Hy couldn’t stop grinning as he made his way toward Sullivan Street.
When Lightner had described Miss Brinkley as beautiful, he’d neglected to mention that special light that seemed to shine out of her sparkling blue eyes.
Listen to you: sparkling blue eyes.
Hy’s face heated, even though nobody could hear his foolish thoughts.
Besides, what was wrong about being taken with a beautiful, spunky girl?
You mean other than the fact that she’s the daughter of one of the richest men in the country?
Hy grimaced. Well, there was that.
“Where is Lord Jasper?” Brinkley had demanded when Hy and O’Malley were brought before him. He’d pounded his huge fist on his fancy desk. “I distinctly told your captain I wanted Lord Jasper on this case. I know he’s back.” He waved a copy of the special edition Hy and O’Malley had seen on their way from the station to Brinkley’s mansion.
Brinkley was an old man, but he had the sort of fierce presence that made him appear dangerous—a lot like Vogel, in fact. Hy wondered if all self-made men were like that.
“Er, he’s back, that’s true, sir, but he’s, um, well, he’s doing too poorly to be out and about just yet.”
Hy had felt O’Malley startle at his barefaced lie and hoped the younger man knew enough to keep his mouth shut.
Fortunately, the door to Brinkley’s office had opened just then.
“Oh, Papa,” a voice had said from behind them. “Are you terrorizing these poor policemen?”
Hy had turned to find the most beautiful woman he’d seen in his entire life approaching him, her small hand outstretched.
“Hello, I haven’t met you yet. I’m Grace Brinkley.”
“Det—” He’d cleared his throat. “Detective Hieronymus Law.”
She’d grinned, her eyes twinkling as if he’d said something funny, her small hand still gripping his tightly. “Hieronymus. Why, what a lovely name.”
“Now, Gracie,” Mr. Brinkley said in a harassed-sounding voice that had pulled Hy’s attention away from the angel in front of him. “Don’t be teasin’ these poor men.”
Miss Brinkley had finally—unfortunately—released his hand and gone to her father, stopping beside the intimidating man and squeezing his shoulder. “Lord Jasper doesn’t need to be here, Papa. These two gentlemen have worked hard—and they’ve found out what happened to Mister Waggers.”
Hy opened his mouth to point out—rightfully—that it had been all O’Malley, but Miss Brinkley wasn’t finished.
“Go ahead and tell him, Patrolman.” She’d spoken to O’Malley, but she’d been smiling and gazing at Hy—poor, scruffy Hieronymus Law.
And if that hadn’t been enough—after Mr. Brinkley had listened to O’Malley’s story and written them a $500 cheque, as cool as you please—Miss Brinkley had walked them to the door—the front door this time, not the servants’ entrance, which was the door they’d come in.
She’d chattered at them the whole way.
O’Malley had been too stunned to speak, his gaze fastened to the check he held tightly with both hands, as if somebody might snatch it away.
Hy was older and wiser and should have done better holding up his end of the conversation with Miss Brinkley, but it grieved him to recall what a lump he’d been in her presence.
The truth was, he’d never spoken to a woman who was both so pretty and so rich.
The house was even fancier than Inspector Lightner’s—and he didn’t know how many times bigger. He was ashamed to admit that the house, Miss Brinkley, and being glared at by her father—as if the old man could see right into his brain, and the thoughts Hy was having about his daughter—had cowed him.
He still couldn’t get his mind around the last thing she’d said, at the front door.
O’Malley had already barreled down the steps, still staring like a yokel at the check.
Hy, meanwhile, had done his own yokel impression with Miss Brinkley.
He knew it had to have been his imagination, but he would swear that she’d almost glowed as she stood there in her pink dress in front of the big wood and glass door.
She’d scattered his wits even worse by offering her bare hand, yet again.
“You have such big hands, Detective Law.”
His jaw had threatened to come unhinged. When he’d been unable to respond, she’d merely smiled.
“I do hope you’ll come back if you find out anything else about poor Mister Waggers—anything at all, no matter how trivial.” She’d cocked her head and squeezed his hand tightly.
“Er, um, yeah.”
Her smile had been radiant—as if he’d said the cleverest thing she’d ever heard instead of sounding like a dolt. “Papa would so like to give him a decent burial.” She’d released him then, which served to wake him from his stupor.
“Of course, ma’am.” He’d tipped his hat, flushing with pleasure at the thought of delivering the dog to her and making her smile like that again.
Of course, he felt like a snake for scheming ways to bring back Waggers’s body—if that had really been the dog Powell had in his ice box—without having either Lightner or O’Malley with him.
Still, Lightner had been the one to insist he go along with O’Malley, so he clearly had no interest in the young woman. And O’Malley—green young sprig that he was—was more interested in the cheque.
So he’d done the younger man a good turn by leaving him with the honor of presenting Davies with the money.
“Are you sure you don’t want to be with me when we give it to him?” O’Malley had asked, his generosity in wanting to share the credit making Hy feel twice as snaky for weaseling a way to get back to Miss Brinkley by himself.
“Nope, you did the work, Patrolman. You should take all the credit.”
The minute he’d gotten shed of the younger man, his conscience had dictated that he go back over to Martello’s building—that was police business, after all—and talk to the last tenant.
As Hy had suspected, it had been a waste of time. The two older women who’d shared the apartment hadn’t seen either an old lady or pretty young girl visitors or anything they thought was out of the ordinary.
Having gotten that errand off his chest, he’d hoofed it over to the good doctor’s shack, only to find it dark and locked.
The carriage house was also locked, so Lightner must have already come and gone. “Well, dang,” he muttered. He wanted that damned dog.
No doubt Harold could get him inside the stuffer shack.
He knocked on the Stamplers’ back door—the one that led to their kitchen—his stomach growling; maybe Mrs. Stampler would have some of those shortbread biscuits.
Hy knocked again and then peered through the window, struggling to see through a small gap in the curtains.
He squinted. “Now what the—” he muttered, turning his head to get a better look.
Hy’s eyes bulged at what he saw. “Well, holy shit,” he said. It was a damned doorway—cut right into the wall with no frame or door.
Hy grinned; Lightner had been right. He was probably down there right now. Hy turned the doorknob and found it unlocked.
Without the curtain in the way, he could see that the opening was normally hidden behind a section of cupboards that looked as if they were built into the wall. Instead, somebody had shoved them aside to expose the doorway.
He poked his head into the opening. “Hello?” he called out, his voice echoing weirdly in the small landing, which had stairs leading down. The steps were stone and looked to have been hewed from the bedrock itself. Hy knew it wasn’t the cellar because the entrance to that was outside the building. He’d checked the cellars under both houses the first day and had found nothing unusual.
His feet carried him down without any urging from his brain.
There was light shining below and Hy saw the feet first, instantly recognizing Lightner’s fine footwear.
“Inspector?” He took the last few steps so quickly he almost tripped and fell on top of Lightner’s body, which was curled up facing the wall.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, dropping to his knees and leaning over him.
The Englishman was pale, but then he was always pale. Hy lowered his ear to Lightner’s mouth.
Which was when he saw the body against the opposite wall. Or what was left of a body.
“He’s alive, Detective.”
Hy screamed like a little girl and spun on his knees.
Mrs. Stampler stood a few feet away, holding a pistol pointed at Hy, while Harold hovered beside her.
The old woman gave him the same grandmotherly smile she’d been giving him all along. “Stand up and come away from his lordship, Detective.”
“Did you poison him?”
She gave a warm chuckle. “Oh, heavens no. He is such a delightful man, and poison is such a painful way to die. No, Harold just gave him enough of a knock to put him down and then I gave him a bit of this.” She pointed to a small medicine bottle on the work bench. “It’s morphine. He’s feeling no pain right now, and he’ll pass quietly and never know what happened to him, when the time comes.”
Hy’s horrified gaze was pulled by something else on the work bench, something about a foot away from the bottle.
“Jesus Christ. Is that Powell’s arm?”
“No need to take the Lord’s name in vain, Detective. Yes, that is Doctor Powell’s arm. As you’ve probably surmised, the good doctor has already gone to his eternal reward. I’m afraid he came to Harold with several accusations when he was released from your stationhouse.” She clucked her tongue. “He was quite ugly about Miss Martello’s tools ending up in his shop, not to mention the saw, which apparently wasn’t the one Albert had taken from him, but one Harold borrowed last December.” The old lady clucked her tongue. “Harold told me not to plant it at Miss Martello’s, but I ignored him. And now see what has happened?”
Hy’s brain didn’t seem to be working.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Detective.” She pointed to a fancy gold and white chair that didn’t look as if it could hold his weight.
“It’s a Chippendale,” she said. “The chair,” she explained when he stared. “It’s worth a great deal of money. All of this is.” She waved down the narrow tunnel, which was crowded with paintings, furniture, and rolled-up things he assumed were rugs, along with other, less identifiable items.
“Now,” she said, her face shifting, the muscles moving beneath the skin until she no longer resembled a kindly old grandmother. “Sit. Down.”
Hy sat.
“Go fetch some rope, Harold.”
Harold picked up a candlestick and disappeared down the tunnel.
“You can clasp your hands behind your back.”
Hy hesitated, and the old woman reached out with her free hand and picked up the saw that lay on the wooden workbench; the sharp metal teeth were already full of blood, bits of bone, and skin. All of it looked fresh. “It makes no difference to Harold if you’re alive or dead when he goes to work on you, Detective.”
Hy put his hands behind his back.
The chair had a round padded back with a gap between the back and the seat. Hy pressed his hip against the chair frame, hoping that would hide the bulge of his knife sheath, which he wore on the same belt that held his baton.
Mrs. Stampler smiled. “There, now. I knew you’d do things the wise way.”
His eyes bounced around the tunnel, searching for a way out of—“Is that Frumkin’s hand?” he blurted, his gaze fixed on the skeletal gray hand in a glass jar on the counter.
“Why yes, it is,” she said, her expression placid.
“But … why?”
“It’s the Hand of Glory,” Harold said as he emerged from the tunnel, a coil of rope in one hand. “It is the hand of a murderer, dried and pickled according to the Compendium Maleficarum. It is supposed to open any door.”
Hy looked from Harold’s insane gaze to the old lady.
Mrs. Stampler shrugged.
Hy had to ask. “Er, does it work?”
Harold frowned. “No.”
Mrs. Stampler made a soothing sound as Harold dropped the rope at Hy’s feet. “The copy of the Compendium Maleficarum Harold used was quite damaged. The instructions were not clear.” She nodded at Harold. “But Harold will try again with Doctor Powell’s hand. Besides, my grandson is quite skilled at opening locks without any supernatural assistance.”
Harold flashed a brief, disturbing smile, the expression exposing two rows of teeth that looked too small for his head.
“Go ahead and take his truncheon and pat down his coat pockets, Harold.”
Harold obeyed her orders with the same dull expression he did everything.
“Unbutton his coat. Hold it open—” Harold did so and she squinted at Hy’s vest. “All right. Now pat down his sleeves, we want to make sure there is nothing up them.”
“What are you going to do with us?” Hy asked, hoping to distract her from telling Harold to pat the part of his body currently mashed up against the arm of the chair.
“Unfortunately, his lordship’s interest in these tunnels means we’re going to have to leave sooner than we’d hoped. And without all of this.” She jerked her chin to indicate everything around them.
“Oh? Why do that? This all looks to be worth a fair bit. And then the stuff in the carriage house—and even more stuff in Mr. Frumkin’s house, too,” Hy babbled; he’d take any bloody opportunity to keep the old bird talking.
She chuckled. “Oh, we’ll get everything from the house. Well, not the carriage house, of course, as I suspect the customs house will already be making plans for that. Unfortunately, we’ll have to sacrifice what’s down here.”
“Sacrifice?” Hy asked, his voice higher than normal.
“Yes. But don’t worry. You’ll suffocate long before you ever feel a lick of flame. You won’t suffer.”
Fire.
Hy swallowed and it felt like he had a rock in his throat.
“We’d never do that to you—make you suffer. Would we, Harold?”
“No.”
She gave Hy a hard, expectant look.
“Er, yes. I appreciate your consideration,” he said.
A smile spread across her face. “I’m pleased to hear that. We’re not cruel people, you see, but the circumstances require desperate measures. If you and his lordship had just been happy with the murderers we gave you, then everything would have been fine.” Her lips pursed. “Mr. Vogel, in particular, was not a nice man, and I think you know that.”
“Er, that was clever puttin’ salt and a bit of blood up on the third floor—especially with Vogel goin’ up there and all,” Hy said.
Mrs. Stampler allowed herself a bit of preening. “Oh yes, we had several possibilities worked out, just in case one fell through, there was always another.” She frowned, her kindly old lady façade slipping. “It’s a shame Lord Jasper had to come snooping today.”
“What about Powell, though?” Hy asked, not liking the calculating gleam in her eyes as she considered Lightner’s interference. “He didn’t kill anyone. Neither did Miss Martello—did she?”
She laughed. “Powell was a fornicator and a murderer—a dipsomaniac who operated on people while he was impaired. One of his patients died an agonizing death from sepsis—far worse than anything Harold and I did. Doctor Powell never felt a thing, and Miss Martello, well, her life was a pathetic burden to her. Her death was quick and humane. I expected her to struggle—to fight—but she seemed almost relieved to die. Even Albert, monster that he was, we killed first—before Harold worked on him.”
Hy’s brain spun. All he could come up with was, “But a fire will burn all this fine stuff you have here.”
She nodded placidly. “That’s true, of course, but it is better for us to leave now. After all, how many coppers will come looking for you and his lordship? No, this way you’ll be found together, you three. We’ll shut the passageway doors and, without plentiful oxygen, the fire will burn out. It shouldn’t take the entire house. But if it does,” she shrugged. “Well, Albert had excellent insurance on it. No doubt he was planning to burn it himself at some point for the money.”
Albert. This was the second time that she’d called him Albert.
“Why?” Hy asked, wincing as Harold looped the rough hemp rope tight, jostling his splinted fingers.
Mrs. Stampler blinked. “Why what?”
“Why cut him up and ship him halfway around the country? Why not just kill him? In fact—why did you want to kill him at all? What did he do to you?”
“Tut tut, so curious, Detective. You know what happened to the cat,” she teased.
Hy could only stare.
“But I’ll answer your questions. It might not have been the easiest way to kill him,” she said, “but Harold does enjoy his experiments and there was no harm in it.”.
Hy almost laughed out loud at that; luckily he caught himself.
“We couldn’t let the body be found here—not where we’ve been living. Not only that, but we worried the lawyers wouldn’t find us. Most of the documents that might have helped prove our case had burned in the fire in New Orleans.”
Hy groaned as the pieces started to fall into place. “Dupuy.”
Mrs. Stampler smiled at him. “I see you understand now.”
“So, Harold is Frumkin’s son?”
“No, that’s Gordon. But with all the false names Albert used over the years, how would anyone ever find out about poor Gordon? We knew that Gordon wouldn’t even be mentioned in the Albert’s will because Albert thought he was dead. He would have been dead, if I hadn’t been there to care for the poor, burnt mite.”
She paused, a strange look in her eyes, as if something had just occurred to her. “My goodness, how in the world did you learn that Albert had used the name Dupuy? Oh,” she said before he could answer, “I suppose it must be that derned telegraph.” She shook her head. “The world is shrinking so fast. What a fine detective you are—or was it Lord Jasper who found that out?” She waved the hand with the gun. “It doesn’t matter.” She chuckled. “Well, I’m certainly glad I discovered you knew that bit of information before we left. I see we shall have to change our plans.”
Hy wanted to beat his head against something hard, but he suspected Harold would do it for him soon enough.
“Harold is my daughter’s first child.” She looked at her grandson with an affectionate smile. “He was born on the wrong side of the blanket. My husband was a proud man and wanted to send Harold away—get rid of him for good. But for once my Martha stood up for something. She never could claim Harold as her own—not if she wanted a respectable young man to marry her.” She laughed harshly. “That never happened, anyhow. What she got was Albert Dupuy Frumkin Milton Beauchamp and who knows what other names.” She cocked her head at Hy. “Did you ever learn his real name?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Hmmph.”
Harold finished tying the hell out of his wrists and then gave them a jerk for good measure, ramming one of Hy’s broken fingers into the chair back in the process.
Hy bit his tongue until it bled.
He swallowed his pain, along with some blood, and asked, “What happened with that fire—the one Frumkin was supposed to have died in. Why did he do it?”
“Ha! For money—why did Albert do anything? My fool of a husband must have cottoned onto something Albert was up to—no doubt he learned of money going missing, or something of that nature. Albert worked at the family shipping business, and it would have been easy enough for a man like that to dip his hand in the till. I daresay he was embezzling because there was nothing left after the fire.” She turned to her grandson. “Show him the scars, Harold.”
Harold got to his feet and stood in front of Hy, so close his knees were touching Hy’s legs, his big, spatulate fingers unbuttoning his coat.
Mrs. Stampler continued while her grandson disrobed. “It turns out that Harold was fortunate to be living out in the servant quarters—raised with the slaves, if you’ll believe it, his own mother just a few steps away—because he escaped the worst of the fire, although he certainly got his share of pain. But Gordon is the one who really suffered because Albert set the fire in the family quarters.” Lamplight glinted off her glasses, obscuring her eyes. “What kind of man sets his own son on fire?”
After a long moment, she seemed to shake herself. “But poor Gordon survived, although he has been confined to a wheelchair since he was just a sprout. He can feed himself, take care of his private matters, and the like, but he needs a full-time nurse. Finding the money for that—after Albert stripped every dime Martha had from her accounts—well, that wasn’t easy. Oh, I had my little nest egg. But the bills—oh, the bills.”
“I understand why Frumkin didn’t recognize Harold—he must have been, what? Four years old?”
“Yes, only just four. And of course Harold is not his real name—just as Stampler is not our surname.”
“Chenier,” Hy said.
“Very good, Detective.”
“Why didn’t Frumkin recognize you?”
“That’s simple, Detective—we never met. You see, my husband had put me in a sanatorium for my health.” Her pale eyes glinted dangerously. “He married me for my family’s money, but he never really wanted me. He set up a pretty little dolly right under my nose. When she ended up murdered, my dear husband immediately used that excuse to have me put away. It was better than the noose, he said. Almost twenty years I spent locked up—no better than a prisoner. In all those years, only Martha ever visited me. Once my husband was dead, and all his money gone, I was tossed out into the street.”
Hy swallowed at the flicker of madness he saw beneath her genteel façade. For the first time, she truly looked like her grandson.
Harold had finished with his coat and vest and now opened his shirt.
Hy sucked in a breath. The skin looked as if it had been stirred. Whorls of tissue-thin pink skin mixed in with tan, thicker skin.
“He’s like that all over.”
Hy looked up at Harold, who merely blinked down at him and began the slow process of buttoning himself up.
“I still don’t understand,” Hy said, casting a quick look over at Lightner, who’d not moved from the way Hy had left him, on his side, face to the wall, back to the room. “Why do all this? The crate, the cutting, the salt? Why not just kill Frumkin and leave his body in the bathtub?”
Mrs. Stampler laughed. “Oh, no. That wouldn’t do. We needed to get him to New Orleans—needed to have the police there find him. We put his wallet in the crate—nice and convenient for when the police opened it up—complete with a business card we printed up for a Mr. Albert Dupuy, 1811 Sullivan Street. Once they had that name, they could then put it together with the name on the first-class ticket—Beauchamp—and then Gordon could go and claim his inheritance. It should have been so simple.”
She gave a laugh that was part wonder, part bitterness, and part genuine-sounding amusement. “But then the body never showed up in New Orleans. Day after day passed, Gordon actually went down to the docks—not an easy task to get himself into a carriage and all the way to New Orleans from where we live in the country. But he could hardly ask if there was an unclaimed box that had been discovered in a first-class cabin with a body in it. Just what would that look like?
“And then, to make matters worse, the Metropolitan Shipping Line, which had been sold earlier in ’56, just seemed to have one problem after another. There were firings, replacements, more confusion. Things just … got lost.” She shook her head. “Gordon had learned by then that unclaimed items were kept for four months and then the contents seized and sold to cover costs. So Gordon waited and waited, expecting word any day. But nobody ever got in touch with him.”
“Because whoever opened the crate in New Orleans stole the wallet?” Hy guessed.
Mrs. Stampler shrugged. “Stole it, lost it, threw it away, didn’t care—who knows? All we know for sure is that the police never got the card with Albert’s real name—or at least the one he’d used in New Orleans. All they had was the name Albert Beauchamp, a man with no connections in the city.” She tsk-tsked. “Just one muck-up after another. In any event, what does Albert do next? Why, he comes back here, to New York City.” She laughed again, waving the gun. “Even in death he was making our lives miserable. But you know what, Detective?”
“Er, no.”
“It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”
“Why is that?”
“Albert’s damned will! We searched the house—but we couldn’t get into that safe. Yes, the will caused us a great deal of trouble—and it turned out to be a good thing we were still in New York when the will was finally found. Otherwise, we would have done all that work here for nothing. If not for that newspaper story we’d never have known that Albert had a daughter here.”
Hy shook his head, sickened; somebody at the Eighth Precinct had blood on their hands for selling that information.
“So,” he said, “you both decided to kill Miss Martello,”
“Oh, you needn’t look so tragic about it, Detective,” the old woman chided, chuckling. “She was a miserable young woman who wanted to die—you should have heard her railing against her father. She hated the man. Hated life, really. She was still frozen in the past—angry for what Albert had done to her mother and her all those years ago.” Mrs. Stampler snorted. “She had nothing to complain about—she wasn’t burnt and crippled like poor Gordon, she was just a bitter, unhappy woman. She didn’t struggle or fight—I told her what to write, and she wrote it. Her passing was peaceful; not for a second did she put up a fuss.”
“You did it?” Hy said.
“You look so amazed, Detective. But then people are so easily fooled. They see a cane and think a person’s a cripple. What about Lord Jasper, there? He uses a cane, and he isn’t a cripple. Besides, I could hardly send Harold to finish her off—a handsome young man in a hen roost like that would have been noticed. Another old lady? Nobody cares or even notices. Miss Martello wasn’t a problem. But Miss Fowler, now,” she clucked her tongue. “That young woman was an entirely different kettle of fish. She was a scrapper—too much for me to handle—but I knew the deed had to be done quickly. I had to send poor Harold by himself to take care of that, but then we got another piece of luck—almost like the Lord was looking out for us—and Vogel killed her.”
Hy’s brow furrowed. “Wait. Why did you want to kill Fowler?”
“Oh, she knew something was wrong right from the night she found Frumkin’s body—and robbed him—but then returned to find the door locked. She was always looking and watching. Back in June, we got careless and she noticed that Harold had gone into the house, but then came out of the carriage house. When she confronted him about it, we knew she’d need to be dealt with eventually, but we didn’t want a murder investigation, so we admitted to finding a passage between the carriage house and our apartment and confessed to selling some of the smuggled goods ourselves. We told her that we’d give her a share of money to keep quiet. We kept wondering if she’d ever guess that a tunnel connected all three buildings, but it never seemed to occur to her.”
“So that’s how you got Frumkin’s body out of his house that night. But if she didn’t know that, why did you want to kill her?”
“We knew that once you and Lord Jasper came snooping about that she couldn’t be allowed to talk to you and let anything slip. Fortunately, she had her own reasons not wanting to talk to the police.
“But we had to ensure her silence, so Harold followed her when she packed her bags and left. He trailed her from the hotel to one of the piers, where she was to leave the glove and pick up the money. But Vogel and two men got to her and—well, I’m sure you can imagine the rest. Harold decided to retrieve any money or valuables she might have left in her room at the Adelphia. He was wise to leave Albert’s jewelry, but the journals were a miraculous find. Lord, the things she wrote about us! Of course, not until we read her diary did we understand why Vogel killed her.” She laughed. “Quite a clever little baggage—but not clever enough. And so greedy! She’d not taken the glove with her when she went to the pier—as the letter Harold found in her luggage instructed her to do. Instead, she’d tucked the glove in her diary. No doubt planning to use it again in the future.”
Harold had finished dressing and lowered himself slowly to his knees and started tying up Hy’s second leg.
Once his legs were secure, Hy would be good and surely fucked. But if he kicked out at Harold now, the old lady had the gun and something told Hy she wouldn’t mind using it. And then there was Lightner. Hy might be able to run out of the cellar, but what about the Englishman? She’d likely shoot him or set the damned place on fire.
This is the end of your life, Hieronymus.
The voice was deep and godlike.
He needed to do or say something …
“If you burn us up in here it will get back to you, Mrs. Stampler.”
She laughed at his pitiful bluff. “Oh, I don’t think so. Your Lord Jasper didn’t know a thing until he came today. He was staring at some piece of paper and I suspect he saw Harold’s handwriting.” She clucked her tongue. “Vanity on my part, that was, teaching the boys such copperplate handwriting. Doubtless you saw the letter to the lawyer? Another mistake. It wasn’t until later that we—”
“Hello? Is anyone down there? The door was open.”
Harold’s hands stilled and Mrs. Stampler’s gun arm swung toward the stairwell and the sound of Captain Sanger’s voice.
It was now or never.
Hy kicked Harold right in the jewels and yelled, “Help!”
The old lady swung the gun back to Hy and pulled the trigger just as he used his free foot to tip the chair onto its side.
Fire bit into his shoulder and his head banged against the stone floor, ringing his bell good.
He saw something fly across the room and heard Mrs. Stampler scream.
“Grandmother!”
Hy twisted his head around in time to see Harold jump on a pair of writhing bodies.
Feet thudded unevenly down the stairs.
“She’s got a gun,” Hy yelled, assuming it was Sanger.
“Not any m-m-more she doesn’t,” Lightner said in a breathless voice. “Harold—don’t move or I shall have to k-kick you again—bloody hell!” the Englishman yelled. “You stop b-biting right this m-m-minute, Mrs. Stampler, or I shall be forced to t-take measures.”
Hy let his head fall to the floor with a thud and laughed.