The Wharton Plot, page 19
Here, there was a pause. Then he said, “Oh! I suppose not. I’m dreadfully sorry.”
It was an apology, not a condolence; he was genuinely appalled by his clumsiness.
Kicking at the wet grass, she said, “I’ve decided to see it as an accomplishment. Any girl can suffer a mere broken engagement. But to be blamed for the break in Town Topics by one’s almost mother-in-law? For an excess of intellectuality? That’s a rare feat.”
“Well, I’d say it is!” She smiled at his enthusiasm, laughing when he added, “Good for you.”
“Yes, good for me.”
“I gather you write.”
“Just poems so far. Stories too. But some of the poems have been printed.”
“Extraordinary,” he marveled. “Extraordinary. Good for you.”
He was so simple, she had laughed again. No one had ever called her extraordinary. No one else had ever congratulated her in this way, seen what a triumph it was for a girl of twenty-two to take the words that spun endlessly in her head and place them before people as worthy of attention. He was, she realized, a bit awed by her. Even better, he did not seem to mind it, her having that power. Perhaps because he was himself a bit strange, still unmarried at the age of thirty, despite having a good family and decent income. He was also strange in that he was kind. And when he said, “I suppose we’re both off to a late start in things,” she understood he meant marriage, and when he asked her to the Patriarch’s Ball, she said yes, knowing what it signified, and when he stammered would she consider, might she … she had said yes straightaway, not making him go through the whole rigmarole. The right words, they agreed, were her métier. He called her writing a kind of witchcraft.
As she began to lead him back to the Belmont, she remembered them, herself so young, walking from her mother’s home on Twenty-Third Street. They walked a lot in those first days—she was so desperate to be away from Lucretia. He had followed her, vast sums of money in his pocket, so that she could buy anything that struck her fancy. Back then, it was the only way she knew to escape: purchase the new, as if the arrival of something novel in the house might transform her world. Quietly, humbly, he had become her ally, trailing behind her as she restlessly wandered the city looking for a life she couldn’t quite yet imagine. But she had started moving too fast. Gone to places where he got lost.
I have made you so unhappy, she thought. Something like a plea of forgiveness darted through her mind.
Removing a hand from her muff, she held it out. He took it, and she despaired at how cold and unsteady his hand was; the tremors radiated up his arm. “… freezing,” she said, rubbing the back of his hand with her thumb. “Come, let’s go in.”
Gently, she tugged him along so that together, they turned the last corner. He said, “My mind is going and the doctors don’t see.” She said, “Then we must find better ones.” As they approached the entrance, she wrapped her arm in his, aligning herself with him, and his shaking eased a little. To the doorman, she gave her loftiest nod, her grandest good evening, holding his gaze with her own imperious one so that he did not take in Teddy’s naked legs and bedraggled slippers under the hem of his Savile Row overcoat. Although, of course, even if he did see, he would never have been so crass as to show it. This was, after all, the Belmont. Appearances were maintained.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“I am attempting to reach Mary Roberts Rinehart. I have been attempting to reach her for some time … No. As I told the last young woman of dubious intellect, I do not have her telephone number. But she is a very famous writer. How many of those can you have in Pittsburgh? Someone must know how to reach her.”
Edith was well aware there was no need to shout into the telephone. The distance between New York and Pennsylvania did not require amplification on her part. But she was frustrated; she had been trying to reach the celebrated mystery author for over half an hour, so she felt like shouting. To Choumai, she said, “Perhaps I should send word by carrier pigeon.”
Last night, she had told herself it was time to set aside the matter of David Graham Phillips. She had suspected a number of people and she had been wrong. She could think of no one else to accuse. Yes, the notes were worrying, but she did not think they would follow her back to Europe. The thing now was to get Dr. Kinnicutt in New York and get herself out of it.
But when she woke up, her very first thought was that while she had been wrong, other people had been more wrong. Carolyn Frevert and Anna Walling’s imagined plot of murderous aristocrats and their lapdogs was entirely wrong. As was, it seemed, her theory of a jealous husband. However, her theory of a frustrated writer had yet to be fully tested. Maybe she had been wrong to suspect Algernon Okrent. But a man as suffocatingly arrogant as David Graham Phillips must have offended someone else. Someone who saw him as a parasite, living off the life blood of others. Someone overwrought enough to use the term vampire.
But her theory was not proof. She needed evidence. More than that, she needed to learn how to obtain evidence. And for that, she needed to speak with someone whose métier was crime—but who was not an actual criminal. Or a policeman, for the simple reason she didn’t know any. Given the nature of the crime, it made sense to put the matter before a fellow author. In America, there was no crime writer more celebrated than Mary Roberts Rinehart.
As she waited, Edith tried to recall everything she had heard about The Circular Staircase; when encountering new authors, she liked to begin on a simple and sincere note of admiration. It had been published three years ago, spawning what some called imitations and others a category called the “had I but known” novel, meaning that if the characters knew what horrors awaited them in the old house or dark woods, they would never have ventured forth. Irritably tapping her pen on the edge of the side table, Edith thought that everything might be called a “had I but known” story. Had she but known that her interest in David Graham Phillips’s murder was going to lead to this interminable phone call, she would never have attended the funeral. Had she but known that the malingering Dr. Kinnicutt was going to take this long to get over a little cold, she would have packed Teddy off to California that first day, Nannie be damned.
“Hello?”
Startled, Edith barked back, “Yes, hello?”
“Is this … Forgive me, they said Mrs. Edith Wharton was on the line, I said surely not, it must be a joke…”
“No, no!” The woman was self-deprecating and deferential, two qualities that endeared her to Edith straightaway. “I apologize for the confusion. This is Edith Wharton.” She realized she was still shouting; the woman wasn’t deaf. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“No, not at all. I…”
“My congratulations on the success of The Circular Staircase. I long to read it.”
“I so enjoyed The House of Mirth,” said the other woman faintly. Edith frowned. The House of Mirth was not a biscuit or blend of tea, something to be blandly enjoyed. Still. She must allow for nerves. Mrs. Rinehart had not expected her call.
Then she heard an impressive crash and a cry of despair from Mrs. Rinehart, who said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Wharton…” before shouting, “Stanley, Alan, and Fred, take yourselves outside the house while there still is a house!”
Returning, she said, “Forgive me.”
“Your sons?” guessed Edith, thinking you would never name a dog Stanley.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Rinehart. “Marvelous, of course, and I adore them. But a challenge when it comes to finding time to write.”
Edith thought the other woman had been about to say something along the lines of as you know before remembering that Edith did not know. The issue of time having been raised, Edith felt she should come to the point. But her well-rehearsed request that Mrs. Rinehart use her knowledge of crime to help her find a murderer now sounded overly bold.
Floundering, she said, “I suppose you have heard of the murder of the writer David Graham Phillips.”
“I read about it in the paper. Terrible. Did you know him?”
“I only met him once, the day before he was killed.” A sympathetic gasp from Mrs. Rinehart encouraged frankness. “And yet since it happened, I haven’t been able to think about anything else. It’s become something of an obsession. I do that, I’m told, become obsessed with things. Trips, motors…”
“I became obsessed with a house once.”
Thinking of The Mount, Edith felt a rush of kinship. “Did you?”
“Yes, I sometimes felt I was writing just to pay for it. But you didn’t call to talk about houses.”
Edith would have happily talked about houses for hours. But she said, “No, I suppose I didn’t. I thought since you write so well about crime, you might have some idea of how one might go about catching the person who did it.”
A gentle pause. “Well, I would go to the police.”
This was disappointing. Edith rallied. “Heavens, Mrs. Rinehart, where would you be if people believed the police solved every crime? Leave it to the professionals, where’s the fun in that?”
The other woman laughed.
Remembering the reviews, Edith said, “In The Circular Staircase, a spinster in a strange house discovers a body at the bottom of the stairs. Then she finds a pistol in a flower bed. Now—she doesn’t tell the police she found the pistol. She investigates on her own.”
“True. But Rachel’s nephew is a suspect, and she feels she has to clear his name.”
“Well, isn’t that dangerous? Doesn’t she experience all sorts of peril once the killer discovers that she’s looking for him?”
“Of course, otherwise nothing would happen in the story.” Edith sensed Mrs. Rinehart smiling on the other end of the phone. “It is true that readers become impatient with a character who needlessly puts herself at risk.”
“But what if she is already at risk? And the only way to feel safe is to catch the person who did it?”
“What do you mean, Mrs. Wharton?”
“I have been asked to read Mr. Phillips’s final book. From the day I began reading, I began to receive anonymous messages at my hotel. Very similar to the ones sent to David Graham Phillips before he was killed.”
A long pause. “Have you seen those notes?” Edith affirmed that she had. “And the handwriting is the same?”
“Yes.”
“Really, Mrs. Wharton, I…”
Edith refused to listen to more advice to go to the police. “Mrs. Rinehart, isn’t the appeal of your book that you write about a woman who wants to find out something? A woman who wants to know? She goes digging and asks questions and takes risks because whatever people might tell her, she knows that women live in the world and must grapple with its realities. Perhaps we don’t serve on juries or fight wars, but we shouldn’t be endlessly sheltered…”
“Many women aren’t,” said Mrs. Rinehart.
Edith heard the rebuke but ignored it. “And so we have a right to seek answers. Like the adults we are.”
Mrs. Rinehart asked, “Mr. Phillips had loved ones, did he not?”
“Yes, strangely. He was a very abrasive man.”
“Do they have any thoughts on who killed him?”
“They think he was murdered by the rich and powerful to stop the publication of his next book. I know the people they suspect, and their complacency is only equal to their incompetence. These are not assassins, Mrs. Rinehart.”
“And what is your opinion, Mrs. Wharton?”
“At one point, I thought it a jealous husband and a love affair gone wrong. Mr. Phillips wrote a great deal about women, but more to scold than in sympathy. He felt very much like a man spurned. Honestly, if a woman did shoot him, I should not be in the least surprised.”
“But you’re sure the shooter was not a woman,” Mrs. Rinehart clarified.
“Not according to the witnesses. They were very dull and unobservant, but that much they seemed to have noticed.”
“And the jealous husband?”
Edith thought of Henry Frevert covered in paste and butcher paper. William Walling, desperate to atone. “One has what I think you call an alibi. The other seems temperamentally unsuited to murder. So I return to my original theory.”
“Which was?”
“A jealous writer.”
She felt mildly foolish in saying it. But Mrs. Rinehart offered a delighted “A-ha.”
Encouraged, she said, “Someone who lives in the same area as Mr. Phillips did. The notes were delivered to his address—the killer seems to have been familiar with his movements. He was shot not very far from his apartment, outside his club. I’ve also wondered if that doesn’t indicate that Mr. Phillips knew his killer. I mean, if you were receiving death threats, Mrs. Rinehart, wouldn’t any stranger who got too close be cause for alarm?”
There was a long pause. Edith worried that she had strayed into fanciful thinking.
But then Mrs. Rinehart said, “I am more concerned with how the killer knows your movements, Mrs. Wharton. The notes to you were delivered where?”
“To my hotel.”
“How did the sender know where you were staying?”
She thought to say, Oh, he was following me. Then remembered, no, that had been poor Teddy.
“How did they know you had taken an interest?” Mrs. Rinehart pressed.
“I went to Appleton. I was reading the book…”
“How did they know who you were? Oh, dear, I’m not saying this right.”
“Well, I am Edith Wharton.”
“Yes, but … how did the killer know you were you?”
Edith was about to snap that of course she was she, she was Edith Wharton, everyone knew who she was, even back to the time she had been Edith Jones, everyone who mattered anyway. Perhaps other people were unused to significance or relevance, but she was not …
Then she remembered her own words: I don’t know what Mary Roberts Rinehart looks like well enough to shoot her.
And Anna Walling: I recognized you from your author portrait.
And if Teddy had been the person who was following her, how did the killer know she was staying at the Belmont?
Mrs. Rinehart’s voice, anxious over the line. “Do you see what I mean, Mrs. Wharton?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“At the very least, you seem to be correct that the shooter is a book lover.”
Or someone who hates writers. Although he may be unaware that he does.
To Mrs. Rinehart, she said, “Well, not a lover of the books of David Graham Phillips. At least not his last one.”
“Then perhaps the answer lies inside the pages of his last book.”
Edith heard a slammed door in the background followed by the stomping of careless feet, and Mrs. Rinehart directing the disposal of hats, coats, and galoshes.
Then her voice clearer as she returned to the phone. “Mrs. Wharton—I must say it again: If this person has killed once, please, be careful.”
“Yes, thank you. And thank you for indulging me, Mrs. Rinehart. I hope we meet in person one day.”
“I as well,” said Mrs. Rinehart warmly. Then, after a brief pause, “May I ask if you support women’s suffrage?”
“Good God, no,” said Edith and bidding the otherwise lovely Mrs. Rinehart adieu, she hung up the phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Alone in her room, Edith pondered Mrs. Rinehart’s warning. She thought of the killer’s last note: A man in this world who does just about what he wishes is liable to be a social outcast, a very prominent member of the Four Hundred, or both.
It was rather funny, given her current situation. The entire point of the Four Hundred was that one should never encounter a person who was not known and approved by the right people. The definition of stranger was incalculably broad: Anyone who didn’t possess one of a handful of names. Anyone who did not possess a comfortable income or live in one of the select areas of select cities—and of course, adhere to prescribed standards. She recalled her mother’s sharp admonition to look away as August Belmont’s mistress sailed by in her yellow brougham. One must only know August Belmont to a certain degree because he was Jewish. One must know nothing at all of his mistress.
She was astonished by how few strangers she encountered in life. Every room she entered, familiar faces, with a few select new ones made known to her by association with the old. A woman of her class was never to be “known” by people outside of it, mentioned publicly only at the time of her birth, marriage, and death, and attendance at the opera. She had fought it, this refusal to associate only with certain people, to stay in approved spaces. When she traveled, she never wanted to go to the five places all Americans went, but to the small convent in the countryside, the caves known only to the locals, uncelebrated houses with beautiful, ancient roofs that spoke of ages past. She wanted to see what real life felt like to the people who lived there. Now she wondered: If her mother knew that Edith’s face and whereabouts were known by a murderer, would she say, Well, that is what comes of traveling to the Grotte di Frasassi?
A person who had taken a life knew who she was. Where she was. And she knew nothing about him.
Or did she?
Now that she was certain neither the Vanderbilts nor the Depews had murdered David Graham Phillips, she allowed Anna Walling’s accusation back into her mind: Closer to home. Who close to home might think her a woman who did just as she wanted? Who might think her too free and send her notes to let her know she was not protected?
It was difficult not to think of the one man whose notes had recently been her entire existence.
But Morton Fullerton had no need of a mystery identity to torment her. And it would hardly satisfy his vanity to unnerve her anonymously. He would want credit. Besides, he was a better writer than the note sender.
