Free What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen Page A

childhood.”
    “Are you saying that you have feared being murdered by us?” Henry laughed.
    “Yes, and of murdering you,” she added gravely. “It is in the nature of the nervous invalid to create such extreme scenarios. We get ill because imagining them is enough to scare us out of all action.”
    William considered the comment. “And Jack the Ripper is somehow empowered to live out the fantasy that frightens the neurasthenic. He is the obverse of what you are, your imagination turned real.”
    “Yes,” said Alice, “which is why I am the person to catch him.”

Chapter 11
    With luncheon concluded, William rose and announced that he was going back to the East End. “Half of problem solving has to do with posing the right questions,” he explained. “The other half with listening to the answers. It’s what I learned teaching undergraduates, which qualifies as a form of detective work, the goal being to figure out how to make mostly uninterested students learn. I hope to bring some of this skill to the interrogation of witnesses. After that, I will proceed to Scotland Yard to examine the letters.” He nodded to Alice, whom he knew was eager for a full report on this aspect of the case.
    “Bring them back with you,” she ordered.
    “It’s highly unlikely that they’ll allow them to leave headquarters.”
    “Try!”
    William waved his hand in exasperation. His sister made him feel duty bound to fulfill her requests, even when they were utterly impractical. He didn’t know whether it was respect for her opinion or deep-seated guilt that made him so solicitous of her. Whatever the motives, he knew that, if he could, he would bring the letters back.
    As he moved into the foyer, he was surprised to find his brother beside him, buttoning a cashmere topcoat and reaching for a bowler hat and silver-tipped cane.
    “I thought I’d come along,” Henry explained casually. “Very important to cover the throat,” he noted, tucking a silk scarf around his neck. “Most vulnerable part of the anatomy.”
    William stiffened. Henry, with his Savile Row wardrobe and effete manner, was bound to be out of place among the poor people of Whitechapel. Besides, he didn’t want his little brother tagging at his heels. He had discouraged it when they were boys, and the same reflex made him discourage it now.
    “I know what you’re thinking, that I’d be in the way,” said Henry placidly, anticipating William’s protest. “But it’s not as though you’re going off to play ball or something strenuous and manly in that line. I’ve lived in this country for a while, you know. I have a sense of the people.”
    “In the East End? Among the squalid tenements and boardinghouses of the poor? Really, Henry, they’re not the sorts with whom you eat your dinners.”
    “No, they’re the sorts who serve me my dinners. I have observed them; indeed, I have talked to them. You’d be surprised how even the lower orders hold to ideas that Americans don’t understand.”
    “And aren’t you an American?”
    “Not really. Not anymore. I have thrown off the yoke of my native country, or if you prefer, I have assumed the yoke of my adopted one. Which is to say, I think I could be useful to you in your present mission.”
    William paused, sensing that Henry was not about to give way. “All right, you can come,” he conceded in the manner of the slightly coerced but magnanimous older brother. “Just don’t lord it over these poor people. And keep your sentences short.”
    Henry smiled but said nothing. He secretly believed that of the two of them, William was the greater snob. As a professor at Harvard, his brother dealt almost exclusively with intellectuals and scholars, people who lived a relatively comfortable and cloistered life. He, on the other hand, consorted with a far more eclectic mix of people: old-moneyed dowagers; newly minted millionaires; aspiring, often impoverished, artists; not to mention domestics of various