From This Moment (13 page)

He flinched, as she’d known he would. A better woman would feel guilty about flinging this in his face, but she didn’t. He hadn’t been here six years ago to hold their baby as he died, and she felt no obligation to spare him the details of what she’d been through.

“But you’re fine now?” he asked.

It was surprising that she could even think about that awful year without dissolving into tears, but time had built a layer of scar tissue over the wound that had once seared her world. The magazine was the only thing that had saved her. Getting up each morning and scheduling the assignments, reviewing the articles, managing the budget . . . these were the things that gave order and structure to her world. And at the end of each month, she had a beautiful magazine to show for it, filled with page after page of scientific wonders.

Four years ago, Clyde had the gall to try to force her into selling her share of
Scientific World
, robbing her of the only thing she had left. Thank heavens Romulus had kept a cool head and steered them through to a compromise that managed to let her retain her share of the magazine.

“I’m fine, but I wish you hadn’t come to Boston.”

“It’s the only city in America building a subway.”

“So you’ve lost interest in blasting railroad tunnels through the West?” She tried not to let bitterness leak into her voice, but it was hard. After they married, Clyde had promised he would take jobs close to her, or in places she could live. A construction tent in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming was no place for a pregnant woman, so she’d stayed in Boston while her husband had gone in search of his next engineering adventure.

Clyde’s smile was tight. “I have an interest in earning a living, especially since I signed over all ownership of the magazine I helped finance and establish. And that means I need to work in Boston. And if you can’t—” He stopped abruptly, looking away and breathing heavily. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to fight with you. If anything, I had hoped that . . .”

“Hoped what?”

He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. If she didn’t know him so well, she’d suspect he was nervous.

“It’s going to take at least a decade before the entire subway is completed. That’s a long time. Depending on how things go in Boston, I had hoped that maybe . . . well, maybe I could settle down here and we could make another go of it.”

“There would be no point in it. The doctor said I can’t ever have more children.”

The breath left him in a rush. It looked as though an unseen fist had just punched him in the stomach. “Evelyn . . . I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

He reached out toward her, but she stepped back before he could make contact. “So, you see, there really wouldn’t be any point in it, would there?” She turned away before he could reply. Clyde had desperately wanted children, and now she was useless for that particular function. All her creative energy was funneled into
Scientific World.

Her ambition to study engineering had been stifled by her father, and her desire for a happy marriage had been squandered by Clyde. Even her opportunity to be a mother had been destroyed by fate. All she had left was the magazine. How ironic that those sixty-four pages each month had become the most precious thing in her world. They were the distillation of her energy, insight, and intellect.
Scientific World
gave her life a dependable rhythm and a sense of security that Clyde had never been able to provide.

It had taken years after the wreckage of her marriage to regain her equilibrium, but she had accomplished it. She would not let Clyde Brixton waltz back into her life to destroy it once again.

Stella dressed with extra care on Thursday morning as she prepared for her meeting with Dr. Lentz. No longer required to hide beneath a drab exterior, today she was free to let her true colors shine. Her eyes feasted on the clothes she had brought from London, where she’d lived among the literary and artistic avant-garde of society and flamboyant displays of style were common.

But this was Boston, not London. She wouldn’t step out in her most outrageous styles, but at least she no longer needed to wear beige. After all, she was going to do battle with the city’s medical examiner this morning and needed to look respectable, competent, and a person of consequence.

Her black velvet tailcoat was the perfect mix of severity and style, a dashing and feminine take on a traditionally masculine cutaway coat. The waist of the jacket was tightly cinched before flaring out at her hips with a swallowtail hem in the back. She paired it with a slim-fitting skirt of polished maroon cotton. It was a sharp ensemble—but perhaps needed a bit of softening. Scanning the jewelry in her top drawer, she selected an oversized starburst brooch of carnelian coral to pin to her lapel. The splash of color was a perfect offset for the midnight-black of her coat. And for her hair? She was thoroughly tired of the sedate buns she had been wearing and opted for a wonderfully soft pile of romantic curls gathered loosely and twisted atop her head. A couple of finger twists and she had blond tendrils framing her face as if she’d just stepped out of a Botticelli portrait.

For the first time since her arrival in Boston, she felt like her true self. She rode the trolley to Court Street, the farthest she could go before subway construction diverted the streetcar route. The air got dustier as she battled the crowds on Tremont. She hadn’t expected the chaos to be so bad. Wooden barricades reduced the width of the sidewalk to a fraction of its normal size, and pedestrians bumped shoulders, inching forward on the claustrophobic path at a snail’s pace. It took her a full ten minutes to walk the three blocks to Romulus’s building.

She rode the elevator to the top floor, where Evelyn’s eyes widened in surprise at the sight of her. Before Evelyn could comment, Romulus flung open the door of his private office and headed toward Evelyn with his typical restless energy.

“I’m heading downstairs for a bite to eat,” he said. “Miss West is shamefully late. If she arrives while I’m gone, please scold her for me, then offer her a pot of tea until I get back.”

He was halfway out the door before she spoke. “Ahem,” she said politely.

Romulus froze, then swiveled back around to gawk at her. A flare of appreciation lit his eyes. When she turned to face him directly, he slowly perused her from the top of her jaunty hat all the way down to the polished leather of her high-heeled boots.

“Well, well, well,” he said in a measured, warm drawl. “The real Miss West finally appears.”

“Indeed,” she replied with a bit of humor, but it was quickly replaced with steel. “I’m ready to face the medical examiner and pry a copy of that report out of his tightfisted little hands.”

Romulus said nothing, but the way one black brow rose communicated his surprise. He pointed to his office. “Let’s have a little chat before we go, hmm?” His voice was polite, but she knew this wasn’t a request. She followed him back to his office and lowered herself into the seat he offered. He closed the door, then propped his hip on his desk and folded his hands casually before him. “You look splendid this morning.”

“Thank you.” Odd, he didn’t really seem complimentary; he seemed annoyed.

“Dr. Lentz reviews the articles about health and medicine for my magazine,” he said tightly. “He got his medical degree from Yale, which besmirches an otherwise faultless record, as Harvard is clearly a superior school, but I know him to be a decent man. We’ve served together for years on the board at the Boston Athenaeum, so I consider him a friend, not a tightfisted man with little hands.”

Her chin rose a notch. “He has been less than friendly with me. My experience with Dr. Lentz has been one of repeated indifference and stonewalling. Not much better than the police I’ve dealt with.”

“I can’t change what’s gone on between you and the police, but I am telling you that attacking Dr. Lentz’s character is the wrong way to handle him. I know Dr. Lentz to be a highly
competent physician. I wouldn’t ask him to review our articles for accuracy otherwise. You will catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I did suggest in my letter to you that I’d expect a modicum of etiquette.”

“You suggested I had the manners of a common wood tick.”

“True, but I suspect you are capable of better. Are you?”

She did love a good challenge, and she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin as though she were the Queen of England. “Watch me,” she said with confidence.

It was enough to convince Romulus, and twenty minutes later they were on North Street, walking toward the office of the medical examiner, which was tucked into a row of elegant Colonial buildings. There was no subway construction here, and life seemed achingly normal.

What a stark contrast to the turmoil gathering momentum in her mind. For months she had been fighting for this appointment, but it hurt to think of Gwendolyn lying cold and lifeless on a mortuary slab. She wanted only to remember Gwendolyn laughing in the sunshine, swimming in the lake near their house, jumping into bed with her on chilly winter mornings. They used to daydream about the men they would someday marry and the number of children they would have. Stella wanted only a single boy and a girl, but Gwendolyn wanted half a dozen children. She would never have any.

“Let me do the talking,” Romulus said as they drew closer to the medical examiner’s building. “We are likely to gab about Boston baseball for at least twenty minutes, and I know—”

“Twenty minutes! What a ridiculous waste of time.”

“Trust me on this,” Romulus said. “You’ve been barging in and telling the police how to do their jobs and have gotten nowhere. Let me soften the ground before we attack Dr. Lentz’s professional abilities, hmm?”

She supposed it would be all right. She didn’t care a fig about baseball, but if it softened up her opponent, she was all for it.

Romulus walked up a narrow path to a door flanked by Corinthian columns, but her feet were frozen to the ground. He must have noticed her hesitation, for he looked at her with question in his eyes. She drew a fortifying breath. This wasn’t going to be easy, but it had to be done.

The stench of carbolic acid greeted her as they walked down the tiled hallway. The clerk at the front counter, the one who had threatened Stella with the police the last time she was here, smiled and nodded to Romulus as they passed into the private wing of the building. Romulus rapped on the door of Dr. Lentz’s private office, the thud echoing down the hallway and ratcheting her tension higher.

A young man wearing a white coat over a plain black suit smiled upon opening the door. With tousled brown hair and a skinny build, the man had a boyish look that was charming.
This
was her enemy?

“Romulus,” he said, holding out his hand for a quick shake. “Please come in.”

His office was remarkably ordinary, with a wide desk facing two chairs. Behind him was a window overlooking a leafy garden.

“You must be Miss Westergaard,” the young doctor said with sympathy in his brown eyes. “Please have a seat and I’ll be happy to share what I know of your sister’s case.”

Well, this was a marked difference from the closed doors she’d been treated to earlier in the month.

Romulus nodded to the autographed photograph of Hugh Duffy, the Boston Red Stockings’s best hitter. “Are you planning on attending the opening game?”

As Romulus had predicted, the two men chatted amiably
about the coming baseball season. Stella couldn’t tear her mind off the plain manila folder placed on the doctor’s desk, Gwendolyn’s name printed on the tab. Dr. Lentz must have noticed her attention, for after a few minutes, he straightened his spine and abruptly changed the topic.

“Enough baseball, let’s get down to business, shall we?” the doctor asked as he opened Gwendolyn’s file.

She drew a breath to launch into her spiel, but a quick glare from Romulus froze her. With a barely perceptible motion of his hand, he indicated she should wait for the doctor to speak first. It didn’t take the man long to review his notes.

“Your sister’s body was pulled from the Fort Point Channel shortly after sunrise on December 10th. Based on the state of rigor mortis, she had been dead for several hours by this time, but her body was not discovered until the sun had cleared the horizon. She arrived at my office an hour later.”

“Did you perform the autopsy?” Romulus asked.

“I did. It was a straightforward case of drowning.” He spoke the words gently, while looking directly at Stella. She was sure Dr. Lentz was well accustomed to dealing with grieving family members, and he skillfully conveyed the perfect blend of compassion and medical competence as he outlined his findings. He listed the typical signs of drowning and confirmed that Gwendolyn’s body showed every one of them.

“Gwendolyn was a strong swimmer,” she said. “The bridge wasn’t that high over the river, no more than ten or twelve feet. I don’t think a fall would have rendered her unconscious.”

“It is impossible to know the exact circumstances of your sister’s fall,” the doctor said. “Her lungs were saturated with water, and there was no sign of foul play. No bruising or other injuries.”