Free Murder in a mill town by P.B. RYAN

grassy esplanade separating the north and south sides of this unfinished boulevard; still, she could tell, to her dismay, that the figure walking hurriedly toward nearby Arlington Street wasn’t Harry. He was too short, too slight. Harry was tall—not as tall as his brother Will, but taller than average, and he moved with a distinctive masculine grace, like all the Hewitt men.
    Nell recognized this man when he passed beneath a street lamp—about forty, with receding blond hair, quite well turned out in a black frock coat and gray trousers. He was Harry’s valet and all-around manservant, Edwin Speck, whom he’d brought with him when he moved out of his parents’ home last March in protest over his father’s refusal to dismiss Nell for being an “insolent little bog-trotter who should learn to peel potatoes and keep her damned mouth shut.” That August Hewitt would have sacked Nell in a heartbeat had his wife not threatened to leave him over it did little to placate Harry. Mr. Hewitt’s friend Leo Thorpe held the deed to the Back Bay townhouse in which his son Jack used to live, so Harry offered to rent it; he never spent another night under his parents’ roof.
    Nell held her pendant watch close to her face, squinting to read it in the dark: almost ten o’clock. She’d been lurking here, waiting for Harry to head out for his nightly debauchery, for over an hour.
    She tugged her shawl more snugly around herself, rubbed her arms. It had been an unusually warm day for September, prompting her to wear her favorite summer dress one last time, but the temperature had been plummeting since nightfall, and she was starting to shiver.
    Last night she’d conducted a similar, if briefer, vigil. After returning from Charlestown, she’d fed Gracie her supper, tucked her in, and walked over here in the hope of following Harry to some public place where she could question him in relative safety; never again would she enter his home alone. Unfortunately, he never left the house. At half past nine, his valet walked down to the corner, as he was doing now, and hailed a hack heading south on Arlington. Forty minutes later, it pulled up in front of ten Commonwealth. Speck got out and paid the driver as two giggling women emerged from the vehicle rather clumsily, not so much because they were unaided, but because they were clearly sotted. They were the frowziest of streetwalkers, all rouge and bosom and swaying hips—and not even that pretty, although they oozed a frank carnality of a type most men found irresistible. The valet herded them, laughing and stumbling, through the iron gate, up the front steps, and into the house. A few minutes later, lamplight shone through the windows of the second floor master bedroom. Dark forms moved behind the curtains, shifting, merging...
    It would appear that both Harry’s secretary and his valet counted pimping among their many and varied duties.
    Frustrated but not defeated, Nell had returned to Colonnade Row determined to try again tonight. Now, as Edwin Speck flagged down yet another hack on Arlington, she was beginning to wonder if Harry Hewitt, spoiled and lazy as he was, no longer cared to go in search of his evening entertainment, but preferred to have it delivered directly to his doorstep.
    Nell groaned as the hack pulled over to the curb. Except this time, instead of entering it, Speck merely said something to the driver, who steered his horses around the corner and down Commonwealth. As the hack pulled up in front of number ten with the valet jogging alongside it, Harry Hewitt stepped out of his house, dapper as always in full evening dress beneath an open black great coat, including one of his signature garish waistcoats, this one of an Oriental-patterned crimson brocade. A long, gold-fringed scarf of the same color hung over his shoulders like the stole of a priest.
    Whispering a brief prayer of thanks, Nell watched Harry adjust the angle of his opera hat as he strode through the