7
I brought you a gift.”
Tom Donaghue stood outside Molly’s bedroom door, a wrapped package in his hands. The late morning sunlight leaked through her window, and she could smell the faint hint of fresh bacon wafting up the stairs.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Molly clutched her robe tightly and moved to shut the door.
She was exhausted.
Last night, she’d lain awake, thinking of how she might honor her promise to Kitty. Fate had brought her to this house, and she did not mean to waste the opportunity. By dawn, she’d come up with a crude plan. She would do whatever it took to stay at Ava’s and find a way into LaValle’s lecture hall. Once there, she would speak to the medical students. Find Edgar. And when she did, she would get him alone and make him confess.
Then she would kill him, just as he’d killed Kitty.
She was in no mood for Tom and his distractions. “Go away.”
“Come, now. Don’t you like presents?” Tom stuck his foot in the door, holding it open. “I couldn’t fall asleep, trying to think of how I was going to make it up to you.”
Molly tried to shame him with a stare.
He only stared back.
Most men who had but one eye might try to hide the deformity, but his stare was more penetrating than any she’d encountered with two. The golden amber of his single eye, along with the scar over the other, put her in mind of a large tomcat she’d had once, as a child. The giant tiger cat was missing an ear and half his tail, and had been in more fights than he had lives. The cat was so fierce he’d once managed to scare a coyote from the chicken coop, though afterward he’d claimed a hen for his reward. Da had nicknamed him Goliath, and the feline had walked with the kind of arrogant strut that seemed to suggest he’d earned it. But that tom had also been sweet and gentle when it came to people. It would follow Molly around for hours until she would scratch his dusty belly and he would flop onto his back in the sun and purr.
This Tom was no pet.
Molly didn’t know what he was, only that last night he’d had her commit a horrific crime without a word of warning.
“I don’t want to speak to you.” She clenched the silk of her robe in her fists, as if this might hold her nerves steady. “I could have been arrested. Worse, maybe.”
He frowned. “You weren’t supposed to open the box. That was a mistake.”
“My only mistake was trusting you.”
“Now, I never said you should do that.” He winked, once again offering the present.
She turned away.
“Molly, I’m sorry,” he said, voice softening. “But it’s like I said. That’s my job. Your aunt’s my boss.”
He swayed so fast from jokes to seriousness it made her dizzy. She shut her eyes, trying to still her spinning mind. He couldn’t have known how cruel it would be for her to touch a body after Kitty.
“What did your friend Ginny mean when she said people were disappearing?”
His lips tightened. “Why are you asking?”
“Tell me. I want to know exactly what kind of world I’ve become a part of.”
He sighed. “There have been rumors, that’s all. People not showing up when they should. Women’s bodies being found.”
“Doesn’t sound much different than your average Friday night,” she said dryly. “Do you just collect the bodies, or do you manufacture them?” Ava had denied the accusation, but Molly did not know her aunt enough to trust her.
Tom’s face grew red. “Now, see here, I come by my corpses honestly. And I don’t waste them neither. The kinds of things folks are finding—they’ve been mutilated. Takes a special kind of monster to do that, and I ain’t him.”
Mutilated. Like Kitty.
“If it’s not you, then who is it?”
“Somebody much sicker than our lot, I’ll tell you that.” He thrust the gift at her. “Now, are you going to take this or not?”
If only to be rid of him, she did. Ripping away the paper, she could feel his eyes on her. She’d endured the hungry stares of the older boys hired to work at the orphanage often enough, sometimes even the priests’. But this was different. He wasn’t looking at her with lust. It was a candid kind of appraisal, one that seemed to skip right past her skin and into something deeper. She felt like a peppered moth, suddenly pulled away from the camouflaging bark of its tree.
Molly threw the wrapping paper onto the floor, a chilly thanks ready on her lips. It was probably some damned trinket. A ribbon or a hatpin or whatever he thought he could buy her off with.
“Do you like it?”
Nestled against blue velvet sat a large wedge of cheese.
An anger, so hot it boiled, rose inside her, pinking her skin. After everything, after all she’d been through, he was making another joke? She looked to him, eyes furious, awaiting an explanation.
He shrugged. “They were out of Limburger.”
She laughed.
The sound so surprised her that she clapped a hand over her mouth as if she might catch it and shove it back in.
For the first time that morning, Tom gave her a real smile, and in the daylight she could see two dimples bloom like bullet holes around the dangerous gun of his grin.
But just as swiftly, it was gone, disappearing behind the cloud of seriousness he wore like a mask.
“See you tonight,” he said, giving her a curt nod. “And this time, wear a dress you can walk in.”
Ava was waiting for her at the breakfast table. When she saw Molly, she hurriedly put down the newspaper she’d been reading. Even so, Molly caught a glimpse of the headline.
WOMAN’S DISMEMBERED BODY FOUND IN SCHUYLKILL
“Good morning!” Her aunt seemed transformed, face radiant with cheer. Her smile was so like Ma’s that Molly had to stop herself from reaching out to beg an embrace.
But it was not Ma. Ma, who’d started each day with a song and a kiss for Molly and Da. Ma, who refused to keep the shutters of the farmhouse closed, who danced in the sunlight and laughed as she churned butter and swept the dirt from the floors. Who was so tenderhearted she brushed the spiders into her dustpan and released them outside rather than kill them. As much as Molly might have liked to think Ava’s cheer was because of her, she hardly knew the woman, outside of the fact that she made her living off the misfortune of others.
Hardening herself, Molly sat down at the table.
“Good morning,” she said. Molly tried and failed to hide the rumbling of her stomach. Laid out on the table was a feast—bread and pastries, a side of bacon, two tumblers of fresh milk, and honeyed butter with jam. Fatigue heightened her hunger. She grabbed a toast point and shoved it into her mouth. The salted butter that melted across her tongue was so delicious she had to stop herself from moaning out loud.
“We’ve much to do today.” Ava dabbed her mouth with a delicate linen napkin. She herself had hardly touched the spread. “If you are to start a new life here, we must begin immediately.”
Molly’s heart sank. She had hoped for a morning by herself, time to gather her thoughts. Rest. Perhaps even a chance to sneak into the church and speak to some of the students. Instead, she was to work. “You steal corpses in the daylight?”
Looking amused, Ava raised an eyebrow. “No, something much worse.”
She tensed.
“Today, Molly Green, we must face the living.”