As Bright as Heaven(86)

Rita

Agnes looks up from the letter. “Who is this Rita?”

Matilda shakes her head. “I don’t know. Ursula never mentioned any of these names to me.”

“She never mentioned living at a hotel in Camden?” I ask.

“No, miss.”

Agnes stares at the letter for a minute. “Come with me, Miss Bright,” she says. With the letter and pencil box still in her hand, Agnes leads me from the back of the house to a library across the house’s marbled foyer and next to the drawing room we’d been in before. She stops at a desk made of polished cherry. A squat black telephone sits atop it.

“Sit yourself down. I’m going to make a call.”

I take a seat on a settee near a wall of books and Agnes lifts the telephone’s handset. A moment later she is asking the switchboard operator to connect her to the Franklin Hotel in Camden, New Jersey. And a few moments after that, she is speaking to the woman named Rita.

I cannot help moving to the edge of my seat to listen to the half of the conversation that I can hear. Agnes gives her name and asks politely how the woman knows Ursula Novak. Then she explains that she is Ursula’s employer and that the girl has had a difficult time—the vaguest of references to what actually happened—and that she’s now recovering in a mental hospital in Philadelphia. Agnes mentions the letter she holds in her hand. Rita must now be asking what Ursula did that landed her in a mental hospital, because the next thing Agnes says is that Ursula tried to do herself mortal harm.

“And she has given her caregivers every indication she will likely try again if afforded the opportunity,” Agnes says. “I was hoping you might share with me what happened to Ursula so that I can apprise her doctors. They are at a loss how to help her. She won’t tell them anything.”

I am itching to jump off the settee and snatch the telephone out of Agnes Prinsen’s hand. I want to ask the questions and I want to hear the answers.

“Well, what is it here that you mention in this note to Ursula?” Agnes says, apparently not happy with the entire answer Rita gave her. “What is not her fault? Who is Cal? Who is Leo?”

A moment later Agnes seems to have been turned to stone. All movement ceases. She stares at the bookshelf in front of her with wide eyes that are obviously picturing something other than books.

“Oh my!” Agnes says a few seconds later, her voice having lost some of its regal authority. “Oh, how dreadful.”

“What is it?” I whisper, unable not to ask. “What happened? What’s not Ursula’s fault?”

But Agnes doesn’t hear me. She is listening to more revelations.

“Yes, yes,” Agnes continues. “I’ll tell that to the doctor.”

“Tell me what?” This I say at normal speaking volume.

Agnes turns to me, shaking her head slightly. Then she crooks an eyebrow and looks off in the distance again. “Wait. No one is demanding you pay for her care, Mrs. Dabney. That’s not why I rang you. I called because—”

She stops and listens. “Well, all right. I will pass along the message. Good day.”

I reach for the telephone to speak to this Rita Dabney myself even as Agnes lays the receiver on its cradle, the connection ended.

“I don’t think that woman is entirely a very nice person,” Agnes says, frowning. Then she turns to me. “She doesn’t think it’s a good idea for her and her husband to come to visit Ursula, and she doesn’t want you or anyone else at the asylum contacting her. I think she’s afraid you will force her to pay for Ursula’s care, and she says they can’t afford it.”

“Who are they?” I ask.

“Rita and Maury Dabney took Ursula in when her mother died. They are her stepfather Cal’s parents. He was married for three years to Ursula’s mother but was off fighting the war in France when she died. Ursula didn’t have any other family but the Dabneys, such as they are. So they took her.”

“What was so dreadful?” I ask, sensing that we are at last, at last making progress. “What wasn’t Ursula’s fault? What happened?”

Agnes inhales and exhales. “Very sad. Very sad indeed. Ursula had that awful flu, too. She was delirious with fever the day her mother died and she tossed her baby brother—Cal’s only child at the time—into the Delaware River.” Agnes shakes her head gloomily. “He drowned, Miss Bright.”





CHAPTER 55



Willa


It’s not that hard to do something you’re not supposed to if nobody thinks you’d ever even contemplate doing such a thing anyway.

The first night I snuck out to the speakeasy, my heart was pounding as I climbed out Alex’s bedroom window while he slept—my window in the attic is too high—and it pounded the whole time I was on the street trying to get there, and while I was meeting with Albert, and every second that I was sneaking back home. But when I tiptoed back inside my house, all was just as I had left it—everyone fast asleep in their beds. No one missed me because no one was awake.

My heart doesn’t pound like a scared rabbit’s anymore when I go. I’ve been back to the Silver Swan—that’s the speakeasy’s name and I like the way it sounds—seven times now and haven’t had a hint of trouble. But I’ve also perfected my technique. For my bed, I make a dummy out of pillows and rolled-up pajamas, and then I sneak out onto the ledge and down the trellis outside Alex’s window after everyone else has gone to bed. You can’t see his window from the street at night because it’s too dark, so I can pop out from the little alley between our house and the apartment building next door looking like I just materialized out of the bricks.