Read Online Chapel Noir by Carole Nelson Douglas - Free Book Online

“Not bread, though brown and crumbly. Yet it reminds me of something. Ah, well.” Her smallest fingernail prodded the mote back into the Oriental needle case, which I could finally think of again by its proper name, etui. It was shocking to think that my humble case had carried a grain of evidence from a scene of such chaos.
    “The police are right about one thing,” Irene said.
    I waited.
    “They will not know what really happened here until they examine the bodies at the morgue.”
    “You don‘t believe that we—?”
    “Should view the remains? The police would not let us, and even our anonymous . . . er, client, would not be interested in our opinion of that.”
    Irene straightened and absently turned down the lamp, an economy we practiced at Neuilly because the oil for them must be hauled in by the barrel.
    Here, in this palace of luxurious decadence, I believe her gesture was an instinctive effort to soften the bright light and harsh shadows that made every scene seemed etched in the black-and-white cartoon of a sensational newspaper drawing.
    “What do you know of the Jack the Ripper murders in London, Nell?” she asked.
    I started, guilty. I recalled feeling the same unhappy emotion what now seemed ages ago (and had only been hours ago), when I realized that I relished the notion of Irene and I alone together again.
    Indeed we were.
    I started guiltily now because last autumn I had suffered from an irresistible curiosity about that string of atrocities in the city we had left in haste only months before. I had such a case of curiosity, in fact, that I devoured any English-language newspapers available. Luckily, Godfrey acquired them regularly for the political and legal news. Naturally, after seeing the lurid sketches of the Whitechapel horrors, my jaded eyes saw this far-removed death scene as drawn in charcoal on dun-colored paper.
    “I ask,” Irene said, “because I confess I did not pay them much attention, except to be glad of leaving a capital that was so beset.”
    “Oh. You do not know much about them.” What a rare opportunity. I personally thought that Irene was rarely interested in newspapers unless she was in them. “I could hardly avoid reading of the atrocities. Truly, a madman was abroad. He was so often almost glimpsed, yet still eluded everyone, like some ogre out of a wicked fairy tale, chopping up children, except these women were hardly innocents. No reason for it all but unreasoning savagery. It did not seem at all English.”
    “No?” Irene’s gaze was piercing. “What of Balaclava? Or Mai-wand?”
    “Well, that was war. Men murdering men, and used to it. Whatever those poor women were, they were defenseless.”
    “And poor, quite literally.” Irene sighed and handed me the etui. “Store this for a while. It is time to revisit Pink. Now that we have seen what she has seen, she will be more forthcoming.”
    “Why so?”
    “Shared shock creates bonds between strangers.”
    “And why should we want a bond with a girl who is already on the path to perdition?”
    Irene leaned close enough to whisper, every word clipped. “Because we might change her path, Nell. Is that not a noble goal?”
    “But it would require consorting with a fallen woman.”
    “And how are they to be kept from falling even more if the righteous will not consort with them?”
    “I suppose they won’t. But the chance for infection—”
    “You are saying that the righteous are weak?”
    “No. Only that evil is contagious.”
    “So,” said Irene, “is ignorance. I believe that if we can discover why someone would kill these women in such a fashion, we shall know a great deal more about evil, and righteousness, than we did before.”
    “Oh, my head is spinning like a compass. We should not be here. We should not be inquiring into these morbid matters: we should not be encouraging a girl of tender years in a life of depravity.”
    Irene drew back, some of the censorious glint in her eyes dimming.