Free Murder on Washington Square by Victoria Thompson

inside before someone hears us.” He shoved Ellsworth into the house and pulled the door shut. In another minute he was back at Sarah Brandt’s back door.
    He wasn’t surprised to see her waiting there, watching to make sure everything went all right. He’d been planning to bid her good night, but she stepped aside for him to enter, which he was more than happy to do.
    “What’s going to happen now?” she asked when he was inside again.
    “I guess I’ll have to find out if there was anyone else who might’ve wanted to kill Anna Blake. Otherwise, Nelson is in a lot of trouble.”
    “He didn’t do it. You know that, don’t you, Malloy?”
    “I don’t think it’s very likely,” he admitted, “but that might not be enough to keep him from frying.”
    She winced. “Then we have to find out who really killed her. Are you investigating the case?”
    “No, Broughan has it.”
    “Oh.” Her expression fell. She knew Broughan. He’d helped Frank out one time on a case she’d been involved with. “He won’t be much help, will he?”
    “He won’t be any help. I had to promise I’d get Ellsworth to confess before he’d let me take him home.”
    “Oh, dear.”
    “Yes, oh dear,” Frank agreed. Then he remembered one more thing he needed to deal with before he left. “Were you just teasing me before or do you really know something about this case that I need to know?”
    “Oh, I’d almost forgotten. Sit down, and I’ll tell you about my meeting with Anna Blake.”
    Frank pushed the dirty dishes away and sat back down at the table. “I’d been meaning to ask you about that,” he said in a tone that should have warned her he was angry, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or else she didn’t care.
    “Nelson sent me a note and asked me to meet him at Washington Square.”
    “Wait, stop right there,” Frank said. “He sent you a note? Why didn’t he just come to your front door if he wanted to talk to you?”
    “Because his mother would have wanted to know why he was talking to me. You know she doesn’t miss a thing that happens on this street. So I met him at the Square on Monday afternoon.”
    “Where in the Square?” Frank asked, thinking this sounded too familiar.
    She hesitated. “By the hanging tree,” she finally admitted.
    “Right where this Anna died.”
    “So it appears.”
    “That’s interesting. Go on.”
    “We met, and he told me about Anna and how she thought she was expecting a baby. He thought maybe I could help her.”
    Frank frowned. “Did he want you to do something to the baby? To get rid of it?”
    “Oh, no! I think perhaps he was hoping she wasn’t expecting at all. That would have solved all his problems. But if she was, he wanted me to offer her assistance and reassure her, I think. Maybe even convince her to marry Nelson.”
    “Now that’s the part I don’t understand. Why would a woman in her position not want to marry the man who’d ruined her?”
    “I didn’t understand that either,” she said, “until I met Anna. You see, she wasn’t at all what I was expecting.”
    “What were you expecting?”
    “I thought she’d be young and innocent and frightened out of her wits. Instead, she wasn’t nearly as young as Nelson seemed to think. She tried hard to look young. Her clothes and her hair and her manner were designed to make her appear so, but I could see she was way past the blush of youth. She was a very good actress, but her eyes gave her away. They weren’t innocent at all.”
    “But Ellsworth was fooled.”
    “Oh, yes, completely. And when Nelson introduced me, she became hysterical. At first she insisted on believing that I was Nelson’s fiancée who had come to denounce her. He finally convinced her I was a midwife, and then she started accusing him of bringing me there to kill her baby! Can you imagine? She wouldn’t listen to anything he said, so finally, I left him there to comfort her and went home.”
    “You’d think she’d be happy to