He Chose the Girl Who Tried to Kill Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Locked Out

Her father puts her trunk on the step. She hunts for the girl and finds Langston's disowned half-brother waiting at the same boarding house.

I did not get into the carriage.

"Adaline," my father said. "It is raining."

"Then I'll be wet."

"You are making a scene on a public street."

"A girl pointed a pistol at my groom this morning," I said. "I think the street has seen worse."

He told the driver to go on.

I walked the nine blocks to our house on Prospect Street.

The carriage would have beaten me there, and I wanted him to wait.

He was waiting in the front hall when I came in, with his watch in his hand.

"Apologize to Langston tomorrow," he said. "He is a generous man. Another man would have had you talked about."

"Father, you knew her."

He closed the watch.

"I did not."

"You said, get that girl out. Before anyone told you she was a girl you should get out."

"A woman with a gun in a church," he said. "Any man would say it."

It was a good answer.

I thought so then, and it was the only reason I let it go.

"I will not apologize," I said. "He put his hand on her shoulder and walked her out of my wedding."

"You will apologize, or you will not sleep under my roof."

I looked at him for a long moment.

He had never once raised his voice to me in twenty-four years.

He did not raise it now.

"Then I won't," I said.

By midnight my trunk was on the front step in the rain, with the strap done up and the cook's umbrella laid across it.

The cook held the door and cried, and my father did not come down.

I took a room at a ladies' hotel on Prospect, with my mother's pearls in my glove.

I lay awake and counted what I knew.

Langston had called her by her name.

My father had known to be afraid before he knew why.

And the girl had worn Langston's coat down his own stairs and carried a tin box with a tag on its handle.

I had read the tag as I stood in that hall.

It said N. Fenner, and then an address on Pearl Street.

In the morning I paid my bill and walked across the river to the Flats.

Pearl Street was a row of narrow brick houses with their steps scrubbed white.

The landlady at number nineteen opened the door six inches.

"Miss Fenner?" she said. "Nobody by that name. Marsh, you mean. She has been gone three months, and her room's let."

"Gone where?"

"Up to Euclid Avenue to be a maid, and good luck to her." She looked past me at the street. "You're the second to ask. You people should talk to each other."

"Who was the first?"

"The tall one," she said, "at the back."

I turned.

A man was sitting on the low wall across the street with a cloth bag on his knees, and a newspaper he was not reading.

He stood up when I looked at him.

He was lean and dark-haired, with ink on both cuffs and a scar through his left eyebrow.

He was Langston's height and had none of Langston's shine.

I had seen him once, at the end of the table at our engagement dinner.

He had not eaten, and nobody had introduced him.

"Miss Severance," he said. "Tobias Haldane."

"Langston has a brother," I said slowly. "Nobody mentions him."

"Langston has a half-brother. His mother prefers that nobody mentions me."

He folded the paper.

"I have been here since six," he said. "Two of Langston's men cleared the room last night, and a girl's things are in the river."

"Why would Langston do that?"

"He would not do it for the girl. He would do it for what she kept in the room."

"A tin box," I said.

He looked at me with real attention for the first time.

"She had it on his stairs," I said. "I saw her."

"Then she has it still, and she is in the house." He put the paper under his arm. "Her name is Nan Fenner. Her sister was a maid, for a time, in a house on Prospect Street. You may know the house."

My mouth went dry.

"My father's house," I said.

"Yes."

"Why would you tell me this?"

"Because Langston has put a footman on her door and told his mother she is ill," Tobias said.

"And because there is one person in Cleveland he will still let through the front door of that house."

He nodded at the ring finger of my left hand, which was bare.

"Not me," he said. "You."

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