These Shallow Graves (9 page)

Eddie's apartment—twenty feet square, with an alcove for his bed—was small, Spartan, and full of books.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a rickety wooden table with a chair on either side. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of one.

Jo sat, but as soon as she did, Oscar's voice was in her head again. She stood up and paced around, desperate to distract herself.

Eddie tried to make his bed without her noticing, then filled a kettle with water and carried it to the small fireplace, where coal embers glowed. He poked them to life, set a trivet over them, and placed the teakettle on it.

“I don't have a stove. The landlady does our cooking,” he explained. “But I can boil water. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Tea, please.”

“Uh, how about coffee?”

Jo nodded. “Cream, please. Two sugars.”

While Eddie ground some coffee beans in a small wooden hand grinder, Jo looked around his room, fascinated. She'd never been in a boy's room before, except her cousin Robert's when they were little. And Eddie's was far different from that one.

Besides a bed, the alcove contained a night table and a reading lamp. There was a small sink in the room. A shelf above it held mugs, glasses, and a bottle of whiskey. Under the single window, on a small table, was a typewriter. A dresser stood against one wall. Cuff links, a penknife, and coins were scattered across it.
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman lay on top of it as well as
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau. Jo was excited to see
Ten Days in a Mad-House
by Nellie Bly.

She picked up Bly's book and paged through it, remembering how Bly's articles on the abuse she endured while an inmate at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island sparked a huge amount of public outrage. Because of her work, changes had been implemented in the way the mentally ill were treated.

“Miss Bly is impossibly brave, isn't she?” Jo said, putting the book back.

“
You
read Nellie Bly?” Eddie asked.

“Everything she writes,” Jo said. “I try to write like her, too. A little,” she added shyly.

Eddie, fiddling with a coffee press now, turned to look at her. “Seriously?”

Jo nodded. “I wrote a piece for my school newspaper on the abuses suffered by local mill girls. I interviewed several of them.”

“Miss Montfort, you are full of surprises. I'd love to read it.”

“I shall have to send you the original, then,” Jo said with a sigh, “for I doubt it will ever be published. Our headmistress is more interested in poems about cats than the welfare of mill workers.”

“You read Julius Chambers? Jake Riis?”

Jo nodded eagerly. Like Bly, Chambers and Riis represented a new breed of journalist who wrote about social ills in the hopes of rectifying them.

“I read whatever of theirs I can,” she said, “but it's difficult. Mama doesn't permit newspapers in the house. I have to get Katie to smuggle them in when I'm at home, and a delivery boy to do it at school. I have Riis's
How the Other Half Lives,
though. I keep it under my bed.”

Eddie laughed. “I keep it next to mine. I really admire his work. He tells stories that never get told. I hope to do the same one day.”

“Why not now?”

Eddie snorted. “At the
Standard
? Please.”

The kettle whistled. He wrapped a dishrag around its handle, took it off the coals, and poured the steaming water into his coffee press. “How about no cream, no sugar?” he asked. “I haven't got either.”

“Black is fine,” Jo said. She sat down again, looking forward to a warming drink.

Eddie carried the press to the table. He took two mugs off the shelf over the sink, checked them to make sure they were clean, then set them on the table, too. “You'll have to forgive Oscar,” he said. “He didn't know who you really are. If he had, he might've softened his words. Then again, knowing him, maybe not.”

Jo nodded. She didn't want to talk about it. She'd managed to pull herself together but could easily fall apart again. She'd do that later when she was alone in her room.

“The Adirondacks,” she said, picking up a schedule for the New York & Central that was lying on the table. “Do you go there often?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

“As often as I can,” Eddie said.

“We do, too,” Jo said. “Every August. We have a camp on Saranac Lake. My father takes me fishing in his canoe. We row out to … rather, we
did
row out—” Water splashed onto the schedule. Jo touched her cheek. It was wet. She realized she was crying.

“Forgive me,” she said. She pulled a handkerchief out of her jacket pocket, dabbed at her eyes, and tried to stop, but her tears only fell harder. Mortified, she got to her feet. “Th-thank you. … I'll be on my w-w-way,” she said, her voice hitching. She had to get out of there.
Now.
Before she made a spectacle of herself.

“Miss Montfort,” Eddie said. “I really think you should sit for another minute.”

“I—I can't. I have to go,” Jo said, her head down so he couldn't see her tears. “I have to get back into my house and Theakston might be up and—” She stopped midsentence and raised her face to his. “It was bad enough that I'd lost my father, but now …
now …
” She looked at him helplessly. “Someone
killed
him, Mr. Gallagher. …
Why?
Why would someone kill my papa?”

And suddenly she was sobbing like a child. She hadn't cried for her father once since Bram and Addie had broken the news to her. She hadn't been able to. The tears wouldn't come. But they came now. In an agonizing torrent.

In an instant, Eddie was out of his chair. He pulled her to him. She buried her head in his neck and wept.

Eddie held her tightly, and let her.

“Drink it,” Eddie said. “You have to.”

“I can't. It smells terrible.”

“Down the hatch. All in one go.”

Jo, sitting down at Eddie's table, took the shot glass he was holding out to her and downed it. The whiskey burned her throat. Her eyes watered and her cheeks turned pink as its fire spread through her chest.

“It only hurts for a second,” Eddie said.

“But does it help, Mr. Gallagher?” she asked in a raspy voice.

“Yes. And it's Eddie. I think we're on a first-name basis now.”

“We are, aren't we? I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me,” Jo said, mortified for breaking down in front of him.

“It's called grief. And there's no need to apologize,” Eddie said. The coffee had finished brewing. Eddie pushed the plunger down on the press, poured it contents into the mugs, then handed one to Jo.

Jo thanked him and wrapped her hands around the hot mug, warming them. She felt as if she'd been gutted, as if there were nothing left inside her. The shocks kept coming, one after another. Tonight's had overwhelmed her.

“I could never quite believe his death was an accident,” she said, “Suicide made no sense to me, either—despite what my uncle told me about my father being despondent. I kept asking myself, who could've upset my father enough to make him kill himself? But I couldn't come up with an answer. Murder makes sense, though. It's the only thing that does, as odd as that must sound.” She took a sip of her coffee, then put the mug down. “I'm going to the police. First thing in the morning,” she said resolutely.

“I wouldn't do that. Not until you have evidence,” Eddie said.

“But isn't that what the police do?” Jo asked, puzzled. “Gather evidence?”

“In this city, they gather money. Your uncle paid them off to call the death an accident. They won't allow anyone to come along after the fact and challenge their findings. If they do, they'll look like fools.”

“I could ask Oscar to help me,” Jo said, trying another tack. “He could tell a judge what he told us.”

“A judge would dismiss him just like Koehler did. All he has to offer is his opinion. I trust it a hundred percent, but I'm probably the only one who does. Other people think he's crazy. Most people have never heard of forensic medicine, and—” Eddie stopped talking abruptly.

“And what?” Jo pressed.

“And most of your evidence is now six feet under. I'm sorry to be blunt, but your father's body has been decomposing for more than two weeks now.”

That was not an image Jo wanted to dwell on. “I'll go to my uncle. He'll know what to do,” she said. Then she shook her head. “No, I won't. Going to the
Standard
on my own was bad enough. If he finds out where I've been tonight—well, you can't imagine the trouble I'd be in. I'd risk his anger if I had proof, but as you point out, I don't. And I don't know how to get any.”

“I'll help you get it,” Eddie said.

“You will?” Jo said, surprised. She was pleased by his change of heart but puzzled by it, too. He'd been noncommittal earlier, on their way to the morgue.

“We'll work as a team,” Eddie continued. “I'll ask around. Drop the names in your father's agenda here and there. You keep your ears open around your father's friends and business associates. At dinners, dances, the races.”

“I don't attend the races.”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “At tea parties, then. Whatever you hear, tell me.”

“I'll have to stay in town if I'm to find out anything,” Jo said, thinking out loud. “I'll tell my mother I don't feel strong enough to return to school. I'll say I'd like to stay home through the holidays. But, Mr. … But, Eddie …”

“Yes?”

“What made you decide to help me?” she asked.

“I need to make my name, and this story could help me,” he replied.

Jo understood then—ambition, that was what was behind his change of heart. For a moment, she'd thought it might be because he'd been touched by her plight, but no. She was surprised to find that she felt hurt but quickly told herself she was being silly. Eddie Gallagher's help was all that mattered, not his motivations.

“I want a new job,” he explained. “I can't work at the
Standard
much longer. Stoatman's nothing but a puppet. Your family tells him what stories to run and what to kill. I started a story on your father when I thought his death was suicide and Stoatman killed
that.
But the story's bigger now. It could really garner some attention.”

“But Mr. Stoatman would never run it. You just said as much,” Jo said. “My uncle would never allow it.”

Eddie sat forward in his chair. “I'd take it to another paper. Use it to get myself hired there. Even though I'm on staff at the
Standard,
I write for other papers, too. They pay me by the article. Stoatman doesn't know. I use a pseudonym. The Oliver Little story? That one's for the
World.
”

“I see,” Jo said.

“Big stories lead to big jobs,” Eddie continued. “Charles Montfort's death turning out to be murder? That would be a huge story. I'm sorry to put it like that, but it's true. No one cares much about the Oliver Littles of the world—he'll get a few column inches on page three and then he'll be forgotten. But Charles Montfort—rich, well-connected, a pillar of society? He's a different matter entirely. If we could get some solid proof, the case would
have
to be reopened and investigated. Even Phillip Montfort couldn't get it hushed up.”

“He wouldn't want to,” Jo said, defending her uncle.

Eddie raised an eyebrow.

“You don't know him like I do. He hushed up my father's suicide, yes, but he had his reasons. And he knows as well as anyone that suicide is one thing, murder another. If he believed my father had been murdered, he'd do everything in his power to bring the killer to justice.”

Eddie nodded, then said, “As I told you earlier, this could get ugly. And I don't quit on a story. I do whatever it takes. We have an agreement?”

“Yes,” Jo said, grateful to have his help. “We have an agreement.” The circumstances of her father's death had changed, but her need for answers hadn't.

Eddie held out his hand and they shook on it. Jo, never having made an agreement before, kept shaking.

“You can let go now,” Eddie said.

“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “All right.” She self-consciously picked up her mug again, the coffee cooler now, and sipped from it. “When can we start?” she asked.

“Right now, but—”

“Right now?” Jo said eagerly, banging her mug down. “Really?”

Eddie held up his hands. “Yes, but hold on. … Before we can find any answers, we need to ask a new question. It's no longer
Who upset Charles Montfort enough to make him kill himself?
It's
Who did Charles Montfort upset enough to make that person kill him?
”