Murder on Astor Place Read Free

think better of it.
    The girl’s glance shifted instantly from the woman writhing on the bed to Sarah, and the horror in her beautiful eyes turned to sheer terror.
    “Get her out of here,” Mrs. Higgins gasped as her pain subsided. “This ain’t no place for her.”
    “Come along now, dear,” the neighbor woman said, hurrying to do Mrs. Higgins’s bidding. “We don’t want to put you off having children of your own, now do we?”
    At that, the girl’s naturally pale face grew chalk white, and Sarah knew a moment’s fear that she might actually faint. But the other woman was shooing her out. If she fainted in the hallway, she wasn’t Sarah’s problem. Banishing all thoughts of the girl from her mind, she turned back to her patient.
    “Now let’s see what’s going on in there,” she said, unbuttoning her cuff to roll up her sleeve for the examination.

    S ARAH DIDN’T THINK of the girl again until a day and a half later when she was paying her first postpartum visit to Mrs. Higgins and her new son. Ordinarily, she went the very next day, but since the baby hadn’t actually been born until nearly the next day, Sarah had waited until another night had passed to pay her usual call.
    The city was very different this morning than it had been the other night. All traces of the snow had been shoveled into carts and dumped into the river, and with it had gone the silence of that night. The roar of the elevated trains over on Sixth Avenue was a constant backdrop to the usual sounds of urban activity. Wagon wheels and horseshoes clattering over cobblestone streets, drivers shouting to their animals or to other drivers, street vendors hawking their wares, women calling for children or to neighbors. Sarah might dream of peaceful meadows, but this was what she truly loved, the vibrant sounds of city life.
    While she walked, she replayed the events of the other night and recalled the girl she’d called “Mina.” Sarah knew exactly who she’d been thinking of. Mina VanDamm had been a classmate of hers at the exclusive private girls’ school she’d attended. They’d also traveled in the same social circles, something that Sarah had once considered important, but which she now knew mattered not a wit. Perhaps Mina VanDamm had looked like that girl back when they were sixteen, but she certainly didn’t look like that any longer. Mina was Sarah’s age, over thirty now, and probably a plump matron with a houseful of children of her own.
    As this girl would be, before long. Because Sarah knew something else about her, too. Something she hadn’t realized until this moment. She was still mulling over her realization when she rounded the comer and saw the crowd gathered in front of the Higgins’s boardinghouse. Several women, still in their plain housedresses beneath their heavy shawls, were huddled together on the sidewalk, which meant an emergency had called them out. Otherwise, they would have changed into their street clothes.
    The women talked quietly while children ran around, playing games and rolling hoops, oblivious to whatever unfortunate event had brought their mothers together. Sarah thought of Mrs. Higgins and her new baby inside the house. If there was trouble, why hadn’t they sent for her?
    She hurried up to the nearest woman, Bertha Peabody. Sarah had delivered her of the fat baby now perched on her hip and contentedly sucking on his middle two fingers.
    “What’s happened?” she asked Bertha.
    “There’s been a murder,” Bertha said, her shock obvious.
    “Mrs. Higgins?” Sarah gasped in horror.
    “Oh, no,” Bertha hastily assured her. “One of her lodgers. A young girl. Hadn’t been there long, only a few weeks, and this morning she turns up dead. One of the children found her when she didn’t come down for breakfast.”
    “A girl with blonde hair?” Sarah didn’t want to believe it.
    “Yes, that’s her.”
    “Terrible thing, just terrible,” another woman declared, and the others