“I… I demand to be released,” he tried.

“Just as soon as you’ve answered some questions. Come with me.” As he waited for the young man to join him, Frank glanced at the two remaining occupants of the parlor. Madame Serafina was beginning to look a little less composed than she had before, and the Professor was positively ashen. He was standing by the door, as if on guard, although there were two patrolmen standing right outside in the hallway. “You, sit down someplace,” Frank told him, and then he pointed the young man to the dining room.

When they were seated with the door safely shut, Frank asked him his name.

“Albert Cunningham,” he said, less sure of himself now that he was alone with Frank. He was younger than Frank had initially guessed, maybe not even twenty-one or -two, but just as neatly groomed and well dressed as Sharpe. He might be considered handsome in a few more years, when life had etched some character into his well-formed face. Now he was merely young. He gave an address not quite as fine as the other séance attendees boasted, but still in a very good neighborhood of the city.

“What were you doing here today, Mr. Cunningham?” Frank asked without expression.

Cunningham was instantly suspicious or perhaps just a bit guilty. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I asked. What were you doing here? The others said they were trying to contact some dead relatives.”

“I… I wanted to speak with my late father,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Did you?”

“Well, no, not today.”

“Have you spoken to him before?” Frank asked curiously.

“Yes, a number of times,” he reported somewhat defensively.

“So you’ve been here many times in the past?”

“I… I suppose you could say that.”

“And you knew Mrs. Gittings very well?”

“No, not well… at least, not very well. I… she’s always here, of course, but we don’t… I can’t say we’re exactly acquainted.”

Frank nodded. This was what he’d been expecting. Nobody, it seemed, knew the mysterious Mrs. Gittings. “Tell me what happened today.”

Cunningham ran a hand nervously over his well-oiled hair. “Well, let’s see, we were all in the séance room…”

“Sitting around the table, trying to contact the spirits,” Frank supplied. “Who were you holding hands with?”

“We don’t hold hands-”

“I know, you hold wrists,” Frank corrected himself, annoyed. “Whose wrist were you holding?”

“I was holding Madame’s wrist, and Mrs. Decker was holding mine.”

Frank frowned. “Don’t you mean Mrs. Brandt?”

“Who?” Cunningham asked in genuine confusion.

“Mrs. Brandt,” Frank repeated. “The lady who was holding your wrist.”

Cunningham finally remembered. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Brandt,” he hastily confirmed.

“Don’t forget again,” Frank warned him and was gratified to see Cunningham swallow nervously. He quickly got back to the subject at hand. “What was happening just before Mrs. Burke screamed?”

This time Cunningham passed a hand over his mouth, then twisted his soft, young hands in his lap. “We were… Yellow Feather was trying to contact the spirits for us. He had quite a crowd of them, which is very unusual. Sometimes he can’t get even one! But today… Well, he was getting messages from all of them, and he couldn’t make out what they were trying to tell him.”

“There was a lot of noise?”

“Oh, yes, we were all shouting out questions, in case someone had a message for one of us.”

“I thought Mrs. Decker was the one asking questions.”

He didn’t notice that Frank had used her real name. “She was, but when Yellow Feather said so many spirits were there, we… I’m afraid we weren’t very polite. We all started shouting at once.”

“What else did you hear?”

“Hear? I… I don’t know. Oftentimes we hear noises, but I’m not sure if I heard anything like that today. It was so confusing.”

“Did you hear Mrs. Gittings asking questions?”

His smooth brow furrowed at that as he tried to recall. “I can’t say if she did or not. Like I said, we were all-”

“Being rude, yes, I know,” Frank said. “When did you realize something was wrong?”

“When Mrs. Burke screamed, of course. That’s when we all realized something was wrong.”

“What did you do when she screamed?”

“I… I jumped up, I know.”

“Did you let go of Madame’s hand?”

“I suppose I did. I don’t remember, but I must have.”

“Did you open the door?”

“No, Madame opened it. She was calling for the Professor to bring smelling salts.”

“What did you do then?”

“Nothing, I… I looked over, across the table, to see what was wrong with Mrs. Gittings. Mrs. Burke was screaming that she’d fainted.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw…” His face suddenly went white as he recalled what he had seen.

Frank jumped up and forced Cunningham’s head down between his knees. “Take a deep breath, that’s right, again, keep breathing… you’ll be fine now.”

After a minute or two, Cunningham was sputtering in outrage, and Frank released him. He sat upright again, bright red spots burning in his cheeks. “What’d you do that for?”

“You were going to faint,” Frank told him with a hint of disgust.

“The hell I was!” he protested, gathering his pride together as a shield.

Frank didn’t bother to argue. “So you looked down and saw Mrs. Gittings,” he reminded him when he’d taken his seat again.

Cunningham swallowed loudly. “I saw the… I saw it sticking out of her back. And the blood on her dress. At least, I realize now it was blood. I couldn’t tell the color. The light was bad and her dress is dark and I just saw… Well, I saw the knife,” he added, his courage returning now.

“Did you say anything?”

He wasn’t sure about that. “I may have. I guess I did. I told them to look at her back or something. They still thought she’d just fainted.”

“Then what happened?”

“Mrs. Burke started screaming again. I… Someone said we should get out, get the ladies out, I think.”

“Who was it?”

“Sharpe, probably. He’d think of that.”

“So you left the room?”

“I took Madame Serafina’s arm. I was concerned about her, that she’d be upset. I wanted to make sure she was all right. We all went to the parlor.”

“Who sent for the police?”

“I don’t know. When we got to the parlor, everybody was talking at once, and Mrs. Burke was crying, and then a patrolman came in and told us all to stay where we were.”

“Did you see Professor Rogers when you came out of the séance room?”

Cunningham frowned. “I don’t remember.”

“You said Madame called for him to bring the smelling salts,” Frank reminded him.

“She did.”

“Did he bring them?”

“I don’t know. If he did, I didn’t see him.”

“When did you see him next?”

Cunningham frowned, trying to remember. “He brought the policeman in. I don’t remember seeing him before that. He must have gone out into the street and found him or something. What’s going to happen now?”

“What do you mean?” Frank asked.

“I mean, what’s going to happen to Madame? This wasn’t her fault, you know.”

“I don’t know anything right now,” Frank informed him. “So I don’t know what’s going to happen to her.”

“You can’t arrest her!” he said, the red spots blooming in his cheeks again. “She didn’t do anything. I know because I was holding her wrist the entire time. She couldn’t have stabbed Mrs. Gittings.”

Which conveniently gave Cunningham an alibi, too, Frank mused. “Did you hear anybody else come into the room during the séance?”

“No, of course not. Nobody could come in unless they came in by the door, and we would have known immediately if anyone opened it.”

“Then that means someone at the séance killed Mrs. Gittings.”

“Why would they do that?” Cunningham asked reasonably. “Why would anyone want to kill her, come to that? Besides, we were all holding each other’s hands. Nobody could have stabbed her without someone else knowing it.”