The Wharton Plot by Mariah Fredericks

Author:Mariah Fredericks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“It’s not unheard of,” Fullerton said.

After Dey Street, Edith said she wanted to see where the murder had occurred. Now she and Fullerton stood side by side gazing up at the dull beige brick of the National Arts Club. She tried to imagine the currents of three lives in that ungainly space—was it always the same two against one, or did the alliances ever shift? As she envisioned Carolyn Frevert moving from room to room and man to man, she was so absorbed, she forgot Fullerton was with her until he spoke.

He had been ominously quiet in the taxi over. She suspected it was something to do with the money she had asked him to pay Frevert, but surely he understood that she had given over a much greater sum to the landlady. Anxious, she had tried to engage him by pointing out sights that had changed; he had not even bothered to look. His only contribution to the conversation had been to remark that Henry Frevert was a complete nonentity and Carolyn Frevert a wise woman to have left him. His instinctive siding with the leaver left her on the side of the abandoned. Tartly, she responded that if decent were deemed a synonym for dull, it was a sad world.

She noted that Fullerton had not specified what was unheard of; she was meant to ask. Asking would give him permission to say things she might not wish to hear. She sensed that his mood had turned malicious. Recalling Henry’s snipe about cousins and half-sisters, Edith decided not to respond.

Instead, she envisioned David Graham Phillips’s last journey. He would have come sauntering out of the building, preoccupied by his own greatness and the world’s wickedness. His head would have been down, she thought; hers was when she was thinking hard. And as it was a walk he had taken many times, he would not need to look where he was going. So he hadn’t seen the man with the gun until it was too late.

The quiet homeliness of the block, the brevity of the walk, struck her as painful. David Graham Phillips’s life had ended so quickly after he left this place. He had died so close to home.

That felt important. She reiterated the thought: He died close to home. And the letters had come to his home.

“What?” asked Fullerton.

“I am thinking of letters.”

In her preoccupation with David Graham Phillips’s home, she had forgotten that letters were a charged subject. The word hung, awkward and twisting, between them until she broke the mood, saying briskly, “Prior to his death, David Graham Phillips received several threats. Some were sent to the Princeton Club. Others came here.”

“Which means the killer knew his address,” said Fullerton, catching her line of thought.

“More than that, he knew his movements, the precise times he came and went. Not easy, even with a man of habit such as David Graham Phillips.”

“So, the killer was watching the house.”

“Precisely.”

But where had the killer stood as he charted

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