Vivian rose slowly to her feet, remembering the deliberate, careful way Hattie had kept touching her belly after she sent Myrtle away. “You never were pregnant. You let that be spread around so you could raise your sister’s baby for her.”
For a moment Hattie stared at Vivian. Then her brows drew together. “Who told you such a nasty rumor about my sister?” she demanded. But that flash of panic had given her away.
“I know she’s expecting the same way I know you aren’t,” Vivian said. “I’ve fit hundreds of dresses. I can tell when clothes are hiding something, and when they’re not.” Her eyes narrowed. “So how did you fool your husband? I might not have known him when he was alive, but I feel pretty safe guessing he wouldn’t have agreed to raise another man’s child.”
“No,” Hattie agreed, and the naked anger in her voice sent a chill skating over Vivian’s skin. “He wouldn’t have.”
They stared at each other for a long moment.Too old to be his type,Myrtle had said. It hadn’t been meant as an insult. Vivian swallowed. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Did you kill him because he—”
“What do you care?” Hattie cut her off.
“I don’t,” Vivian whispered. “Good riddance.”
The flare of emotion in Hattie’s eyes made Vivian take a step back, but a moment later it was gone. Hattie turned away, gripping the back of a chair.
“I would have. I absolutely would have, if I could have figured out how to get away with it,” she said, her voice low and shaking. “But his men were so loyal—no one wants to cut off the hand that’s making them rich. And I couldn’t risk going to jail myself. What would have happened to Myrtle then?”
There was an obvious question, and Vivian heard herself asking it, though she knew she should have left it alone. “Do you think she did it?”
“Absolutely not,” Hattie said firmly. “She wasn’t even here.”
Vivian couldn’t help rolling her eyes. “You gonna keep telling me she was at boarding school?”
“Of course she wasn’t at boarding school,” Hattie snapped. “But do you think I’d force her to wait out her pregnancy in the same house as that monster? She was with our great-aunt on Long Island. And—” Hattie drew herself back up. “She has kindly returned to be with her pregnant sister, who’s in mourning and won’t be out in society until after the baby arrives.”
“You think it was Roy, then?” Vivian said, not bothering to hide her disbelief. “That he killed your husband to win you back?”
Hattie stalked to the door. “I think my husband died of a heart ailment. Which was a great shock to us all, because a heart was clearly the one thing he was utterly without. And now, Miss Kelly—” Mrs. Wilson opened the door so sharply it nearly flew out of her hand. There was an unmistakable warning in her eye. “I’ll thank you to get out of my house.”
THIRTY-ONE
But…” Bea stared at Vivian across the table, a frown puckering her brows. “If it wasn’t that Roy fella’s baby, does that mean he didn’t kill Wilson after all?”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” Vivian said.
She had practically been jumping out of her skin with the need to tell someone what she had learned after she left the Fifth Avenue mansion. Going home to Florence was out of the question, and she wasn’t ready to face Leo yet. She almost went to find Honor, but she wasn’t sure that anyone at the Nightingale would care what had really happened, so long as Hattie and the police commissioner called off the heat. Bea had been the only one she trusted.
First, though, she had to fill in the details of Roy’s break-in, their confrontation, Florence with the gun in her hand… Vivian’s throat closed when she got to that part, and she hurried through her story to talk about Leo instead before jumping forward to her conversation with Hattie and Bruiser George.
Now, she cast a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure neitherof Bea’s brothers or her sister were around and listening. “And Mrs. Wilson said all his men were loyal.No one wants to cut off the hand that’s making them rich,she said, and she’s right about that for sure. So would someone like Roy, who stayed loyal even after his girl left him for his boss, kill that boss without a real reason? A reason like wanting to raise his own child? I don’t think he would’ve.”
“Or maybe he thought it was the way to finally get her back,” Bea pointed out. “Get the husband she hated out of the way? It could’ve worked. You thought it was him just yesterday. Why are you so sure now it wasn’t?”
“I thought he attacked me to keep me from running my mouth off about what he did. But maybe he just couldn’t figure out what I was talking about when I mentioned the baby, and he was dumb and drunk and—” Vivian shook her head. “I think she did it, Bea. If the sister was on Long Island, it had to be Hattie. Wouldn’t you kill any man who hurt your sister?”
“But why would she push the commissioner to find out what happened if she was the one who shot him?” Bea pointed out.
Vivian frowned. “She said it was bad for business, folks thinking someone could just off Wilson and get away with it. So maybe she just had to put on a show, and Roy ended up dead, and she didn’t care.”
“But…” Bea looked suddenly thoughtful. “Hold on a sec.”
She went to the wall that served as a kitchen, sorting through the stack of newspapers that every household kept around. The one she pulled out was one of the society papers they had looked through together what felt like a million years ago.
“Here,” Bea said, flipping through the pages until she found the column she wanted. Vivian skimmed it, reading about a dinner dance with one Mrs. Willard Wilson in attendance. Bea tapped the date at the top of the page. “That’s the day after Wilson was shot, which means she was at a party when her husband was dead in that alley. She couldn’t have done it.”
“Maybe she hired someone. Or maybe it was her sister, then,” Viviansaid, pushing her chair back and standing abruptly, unable to stay still. Pacing back and forth across the small patch of open floor, she crossed her arms. “Maybe she wasn’t away on Long Island. And Hattie didn’t know about it, which was why she wanted the commissioner to—”
“Will you give it a rest?” Bea broke in. “You gotta know when it’s time to stick your nose in and when you mind your own business. This is one of the times to mind your own business, so why can’t you just let it go?”
