Excerpt of City of Darkness and Light by Rhys Bowen

New York City, May 1905

Like many Irish people I have always been a strong believer
in a sixth sense. In fact I had prided myself on mine. I
credited it with alerting me to danger more than once during
my career as an investigator. So I can’t explain why it let
me down on such a critical occasion, when an advance warning
might have spared us all such grief. Maybe the perpetrator
of this evil had not planned it in advance. Maybe it had
been a last-minute order from above, so I had not been able
to sense his intention or his presence … or their presence.
I’m sure there must have been more than one of them. That
was how they worked.

Anyway, there were certainly no uneasy thoughts in my head
that bright May morning as I fed my little one his
breakfast. He was eight months old now, a strapping boy with
a shock of dark curls like his father and an impish smile.
Now I think back on it I wonder if Aggie hadn’t been the one
with the sixth sense, although she had no Celtic connections
that I knew of. She came into the kitchen while I was
feeding Liam, bearing two letters in her hand.

“Mail just arrived, Mrs. Sullivan,” she said. “Two letters
for you. One with a foreign stamp.”

“That will be from my friends in Paris, I expect,” I said,
taking them from her. “How nice.”

I took in Sid’s bold black script on the foreign envelope
and noted that the other was my mother-in-law’s weekly
missive. The former would wait until I had the proper time
to savor Sid’s latest account of their adventures in Paris.
The latter could simply wait.

“Aren’t you going to read them?” Aggie hovered at my
shoulder, still fascinated by the foreign look of the envelope.

“Later, when I have time.”

“If anyone ever wrote to me, I’d want to read it right
away,” she said wistfully. Then she shivered and wrapped her
arms around her scrawny body. “It’s awful cold in here
today, isn’t it?” she said. “Cold for May.”

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed.” I looked out of the window where
early roses were climbing up a trellis. “It’s a nice bright
day. You can come with me when I take Liam for his walk and
you’ll feel warmer in the sun.”

“I need to be getting on with the laundry,” she said, eyeing
Liam, who now had a generous amount of cream of wheat over
his front. “That child gets through more clothes than a
little prince and I expect I’ll warm myself up scrubbing
away at the washboard.”

She stood there, still hugging her arms to her skinny body.
Although she had been with me since Liam was born, and had
an appetite like a horse, there wasn’t an ounce of flesh on
her and she still looked like a pathetic little waif. I had
taken her in out of pity, after she had been forced to give
up the child she had had out of wedlock, but she had
surprised me by being a hard worker and wonderful with the
baby. She’d been the oldest of ten and had grown up taking
care of the younger ones—a valuable asset to her family, but
that hadn’t stopped her parents from throwing her out the
moment they learned she was pregnant. She was pathetically
grateful to come to us and I in turn was grateful for her
knowledge in those first difficult weeks with the new baby.

“The laundry will wait,” I said, smiling at her. “Come on,
get Liam changed out of those messy clothes and we’ll go out.”

She shook her head. “No, Mrs. Sullivan. I think I’d better
stay and get those diapers out on the line, if you don’t
mind. A morning like this is too bright to last. There will
be rain by the end of the day, you mark my words.”

She had grown up on a farm in the Adirondacks so I believed
her. “All the more reason for me to give Liam his daily dose
of fresh air,” I said. “It’s been a gloomy spring so far,
hasn’t it? I was beginning to think summer would never come.”

“It’s been gloomy enough around here,” Aggie said, “with
Captain Sullivan going around with a face that would curdle
milk and hardly a civil word in his head.”

“It’s not for you to criticize your employer,” I said
sharply and watched her flinch as if I’d slapped her. Then I
relented, of course. “Captain Sullivan is under a great deal
of worry at the moment. A policeman’s job is never the
easiest and right now I think he’s battling a major problem.
Not that he ever confides in me, but if his current bad
temper is anything to go on, then I’d say he had a
particularly difficult case on his hands. It’s our job to
make sure his life is as pleasant as possible when he comes
home.”

She nodded silently as she lifted Liam out of his high chair
and bore him away up the stairs. I cleaned away the
aftermath of Liam’s breakfast and considered my little
speech. I realized it had been a pep talk for me as well as
Aggie, because I had found Daniel’s current black mood hard
to take. More than once I’d wondered why I ever thought that
it had been a good idea to leave my life of freedom and
independence as a private investigator to get married. I
think I’d expected to be able to share in his work, mulling
over complicated cases with him and giving him the benefit
of my own experience as a detective. But that hadn’t
happened. Daniel remained tight-lipped about his work. He
was gone from morning till night most days and only popped
in for a hasty meal. A quick peck on the cheek as he ran out
of the door again was the best I could hope for. For better
or worse rang through my head. That was what I’d promised at
the altar. I sighed and put the dishes in the sink for
Aggie. Then I went up to my room to change my clothes. A
walk in the sunshine would soon do wonders for my current mood.

Aggie was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs with
Liam already strapped in his buggy. “You could take those
letters with you to read,” she said, handing them to me.
I laughed. “I believe you’re more interested in my mail than
I am.”

“I love hearing about foreign parts,” she said. “It’s like a
fairy tale.”

“I’ll read Miss Goldfarb’s letter to you later if you like,”
I said. Aggie hadn’t yet managed to learn to read, in spite
of my efforts to teach her. I put on my hat, adjusting it in
front of the hall mirror, then Aggie helped me maneuver the
buggy down the front steps.

“I hope you have a nice walk, Mrs. Sullivan,” she called
after me as I set off.

I almost asked her again to come with us, but I reminded
myself that she was the servant and the laundry was her job.
I’d bring her a cake for tea, I decided. She loved the cakes
I brought from the French bakery around the corner. As Liam
and I bumped over the cobbles of Patchin Place I couldn’t
help glancing across at the doorway of number 9. It had been
two months now since my friends Elena Goldfarb and Augusta
Walcott, more familiarly known as Sid and Gus, had taken it
into their heads to go to Paris, so that Gus could study art
with the best painters of the day. I had never thought that
Gus’s talent for painting was as great as she believed it to
be, but her cousin Willie Walcott had gone to study in Paris
and was now apparently making a name for himself as a
painter of the Impressionist school. He had promised
introductions for Sid and Gus.

From their letters they seemed to be having a roaring good
time, while I missed them terribly. I had come to count on
their comforting presence across the street, their
extravagant parties, and their bohemian lifestyle that
Daniel only just tolerated for my sake. With Sid and Gus,
life was never boring. You never knew when you’d open their
front door and find the front parlor turned into a Mongolian
yurt or a Turkish harem. They never had to worry about the
day-to-day trivialities of normal life. They had enough
money to live as they wanted, according to their rules. This
is not to say that they were always frivolous. They were
keen supporters of the suffrage movement and I missed
attending those meetings at their house as well.

I sighed as I came out onto Greenwich Avenue and steered
Liam’s buggy around a pile of steaming horse droppings. Ah,
well. They’d grow tired of Paris and come home eventually,
wouldn’t they? And in the meantime I had a husband to look
after and a son to raise. Things could be worse. Liam leaned
forward in the buggy, urging me to go faster, and babbled in
delight when an automobile drove past us, its driver’s long
scarf streaming out in the breeze behind him as he steered
the contraption around a slow moving dray. Just like his
father, I thought, smiling at his excitement. We were seeing
more and more automobiles these days. I know Daniel secretly
hankered after one. He was allowed to drive the police
vehicle when there was a special need, but that didn’t
include giving his family a ride.

I waited for a gap in the traffic before I pushed the buggy
across into Washington Square, passing beneath the great
arch and into the relative tranquility of the gardens
beyond. Here activity was confined to mothers pushing
buggies while toddlers clung to their skirts, bigger boys
bowling iron hoops that rattled over the gravel paths, and
even bigger boys playing a game of kick the can. I wondered
why the latter weren’t in school as it certainly wasn’t a
holiday. I suppose they could have been newsboys, taking a
break from long hours standing on street corners.

I found a bench in the sun and turned the buggy so that Liam
could watch the bigger children at play. He seemed more
fascinated with the fountain in the center of the square and
a flock of small birds that perched on the lip, daring each
other to take a bath in the spray that flew out in the breeze...