The Assassin

“One is guilty. Is it Nellie, your blood daughter? Or Edna, your stepdaughter?”

“I love them equally, with all my heart.”

“I don’t doubt that you do. Which is the assassin?”

“I can only say neither,” said Matters. “Even if they hang me.”

“Oh, they will hang you, I promise,” said Bell.

“Your question will hang with me.”

Isaac Bell realized that if somehow the assassin were to stop killing and commit no more crimes, then he could spend the rest of his life wondering and never truly knowing which of them was the woman she seemed to be and which had been a murderer. But why would she ever stop? How many more would die before he caught her?

He was struck suddenly by a terrible insight. He saw a way, a way as cruel as it would be effective, to force Bill Matters to confess.

“There is no question you will hang, Bill.”

“I don’t care.”

“The only question is, will the girl who hangs beside you be the right one?”

“What do you mean?” asked Matters. But Bell saw that he knew exactly what he meant. The blood had drained from his face. His jaw was rigid. His hands were shaking so hard, they rattled the cuffs.

“The only truth you’ve ever told is that you love both your daughters.”

“I do. I do.”

“Your assassin covered her tracks so cleverly that she could be either of them. Either Edna. Or Nellie. But justice must be done.”

“Hanging the wrong one won’t be justice.”

“Sadly, justice makes mistakes. In this case, the better liar—the natural—will go free.”

40

Grim-faced Van Dorns in dark coats and derbies flanked Isaac Bell as he strode the grassy field across the road from the Sleepy Hollow Roadhouse. The ancient tavern was still surrounded by mud. The hayfield was a verdant, boot-pounded carpet under a multicolored fleet of gas balloons in various stages of inflation.

Nellie Matters’ yellow balloon was the tallest, its bulbous top rising higher than the trees at the edge of the Pocantico estate. It was fully inflated, and she was ready to soar under a gigantic billboard for equal enfranchisement.

To VOTES FOR WOMEN she had added NELLIE MATTERS’ NEW WOMAN’S FLYOVER almost as if to ask When you get the vote, will you vote for Nellie?

Other balloons were almost filled or half-filled, hanging odd rumpled shapes in the still air. The suffragists who had brought them had added the names of their states to VOTES FOR WOMEN and phrases aimed at Rockefeller in hopes of persuading the Standard Oil titan to put his influence behind their push to amend the Constitution to give women the right to vote.

Newspapermen and -women wandered among them, invited under the rope that held at bay the public, for whom a tiered fairground grandstand was provided. Typewriters pounded away on picnic tables in an open tent. Photographers swarmed, lugging glass-plate cameras on tripods and waving smaller Kodak instruments that allowed snaps on the run.

Bell spotted Edna Matters darting about in a white cotton dress and made a beeline for her. She had perched a New York Sun press card at a jaunty angle in the hatband of her straw boater and was jotting notes in a pocket diary. Seen from behind, the wisps of chestnut hair trailing her graceful neck could have belonged to a boy until she turned toward him and a smile lit her beautiful face.

“Hello, Isaac! What a day Nellie’s made! Everyone came. Even the dread Amanda, in a scarlet balloon.”

Bell took her arm. Edna saw the Van Dorns. “Hello, Mack, Wally. Lovely to see you again. You’re just in time. They’re about to soar. Nellie’s going first, then the rest will follow.”

Bell said, “The boys will escort you to New York.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I am terribly, terribly sorry, Edna, but we have your father at our office.”

“Is he—”

“A doctor’s patched him up. He’s all right. I will hold off turning him over to the police until you have a moment with him.”

“I better get Nellie.”

“I’ll get Nellie.”

—

He saw Nellie watch him coming.

She gave him a warm smile and a big wave, as if inviting him to join her.

It had been years since Bell’s one ride in a balloon, but he recognized the working parts from her exuberant stories: the ten-foot-diameter wicker basket of tightly woven rattan; her bank of “emergency gas” steel cylinders containing hydrogen under pressure that she could pipe into the narrow mouth of the envelope; the “load ring,” the strong circle that rimmed the mouth, holding the fabric open and anchoring the basket that hung from it; and the giant rope net that encased the towering gasbag.

The controls were simple: three levers on the edge of the basket were linked by wires to drop sand ballast to ascend or release gas to descend. The dragline to reduce weight and stop descent was coiled in the bottom of the basket. A fourth, red-handled lever was co

Nellie was smiling in a shaft of sunlight that shined down through the fabric dome eighty feet overhead. She reminded Bell of a sea captain about to set sail—in command, confident, and alert. She stood with one hand inside her vest in the classic pose of Admiral Lord Nelson. Or Napoleon, he thought grimly. And he thought, too, that he had never seen her more beautiful. She had high color in her cheeks and excitement blazing in her eyes.

Bell vaulted into the basket. The bask ropes—the shrouds that suspended the basket from the load ring—were quivering, vibrating from the power of the gas straining to lift it.

“Hello, Achilles’ heel,” she greeted him cheerfully.

“What?”

“You’re my Achilles’ heel. Every time I try to shoot you, I miss.”

“If you want to be mythological, Nellie, say hello to your Nemesis.”

“Her, too. But if you weren’t my Achilles’ heel, you would be dead already. Somehow I could never bring myself to kill you.”

“Too late to change your mind,” said Bell.

Nellie drew her hand from her vest. Her pearl-handled derringer was already cocked. She aimed at Bell’s heart. “Don’t get close.”

“It’s over,” said Bell.

“Get out of the basket before I shoot you. You know I will.”

Bell moved toward her.

Nellie said, “I will pull the trigger this second if you do not sit on the floor. Now! You will die and it won’t change a thing and I’ll still get away.”

“How far do you think you’ll get in a balloon?”

“Last chance, Isaac. You’re bigger and stronger. I can’t let you close.”

He crossed his ankles and lowered himself into a cross-legged sitting position, poised to spring the instant she looked away. She loved to talk. It would not be hard to keep her talking.

“The wind is dead calm,” he said, “you’ll go straight up. When the gas dissipates, you’ll come down within a couple of miles from here.”

“I will go higher and higher until I find the wind. The troposphere. The stratosphere. The exosphere! As high as I have to to catch the wind.”

“You can’t breathe up there. You’ll die.”

“The wind always swings west. My body will be blown out to sea.”

“Do you want to die?”

“How would you like to die in prison or hang, Isaac? Tell me.”

“First tell me something.”

“Anything, Isaac.” She actually seemed on the edge of laughing. “What can I tell you?”

“Whose idea was it to kill for your father? His? Or yours?”

“I volunteered.”

Bell shook his head. He had tried to convince himself that her father had somehow coerced her. “Why did he accept? His own daughter?”

“He knew I could deliver. He’d seen me in action.”