Stalking Jack the Ripper (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #1)(72)
“No, Wadsworth,” Thomas said blandly, “sending a kidney through the mail is quite ordinary. I do it at least three times a week to remain fashionable. You ought to try it. Really impress the girls at tea.”
I made a face at him. “What I mean is, let’s say he’s been killing women and trying to perform an organ transplant, why eat her kidney at all? Wouldn’t that be a waste of a harvested organ?”
Blackburn’s color drained as if he were about to be sick. His reaction appeared genuine enough, but he’d fooled me before.
He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s barely two o’clock and I swear I already could use a pint. Is that what you think, Dr. Wadsworth? Jack is using human organs to transplant or sell?”
Uncle stared at the box, nodding absently. “I have a suspicion I cannot shake.” Uncle took his spectacles off, wiping them on the front of his jacket before securing them back on his face. “I fear he might’ve taken an extra kidney, but realized he didn’t need it, then decided to keep it from going to waste.”
A shudder wracked my body. If Father was Jack the Ripper, where was he keeping the organs? It’s not as if they could be stored in jars in our icebox without the cooks and maids seeing them. Was that the true reason why he’d never dismissed Martha, our cook? Was she privy to his monstrous secrets? The thought of having slept in the same house where this kind of horror could have been taking shape a few rooms away was too much.
Blackburn walked around his desk, dropping into the chair behind it and rubbing his eyes. “Perhaps running the estate as my father had wanted isn’t such a bad idea. I can handle a vast amount, but this is a bit much. How horrid can a life of leisure and politics be?”
Thomas ignored the superintendent, seeking my uncle’s opinion out again. He narrowed his eyes, his angular features sharpening his every thought. “Are you saying he’s finished with the killings, then?”
Uncle shook his head, and parts of my skin tried crawling away from my body. He had that bleak look in his eye, the one that spoke of worse things to follow. When he started touching his mustache, I wasn’t at all surprised by his next words. “I believe there’s one final thing he’s in need of, then the murders may stop.”
A police officer walked over to Superintendent Blackburn and handed him a file, whispering some message in his ear before departing as quickly as he’d come. Whatever he said couldn’t have been too important, as Blackburn tossed the paper onto the desk and fixed his gaze back on Uncle. “I’m not sure I want to hear any more, Dr. Wadsworth. But I’m afraid I do not have the luxury of ignorance. Do enlighten us.”
I don’t know how, but I knew, with more certainty than I had any right to, exactly what Jack the Ripper was missing. It’d be the most impressive organ to transplant or steal. The words nearly gagged me on their way out, but I said them anyway. “A heart. He’ll need a heart before he’s through butchering women.”
I felt Thomas staring at me, his gaze searing a hole through my conviction to remain silent, but couldn’t meet his eyes for fear I’d confess everything I suspected to the police right then and there. Consequences be damned.
But the one thread of hope I held fast to was that Uncle hadn’t mentioned a thing about Father to police, either. I’d told him my suspicions last night in the laboratory, and though he was even more skeptical than I was, his face had paled.
Uncle told me not to worry, that we’d uncover the truth soon enough. That Father was simply unwell and everything mounting up against him only a coincidence.
Seeing the truth was never easy, especially when it revealed those closest to us could be monsters hidden in plain sight. If Uncle could hang on to a single string of belief, unraveling as quickly as it might be, that Father was innocent, then so could I.
For now.
TWENTY-FIVE
A VIOLET FROM MOTHER’S GRAVE
DR. JONATHAN WADSWORTH’S RESIDENCE,
HIGHGATE
8 NOVEMBER 1888
I pulled the tattered navy dress from a trunk in Uncle’s attic; its stitches were coming loose at the seams and the smell of must filled the space as I shook it out in the pale moonlight.
There was no hope of making it fashionable; too much time and not enough care had passed since it was first worn by Miss Emma Elizabeth.
Uncle had gathered nearly all her belongings from a family no longer wanting to be associated with her, taking pains to leave things as she had, frozen in time as if they were captured in a photograph. Except with a thick covering of dust and a few too many hungry moths having had a fine dining experience over the last several years.
The dress was a little too old, a little too ragged, a bit too big.
If I were to wear this ghastly dress out, I’d look as if I belonged in the East End, begging for work to feed my addictions, and Aunt Amelia would surely perish on the spot. I doubted even Liza would be able to make it pretty.
It was absolutely perfect.
Thomas leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, watching me in that silent, calculating way that drove me mad.
“I don’t see sense in what you’re doing, Wadsworth. Why not confront your father and be done with it? Sneaking about like a prostitute is by far the worst idea you’ve ever come up with. Congratulations,” he said, unlatching his arms and clapping slowly. “You’ve achieved something memorable, even if it’s ridiculous.”