Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Adams only shook his head, whether in negation or confusion, Holmes couldn’t tell.

“Earlier in the letter to her sister,” said Holmes, “Mrs. Adams wrote, and again I believe I can cite it fully from memory— ‘If I had one single point of character or goodness, I would stand on that and grow back to life.’ But then the letter ends. Why did you turn around and go home so quickly, Mr. Adams? After only ten minutes or so of walking? I know you had no appointment with your dentist that morning.”

Adams lifted a fountain pen from the table top and held it in both hands as if he were going to snap it. “I became . . . alarmed,” he said at last. “Concerned. I realized that it had been a bastardly thing to do . . . leaving Clover alone in the house on a morning when she was hurting so much.”

“And upon returning to your home then at sixteen-oh-seven H Street—just down the street,” said Holmes. “You told the police that you found Miss Rebecca Lorne waiting outside the front door. You said that she asked your opinion on whether she should go up and visit Clover that day.”

Adams said nothing. His usually almost frighteningly intelligent eyes seemed to have a haze over them— A translucent caul of memory , thought Holmes.

“Why did you lie about that as well, Mr. Adams?” said Holmes.

Adams blinked. “Who said that I lied.”

“I did. You encountered Rebecca Lorne coming out the front door of your house on H Street. She was weeping—as hysterical as Mrs. Adams had been a short time earlier. She had trouble telling you what she had found when she went up to visit Mrs. Adams, didn’t she, Mr. Adams?”

“Yes. I had to take her into the foyer so that no one could see her hysterics . . . it took me a full minute or two to get her calmed down to the point where Miss Lorne could tell me what she’d discovered upstairs.”

“How did she get in?” asked Holmes, leaning forward again.

“What?”

“I’m sure you locked the door behind you when you left to work off your anger in your walk,” said Holmes. “How did Rebecca Lorne gain entry to your home?”

“Oh, Clover had had an extra key made up for Rebecca a month or two earlier,” Adams answered almost distractedly. “We’d hoped to go to New York for some shopping—a vain hope, as it turned out—and Clover had given Miss Lorne the key so that she could drop in to check on the servants and see that the plants were properly watered.”

“Rebecca Lorne discovered Mrs. Adams’s body in the wreckage that had been the parlor, not you,” said Holmes. He did not phrase it as a question and Adams did not answer other than to nod ever so slightly.

Eventually Adams spoke in hollowed-out tones, the voice of a man who has passed through Hell and who knows he must go there again. “In those last months, it was only Rebecca Lorne who seemed to give Clover any surcease of her sorrow over her father’s death. Clover had stopped seeing most of her usual friends. It’s not quite fair to say that she and Miss Lorne were inseparable during those last late-summer and autumn months, but there’s no one whom Clover looked forward to seeing more than Miss Lorne.”

“Hadn’t the two of them paid a call on Mrs. Cameron—Lizzie Cameron—the previous evening?” asked Holmes.

Adams blinked rapidly once again. “Yes, they had. Lizzie had been very ill with . . . the influenza, I believe. Clover visited her and Miss Lorne accompanied her. They brought flowers and a book.”

Holmes removed the untitled publicity photograph of Irene Adler from his upper jacket pocket and handed it across to Henry Adams. “Is this a picture of Rebecca Lorne?”

Adams moved the photograph back and forth to bring it into proper focus. “Well . . . yes, it appears to be Miss Lorne. Her dress here is more . . . ‘showy’ is perhaps the right word . . . and she looks a little younger than when I last saw her, but this appears to be Rebecca.”

Holmes took the photo back. “This is a program advertisement for a certain Irene Adler—American born but European trained.”

“Trained in what?” said Adams.

“Opera, acting on the stage, and blackmail,” said Holmes. “Most specially that last skill.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You remember her cousin, a certain Clifton Richards?”

“Of course,” said Adams. “He worked in the photographic section of the State Department.” Adams paused and the haze came over his eyes again. “He’s the one who brought Clover the new developing solution that contained the potassium cyanide.”

“His real name is Lucan,” said Holmes. “Possibly Lucan Adler. Probably Irene Adler’s son.”

Adams shook his head again.

“You didn’t see or talk to Lucan—this Cousin Clifton—on the day you met Rebecca Lorne coming out of your house . . . the day Clover died?”

“No.”

“So he might have been in the house and exited via the back stairs when you ran up the front stairs, and he may have slipped out the back way into the alley,” said Holmes.

“An extraordinary and outrageous supposition,” said Henry Adams. “We have no evidence that her cousin Clifton was with her in my home on that terrible day.”

“No,” said Holmes, “but we know beyond a doubt that ‘Clifton Richards’ was Adler the assassin. And without questioning Irene Adler—your so-called Rebecca Lorne—we simply cannot know the truth of that day. And there was an obituary for Irene Adler in the March eighteen eighty-six London Times .”

Adams shook his head again, but with a negative hand gesture this time, a physical pushing away of Holmes’s words or their import. “No, no . . . this Irene Adler cannot have been the same woman that I knew so well in the year before Clover’s death. I’ve written letters to Miss Lorne, it’s been Mrs . Braxton, of Boston, over the years. And she has always responded.”

“Recently?” said Holmes, his ears metaphorically perking up like a hunting hound’s.

“Her last letter to me was last autumn, I believe,” said Adams. “So you see that your late actress person cannot be Mrs. Rebecca Lorne Braxton of Boston.”

“And her handwriting has stayed the same?” said Holmes.

“Yes, of course,” said Adams. “But I shall show you the letters. You may make your own judgment. Mrs. Braxton has never sent me a typewritten missive such as those accursed annual cards you are so clumsily and invasively investigating.”

“When was Miss Lorne married?”

“About two years after my wife’s death,” said Adams. “Miss Lorne had moved to Boston in January of eighteen eighty-six, only a month after . . . after. She sent me a note of her marriage in August of eighteen eighty-eight. I know only that her husband is somewhat older than she and that he makes a living in the sea trade with India.”

“May I see these letters? Hers to you, I mean. Not yours to her.”

Holmes expected an argument, possibly harsh words, but Adams must have been expecting the request; he pulled a small bundle of envelopes, tied in a pink bow, from the main drawer of his desk.

“Read them, Mr. Holmes. Take them with you as long as you promise to return them. You shall find nothing in Rebecca Lorne Braxton’s letters to me—or in my short notes to her, for that matter, should the lady allow you to read them someday—but normal conversation between an aging widower and his wife’s friend, a friend, like the husband, still deep in mourning after seven years.” Adams’s tone was flat, almost businesslike.

Holmes accepted the bundle of letters in silence.

“Another thing . . . another mystery , if you will, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams.

Holmes held the letters in his lap and waited.