by Amy Stewart
“It doesn’t work like that, son. The prosecutor’s drawing up the charges now. The only question is whether Miss Davis testifies against you or refuses to.”
“She won’t say a word against me because she loves me,” Tony said, a little boastfully. “She was never forced. Do you want her to lie and say she was?”
“It doesn’t matter what we want,” Constance said. “Only—she’s taking the hard road. If she tells the truth, well . . . we just can’t say what might become of her. If you can think of anyone who could speak on her behalf, please tell us.”
Sheriff Heath turned to walk away and Constance followed. Tony shouted after them, “Can’t you do something for her, miss? She doesn’t deserve to be mixed up in all of this, a kid like that.”
He sounded sincere about it. She almost felt sorry for him.
21
JOHN COURTER WAS WAITING for the sheriff downstairs. He couldn’t be bothered to nod at Constance, as there was no civility between the two of them.
“I need the key to the female section,” the detective said, without any preliminaries.
“It’s customary for the guards to bring an inmate downstairs for questioning,” Sheriff Heath said.
Mr. Courter was the kind of red-faced man for whom beads of sweat bloomed constantly across his forehead. Constance felt quite cool and collected by comparison.
“It’s time for me to speak to that poor unfortunate girl of yours. Isn’t that where you have your little fireside chats? Upstairs, in the ladies’ cells, where you girls drink your tea and do your embroidery?”
“Miss Davis hasn’t anything new to say,” Constance told him, “and if she did, she’d say it to me.”
He took a step closer to her and spoke in the manner of a schoolmaster speaking to a young student. “I blame the sheriff here for not explaining to you how a criminal prosecution works. He might’ve thought you didn’t need to know, seeing as how you’re only here to look after the girls. But since he hasn’t told you, I will. I interview the witnesses. I file the charges. You’re the jailer. All you have to do is to hold them in those little cells upstairs until I decide what happens to them. Do you think you can remember all of that?”
Constance was not a woman who was troubled by the idea of shoving a man, or throwing one down on the ground. When she was angry, a certain vigor flowed quite easily into her limbs and made itself ready for a demonstration of might. The only difficulty was keeping it in check.
“Every week I’m seeing girls brought up on frivolous charges,” she said. “Someone has to speak up for them.”
He snorted. “We have people called lawyers who come before the judge to explain the criminal’s side of things. You aren’t pretending to practice law now, too, are you?”
Sheriff Heath said, “John, you know a sixteen-year-old girl can’t pay a lawyer.”
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why she would need one, if she was dragged away by a white slaver. For that matter, why did that Heustis girl require any intervention, if she was innocent of the charges? And why haven’t I seen a report on her? The judge released that girl on your word. I can have her arrested again if I’m not convinced that she’s meeting the terms the judge set out. Or didn’t Sheriff Heath explain that to you?”
“You’ll have your report,” Constance said.
22
WITH A SIGH EDNA straightened her collar and walked up to the door of her parents’ house in Edgewater. It wasn’t her home anymore, and for that reason she hesitated before she walked in, wondering if she ought to knock first. Her brothers never did: they simply bounced inside and hollered out to whoever might be within earshot. But her brothers all acted as though they belonged anywhere and everywhere, while Edna wasn’t sure where she belonged anymore. She certainly didn’t belong at the little yellow house in Edgewater.
She was about to raise her hand and knock when she heard a familiar voice behind her.
“They told me you wouldn’t miss your old dad’s birthday!”
Edna turned around and found herself nearly in the arms of Dewey Barnes. She stumbled on the porch step, and he laughed and caught her by the elbow. “I never swept a girl off her feet before,” he said, a little too loudly, in the manner of someone hoping to be overheard.
Edna righted herself and stepped back to get a look at him. He was a man of soft features: round, unsuspecting eyes, a bulbous nose, wide lips, and a dimple on his chin like a finger pressed in dough. He was not an altogether unpleasant-looking man, but he didn’t make much of an impression.
“Hello, Dewey. How good of you to stop by.”
“You’re awfully formal, Miss Edna.” He leaned over to place a kiss on her cheek, but it landed awkwardly near her eye and Edna had to resist the urge to wipe it away.
“Your brothers invited me,” he continued, as if nothing strange had happened. “I wouldn’t miss a good Sunday dinner.” He reached around and knocked on the door, settling the question of how Edna was to gain entrance.
Because they walked in together, her brothers had the idea that they’d arrived as a couple, and treated them as such.
“There they are!” Charlie called, jumping to his feet and pumping Dewey’s hand. “We wondered where you two had gone off to.”
Edna wanted to correct the idea that she’d been anywhere with Dewey, but everyone was talking at once and she couldn’t. All four of her brothers were crowded into the parlor, which seemed so small now that she’d been away. Her father sat happily among them, wearing a silly crown of crepe paper that the boys must have forced on him.
Only her mother stayed quiet. She hovered uneasily around the edge of the room, darting in and out of the kitchen at intervals. Edna knew that she was expected to disappear, too, and help tend to the roast or peel the potatoes, but she didn’t. She settled right between her two eldest brothers, and joined into their talk of work and war.
“They finally gunned down a zeppelin,” her father said. “Can you believe it? They were firing from an automobile.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you could take a zeppelin down with a bullet,” said Fred, one of the twins.
“Oh, they didn’t,” Edna said. “They have a special sort of shell that explodes against the aluminum. They held enormous searchlights on it the entire time. It came right down in the countryside, and every single bomb it was carrying went off at once in a farmer’s field. But it didn’t get to Paris, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
The men in the room looked at her in astonishment. Her younger brother, Davie, said, “You haven’t taken up with a soldier, have you? That might come as news to old Dewey here.”
Edna’s brothers had been teasing her about marrying Dewey for years. He’d been at school with the twins and hung around the house with them on Saturdays, and seemed to act as though a match with Edna were a foregone conclusion. And what was wrong with that? He was one of those perfectly dull, solid, mild-mannered men who would ask nothing more of a wife than a comfortable chair and a newspaper to hide behind. He would go unquestioningly to his office, his club, and his church every week, and to his mother-in-law’s house for Sunday dinner. A fishing camp along a river would be his idea of an adventure, but even that would lose its appeal after a few years, and he would spend his Saturdays in the garage, tinkering with an automobile or an old clock.
Edna could see Dewey’s entire life written across his placid face. Maybe at one time she had encouraged him—just a little—but now it was glaringly apparent that he had nothing on offer that Edna wanted.
“I haven’t taken up with anyone,” she said, avoiding Dewey’s eyes. “I read the papers, that’s all. We make some of those bullets and bombs up at the powder works. Why shouldn’t I want to know about it?”
Her father reached over and patted her knee. “That’s just fine. You’re doing your part. Be sure to carve your initials in one or two of those bullets, and maybe your brothers will see them in France.”
Mrs. Heustis
had been coming down the hall from the kitchen as he said this. She gave a little sob when she heard him and ran back to her oven. Edna had no choice but to go and comfort her, and to roll out the biscuits and put the potatoes on. No one else was going to do it.
She didn’t say a word to her mother, or to anyone else, about the Women’s Preparedness Committee recruiting volunteers to go overseas. It was one thing for her to do her duty in a factory; it was another entirely to board a ship to France. But the notion was gaining traction with Edna. She hadn’t said a word out loud to anyone about it, but already the possibility had turned into a plan, and the wild idea had hardened to resolve.
23
FLEURETTE BOUGHT HER TRAIN ticket at the station agent’s window. She had to fight the urge to lift it to her lips and kiss it.
I did it, she thought. She’d found the money, she’d contrived a reason to send Norma to town (Constance seemed to be very busy on a case and hadn’t been home at all), packed her trunks in secret, and bribed a man from the dairy to take her to the train station. She managed every bit of it so beautifully that it was a wonder she’d never run off before.
Now there was nothing to do but to wait for May Ward and her troupe, who would be boarding in Leonia, down south. She was to join them when the train stopped in Paterson.
Fleurette had seen no reason to tell her sisters that she was leaving. She was tired of having her whereabouts always known. She wanted very much to be out of sight of her family, to be on a train or in a hotel or on a sidewalk in some distant city, so that no one who knew her—not a single soul—could say, with any certainty, exactly where she was or what she was doing.
What a novelty it would be! Imagine walking into a shop where she’d never been seen before, and having her own money to buy things, not an account under Constance’s name. Imagine sitting in a lunchroom on her very own, with the rest of the world around her, people whose lives held secrets she couldn’t guess, people who spoke languages she couldn’t understand, people whose afternoons rolled out before them, filled in whatever manner that other, more interesting people filled their days. Fleurette would never know until she left home to find out about them.
Even if May Ward wouldn’t let her on the stage—and she would, she would, once she saw what Fleurette could do—at least she had a ticket out of town.
Mrs. Ward had been delighted with the idea of a full-time seamstress to travel with the company and put her wardrobe in order—it was such a bother, she said, to send things out at the hotel—but Freeman Bernstein insisted that it couldn’t be done. It would be impossible, he explained, with lighthearted regret, to add the expense of another girl to a tour already settled.
“People don’t buy tickets to watch a seamstress,” he said. “If you’re not on stage, you’re not paying your way.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Fleurette told him, still animated and half out of her mind after the audition. “I will pay my way. You won’t owe me a thing until the end of the first week. If you like what I can do—if Mrs. Ward is pleased (for Fleurette knew that it was Mrs. Ward who had to be persuaded, and she would persuade her husband), then you’ll put me into the company. If not, you’ll send me home.”
Fleurette and May Ward proved to be a formidable opposition to Mr. Bernstein’s objections. After a hushed conference, he agreed and gave Fleurette the date and time of departure.
“You’ll buy your own train ticket,” Mr. Bernstein said. “I’m holding you to it.”
“I expect you to,” she answered, feeling terribly bold and brash.
Of course, there was the problem of putting her hands on the money. She could sell a few things—there was always something in her wardrobe she could part with—and she was owed for dresses she’d made for her fellow students. But that wouldn’t be enough. She needed twenty dollars, at least. She didn’t dare come right out and ask Constance for such a large sum.
But that didn’t mean that Constance wouldn’t have been willing to give it to her, if she’d understood the situation properly, did it? Besides, it would all be repaid. Fleurette imagined herself, after she’d made a success on the stage, stopping in at banks to have money sent to her spinster sisters in the countryside. When the papers wrote about her, they would all say that she was generous to her family, and that she never forgot that first twenty-dollar loan that gave her the start she needed. She would laugh with the reporter over the circumstances under which she’d “borrowed” the money, and how easily her sisters forgave her, once it had been returned many times over.
With that in mind, Fleurette had behaved, on the night of the audition, exactly as Norma and Constance would’ve expected her to. She didn’t want to give any hint of what had actually happened backstage, or of what was to come.
“May Ward said we stole the show,” she told them, with the easy confidence of someone who had, in fact, triumphed on stage that very night. “Mr. Bernstein said it was the best performance he’d ever seen at one of their auditions, and they’ve done them all over the country.”
“Of course they have,” Norma said. “The only easier way to make money would be to print it oneself, and I suppose he’s tried that, too.”
Constance gave her praise, measured and steady as always, for the clear and beautiful singing, the cleverness of the choreography, and the sheer perfection of the costumes. “May Ward couldn’t help but think you were the best,” she said. “We all did.”
But it was dull to hear the same old praise from Constance. Being held in Constance’s high regard did nothing for her. She wanted the admiration of theater critics, and show managers, and tasteful people sitting in boxes.
When the talk turned away from Fleurette’s theatrical accomplishments, she allowed it to drift. It wouldn’t do to make too much of a fuss about the evening. Over the coming days, she’d have any number of secretive preparations to make, and it would be better for her if the events of the evening were allowed to recede slightly, and for Norma and Constance to return to whatever usually occupied their minds.
Fortunately, a packet of letters had arrived earlier in the day, and Norma took them up as soon as they returned from the theater.
“I regret to inform Deputy Kopp that she has caught the attention of an attorney in St. Louis who wishes to interest her in a legal matter.” Norma held up a sheet of creamy rag paper. Constance squinted at the three immaculately typed paragraphs and the elaborate flourish of a signature underneath.
“Does he want me for his wife or his secretary?” Constance asked.
“Both,” Norma said, and read it aloud.
My Dear Miss Kopp,
I feel as though we are already acquainted through the many charming portraits of you that I have seen displayed in our Sunday papers. I would enclose a copy so that you could see how celebrated you are in our city, but I have pasted mine into frames and could not bear to part with them. They hang in my office where I may gaze upon them in the morning and whisper good-night to them in the evening.
After a long and careful consideration, I feel that I must give voice to what lives in my heart and tell you of the decision that I have, at last, come to know as the right one for both you and I: We must be wed in the fall, and you are to take up residence in St. Louis and carry on with all the duties of an attorney’s wife, a legal secretary, and mother to my four children, left bereft after the unexplained disappearance and presumed death of my wife several weeks ago.
You will find that I live, breathe, and sleep by the law. Its principles guide my every step and even the stirrings within my soul. Now that we have found that our hearts beat, practically speaking, as one, I take it that we may safely assume that we are engaged to be married. Under such blissful circumstances as these, I think it wiser for you (and incidentally even for me) that we should place our happy matrimonial contract upon a firm and rigid footing, so that in the future there may be no unseemly wrangling in case we should fall out (as all true lovers will) in the interval which must elapse be
tween now and our nuptials.
Therefore, this letter, my own dear bride-to-be, according to law, is a business contract. I have copied it into my office letter book. Please send your affirmative reply, or indicate your consent by signature below, for which I enclose a stamp and my affectionate regard.
Please believe me to be—
Yours in perpetuity subject to the above—
Edwin G. Bagott, Esq.
“‘Subject to the above’!” Fleurette shrieked. “What kind of man sends a woman a contract and a demand for a signature?”
“Are we obligated to reply,” asked Constance, “or is the lack of an acceptance considered a refusal?”
Norma scrutinized the page again. “With no terms given, I feel that we must refuse in all good speed, and preserve a copy for our office letter book, too, before you find yourself legally bound to Mr. Bagott.”
“Mrs. Constance Bagott!” said Fleurette. “Mother of four.”
“I do wonder about the mysteriously vanished former Mrs. Bagott, who apparently saw no other way out of her contract,” Norma muttered, and took up her pencil to compose the first draft of what was to be a carefully considered and legally binding reply.
“This is Carrie Hart’s fault,” Constance said. “That story of hers must be going all over the country.”
As Norma wrote and crossed out and muttered to herself, Fleurette imagined boarding a train. She often imagined boarding a train when Norma spoke, but now that the idea was to be made manifest, it gave her an extra thrill. She wondered what the Eight Dresden Dolls were doing at that very moment, and marveled at the fact that none of them were sitting in a parlor with two stiff older sisters, dreaming up clever ways to reject whatever proposal of marriage, job prospect, or other chance at a new life came their way.
It occurred to her, for the hundredth time, that other people didn’t pass their evenings this way. Other people—May Ward, in particular, and probably her Dolls, as well—would be intrigued by a letter from a stranger, and might hazard a friendly reply, and thereby find a new world—or at least an interesting correspondence—unfolding before them.
