a country practitioner who travels here to make his kills anonymously.”
“Kill, singular,” Thornhollow said. “We have just the one body. For all we know it’s as that idiot at the murder scene said, some railroad bum stopped off here to dabble a bit in his dark fantasies.”
“A railroad bum with ether in his pocket?” Grace asked. “You’re drowning in self-pity along with spirits, Thornhollow. And besides, if you’d bothered to answer the knock on your door, you’d know that there’s been another victim.”
“What? When?”
“Mrs. Jacobs’s daughter,” she answered. “The other policemen were content to write it off as an unhappy woman finding her end in a bottle, but Davey said the room smelled of ether and that she had been positioned in the same manner.”
“Eyes open? Ankles crossed? Hands folded over her abdomen?” Thornhollow’s questions came quickly as the dull sheen over his eyes evaporated.
“Yes to all.”
He was on his feet in a moment, his path winding a circuitous route around her chair. “If this is true, it’s a wonderful occurrence.”
“Mrs. Jacobs might disagree.”
“Emotions aside,” he went on, waving his hands at the inefficacy of her thoughts. “Don’t you see? This may put our suppositions back on track, Grace. Our killer failed in his first attempt to be intimate with his victim, perhaps too hurried by the fear of being caught or too flustered in the moment of his first kill. But he learned from his error and tried a different approach. Any struggles or cries in a brothel would hardly be out of place, and he would be free to entertain himself as he saw fit after the fact.”
“But the exposure,” Grace argued. “Anyone could see him go up to the woman’s room. Why would he take the risk?”
“Perhaps he’s confident that the police would not recognize the smell of ether, chalking up her death to drink. Which, it seems, they were quick to do if not for the observations of young Davey. And,” Thornhollow added, “as much as it would satisfy my ego to believe wholeheartedly that Mrs. Jacobs’s daughter is indeed our second victim, I can’t properly ascertain that.”
“Nonsense. Davey said that—”
“I think Davey would happily say just about anything in order to see you again, Grace.”
“He asked for you, Dr. Thornhollow.”
“Knowing full well that by finding me, he would be led to you.” The doctor held up his hand to stem her next flow of words. “I’m not saying Davey is a liar, only that he might have preemptively jumped to a conclusion that helps fulfill his own whim.”
“Then you’ll have to see the body yourself, I suppose,” Grace said, only slightly mollified. “She’s been moved by now, I’m sure, but maybe you can determine whether ether was at work in her death.”
“‘Moved’ is putting it mildly,” Thornhollow said, approaching the blackboard. “She’s already in the ground.”
“That was fast work.”
Thornhollow shrugged as he reached for the chalk. “She’s a whore with a mother in the insane asylum. Who would go to the funeral?”
“No one, I suppose.”
“If—and I stress the if—Davey is correct that she was the second victim of our killer, we could have learned much from the scene. All those clues are now lost to us, sadly.”
“Unless someone saw who the girl took into her room last,” Grace said.
Thornhollow made a notation on the blackboard. “It’s a possibility. Although I’m sure there’s plenty of traffic, and anonymity is the key to the game played in those walls.”
“It’s still more than we had a few hours ago,” she insisted. “A simple visit and a few questions could be the answer.”
Thornhollow turned to her, face pale. “You’re not suggesting we visit a brothel?”
Grace felt a bit of warmth in her cheeks as she spoke. “I don’t see a way around it. We can’t blanch at an unpleasantness when it could remove a hurdle.”
“An unpleasantness,” the doctor huffed, returning his attention to the board. Grace watched him write, the slanted cursive sentences he listed on the board ending with more question marks than periods.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” he said suddenly, a tenseness in his shoulders.
“I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” Grace said, her voice unsteady at the first allusion to their heated words of that morning. “I met a little girl today, on the grounds, and a . . . a baby,” she said, her mouth barely able to pronounce the last word. “In some ways the girl was like Alice; the set of her mouth, the curl of her hair. But mostly it