“Mother…”
“Marie got a baby in her… got my mother in her… from Auguste Dupin. He didn’t visit us often at the brothel. But when he did, he liked my grandmother best.”
I feel anger stirring in my gut. It is hot like the worst of a summer’s day. “You told me my great-grandmother and Dupin were married. But now you say Dupin was only my great-grandmother’s customer?”
Mother hangs her head again. She starts to pick at a loose thread on a bodice buttonhole. “I wish they had been lovers, or married. She took his last name, anyway. Who would care what a whore called herself?”
“Mother.” I speak slowly through clenched jaws. “Did you kill Peter Garrett?”
Mother shakes her head violently. “No! No! I got my brain fixed, I told you! I was smart like my grandfather one time. Smart like you! But I was also like my mother and grandmother. I got mad like them. And when I did I didn’t always know what I was doing. I killed men who made me angry.”
Consider the facts…
“With a chair leg that had been sharpened and tempered in fire.”
Mother grimaces. “When you were born I loved you. You were the only person I ever loved. Molly, don’t hate me, please!” She picks more furiously at her buttonhole, and I know it will need mending along with the torn stockings. I don’t know that I’ll do the mending, though. I think I hate my mother now.
“Mother, did Peter make you angry? Were you upset that I loved him? Did you think I’d leave you?”
Mother looks at me. “I didn’t know you loved him.”
My breathing grows rapid. So do my heartbeats.
Mother shakes her head. “I didn’t want to kill any more, Molly. If the Paris coppers caught me they would kill me. Chop my head clean off! What would happen to you, you were such a little thing? I found out about Dr. Burckholdt. A man who operated on brains of people to make them better. To get rid of the bad. The sin. Some of them died, but I wasn’t scared. I didn’t care if I died. Better die than kill! Dr. Burckholdt visited Paris. I went to see him. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I let him have me. A trade. He said all right. He liked me. Thought I was pretty. When it was over my memory wasn’t so good. I wasn’t so good with numbers anymore. I got lost a lot. The women at the brothel didn’t like me anymore. They made sport of me. But I never killed anybody again. I promise I didn’t.”
I get up and lean on the window.
“I never ever killed again,” Mother repeats.
I look down at the street. Light is fading fast and heavy clouds are gathering. I hear Mother, still whimpering, go into her bedroom. This time she closes the door.
Mr. Denny stands outside his shop, smoking a cigar. Mr. Bruce is beside him, talking about something I can’t quite make out. Probably about Peter Garrett’s murder and the man they arrested for the crime. A cat laps at a muddy puddle in the middle of the road. It looks like it might rain again tonight.
I hear Mrs. Anderson in her flat across the hall, fussing at Katherine for staying out so late. Katherine, the prettiest woman in our neighborhood, who flounces and tosses her head oh, so haughtily. I saw her kissing Peter a couple of days ago. He laughed and kissed her back before he drove on in his milk wagon.
A dreadful heat that has nothing to do with summer stings the back of my mind.
I go to the pie safe and look down at my shoes. They are coated in mud.
I sit in my chair, pick up my knitting, and make a row with the large wooden needles. The first few stitches of the cream colored yarn are spotted with a gray, ashy residue and dried flecks; something crusty, reddish.
Consider the facts, great-granddaughter.
How terrible for the immigrant to be imprisoned wrongly and facing certain execution.
Yes. Yes.
But how much better for me.
AFTER THE END
A NEW STORY ABOUT C. AUGUSTE DUPIN
(with apologies to E.A. Poe)
By
LISA TUTTLE
I have written before about my quondam friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, with whom I long ago resided in an ancient house in a retired and desolate street in Paris, yet never have I described the details of his final case. That it would be of great interest to a very wide readership I was never in doubt, for it involved a series of horrific murders that terrified the public and baffled the police, and without the intervention of Dupin and his superior powers of analytical thought, the killer would never have been found and brought to justice.
The victims were all young women, but there was no discernible connection between them; one was married, one affianced; one a grisette, and another the daughter of a lawyer. They were of different classes and lived in different quarters of the city. At first, therefore, the police quite naturally assumed each had been murdered by a different man. There were no suspects, and no one came forward to inform or confess, but when another woman died, the public became convinced one single, bloodthirsty monster was responsible.
Dupin had already recognized the evidence, what he called the killer’s signature, even while the police resisted the idea.
The problem was how to find the murderer? No matter how he searched for a connection between these disparate women (or their families), Dupin could find nothing. They had lived and died in different arrondissements, did not attend the same church or buy their bread from the same baker. The only thing they had in common was their sex and relative youth (the eldest was twenty-four; the youngest, seventeen), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that they did not know their killer. Dupin concluded that the man the popular press had dubbed “The Beast of Paris” was deliberately choosing his victims from a large pool of total strangers, women previously unknown to him, with whom he had no traceable connection.
But who sets out to kill strangers, outside of wartime, for no reason or benefit?
Only a madman. Indeed, the senseless cruelty of the crimes could be the very definition of insanity. Yet, apart from that, the killer did not act like one in the grip of madness. He was cool and calculating. He planned his murders in advance, and possessed sufficient self-control to resist drawing attention to himself. If he was mad, it was only now and then, at times of his own choosing — which surely is not madness at all, but an expression of pure evil. A better name for this monster than “beast” would be “devil,” I thought.
By now, some of my readers will have guessed the identity of this devil, and recall the scandal that erupted when the police, acting on the results of Monsieur Dupin’s investigations, arrested one Paul Gabriel Reclus. Monsieur Reclus was known as a respectable, wealthy, unmarried gentleman of Paris. Not himself a member of either the government or the press, he had influential friends in both, and as a result, the police found themselves obliged to release him almost immediately, with groveling apologies, for they had no evidence against him. Although convinced by Dupin’s argument, constructed from his subtle observations, it amounted to nothing more than a delicate chain of logic. There were no witnesses to any of the murders, and nothing, not a single, solid object or piece of blood-stained clothing, in the possession of Monsieur Reclus to tie him to any one of the crimes. As he showed no signs of guilt or any inclination to confess, the police had nothing with which to convict him, not even an obvious reason for arresting him.
Naturally, they blamed Dupin for leading them astray. The results were quite disastrous for my friend. He did not mind the mockery in the press (although some of the cartoons were particularly savage) and simply ignored those military friends of Reclus who challenged him to a duel (after all, dueling was illegal, however common it might have been among bantam cocks obsessed with their notion of honor), but the charges of slander and libel brought against him in court cost him most of his patrimony to defend. However, there was something far worse than all of that: the secret, subterranean vengeance enacted by Reclus against Dupin, about which my friend dared say nothing. For Monsieur Reclus continued to kill innocent young women. He must have believed himself invincible, untouchable. But now, for his victims, he chose girls who possessed some connection to the one man who had revealed he knew his secret. Because Dupin led a retired and celibate existence, the connections were necessarily remote, of a sort only he would be sure to recognize. The first victim worked in the shop where my friend customarily bought his daily bread. The next was the wife of his butcher. Then a bookseller’s daughter met her mysterious, violent end.