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...