Sara Mitchell - The Widow's Secret

In the end, it didn’t matter. Orders were orders, and money was money. And his own life was on the line.

“Find these items, and you’ll be rewarded accordingly. Fail, and your usefulness might come to an end.”

There. White porch, two columns. Getaway alleys on either side. At last, luck was running his way.

He slid one hand inside to make sure the knife was within easy reach. Next he fit his brass knuckles over the fingerless gloves. Ten minutes later he slipped over the windowsill and into the house’s parlor.

“I refuse to stay inside this place another day!” Jocelyn stabbed hat pins in place while she glared at her obdurate maid. “It’s been three days. We’ve cleaned everything up, nothing is missing. The police assure me they’re doing everything they can to—What?”

Katya wrote with a furious speed that mirrored Jocelyn’s frustration, her double chin quivering like calf’s-foot jelly. Need to wait for—she hurriedly searched the list of correctly spelled words she kept inside her apron pocket—Mr. MacKenzie.

Sergeant Whitlock, the policeman who was still investigating Mr. Hepplewhite’s murder, was the officer who had appeared on her doorstep to investigate her report of vandalism. More policemen had followed, as well as a nattily dressed detective wearing a dark suit and spotted yellow bow tie instead of a blue uniform.

Operative Micah MacKenzie’s name had been mentioned several times. But nobody saw fit to enlighten Jocelyn as to when he would return to Richmond, or whether or not he concurred with their hypotheses that the villain who had torn her house apart was connected with Mr. Hepplewhite’s murder.

Jocelyn crumpled Katya’s words into a ball, stomped across to the parlor fireplace, hurled the note into the flames, then returned to the foyer where Katya hovered like an over-wrought governess. “For the last time, I doubt we’ll ever see Micah MacKenzie again. What’s the matter with you, anyway? No—don’t answer that, it’s just a rhetorical question. And before you ask what that means, a rhetorical question is one for which I don’t expect an answer. They’re not meant to be answered—Oh, botheration.” Her gloves weren’t cooperating with her fingers. Jocelyn gave up and threw them down. “I’m going downtown. You can either stay here and fret, or do what the police sergeant told you to do and come with me.”

Katya gave her a wounded look as she wrote. I fetch my coat.

They walked the two blocks to the streetcar stop in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Jocelyn said after they boarded the nearly empty car and sat down, side by side but an ocean apart. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper, or taken it out on you.”

A self-righteous sniff was Katya’s only response, but when Jocelyn glanced sideways, she spied a twinkle in her maid’s eyes. “Come now, confess,” she coaxed. “You’ve been wanting to go to town as much as I have. We’ll stop by the bakery, and buy some of those nutmeg doughnuts you love so much.”

When Katya dug into the folds of her voluminous sack coat for her pad and thick charcoal pencil, Jocelyn almost wept with relief. The further evidence of her crumbling fortitude drained her. Her desperation for any connection with another human being, albeit through the silent scribbling on a notepad, reduced her to a tearful puddle.

Katya tugged her arm. Their stop had arrived. Jocelyn corralled her gloomy thoughts as they joined the throng of pedestrians spilling across the tracks to the sidewalk. As long as she and Katya stayed together, Sergeant Whitlock counseled her, and confined their meanderings to the busy downtown, they should be safe.

After they strolled along East Main for several blocks, she relaxed enough to point out a display of ladies’ shoes in the window of a shoe store, even laughed with her companion over a man on a bicycle bumping his way down the cobbled street scarcely a dozen paces ahead of a horsecar. She lingered in front of the bookshop until Katya thrust a piece of paper in front of her face.

Bakery.

“Oh, all right.”

They walked up Sixth Street to Bromm’s Bakery on East Marshall. Several moments later they emerged from the shop, carrying fragrant sacks of confections. A mule-drawn delivery wagon pulled up in front of the bakery and a wiry dark-skinned man jumped down, tying the mule to the hitching post. Katya’s entire face lit up as she pointed to the straw hat on top of the mule’s head, its long ears poking through holes cut on either side. When she indicated that she wanted to go pet the mule, Jocelyn waved her on without a second thought.

“I’ll wait for you here. I’ve no desire to spoil the fragrance of our doughnuts with eau de mule.”

Sometimes she forgot how young Katya was, she mused, watching the girl gesturing with her hands to the driver, relieved when he obligingly introduced her to the flop-eared mule.

How had Katya endured the nightmares in her short life, yet retained the capacity for joy and hope?

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