Read Murder on Sisters' Row for Free Online Page B

information in neat handwriting. Then she looked up again. “This girl you want us to help, what is her relation to you?”
    “She’s no relation to me at all. I’m a midwife, and two days ago, a young man came to take me to a birth at what I thought was a boardinghouse. I eventually realized I was in a house of ill repute. The young woman whose baby I delivered begged me to help her get away.”
    “Did you try?” Miss Yingling asked with interest.
    “No, she warned me not to. She said . . . Well, she said it wasn’t safe. She asked me to find Mrs. Van Orner and ask her for help.”
    Miss Yingling was intrigued. “How did she know about Mrs. Van Orner?”
    “She said all the . . . the girls who worked there knew about her.”
    Miss Yingling nodded. “That’s good. Word of our work is spreading.”
    “Can you help her?”
    “Do you know where the house is?”
    “Yes, it’s on Sisters’ Row.”
    Her blue eyes widened. “Oh, my.”
    “Is something wrong?”
    “Oh, no, it’s just . . . The police protect these places, you know, and Sisters’ Row . . .”
    “I’ve been told it serves very wealthy clients.”
    “And that’s another problem.”
    “In what way?”
    Miss Yingling seemed surprised by the question. “I . . . Oh, I mean . . . Well, because the place earns a tremendous amount of money, and they can bribe just about anyone they want.”
    Sarah didn’t believe her. “Are you afraid of offending someone wealthy?”
    “No, no, not at all. Mrs. Van Orner isn’t afraid of anything,” the girl insisted. “We’ll just need to be more careful than usual.”
    “We also have to rescue the baby,” Sarah said.
    “Baby?”
    “The baby I delivered,” Sarah reminded her. “Mrs. Walker, the woman who runs the place, is going to take him away from his mother in a few days, and the mother is very concerned that she won’t be able to find him again.”
    Miss Yingling frowned. “That’s very odd. They don’t usually allow the girls to have babies.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Miss Yingling shrugged. “Interestingly enough, very few of these women conceive at all, but when they do, they see an abortionist.”
    Sarah remembered a remark Mrs. Walker had made about Amy lying to her. Had she managed to keep her pregnancy a secret until it was too late to end it? But none of that really mattered now. “Can you help this girl and her baby or not?”
    “I’ll have to discuss the case with Mrs. Van Orner, of course—”
    “I’m going to see the girl today. It may be my last chance to visit with her, and I’d like to tell her some good news.”
    “I can’t promise anything without Mrs. Van Orner’s approval.”
    Sarah seldom used her family’s power to her own advantage, but this time she saw it was necessary. “Perhaps Mrs. Van Orner knows my mother, Mrs. Felix Decker.”
    Miss Yingling’s eyes widened again. “Mrs. Decker is your mother?” Like the fellow downstairs, she looked Sarah over and found nothing to impress her. “But you’re a . . .”
    “A midwife. Yes, I earn my own living. Do you know if my parents are donors to your cause? They’re very generous, and I could certainly put in a good word with them about the work you do.”
    Miss Yingling carefully wrote, “Mrs. Felix Decker,” on the paper beneath her notes about Amy’s case. When she looked up again, she seemed much more eager to help. “Did you say this girl had a baby two days ago?”
    “Early yesterday morning.”
    “How soon will it be safe to move her?”
    Sarah knew that most doctors wouldn’t even allow a woman out of bed for two weeks after she delivered, but she also knew few women could afford such a lengthy time of idleness. Most of her clients were up doing housework after a week, some even sooner. “I’d like to say a week, but if you need to get her sooner . . . I’d say the day after tomorrow at the earliest, and she’ll need a safe place to go where she can finish recovering.”
    “We have a