The Fifth Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

two-twenty-one-B Baker Street from a prospective client. The distressed gentleman was an American, the topic was murder in the American capital, and his name was Edward Hooper. He showed me three thousand dollars that he was willing to pay me if I came with him to America and solved the mystery of his sister’s death. I accepted only one dollar—as my retainer—but it has taken these three years for me to become active in the . . . mystery.”
    “No, I do not know nor have I heard of . . .” began James and then stopped abruptly.
    “I believe you knew Mr. Edward Hooper’s sister—Marian Hooper Adams,” said Holmes.
    “Clover,” James said so softly that he could hardly hear the two syllables himself. “Clover Adams,” said Henry James. “From the time she was a girl, everyone called Marian Hooper ‘Clover’. It suited her.”
    “You knew her well then,” pressed Holmes.
    “I have been friends with Henry Adams for . . . many, many years,” said James. He wished he could will himself not to speak of any of this, but this night he seemed under some strange compulsion to break confidences he normally would have guarded with his life. “I was also close to Clover Adams—as close as anyone could be to such an intelligent but unpredictable and frequently melancholic woman. I was a guest in their home the last time I was in America in the early eighteen eighties.”
    “You know the public details of her death then,” said Holmes. There was a strange light in the consulting detective’s eye, James thought, but it could have been a reflection from one of the gas lights that still illuminated this section of the Rue de la Paix.
    “Her death by
suicide
,” James said in a sharper tone than he might have intended. “By her own hand. Six . . . no . . . some seven-and-a-half years ago now. It is ancient history for all but the most closely bereaved such as her husband Henry and her dear friends—a category which includes me.”
    “On six December, eighteen eighty-five,” Holmes said quietly. “The date is part of the mystery presented to me by her brother, Mr. Edward Hooper.”
    James started to say that he had never had the pleasure of actually meeting Clover’s brother Edward, that Clover and Henry had always referred to him as “Ned”, but instead he heard himself snapping words like a whip. “Death by sad
suicide
, Mr. Holmes. Everyone agreed to that. Her husband Henry. My particular mutual friend and neighbor to the Adamses, Mr. John Hay. The doctor. The police. The newspapers. Everyone agreed that she had taken her own life. She was of a melancholic nature, you see. All of us who knew and loved Clover Adams had known that. A tendency toward melancholy—and even self-murder—ran in the Hooper family. And she was in a deep, perhaps irrecoverable mourning for her father who had passed away earlier that year. She had been very close to her father, you see, and nothing that Henry Adams or anyone else could do in the months following Mr. Hooper’s death seemed capable of breaking the iron bonds of loss and melancholy that had closed around poor Clover.”
    James stopped. He was almost panting from the intensity and exertion of his little speech. He felt like a fool for saying so much.
    Holmes reached into an interior pocket of his tweed jacket and removed what looked to be a small white card. Despite his spirit of resistance, James unclenched one hand from his umbrella and took the offered card. It looked like a lady’s visiting card, although it was done in simple white rather than the colorful cards now in vogue in England and America and was embossed with a subtle white rectangle within the rectangle of the card itself. At the top of the card within that plain border, there were five hearts embossed. Four of the hearts had been colored in, in blue, with what looked to have been hasty strokes of a colored pencil or crayon. The fifth heart was left uncolored—blank.
    Henry James knew immediately the