RESPECTABLE LADIES requiring specialized medical care and treatment should be aware that Dr. Weiss, a specialist in the very particular needs of the weaker sex, renowned for his kind, professional, and efficient methods, is seeing patients at his offices in the Hughes Building.
LADIES IN DISTRESS and without other recourse, married or maiden, may apply to Dr. Sanders, a physician and professor of women’s indispositions with many years’ experience. Inquiries to the Park Avenue Post Office, Box 4. By return mail you will receive a description of services offered. Specific details of your case will make a detailed response, including costs, possible.
She counted thirty ads of the same type, and estimated twice as many for pills and teas guaranteed to restore a lady’s health and circulation, a euphemism that always set Anna’s teeth on edge. As if a woman’s menstrual cycle were an ailment that required a male’s better understanding to bring under control. If she took the time to go through the dozens of daily newspapers she would find hundreds of ads that targeted the most desperate, and none of them could provide the help they claimed to offer. The reputable doctors and midwives who performed abortions didn’t advertise at all and were by necessity extremely cautious in accepting patients.
She read on, skimming the more personal and for the most part, undecipherable ads: A.Y.: all is prepared. Tomorrow at eight at the agreed place. W.G.G. Were A.Y. and W.G.G. eloping, or committing adultery, or planning a robbery? It struck her as quite understandable that people might be caught up in the mystery and intrigue of what could be taken as very short stories, ripe for development. Mrs. Lee and Aunt Quinlan sometimes talked about them as if the parties were old acquaintances.
Anna wondered what Jack and Oscar thought they might gain by going through newspaper advertisements, and if they intended to investigate every one of the practitioners who made outlandish and irresponsible claims under false names. As she folded the paper to put it back on the desk, another ad caught her eye. While she was studying it the clerk came in.
Anna nodded impatiently at the long-winded excuse for his absence and held up the paper. “Is this yours, Mr. Andrews?”
He was tall and slender to the point of emaciation, his skin livid with inflamed eruptions that a luckier person would have outgrown years since. Anna imagined very well that he never looked at his reflection if he could help it. Now sweat broke out on his brow because she had looked at him. She turned her attention back to the paper.
“You’re not in any trouble,” she said in a kinder tone. “I came in with some death certificates, and noticed the paper. I was just wondering if I might take this page of advertisements, or if that would interrupt your reading?”
He raised both hands, palms out, as if he were surrendering to a greater military power.
“Please,” he said. “Help yourself.”
• • •
JACK AND OSCAR knocked on Archer Campbell’s door at ten in the morning, and kept knocking until they heard him cursing as he marched through the house. He yanked the door open to glare at them, his eyes bloodshot and red-rimmed.
His sleeves were pushed up to the elbows, his hands and forearms scalded red and dripping with water and soapsuds. His trousers were wet from the knee to the ankle, and his shoes were scuffed and caked with dirt.
“What do you want?”
“A few questions,” Oscar said. His tone was not so sharp as Jack would have anticipated.
“I’ve got a few of my own,” said Campbell. “But I doubt you’ll have any answers. Fuckin useless buggers, every one of youse.”
They followed him into the house, through the small parlor and dining room to a kitchen that had been emptied of furniture, and the windows and rear door stood wide open. The room smelled of lye soap and carbolic. They stepped around a bucket and a scrub brush and followed him into the yard, where a washtub full of clothes waited.
“Get on with it,” Campbell said. “Or were you expecting cake and coffee first?”
Oscar said, “How much money did your wife take with her when she left with the boys that Wednesday morning?”
Campbell’s head jerked up. “What?”
“How much money—”
“Never mind. Why would you care?”
“We’re trying to track down the doctor who treated her,” Jack said. “Money is relevant.”
“She never lacked a thing,” Campbell said hotly. “Her or the boys.”
Oscar glanced at Jack, but they kept their silence.
Campbell put back his head and looked up into the sky. After a long moment he said, “She took it all. One thousand two hundred twenty-two dollars, every penny I’ve saved since I started to work on the day I turned eleven.”
“You kept it in the house.”
“Show me a man who put his trust in a bank, and I’ll show you a fool. It was well hidden, that you can believe, but not well enough. It never occurred to me she’d have the guts to rob her own husband, but then as it turns out, I didn’t know her at all, did I?”
“Have you given up the search for your boys?”
Campbell’s expression hardened. “With what money? Train fares and private detectives and all the rest cost plenty.”
He glanced over his shoulder as if he were worried about being overheard.
“She planned it all out. Took the money so she could pay the doctor, the one who fixed her and did such a grand job of it. I think she already knew how things stood, that she was dying, so she paid somebody to take all four boys in. She stole my savings and used it to hide my boys from me, tied my hands so I couldn’t go looking for them proper. Miserable bitch. I’ll never get the stink of her out of my house.”
• • •
ANNA LEFT THE New Amsterdam and hailed a cab, headed all the way uptown on Bloomingdale Road to a little farm that had been one of her favorite places as a child. It was a trip she and Sophie and Aunt Quinlan each made once a month, but Anna had last visited in March, the week before she went to Hoboken. Amelie would not make accusations, but Anna was regretful, nonetheless.
When the cabdriver balked about going so far, she promised him an extra dollar on top of his normal fare if he would wait for her. He stopped in front of the garden gate, heavy with twining flower vines studded with blossoms as big as saucers, bright blue in the sunlight.
The farm belonged to Amelie, her cousin—her half cousin, really, who was just sixty-five but had given up her midwifery practice. These days she never left home; she hadn’t come to Sophie’s wedding, and wouldn’t have come to Anna’s, if there had been one. Amelie had withdrawn from the world, it was that simple, and more than that: she kept her reasons to herself.
At the garden gate Anna stopped a minute to look and take comfort in the fact that nothing changed here. A small barn in good repair, a pasture where sheep and a donkey and a very old horse grazed, and the small cottage surrounded by a garden where chickens scuffled and scoured the earth. The herbs that grew along the walkway—mint, comfrey, sage, thyme, tansy, pennyroyal, blue cohosh, mugwort, verbena, rue—rioted on the very edge of anarchy, which was true of the whole garden. Abundance was the word that came to mind.
“Beauregard,” she said, surprised to see Amelie’s old dog sleeping in his usual spot. She always went away thinking he’d be gone before she returned, but here he was. His eyes were milky with cataracts but his tail thumped at the sound of her voice. She crouched down to rub the crown of his head, and he flopped over onto his back to offer his belly instead.
“Doesn’t matter how old he gets,” said a familiar voice from the far side of the garden. “He demands his toll. Anna Savard, look at you.”
Anna got up and wound her way through the garden beds—cabbage, squash, carrots, cucumbers, parsnips, beans, peas, turnips—until she reached Amelie, who got up from her weeding and held out both arms.
“Beauregard ain’t the only one who
se toll has to be paid. Come here and give me my due.”
Her arms were thin but she hugged Anna with all her strength. Then she stepped back and caught up her hands to squeeze them. Her hazel eyes were damp with tears, but if Anna were to point this out, she would deny it.
“Don’t you look more like Birdie every day, bless her sweet soul. Come on now, these weeds ain’t going nowhere. They’ll wait on me but I’ll bet you’re in a hurry.”
At that moment Anna would have gladly forgotten everything and everyone else just to spend the afternoon working in the garden with Amelie. It was Amelie who had delivered her, far away from this tidy farm, on the very edge of the endless forest. Anna promised herself that before the summer was out she would come for a whole day, and bring Jack with her. Jack should hear Amelie’s stories from Amelie herself.
“Sophie and Cap were here right before they sailed,” Amelie was saying over her shoulder. “I hope you won’t be mad that they told me your news. And don’t start apologizing, I know how busy you are.”
“I should apologize,” Anna said.
“But don’t. Come in the kitchen, I’ve got cake.”
Anna followed the winding path to the back of the house, lined with bushes in flower and alive with bees and hummingbirds. As a little girl she had always thought of this house as she did of the cottages in fairy tales, full of secret cabinets and hidden stairs and most of all, stories. It was an odd structure, out of kilter at every corner, an old lady plagued by arthritis but cheerful, nonetheless. Front and kitchen doors and every window stood open to the breeze because as old-fashioned as the house and Amelie herself might seem, she was keen on new inventions and had screens installed everywhere, bought from a man in Chicago and shipped at great expense. And worth every penny, she said when people asked; she would have paid more for fresh air without the flies and mosquitoes that plagued man and beast on a farm.
While Amelie went about her business, Anna took the chance to study her cousin: the river of hair, iron and silver and black, in a long braid down her back, her clothes flowing and old-fashioned, worn soft and faded. In comparison her complexion was far younger than her years, supple and smooth, still unlined. She was the daughter and granddaughter of slaves and slave holders, of Mohawk and Seminole, and all those bloodlines had come together to a color that had entranced Anna as a very young child. It still reminded her of burning sugar, caramel on the verge of something even deeper. She remembered, vaguely, tasting the skin of Amelie’s arm, and coming away with simple salt on the tongue where she had expected sugar.
Amelie disappeared into the pantry, raising her voice to be heard above the noise she was making, shifting through baskets and bins.
“Tell me about your Jack.”
“First tell me your news.”
Amelie always had news of her sister, who lived in Boston and had raised a family of ten children who had, in turn, produced eighteen children of their own, and of her brother Henry who was still working as an engineer on the railroads though he was almost seventy.
“Can’t slow him down. Takes after Da that way.”
Her head appeared around the corner of the pantry. “Stop stalling now and tell me.”
So Anna put together the story of Jack Mezzanotte while Amelie gathered what she needed, mashed boiled ginger root, sorted through dried peppermint leaves, and put both to steep.
“Mezzanotte, you say. Do his people keep bees, in Jersey somewhere?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “I should have realized you’d recognize the name.”
“I do indeed. All right, I approve.”
That made Anna laugh. “Because his parents keep bees?”
“Because you do nothing by halves,” Amelie said. “And because it’s clear to me that he did indeed sneak up on you, which means you let your guard down, and that tells me everything. Hand me that tin, would you?”
She put things on the table: a teapot with a mismatched lid, thick cups on chipped saucers, a jug of milk and a bowl of brown sugar lumps. Then she levered the lid off the cake tin so that the smells of browned butter and cardamom could slip out, like a genie released from a bottle.
Amelie said, “Do you have a case for me?”
“No,” Anna said. “Not today. But I have cases I wanted to tell you about, to get your opinion on.” She went to the sink to wash her hands, then dried them on the towel Amelie handed her.
Amelie leaned back in her chair. “Start at the beginning,” she said. “And don’t leave anything out.”
• • •
WHEN ANNA HAD finished recounting all she knew about Janine Campbell, Abigail Liljeström, and Eula Schmitt, Amelie went about cutting cake. Anna let the silence stretch out, patient with Amelie because patience and patience alone would bring rewards.
“I read about the Campbell inquest in the paper,” Amelie said finally. “Tell me, why didn’t Sophie send the woman to me?”
“You know why,” Anna said. “We said we wouldn’t send anybody until Comstock stops this campaign of his. Mrs. Campbell’s husband actually works for Comstock. It was too dangerous, and in the end your safety was more important to us.”
“You thought Comstock would follow her here,” her cousin said.
“You know he does that kind of thing.”
She rocked her head from side to side, considering. “So you think that the Campbell woman went to somebody who advertised himself as a reputable doctor, but wasn’t. You know that happens every day.”
“It’s more than that,” Anna said. “Whoever did Janine Campbell’s procedure was angry. It was more like a stabbing than anything else. I didn’t see the postmortem, but I did read the Liljeström autopsy report, and the similarities are hard to deny. Then this third case, and more of the same.”
“What does your Jack think?”
Anna took a few moments to gather her thoughts. “He thinks there’s a man, maybe a doctor, maybe not, who has a compulsion to do this to women. Somebody very intelligent, who plans ahead.”
“Does Jack know about me?”
Anna had been waiting for this question, and she shook her head. “Not yet.”
“He’ll disapprove.”
“I think he’ll withhold judgment until he meets you, and then he’ll be satisfied.”
That got her a smile. “Now, that you’ll have to explain.”
“He’s unusual, Amelie. Because of his family background, he doesn’t jump to condemnation and he tries to see below the surface. It’s the reason we were drawn to each other, I think.”
“A perfect man.”
“Hardly,” Anna said, laughing. “And I still haven’t met all his family, so there may be trouble waiting there. In fact, I know there is.” This was not the time to talk about Bambina, though she would have liked to.
“If you want my opinion, Jack may well be right in his suspicions about the way these three women died,” Amelie said.
Anna had been expecting something less definitive. “Can you explain to me how you come to that conclusion?”
“It just feels off to me, based on forty years of looking after women.”
“Do you have any suggestions on where to start? Any names?”
Her cousin studied her teacup for a good while. “There was one doctor, thirty years ago or more. He wasn’t young then, so he’ll be long gone. But he was brutal with his patients, more bent on purifying their souls than saving their lives. I could imagine him letting a woman die. I think he probably did, and more than once. But that’s a far cry from these cases of yours. Something like this takes a special kind of monster.”
Anne retrieved the page of the newspaper she had brought with her from the city and, laying it in front of Amelie, pointed to the advertisement that had raised her suspicions.
To the refined, dignified but distraught lady departing Smithson’s near the Jefferson Mark
et yesterday morning: I believe I can provide the assistance you require. Write for particulars to Dr. dePaul, Station A, Union Square.
When Amelie finished reading and looked up, Anna asked her question.
“Isn’t Smithson the druggist who takes messages for Sarah?”
“It is. Or it was. Sarah moved to Jersey to live with her son’s family.”
“She’s unwell?”
“She’s seventy-eight this past November.”
Anna gave her an apologetic half smile. “I didn’t realize. Did someone take over her practice?”
“I thought Nan did,” Amelie said. “You remember Nan Gray.”
“Vaguely. Is she one of yours?”
Over the years Amelie had trained or mentored a hundred midwives, and she tried to keep track of all of them.
“Not mine. She came up from Washington, maybe twenty years ago. But maybe she’s not the one who stepped in for Sarah. You’re thinking that this Dr. dePaul, whoever he is, watches for women coming out of Smithson’s? That seems a very chancy way to set a trap. If that’s what’s going on.”
Anna said, “But it’s written in such vague terms, anyone might think themselves the target of his attention. If he only gets one response a month, that’s probably more than he can deal with. I hope.”
Amelie hummed to herself as she poured more tea. “Practicing medicine requires a cynical turn of mind, but this—” She shook her head. “Let me understand you correctly. You think there’s a man who trolls for women in distress, offers them his services, and operates in a way that assures that they don’t survive, and even that they die in terrible pain. That his purpose is what—to punish them? To make examples of them?”
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “But I have this sense that it would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility.”
Amelie went quiet, her head turned away as if she were looking out into the garden, but in fact Anna knew she wasn’t seeing anything at all. Her cousin had a way of climbing right inside a problem and sitting there until she found a way out. She had been trained by her own mother, Anna’s aunt Hannah, a doctor of almost mythic fame on the New York frontier, and it seemed to Anna that Amelie understood the minds of doctors as well as she did the women they cared for.