THE BUTCHER FIGURED IT OUT FIRST. HE WAS THE ONE WHO NOTICED that the local anarchist, Anton Vorachek, was suddenly buying some better cuts of meat. He usually bought remnants and offal—whatever was going cheap—and not much of it. One day, he came in and bought some cube steak.
Or maybe it was the waitress at the diner. She said that Vorachek came in for his weekly single scrambled egg—he always did this on Sundays to try to talk to people at the counter and recruit. That Sunday, he ordered two eggs, hash-browned potatoes, a side of bacon, and toast. He even had coffee. And he tipped her a quarter on a thirty-five-cent check because “the worker deserves a greater share of the profits.”
Or maybe it was the bus driver, because Vorachek suddenly had money for the bus.
All of Burlington reported a man who, if not vying with the Rockefellers for wealth, was more flush than he previously had been.
He was not liked by many. He started strikes and handed out anarchist literature. He shouted “Death to tyrants!” when Ellingham’s name was mentioned. Albert Ellingham was much beloved in the area. He provided money for the police and the schools and the fire department and the hospital and any other cause that came his way, and had touched many thousands of lives in Burlington. This was a man who provided free ice cream for poor children. And now he had opened a school of his own.
So people took offense to calls for his death.
Officially, the police searched his house because a witness came forward and said he saw Vorachek scouting out telephone booths. Then someone else came forward and said that they definitely saw Vorachek place a call at 7:07 on the night of April 14. Seven separate witnesses from the night of April 14 who received fifty cents for their reports said they saw Vorachek heading for Rock Point. It didn’t seem to bother many people that it took a few months for these people to realize they had seen these things, or that the witness accounts didn’t match. Two of the people writing reports claimed that Vorachek went to Rock Point in a black car. Two said on foot. One said in a cab. One said on a bicycle. One could not explain the means of transport.
In any case, the Burlington police had enough to go and have a look in his house, where they found a pile of cash painted with Leonard Holmes Nair’s glowing paint, and even a cash bundle with Ellingham’s invisible fingerprint. More troubling, they also found a child’s shoe, the match to the one left on Rock Point.
Vorachek was arrested and charged with the kidnapping of Iris and Alice Ellingham and the murders of Iris and Dottie Epstein.
“I did it,” he said when handcuffed. “All tyrants will fall. This is only the beginning!”
The wheels of justice began to grind. All that fall and winter the evidence was examined, experts brought in. A famous attorney came in to represent Vorachek. In the spring, everything seemed ready to start, but then there were delays. The anarchists came to town to protest Vorachek’s arrest. There was talk of moving the trial, but that was quashed.
Finally, everything was set to start on July 15, during a devastating heat wave. Burlington was almost broken from the weight of it all. There were no hotel rooms, so Albert Ellingham simply bought a house near the court. The press lived on the lawn and cracked the sidewalk from their pacing. The case was front page, every day, everywhere. There were reporters from every paper in America, all over the world. There were so many telegraph wires outside the court that when Robert looked up, sometimes he couldn’t see the sky. Then there were the onlookers, the people who simply came to watch. You couldn’t walk down Church Street. The restaurants ran out of food daily. Boatloads of people came across Lake Champlain just to be in Burlington, to see Anton Vorachek stand trial. Vendors set up out in front of the court and sold cold beer and popcorn and lemonade. It was like being at a baseball game.
Every day during that brutal month, Robert Mackenzie sat in the stifling courtroom next to Albert Ellingham and watched the presentation of evidence. He took notes that weren’t really necessary, but he was the right hand, and the right hand needed to do something. He saw the police show the photos of the money they found under the floorboards, the notes they had painted with Leo’s special paint. They saw the one paper wrap that Albert Ellingham had marked with his fingerprint in the invisible paint, proving without a doubt where those bills had come from. Leo testified about making the paint and the process by which it was revealed.
Vorachek used the courtroom like a pulpit to rage against the industrialists of the world. This was revenge, he said. Soon, all people like Albert Ellingham would pay. The anarchists cheered and were taken from the court. The crowd gasped and cried and ate their popcorn.
Albert Ellingham sat expressionless through it all. Sometimes he didn’t even sweat. He was gray and unmoving. His focus never waved. Every day he said to Robert, “Maybe today he will say where Alice is.”
Vorachek was found guilty on all counts.
On the night before sentencing, Albert Ellingham came into Robert’s room at the house.
“We’re going to the court,” he said simply. “I’m going to talk to him.”
Robert grabbed his hat and followed. They surprised the journalists, many of whom were off having dinner or eating sandwiches on the grass. They walked down Church Street, a gang of people on their heels, barking questions.
Because of the interest in and the sheer magnitude of the event, Anton Vorachek could not be housed in the normal jail. A cell had been built in the basement of the imposing custom house and post office next to the court, in a space usually reserved for storage. George Marsh met them there.
“He’s this way,” he said, beckoning them down the darkened hallway to the stairs.
Robert and Ellingham were escorted inside, down through the sorting rooms and the sacks of mail, into the empty depths. There, behind a specially constructed barred door, sat the man convicted of it all. He was small, with a sharply pointed beard and bright eyes. He was dressed in the rough brown coveralls he had been given to wear in his cell. Robert could tell they had not been washed in some time. There was a smell even a few feet away. The cell Anton Vorachek occupied had a cot and a wooden bench; buckets had been provided for bodily necessities. There was no window, and the light came from outside the cell, so he was mostly in darkness.
“They keep you safe down here,” Ellingham said in greeting.
Anton Vorachek blinked and took a seat on his bench, hunching his knees close to his chest. A guard brought a wooden chair for Albert Ellingham, and he put it directly in front of the bars so he could look deep inside the cell.
“Tell me where she is,” Ellingham said. “Tell me who helped you. There’s no way you did this alone.”
Anton Vorachek said nothing. For an hour he sat in silence and Ellingham watched him. Robert smoked with George Marsh and the guards. They stood, and shifted on occasion, but no one broke the spell.
“They’re going to put you in the electric chair, you know,” Albert Ellingham finally said, leaning back.
Anton Vorachek finally left his seat and came to the bars and gripped them tightly.
“Why does it matter who I am?” he said. “Your kind destroys mine every day.”
Why does it matter who I am? Robert thought. What a strange thing to say.
“This is your last chance,” Ellingham said.
“What does it matter?” Vorachek said.
“What does it matter?” Albert Ellingham almost quaked from the force of his speaking. “If you tell us where Alice is, I will speak to the judge. I’ll go to his house. I’ll plead on your behalf. You can keep your life. Even if you tell us where her body is . . .”
There was just the tiniest quiver at the word body.
Anton Vorachek stared at Ellingham for a long moment, and the look he’d had on the stand vanished. The mask was dropped and a human sat in front of them. A human who looked . . . sympathetic?
“Go home, old man,” Vorachek finally said. “I have nothing for you.”
“Then I will watch you die,” Ellingham replied.
He stood and pushed back the chair. On the way back upstairs, George Marsh put a hand on his back.
“He was never going to crack, Albert,” he said. “Tomorrow, it will end.”
“It never ends,” Ellingham said. “Don’t you understand? Tomorrow, it begins.”
Robert Mackenzie slept poorly that night, even worse than he had in the last brutal weeks. Usually he could beat through the horror and heat to get a few scattered hours, but this time he turned and twisted the entire night through.
He went to the window and looked at the moon hanging over the city and Lake Champlain. It was almost ridiculous to say something felt wrong in a situation where everything was wrong, but something bad was coming.
He dressed at dawn, splashing himself with cold water. He found his employer ready as well. They arrived at the courthouse early and stood in the hall, waiting for Vorachek to be brought around for this final day.
On that last day, something changed. Instead of bringing Vorachek in through the back, as they had every day before, the police walked him around the front. Vorachek held his head high as he walked to meet his fate. The press crushed in and the crowd erupted in shouted questions and small explosions from the camera flashes.
Robert would later remember that he didn’t hear the noise at all, that it blended in completely with the shouting and the flashes. Vorachek crumpled, possibly tripped. The crowd seethed, and suddenly someone started yelling, “Down! Everyone down!”
George Marsh grabbed Albert Ellingham and pulled him into the vestibule of the courthouse. Robert Mackenzie was caught in a general wave of people and police lunging for the door. He heard cries of “shot” and “gun.” Everyone was screaming and running.
Vorachek was dragged into the courthouse lobby, his shirt thick with blood, blood on his hands, smeared on his face. Leonard Holmes Nair, who was there that day, would later paint the scene, lashing red paint over the small form on the ground.
The police pushed everyone back and a doctor came forward, but it was clear that there was nothing to be done. In his final moments, Vorachek attempted to speak. Mostly, blood and foamy spittle came from his mouth, but Robert was close enough to hear him say, “Did not . . .”
Then Anton Vorachek died.