As Bright as Heaven(85)

Matilda stands before me now looking as though she thinks Agnes and I are somehow holding her responsible for what Ursula did to herself. She looks younger than her eighteen years. I try to reassure her that Ursula simply needs our help.

“She is feeling better, but she is still very melancholy,” I say. “If we can discover what is making her so sad, we can help her find happiness again. You’d be doing her a great kindness if you could help me. Would you do that?”

Matilda looks from me to her employer and back to me again. “I don’t know how I can help you, miss,” she says, her face pale with worry that her job hangs in the balance.

“Just answer Miss Bright’s questions truthfully, Matilda,” Agnes Prinsen says, “even if you must reveal a secret Ursula told you to keep. Secrets will not help her right now. Surely you can see that.”

“But . . . but she never told me any secrets.”

“Did she say where she lived after her mother died? After the flu?” I ask.

“She didn’t like to talk about her mother. Or the flu.”

“She never mentioned an orphanage? Or who took her in? Or where she went to school?”

“No, miss.”

“What did she like to talk about?”

Matilda bites her lip in consternation. “Nothing special. I did most of the talking. She just listened. I thought she was shy.”

“Can you tell me if anything out of the ordinary happened on the day she tried to hurt herself? Anything at all? Or the day before?”

Matilda slowly shakes her head. “It was like any other day. Both days were.”

“And she never had visitors or letters sent to her in the mail?” I ask this of both the maid and Agnes, and they shake their heads.

“You never woke to hear her crying in her bed?”

“No, miss,” Matilda replies.

I am gaining no new ground here, and it perplexes me. I don’t want to merely hope that someday Ursula will tell me why she wanted to end her life. I can’t assume that I have the luxury of time. What if she finds another way to kill herself? What if she somehow escapes from the hospital and runs in front of a train or an automobile, or gets ahold of a pair of hospital scissors and slices her wrists? What if the second time she tries to commit suicide she is successful? She would be no different from Sybil then, a beautiful woman I cannot save. Every time I see Conrad Reese visiting Sybil, or holding her hand, or kissing her cheek, my heart feels riven in two. The devotion Conrad has for her is everything I want for myself. It is what I want for Maggie and Willa and even Papa were he to marry again. It is why I don’t think Maggie should settle for marriage to a man she is merely fond of. It is why I can’t keep my gaze off Conrad when he visits his wife. If only there was something I could do to restore Sybil to him. It angers and pains me daily that there isn’t. But I know I can help Ursula. I know I can. If I can just figure out what happened to her.

I am pondering this when Matilda clears her throat.

“She . . . she did have a secret place in our room where she hid things.” The maid practically whispers this, and her face turns crimson. Matilda had snooped into this secret place; this is obvious.

“It’s all right, Matilda. It doesn’t matter that you know about it,” I assure her. “Can you show us? Can you show us where it is?”

She looks to Agnes for approval, and when the woman nods, Matilda asks us to follow her.

The maid takes us through the kitchen and down a half flight of stairs that leads to two sets of quarters half aboveground and half part of the cellar. We enter one of the rooms. Inside the small space are two metal-framed beds separated by a nightstand and a hooked rug, along with a bureau, a washstand, and a wardrobe. A painting of irises hangs on the far wall. Only one bed is made up with linens; the other stands empty and available. Agnes Prinsen must expect Ursula to return to her. She has not filled the vacancy and given the bed to another girl. This adds fuel to my desire to help Ursula, to bring her back, to end her suffering. To do for her what I cannot do for Sybil and Conrad Reese.

Matilda turns to Agnes and me. “It’s not my way to spy on other people. I was just curious, that’s all.”

“You’re not in any kind of trouble, Matilda,” Agnes replies. “Just show us the place.”

Matilda crosses the room to the nightstand and kneels. She reaches between the legs of the table for a brick in the wall and shimmies it back and forth. The brick comes away from the cracked mortar around it, leaving a darkened rectangular space. She reaches in and pulls out a slender wooden pencil box. When she rises, she hands the box to Agnes, who opens it. Inside are a necklace, some dollar coins, a key, and several papers. Agnes removes the documents and flips through them. One is a single sheet of paper, a list of some kind, written in a foreign language that I don’t recognize. Another is a photograph of a woman and a little girl of about five years. Ursula and her mother, perhaps? The last is an envelope addressed simply “Ursula.” Inside is a letter and an expired train ticket from Camden, New Jersey, six miles away. The letter was written on a piece of stationery printed at the bottom with the name “The Franklin Hotel” and dated on the top: May 17, 1924.

“This date is just a few months before I hired her,” Agnes says. She opens the letter and reads aloud:

Dear Ursula:

I know I can’t change your mind about leaving us, but you need to know Cal didn’t mean what he said. He knows it’s not your fault what happened to Leo. We all know it’s not your fault. You were sick and you didn’t know what you were doing. Sometimes the war and the flu and all that happened just gets to Cal and he drinks too much bootleg and then he says things he doesn’t mean. He feels bad about what he said. He really does. You will always have a home here with us at the hotel, no matter what Cal said. So when your money runs out, and if you want to, come on back.