City of Light (50 page)

Her passion, reverberating against the walls, made me afraid of her, and afraid
for
her.

“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” she said, her anger receding. “At least I’ll always know I’ve done something important—no one can ever take that away from me. Even if I go to prison for the rest of my life, I’ll know to the end that I’ve done something important.” She sighed, seeming drained and exhausted.

“Why did you want to see me?” I repeated gently.

Staring at her lap, she said, “I had to tell you that I lied. About those drawings. The ones I said belonged to Grace Sinclair. I did them, not Grace. Even I don’t like a lie to go on forever. I’m not that far gone.”

For a flash I felt a deep and terrible hatred toward her for what she’d done, but swiftly the hatred was replaced by relief as my hidden, lingering doubts were swept away. “Thank you, Susannah. I appreciate your telling me the truth.”

“It was a lie for a good cause, though!” she blurted out defensively. “And I knew you’d believe me, because men do that kind of thing to women all the time, one way or another. But I realized afterward that it could hurt Grace. I’d never want to hurt Grace, even though her father is—well, I won’t offend your sensibilities, Miss Barrett, by telling you what I think of her father.”

There was nothing I could—or would—say in response to her insult. I had heard her out, and now I felt free to leave. But as I moved to go she caught at me, hard, pulling me down beside her on the bed. Suddenly, unpredictably, she was close to tears. “I wanted to say also, I mean, I wanted to ask you, since I’m here and you’re … I mean, I’m worried about Grace Sinclair. She’s—I don’t know exactly how to describe it; I feel as if she’s like—like a thin pane of glass that’s being pressed so hard it’s about to shatter.” I winced at her insight. “And I hope, now that I can’t look after her, that you’ll—I mean, you are her godmother….”

I grasped her hands to comfort and reassure her. “Yes, Susannah. I’ll look after Grace. I always have.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you.” The smile she offered me was pure and bright. “I knew I was right to talk to you. I knew you’d forgive me for lying before.” Abruptly matter-of-fact she asked, “Do you think they’ll kill me?”

“No, Susannah,” I said, startled. “Of course not. You haven’t murdered anyone; they won’t give you capital punishment.” I smoothed her hair, as if she were a child.

She nodded in agreement and then, as she stared at me, something seemed to shift inside her. Her eyes widened but at the same time became glassy. “No one ever thought it could be me,” she said. “Not even you. It was as if I didn’t even exist. No one ever suspected me.”

“Pardon?”

“Do you ever feel as if you’re invisible, Miss Barrett?”

I strained to understand what she was trying to tell me.

“It was Mr. Bates who sent me to meet him. In the lobby of the Iroquois Hotel. I went right up to him—a complete stranger! Mr. Bates always gives me courage.”

“Who did you go up to?”

“The engineer, of course. Karl Speyer.” She beamed with pride.

“Karl Speyer?”

Her expression turned to self-righteous anger.
“Engineer
—people say that word as if it’s another word for God himself. I hope I never live to see a world made by engineers.” All at once, with her hair flowing around her, I saw her as a Cassandra staring into the future. “It would be a world of monsters. The machines and the people—all turned into monsters.”

“Susannah.” I gripped her shoulders, shaking her, trying to bring her back to sanity. “What did you say to Karl Speyer when you went up to him in the Iroquois Hotel?”

“Oh, I just went up and introduced myself,” she said, as if to reassure me. “I said I’d done watercolors of the power station, and I wanted to meet the man who’d helped to create such beauty. Mr. Bates called it an ‘encounter.’ An approach. A way to find out the opposition’s plans,” she explained earnestly. “I can make myself very attractive to men when I want to. Right then and there, the engineer took my elbow and led me into the restaurant for lunch, which was delicious, by the way. Afterward he asked me to go upstairs with him, which of course I had to refuse, pleading my youth and virtue.” She giggled. “He was married, with two young children—but there he was, trying to seduce me into visiting his room.” She shook her head in incredulity, as if we were two young ladies sharing gossip over tea at the Twentieth Century Club. “I told him, however, that I would be honored to see him again, that perhaps if we got to know each other better…. Well, he knew what I meant. And off he walked, whistling! From then on he wrote to me a week before each of his visits, arranging an innocent assignation. Luckily he never spent enough time in the city to learn my reputation for interests quite in the opposite direction!” How pleased she was with herself.

“Months passed like this. And the power development went ahead, more and more. We saw that Thomas Sinclair and his friends wouldn’t be satisfied until they had taken all the water—all of it. To make aluminum and abrasives and God knows what else. People even began saying those words—aluminum, abrasives—as if they were quoting holy scripture. Something had to be done to stop them.”

She gazed at me playfully. “I had the idea to kill him myself. I couldn’t tell the others—then they would be implicated if I were caught. So I planned it on my own. I bought a special pair of leather slippers that didn’t make an imprint in the snow at all. I even set up my easel on the banks of the park lake the day before so I could survey the scene at my leisure. I nearly froze! My fingers could barely hold the brush!” From her tone she might have been recounting the planning of a particularly successful surprise birthday party.

“As usual I’d received a letter from him a week before he came to the city. I left a note at the hotel, telling him to meet me at the park lake at eleven P.M. for a walk in the moonlight. I tried to hint that a romantic stroll was all that stood in the way of his attainment of his goal. I wrote that it would be ‘the night of nights’! Isn’t that silly?” She cocked her head at her own disingenuousness. “But he believed it. He met me at the lake even though the moon was covered by clouds, just as I knew he would. He was a little late, because of a meeting at the Buffalo Club, and he apologized twice. I was glad he felt guilty, because it made him more pliable. I said I wanted to walk across the ice-skating area, which was marked off with ropes. It was snowing lightly, off and on. It was a beautiful night, as romantic as anything I could ever imagine. ‘Oh, what’s that?’ I asked him, pretending to see something in the distance. I climbed over the rope, onto the snow mound that’s always made when the skating ice is shoveled, and he followed me. And then—always pretending to look at this mysterious thing in the distance—I ran out across the uncleared ice, stepping lightly in my slipper boots. I was afraid of falling, but I never did. My feet were so cold, but I left almost no trail, I checked that, for certain!

“He called to me that it wasn’t safe, that I should come back. Finally, when I was halfway across the lake, I pretended to realize where I was, and I pretended to be frightened, although I wasn’t frightened at all. I knew what I was doing was right. Nature herself protected me. I felt her power all around me. I felt nature’s power around him too—but against him. I called that I was too scared to move, that I didn’t know what to do.” She smirked. “He fancied himself a gentleman, so he came to rescue me. But the ice that held me couldn’t hold him, the way he was trudging toward me in his heavy boots, with that great coat and that bourgeois bulk of his. He broke through the ice long before he reached me. Closer to shore than I expected. He cried out and tried to save himself, tried to pull himself out, but he was weighted down, soaked through. His coat pulled him down. He tried to take the coat off, but he couldn’t. He became frantic, calling to me to get a stick, anything, to help him. He actually called to me, to help him.” She regarded me with puzzlement. “How could he have thought that I would help him?”

She paused, actually waiting for me to answer her question. As I perceived the depth of her insanity, dread crept over me like a twitching in my arms and fingers.

“When he stopped calling, my ears began to fill with a screeching like a million birds singing. Singing, singing, singing—in victory! Nature herself filling me with her triumph! And I began to run as if I were skimming across the ice, not even touching it, not leaving any trail at all, nature protecting me, the snow falling to protect me, falling onto my face and blessing me and baptizing me and I ran and ran, until I came to a road.

“And then I stopped. The singing of the birds stopped. The snow stopped. I saw I was at Delaware Avenue. The cemetery was in front of me. I could just make out the monuments on the hill. The angels. They were illuminated by the snow. I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked up Delaware Avenue to the circle, turned onto Chapin Parkway, and then I was home. And no one ever suspected.”

She regarded me with a self-effacing smile, as if expecting congratulations.

“Susannah, you let him die a horrible death. You disagreed with what he did, granted, but he was still a human being, with feelings. He didn’t deserve to die that way. He had a wife, and two children—”

Her hand cut the air in dismissal. “What are a wife and two children compared to the preservation of Niagara? Besides, he was happy enough to betray his family when given the chance. Oh no, he had no qualms about betraying them. He was like all those men who believe they’re so high and mighty. They get away with being one way in public, where everyone thinks they’re pure and good and noble, when all along, in private, they’re lewd and selfish.”

Insane as she was, of course she spoke the truth.

“His family’s better off without him. My only regret is that even his death didn’t accomplish what we set out to do. He was replaced by another.”

“James Fitzhugh,” I said, sick at heart.

She grinned sheepishly. “He was easier. There was no other choice, Miss Barrett. Some of my friends tried to get at Sinclair by throwing a torch through his window at home—that was useless and stupid; it didn’t accomplish anything. But Fitzhugh—the simplicity of it was beautiful. He took walks, you see. Almost every day. I tried to be there, where he would see me. After a while he began to talk to me. To seek me out. To walk with me. He asked to see my paintings. He wasn’t married, you know. He was timid, in his way. Anyway, he confided to me his doubts. He understood the evil he was doing. He wanted to die. He welcomed it.”

“He told you that?”

“No. But I saw it in his face, at the end.”

“The end?”

“After I led him to the waters. That place on Celinda Eliza where the current sweeps the shore. I took you there—remember?” She brightened at the memory. “I almost got you to walk into the water, didn’t I?” she reflected gleefully. “I would have too,” she assured me, “if that man Fiske hadn’t come along.”

All at once I saw that she would have killed me simply for fun. How could I have been so blind? I steeled myself to self-control: “You were saying about Mr. Fitzhugh?”

“Oh, yes. It was such a hot day. I told him I often waded there, at that spot. He took off his shoes and socks—I had to throw them in after him!” she exclaimed. “It was over so much more quickly than I thought possible. The other one took so long, struggling under the ice. This one barely had time to realize what was happening, before he was swept away.”

She paused, thoughtful. “Little Grace was with me that day. That was the same day you found us. Grace didn’t see anything—I made sure of that. She was working. Hard at work. The man and I walked around the bend, just to that spot where I took you, later. Grace saw nothing. Afterward I told her that he had gone back to the power station.”

I was enraged. I felt like screaming, like slapping her across the face, but I struggled to hold myself back. I needed to learn what she might say next. “You did well, to make sure Grace remained innocent.”

She smiled like a young girl praised for getting an
A
in spelling. “So then you’ll promise to take care of Grace for me?”

“Of course,” I assured her again.

“And you won’t tell on me? I mean, you won’t tell anyone what I told you, about those men?”

I hadn’t thought about this yet. If I told her story to the police matron standing outside, what would happen? The process of justice would be set in motion, and Susannah would face trial and the electric chair. She wouldn’t show regret or repentance, she would consider herself a martyr. But no. More likely, she would never face trial. When Mr. Rumsey learned of her confession, he would never permit the scandal of a trial, not for this woman who had been admitted to all our homes as a trusted tutor. She would be done away with quietly—as if smothered by rose petals—and her death would be deemed a suicide. Or else she would simply be left to wither away here, branded a raving lunatic.

On the other hand, what would happen if I kept her secret? She would spend some time here, safe from the world, until Francesca maneuvered her release and took her far away. Maybe in that faraway place she could heal, and find her own punishment and redemption. Did I have a duty to tell Francesca the truth? Would Francesca be prompted to protect her more or less because of the knowledge? Shouldn’t Susannah herself be the one to tell Francesca? Dare I place myself between them? I didn’t know, I couldn’t decide. I needed time to think. All I understood for certain was that Tom was innocent of the murders of Speyer and Fitzhugh.

Justice. I couldn’t take Susannah Riley’s fate upon me. Although she had determined the deaths of others, I couldn’t take responsibility for whether she lived or died, was imprisoned or freed. The police would have to gather their evidence on their own—if they could. If she wasn’t completely invisible to them, as she suspected.

All at once I discerned a kind of justice that was mine to dispense. “Susannah, I feel you should know that Karl Speyer actually opposed the exploitation of Niagara. At his death he was fighting the directors, to slow production. To
save
the cataract. He’d developed a new generator to produce more electricity with less water—that was the generator you and your friends bombed. Even James Fitzhugh, by your own admission, felt disturbed about the route development was taking. You should have let them live, Susannah. They would have been your best allies.”