Miss Kopp Investigates

by Amy Stewart

  And Norma, begrudgingly, had to admit that she felt the same. What sort of existence would be waiting for her, back in New Jersey? Of course her sisters depended upon her immeasurably. Norma ran the household. She ran the farm. She ran things generally, because she was predisposed to do so.

  But what would be left to run, after she returned? Fleurette was on her own. Constance could go to Washington or New York or anywhere she liked. Was Norma to return to an empty farmhouse and an abandoned pigeon loft? Without the war to prepare for—and she had been preparing, from the day the Archduke was assassinated—what did she have to look forward to?

  Aggie had signed on to perform relief work for the refugees in Belgium. At the last minute she persuaded Norma, who spoke both French and German courtesy of her foreign-born parents, to come along and serve as an interpreter.

  More importantly, she had persuaded Norma to stay with her as her companion and help-mate, to travel together and live as a pair, just as they had done for the last year. Their adventures weren’t over, Aggie insisted. They belonged in Europe, and they belonged together.

  That plea stirred something in Norma. It was a rare and fine thing to be wanted and appreciated by someone outside the family, someone she’d come to know on her own terms and in her own way. She agreed at once.

  It was all settled—their tickets purchased, their trunks packed.

  Then the telegram arrived.

  Of course Norma had no choice but to return home. Aggie had to let her go, and to do so bravely. She’d been hardened to the tragedies of war and didn’t shed a tear when they said good-bye on the train platform, one bound east and the other west. But she drew Norma into a tight squeeze, and whispered that she would write every week, and that she hoped Norma would come and join her, someday, when things were settled in New Jersey.

  Norma didn’t make any promises. When they pulled away from one another, Norma could still feel the impression Aggie had made against her, and could smell the particular sweet mixture of cold cream and milk soap that always clung to Aggie. By the end of a damp and chilly voyage across the Atlantic, that fragrance was gone.

  Norma hadn’t said a word about the plans she’d made with Aggie and didn’t consider it her sisters’ business. There would be letters from Aggie soon enough, telling about where she’d settled in Belgium and giving an address where Norma could write. Not in the first letter, but in the second or third, Aggie would ask if Norma’s family could spare her, and if she’d thought about returning to Europe.

  But Norma knew the answer already. Of course she couldn’t leave. One look at Bessie told her that the world had fallen apart, right here in Hawthorne. The Kopps were in ruins, and who but Norma would put them back together? Constance had one eye on a job in Washington. Fleurette would go skipping back to the stage any day now.

  Someone had to stand by Bessie. Belgium would have to shift for itself.

  The children finished picking at their breakfasts—neither one of them had much appetite—and Bessie shooed them away from the table.

  “I want you ready for school in ten minutes,” she called. It was her belief that the sooner the children resumed their old routine, the better. They’d been out since before Christmas. School had started a week earlier, and she didn’t want them to fall further behind.

  Once they’d disappeared down the hall, Bessie turned to Norma and said, “I hope we can make you comfortable here. I want you to stay as long as you like. It’s good to have the house full of people.”

  “I can make room for you at the boarding-house as well,” said Constance. “I’m keeping my room there until we decide . . .”

  She let that trail off. It was just as well. None of them knew what had to be decided just yet.

  “As long as I have a hot bath and a clean bed, it doesn’t matter where you put me,” Norma said. “But I’ll get settled back home as soon as I can. Constance and I are going up to the farm this morning to have a look around.” The farm, out in Wyckoff, had been sitting empty during the war. It was only five miles out of town, but it was an inconvenient journey on muddy roads. “Does the trolley still run out that way?”

  “Oh, why don’t you rest for a day first!” Bessie said. “Everything’s been so hurried, since—”

  “No, I want to go right away and find out what needs to be done around the place,” Norma said, “and I see a few things I’d like to take care of here, too. I don’t like the looks of those gutters. I’ll get Frankie up on a ladder to clear them out. And what about your accounts, the bills and banking and so forth? Did Francis have charge of all that?”

  Bessie shifted in her chair and put a hand over her stomach. Fleurette thought she looked queasy and wished Norma wouldn’t go rushing into her affairs like that. But it was just like Norma to march from one thing to the next. If the funeral was over, it must be time for gutters and book-keeping.

  “I’m sure I’ll manage,” Bessie said, in a voice both vague and kind.

  As much as Fleurette didn’t like to admit to having anything in common with her sisters, it was true that the three of them could each be sharp-edged and argumentative in their own ways. But Bessie was soft and tender, right down to her very center, even when Norma was at her most irritating.

  It occurred to Fleurette just then that perhaps this was why Francis had married Bessie. She was nothing like the Kopp women. She was generous and accommodating and just better, in every way that would’ve mattered to him.

  “Well, we’re here to do whatever needs doing,” Norma said.

  “I know.” Bessie pushed her chair aside and went down the hall toward her bedroom. Norma took Constance out on the porch to show her the gutters. Fleurette had hoped to make her announcement about the room she’d rented before breakfast was over, but she was still halfway through buttering her toast when everyone dispersed.

  She would’ve gone out to speak to Constance and Norma about it, thinking that it might be better to tell them privately anyway, but just then she heard Bessie retching in the bathroom.

  The door was not entirely closed. Fleurette pushed against it, lightly, and found Bessie doubled over next to the toilet, her hair hanging down around her face, hands over her belly.

  Weeping. Heaving.

  What a picture of misery! Bessie had such a warm glow around her, and was always so pleasingly put together, in a manner that Fleurette could only describe as welcoming and reassuring, like a pretty nurse, perhaps. When Francis first met her, and Fleurette was only a little girl looking up at her, that’s what she thought: My brother has fallen in love with a pretty nurse.

  But there she was in a heap on the floor, leaning over to press her cheek against the cool porcelain rim of the bathtub, sweat beading on her forehead. She looked up at Fleurette with an expression of horror that quickly gave way to apology. She didn’t want to be seen like that. She didn’t want anyone to have the burden of knowing how awful it really was for her.

  Fleurette closed the door and locked it—what a blessing to women is a lock on the bathroom door!—and slid down on the floor next to her. There was a face-cloth dangling from the sink above them. She reached up and swished it under the faucet and passed it to Bessie, dripping and cold.

  “Ahhhhh,” Bessie sighed, running it over her mouth and around her neck. Then she pressed it into her eyes, and once her face was soothed a little, she dropped the cloth and turned to Fleurette. Her eyes were rimmed in pink and her lips swollen.

  After a pause—as if debating how to put it—she said, “I’d forgotten what this feels like.”

  Still Fleurette didn’t guess at her meaning! It was the last thing anyone might think of, at a time like that. But just as she opened her mouth to say some nonsense in return—“You’ve never lost a husband before, how can you know”—it came to her.

  Bessie wasn’t sick over Francis.

  Well, she was, but this was something else.

  As the realization dawned across Fleurette’s face, Bessie smiled just slight
ly. A woman can’t help but be a little proud of the creature she carries inside her, no matter the circumstances.

  “Oh, Bessie,” Fleurette whispered. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded and reached out to take Fleurette’s hand. They sat shoulder to shoulder as sisters, their fingers folded together. “It’s been three months. You’ll be letting out my dresses before long.”

  A baby—at her age! Bessie was forty. Frankie was her youngest, and he was already eleven. Lorraine was thirteen. What would Francis have thought about another baby in the house?

  Somehow she managed to keep that question to herself, but she could only just manage to stop herself from asking one impertinent question before the next one popped into her head. Had Francis known about the baby? Was he conscious for even a few minutes there at the last, panting and clutching at his chest, thinking of the son or daughter he’d never meet?

  And—here was the part Fleurette knew she really mustn’t say aloud—what was Bessie going to do now? How could she manage, with a third child on the way?

  While she was busy not saying any of that, she just stared at Bessie, at that sweet fallen face. Bessie was always composed when the rest of them weren’t, but this time, she didn’t even try to put on a brave mask. It was all there for Fleurette to see: the anguish, the great gaping loss before her, the despair of a woman left to look after two children alone, much less three. She had the prettiest blue eyes, and when she cried, they were even brighter, the lashes wetter and darker.

  “And you haven’t told anyone?” Fleurette asked at last, grasping for any remark that wouldn’t upset or offend.

  Bessie squeezed her hand. “Not yet. Well, now you know. And Francis knew.”

  Fleurette took in a little gasp, not meaning to, but it hit her in the body, knowing that.

  “That’s good,” she said. “It’s good that he knew.”

  But was it?

  “Oh, I’m not so sure,” Bessie said. “I’m afraid I only added to his worries.” Another wash of tears flooded her eyes.

  “No, no, that’s impossible! He wouldn’t have worried,” Fleurette said, quick as she could. “He loved babies. You remember how much he loved your babies when they were born. He’d sit at the dinner table with Lorraine on his chest. My mother was so shocked by that. She’d never seen a man handle a baby.”

  Bessie leaned back against the wall and sighed. “Your mother. She was so afraid he’d drop one of them.”

  “But he never did.”

  “No.” Bessie pushed her hair back. There was already a little gray coming in around her forehead.

  From outside the bathroom door came a sound—a tiny, almost imperceptible sniff, a smothered sneeze, perhaps. Bessie cast a knowing eye at the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor boards. Fleurette looked over, too, and could just make out the shadows cast by one if not two pairs of feet.

  Enormous feet.

  Bessie shrugged. “You might as well let them in.”

  The doorknob rattled and Fleurette reached up, reluctantly, to grant her sisters admittance. They practically fell inside—comically, like two fools in a vaudeville show—and Bessie and Fleurette had to sit up quickly to avoid being trampled.

  “I knew you didn’t look right,” Norma said, taking a seat on the toilet lid in the manner of a businessman sitting down to meet with his board. “When exactly is this baby coming and how are we going to manage it?”

  “July, I expect,” Bessie said. “It’s enough time to get us moved, and settled—”

  “Moved?” cried all three sisters, in unison.

  Bessie sighed and pressed the cloth against her neck again. “I didn’t want to tell you so soon after the funeral, but you might as well have it all at once. We did just fine on Francis’s salary, but there’s nothing coming in now. I don’t like to depend on anyone, but I hardly have a choice. My sister has offered to take us all in. They have plenty of room and the children will get to live with their cousins.”

  “Didn’t you tell us that you moved east to get away from your sister?” asked Norma.

  “She didn’t even come to the funeral,” said Constance.

  “And what about the children’s school?” said Norma.

  Bessie smiled a little at that. “They have schools in Illinois. And Della and I are older now. We’ll get along just fine. They still live in my parent’s old house in Springfield. There’s plenty of room, and Della’s husband is about to take over a medical practice from a doctor who’s retiring. And you know, they’re just far enough outside of town that they keep chickens.”

  Fleurette suspected that she said that last part for Norma, thinking that Norma would approve of a farmhouse with chickens.

  Norma did not approve. She’d given up Belgium for this. She was digging in, already.

  “Well, you’re not going. You’re provided for right here. You have this house. You have us. And surely Francis left something. Wouldn’t there be life insurance?”

  Bessie put her hands over her eyes. The three of them waited, hardly breathing. Then she looked up at them and shook her head. “People used to come around selling life insurance. Francis would talk to them, but nothing came of it. I suppose I thought that if anything happened to him, I’d find some sort of work for myself, but nobody would have me now. Not with a baby on the way.”

  “But if you could live with Della in the countryside,” Fleurette put in, not liking this idea at all but thinking that she should offer it anyway, “couldn’t you live with us in the countryside? Let’s all go out to the farm together and have a look around. We could turn the sitting-room into a nursery.”

  But Bessie wouldn’t have it. “How are any of us to earn a dollar, out there in Wyckoff ? Are we to raise three children on nothing but turnips and eggs?”

  “What about our—” Fleurette understood so little of their finances that she hardly knew how to put it. “What about our little mortgages, from the parcels we sold?”

  “The little mortgages are paid off, or else defaulted on,” said Constance. “We have a few pastures leased, but—”

  Norma said, “But we’ll need that money to patch things up out there, once I have a look to see what needs to be done. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You’re not about to run off to Illinois. The Wilkinsons are selling their house, did you know that?”

  “Next door?” asked Constance.

  Fleurette had an ill and nervous feeling about this.

  “We’ll sell the farm,” Norma said, “and we’ll move in next door and look after you.”

  “Oh, but you couldn’t sell the farm,” Bessie said. “Your mother intended that land for you girls.”

  “You’re one of the girls that mother intended the farm for,” Norma said. “She just didn’t know it at the time.”

  Bessie was a bit weepy again (and now they all understood why: no one who is both pregnant and in mourning can keep a dry eye for more than a minute or two), but through her tears she continued to insist that they could not sell their land. “You’ve all made your plans for after the war,” she said. “You have things you wanted to do. Fleurette’s going back on the stage, Constance is bound for Washington, and you—”

  But no one knew what Norma intended to do, and Norma didn’t offer an explanation.

  “No one’s going to Washington,” she said, without so much as a glance at Constance. Of Fleurette’s supposed return to the stage, she made not the slightest acknowledgment. “I’ll speak to the Wilkinsons right now. They asked me at the funeral what they could do to help, and here it is. They’ll lease the house to us when they move out, and we’ll buy it when we sell the farm. I’ll arrange it this minute.”

  “Oh, girls, I don’t know,” Bessie said, but it wasn’t much of a protest. No one believed for a minute that she wanted to leave her home and drag her children off to Illinois.

  “Well, we do know,” Norma said briskly. “We’ll be here every day to help with the children. There will be enough money after we se
ll the farm to buy the Wilkinsons’ house and put some aside for all of us. With Constance working, and Fleurette—”

  Fleurette didn’t hear the rest of that, because all she could think about was that dear little room at Mrs. Doyle’s slipping away.

  She would have to set up housekeeping with her sisters, just as they had done before the war, only now she’d be in and out of Francis’s house every day, unable to push tragedy aside for even a minute.

  But what choice did she have? How could she stand up and say that moving into the Wilkinsons’ was fine for Norma, and fine for Constance, but that she was having none of it?

  She could not.

  Not with Bessie beside her, awash in tears and gratitude.

  Having decided the matter, Norma went off to tell the Wilkinsons about it. Constance rushed the children off to school, leaving Bessie to compose herself in the bathroom.

  Fleurette slipped back into her room, where Laura was waiting for her. She dropped onto the bed and her parrot watched her expectantly, as if she knew that something was afoot.

  “We might not be going far after all,” Fleurette said.

  “Far,” answered Laura, filling the word with music and longing.

  5

  CONSTANCE WASN’T GOING far, either. She, too, felt a twinge of regret that she would admit to no one.

  Norma had always been fond of making proclamations about Constance’s life—what sort of books she ought to read, what she ought to make for dinner when it was her turn to cook, what sort of work would suit her best. When Constance ran the female section at the Hackensack jail, Norma knew every inmate by name and instructed Constance on the best way to handle each girl’s troubles, without regard to the dictates of law or common sense.

  “Hand that one back to her mother,” Norma would say about a girl who’d been arrested for shop-lifting. “She has too much leisure time. That’s her only problem.”

  “That’s for the judge to say,” Constance would tell her. “I can’t just unlock the door to the jail and allow her to walk out because my sister told me to.”