Five

When I was unable to persuade my brother to return to Hyde Park with me, Fitz insisted on giving me a ride back to the city in his motorcar. From there I got a train home. Although it was nearly suppertime when I arrived, I went directly to Clara and Alden’s town house on University Avenue. Like me, Clara was a lecturer at the university, but her subject was chemistry. My best friend, she’d turned thirty-nine in April, as I would do in September. Alden was five years younger, and sometimes I thought he’d never grown out of his childhood. He was spoiled, plain and simple. Here he was the father of two children, Penelope, an eleven-year-old, and Oliver, ten. Yet, too often, Alden was like the third child of the family with an age of perhaps twelve, like my youngest son, Tommy. I knew not everyone felt that way about my brother, but it was how I saw him.

I found Clara in the washing room that was behind the kitchen in her house. It had walls faced in white glazed brick and was where she had a laundress come in to do the wash twice a week. Two young maids were helping her fold and pack linens for the trip to Woods Hole. The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole was where Clara and Alden became engaged, years ago, after a tumultuous summer when Clara was betrayed by a young scholar and accused of academic sabotage and murder. When it happened, Alden staunchly defended her. Despite those associations, we’d spent pleasant summer days there with our children ever since.

“Clara, do you know where Alden is?”

She didn’t look at me as she folded a tablecloth. “I believe he was planning to be at the Selig studios this week,” she said. I wondered if she knew he’d left his job at the Tribune and started working at the studios a whole month before. Would I have to tell her?

“A man was killed there this morning, and Alden was found standing over the body. One of the film people claims that Alden did the shooting then put the gun in the dead man’s hand to make it look like suicide. I was with Detective Whitbread when he was called to the scene.” The three women stopped their work to stare at me and I regretted blurting it all out. But Clara had to know what was happening.

“Has Alden been arrested?” Clara asked, her normally creamy complexion looking gray.

“No, no. I’m sorry to alarm you. Whitbread’s still investigating. He hasn’t arrested anyone and he let Alden go, but he told him not to leave the city. But, Clara, Alden had a fight with the dead man yesterday. He was a film censor. That type of disagreement is no reason to shoot a man, of course, but I had no idea he quit his job with the Tribune. Did you know?”

She bent to choose another piece of cloth to fold and gestured to the maids to continue their work. “No, I didn’t know that he left his job. It doesn’t surprise me, however. He wants to move to California.” Clara was from Kentucky and there was always a soft twang in her voice that reminded me of that fact. When that twang became more pronounced it was a signal that she was angry. Her back was straight in her chair and she held her head high but I thought her teeth were clenched as if waiting for a blow.

“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “California? Has he ever even been there? He’s mad, Clara. You mustn’t let him get away with this.”

“Oh, he went out there last year to cover a boxing match, but that was to San Francisco. He wants to move to southern California, Los Angeles. It’s for the motion picture company. Apparently, the weather is better there, so they can make pictures outdoors all year round. He said Col. Selig’s already opened a studio there and that’s where he wants to go.”

“So, he never intended to go to Woods Hole with us this year, at all?” With so many good memories of our summers on the Cape, we were always eager to leave the dirty city behind for the beaches swept clean by its brisk sea breezes. Why he would want to give that up for an unknown life in California was beyond my comprehension. “He’s mad, Clara. You’ve got to stop him. If he wants to work for Selig, they already have a massive studio here. I saw it. It’s huge.” I found I couldn’t tell her what Whitbread had said about Kathlyn Williams. I couldn’t really believe it myself. How could I be the one to tell Clara of such suspicions? My mouth wouldn’t form the words.

Clara bit her lip as she smoothed the linen sheet she’d folded, then she handed it to one of the maids to put into a big trunk that lay open on the tile floor. We were sitting in straight-backed wooden chairs from the kitchen. “He’s been seduced by the film business,” she said. She was staring off at a blank wall. She shook her head as if shaking away flies. “But, even so, he would never shoot a man unless it was in self-defense, Emily. You know that.”

After that, she asked the maids to continue packing upstairs and waited until they left the room. Then she said, “Alden’s never been happy about the wealth I brought to our marriage.” Clara’s grandmother had supported her studies and then left her a large inheritance. For the first time, I noticed some fine lines around Clara’s mouth that reminded me we were getting older. She’d always been a stunning beauty, a tall woman with glossy black hair and a fine bone structure to her face. I could see a few gray strands now. As with my own reflection in the mirror, those gray hairs took me by surprise.

“He feels undervalued,” she said. “And it’s been worse the past few years. They keep having newspaper wars and demand ever more exciting stories to compete with the other papers. Alden says if he’s going to write fiction, he’d rather have it labeled fiction. I know he tried to write a novel. He hid it from me, but I came across it one day. When I asked him about it he got very angry.” Folding her arms, she sat back looking at me. “I think he really wants to write stories like Ring Lardner, but he hasn’t been successful yet.”

“Well, if that’s what he wants to do, why doesn’t he just do it?” I asked, flapping a towel I was supposed to be folding. It was true that, with Clara’s money, he could afford to do whatever he wanted. I didn’t like the idea, as I thought he really should be supporting his family, but I knew it was possible.

She shook her head. “He won’t. He thinks it’s wrong to live off my money. I don’t know what to do, Emily. I can see he’s so unhappy, but he won’t let me help him. He just gets furious when I suggest anything.”

“That’s so like Alden,” I said. “How is going to California supposed to help? Not that you can expect Alden to have a rational explanation, I know. That would be too much to ask.” I was tempted to go on in that vein, expressing my frustration with my exasperating brother, but I noticed how sad Clara seemed, and I was worried.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what he thinks moving to California would do to improve the situation. Perhaps he’s saying it in an attempt to be free of all this.” She waved her hand to encompass their house and the home she’d created for them. “Or to be free of me.”

She looked so forlorn. It made me doubly angry with my brother. I just couldn’t tell her about Whitbread’s suspicions that he was in a relationship with a film actress. Telling her that he’d nearly been arrested, and was still under suspicion, was bad enough. So, instead, I promised her that I’d work with Detective Whitbread to clear Alden’s name by uncovering the actual murderer. As Clara was well aware, I’d participated in many of Whitbread’s investigations over the years by chance, or invitation, or pure stubbornness on my part. I pointed out that there was no sense worrying about Alden’s plans to move to California as long as the threat of arrest hung over him.

§

When I returned home, I found my husband, Stephen, seated at the kitchen table with two of our children, eating omelets. “Where’s Tommy?” I asked, as I removed my straw hat and tight jacket. Delia, our nursemaid, smiled as she cracked eggs into the pan to make another omelet for me. I worried about my youngest son. At twelve years old, Tommy was a hellion. Smiling at Delia, I brought a plate and utensils to the table in time for her to serve me from the pan. “Jack?” My fourteen-year-old was the quiet, responsible one and I could usually depend on him to curb his younger brother.

Jack gulped down his latest mouthful and glanced at his father. Stephen was trying to look innocent as he carefully cut a piece of bread. At fifty-one, his hair was a little grayer and a bit sparse. His left arm—which had been damaged by a shotgun blast so many years before—ached more than ever when it rained, and there were deep lines that scored his face, although some of them were from laughter. I could tell that he and Jack were both reluctant to face me.

“Tommy threw rocks and broke Mrs. Chalmers’s window so she’s making him weed her flower bed and she won’t let him go, ‘Till every single weed is gone, young man,’” my daughter, Lizzie, said, imitating our widowed neighbor. She squinted her eyes, pursed her lips, and wagged one finger up and down with each word, and I had to cough to keep from laughing. At thirteen, Lizzie was nearly as incorrigible as Tommy, but she was quicker to escape the consequences of her actions. Still, I tried not to encourage her impertinence.

I planned to wait until we were alone to tell Stephen about Alden’s predicament and his strange plans to move to California, but I mentioned that I’d visited the Selig Polyscope Company. Both children looked up with interest and Lizzie shouted, “Oh, can we go? Uncle Alden promised to take us. Ollie says they’ve got cowboys who ride and shoot, and I heard they’re building Oz there. I want to go. Can we?”

“Sounds like an exciting place,” Stephen said. I frowned at him. I didn’t want him to encourage them.

“Sit down, Lizzie, and eat your omelet. You know we’re getting ready to go to Woods Hole next week. Aren’t you excited about that? There’s no time for visiting motion picture studios. You can do that when we come back. It’s way up on the north side and, besides, there’s nothing to see. It’s just a lot of fake scenery.”

“Did you see Tom Mix?” Jack asked. When I looked puzzled, he said, “The cowboy. He’s making a movie there. Don’t you know, Mother? Uncle Alden says he does all his own stunts.”

I stared at him. “Who? How do you know about that, anyway?”

Jack grimaced and looked down at his food.

“Jack?” I asked. I could see my husband was trying not to grin. Jack mumbled something. “What did you say?”

“The nickelodeon. Ollie and I went…to see the moving pictures.”

Ollie was Alden and Clara’s son, and was younger than Jack. His sister, Penny, was almost Lizzie’s age. The children all attended the university’s laboratory school together.

“Jack, shame on you. You know that nickelodeons are just cheap amusements for people who have no education.” Most of them were in the Levee district of the Loop. I wondered when Jack and Ollie had managed to go there without supervision. It was a challenging thing, this raising of children. I didn’t want them to be afraid of the world but, at the same time, there were plenty of places I didn’t want them to go.

“Perhaps Alden took them?” Stephen suggested as he reached for another piece of bread.

“It only costs a nickel,” Lizzie said. “And they’re good. Besides, Uncle Alden promised to take us to see the studios. He said they’re building Oz. I want to go.” Lizzie was a big fan of the Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum. I’d read them with her over the years.

I rolled my eyes. It was typical of Alden to get the children all excited like this. I’d discuss it with Stephen later, but I feared that now we would never get them safely on the train to the East Coast without a visit to the place where they manufactured dreams, up there on the north side. Perhaps a glimpse of the tawdry behind-the-scenes of the motion picture company might even disillusion the young people, and that might not be a bad thing. However, a man had been shot there and, if it wasn’t suicide, that meant a murderer was loose in the studio. So, I was not happy with the prospect of having my children exposed to the place. And I couldn’t help wondering myself, was it really murder? And was Alden involved? It couldn’t be, but I couldn’t be sure he was innocent, either. I ought to be able to be sure, but I wasn’t. When had we grown so far apart that I could have such doubts about my own brother?