Murder in a mill town Read online

  The Fallons stared at Nell, clearly as baffled as she as to why Viola had summoned her. “It’s our girl,” Mrs. Fallon said. “Our daughter, Bridie. Well, Bridget, really, but we call her Bridie.”

  “Her daughter,” Mr. Fallon interjected, with a nod toward his wife; his brogue was stronger than hers. “My stepdaughter.”

  In a low, strained voice, Mrs. Fallon said, “What godly difference does that make, Liam?”

  He raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Just settin’ things straight.”

  “My daughter, then. She turned up missing three days ago—Sunday it was. The coppers think she run off with her fella, but I know her better than that. She wouldn’t never just up and leave like that—never.”

  Her husband cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Nell glanced at Gracie to see how much of this she was absorbing, but she seemed to be intent on trying to force a miniature baby bottle into the mouth of her favorite doll.

  Mrs. Fallon slid a hard glance in her husband’s direction before continuing. “The cops, they won’t do nothin’, so we went to Mr. Harry, thinking they’d be sure to help if he told ‘em to, but he said it wasn’t none of his concern.”

  Harry? Nell aimed a quizzical look at Viola. Harry Hewitt was the second eldest of her three remaining sons. The youngest, Martin, the last to still live at home, was pursuing his Masters in Divinity at Harvard University. Next oldest was the late Robbie, who died four years ago at the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. Viola’s eldest, Will, the black sheep, had been missing since his own stint at Andersonville, except for those brief weeks last winter when he resurfaced with a murder charge hanging over his head.

  That left Harry, the wildly profligate middle son, to help run—if only nominally—his father’s two hugely lucrative businesses: Hewitt Shipping and Hewitt Mills and Dye Works. Harry served as general manager of the latter, an enormous textile factory just across the river to the north in Charlestown. In fact, he was more or less a figurehead; Nell would have been surprised if he knew any more about dying and weaving than she did. His father, August Hewitt, governed the more complex and demanding shipping concern.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Fallon live in Charlestown, and Bridie works at the mill,” Viola explained. “That was why they thought Harry might be able to help.”

  Able? Probably. Willing? Harry Hewitt cared about Harry Hewitt. By his own admission, there was little in life he deemed worthy of effort aside from the pursuit of simple animal gratification. Once one has absorbed that essential truth, he told her last winter, when they were still on speaking terms, it’s actually quite liberating. The rules that keep others on a short leash don’t exist for you—as they shouldn’t, because they’re arbitrary and suffocating, most of them. Everything becomes possible. Nothing is taboo.

  “We went to Mr. Harry’s office at the mill,” Mrs. Fallon said, “but like I said, he didn’t see where it was none of his business. He said if the cops thought she run off with Virgil, she probably did.”

  Nell said, “Virgil...?”

  “Hines.” Mrs. Fallon grimaced. “A handsome enough brute, but a right bad egg. Got out of prison last May, and by the end of the month, him and my Bridie was stuck together like they’d been glued. Can’t imagine what she seen in him.”

  “The state prison in Charlestown?” Nell asked.

  Mrs. Fallon nodded. Her husband said, “It’s just down the road from the mill there.”

  “Why do you ask?” Viola wanted to know.

  Because that’s where Duncan is. Nell smoothed her skirts, hearing Duncan’s most recent letter to her, the one that came last Friday when she was wearing this same dress, crackle in her pocket. “No particular reason.”

  “Don’t see how you can call him handsome,” said Mr. Hines, “what with them stars on his forehead.”

  “Stars?” Nell asked.

  “He was in the Navy during the war,” Mrs. Fallon explained. “Got one of them, what do you call ‘em, where they prick a pitcher into your skin.”

  “A tattoo,” Viola said. “Seamen like to get them.”

  “Yes, I know, on their arms,” Nell said. “But the forehead?”

  Mrs. Fallon shrugged. “Like I says, I got no idea what she seen in him.”

  “How old is she?” Nell asked.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “And she lives with you?”

  Mrs. Fallon said “Yes,” Mr. Fallon “No.”

  Nell cocked her head, as if to ask, Which is it?

  Darting a look at her husband, Mrs. Fallon said, “She did live in Boston for a while—the North End—but she’s been back home all summer.”

  “Because of Mr. Hines?” Nell asked. “To be near him?”

  “I reckon,” Mrs. Fallon answered after a short pause.

  Nell said, “I assume, Mrs. Fallon, that if the police believe your daughter ran off with Mr. Hines, that he’s gone, too.”

  “No one’s seen him round Charlestown the past few days,” Mrs. Fallon replied, “but that don’t mean Bridie run off with him—least, not of her own accord. She’s a good girl, she is. Deep down.”

  That met with a dubious little grunt from Liam Fallon. Ignoring it—or too distressed to notice—his wife said, “My Bridie, she’s got the prettiest red hair you ever seen—shines like heaven itself when the sun hits it just right. Big green eyes, pink cheeks... If something’s happened to her...” She lowered her head, dabbing her face with the wadded-up handkerchief, her shoulders shaking.

  Her husband plucked a tea sandwich from the stack on the table in front of him and pried it open, critically examining its contents.

  Just as Nell was about to rise from her chair to go comfort the poor woman, Gracie said, “Why you cwyin’?” She crossed to Mrs. Fallon, baby doll in tow. “It’s all wight,” she soothed. “Don’t cwy. Here, you want to hold Hortense?”

  She offered the doll to the weeping woman, who accepted it in that instinctively maternal way some women had, automatically supporting its little head as she held it to her shoulder. “This is just how my Bridie felt,” she said tremulously, “when she was little like this, all heavy and soft. My other babes, they was all sickly. Wasn’t none of ‘em lived very long. But that Bridie, she was as hale and hearty as they come.”

  “Good girl,” Nell mouthed to Gracie as the child settled back down with her other dolls.

  “When the Fallons realized Harry wasn’t going to help them,” Viola told Nell, “they decided to go to Mr. Hewitt himself.”

  “We went down to that building near India Wharf where he has his office,” Mrs. Fallon said as she patted the doll’s back, “but he wouldn’t see us. Sent some fella out to swat us away. Fella said if Mr. Harry didn’t think there was nothin’ to be done, then there was nothin’ to be done. I asked him what Mr. Hewitt would do if it was his child that disappeared, but he said I was bein’...somethin’...”

  “Important,” her husband offered through a mouthful of food.

  “Impertinent?” Viola ventured.

  “That’s it. He walked us out of the building and told us not to come back.”

  “How dweadfully savage,” Gracie said.

  All eyes turned to her.

  “Come here, buttercup.” Gracie climbed onto the lap of her governess, who whispered into her ear, “It is dreadfully savage, but you must remember not to speak when the adults are having a conversation.”

  “Mrs. Fallon thought if she came here,” Viola said, “and appealed to me as a mother, that she might find a more sympathetic ear.”

  And, clearly, so she had.

  “Have you asked your daughter’s friends and associates if they know where she might be?” Nell inquired.

  Mrs. Fallon nodded as she stroked the doll’s back. “I musta talked to everyone in Charlestown, or tried to. Some of ‘em, like them girls she worked with at the mill, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. Others, they’d talk, but there wasn’t much they could tell me. One day Bridie’s there, the next day she
ain’t. She just up and disappeared. Went off to work Saturday mornin’ and just never come home.”

  “Saturday?” Nell said. “I thought you said she disappeared Sunday.”

  “Ah.” Spots of pink blossomed on Mrs. Fallon’s cheeks. “Fact is, she, uh, well...”

  “She didn’t never come home on Saturday nights,” her husband said. “That Virgil, he’d meet her at work and them two would head off somewheres to...well...”

  “I see,” Nell said. “But she usually returns the following day?”

  “Every Sunday evenin’ by six o’clock,” Mrs. Fallon said, “on account of that’s when Virgil has to have Ollie Fuller’s cart back to him.”

  “Ollie’s a coal dealer up in Charlestown,” her husband explained, “but he don’t work on the Sabbath, so he lets Virgil rent his cart from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday.”

  “Where do they go in the cart?” Nell asked.

  Mrs. Fallon shook her head. “She didn’t like to talk to me about it. She knew how I felt. Father Dunne at Immaculate Conception keeps askin’ why she ain’t in church on Sundays. What am I supposed to tell him?”

  “I still say Jimmy might know somethin’ about all this,” Mr. Fallon told his wife. “If you really want to find her, you’ll ask—”

  “I said I’d do the talkin’,” she muttered. “Didn’t I say I’d do the talkin’?”

  “Jimmy?” Nell asked.

  “He isn’t important,” Mrs. Fallon answered quickly.

  “He’s Bridie’s husband,” Mr. Fallon said.

  Chapter 2

  Mrs. Fallon glared at her husband, her blush deepening to a livid, blotchy stain.

  “Ah,” said Viola.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Gracie said.

  Oh, dear. Nell and Viola exchanged a look.

  “I should think Gracie would be happier playing somewhere else right now,” Viola said. “Perhaps we can ask Miss Parrish to—”

  “No!” Gracie wrapped her arms around Nell’s neck and clung tightly. “Don’t want Miss Pawish. Want Miseeney.”

  “Speaking of naps,” Nell said, “isn’t it about time Hortense went down for hers?”

  “No, no, not yet,” Gracie protested. She usually tucked the doll into her cradle when their midmorning snack was delivered to the nursery.

  “Close enough.” Setting the little girl on her feet, Nell said, “I wonder if Mrs. Fallon would like to help you put her down.”

  Mrs. Fallon, still cuddling the doll as if she were her own baby Bridie, hesitated for a moment, then smiled. “Why, yes, I...I’d be happy to. More than happy,” she added with a look of gratitude that gave Nell a pinch of guilt, seeing as this was really just a ruse to get her out of the room.

  The novelty of sharing this task with someone new evidently appealed to Gracie, who promptly took Mrs. Fallon’s hand and led her away.

  “So,” Nell said as Mr. Fallon sorted through the tray of sandwiches, “it would appear as though your stepdaughter has one too many men in her life.”

  He snorted in affirmation as he plucked a sandwich from the pile. “She was paintin’ on the lip rouge when she was still in short skirts, that one. Weren’t no better than she ought to be, right from the get-go.”

  Weren’t? “Do you think she’s dead?”

  He chewed and swallowed, then started rummaging through the stack again. “A girl like that never comes to no good, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

  “Tell me about her husband,” Nell said. Viola followed the interrogation quietly, content to let Nell conduct it as she saw fit—clearly her purpose in having called her down.

  “He’s a deep-sea fisherman, gone for weeks, months at a time. They been hitched about a year. God knows what he was thinkin’, marrying a jade like Bridie. She was the kind that needs a keeper.” Stuffing the sandwich into his mouth, he added, “Is the kind,” as an afterthought.

  “So, her husband—Jimmy, is it?”

  “Sullivan. Jimmy Sullivan.”

  “What kind of person is he?”

  “My wife thinks he walks on water, but he ain’t no saint, let me tell you that. He’s got a short fuse, that Jimmy Sullivan, and he’s a bruiser. Makes a pretty penny fightin’ other bruisers bare-knuckled when he’s in town.”

  “Has he ever taken those fists to Bridie?” Nell asked.

  “Once or twice, when she was beggin’ for it—makin’ eyes at other men, comin’ home drunk... What man wouldn’t, with baggage like that to keep in line? Even my wife told Bridie it was her own fault. Tried to make her stop slippin’ around on Jimmy while he was off fishing. Said adultery was a sin, said she ought to know better.”

  “Did Jimmy know she was unfaithful?”

  “He suspected, on account of the whispers, and seein’ how she acted with other men. She always denied it, though, and a pretty wench has a way of makin’ a man believe what she wants him to believe. But he was away more than he was home, and when the cat’s away...”

  “So there were other men besides Mr. Hines?”

  “Oh, she gave it away pretty free, least till Virgil come along at the end of May. I never knew their names, them others, but all summer it’s been ‘Virgil this’ and ‘Virgil that.’”

  “When did she move back home?”

  “June. Jimmy come home a few days early and caught the two of ‘em in the act. Gave Bridie a black eye, but he didn’t lay a hand on Virgil. Told him he knew it was all Bridie’s doin’, that she was like a bitch in heat, and... Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, looking back and forth between Nell and Viola.

  “We’re both quite unshockable,” Viola said, with little smile in Nell’s direction.

  “So he just let Mr. Hines go?” Nell asked.

  Mr. Fallon nodded. “Said there wasn’t a man alive could resist a hot little piece like Bridie when she was shovin’ her...uh, self in his face, so he didn’t blame him one bit. Said he’d get off without a beatin’ long as he took Bridie out of there and kept her away for good. Told him if he was smart, he’d learn to keep her in line with his fists, ‘cause it was all she understood.”

  “Did Mr. Hines take that advice, do you know?” Nell asked.

  He shook his head. “She’s been livin’ with us since June, and I ain’t seen no fresh bruises, but could be he’s the type to just hold it all in till he can’t take it no more.”

  Or the type to hit her where it won’t show, Nell thought.

  “If them two run off together,” Fallon continued, “and she makes a fool out of him like she done with Jimmy, no tellin’ what might happen.”

  Reaching for another sandwich, he added, “Or already has.”

  * * *

  “I feel sorry for her,” Viola said after the Fallons had left.

  “Mrs. Fallon?”

  She nodded. “And Bridie, too. It’s easy to label someone a fallen woman, and dismiss her as worthless, but these things are—”

  “Complicated?” Nell finished with a smile. It was a familiar refrain from Viola, for whom life wasn’t sketched in black and white, but rather painted up layer by layer from a palette of infinite hues and shades. And, too, hadn’t Mr. Hewitt saved her from her own youthful indiscretion by marrying her after she became pregnant, by another man, with Will? Like Nell, Viola Hewitt knew all too well the many factors that could tempt a female into sin...just as she knew the repercussions, despite having been spared them herself.

  Viola said, “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  Nell sighed.

  “If I could look into this myself,” Viola said, “I would. But with these pointless legs of mine...”

  “Mrs. Hewitt—”

  “You were such a help to me last winter, after Will was arrested. I know you can find out what became of Bridie. You’ve got a way about you. People trust you. They tell you things. And you’re so savvy, so perceptive.”

  “I did a great deal of stumbling about and backtracking last winter,” Nell said. “I drew more wrong conclusions than you know.
” You infer too much, Will used to say. Far too many facile assumptions. And he was right.

  “Harry won’t help,” Viola said. “Mr. Hewitt won’t help. That poor woman has no one to turn to but me. And I have no one to turn to but you.”

  “I’ve got Gracie to look after.”

  “She’ll sleep till three or three-thirty, and then Miss Parrish can watch her.”

  “You mean you want me to do this right now? Today?”

  “In a situation like this, time is of the essence. I’ll have Brady drive you up to Charlestown in the brougham so you don’t have to bother with a hackney. And I’ll give you a letter introducing you and asking for cooperation and so forth. That might help smooth the way a bit.” A classic Viola Hewitt understatement. She was one of the two or three most eminent ladies of Boston, a renowned philanthropist and the matriarch of one of its oldest families. Her name opened doors all over the city.

  Nell studied the pattern on the Oriental carpet, reflecting on all Viola Hewitt had given her in the past four years, the most precious of which was Gracie. Looking up, she met Viola benevolent gaze. “You know I can’t refuse you anything.”

  “Thank you, my dear.” Reaching across the space that separated them, she squeezed Nell’s hand. “You’re not just my legs, you know. You’re the daughter I never had, even more so than Gracie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Chapter 3

  “This here’s the weaving room,” said the young mill girl who’d agreed to guide Nell to Bridie Sullivan’s former workstation, hollering to be heard above the mechanical din that filled the Hewitt woolen factory.

  To call such a cavernous space a room was like calling Boston Harbor a little inlet. High-ceilinged and about a hundred yards long, it occupied the entire third floor of this huge stone edifice. Hundreds of power looms whirred and clacked and rumbled as scores of young women—some of them little more than girls—trotted up and down the aisles, tending them. Midday sunshine flooded the vast whitewashed space through banks of tall windows, their glass frosted lest the workers be distracted by the view of the stream that had powered this mill before Mr. Hewitt replaced water power with steam.