“Anyways, the room had that same smell about it. I tried to say as much to George, but there ain’t nobody too interested in a dead woman of ill repute who drunk herself to death. And that’s how it went down in the books. Drunk herself into the dark, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to let that stand so I came here to tell the doctor what I seen, and find you instead.

“Which, I think . . .” He trailed off again, nerves back into his voice now that he’d lost momentum. “If you don’t mind my saying so, I think that you’ve got your own way about you, talking or not. Soon as I knew the doctor couldn’t be had I said I wanted that Grace girl, because I feel that telling you is as good as telling him, and that I done what I came to do.”

Color flushed his whole face, rising up through his neck and filling every pore straight to his hairline. Davey cleared his throat and jammed his hat onto his head.

“And I . . . I wish you a good evening,” he said, bowing awkwardly and jumping onto his horse, the back of his neck as red as the sunset.

TWENTY-THREE

“Dr. Thornhollow, I—” Grace burst into his office, only to stop cold two steps later. “Doctor, are you drunk?”

“Thoroughly.” He mock toasted her with a tumbler from his armchair, which he’d moved to squarely face the blackboard. “And this time there’s no deceit in it. It appears you get to see all my worst traits today, Grace.”

She closed the office door behind her, latching it for both their sakes. “Doctor,” she said slowly. “Davey was here and he—”

“Yes, I heard Janey knocking. She said there was a policeman here but as I’ve found them so totally unhelpful I wasn’t inclined to spare any of my time.” He threw back what was left of his drink and pointed the empty glass at the blackboard. “On the other hand, since my theory has completely collapsed, I suppose that may have been a mistake.”

Grace pulled a chair over next to his, their argument forgotten for the moment. “You were confident in the hypothesis before our trip to town,” she reminded him. “Did the failure of our visits to the doctors’ offices truly constitute a complete collapse?”

“Yes,” Thornhollow said. “The ether indicates a medical man, for sure. But that’s not criminal psychology at work, Grace, that’s a fact any bullheaded policeman could wrap his head around.”

He nodded toward the board again, where their handwriting intersected each other’s, weaving a web of notes in which to capture the killer’s personality. “But our work, the beauty of conjecture we spun here, has failed us. I had hoped to catch our man so easily, but it was presumptuous.” He leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees, bloodshot eyes darting over the board. “I’ve missed something, or built the entire thing on a false cornerstone. Regardless, our house of cards has fallen.”

“Then we shall pick up the deck and reshuffle,” Grace said. “If the ether points to a doctor, then we still have a narrowed list of suspects. Perhaps he is smart enough not to kill in his own area. He could be a country practitioner who travels here to make his kills anonymously.”

“Kill, singular,” Thornhollow said. “We have just the one body. For all we know it’s as that idiot at the murder scene said, some railroad bum stopped off here to dabble a bit in his dark fantasies.”

“A railroad bum with ether in his pocket?” Grace asked. “You’re drowning in self-pity along with spirits, Thornhollow. And besides, if you’d bothered to answer the knock on your door, you’d know that there’s been another victim.”

“What? When?”

“Mrs. Jacobs’s daughter,” she answered. “The other policemen were content to write it off as an unhappy woman finding her end in a bottle, but Davey said the room smelled of ether and that she had been positioned in the same manner.”

“Eyes open? Ankles crossed? Hands folded over her abdomen?” Thornhollow’s questions came quickly as the dull sheen over his eyes evaporated.

“Yes to all.”

He was on his feet in a moment, his path winding a circuitous route around her chair. “If this is true, it’s a wonderful occurrence.”

“Mrs. Jacobs might disagree.”

“Emotions aside,” he went on, waving his hands at the inefficacy of her thoughts. “Don’t you see? This may put our suppositions back on track, Grace. Our killer failed in his first attempt to be intimate with his victim, perhaps too hurried by the fear of being caught or too flustered in the moment of his first kill. But he learned from his error and tried a different approach. Any struggles or cries in a brothel would hardly be out of place, and he would be free to entertain himself as he saw fit after the fact.”

“But the exposure,” Grace argued. “Anyone could see him go up to the woman’s room. Why would he take the risk?”

“Perhaps he’s confident that the police would not recognize the smell of ether, chalking up her death to drink. Which, it seems, they were quick to do if not for the observations of young Davey. And,” Thornhollow added, “as much as it would satisfy my ego to believe wholeheartedly that Mrs. Jacobs’s daughter is indeed our second victim, I can’t properly ascertain that.”

“Nonsense. Davey said that—”

“I think Davey would happily say just about anything in order to see you again, Grace.”

“He asked for you, Dr. Thornhollow.”

“Knowing full well that by finding me, he would be led to you.” The doctor held up his hand to stem her next flow of words. “I’m not saying Davey is a liar, only that he might have preemptively jumped to a conclusion that helps fulfill his own whim.”

“Then you’ll have to see the body yourself, I suppose,” Grace said, only slightly mollified. “She’s been moved by now, I’m sure, but maybe you can determine whether ether was at work in her death.”

“‘Moved’ is putting it mildly,” Thornhollow said, approaching the blackboard. “She’s already in the ground.”

“That was fast work.”

Thornhollow shrugged as he reached for the chalk. “She’s a whore with a mother in the insane asylum. Who would go to the funeral?”

“No one, I suppose.”

“If—and I stress the if—Davey is correct that she was the second victim of our killer, we could have learned much from the scene. All those clues are now lost to us, sadly.”

“Unless someone saw who the girl took into her room last,” Grace said.

Thornhollow made a notation on the blackboard. “It’s a possibility. Although I’m sure there’s plenty of traffic, and anonymity is the key to the game played in those walls.”

“It’s still more than we had a few hours ago,” she insisted. “A simple visit and a few questions could be the answer.”

Thornhollow turned to her, face pale. “You’re not suggesting we visit a brothel?”

Grace felt a bit of warmth in her cheeks as she spoke. “I don’t see a way around it. We can’t blanch at an unpleasantness when it could remove a hurdle.”

“An unpleasantness,” the doctor huffed, returning his attention to the board. Grace watched him write, the slanted cursive sentences he listed on the board ending with more question marks than periods.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” he said suddenly, a tenseness in his shoulders.

“I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” Grace said, her voice unsteady at the first allusion to their heated words of that morning. “I met a little girl today, on the grounds, and a . . . a baby,” she said, her mouth barely able to pronounce the last word. “In some ways the girl was like Alice; the set of her mouth, the curl of her hair. But mostly it was the light I saw inside, the innocence and joy of life. Doctor, I hope you realize that I wouldn’t have written to Falsteed if I had any concerns—”

“It’s all very well, Grace. I can’t fault you for making emotional connections with other humans.”