Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets

Book 3: Gilded Age Mystery

by Rosemary Simpson

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Private Investigators

Synopsis

In Gilded Age New York, heiress Prudence MacKenzie and ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter investigate crimes that take them from the slums of Five Points in lower Manhattan to the Fifth Avenue mansions of society's elite. In the late 19th century, women are particularly vulnerable....

Childbirth can be dangerous even for the wealthy. So when opera singer Claire Buchanan shows Prudence and Geoffrey a postmortem cabinet photograph of her deceased twin sister and newborn niece, they express sadness but not surprise. The popular black-bordered portraits are the era's way of coping with the devastating losses that plague every family. What makes this death different is that Claire is convinced Catherine and her child were murdered.

Prudence's friend is haunted by a sense of her sister's lingering presence, and by the conviction that her dead twin is demanding justice. Catherine's widower, Aaron Sorensen, is a cold, controlling man who swiftly remarried. Now his second wife is already pregnant and may be in terrible danger. In order to discover the truth and find evidence of Sorensen's guilt, Geoffrey will delve deep into his past while Prudence casts herself as his next victim — putting her own life at grave risk....

Release date: November 27, 2018

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Josiah Gregory folded the New York Times of February 21, 1889, into a neat rectangle and placed it on his desk so the review of Aïda was uppermost. Miss Prudence and Mr. Hunter had been in the opening-night audience. He wondered whether they would agree with the unsigned review applauding the staging of the opera, but not the worn-out voice of the famous diva singing the title role. Josiah sighed. Age and its indignities came to everyone.

“Anything new?” asked Prudence MacKenzie. A puff of frigid air invaded the office as she took off her hat and long, curly black astrakhan fur coat. “It’s bitterly cold out. Kincaid put warm bricks in the carriage, but my feet are still frozen.”

She peeled black kidskin gloves from her hands and stuffed them into the pockets of the coat, running appreciative fingers over the thick bands of contrasting gray fur bordering the sleeves and running from neckline to hem. They exactly matched the color of her eyes. The coat was an extravagance Prudence would not have purchased for herself; it had been a gift from an eccentric aunt to a beloved and seldom-seen niece. The astrakhan turned heads whenever and wherever she wore it.

“I assume you’ve seen the Aïda review?”

“I agree with it,” Prudence said. “The staging was magnificent, and Frau Schröder-Hanfstängl had her moments, but there were far too few of them. We had complimentary tickets, so I shouldn’t complain too much.”

“How was your supper after the performance?” Josiah had made a hard-to-get opening-night reservation at Delmonico’s on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. He prided himself on being able to do the impossible.

“We canceled,” Prudence said. The shocked look on her secretary’s face prompted an explanation. “Miss Buchanan sent a note thanking us for the invitation, but regretfully declining for reasons she didn’t specify. She asked if we would meet with her today instead. Here in the office.”

“Shall I start a file on her?”

“She didn’t say she was coming as a client.”

“She will be,” he predicted, writing Buchanan across the top of a new cardboard folder.

“Is Geoffrey in?” Prudence picked up the Aïda review.

“He wanted to be informed as soon as you arrived.”

“You’d better join us, Josiah. I don’t think we filled you in on everything that happened while we were in England. If you’re right and Claire Buchanan does want to consult us professionally, you’ll need background information to put in that file.” Prudence crossed to Geoffrey’s office, knocked, and entered, leaving the door open for their secretary to follow.

The man who stood up behind his desk when Prudence appeared in his doorway was well over six feet tall. He had broad shoulders, long legs, and an athletic grace that spoke of years spent on horseback. Hunter was a Southerner born and bred, an exile by choice from the North Carolina plantation where his family still lived. Unlike most men of his social standing, he was clean-shaven. Black-haired and with eyes so deeply brown they looked like polished onyx, he inevitably drew the attention of the ladies. All of whom he kept at arm’s length. Except for Prudence.

“Claire will be here at eleven,” she said, laying Josiah’s copy of the New York Times on his desk, placing the opera singer’s note beside it. Her father had trained her to line up evidentiary artifacts like a row of soldiers on parade. It was a habit of which her ex-Pinkerton partner heartily approved. “Josiah thinks she’ll be a client.”

“I’ve never known him to be wrong. Do you have any idea what this is about?” Geoffrey asked.

“None whatsoever. Now that I think back over the conversations we had on the ship, I realize how seldom Claire spoke about herself. I don’t think I know much more than what Aunt Gillian was able to tell us. She’s been a cover singer in opera companies in London and several European cities. Everyone expects she’ll join the ranks of the divas before too much longer.”

“Is that what opera understudies are called? Cover singers?” Josiah served them coffee, warm milk, lumps of brown sugar, and a plate of pastries from a German bakery he passed on his way to work every morning.

“Exactly. I hadn’t mentioned her before the tickets came because I thought it was likely to be one of those shipboard friendships that doesn’t persist onto land,” Prudence said. “We met Miss Buchanan when we stayed with Aunt Gillian in London. It was a very long month. I don’t think there was an exhibit or gallery anywhere in the city we didn’t visit.”

“Don’t forget all the parks and museums,” Geoffrey put in. “I’ve never been so wet and cold in my life.”

“You didn’t complain about it then.”

“It would have been churlish. And Lady Rotherton is not the type to tolerate bad manners.”

“The week before we left we went to Covent Garden to see a performance of Bizet’s Carmen. Miss Buchanan was the cover singer for the title role, but she was buried in the chorus that night. There are always galas after a performance. Aunt Gillian brought us as her guests to one of the most exclusive. The Prince of Wales was expected, but I don’t think he ever appeared. Did he, Geoffrey?”

“You would have remembered if he had.”

“The hostess at these affairs usually invites one or two members of the opera company. It’s a sing-for-your-supper command performance. Claire told me later that no one turns down an invitation, even though they know they’re only there to provide free entertainment. She said there’s always the chance someone important will hear her sing and realize she’s as good as the diva she’s covering. Many of the younger women singers hope to snare a patron or protector. The hostess had requested arias by Donizetti and Rossini, so that’s what she sang.”

“Her voice is one of the loveliest sopranos I’ve ever heard,” contributed Geoffrey. “Rich and full, but not shrill or heavy. There was very little conversation while she performed. It was a great compliment, given the amount of champagne flowing that night.”

“My aunt introduced us, since we three were the only Americans at the soirée.”

“I thought your aunt was American.” Josiah looked confused.

“She was American a very long time ago. Now she’s more English than the English,” Prudence said. She couldn’t remember whether the topic of her mother’s sister had ever come up in the office. She thought it probably hadn’t. Josiah was notoriously Anglophile; he would have remembered every detail of Lady Rotherton’s story.

“Aunt Gillian married a title twenty years ago, well before Jennie Jerome made it the thing to do. Willie, as she always calls him, was chasing her fortune, and she was in the mood to be caught. He died in a shooting accident and she became the Dowager Viscountess Rotherton within a year of the wedding. Since she hadn’t given birth to an heir, the estate and the title passed to a distant cousin, but there was a clause in her marriage contract stipulating the return of her dowry and giving her tenancy of their London house for her lifetime.”

“She didn’t remarry?”

“Nor did she come back to America to live. Aunt Gillian is the kind of woman who takes carefully considered chances that usually turn out to be sure things. My father told me that within a few years of Lord Rotherton’s passing, she’d doubled and then redoubled the value of her portfolio, with no guidance except the financial section of the London Times and shrewd common sense. He said she thinks of herself as a Hetty Green, with good jewelry and a title.”

“From what I observed while we were there, a wealthy widow can lead a very fine life in Victoria’s London, even though the queen herself has been in mourning for as long as anyone can remember.” Geoffrey helped himself to one of the pastries.

“Gillian returned to America only twice after she married, once to dance at my mother’s wedding and then to mourn at her funeral. She said she remembered me as a beautiful six-year-old child who reminded her so painfully of her younger sister that she fled back to London as soon as decently possible.” Prudence paused. “Nevertheless, she offered to chaperone me here in New York. I couldn’t decide whether she’s become bored with London society or tired of the winter weather.”

“You turned her down?” Josiah’s sense of what was fitting and proper had long been offended by Miss Prudence’s decision to live alone after her stepmother’s fortuitous death. If he hadn’t been afraid of unforgivably offending her, he would have brought up the subject long before now.

“Not quite. I left the idea hanging in limbo.”

“When we met her, Claire had already made plans to come to New York,” Geoffrey said, steering the conversation back to its original subject. “She’d signed a contract to cover at the Met and persuaded the Royal Opera Company to release her. We were booked on the same ship.”

“For which I was grateful,” Prudence said. “The Atlantic was so rough on the westward crossing that ladies didn’t dare stroll the decks. You risked being knocked off your feet by the wind. Geoffrey was the only passenger who consistently braved the weather. We used to watch him through a porthole, loping along like a drunken sailor, veering from rail to rail and then hanging on to the ropes that were strung against the outside walls of the cabins. I’m sure the crew thought he was foolhardy and more than a little crazy.”

“It’s the best cure there is against seasickness,” Geoffrey said.

“Claire and I spent a good many hours together in the first-class lounge playing cards. She taught me the tarot. She said that was how members of the opera company passed the time backstage and in the wings during performances and rehearsals. She gave me a deck of French tarot cards. They’re beautiful. I’ll bring them in to the office to show you.”

“As it happens, Miss Prudence, I’m not unfamiliar with the tarot.”

“You always surprise me, Josiah.”

“Mr. Conkling insisted I learn what all the fuss was about. He had a client who wanted to bring suit against a fraudulent fortune-teller.”

“They’re all fakes,” Geoffrey said. “With a very limited bag of tricks. Once you learn what they are, you can turn the tables on any one of them. If you want.” He smiled as though recalling a particularly enjoyable scam.

“We said our good-byes when the ship docked and promised to see one another whenever Claire could find time between rehearsals and performances. The diva she’s covering is contracted for four different operas this season. I’ve kept an eye on the opera news in hopes of seeing Claire’s name, but she hasn’t been mentioned in any of the reviews or columns I’ve read.”

“Cover singers are invisible until the night they replace a principal,” Geoffrey said.

“It’s almost eleven o’clock,” Josiah informed them. He balanced his ever-present stenographer’s notebook on his lap and took a last bite of German pastry, managing not to spill the sugary frosting on his immaculate white shirt and meticulously brushed black suit.

Clients weren’t always on time, but Josiah lived by the clock and the firm’s appointment book.

The woman Josiah ushered into Geoffrey Hunter’s office was tall and slender, elegantly dressed in a gown that could only have been fashioned in one of the couturier salons of Paris. The high-necked black wool afternoon costume gleamed and glistened with elaborate designs of jet-beaded passementerie, rosettes, twisted cording, and finely worked braid, its severe perfection lightened by a fall of snow-white lace from the interior of the narrow sleeves. The perfectly pointed V waist and naturally contoured bustle were the epitome of the latest European fashion as pictured in Godey’s Lady’s Book.

“It’s wonderful to see you again, Prudence,” she said. “I hope you’ll forgive me for declining your supper invitation last night. The rehearsal schedule has been brutal.” The women exchanged kisses on the cheek in the French fashion; then Claire held out a gloved hand to Geoffrey. “I hardly recognize you when you’re not lurching about on the deck of a ship.” Her speech was lightly accented, as though she had spoken English as a child, then lived abroad for many years.

She accepted the cup of coffee Josiah handed her, settling herself into the chair he placed in front of Geoffrey’s desk. With one penetrating look she seemed to take his measure; the slightest of nods indicated he would do.

“Thank you again for last night’s tickets to Aïda,” Prudence began.

“It wasn’t the best of performances,” Claire said. “There’s no point pretending otherwise.” She gestured toward the folded Times. “I see you’ve read the review.”

“Will Frau Schröder-Hanfstängl continue?”

“Everyone gets bad reviews occasionally. There was a rumor for a while that she was considering a teaching position at one of the conservatories, but nothing came of it. All performers grow thick skins. We wouldn’t survive otherwise. So, yes, she’ll sing for the rest of this season at the Met and probably for years to come.”

“I’m sure you can’t help but wish it were otherwise,” Geoffrey said. He knew that some artistes spent their entire professional careers singing minor roles or lost in the chorus, waiting for the chance that never came.

“Prudence mentioned that you’re a former Pinkerton agent, Mr. Hunter.” Claire Buchanan deftly sidestepped his comment. “The Pinkertons claim to be the best detectives in the world. Is that true?”

“It’s a well-deserved reputation,” he answered.

“I hadn’t realized there were lady detectives until Prudence told me about your partnership and that Allan Pinkerton had hired female operatives,” Claire continued. “You were kind aboard ship not to ask questions about my personal life. I’m sure I made it obvious I wouldn’t welcome them.” She smiled an apology. “I wasn’t keeping secrets to be deliberately mysterious. I thought that if I didn’t talk about it, the pain would eventually lessen. So I taught Prudence the tarot and avoided all mention of what I’ve lost.”

“How can we be of assistance, Miss Buchanan?” Geoffrey asked. Josiah had been right, as usual. Their shipboard acquaintance had come to the office today with the intention of becoming a client.

The opera singer reached into a velvet reticule whose passementerie matched the patterns on her dress. She took out a black cardboard folder slightly larger than her hand. “Open it,” she said, giving the folder to Prudence. “A part of me dies every time I look at it.”

The cardboard was of the thickness used to mount and protect photographs, the two covers tied together by a narrow black silk ribbon. On the front was an embossed design of intertwined lilies surrounded by a stand of cypress trees, popular symbols of mourning throughout the Western world.

“Is this what I think it is?” Prudence asked. She’d seen cabinet photos like this one too many times not to recognize what she’d been given. She glanced up in time to catch a twitch of aversion cross Geoffrey’s face.

“Please undo the tie.”

Prudence opened the folder. Inside, mounted within an oval cutout decorated with the same motif of lilies and weeping cypress trees, was the photograph of a young woman holding in her lap a perfect infant. Eyes open, tiny features composed and expressionless, the child had been posed with its head lying against the mother’s bosom, as though to be comforted by the sound of her heartbeat.

Except that both of them were dead when the photograph was taken.

The lifeless woman was Claire Buchanan.

Prudence passed the cabinet photograph to Geoffrey, not saying a word, knowing that after the initial shock he would make the same connection she had.

“Your sister?” he asked.

“My twin,” Claire said. “As children we were inseparable.”

“The resemblance is striking. Not all twins look so much alike.”

“When did you lose her?” Prudence asked gently. “Lose both of them?”

“Catherine and her child only survived for a day after the birth. She gave the baby our mother’s name. Ingrid.”

Prudence and Geoffrey waited. Their client-to-be needed time to tell the story in her own words.

“Catherine’s voice was extraordinary. Had she not married Aaron Sorensen, she would have been one of the greatest divas the world of opera has ever known. Compared to my sister, mine is a very modest talent.” Claire hesitated. “The Met contacted me to cover for Frau Schröder-Hanfstängl this season because I’d done it in Europe and I knew the repertoire. That’s what brought me back to America.”

“Not this?” asked Prudence, gesturing to the postmortem photograph of Catherine Sorensen and her dead child. There was a New York City address below the photographer’s name on the back of the folder.

“I was in Vienna when Catherine died. That was ten months ago. Sorensen had sent a carte de visite announcing her passing to my apartment in Paris. I don’t have my mail forwarded when I’m on tour. There’s no point to it. Any correspondence is more likely to get lost than to catch up with me. So I didn’t know what had happened until the tour ended and I returned home. By that time my manager had received the offer from the Royal Opera. I knew no one in London. It seemed the ideal place to hide with my grief.”

“Did your brother-in-law also send you this?” Geoffrey tapped his forefinger on the closed cardboard folder.

“I had no idea it existed until after I started rehearsals three weeks ago. I share a dressing room at the Met with another cover singer, Lucinda Pallazzo. We’ve known each other casually for years. She and Catherine became close after I left New York. This photograph was in a drawer of her makeup table. She had put it away to spare my feelings. When I told her I’d never seen it before, she gave it to me.”

Claire handed him a black-bordered envelope she took from her reticule. “This is what was waiting for me in Paris when I returned from Vienna.”

“May I?” Geoffrey waited politely. At Claire’s nod he extracted a black-bordered carte de visite: In loving memory of Catherine Sorensen, who departed this life on April 30, 1888, aged twenty-four years, two months, and three days, taking with her the pure soul of her infant daughter, Ingrid, aged one day. Cherished wife of Aaron Sorensen. They are gone, but not forgotten. The message was engraved in the center of an embossed frieze of winged angels and weeping cypress trees. An elegant copperplate signature had been penned in black ink across the bottom: Aaron Sorensen.

Geoffrey passed both the card and the envelope to Prudence.

“As you can see, there’s no personal message. Just Sorensen’s name. His full name. Exactly the way he would have signed dozens of cards sent to friends, acquaintances, perhaps even business colleagues. He did everything he could to come between my sister and me. Omitting her maiden name from the announcement of her death was the final blow.”

“You mentioned business colleagues, Claire.” Prudence ran a finger over the black-bordered card stock, with its expensively embossed images, before laying it on Geoffrey’s desk.

“Aaron Sorensen was an importer of European antiques when he first came into our lives. Our parents had settled in New York City before we were born, and they maintained a home here, even though they traveled extensively. We grew up in hotels and concert halls. I remember my father joking that sometimes the only way he could tell what country we were in was by the cuisine. We were fifteen when our mother fell ill. She begged to be brought back to America to die. Afterward, we stayed on.”

“I know how terrible it is to lose a parent when you’re young.” Prudence had been six years old when her mother succumbed to consumption.

“My father never recovered. He was a pianist, but for a long time he couldn’t bear to hear the pieces they had performed together. He never played another public concert. He turned all his attention to my sister and me, but especially Catherine. She was the finest soprano I’ve ever heard.”

“Aaron Sorensen,” Prudence prompted.

“He approached my father when a client asked him to broker a Brazilian rosewood Chickering piano that had been owned and played by Franz Liszt. The provenance had been authenticated, and my father became fixated on the instrument. It was all he could talk about. I don’t know why he insisted that Catherine and I accompany him when he went to see it. Perhaps he had some idea we would be his final audience. He still practiced as though he were on tour, just never the pieces he had played as accompanist to our mother. That day he played Liszt’s Sonata in B minor.”

“Did he purchase the piano?” Prudence found herself captivated by the story Claire Buchanan was telling.

“No. I don’t think he had any intention of buying it. He just wanted to prove himself Liszt’s technical equal on the master’s own keyboard. He was magnificent. It was as good a performance as any of his concerts. Three months later, Catherine and Sorensen eloped. She stopped taking vocal lessons. As far as I know, she never sang in public again.”

Claire Buchanan reached for the folder containing the photograph of her sister, the image she had said broke her heart every time she looked at it. She sat for a moment holding the open folder beside the announcement of Catherine Sorensen’s death.

“What happened after they eloped?” Prudence asked. “Your father must have been very angry.”

“Strangely enough, he wasn’t. I didn’t understand it at the time, and he refused to discuss it. Aaron moved into our home, and my father gave him and Catherine the suite of rooms where he and my mother had lived. The antipathy between me and my new brother-in-law was immediate and impossible to overcome. He hated the fact that as children Catherine and I had been inseparable, and that as adults we tried never to be apart for very long. We could read each other’s minds. Sometimes it seemed we were a single individual. He was jealous. He did everything he could to drive a wedge between us.”

“Did he succeed, Claire?” Prudence asked.

“No. One of the reasons I went to Europe was to make life easier for Catherine. She paid a price whenever we went out together in the afternoon or if her husband walked in on us when we were having tea and laughing together. Aaron never said or did anything overtly hostile, but every word, every look and gesture, was calculated to wound. When I felt her pain becoming unbearable, I left.”

“When was that?” Geoffrey glanced at Josiah, who nodded as he continued to take notes. He’d mastered Gregg shorthand so as not to miss a word of a client’s interview or deposition.

“Less than a month after they married. I think I knew from the first day that Aaron was determined to destroy what my sister and I shared. He had convinced her not to confide in me about the elopement. It was the first secret either of us kept from the other. My father deeded our house in New York to Catherine. He provided me with funds of equal value to buy an apartment in Paris. I was to continue my vocal studies there, and he would join me. It seemed a workable solution to what we knew would eventually become an irreconcilable break if we continued to try to live together.”

“Was Sorensen a part of these discussions?” Geoffrey asked.

“It seems strange now, but we didn’t talk about what was happening. Not with any degree of frankness. It all took place very quickly and quietly.” Claire lowered her head for a moment. When she looked up, tears stood diamond-bright in her eyes. “My father never came to Paris. He fell ill shortly after I sailed at the end of October that year. He didn’t recover.”

“How alone you must have felt,” Prudence murmured.

“To survive I threw myself into my work. I took vocal lessons by day, practiced for hours on end, and joined the first company to offer me a contract. I wrote to Catherine every day. She rarely answered, and when a letter did come, I could tell the words weren’t hers. Aaron had dictated them.”

“Did you keep the letters?” Geoffrey wanted to know.

Claire nodded. “There are only five of them. Nowhere does she tell me she’s with child. Not a word about her condition.” She gestured toward the cabinet photo and the carte de visite. “That’s the first I knew of the baby. When she and Catherine were already dead.”

“There were no letters from friends or relatives mentioning her condition?”

“None. My father hadn’t encouraged us to make friends, and both he and our mother were the only children in their families to live into adulthood. Lucinda said she never imagined Catherine had not written me the news.”

“Sorensen didn’t object to their friendship?”

“He didn’t discover it until just before Catherine gave birth. They usually met for tea in out-of-the-way places, where they wouldn’t be seen by anyone they knew. Sometimes they went to museums. When Sorensen did find out, he was furious. He forbade Catherine to see her friend again. Lucinda received a note that I am certain my sister did not write.”

“When did you decide to come back to America?” Geoffrey asked.

“I always knew I wouldn’t stay away forever,” Claire said. “But I couldn’t face returning to nothing. I didn’t want to live in a New York that didn’t contain my sister. I told you I was in Vienna when Catherine died, and that I didn’t learn what had happened until I was back in Paris nearly two months later. But I sensed something was wrong long before then.

“The night Catherine died, in the middle of a performance at the Vienna Court Opera, I felt a terrible pain wash over me. I thought I might be falling ill. I had no idea what caused it. I went back to my hotel after the performance, but I couldn’t sleep. The next day I sent a telegram to America. There was never any answer. Then the dreams began.”

“Can you tell us about them?” Prudence asked. She wanted to stretch out a hand to comfort, console, and strengthen her shipboard friend, but she didn’t dare. Something about the set of Claire’s mouth told her that any such gesture might break the singer’s fragile control.

“They were vague at first. An image of mist and of a person I couldn’t make out hidden in cloudlike swirls too thick for the eye to penetrate. The figure and I seemed to be walking toward one another, but we never met. Then I woke up. G. . .