The Widow's Secret (5 page)

Turning, he walked back to his desk, picked up a file folder, carefully wound the string around the button tabs. Then he looked across at Micah. “After this meeting I'll clear my schedule. I'll see you and Mrs. Tremayne at four o'clock. But if I detect even the slightest trace of suspicion on her part—or inappropriate regard on yours—I'll remove you from this case.”

With Chief Hazen's words buzzing like mosquitoes inside his head, Micah headed for the hotel where Mrs. Tremayne and Katya were staying. If Jocelyn Tremayne turned out to be a counterfeit of the woman he remembered, the chief wouldn't have to fire him. Micah would turn in his credentials, because he would no longer trust his instincts. On the other hand, if he were forced to choose between her and unmasking the man responsible for murdering his father…

Lord, please don't force me to make that choice.

“I
promise he won't arrest you or threaten you.”

“But you can't promise that he'll believe me.” Jocelyn glanced at the man seated beside her in the hansom cab, then, clearly uncomfortable, shifted her attention to the street.

It was a dreary afternoon, the sky a dull smear of gray, the buildings stolid rows of brick and stone. Over the clatter of the wheels, a train whistle tooted a warning; seconds later the hansom stopped, and a Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive pulling several passenger cars rumbled across Maryland Avenue on its way toward the depot. Moments later, the driver flicked the whip and the hansom lurched into motion once more.

Beneath the layers of her blouse and walking suit, Jocelyn's heart fluttered like a captured rabbit. She still didn't know quite how Operative MacKenzie had persuaded her to accompany him to the Treasury Building—except she'd been reluctant to thumb her nose at a summons from the head of the Secret Service.

As though he'd been reading her mind, after the sound of the train had faded in the distance, Operative MacKenzie
observed, “I can't speak for Chief Hazen, but I might make the observation that I'm not sure
you
believe me.”

She jerked her head around, searching the shuttered face. The rocking motion of the cab made her queasy, and she fought the incipient panic rising in her throat. “It's difficult, when I know I've done nothing wrong. Nothing! Yet you've frightened me, hounded me, and now you've bullied me into a situation I don't want to be in. I returned your evidence, so I don't understand what I can possibly say to your chief that I haven't already explained to you.”

An unexpected smile kindled in his eyes, crinkling the corners, then beneath his mustache a corner of his mouth tipped up. “If that's how you perceive me, I'm fortunate you're here at all, Mrs. Tremayne. Ah…you've placed me in an awkward position, especially after hearing your interpretation of my actions. You see, once he meets you in person, I don't think Chief Hazen will have any lingering doubts about you.”

Instantly wary, Jocelyn stiffened. “And why is that? You believe someone who looks like me is far too…noticeable…to engage in criminal activities? I'm too easily picked out of a crowd? Oh, yes—I swoon when confronted by murder.”

“I could pick you out of a crowd of a hundred redheads,” Operative MacKenzie said, his voice deepening. “Besides which, the lovely young woman I met a decade ago still lives somewhere inside the woman sitting beside me now. Regardless of how much you may have changed in the intervening years, Mrs. Tremayne, I don't believe you'd ever knowingly be part of anything illegal.” A soft pause as potent as the touch of his fingers seeped into Jocelyn. “And you didn't swoon. You're harboring a terrible fear inside you, Mrs. Tremayne. But I also see a rare strength of character, not to mention a formidable temper.”

Hot color whooshed from her chin to her hairline. If she leaned sideways a scant six inches, their shoulders would touch, and she would feel again the strength of him, of muscles tensile and tough as her oak banister. An evocative scent of starch and something uniquely masculine flooded her senses. If only she'd met this man when she was seventeen, still bubbling with hope and a heart full of dreams. Instinctively, her hand lifted to press against her throat in an effort to calm her galloping pulse. “I—You shouldn't say such things to me. I don't know how to interpret them. I wish I…” She bit her lip, tearing her gaze away from Micah MacKenzie.

With a jerk the hansom came to a halt. “Treasury Building,” the hack announced.

The imposing building loomed before her, its seventy-four granite columns reminding Jocelyn of massive bars on a stone prison cell. When a warm hand gently clasped her elbow, she jumped.

“It's really not the lion's den,” Operative MacKenzie murmured. “But if it were, even if I couldn't close the mouths of the lions, I'd protect you with my life.” When her startled gaze lifted, she discovered that despite the light tone, his eyes probed hers with an intensity that stole her breath.

With his hand supporting her, they climbed the stairs into the main entrance. Jocelyn realized with a spurt of astonishment that she actually looked forward to engaging the chief of the Secret Service in a spirited defense of her position.

Richmond

A week had passed since Jocelyn and Katya returned from Washington, and life settled back into an uneasy rhythm of
sorts. For long clumps of time, Jocelyn almost forgot about the man who had burst into her life with the force of a runaway locomotive, then chugged off toward the horizon. Operative MacKenzie was somewhere in the Midwest—St. Louis? Chicago?—chasing after counterfeiters while Jocelyn struggled to believe his parting words.

“I'll be back,”
he promised.
“Don't think you've seen the last of me, Mrs. Tremayne.”

“You're like the wind, Operative MacKenzie,”
she retorted, disguising desolation with flippancy.
“Blowing here and there, and nobody can hold it in one place, or capture it inside a basket. I plan to go back to living my life as though none of the past week ever happened.”

“Mmm. I gave up playing pretend games when I was, oh, about six years old.”
Then he touched the brim of his hat.
“But for now, I'll leave you to yours. Be careful, please. The police are keeping an eye out, but—”

She wondered now what words he'd swallowed back, but refused to invest much effort in an exercise that would only trigger a plethora of memories.

Tonight she was attending a musicale at the Westhampton Club with friends—an enjoyable diversion that might allow her to forget, if only for a few hours, Micah MacKenzie and the Secret Service. During the days she filled the hours with mindless activities, while the nights taunted her with their emptiness as she searched in vain for peace of mind.

There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked.

The poisonous verse slapped at her like a vindictive hand.

“I'm not wicked!” Jocelyn announced aloud, anger and pain twining her in thorny vines. “I'm not….” When her voice broke, she bit her lip until she tasted blood. Throat aching, she snatched up her gloves and evening cloak and swept out of the room, firmly shutting the door behind her.

 

The night was warm, more like summer than late fall. Air thick with humidity clung to trees and buildings. Despite his considerable bulk, a man walked in soundless stealth along the city's back streets until bank buildings and stores gave way to lumber and tobacco warehouses. For a block or two he followed the railroad tracks. Eventually, he reached a neighborhood where, in daylight hours, he could never risk showing his face.

He wasn't stupid. He knew this task was both reprimand, and restitution. Still, it gave him the shivers. He was a professional, but he had a few standards; he'd never snuffed a woman. He'd stolen from 'em plenty, he'd cut a few as warnings, but he'd made it plain that he wasn't after anything worse.

But a job had to be done, and he had to do it. His reputation after the last botched assignment was hanging over his head, a noose about to drop around his size 19 neck. He'd explained. Unfamiliar city, poor directions—no time to study patterns, so the old man's death wasn't his fault.

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?

A
n hour later, by the time they left the streetcar to walk the last three blocks, they'd gobbled down three doughnuts each. Leaves swirled about their feet in a lazy shuffle, and in a burst of contentment Jocelyn waved enthusiastically to the driver of an ice-block delivery wagon as he passed by, causing Katya to roll her eyes.

Their innocuous outing had momentarily banished the ugly shadows that swirled around Jocelyn like the leaves; a lightness spread inside her heart until she had to squelch the giddy impulse to skip down the last block like a young girl.

The mailman met them as they reached the front porch.

“Afternoon, ladies. Mighty fine day for an outing. I have a letter here for you, Miz Tremayne. Y'all caught me just before I popped it into your box.” He handed the envelope to Jocelyn.

“Thank you, Mr. Hobbes,” she managed, giddiness transforming into a tangled mix of hope and dread. The letter might be from Operative MacKenzie. He was probably writing to tell her he'd been ordered to California or the Wyoming Territory. She glanced down and all the blood drained from her head.

“Have a doughnut,” she offered the mailman automatically, while the buzzing in her ears intensified so that she scarcely heard her own voice. “They're fresh, from Bromm's Bakery.”

“Why, thank you kindly, Miz Tremayne. Ma'am.” He nodded to Katya, then whistled his way down the walk.

Somehow Jocelyn managed to climb the porch steps and unlock the door. She could feel the weight of Katya's curiosity pressing down on her shoulders; she dropped her cloak onto the hall tree, then wandered into the parlor, the envelope clenched in her hand.

The Honorable Augustus Brock, New York City.

Not Micah MacKenzie, but Chadwick's uncle, his mother's brother. Jocelyn's last memory of Augustus Brock and his narcissistic wife, Portia, was the day of Chadwick's funeral. Dressed in their hastily dyed mourning clothes, they'd glared at Jocelyn like two black ravens about to pick out her eyes. “He wouldn't have been driven to commit such an abominable act of shame if you'd given him the child he longed for,” Augustus's wife proclaimed loudly enough for the rest of the mourners to stiffen into appalled silence.

“Don't know why Rupert agreed to let his son marry you in the first place,” her husband muttered, his complexion flushed above the high shirt collar. “Who would have thought it—all that brass in your hair and you turn out to be barren. Disgrace to the whole family.”

Jocelyn started violently when a hand brushed her arm, only then realizing that Katya was beside her, waving a piece of paper in front of her face. “Sorry.” She squeezed Katya's hand, but after reading the words moved away, unable to bear even the loyal maid's proximity. “It's a letter from…some people I used to know. Be a dear, won't you, and…and make us some tea?”

Satisfied to have a task, Katya nodded and hurried from the room. Jocelyn collapsed onto the sofa. Why now? She felt like a puppet whose master delighted in dangling her over a fire. One day, she thought, the flames would leap up and consume her.

Hurriedly, before she yielded to the urge to rip the letter unread into tiny pieces, she opened the envelope and withdrew two sheets of expensive vellum.

Now there was a masterstroke of understatement for you. The entire Bingham clan, including the Brocks, had disowned Jocelyn before the gravediggers finished shoveling dirt over Chadwick's coffin. One of the Brock cousins—she neither remembered nor cared which—had gone so far as to spit on her, claiming she was nothing but poor white trash, a pathetic creature whose hair and face had embarrassed Chadwick almost as much as her barrenness.

The letter crumpled in her hands. Jocelyn inhaled a shuddering breath, flexed her fingers and forced herself to read the rest of it.

When Katya tiptoed in with a tray some time later, she found Jocelyn sitting on the edge of the sofa, bowed at the waist with her face in her hands, the wrinkled vellum sheets lying faceup on the floor.

 

Micah returned to Richmond a day after the clear, cool autumn days of the past week blew into the Atlantic, driven out by another ill-tempered hot spell from the south. Indifferent to its cloying humidity, he rented a buggy from the livery stable and drove himself directly to the Third District Police Station.

“Operative MacKenzie! 'Bout time you brought your ugly self back to help us poor clods of the Richmond Police.” George Firth, acting sergeant, greeted him with a congenial
handshake—and the unpleasant news that “Your little redheaded widow's got more trouble than a cemetery's got head-stones.”

“What's happened? Has she been harmed? Why didn't someone notify me?”

The sergeant threw back his head and guffawed. “I'll be…they wuz right, about you and Miz Tremayne. And here I am telling 'em you're just a high-falutin' government man, keeping his sticky fingers in our business.”

Heat crept up Micah's face. He felt like a rube, the target of public ridicule, but he counted to thirty and waited until the other man's coarse jesting finally wound down. “I've been in constant touch with your chief, the Detective Bureau and the mayor, concerning Mr. Hepplewhite's murder and its possible connection with my case. Mrs. Tremayne is part of that investigation,” he stated evenly. “Now, over the past few weeks I spent three days locked in an airless room, examining approximately $100,000 in fraudulent two-and five-dollar bills, not to mention over $20,000 in spurious coinage. Less than twelve hours later, I caught a midnight train heading west, and I've been on the road going on ten days now. I came here straight from the train station, I haven't had a decent meal or a bath in—” he glanced at the large round clock on the wall across the room “—almost forty hours. So when I ask if Mrs. Tremayne is all right, you might want to let me know—at once.”

“Oh-ho, tetchy today, eh? Fair enough. Now that you mention it, you do look frayed a bit around the edges. Here—Tenner! Fetch Sergeant Whitlock. We got our own gen-yoo-ine agent from the Treasury Department back in town. Fill him in, and let's watch how fast he hightails it over to the widow Tremayne's.”

 

Micah tied the livery horse to a post three houses down from Jocelyn's home, then checked the time. Seventeen
minutes. He'd driven the buggy with imprudent haste through a maze of narrow streets, dodged two streetcars, an oncoming freight train, and clipped the wheel on a curb when he took a corner too fast on the edge of Monroe Park. He'd planned to return to Richmond a week earlier, but duty, not to mention Chief Hazen, bound him with chains he could not afford to break. Sighing, he thrust the watch back in his pocket. Ah, yes. Duty.

Katya's round face lit up like a harvest moon when she opened the door. But her gestures spoke of urgency as she bustled him into the front parlor.

“Hello, Katya. You're looking fine.” When the maid rolled her eyes, Micah smiled a little. “It's all right, I came from the police station. I know about the break-in. Is she home?” he asked, glancing around the room, noticing the absence of a pair of green glass paperweights with flower etchings that had been displayed on the doily-covered table next to the window. A colorful urn in the foyer that had boasted several peacock feathers was also gone.

He started to say something else, but the words drained out of his head when Jocelyn appeared between the fringed draperies lining the entrance to the parlor. “Mrs. Tremayne.”

“Operative MacKenzie.”

She hovered, seemingly uncertain about whether to enter, or perhaps flee up the staircase. Her reception was so contrary to Micah's expectations that for a moment he floundered in his own swamp of indecision. Then he looked more closely into her eyes and realized that her lack of warmth stemmed from causes other than himself. “I believe we agreed that ‘Mister' is less official-sounding. What's happened, besides your home being vandalized?”

“Oh…I'd forgotten. How did you know?”

With a wry look, he gestured to his wrinkled, travel-worn
attire. “I went from the train station to the police station to your house as fast as I could. I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner. Katya's back to looking anxious, and you're looking—” he reeled in the words dancing indiscriminately on his tongue “—subdued,” he finished, and behind him Katya stomped the floor.

“I'm glad you're here,” Jocelyn said, waving a limp hand at her maid. “There's nobody else I can ask….”

Micah waited, but when she didn't elaborate, and a backward glance at the maid revealed her frantically writing in her tablet, he went with instinct. “Here.” He placed his hand under her elbow, exulting in the feel of her despite the alarming fragility that hovered all around her. “Come and sit down. Tell me what's bothering you.”

“I don't know where to begin.”

“Anywhere you like.” He sat her down on one end of the luxurious sofa, and commandeered the other end for himself. “Perhaps…what happened the other night? The police report indicated that you weren't home, so the only damage was to some of your possessions.” And he thanked God for it, though not aloud.

Jocelyn shrugged. “It doesn't matter. I don't want to talk about that, not right now.”

Katya thrust her paper into his hand.
Tell her we can not to New York go, do not know these people.

“New York?” Alarmed, he searched Jocelyn's lackluster countenance. “Who is requesting your presence in New York?”

Her complexion paled further, highlighting purple smudges beneath eyes that made her look far too old. “You needn't glare as though I were guilty of a crime.” Her mouth flattened. “Or have you and Chief Hazen decided otherwise, and the purpose of this visit is to finally arrest me? Did you bring your handcuffs along with your badge?”

“No, of course not.” Micah better recognized now the fear
driving her barbed questions. It replicated the fear she had manifested from the day they'd met again in Clocks & Watches. Since he and Chief Hazen had decided not to badger her about her relationship with the Bingham family, opting instead to wait to see how things developed, her continued anxieties over being arrested were troubling. In Micah's experience, only guilt promulgated this level of fear.

And now—New York? Stalling, he folded his arms across his chest. “Katya, has your mistress always had a penchant for melodrama?”

“She won't understand ‘penchant' or ‘melodrama,'” Jocelyn muttered, flushing. She shot Katya a quick look.

The maid scowled as she wrote her response.
She is afraid ever since a letter. You must help.

“And I will, Katya.” A strand of Jocelyn's hair had slipped free of its chignon and dangled behind her ear, an alluring temptation inches from the reach of his fingers. Above her ruffled collar, the creamy texture of her neck with those irresistible freckles begged to be touched. Micah blinked, then produced what he hoped was a coaxing smile. “Before I can help, first I need to understand how a letter can frighten you enough to want to flee.”

“Katya, I'd like to talk to Oper—to Mr. MacKenzie alone for a few moments, all right?”

She waited until the maid reluctantly left the parlor. “Mr. MacKenzie…I know our acquaintance has been brief, but from the moment I remembered—” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again Micah felt as though he'd fallen into a sea churning with despair. “My intention is not to take advantage of your kindness,” she whispered desperately, “but I—There's no one else. I have no other choice. Chief Hazen obviously thinks highly of you, and I remembered that before you were assigned to Washington,
you were the operative in charge, in New York. And…you knew Chadwick.”

After an awkward pause she resumed speaking, her gaze fixed somewhere over Micah's right shoulder. “My marriage was not a happy one. I was unable—We never had children. There were expectations. I failed. The Binghams renounced me.”

She turned her head so that Micah could not see her face, but the toneless manifestation of her pain resonated inside his soul. Some griefs were harder to heal from than others, he thought, tamping more nails onto the lid of his own anguished memories.

“It's been five years since he died,” she said. “I've neither seen nor heard from anyone in my husband's family. Until—” her voice wobbled, then steadied “—until I received a letter, the day before yesterday, from Chadwick's uncle. A-Augustus Brock is Chadwick's mother's brother.”