Street, in Boston,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Although badly injured, he survived and was taken to a Boston asylum. Hooper appeared to be recovering, both mentally and physically, but two weeks ago he came down with pneumonia. The disease carried him off.”

“This is terrible,” muttered James. “Horrible. Henry did not write me of these events. How is it that you, Mr. Holmes, who say that you have been in the wilderness of the far-flung Empire for these last two years, should be aware of such recent events in America when I am not?”

“Every good Englishman is behind The Times ,” said Sherlock Holmes.

James blinked either his lack of understanding or his disgust at hearing the ancient joke in this context. Perhaps he meant to signal both.

“I have read my London newspapers even when, as in India, they were weeks out of date,” elaborated Holmes. “Here in Paris, they are quite current. And the choice of American newspapers here—including the newspaper from Boston which carried the news of Edward Hooper’s suicide attempts and final death by pneumonia—is very extensive indeed.”

James took a ragged breath and looked back toward the beckoning lights of his hotel.