Jennifer Shaw

Read Part I here.

Read Part II here.

February 14, 1897

One year after the disappearance of Katherine Williams

New York City

The day was as heavy as Molly had feared. It reminded her that, although time moved forward, that linear progression was no straight, smooth arrow. Rather, it consisted of smaller, circular connections, an awful chain that looped back on itself repeatedly, agonizingly, even as it spiraled slowly forward.

That day, no one could escape it. That noon, no one had words precise enough to capture, to somehow assuage, that agony of the Williams household. It was a pain that extended below stairs even, into the enormous, white-tiled, copper-potted kitchen and darker, more claustrophobic dining nook where, in that slow hour after morning duties and before luncheon, many of the staff crammed together. A dim gasolier leered over them all. Despite the boiled meat and vegetables put out, no one had much appetite.

“Did anyone see today’s headline?” Peter, the kitchen boy, finally asked.

Some heads nodded, others shook no. Stirring her coffee—though she’d added no milk or sugar—Molly kept her brunette head still.

“ ‘On Anniversary of Heiress’s Disappearance, NYPD Maintain Case is One of Missing Person’,” recited the assistant chef impressively. Hargrove, the butler, cut his eyes at him before resuming his futile occupation with a set of lists.

Peter snorted. “I can’t believe the police have kept the body quiet all this time. Mr. Williams must have paid them handsomely.”

“Enough,” shot Mrs. Mason, the housekeeper. “We none of us know if that was actually Miss Katherine, it was rotted so badly. And, as far as the public is concerned, that body was never dredged from the reservoir. Remember that.” Her brows shot up at them all in a look that rivaled her mistress’s, in those former days of Miranda Williams’s powerful household reign.

It was a good reminder, Molly thought. All the servants had been forced to sign legal agreements to remain permanently silent about everything related to Katya’s disappearance, on pain of being fired and sued for all they had in court. It had worked, but they’d signed those papers a year ago—one day after Katherine vanished, when her parents hired a lawyer, no one else, to help them manage the emergency. The Williamses never spoke explicitly about the agreements, so it was easy to forget what a powerful threat they were. But they remained there, forced on them all, hanging over them like an enormous, fatal net, and the agreements had no expiration.

Molly herself had, several times, fantasized about escaping the threat of that net. Of quitting her work for this family altogether. However, from the week Katya disappeared, and just a day after their guest, the Earl of Worcester, fled their household for the sympathy of the Rockefeller parlor (claiming only that he’d been jilted), Mrs. Williams had insisted Molly remain. Despite her threatening tone, she had given Molly a new position and even a substantial raise, and Molly had borne it. To do otherwise would have raised stronger suspicions, and she could not allow that.

The head chef now shook his head of thick gray hair. “I’ll say it again: it was a crime they waited so long to report her missing to the police. All that time they spent handling it on their own, all those weeks they denied it to their friends, the world, that she was missing. Maybe, if they hadn’t been so concerned with scandals, appearances…”

He didn’t need to finish; they all knew the rest—Katya would still be alive. The experts would have tracked her down, rescued her, prosecuted the people responsible. Or, at the very least, verified that darkest of possibilities: that she was in fact dead.

The uncertainty was awful, and not at all helped by the false sightings and fraudulent ransom notes that poured in when the Williamses finally made their daughter’s disappearance public. It was killing her parents, particularly her mother.

Molly now worked as a second lady’s maid for Miranda Williams, and she’d born witness to the ghost Mischa had become—now chronically ill, unable to stay out of bed a full day. She no longer attended social functions, was no longer any kind of real member of New York society.

“Please, Mrs. Williams,” Molly pled on a regular basis. “Come sit at your vanity so I can brush your hair.”

Often, the woman kept her gray face turned into her pillow, her once-rich mass of dark locks knotted and dull on the pillowcase, the roots shiny with grease.

“Can you at least sit up please, ma’am?”

Nothing.

Molly no longer worked, essentially. She was paid to plead with her mistress for as long as Mischa would tolerate before she sent her out.

Mr. Williams spent more and more time away from the house. He either quartered in his office or spent long weeks hovelled up in his hunting lodge on Long Island. House rumors were, he was planning a long journey overseas, without his wife.

“Maybe that body truly wasn’t Miss Williams’s,” offered a chambermaid, her voice wavering.

“Who else could it have been?” asked the assistant chef, gesturing with a fleshy hand.

“Dozens of others!” shot Mrs. Mason. “Any number of prostitutes, or drunken beggar women, or some poor girl who crossed paths with the wrong person, like that wicked Jack the Ripper over there in London… Not our Katya, who was alone for such a short while. How is it possible someone snatched her in just a dozen feet of sidewalk?”

“That friend of Mr. Williams’s told the papers, ‘We New Yorkers never notice much’,” countered the assistant chef.

“Phfff!” retorted the housekeeper. “What about the way she was dressed—that Doucet gown and that gorgeous sable coat? Her hat, her muff? Someone would have noticed a killer wrestling with a woman that well-dressed. And the snow? There were no tracks. I don’t know what happened to her, but that wasn’t her body.”

“Yet,” said the butler, finally drawn in, “She’s likely dead. Even if that wasn’t her corpse, nothing was missing from her rooms to indicate she was running away. No clothing, no jewelry gone except for those pieces she wore, no other items taken, no charges to her family’s account… what else could have happened, except that someone got her, somehow?”

Silence thundered over the small, dim nook, and a wave of heat overtook Molly, flaming her pale face.

No, no. She willed her body to coolness, passivity, silence. Even as the truth burned in her throat.

Keep to the script.

As usual, everyone’s eyes fell on her. She’d been closest to Miss Katya; she was the last person to see her. Always, sick to her stomach, Molly maintained the same story. She’d stuck to the engagement plan: she stayed behind, not far, while Miss Katya made her way around an empty curve in the sidewalk, toward the place where the earl waited out of sight. This was the scene the lady had wanted to enact for the sake of the occasion, Molly insisted, and she had just done Katya’s bidding. Mrs. Williams would have been there to escort her daughter except she’d gotten so sick the night before.

House rumors flew about that, too. About the bottle of arsenic found misplaced, as if taken from the housekeeper’s cabinet and not put back properly… that someone had poisoned Mrs. Williams with a very small dose… But not a word about that was ever breathed to anyone outside the Williamses’ front door. No one even made a peep about it to the private investigator.  

Now, Molly looked steadily at them all, despite the phantom flames engulfing her. Just as she’d looked steadily, first, at the lawyer and private detective with their cold, suspicious eyes, and, later, at the police. Innumerable times.

“You know my story,” she said, and sipped her coffee. Miraculously, the liquid made its way down her throat.

“Enough, enough!” snapped Mrs. Mason. Everyone jumped.

That was the end of it.

It hurt too much, anyway. It was too heavy for them all. Guilt was an insidious thing, and it snaked its way through even that lowest floor, affecting them all with a strange sense that they were somehow, in some way, culpable. Though, they dared not try to articulate that.   

But that afternoon, a “household errand” compelled Molly off Fifth Avenue. The sturdy Irishwoman made her way deep into another part of the city, to the letter box where Miss Katya had conducted her secret correspondence.

Their agreement had been that Katya would keep the box and, if she could, mail a signal to Molly, something letting her know she was alright. That had been Molly’s one iron-clad condition, when she’d finally agreed to aid the Williams heiress who was also her friend.

Her only friend, given that Molly was a childless widow, her own siblings, nieces, and nephews long moved away. She had worked for the Williamses her entire adult life and watched little Katya grow up. Had heard her play that piano, in all those stolen moments when Molly lingered, unseen, in a doorway to the ballroom. The lush, trilling notes assuaging her tedium, relieving that soul-crushing, endlessly lonely doldrum so even she—raw and common and thick-limbed as she was—could fly for a time through something sublime.

The first time Molly experienced it, something broke open in her chest—a spill of pure molten gold so powerful she brought a hand to her bosom. Her arms and neck prickled, her eyes welled, and then Katya’s passionate playing lifted her up.

The two of them were united, and every distinction that had ever stood between them, every difference—of class, culture, education—that had felt so permanent, so cast in iron, melted away. They were simply two human beings transcending together in a moment of divinity.

That had been it, what made Molly decide. No one deserved to live in a cage. Certainly, not this gifted young woman, even if her captivity was beautiful and safe.

At what price?  

So, that was Molly’s condition. Katya had to let her know she was well. Then, Molly would burn the evidence.

“I cannot live with that uncertainty,” she told her young mistress.

Molly had found a way, somehow, to check that box every week for nearly a year. And, for 364 days, there had been nothing in it—no letter, no parcel, no object, no cryptic, bare-boned message. The mounting silence had stolen sleep from the servant, robbed her of her appetite, forced her to her knees every night to ask God’s forgiveness for her part in it all.

Especially after the private investigator located Henry Bauer in Athens, searched his house, and even interviewed his colleagues, all of which yielded no sign of Katya. Worse, still, when the police looked for him too, months later, and discovered he’d resigned at the end of the spring ‘96 term and gone somewhere unknown. Molly knew all that only because the housemaids were adept at eavesdropping.

Yet, something had told Molly to refrain from confessing. To wait, have faith, and give Katya a solid chance. Molly would know in her heart when it was time to give up.  

Today was the final day. If nothing were there, Molly decided, she would cease to check that postal box. She would accept that Katya was very likely that body found in midsummer, weighted down in the water. For it had been a dark-haired female, and the exact length to match Katya’s height. She might even go straight to the police and suffer whatever the repercussions would be.

Wrapped in a wool shawl and wearing a worn toque hat that covered her ears, Molly trudged her chilly way through the bustling streets, invisible to all the chortling or tight-lipped pedestrians concerned, naturally, with only themselves. She found her way to the freestanding metal box, one of many that had appeared on the city’s streets over the years. This one stood shadowed in a back alley littered with dirty snow and surrounded by chipped red brick. It never saw the sun, obscured as the rays were by all the buildings. Feeling more than seeing, it was such a familiar movement, Molly slid the skeleton key into the lock and turned it smoothly, opening the square door.

Saw, instead of darkness, a hint of white. An envelope, its face nearly blank. No return address.

She tucked it inside her shawl. She locked the box again and left the alley, making her steady way to a little café in a safer yet modest part of town where she sometimes liked to have a bite.

She sat at a table in the corner, pulling the toque from her head and the envelope from her chest. Heart banging against her breast, she slit open that piece of mail with her icy finger.

Inside was a single creased sheet of…something. When she unfolded it, she saw the top had been snipped off. One side had butcher’s paper glued over it, as if to hide whatever was beneath. But on the other side was… a list. It took Molly a minute to comprehend it. Though printed in a foreign language—German?—it looked like a list of musical instruments and their players, with a single name and title at the very top.

The sender had considerately circled the two names most important and, in the margins, translated the odd words into English. The name and title at the top: Harry Percy, Conductor. And, further down, Kate Percy: Piano.

Beside the top name was scrawled a short note: Isn’t that a good joke? His idea, not mine.

And then: All my love, always.

Molly’s head shot up, her eyes streaming. A massive phantom weight lifted from her shoulders. In fact, she felt herself rising entirely out of her body.

Outside, the sun sliced through the winter clouds, and the street morphed with incandescence, everything cast in a delicate gold.

A bird landed lithely on the ledge of the café’s window, peering through the glass at the customers inside. Molly couldn’t see its color well, but she imagined it was green and yellow.

Katya, and even she.

Yes. Now she, Molly, could go too.

Perhaps to Pittsburgh, where her youngest sister lived with her large family, toiling as a seamstress. With all the generous, guilty wages Molly had horded, she could help them. She could make a significant difference for them, too. Like Katya had for her.

Yes, she thought. Yes, yes.

You brave, wonderful woman.

All my love to you, too.  

THE END

Happy Valentine’s Day!