Page 98 of Evil at the Essex House
“Her friend.” All of our attention switched to the brunette next to Ruth on the floor.
“Myrtle Cavanaugh,” she said, in Flossie’s strident American accent. And unlike Ruth’s tears and Sid’s anger, there was defiance on her face, and no regret whatsoever. Not even regret over having been caught, although I suppose that must have been there, deep down.
“Miss Cavanaugh.” Tom eyed her. “You met Miss Ruth on the boat? Or did you already know each other before that?”
“We met on ship,” Flossie—Myrtle; and it was going to take me a moment to get used to that—said. “We were cabin-mates.”
She leveled an unimpressed look at Hiram and Sarah. “All that money, and they couldn’t even be bothered to pay for a private room for their servant to travel all the way to England. Had to throw her in with a stranger to save a few dollars instead.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Tom cleared his throat.
“So you met on the boat. And when you arrived in England, you took lodgings at the same boarding house?”
“By then, we had already fixed on a plan,” Myrtle said.
“A plan for what?”
Ruth whimpered, and Myrtle glanced at her, but pushed ahead with what she was going to say even in the face of Ruth’s distress. “A plan for getting the heiress out of the way once she got to London, and for having me take her place.”
She smirked suddenly, in the direction of Hiram and Sarah. “I look a bit like her, don’t I? Ruth said that I do.”
The comment, not to mention the smile, was frankly shocking, a bit like a punch to the stomach, and it was no wonder that Hiram and Sarah both looked as if they had been slapped across the face.
“Evil,” Christopher murmured beside me, and I nodded. Definitely evil.
Tom cleared his throat. “So you made a plan for what to do when Miss Schlomsky arrived in England. What did the plan entail?”
Myrtle flicked a glance at Ruth, or perhaps at Sid, or at both of them. “We made arrangements for the apartment in London and the cottage.” She looked around at the dining room, indicating the space she was sitting in. “Sid nailed up the boards over the window on the second floor. When the heiress arrived in Southampton, Sid and Ruth drove all the way there to fetch her.”
She snorted. “No train trip to London for the heiress. She was to be fetched directly off the ship.”
Well, of course she was. It was understandable that Sarah and Hiram wanted Florence taken care of in every way they could, in a foreign country and among people who might not wish her well.
But at the same time, yes, I could see Myrtle’s point.
“So Mr. Hodge and Ruth picked Miss Schlomsky up in Southampton,” Tom prodded, and Myrtle nodded.
“They brought her here and we locked her in the room upstairs. Sid made sure she had enough opium and other dope to keep her quiet and happy. I moved into the apartment in Town, and we started to use the money. Every month or so, we made her write her parents a letter so they wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong.”
Tom glanced at Hiram and Sarah, a question in his eyes.
Sarah shook her head. “No. We didn’t suspect anything. It was my daughter’s handwriting, and there was no reason to believe she wasn’t telling the truth about what she was doing. We believed she and Ruth lived together in an apartment in London, and that they had a little cottage they went to on the weekends sometimes. If I had had any idea…”
She trailed off, mouth flattening. Myrtle, damn her, tittered.
“And this went on for eight months,” Tom asked, “with no problems?”
Myrtle shook her head. “Sid and Ruth kept the heiress contained. Sid got his motorcar and enough money that he didn’t have to work for a living. Ruth got to play house with Sid. I got the apartment in London and whatever else I wanted?—”
“And all you had to do was keep one girl imprisoned,” I muttered.
She heard me, and gave me a glare and a toss of her head. “It’s not like you’ve got any room to talk, Miss High and Mighty. You’re living off your cousin’s money, with your eye on the rest of the fortune, aren’t you?”
Oh, was I?
“That’s ridiculous—” I began, but then Christopher growled, and a second later, so did Wolfgang.
The latter took a step forward, and Myrtle rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. I have no idea who you think you are, but?—”
