“If you’ll excuse us, Mrs. Ellsworth,” Frank said, rising to usher her out of the room. Plainly she didn’t want to leave.

“Can I get you anything? Are you hungry?” she asked anxiously, looking for an excuse to return.

“No, we won’t need anything,” Frank assured her, closing the parlor door practically in her face. He hoped she wouldn’t listen outside the door. She wouldn’t want to hear the answers to the questions Frank had to ask.

Nelson had seated himself in one of the chairs and was staring up at him with resignation. “You’re here to arrest me, aren’t you?” he said.

“Not yet,” Frank replied cheerfully. “We’re still working on the case, and some questions have come up that I’m hoping you can answer.”

“Questions about what?”

“About you and Anna Blake. When was the last time you were with her?”

“I saw her Monday evening, the night I went there with Mrs. Brandt. I stayed for a while after Mrs. Brandt left, but Anna was so upset, I finally left.”

“You didn’t see her the next night, the night she was killed?” Frank asked.

Nelson shook his head. “No, she told me not to come back, that she never wanted to see me again.”

“So you weren’t ever going to see her again?” Frank asked incredulously.

“Oh, no, she said that often, whenever she was upset. I would give her a day or two to calm down, then call on her again. She never seemed to remember that she’d told me not to come back, you see. This time I planned to give her several days, and then…”

His voice broke and he covered his eyes with his hand. Frank stared at him in pity, but he had no time for such indulgences. He needed Nelson to accept the truth about the dead woman. The sooner he did, the sooner he’d be a help in solving her murder.

“Nelson, this is very important. When was the last time you… uh… screwed Anna Blake?”

Nelson’s eyes widened in shock. Plainly, no one had ever asked him such a thing. “Really, Mr. Malloy, that’s hardly-” he began in outrage, but Frank didn’t have the patience for his finer feelings.

“You’ve already told me you did it. How else could she have convinced you that you’d gotten her in a family way? Now just tell me when was the last time?”

“I… I don’t really remember exactly,” he hedged. “I mean, there was just the one time and-”

“Just one time?” Frank echoed in surprise.

Nelson flushed. “What kind of am man do you think I am? I couldn’t take advantage of her like that!”

“You did it once, why not again?” Frank countered reasonably.

Nelson grew even redder, if that was possible. “The first time it was… Well, it was a mistake, a terrible mistake. I’ll never forgive myself, but I wasn’t myself at all, you see, and-”

“Who were you, if you weren’t yourself?” Frank asked a little sarcastically.

Nelson had a the grace to look chagrinned. “It was the wine,” he admitted reluctantly.

“What wine?”

“The wine that… Anna wasn’t feeling well, and…” He gestured helplessly.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me how it happened,” Frank suggested.

“It’s so ungentlemanly,” Nelson protested.

“Seducing her was ungentlemanly,” Frank countered. “Telling me how it happened might save your neck.”

Nelson winced, but he couldn’t argue with such logic. “I came to call on her, just the way I had been for several weeks. I was concerned about her, you see. She didn’t have a friend in the world, and I didn’t want her to end up on the street the way so many other girls do.”

“Of course not,” Frank said encouragingly. “And of course you had to give her money.”

“It was just a loan,” he insisted. “She was going to pay me back. She didn’t want to take charity.”

“That’s very commendable, “Frank said, the irony lost on Nelson.

“One evening I stopped by on my way home from the bank, just to say hello, you understand. But Mrs. Walcott told me Anna was ill. She seemed very upset. She thought Anna might be going into a decline. Having lost her mother and no longer being able to provide for herself, Mrs. Walcott thought Anna might simply die to avoid what she considered a worse fate.”

“Was she really sick?” Frank asked when he hesitated, lost in his memories.

“She seemed to be. Although it was highly improper, and Mrs. Walcott assured me she never allowed gentleman callers above stairs, she asked me to go to Anna’s room to see if I could help in some way. That’s how concerned she was.”

This was starting to make a lot of sense to Frank. Seducing a woman wasn’t as easy as people made it sound. Women were usually trussed up in so many layers of corsets and clothing that just getting to them was half-a-day’s work. Even rape required a lot of determination to dig through all those petticoats. But if Anna were ill, she’d be in her nightclothes, simplifying the process considerably.

“So you went to her room,” Frank prodded.

“Yes, she was very ill indeed. I wanted to call a doctor immediately, but she begged me not to. She said she felt much better just having me there and knowing I cared about her. Mrs. Walcott had sent up a bottle of wine, thinking that might make Anna feel better. She didn’t want to drink it. Her mother had been a temperance worker, you see, so I took some myself, just to encourage her. I don’t know how much I drank before I finally convinced her to try some, but it must have been too much. By the time I realized I wasn’t myself, it was too late.”

“Are you telling me you turned into a raging beast?” Frank asked skeptically.

“Certainly not!” Nelson cried, but his outrage evaporated instantly. “At least I didn’t realize I did. Later, Anna told me… Well, I started to feel a little unsteady, and Anna tried to help me to my feet so I could go back downstairs. The last thing I remember, my arms were around her and…”

“You don’t remember what happened?” Frank asked in amazement.

“If I’d been in my right mind, it never would have happened!” he insisted. “When I came to myself again, Anna was curled up on the bed beside me, weeping piteously. I knew what I’d done, even before she told me I’d ruined her.”

“What did you do then?”

“What do you think I did? I asked her to become my wife. I’m not a cad!”

“And what did she say?” Frank asked, not bothering to express his opinion on Nelson’s honor.

“She… Well, she was naturally upset. I don’t think she realized the implications. She just told me to go away and never see her again. She was terribly ashamed and wanted to forget this had ever happened. She made me swear I would never tell, and of course I never would have.”

“So you just left?”

“I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t stay there with her, even if she’d wanted me to. Mrs. Walcott would have thought that strange indeed.”

“Indeed,” Frank murmured.

“I resolved to come back the next day and make my offer again, when Anna was more composed and had had time to realize her situation. But when I did return, she wouldn’t see me. She wouldn’t see me for several weeks, and then…”

“Then you got an urgent message,” Frank guessed.

“How did you know?”

“Just a lucky guess,” Frank said wearily. “Nelson, there was no baby.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Anna Blake wasn’t with child.”

He frowned in confusion. “But she was so sure.”

“The coroner assures me she wasn’t, and what’s more, she knew it. She was actually taking precautions not to be.”

Now Nelson was really confused. “What kind of precautions?”

Frank didn’t feel as embarrassed as he had with Sarah Brandt, but he still didn’t have the proper words for this. “If a woman doesn’t want to have a child, she can put a sponge inside of her to protect her from it. She was wearing one when she died. And Nelson…?”

Nelson didn’t want to hear the rest of this. “Yes?” he asked with great reluctance.

“She’d been with another man not long before she died.”