Page 74 of Evil at the Essex House
We had, in fact. The opium smell had probably permeated both my lovely new frock and my hair by now, and it would be difficult to get it out. For that reason alone, I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Christopher turned the beam into the room, and Crispin took a step forward.
Only to stop with a rock-back on his heels, as if he had run into an invisible wall.
Christopher’s hand jerked, and he whispered an obscenity, but not before I had gotten a glimpse of a figure in a pink frock, sprawled on a dirty mattress up against the opposite wall.
I recognized the frock. There was no way anyone would recognize anything else. Where the face should have been, there was nothing but blood. Blood and torn flesh and broken bones poking through the skin in jagged ivory shards.
My stomach roiled, and I turned and buried my face in Christopher’s shoulder. He put an arm around me. It shook. So did I.
I took a step back, pulling him with me. He pushed Crispin backwards out of the way. Neither of us spoke until we had shut the door on the monstrosity beyond, and were standing in the middle of the floor with no care whatsoever for any footprints or evidence we were trampling underfoot.
“Was that…?” My voice gave out, and I had to clear my throat.
“Who could tell?” Crispin answered. He might have meant it to sound nonchalant, but his voice was shaking, too, and so was the tire iron in his hand.
I eyed it, and he told me, “Don’t be ridiculous, Darling. I’ve been with you, remember?”
Of course he had. I took a breath. And another one. “Should we perhaps check and see whether…?”
“There’s nothing we can do for her,” Christopher said firmly. “No one could survive that and still be breathing.”
“Sometimes amazing things happen. We might just look…?”
“Be my guest, Darling,” Crispin said and headed for the door. Not the one that led to the—for lack of a better word—bedroom. The other one, to the hallway and the stairs and the outside. Christopher’s torch beam followed him. “I’m going for the police.”
That was probably a good idea, actually. “Leave the tire iron,” I said.
He shook his head at me over his shoulder. “Better not, Darling. Safer if it’s in the back of the motorcar when the police get here. That way they won’t get any ideas.”
“Unless you’ve used it on someone at some point—” I began, and then gagged when I got a visual reminder of what exactly ‘using it on someone’ would look like. “Yes, good idea. Hurry.”
Crispin nodded. “If anyone attacks you, Kit can hit them with the torch. But hopefully that won’t happen. I won’t be long.”
No, I imagined he would put all his skills to use to get to where he was going as quickly as was humanly possible. “Be careful,” I told him. “You won’t be doing anyone any favors if you motor straight into a wall between here and Scotland Yard.”
“How lovely to know you care, Darling.” He pulled the door to the hallway open. “I’ll?—”
…be back as soon as I can, I assumed. He didn’t say it. Instead, the sentence turned into a high-pitched squeak of surprise as a dark figure materialized in the doorway.
The tire iron rose—I would have done the same thing, admittedly—and Christopher threw himself forward and yanked Crispin back before the weapon could do anything but fall in a whistling arc through the air, narrowly missing the nose of the person standing there.
They both stumbled back a few steps, knocking into me, and for a second or two we huddled in the middle of the room facing the doorway, before?—
“What in tarnation is going on here?” Hiram Schlomsky roared.
ChapterSeventeen
It was pandemonium after that,of course, with Hiram yelling, and Christopher and Crispin both trying to calm him down, and then Sarah Schlomsky showed up in the doorway, and as soon as that happened, Hiram turned on her instead, because he assumed that her being inside the house instead of outside in the Hackney meant that their driver must have driven away and left them there, which a trip down the stairs to peer out the front door proved to be true—the driver was gone, and so was the Hackney, and furthermore, it was hard to blame him, because it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where anyone would want to linger.
“Why did you pay the fare?” Hiram screamed at his wife, who told him, in quite a cold and cutting manner, that the driver wouldn’t let her out of the cab until she had done so.
“Then you should have stayed there!” Hiram insisted, frothing at the mouth. The bottom edge of his mustache was wet with spittle. “Like I told you to do!”
Sarah drew herself up to full height and puffed out her not-inconsiderable bosom. “You’re not the boss of me, Hiram Schlomsky!”
“That was the whole point of leaving you there!” Hiram raged. “So he wouldn’t drive away and leave us stranded!”
“Don’t be silly, Hiram,” Sarah said. “We’re not stranded.”
