“It’s all right, Matilda. It doesn’t matter that you know about it,” I assure her. “Can you show us? Can you show us where it is?”
She looks to Agnes for approval, and when the woman nods, Matilda asks us to follow her.
The maid takes us through the kitchen and down a half flight of stairs that leads to two sets of quarters half aboveground and half part of the cellar. We enter one of the rooms. Inside the small space are two metal-framed beds separated by a nightstand and a hooked rug, alongwith a bureau, a washstand, and a wardrobe. A painting of irises hangs on the far wall. Only one bed is made up with linens; the other stands empty and available. Agnes Prinsen must expect Ursula to return to her. She has not filled the vacancy and given the bed to another girl. This adds fuel to my desire to help Ursula, to bring her back, to end her suffering. To do for her what I cannot do for Sybil and Conrad Reese.
Matilda turns to Agnes and me. “It’s not my way to spy on other people. I was just curious, that’s all.”
“You’re not in any kind of trouble, Matilda,” Agnes replies. “Just show us the place.”
Matilda crosses the room to the nightstand and kneels. She reaches between the legs of the table for a brick in the wall and shimmies it back and forth. The brick comes away from the cracked mortar around it, leaving a darkened rectangular space. She reaches in and pulls out a slender wooden pencil box. When she rises, she hands the box to Agnes, who opens it. Inside are a necklace, some dollar coins, a key, and several papers. Agnes removes the documents and flips through them. One is a single sheet of paper, a list of some kind, written in a foreign language that I don’t recognize. Another is a photograph of a woman and a little girl of about five years. Ursula and her mother, perhaps? The last is an envelope addressed simply “Ursula.” Inside is a letter and an expired train ticket from Camden, New Jersey, six miles away. The letter was written on a piece of stationery printed at the bottom with the name “The Franklin Hotel” and dated on the top: May 17, 1924.
“This date is just a few months before I hired her,” Agnes says. She opens the letter and reads aloud:
Dear Ursula:
I know I can’t change your mind about leaving us, but you need to know Cal didn’t mean what he said. He knows it’s not your fault what happened to Leo. We all know it’s not your fault. You were sick and you didn’t knowwhat you were doing. Sometimes the war and the flu and all that happened just gets to Cal and he drinks too much bootleg and then he says things he doesn’t mean. He feels bad about what he said. He really does. You will always have a home here with us at the hotel, no matter what Cal said. So when your money runs out, and if you want to, come on back.
Rita
Agnes looks up from the letter. “Who is this Rita?”
Matilda shakes her head. “I don’t know. Ursula never mentioned any of these names to me.”
“She never mentioned living at a hotel in Camden?” I ask.
“No, miss.”
Agnes stares at the letter for a minute. “Come with me, Miss Bright,” she says. With the letter and pencil box still in her hand, Agnes leads me from the back of the house to a library across the house’s marbled foyer and next to the drawing room we’d been in before. She stops at a desk made of polished cherry. A squat black telephone sits atop it.
“Sit yourself down. I’m going to make a call.”
I take a seat on a settee near a wall of books and Agnes lifts the telephone’s handset. A moment later she is asking the switchboard operator to connect her to the Franklin Hotel in Camden, New Jersey. And a few moments after that, she is speaking to the woman named Rita.
I cannot help moving to the edge of my seat to listen to the half of the conversation that I can hear. Agnes gives her name and asks politely how the woman knows Ursula Novak. Then she explains that she is Ursula’s employer and that the girl has had a difficult time—the vaguest of references to what actually happened—and that she’s now recovering in a mental hospital in Philadelphia. Agnes mentions the letter she holds in her hand. Rita must now be asking what Ursula did that landed her in a mental hospital, because the next thing Agnes says is that Ursula tried to do herself mortal harm.
“And she has given her caregivers every indication she will likely try again if afforded the opportunity,” Agnes says. “I was hoping you might share with me what happened to Ursula so that I can apprise her doctors. They are at a loss how to help her. She won’t tell them anything.”
I am itching to jump off the settee and snatch the telephone out of Agnes Prinsen’s hand. I want to ask the questions and I want to hear the answers.
“Well, what is it here that you mention in this note to Ursula?” Agnes says, apparently not happy with the entire answer Rita gave her. “What is not her fault? Who is Cal? Who is Leo?”
A moment later Agnes seems to have been turned to stone. All movement ceases. She stares at the bookshelf in front of her with wide eyes that are obviously picturing something other than books.
“Oh my!” Agnes says a few seconds later, her voice having lost some of its regal authority. “Oh, how dreadful.”
“What is it?” I whisper, unable not to ask. “What happened? What’s not Ursula’s fault?”
But Agnes doesn’t hear me. She is listening to more revelations.
“Yes, yes,” Agnes continues. “I’ll tell that to the doctor.”
“Tell me what?” This I say at normal speaking volume.
Agnes turns to me, shaking her head slightly. Then she crooks an eyebrow and looks off in the distance again. “Wait. No one is demanding you pay for her care, Mrs. Dabney. That’s not why I rang you. I called because—”
She stops and listens. “Well, all right. I will pass along the message. Good day.”
I reach for the telephone to speak to this Rita Dabney myself even as Agnes lays the receiver on its cradle, the connection ended.
“I don’t think that woman is entirely a very nice person,” Agnes says, frowning. Then she turns to me. “She doesn’t think it’s a good idea for her and her husband to come to visit Ursula, and she doesn’t want you or anyone else at the asylum contacting her. I think she’s afraid you will force her to pay for Ursula’s care, and she says they can’t afford it.”
“Whoarethey?” I ask.
“Rita and Maury Dabney took Ursula in when her mother died. They are her stepfather Cal’s parents. He was married for three years to Ursula’s mother but was off fighting the war in France when she died. Ursula didn’t have any other family but the Dabneys, such as they are. So they took her.”
“What was so dreadful?” I ask, sensing that we are at last, at last making progress. “What wasn’t Ursula’s fault? What happened?”
Agnes inhales and exhales. “Very sad. Very sad indeed. Ursula had that awful flu, too. She was delirious with fever the day her mother died and she tossed her baby brother—Cal’s only child at the time—into the Delaware River.” Agnes shakes her head gloomily. “He drowned, Miss Bright.”
