Daniel was staring at me now. “You saw such a man?”
“Last week Sid, Gus and I saw a young negro standing on Patchin Place staring up at the houses on our side. He clearly wasn’t staring at Mrs. Konigsberg’s. We wondered what he was doing here. What if he had come to find Mrs. Emory again?”
Daniel frowned. “A negro?”
“He was light skinned and very handsome, Daniel. I could well understand a young girl falling for such a man.”
“But such a relationship could never be sanctioned, surely. Especially not in the South.”
“That’s why it was a hopeless romance,” I said, warming to my subject. “But what if the young man had made good, financially. He was finally able to provide for her. What if she decided that she’d rather risk happiness with him, even if they were rejected by society.”
“Then why not just run away, instead of setting up an elaborate hoax like this?”
“Because she wanted to pay back her husband for the misery he had caused her.”
“But he could face the electric chair, or a lifetime in Sing Sing. Had she no conscience?”
I shrugged. “Perhaps she wasn’t thinking of the ramifications and was only thinking of herself. While he was under suspicion of murder she knew that nobody would be looking for her. They’d be looking for her body.”
Daniel reached across and stroked back my hair from my cheek. “My wife never fails to astonish me,” he said. “I have to admit it does make sense. But what about the laundry cart—did she escape in the laundry basket?”
“No,” I said. “I suspect the laundry cart was just to suggest to the police how Mr. Emory might have carried out the body. But she walked out on her own two feet.”
“She did? You saw her?”
“She was disguised as Mrs. Konigsberg. She used to love amateur dramatics and charades. But Mrs. Konigsberg is a creature of habit. She takes her walk at eleven o’clock every day and she never goes out without her dachshund. When I saw her going out in the early evening I thought it odd, so I went to visit her and she confirmed she had not left her house that evening.”
Daniel laughed. “And I thought you were supposed to be resting and recovering. Not running around the neighborhood. I’ll never hear the last of it from my mother.”
“I didn’t do much running around,” I said. “Most of it was observed from right here, through the window.”