Fallen Women (13 page)

Mick came to her aid, ripped off the newspaper, and crumpled it in his hand. Then as he dropped it into the gutter, he stared hard at someone who was moving quickly in and out of the crowd on the sidewalk, moving low to the ground as if he didn’t want to be seen. Beret saw Mick’s eyes narrow and followed his gaze as the man disappeared around a corner.

“I’ve seen him before. Last week, he was outside the restaurant where we met Elsie. I saw him through the window, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I thought he was just a tout. There are a thousand like him on the street. But it’s odd he would be at both places. I don’t much like coincidences.”

“Perhaps he is following you, Detective,” Beret teased.

“It’s more likely he’s following you. I think I’d better see you home.”

“No need, Officer. I know the man.”

“You do?”

“After all, you said I knew a great many people, so it shouldn’t surprise you.” She waited for him to respond, but Mick didn’t seem to remember the remark, so she said, “He’s a former newsboy who was beaten by a group of bullies.”

“From New York? That would be quite a coincidence, indeed. Did he follow you here?”

“Oh no.” Beret paused, enjoying Mick’s confusion. “He is my aunt’s groom. He brought me to the police station.”

“And now he’s following you? He looks familiar. I’ve encountered him somewhere.”

“He is harmless, Detective. Uncle says the poor man is indebted to my aunt for taking him in. You see, two years ago or thereabouts, she rescued him from the bully boys and took him to a hospital. Then she hired him to work in my uncle’s stable. His name is Jonas Silk. Uncle says Jonas feels he let my aunt down by not protecting Lillie, although how he could have prevented her murder, I don’t know. I wonder that he knew Lillie had become a prostitute, but I suppose men like that always know. Anyway, he has taken it upon himself to protect Aunt and Uncle and, by extension, me.”

Mick mulled that over, thinking. “Jonas Silk. Now I remember him. He’s not a very attractive fellow, is he? He looks demented.”

Beret chuckled. “Surely, sir, you and I are too experienced to judge a book by its cover.” She held out her hand. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to take the streetcar home, since any hope I had of riding in my aunt’s carriage seems to have been frightened away.”

*   *   *

Beret had no intention of boarding the streetcar again, but she feared that if she told Mick of her plans to walk to the Grant Avenue home, the detective, unsure about what Jonas was doing on Larimer Street, would put her into a hack. Or he might even insist that he take her home himself. She did not want that, because of the chance of his encountering her aunt or uncle. She didn’t want Mick upsetting them by mentioning they had talked with Teddy. Mick might want to interrogate Jonas, and that would infuriate her aunt. Varina might be angry enough to demand that Beret stay out of the investigation. Besides, Beret had thinking to do, and walking cleared her mind.

She started toward the streetcar stop, just in case the detective was watching, but paid little attention to where she was going and was startled to hear a voice call, “Beret!” She stopped, confused, hoping the detective had not deduced her plans to go on foot. But he would not have called her by her first name, and she knew almost no one else in Denver. Then she realized, disgust building up inside her, that she was in front of the Arcade, and the voice came from just inside. Teddy.

She cringed, and her stomach felt sour, and she hurried on, but Teddy rushed out of the gambling hall and grabbed Beret’s arm and held her. “Let go of me,” she said, her voice a harsh rasp.

“I have to talk to you.”

“There is nothing to say that hasn’t been said already.” Beret closed her eyes for a moment, recalling the angry words that still taunted her and perhaps always would. She felt the bitterness that had been her constant companion for the past year.

“Please. Let me take you someplace where we can get out of the wind. Would you like tea?”

“I have already had my tea. Let go of me, Edward.”

But Teddy wouldn’t. “I have something to say to you.”

“There is nothing you can say that I care to hear.” She looked with loathing at the hand on her arm, but Teddy did not let go. What more could he possibly say? One thing, Beret thought, and told him, “The only thing I want to hear from you is why you murdered my sister.”

“I didn’t. You know I didn’t. I told you that already.”

“You’ve told me a great many things that weren’t true.”

“I mean it, Beret. I never would have hurt her, although she’s not what you think—wasn’t what you thought, that is.”

Beret yanked her arm away and looked at Teddy fiercely. She had already realized the truth of what he said, but she would not hear those words from him. “How dare you say that! You know as well as I do that Lillie was an innocent child and you ruined her life.”

“She wasn’t innocent at all. You loved her too much. You didn’t see her clearly.”

Beret seethed with fury. “Will you tell me then that she seduced you, that she joined a brothel by choice so that she could outfit you in the fashion to which you’d become accustomed by Osmundsen money? You have sunk very low indeed, Edward.”

“I never took her money.”

“Not at first, of course. I made sure of that. But later on, when what you had gotten from me stopped, didn’t you send her to work at Miss Hettie’s so that she could pay your gambling debts?”

Teddy started to protest, but Beret put up her hand. “Oh yes, I know about your gambling. The debt collectors came to me, threatened me, threatened the Osmundsen name, so I paid, paid thousands of dollars. Lillie could not have underwritten your gambling if she had”—Beret considered her words—“slept with every filthy vagrant on Larimer Street. That’s what you turned her into, you know—a whore, available to any vag with a little money.”

Teddy flinched. “That’s not true.” He grabbed Beret’s arm again and glared at her with such anger that she felt a flicker of fear. She had despised him, had hated him, but she had never been afraid of her husband. In all their quarreling at the time of the divorce, he had never struck her, never raised his hand or even threatened her. Beret wondered what her words had unleashed. If he had killed Lillie, whom he loved, wouldn’t he as easily kill her?

Beret was not a timid woman. In her mission work, she had been threatened by drunken fathers, self-righteous husbands, malicious pimps, sometimes even the women themselves, and she had stood her ground. But she faltered now as she looked into Teddy’s eyes. She took a step backward and said, “Detective McCauley is contacting the men whose names you gave him, and we shall see if you were in Leadville when Lillie was killed. Neither the detective nor I believe you are innocent.”

The anger in Teddy’s eyes faded. “I did not kill her, Beret. I swear I didn’t. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“And drugs. Did you give her drugs?”

Teddy’s eyes widened.

“Yes, I knew you took opiates. It seems you owed the man who sold them to you. He came to me for payment. Did you give drugs to Lillie?”

“Are you saying Lillie was a doper?”

Beret wasn’t sure. The housekeeper told her after Lillie left that a maid had discovered a strange substance hidden in Lillie’s room, but she had thrown it out. So Beret hadn’t known whether it was an opiate or face powder or ordinary flour, for that matter. Many of the women who came to the mission were addicted to drugs. So were some of the members of New York society. When Beret discovered that Teddy experimented with drugs, she could not help but wonder if he had shared them with Lillie. Drugs would explain why her sister had moved into a brothel. Someone—Teddy or maybe Joey Summers—could have provided her with them, and then later on, Lillie could have purchased them from Miss Hettie or one of the other girls, maybe Elsie. Beret hadn’t discussed that with the detective sergeant, hadn’t wanted him to know she was convinced Lillie was a doper. “I have nothing more to say to you,” she told Teddy abruptly.

“But I have so much I want to say to you. I have made a beastly mess of our lives—yours and mine and poor Lillie’s. I would give anything if I could take it back.”

“Well, you can’t, can you? Besides, you have just told me it was Lillie’s fault.”

“And mine. I will own up to that. I should not have let it happen. I have been unfaithful and cruel, and I have broken your heart.”

Beret heard a warmth and sincerity in his voice that had not been there for a long time, but told herself she would not be seduced by it. After all, for the past year, Teddy had been out in the underworld of men who preyed on women for a living. He would have perfected the honeyed words they used to get what they wanted, not that he hadn’t known them already. “It was not you who broke my heart. It was Lillie. She was the one I loved. When I found out what you were, I was glad to be rid of you. I could not believe I had married such a scoundrel.”

“You loved me once.”

“You laughed at me! I caught the two of you together, and you laughed.” Beret took a deep breath to control herself. “Please, Teddy, you’ve already said everything there is to say, and it hasn’t worked for you. I don’t want to hear any more. No matter what you say, I have no intention of taking you back.”

“I don’t dare even to hope for that. I’m asking for your forgiveness.”

Humility was a virtue Beret did not know her husband possessed, and for a second, she was moved, tempted. Did he mean what he’d said, or was he only being clever? She must be wary. “Forgive you for murdering my sister?”

“No. I told you I didn’t kill her. I want you to forgive me for destroying what was between us, not for taking Lillie’s innocence, but for taking yours.”

Beret shuddered. “I was not so innocent. I knew the way of the world. I just did not believe my husband was no better than the brutes I encountered through the mission. You are worse than they, because they don’t know any better. But you, Teddy, you were raised as a man of conscience, a gentleman. You are the guiltier one.”

“I won’t deny it.” He paused as Beret began to shake. “You are cold. I will take you to your uncle’s house. You are staying with him, of course. We can talk there.”

“Never! They despise you.” She cut him off. She would not allow him anywhere near the Stanton house.

“I still love you,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “I loved you once, you know, and I never stopped.”

“Not even when you loved Lillie?” Her voice was thick with scorn. She would not let him know how his words tormented her. She had loved him, too, and maybe beneath the hurt and anger, she still did. Would she ever love anyone else as she had Teddy?

He was silent for a moment, rubbing his hand over the gold knob on his walking stick, the one she had given him that first Christmas. Had he loved her then? Beret stared at her former husband, observing for the first time that he had changed. His face, once puffy from good living, was leaner, harder. He had lost weight, but his clothes fit well. Had Lillie paid for them? He was still a handsome man, perhaps even better looking than he had been, less boyish, more mature.

“I lusted for her. I did not love her as I did you,” Teddy said.

Beret felt tears form in her eyes, and she rubbed them, complaining about the dirt the wind blew up. No one, not Teddy nor any other man had ever lusted after her. “You are obscene,” she said hoarsely. Then she could not stop herself from asking, “How long, Teddy? How long did it go on?” The question had tortured her ever since she had caught them together. It had not been their first time. She knew that. Thinking back, she had realized there were secret smiles between them, touches that were not accidental, excuses that had put them together without her. The thought that the affair might have gone on for years ate at her soul.

Teddy swallowed. “Not long. A few weeks.”

She stared at him, then abruptly she turned and started off, not slowing when Teddy called her name. She did not turn around, did not know how long he stood in front of the Arcade looking after her, only knew at some point that he was not behind her.

*   *   *

The anger and distress drove Beret on, and she hurried along the streets. Her heart had begun to heal, a little at any rate, and then she had had to encounter Teddy. She remembered his touch, her hand on his arm, his hand on her cheek. Theirs had been an affectionate marriage, and she wondered if any man would ever touch her the way Teddy had. Those years had been precious, filled with gaiety and caring. She had loved him so much, and surely he had loved her a little. He’d been good to her, kind and courtly. Would she ever allow another man to get that close, knowing as she did now that Teddy had been after her money? She would always wonder if any man who showed an interest cared only about her fortune.

She slowed her steps and took note of where she was. She had left the business district with its crowds of people and conveyances and had come upon a residential area of early Denver mansions, homes that already were being deserted by Denver’s upper class for the fashionable Capitol Hill district. Her aunt and uncle had once lived in this neighborhood, until they moved into their Grant Avenue mansion. The homes here were simpler, less pretentious, befitting a first generation just coming into money, just starting to experiment with lavish possessions. The houses were tall, stately, with long Italian windows and iron cresting on their roofs, iron fences outlining the lots, here and there a mansard roof. Families still lived in the houses, but there were discreet
ROOMS TO LET
placards in some of the windows. On closer inspection, Beret could see signs of neglect—bare wood where the paint had been scoured off by the weather, roofs that needed patching, broken fences, gardens let go.

A
SOLICITOR
sign hung over the doorway of one of the houses, and a man emerged, staring at Beret as if wondering what she was doing there. Other homes, too, had been turned into office buildings and boardinghouses. Then she recognized the house her aunt and uncle had lived in before they built the Grant Avenue mansion. It was dowdy and needed paint. The stable behind it was now a blacksmith shop. Beret found the change unsettling. She remembered, as a girl, visiting her aunt and uncle and loving their sleek house with its gazebo set in a carefully tended garden, a groom taking her about in a pony cart.