Free Chapel Noir by Carole Nelson Douglas Page A

leave now.”
    I made one last plea. “But surely the murders are enough to encourage removal! And you have not even, even—” I could not find a single phrase to decently describe what Pink had not yet committed.
    She stood, picked up the brandy glass, and finished its contents in one swallow.
    “I am sorry if my temporary shock misled you, Miss Huxleigh, but I am quite a determined sinner and not about to give up my chosen profession. Thanks for the invitation.” She glanced to Irene and back to me with a bright, brave smile. “I have work to do here, and am not in the market for ‘saving.’ ”
    With that she rustled to the door and left us.

7.
Woman of Mystery

    For whole hours at night she lay in bed unable to sleep
because of the tirelessness of her imagination, weaving tales
and creating heroes and heroines . . .
It was her wont to get the girls of the town together and
tell them these stories . . .
— ANONYMOUS
    FROM A JOURNAL
    I have met the most remarkable woman! She is American, of course. And very beautiful. And was dressed as a man! And smoked the most adorable petite cigars.
    The sudden appearance on the scene of this most intriguing apparition has banished my unusual state of suspended animation. Here I had imagined that I wished to see and experience every side of life, no matter how squalid or sordid. Yet discovering the dead women my first night at the maison de rendezvous was enough to give me serious pause, despite the poverty, misery, and filth I have experienced elsewhere.
    The luxury of the death scene added a sort of operatic decadence to the violence of the slaughter.
    It was as if the ghost of violent death still hovered in that reeking and fashionable room. As if its unseen, hollow, pitiless eyes watched me. And me done up like a French crumpet in a whalebone corset and frou-frou, as ready for crunching as a marzipan cake.
    I shiver as I write this. The murderer could still linger in the house. I find myself most puzzled, though the trail has led here and I but followed it.
    From the gutters of Whitechapel in London to the boudoirs of brothels in Paris: it hardly seems possible that Jack the Ripper could manage such a leap in place and time and stage setting.
    And besides, the wretch is dead.
    Or so the London police would have us all believe.
    I have not properly “sketched” my new acquaintance and fellow countryman, though. She has the rare sort of face whose beauty is undeniable yet so indefinable that neither men nor women can keep their eyes off of her. I am not considered unappealing, yet would pale beside her, and I cannot precisely say why. I can only imagine how men would react. She seems indifferent to her physical force although I suspect she sometimes hides behind it.
    Her companion is another sort. After my recent visit to London, where I soon became fed up with the English whore’s attitude of superiority to all other living beings, I am in no mind to suffer this American beauty’s typically British familiar. Even the most innocuous of that breed marches to the tune of “Rule, Britannia” and radiates the snobbish certainty that she was put on this earth to set other people straight. This particular domestic martinet is a mousy soul named, of all things, Nell, like the spineless put-upon heroine of a melodrama. Those blessed with great beauty seem to crave the company of the plain. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I wonder what her husband is like. Not the companion’s; she is a spinster. “Irene Adler Norton” the cigar-smoking beauty called herself. That implies a husband, though why he would let his wife go off on such gruesome investigations alone is beyond me.
    I had heard of these European practices among certain privileged women—tattoos, cigars, naughty lingerie—but never expected to meet such a creature. And she has the ear of the police, has worked for the Pinkertons. Not one to underestimate.
    I wonder if she follows the same trail that I