Murder on Lexington Avenue (11 page)

“Where is it?” Electra demanded, turning back to see her mother’s answer. “Where is the baby?”

“It hasn’t arrived yet,” she said. “You must go to your room and wait there until I send for you.”

“I want to see it!” Electra cried.

“You will, when it gets here,” her mother said gently. “Betty, take her out of here,” she added, less gently.

Mrs. Parmer went over and took Electra’s arm, encouraging her to rise. She shook off her aunt’s hand and scrambled to her feet. “Why do you want a baby?” she demanded of her mother.

Mrs. Wooten closed her eyes, and Sarah suspected she was having a contraction.

“Mrs. Parmer, please take Miss Wooten out,” Sarah said. “This is no place for her right now.”

“Electra,” Mrs. Parmer said, turning the girl’s face toward hers. “I’ll explain everything to you. Come along now. Your mother needs to rest.”

“Mama?” the girl tried, but Mrs. Wooten shook her head.

“Go with Aunt Betty,” she said.

Mrs. Parmer fairly dragged the girl out of the room. A maid Sarah hadn’t noticed before closed the door behind them. Finally, Mrs. Wooten opened her eyes and looked at Sarah, taking her in from head to toe.

“You must be the midwife,” she said, her voice flat.

“Yes, I’m Sarah Brandt,” she said, putting down her bag and going to Mrs. Wooten’s side. The maid carried over a slipper chair so she could sit down beside her. “I understand your water broke.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice reflecting all the embarrassment she must have felt at the time.

“Do you know how far along you are?”

“The baby isn’t coming early, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“This is your third child?”

“Fourth. I lost a child after Electra. He was stillborn.”

Sarah nodded. “Are you having labor pains?”

Mrs. Wooten sighed wearily. “I guess I am. I’ve probably been having them all day. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

“Do you know how far apart they are?”

“Minnie?” she said, addressing the maid.

“About ten minutes, miss,” the woman told Sarah.

“Well, then, we’ve got plenty of time to get everything ready,” Sarah said and started giving the maid instructions.

When the maid had gone to fetch some of the necessary items, Mrs. Wooten said, “Are you really Felix Decker’s daughter?”

“Yes, I am,” Sarah admitted.

Mrs. Wooten raised her eyes to heaven. “What is this world coming to?” she asked of no one in particular.

 

 

F
RANK HEARD THE DOOR OPEN UPSTAIRS, AND HE WAITED impatiently at the bottom of the steps. He could hear Mrs. Parmer and Electra arguing, although Mrs. Parmer was speaking too softly for him to make out her words. Electra, it seemed, was outraged that her mother would want another child.

Plainly, Electra had no idea where babies came from or how they were delivered. She seemed to think her mother could just send it back wherever it was coming from. This wasn’t particularly surprising. Few girls of her age and class knew about such things until they were married and it was far too late.

Mrs. Parmer was trying to convince Electra to retire to her bedroom, but she didn’t want to do that. Frank wondered how he could get her to come back downstairs. Calling wouldn’t help. She couldn’t hear him. But Mrs. Parmer could.

“Mrs. Parmer?” he tried.

He couldn’t see her, but she must have heard him because Electra said, “What is it?”

Mrs. Parmer said something he couldn’t hear, and then Electra said, “Who is it? Who’s there?”

As Frank had hoped, she came running to the top of the stairs. She wasn’t pleased to see him. Mrs. Parmer was close behind her.

“Go to your room, Electra,” she tried again, but Electra wouldn’t even look at her. She was staring down at Frank.

Frank held up the paper on which he had written the message he wanted to convey to the girl, the message she wouldn’t want anyone else to know. As he had hoped, curiosity drew her down the stairs.

“Electra!” Mrs. Parmer tried, but Electra couldn’t hear her.

The girl didn’t like him one bit. She didn’t like him being there either, but she had to know what he was trying to show her. She snatched the paper from him and read it, quickly scanning the scrawled words in the seconds before her aunt caught up with her.

“What’s that? What have you given her?” Mrs. Parmer demanded.

But Electra had seen the message. Her face went white, and she crumpled the paper in her hands and clutched it to her chest so Mrs. Parmer couldn’t see it.

“Give it to me,” Mrs. Parmer tried, but Electra shook her head violently, her eyes wide with fright.

“No, no,” she said. “I must speak to him.”

“You most certainly will not! I won’t allow it! Your mother would never—”

“I must!” the girl cried, her eyes welling with tears. “Take me to jail!” she told Frank, startling him with her vehemence. He’d certainly convinced her of her need to cooperate with him.

“You aren’t going to take her anywhere!” Mrs. Parmer said, her voice rising hysterically.

“No, I’m not,” he assured her. Frank got the girl’s attention. “We can write,” he said, making a motion of a pencil on paper. “Your aunt can sit in the room with us, but she won’t see what you write.” He turned to Mrs. Parmer. “I need to ask her some questions. I’ll write them down, and she can write her answers.”

“I’ll need to see what you’re writing,” Mrs. Parmer said stubbornly.

“No!” Electra said.

“If Electra wants you to know what we talk about, she can show you afterward,” Frank said.

“This is outrageous!” Mrs. Parmer exclaimed. “I can’t permit it.”

Electra set her chin stubbornly. “Take me to jail,” she told Frank again, grabbing his arm and pulling him toward the stairs that led to the lower floor.

“No, wait!” Mrs. Parmer cried, finally defeated. “All right, but you can’t be alone with her, not for a moment!”

“You can sit right there with us the whole time,” he said.

“Come,” Electra said and led them to the small room with the desk and writing materials.

After some more negotiations, Mrs. Parmer sat herself in a small upholstered chair as far from them as possible, at an angle where she could not see what they were writing. Electra sat in the desk chair, and Frank drew up a straight-backed chair from the hall so they could share the desk.

The message he’d written out for Electra had informed her that he knew about her romance with Adam Oldham and her plans to marry him. He hadn’t been sure who already knew her secret, so to frighten her enough to get her cooperation, he’d added that he needed to ask her some questions to make certain Adam wasn’t the one who killed her father. Obviously, he’d succeeded.

“How did you meet Adam?” he wrote.

The girl might be young, but she possessed all the ability she would ever need to make a man feel like the dirt beneath her feet. Her very body radiated her disdain for him and her resentment at answering his questions. Still, she wrote her reply in a precise, schoolgirl hand. “Mr. Rossiter introduced us.”

Rossiter. That was the man Adam Oldham was supposedly visiting on Saturday evening. He also taught at Brian’s school.

“Why did he introduce you?” Frank asked.

The girl looked up to make sure her aunt still couldn’t see what they were writing. Then she wrote, “I wanted to learn to sign.”

Even though Oldham had told him that, he was still surprised to hear it from her. She had set her jaw defensively, and Frank could imagine why. Her father had made certain that she could speak and lip-read so she would never have to rely on signing to communicate. He had been determined that she would be able to live among hearing people and have no need of the language that deaf people used. “Why?”

She hated him now. He could see it in her lovely eyes. They filled with tears that she angrily blinked away, and when she wrote, she used such force that she nearly broke the pencil point. “So I can talk to other deaf people.”

Well, well, well, wasn’t this interesting? Her father would have hated this reason.

Frank reached for the pencil to write another question, but she started writing again, the words forming like magic beneath the pencil, her careful handwriting disintegrating into a scrawl as the story poured out of her.

She’d started studying lipreading and learning how to speak almost as soon as her parents realized she was deaf, when she was three years old. She’d spent years mastering the difficult skills, but even still, she knew her speech was different from hearing people and hard to understand. She knew people could tell as soon as they heard her voice that something was wrong with her, that she was different. And even though she could lip-read better than anyone at the Lexington Avenue School, it wasn’t the same as hearing, not at all. She could understand only a bit of what people said in the best of times, and sometimes with some people, she couldn’t understand anything at all. She usually had to guess at least some of what people were talking about and sometimes she just pretended to understand so people wouldn’t lose patience with her.

“What is she writing?” Mrs. Parmer demanded, alarmed at Electra’s frantic scribbling. “What is she telling you?”

She half rose from her chair, but Electra snatched up the pages and clutched them to her chest as she had before. “No! You promised!”

“She hasn’t confessed to killing her father,” Frank told her, earning a scathing glare from both of them. Mrs. Parmer sank back into her chair, although she continued to watch Frank as she would have watched a snake she was afraid would strike.

Electra laid the papers down again and continued to write, her knuckles white as she gripped the pencil. She hated being different. She hated not understanding. She hated not being understood. She wanted to be with people like her. She wanted to be able to talk to someone!

“Aren’t the students at your school like you?” Frank wrote.

“Yes!” she scribbled. “It’s hard for us to understand each other, too, except when we finger-spell.”

Frank knew that there was a sign for every letter in the alphabet and deaf people could spell words with their hands. It was a laborious process, however, useful for only limited communication. Sort of like this writing he was doing with Electra.

“Did Adam teach you to sign?” Frank wrote.

“Yes.”

Frank raised his eyebrows at the short answer. “How long have you been meeting with him?”

“Six months.”

“Where do you meet him?” Frank asked, wondering if Adam had seduced the girl as well as winning her affections.

“Different places. Why does it matter? He didn’t kill Father.”

Frank wasn’t so sure of that yet. “How did your father find out about him?”

“Miss Dunham told him. She’s a teacher at my school.
I hate her
,” she added in bold, dark letters.

“When did this happen?”

“Last Thursday.”

“What did your father do when he found out?”

“He locked me in my room. Mother let me out when he went to work.”

“Did your mother approve of you learning to sign?”

“She didn’t know about it.”

“She knows about it now,” he reminded her.

Her lip curled in disgust. “She doesn’t care what I do.”

That was an interesting answer, Frank thought. “How did your teacher find out about Adam teaching you to sign?”

“She caught us.”

“Doing what?” Frank asked, feeling a frisson of alarm.

“Signing,” she told him in disgust.

“Was your father angry?”

“Of course!”

“So he locked you in your room?”

“Only after I told him Adam wanted to marry me.”

“Why didn’t he want you and Adam to get married?” Frank asked. “Too poor?”

“Too deaf,” she wrote in renewed disgust.

Had Nehemiah Wooten explained his theory of eugenics to his daughter? And if he had, would she have understood any of it? Probably not. She would have only been interested in one thing: the fact that he was forbidding her to marry Adam.

“Does your mother know Adam proposed to you?”

“Yes.”

“Does she approve?”

“No. She says I’m too young to marry. She was seventeen when she married Father!” she added in outrage.

Which was probably why she didn’t want her daughter to marry so young, but he didn’t bother to write that. “What does she think of Adam?”

“She never met him.”

Which didn’t answer his question, Frank noted. “Did Adam ever meet your father?”

Electra stiffened in her seat and stared at him for a long moment.

“What did you ask her?” Mrs. Parmer asked in alarm.

“Nothing improper,” Frank assured her. “Did he?” he wrote more firmly.

She touched her pencil to the paper and drew the letters with exaggerated care.

“No.”

Frank knew she was lying, but before he could challenge her, he was distracted by the sound of running feet on the stairs from the floor below.

“Mother!” a male voice was shouting. “Where are you?”

This, Frank thought with satisfaction, must be the son.

 

 

“I
DIDN’T TELL MY CHILDREN ABOUT THE BABY,” MRS. Wooten told Sarah.

This wasn’t unusual, of course. Children were often completely surprised to wake up one morning and find they had a new baby brother or sister that the doctor had brought in his black bag the evening before. Children as old as Electra might notice their mother’s changing figure and inquire about the reason, of course, but even now, Sarah could see that Mrs. Wooten was such a large woman that her condition wouldn’t necessarily have been noticed.

“I gathered she didn’t know about the baby,” Sarah said. She didn’t mention that Malloy had told her that Mrs. Parmer and Mrs. Wooten’s lover hadn’t suspected either. “I understand your husband recently passed away,” she added after a moment. “I’m very sorry.”