“Mrs. Van Orner’s secretary,” Maeve whispered back.
“More people than that knew about her drinking,” Malloy said, resolutely ignoring Mrs. Ellsworth.
Sarah managed not to smile. “I know. Even Mrs. Spratt-Williams realized it when I challenged her. She allowed that the Van Orners’ servants probably knew, at least her maid.”
“Oh, yes, maids know everything,” Mrs. Ellsworth agreed.
“Mr. Porter knew, too,” Malloy said.
“Who’s Mr. Porter?” Mrs. Ellsworth whispered to Maeve again.
“Another one of Mrs. Van Orner’s helpers,” Malloy answered impatiently, without waiting for Maeve. “He said everybody who worked with her knew about the flask she carried. They never let on, but they all knew.”
“So any one of them could have poisoned her,” Maeve said.
“No, they had to have an opportunity to put the poison in the flask yesterday, too,” Sarah reminded them.
“Why did it have to be yesterday?” Maeve asked.
Everyone looked at her in surprise.
The color bloomed in her fair cheeks at the sudden attention, but she didn’t hesitate. “Just because she drank it yesterday doesn’t mean the killer put it in yesterday. They could have put it in anytime before that, and she just happened to drink it when she did.”
“Maeve is right,” Sarah said. “I guess we’ve been assuming that she drank from the flask every day.”
“Do you know how often she did drink from it?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked.
Sarah looked at Malloy, who shrugged. “Miss Yingling said she took a drink when she got upset, to calm her down.”
“She smelled of mint the two times I met with her in her office,” Sarah remembered. “She carried peppermints, and she even offered me one. I think she must have used them to cover the smell of the liquor on her breath.”
“It takes more than a peppermint to do that,” Maeve said with authority.
No one asked how she knew this.
“The stuff she carried in her flask was a liqueur that smelled like mint,” Malloy told her.
“It’s called crème de menthe,” Sarah added. “It’s very sweet.”
“I’ve tasted that. It’s delicious,” Mrs. Ellsworth said. “I can’t imagine gulping it down from a flask, though.”
Sarah smiled. “I’m sure you’d get used to it if you drank it all the time.”
“So you need to find out if she drank every day,” Maeve said. “And who could’ve put the poison in her flask.”
“According to everyone I talked to, anyone at the rescue house could have done it, since she usually left her purse lying on the hallway table. And now,” Sarah added with growing dismay, “it looks like anyone at her home could have done it and maybe other people as well. We don’t know where she might have been in the days before she died.”
“What kind of poison was it?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked.
“Laudanum,” Malloy said.
“Oh, my, anyone could have gotten hold of that, too.”
“We found an empty bottle of it at the rescue house,” Sarah said.
Malloy shook his head. “That doesn’t prove anything. Every house in the city probably has a bottle that’s at least half-empty.”
“Including the Van Orners,” Sarah said. “Oh, the coffee’s boiling over.”
Maeve jumped up before Mrs. Ellsworth could.
“Could her husband have poisoned her?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked as Maeve started to fill the cups the older woman had set out.
“He’s the one who told me to find her killer,” Malloy said. “I doubt he would’ve done that if he was the killer.”
“Her servants, then?” Mrs. Ellsworth suggested. “Or somebody else who lives at her house?”
“Miss Yingling lives there,” Sarah recalled.
“Why would she want to kill Mrs. Van Orner, though? She’d lose her job,” Maeve said, setting cups in front of Malloy and Mrs. Ellsworth.
Sarah tried to think of a reason. “Maybe Mrs. Van Orner had learned something bad about her and was going to let her go. Maybe she was even going to make a scandal and ruin her reputation.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Ellsworth agreed eagerly as Maeve set down cups for Sarah and herself. “Oh, wait, that one was for Mrs.—” She seemed to catch herself and set about vigorously stirring her own coffee.
Maeve gave her an odd look, then sat down and picked up the spoon from her own saucer. “Oh, look,” she said in feigned surprise. “I have two spoons. Doesn’t that mean I’m going to get married soon, Mrs. Ellsworth?”
Mrs. Ellsworth also feigned surprise, but since she’d set out the cups and spoons, nobody imagined for a moment that she was. She’d obviously meant the two spoons to go to Sarah. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d tried to “arrange” a superstition for her. “Well, yes, it can mean that. It can also mean you’re going to marry twice, so I hope you don’t feel you must hurry to find a beau.”
Sarah covered her mouth to hide a smile while Malloy looked on, completely bewildered by the exchange. She wasn’t about to explain it to him. “So where were we? Oh, yes, we decided that Mrs. Van Orner was going to ruin Miss Yingling and she was desperate to save herself. She was afraid she might end up in a brothel like those other girls, so she had to kill Mrs. Van Orner.”
“I see,” said Maeve. “And if she killed Mrs. Van Orner before she told anyone about Miss Yingling, someone else would give her a job after Mrs. Van Orner died.”
Malloy sighed in exasperation. “That’s fine except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Sarah asked.
“Miss Yingling was a prostitute herself.”
“What!” all three women cried in unison.
“Who told you that?” Sarah asked in amazement.
“Mr. Porter. She was the first prostitute Mrs. Van Orner rescued. That’s what I came here to tell you.”
10
SARAH SHOOK HER HEAD, TRYING TO UNDERSTAND. “DID the other people at Rahab’s Daughters know Miss Yingling had been a prostitute? Oh, wait, of course they did. Now it all makes sense.”
“What makes sense?” Malloy asked.
“The way they treated her, that day we had the meeting in Mrs. Van Orner’s office to plan how we were going to rescue Amy from the brothel. Mrs. Spratt-Williams and the two gentlemen, they acted like she wasn’t even there. I don’t think they even looked at her unless they had to. I thought they were just too proud to speak to a lowly secretary, but that wasn’t it at all.”
“How did Mrs. Van Orner treat her?” Maeve asked. Sarah tried to recall. “She treated her like she was a servant, but that didn’t seem strange, because in a sense, she was.”
“Except she lived in the Van Orners’ house,” Malloy reminded her.
“So do their other servants,” Sarah said. “What I can’t understand is why Mr. Van Orner allowed it.”
“You’re forgetting the rumors about Mr. Van Orner,” Malloy said. “They say he likes prostitutes.”
“But would he like one living under his own roof?” Mrs. Ellsworth scoffed. “He’d be a laughingstock.”
Malloy refused to give in. “Maybe his friends didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t even know. I can’t imagine his wife telling him.”
Sarah shook her head. “And I can’t believe Miss Yingling was a prostitute. She’s one of the most prim and proper young women I’ve ever met.”
“That’s what she’d want Mrs. Van Orner and everybody else to think,” Malloy argued back. “You didn’t see her last night, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Mrs. Ellsworth and Maeve leaned forward eagerly.
“I mean when I asked if Mr. Van Orner would let me investigate his wife’s murder, she said she would ask him, but it would take a long time. I didn’t know what she meant at first. I thought she needed time to convince him, but when she came back an hour later, I realized that she needed the time to get herself fixed up. I didn’t even recognize her. She’d changed completely.”