They all stepped up to the door, and Marcus gave it a sharp rap.

“Here we go…” Miss Howard whispered.

A few minutes went by. Marcus knocked again. We could hear the sound of a voice yelling from an upper floor: a rasping, plaintive sort of sound, which I’d’ve said was being made by a man somewhere in his fifties. The voice stopped; Marcus knocked again.

In a sudden, harsh sort of motion the door opened, and into its frame stepped a shapely female figure in a red patterned dress, with a gray apron tied around the neck and waist. The red of the dress ran right up to a black lace collar at the neck, and above the neck was a face we’d all come to know well:

It was the woman in Miss Beaux’s sketch; it was the woman whose history we already knew peculiarly well; it was Nurse Elspeth Hunter herself.

“My Lord,” Cyrus whispered next to me. I turned for an instant to see his face full of troubled wonder. “Can it really be this easy…?”

Up on the small stoop, which wasn’t but ten feet from us, Nurse Hunter’s brilliant golden eyes flitted from face to face, taking in the men before her with a look what said her brain was working hard at a whole set of problems. She started wiping her wet hands on the lap of her apron, and just as I expected her to give out with some expression of shock or alarm, she smiled: gently, slowly, and very, very coyly.

“Well …” she said quietly, in a complicated tone what matched the face. Then her hands went up to neaten her thick, attractive chestnut hair. “I’m very popular all of a sudden. Is there something I can do for you-gentlemen?” The accent wasn’t what I’d expected: there was no New England drawl, yet there was still a hint of the countryside.

Marcus stepped to the fore. “Good afternoon. Am I right in supposing that you are Mrs. Elspeth Hunter?”

“Yes,” she answered slowly, eyeing Marcus up and down and curling her lips. “You suppose correctly, Mister-”

He held up his badge. “Detective Sergeant Marcus Isaacson. New York Police Department.”

Nurse Hunter took in the badge without a blink; if she was who we were looking for, then she was as cool as any con I’d ever seen during my years in the trade.

“I see,” she answered, never losing the lightly coquettish smile. “And are these your troops, Detective Sergeant?” she asked, turning the smile to Lucius and broadening it.

It was as if she knew that Lucius would start to squirm under the flirtation, as indeed he did. “I’m, uh”-he held up his badge-“I’m Detective Sergeant Lucius Isaacson. Also of the New York Police Department.”

“You’re not brothers?” Nurse Hunter said, the golden eyes dancing from one to the other. “How wonderful-and they let you work together, too! But you’re not at all what I’d expect-I thought that New York policemen were all named Mahoney, and had great handlebar mustaches.” The Isaacsons laughed just a little at that; it was exactly the right kind of joke to get to them with.

Nurse Hunter’s manner became far less playful as she looked beyond the detective sergeants to Mr. Moore and the Doctor. “And these gentlemen?” she said. “They can’t be police.”

“No,” Marcus answered. “They are-assisting us on a case. Mr. John Schuyler Moore and Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.”

Her face straightening with what appeared to be genuine awe and humility, Nurse Hunter directed her sunlit stare into Dr. Kreizler’s black eyes. “I-don’t know what to say…” Her words seemed to come with genuine difficulty. “I know of your work, of course, Doctor. I used to be a nurse, you see, at the Lying-in Hospital, just down the street from your-”

“Yes, I know,” the Doctor answered coldly, looking disturbed that the conversation was going on so long.

“I hope you won’t hold that fact against me,” Nurse Hunter continued. “I know that Dr. Markoe thought-well, I read some of your monographs myself, and I thought they were extremely interesting.”

The Doctor only bowed a bit, and that with just his head; but even if it was plain that he knew she was trying to touch something in him, it was also plain that she’d in fact touched it.

As Nurse Hunter turned to Mr. Moore, her face stayed straight for a few seconds; then she displayed another flirtatious look, one that soon grew into positive ogling. “And Mr. Moore…?”

He smiled back at her, then showed his cards like an amateur of the sort what he definitely was not. “New York Times,” he said, extending his hand.

Back inside the calash, Miss Howard let out a hiss of amazement. “I’ll be damned,” she whispered. “Four out of four… she’s sharp, all right.”

“What’s that accent?” I said quietly. “I can’t quite make it-it ain’t New England, but it ain’t local, either.”

“No,” Miss Howard whispered with a smiling shake of her head. “It’s upstate-my part of the country, maybe a little farther north. Yes, I’ve heard that kind of voice before…”

Back on the steps, the Doctor cleared his throat. “I think, Detective Sergeant,” he said, “that we had better get to the business at hand.”

“Oh,” Marcus answered. “Yes. Mrs. Hunter, we have reason to believe-”

“Please,” she said, giving Marcus the particular kind of playful smile that she’d flashed on him before. Then she held a hand out toward the inside of the house. “Whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll be more comfortable discussing it over tea.”

In two mirror movements, the four men on the steps and the three of us in the carriage looked at each other in shock. We’d connived and planned so much at how to get into the place to find out if the Linares baby was there that the flat-out invitation was like a kick to the chest.

“What?”Miss Howard whispered, when she could.

“Tea?”Cyrus added, similarly shocked.

“I hope they know enough not to drink it” was all I could think to say.

Nurse Hunter stood in her doorway, waiting for an answer; finally Lucius managed to come up with “Ma’am, I don’t know if you really understand the nature of-”

“Detective Sergeant,” she said, in a voice what was part motherly but still kind of playful. “I have, as I suspect you know, been through enough trouble in recent years to realize that you can’t be here on any pleasant business. I’m only suggesting that we make it as civilized as possible. That’s all.”

Bewildered, Lucius looked to the Doctor, who only weighed the matter with a stone face for a moment. Then he shrugged and nodded to the detective sergeant, in a way what seemed to say, If she wants to make it easy for us…

“Oh, God,” Miss Howard whispered. “They’re actually going in.”

The four men began to file into the house, the Doctor bringing up the rear. As he stepped over the threshold, Nurse Hunter tapped his shoulder, again addressing him with what seemed very genuine respect. “Oh, um-Doctor?”

He turned, and she looked at the three of us in the carriage; not in our direction, but right at us.

“Wouldn’t you like your other friends to come in, too? I don’t want to appear rude…”

The Doctor glanced at us, caught off-guard for just an instant; but to catch the Doctor that way, even for an instant, was a very slick trick.

“Ah,” he noised. “No. I don’t think so. They are my servants, you see. They’ll be fine.”

With that he headed inside.

Nurse Hunter glanced once down the street toward the river and once to the east. She lifted her arm, appearing to wave at someone in the distance. Then she looked directly at those of us in the carriage again:

All her smiles and respect were gone now; and for the first time, I could see hard and even murderous cruelty in those golden eyes. That vision alone would have been enough to make me ill at ease; but when I looked down the block ahead of the carriage, curious to know who or what Nurse Hunter had been waving at, my feeling of uneasiness suddenly turned into a deeper and much more immediate fear.