Free Death in Saratoga Springs by Charles O'Brien Page A

of gaslight slanting through the transom window. Music played in the distance. A floorboard creaked. For a moment he lay still and listened. Someone was in the room.
    He called out, “Anyone there?”
    A board creaked again, this time closer. A dim light from a lantern shone on him. Groggy from the drug, Crake struggled in vain to rise. A shadowy figure approached him, and a spark of light glinted off metal. A searing pain ripped through his chest. Life ebbed from his body.

C HAPTER 8
Troubling News
    New York City
Monday, July 9
    Â 
    T wo days later at midmorning, a pale and agitated aide rushed up to Pamela Thompson. “One of our girls is in trouble.”
    On vacation for two weeks, Pamela was working at St. Barnabas Mission. The first thought to leap to her mind was an unwanted pregnancy. “Who is it?”
    â€œFrancesca Ricci,” the aide replied. “But it’s not what you’re thinking. In Saratoga Springs they say she was trying to steal something and killed a rich man. She’s in jail.” The aide handed Pamela a telegraphed message from Helen Fisk, her friend and patron of St. Barnabas.
    DEAR PAMELA,
MR. JED CRAKE WAS STABBED TO
DEATH SATURDAY EVENING IN HIS
ROOMS AT THE GRAND UNION
HOTEL. THE POLICE SAY HE
CONFRONTED MISS RICCI STEALING
HIS WIFE’S JEWELRY. SHE STABBED HIM
AND FLED. STOLEN JEWELRY WAS
FOUND IN HER ROOM. THE POLICE
ARE HOLDING HER IN THE TOWN
JAIL. I VISITED HER THIS SUNDAY
AFTERNOON. SHE ASKED FOR YOU.
HELEN
    Pamela stared at the message, shocked and incredulous. Her knees began to buckle. She lowered herself into a chair and breathed deeply. Francesca was her ward and a friend, and had lived with her up to a month or so ago.
    There couldn’t be two Jed Crakes. The murdered man had to be the Captain Crake whom Pamela investigated a few months ago. When she last heard of him, he was ill but still alive in New York City. That he should die violently at Francesca’s hand must be a mistake.
    â€œWould you speak to her mother? Mrs. Fisk sent a copy of the message to her.”
    â€œOf course.” Still shaken by the news, Pamela followed the aide into a parlor where Signora Ricci was sitting. A slender, careworn widow and too ill to care for Francesca, she had given up the girl to the mission.
    â€œMy daughter, Francesca, wouldn’t murder anyone,” she exclaimed in heavily accented English. “Can you help her?”
    â€œI’ll try.” She calmed and comforted the anxious mother, then asked if Francesca had reported having any problems in Saratoga Springs. Her occasional notes to Pamela were brief and cheerful.
    â€œOh no, she has written that she was pleased with her work and the people were kind to her.”
    Pamela thought that’s what a daughter would write to keep her mother from worrying. “I’ll see what I can do. At the least I can arrange for legal counsel.”
    An exploratory trip to Saratoga Springs was feasible. Prescott, her boss, was at his cabin in the Berkshires near his son, Edward. She didn’t know when he would return to the city, but he wouldn’t mind what she did on her own time.
    A single woman in Saratoga, even a forty-year-old widow like herself, would feel awkward by herself as a private investigator. At least at the start, she would need a companion. Fortunately, Harry Miller, her fellow investigator in Prescott’s firm, also had vacation time and might be willing to join her.
    Miller’s home was a room in a boardinghouse on Irving Place near the Prescott office. With a compliant smile, his landlady showed her into a small parlor and left to call him. She knew that Pamela and Miller worked together solving crimes, a legal but disreputable business.
    He entered the parlor in rumpled clothes and glassy eyes.
    â€œHarry! Have you been studying?” Pamela put a teasing reproach in her voice. He devoted nearly every free hour to his law books and new investigative