“What do you mean?”
“I’d like to find out how she was dressed when she went out the night she died. That could tell me who she was going to meet.”
“How could what she was wearing tell you anything?” Catherine asked.
“If she was dressed carefully, she was probably going to meet a lover,” Sarah said. “If she dressed hastily, she might have been in a hurry. Can you remember?”
“I only know what she was wearing last time I saw her.”
“Could you tell from looking at the clothes in her room what she wore to go out that night?”
Catherine cast one anxious glance at the door again. Could she actually be frightened at the prospect of having Mrs. Walcott catch her talking to Sarah? What kind of a relationship did she have with the landlady? Before she could pursue that thought, Catherine said, “I can look at her things. They’re all there in her room. Mrs. Walcott won’t let anybody touch them. It’s not like Anna’s going to need them or anything, is it?” she grumbled, opening the parlor doors and leading Sarah up the stairs.
Sarah followed her into Anna’s room. The shades had been drawn, and everything was just as she’d seen it last. The place was starting to have that closed-up, dusty smell to it.
“I could wear her things,” Catherine was saying. “We were the same size. I don’t know why she won’t let me have them.”
“Maybe she will when this is all settled,” Sarah suggested.
Catherine took a quick inventory. “That’s funny.”
“What?”
“Looks like she didn’t change her clothes before she went out. She was wearing her house dress that night. After the boy left, she changed into it. She didn’t like to sit around in her good clothes if nobody was coming to call. Clothes cost the earth, you know.”
Sarah knew it well. “What color was it?”
“Brown,” she said, confirming what Mrs. Walcott had said, although the landlady hadn’t mentioned what kind of a dress it had been. Women usually had a dress, usually one past its prime, they kept for doing housework and such. Although Anna wouldn’t have done much work, she would have had a shabby dress she wore to be comfortable.
“So she was wearing a house dress. What coat would she have been wearing?”
Catherine looked at everything again. “She only had this cape, and it’s still here. Her winter coat is in the trunk. It hasn’t been cold enough to get it out. Or at least it wasn’t before she died. It’s a nice coat, too. Hardly worn at all,” she added enviously.
“Did she have a shawl or something?”
Catherine looked at each garment again. “The one she wore around the house. She had it on that night when we was playing checkers. Mrs. Walcott wouldn’t light a fire. She said it wasn’t cold enough yet, but Anna was always cold.”
They could hear the front door opening, and a voice calling for Mary. Catherine’s eyes widened in alarm. “Oh, miss, could you… I don’t want Mrs. Walcott to know I was talking to you. Could you leave by the back stairs so she don’t see you?”
Sarah considered refusing. She wouldn’t mind seeing Mrs. Walcott again, but not if her presence would make the woman angry. She might need to come back again, and there was no use in antagonizing the landlady unnecessarily. “I’d be glad to,” Sarah assured her.
Placing her finger to her lips to signal Sarah to be silent, Catherine led her quickly down the hallway to the back staircase. Sarah stole down the steps and out through the empty kitchen to the back porch.
She wasn’t too surprised to find a couple of stray dogs in the back yard, a large brown one and a small black one. Such animals roamed the entire city, scavenging garbage and the carcasses of dead animals when they were lucky enough to find them. These were like most, mangy and scrawny and sniffing around for whatever they could find. They were sniffing at the Walcotts’ cellar door, scratching fruitlessly in an effort to get inside. Sarah remembered the maid complaining about how something had died down there. The scent must have attracted these poor creatures.
“Shoo!” she tried, shaking her skirts at them, but they barely spared her a glance before returning to their quest. Leaving them to it, Sarah made her way out of the tiny yard and into the alley, where she made her escape undetected.
Sarah decided to go home before returning to the hospital. She wanted to get her medical bag and take it with her this time so she could check Webster Prescott’s condition more closely. She also wanted to check on the Ellsworths. They must be nearly insane after being held prisoner in their home for so long. She couldn’t do much but try to reassure them that their ordeal would soon be over, but she couldn’t just leave them with no news at all.
But when Sarah reached Bank Street, she saw to her dismay that the reporters were back in force. A clump of young men stood gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Ellsworth house, and Sarah muttered a curse when they began to descend on her.
“Who are you?”
“Do you know Nelson Ellsworth?”
“Do you know he murdered a woman?”
The questions came faster than she could even register them. Since she had no intention of answering any of them, she didn’t even bother to try. “What are you doing here?” she demanded instead. “Haven’t you done enough?”
“None of us killed anybody, lady,” one of the reporters said.
“Neither did Nelson Ellsworth,” Sarah said, pushing her way through them toward her front steps.
“You know him then!” one of them shouted in triumph.
“Are you in love with him?”
“Are you lovers?”
“Are you engaged?”
Sarah rolled her eyes and kept moving.
“Maybe she’s the one who stabbed Prescott!” another called.
This stopped her in her tracks. “What did you say?”
“Did you stab Webster Prescott to protect your lover?” a young man with a very bad complexion asked hopefully.
“How did you find out Mr. Prescott had been stabbed?” she demanded.
“How did you?” another one countered provocatively.
Sarah sighed in exasperation. “The police told me,” she said. “Now how did you find out?”
“It was in the World this morning,” one of them said. “A woman tried to kill him because he was getting too close to the truth! Was it you, trying to protect Ellsworth?”
Sarah fought her way through the rest of them and quickly climbed her steps, ignoring their shouted questions and innuendoes. Now she was very glad she’d come home when she did. She had to see Mrs. Ellsworth and make sure she and Nelson were all right after this recent onslaught.
Once safely inside, she didn’t even remove her cloak. Making a hasty foraging trip through the kitchen for anything edible she could find, she threw the things into her market basket and slipped it over her arm. Then she snatched up her medical bag and launched herself back into the street again. There was no need to sneak around the back way. She’d simply go in the front door and the devil take them all.
They were like jackals on the scent when they saw where she was going. She didn’t allow herself to hear the shouts or the questions as she made her way through them to the Ellsworths’ front door. She pounded on it, calling, “It’s Sarah Brandt!” so they wouldn’t be afraid to let her in.
After a few moments, the door opened a crack. She glimpsed Mrs. Ellsworth’s frightened face in the instant before she squeezed through the narrow opening and threw her weight against the door to help the old woman close it behind her. By then the reporters were pounding on it, too, demanding admittance. After making sure it was locked securely, Sarah led Mrs. Ellsworth away to the relative quiet of the kitchen.
“Oh, Mrs. Brandt, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” the old woman wailed. “I thought they’d gotten tired of us, and now…”