His head half buried beneath his pillow, Andrew squinted at the window. Well before noon, based on the angle of the light.
The knock came again, followed by his landlady’s muffled voice. “Dr. Cavanaugh, are you in?”
“Just a moment.” He threw back the covers and hauled himself upright. He padded to the door, tying on his dressing gown.
Mrs. Danbury looked taken aback as Andrew peered at her through a crack in the door.
“Oh dear. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ve just come back from church, you see, and I wasn’t certain you were here.”
“It’s quite all right.” He heard his tone and made an effort to soften it as he continued. “Was there something you needed?”
“There’s someone—a gentleman—in the parlor. He says he’s a friend of yours. A Mr. Edward Glenn?”
Andrew frowned. “I don’t think I— Wait.” His half-wakened brain snagged on a thought. Ned Glenn had been a friend in college, but he still lived in Boston, the last Andrew had heard. What was he doing in New York? And how did he know Andrew was here? “Please tell him I’ll be down directly.”
He shaved and dressed quickly, gooseflesh stippling his arms. Mrs. Danbury was a widow who claimed she took in boarders only because she felt safer with men in the house. Her parsimoniousness with things like heat suggested other motives.
Minutes later, Andrew made his way down the stairs as Mrs. Danbury emerged from the kitchen holding a tray with a coffeepot and a pair of cups.
Andrew reached for it. “Allow me.”
She relinquished her burden with a grateful smile and disappeared back into the kitchen. Andrew shouldered open the parlor door and stepped inside. Like its mistress, the room showed evidence of having once been grander than it now was. A pair of tufted sofas, their velvet upholstery worn smooth in spots, faced each other across a low table flanked by chairs with needlepoint covers and arms of dark, shining wood.
A man’s coat and hat lay across the back of one of the sofas, and the man who’d shed them stood looking out the window. He turned as Andrew set the tray on the table. His face was thinner than Andrew remembered, and there was an unfamiliar degree of strain in his expression, but it was unmistakably his old friend.
Andrew smiled and shook the hand Ned offered, then gestured for him to sit. “This is quite the surprise. I thought you were still in Boston.”
“I am,” Ned said, settling uneasily on the edge of a chair. He nodded his thanks as he accepted the coffee cup Andrew offered. “My wife—I don’t suppose you knew I’d gotten married?”
“I didn’t,” Andrew said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. And to you as well,” Ned added, his face brightening in sudden recollection. “I believe I heard you were engaged?”
Andrew tried to suppress a grimace. Cecilia’s family had announced their engagement in several cities’ newspapers. Word of its end hadn’t spread quite as far, it seemed. He busied himself adding sugar to his own cup. “I was, briefly. But not any longer.”
There was an awkward beat before Ned cleared his throat and went on. “Well, at any rate, my wife’s family is in Boston, and she didn’t want to leave. But I was born here, though there’s no reason you would have remembered that.”
Andrew hadn’t, in fact. “So you’re visiting?”
Ned’s posture stiffened, and he toyed with his cup. “Not exactly,” he said, setting the cup on the tray with precise movements. “It’s rather sensitive. I must ask for your discretion.”
Andrew straightened, realizing why Ned must have come. It was a hazard of his profession, being approached for help with embarrassing medical problems. Ned was recently married. Perhaps he and his wife were having conjugal difficulties. Or it could be something worse. Andrew had been approached several times by men suffering ill effects from extramarital dalliances. “If you’re experiencing a medical issue, surely the place to start would be with your own physician. I’m hesitant to—”
“It’s nothing like that,” Ned interrupted. “It’s not about me.” He took a breath. “It’s my sister, Julia. She’s missing. I think… we have reason to believe she may be in the city asylum.”
Whatever he had been expecting, it was not this. Andrew groped for an appropriate response. “I don’t see how that could be,” he said finally.
“I know it sounds mad.” Ned shot him a tight smile. “Just hear me out.”
Andrew sat back. “Very well.”
Some of the tension went out of Ned’s shoulders. “Thank you.” He took a breath, then stopped, seeming uncertain how to begin.
“Why don’t you tell me a bit about her?” Andrew suggested.
“Oh. Well. Julia is my elder by nearly ten years.” Ned smiled slightly. “Growing up, it was almost as though I had two mothers. We’ve always been close. Six years ago, she married a man called Bryce Weaver.”
There was something sour in his tone when he said the man’s name.
“You don’t like him?” Andrew asked.
“No,” Ned said frankly. “I never have. I met him for the first time shortly before the wedding, and the whole business struck me as odd. He’s several years younger than Julia, for one thing. And much as I love her, the fact is that Julia was always plain. Quiet. Something of a wallflower. She’d never had a suitor before, and suddenly here was this charming, good-looking fellow wanting to marry her.
“I didn’t trust it. But Julia was smitten with him—anyone could see it. And, really,” Ned added, “how do you tell your sister you think she’s not pretty enough for the man who says he wants her?” He shook his head. “I kept my worries to myself. They married, and my parents gave them some money to help them get started. Bryce has done well for himself—I understand that he’s become quite wealthy in the last few years.”
“And your sister?” Andrew asked. “Was she happy?”
“She seemed to be.” Ned looked down at his hands. “I didn’t see her more than two or three times a year, but we wrote often. There was nothing amiss in her letters. She has a little girl—my niece, Catherine. We call her Kitty. She’s almost five now.”
He hauled in a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair as he went on. “Four months ago, Bryce came to my parents. He told them Julia had been unwell for some time, and he’d waited as long as he could, but he’d finally made the decision to send her to a place upstate for treatment—for a ‘rest cure,’ he called it. They said Bryce wouldn’t tell them much, but that he hinted Julia had been… inappropriate with men.” Ned flushed and glanced at Andrew, who nodded for him to continue. “And he said she had terrible moods, laughing one minute and crying the next. He claimed she had horrible bouts of anger, screaming and breaking things. That sometimes when she spoke, she made no sense. But my mother had spent the afternoon with her only a few days before and says she was fine.”
“There are illnesses that can come on suddenly,” Andrew interjected in a cautious tone. “And it’s certainly possible for a sufferer to appear well between bouts of madness.”
“So I’m told,” Ned replied. “And we might have had to accept it, but for everything that’s happened since.”
“What do you mean?”
“When my parents asked where Julia was, Bryce wouldn’t say. He said the doctors believed she needed a period of solitude and quiet. My parents were obviously terribly worried, but they agreed. They didn’t even tell me what was happening until weeks later. I think they were trying to save Julia the embarrassment. But if I’d known earlier, I might have been able to do something.” He rubbed at his eyes and went on. “My parents kept asking, and Bryce kept putting them off. And then, a few weeks after he sent Julia away my mother went to the house to visit Kitty, and the servants wouldn’t let her in. Bryce has completely cut off contact with them. It’s half killed my parents,” he added. “They look like they’ve aged twenty years since then. Most of the life has gone out of them.”
As though he could no longer bear to sit still, Ned sprang from the chair and began to pace around the parlor. “Once my parents told me what had happened, I started looking for Julia on my own,” he continued. “Bryce said ‘upstate,’ but I sent letters and telegrams to every place I could find in half a dozen states. She’s not in any of them. I was considering hiring a private detective to search for her.
“But then,” he said, “last month, my mother got a letter from Julia’s lady’s maid, Ellen. Her mother had been ailing, and so right after Julia was sent away, Ellen went home to Albany to take care of her. Three weeks later, Bryce fired her, even though he’d given her leave to go. So she stayed in Albany and had no idea about everything that happened after—with Bryce not telling us where Julia was and so on. Ellen said she’d finally heard about it from one of the other servants and was horrified. So she wrote to tell us.”
“Tell you what?”
Ned stopped his pacing and dropped onto the couch opposite Andrew. His voice went flat and precise. “Ellen was there when Julia was taken away,” he said. “She said two men half carried my sister out of the house; limp, and wearing a ragged dress Ellen had never seen before. No luggage. One of the men said something about meeting the ferry, and the other said the wagon would be waiting when they got to the island. They had to be talking about the city asylum. My parents telegraphed me as soon as they got the letter, and I got on a train.”
“And you’ve been here since?”
Ned nodded. “Trying to find any information I could. I telephoned the asylum. The man I spoke to said Julia wasn’t there. I didn’t believe him, so I took the ferry to the island. I meant to look in the face of every woman in that building if I had to.” His voice was ragged.
“And?” Andrew said.
Ned made a sound that was half disgust, half embarrassment. “I’m afraid I made a bit of a scene. A pair of large orderlies escorted me back to the ferry and made it plain I wasn’t to return. I’ve been trying to think of another way ever since.” He sat forward. “But then I heard you’d started working there.”
His tone made Andrew’s throat tighten. It was that of a drowning man who’d spotted a ship in the distance. A faint hope, but one too precious, too providential, to relinquish.
And yet it was almost certainly false. The city asylum was for the indigent. A wealthy man like Bryce Weaver wouldn’t be allowed to place his wife there. Most probably, the maid was mistaken in what she’d overheard. Julia Weaver was likely ensconced in some private facility, tucked away in the countryside.
As if he sensed Andrew’s doubt, Ned leaned forward to look him in the eye. “You have to help me. I can’t give up. She’s my sister.”
Andrew’s resistance cracked in the face of Ned’s plea. It cost him nothing to look. And if, as Andrew suspected, Julia Weaver were not on the island, Ned would at least know for certain.
“Very well. I’ll look.”
Ned slumped with relief, then reached for his coat and dug a hand into the pocket. He extracted a large envelope.
“Here,” he said, handing it to Andrew. “This is the last letter I received from Julia. You’ll see there’s no hint of anything wrong with her. I’ve also included Ellen’s letter to my mother and a pair of photographs of Julia. Keep them as long as you need. Use them to find her. Please.”