He Chose the Girl Who Tried to Kill Him novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Tea in the Haldane House

Adaline walks into the Haldane house and learns from Nan why she tried to kill him. Nan tells her to look in the jacket lining.

Mrs. Haldane met me in the hall of the house on Euclid Avenue with both hands out.

"Adaline, my darling," she said. "You came back to us."

"I came to see Nan Fenner."

Her smile did not move.

I noticed that, and then I told myself it was the manners of a woman who had hosted four hundred dinners.

"The poor child has a fever," she said. "Langston is at the shipping office until four. I will have tea sent up, and you may be as kind to her as you like."

She patted my arm and said the third floor, the end door.

A footman stood outside it with his hands behind his back.

Mrs. Haldane told him to open it, and he did.

The room was narrow, with a bed, a washstand and a single window painted shut.

Nan Fenner sat on the bed with Langston's grey coat over her knees.

She had a bruise coming up on her jaw, and her chin was lifted anyway.

"You came to gloat," she said.

"I came to ask why you were in my church."

The door closed behind me.

She watched me for a long moment.

"Your name is Adaline," she said. "He talked about you in his sleep. Mostly about how kind you were."

"That is a strange thing to say to me."

"It's a strange thing to hear a man say with his arm round you." She lifted one shoulder. "I would rather not like you. It's making this hard."

I sat on the one chair.

"Tell me."

So she told me.

She had a sister, Lottie, three years older, who went into service at nineteen.

Lottie sent half her wages home every month and signed her letters with a drawing of a cat.

In April of 1907 the letters stopped.

Nan was told Lottie had gone to the hospital, and then she was told Lottie had died there, and then that the family she worked for did not care to discuss it.

"What family?" I said.

"A house on Prospect Street."

I went still.

"The Severances," Nan said. "Yes. Your father's cook gave me a cup of tea at the back door and told me nothing, and then your father's man came out and told me to go away."

I remembered Lottie.

I had not thought of her in two years, and now she came back whole, a tall girl who sang while she cleaned the grates, with a chipped front tooth she hid when she laughed.

She had left in the spring.

My father had said she went home to her people.

"She did not go home," Nan said. "She was driven to a back-room doctor on Case Avenue in a motorcar, in the middle of the night, and left at the door. She bled to death on his floor before the morning. The doctor's wife told me. It cost me a month's wages."

"Whose motorcar?"

"There was one letter, the last one, posted before she went." Nan's hand moved to the tin box under the bed, then away. "It said that Mr. Haldane's motorcar would take her to a doctor who would put things right. Mr. Haldane. There was only one man by that name in Cleveland with a motorcar."

"Langston," I said.

"I found a place in his house under another name. I put the pistol in my apron pocket the first morning."

She laughed once, without any sound in it.

"He found it in the first week. He turned my pocket out looking for a handkerchief, and he held it up and looked at me. Then he put it back, and he kissed me, and he said a girl who comes to a man's house with a gun was the first honest thing in it."

I did not say anything.

I felt hot, and sick, and stupid.

"Three months," Nan said. "I slept across a bed from him three months with a loaded gun in my skirt, and I never once drew it. I knew I would go on never doing it unless two hundred people were watching."

"So you chose my wedding."

"I chose where I couldn't back out." She looked at me then, finally, with no triumph in her face at all. "I'm sorry it was yours."

The door had a small round clock set in the wall beside it, and it said a quarter to four.

Langston would be home within the hour.

"Why did you tell me this?" I said. "I am his fiancée. I was."

"Because you left the ring on the table." She picked up the grey coat and held it out across the gap between us. "Look in the lining. Left side, by the arm."

I took it from her.

It was heavier than a coat should be, and it smelled of his shaving soap.

I put my fingers along the inside seam and felt a place where the stitching was newer and uneven.

"I sewed it in myself," Nan said. "Nobody searches the coat a maid is wearing."

I picked at the thread with my thumbnail until it gave.

Behind the lining there was a single sheet of paper folded in four.

I opened it.

It was a doctor's receipt, printed with an address on Case Avenue.

Received of G. Haldane, two hundred dollars, for attendance, the fourteenth of April, 1907.

Under it, in Langston's own handwriting, was one more line.

She is not to be named.

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