Bless the Bride

land an excellent catch like me.”
    “Ah, but he’s a lord with a huge property,” I said. “Sarah will be a lady.”
    “So there’s the attraction.” Daniel nodded. “Off home with you, then, and I’ll see you when I can.”
    He put his fingers to his lips to blow me a kiss, then crossed Bayard toward Elizabeth Street.
    I was about to head for the elevated railway when a strange idea came to me. Annie hadn’t said she had seen a white face floating up the stairs. She had said “a white floating head.”
    And unbidden, an image of Monty Warrington-Chase flashed into my mind.

Thirty-two
     
     
     
    I stood like a statue, staring out across the street. No, that was ridiculous. What could an English aristocrat like Monty Warrington-Chase possibly have to do with Lee Sing Tai? Even as I asked myself the question, a likely answer formed in my head. Monty who looked so unwell recently, who had been seen hurrying toward Chinatown, not noticing either Daniel or myself. I had seen a face that resembled Monty’s emerging from an alleyway on Mott Street, and I realized that the man had come from an opium den. So Monty was a drug fiend.
    The moment I realized that, I saw how easily he could have killed Annie. He would not have been seen as an outsider at the settlement house. Nobody would have questioned his presence if he went upstairs, looking for Sarah. And of course he had to kill her because he realized that she had seen him, carrying Lee Sing Tai’s body up the stairs to throw it off the roof. And I had been partly responsible for her death. If I hadn’t brought Bo Kei home with me, then Monty wouldn’t have bumped into her coming out of the water closet, and realized that she was not the girl who had seen him at Lee’s. That the girl he had seen was the other girl Sarah had told him about—the girl who was still at the settlement house.
    I looked across the street for Daniel, but he had already vanished between pushcarts. So what should I do now? Obviously report what I had deduced to him, but I needed proof. Then it occurred to me that we had proof, in Lee Sing Tai’s cabinet. That day when Bobby Lee had opened it and complained that someone had been there, I had glimpsed a signature on a piece of paper, half protruding from one of the drawers. There had been something about it that struck a chord then, but I hadn’t been able to place what it was. Now it came to me that I had seen that signature before—when Hermione had shown me Monty’s letter to her. There was a particular flourish to the way he formed his M.
    I couldn’t wait to prove that I was right—what a coup that would be if I could go to Daniel and tell him that I had solved the case. I’d rather enjoy seeing Captain Kear’s face too. So I turned back down Mott Street. The constable was standing on duty outside Lee’s residence. I went up to him.
    “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I think I must have left my gloves up there when I came out with Captain Sullivan a few minutes ago. Would it be all right if I popped up to retrieve them?”
    “I don’t see why not, miss,” he said genially. “Just don’t go touching anything or I’ll be in the soup.”
    “Don’t worry. I’ll be very careful,” I said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you, but they are new gloves and they cost so much these days, don’t they?”
    “Doesn’t everything,” he said.
    I gave him a beaming smile and ran up the steps, opened the front door, and moved cautiously around the screen. Then I sprinted across the room to the cabinet and opened it, using my handkerchief to hold the key and then the side of the door. I tried to remember in which of the drawers I had seen the signature. Over on the left, about halfway up.… I was conscious of the need to hurry or the constable would come up to see what was delaying me. I pulled open a drawer. It was literally stuffed full of papers—a daunting prospect. Obviously I couldn’t go through them all. But the one I wanted had been sticking out. Surely it would have been shoved back hastily when the cabinet was closed. I examined one drawer, then another. I pushed it back, but it didn’t seem to go all the way in. On impulse, I pulled the drawer completely out and hit pay dirt. Several papers had been pushed behind the drawer, and one of them contained the signature I had seen.
    I held it in my hand. The writing was all in Chinese characters but it was clearly some kind of IOU.
    “Perfect,” I