The Styx

by Jonathon King

  As they passed three of these, Marjory looked carefully at the drivers, trying to discern from the look on their faces whether they knew what they had lost in the fire or were concerned over where they would sleep tonight. But their looks were as passive and unemotional as if they themselves were some part of the machinery they propelled. Marjory turned her eye to the rows of coconut palms that gracefully lined the avenue. Only the tuned ear heard the dead fronds in the tops, dried and scratching in the wind. She counted them, trying to distract herself from imagining the destination Mr. Pearson had in mind and in order to keep her mouth from getting her deeper into trouble. Instead, she speculated on who might identify the body now lying in the Styx, awaiting the sheriff, whose reputation preceded him as a man who was iron-handed when it came to keeping the sometimes boisterous rail workers in line during their off hours on the mainland and also making sure nothing that contained a whiff of illegality or violence should cross Lake Worth onto Palm Beach Island’s fantasy getaway. She’d met the sheriff once, at a social luncheon, and he struck her as someone as false and vulgar as the cheap cologne he wore at midday.

  When they finally pulled into a turnabout at the rear of the massive Poinciana, a livery boy took the horses by their bridles and a valet helped Marjory and Pearson down. In the side yards off to the north, Marjory could see a small gathering of ladies and gentlemen watching what could only be Roseann Birch, in full Victorian skirt and in full swing, hammering a golf ball out into an open field from a tee specifically built for the driving range. Roseann, a stout and irrepressible woman in her fifties, was the wife of an extremely rich banker in New York City, and Marjory had seen her harrumph and flick off any man who questioned her desire or participation in any activity at the hotel, be it golf, tennis, competitive swimming in the salt water pool or even skeet shooting.

  “Men are simply boys with toys. The only deadly sports I stay away from are politics and real estate,” she was famously known as saying aloud in mixed social settings, usually followed by a single-breath downing of a mint julep and an eye that challenged any man to match her estimable ability to consume alcohol.

  Marjory followed Pearson’s lead up the marbled stairs. As they crossed the expanse of the hotel’s grand lobby Pearson’s heels clacked over the inlaid Italian tile and every employee and nearly every guest tipped their heads in deference to the manager and half again as many made notice of Marjory. The men that she knew through introductions by her father indeed made it a point to touch the brims off their boaters and greet her by name as they passed. She greeted them by name if she remembered and by a subtle smile if she did not. Some of the newer guests were gaping up at the ornate frescos on the ceilings or at the arrangements of bright orange bird-of-paradise flowers shooting erotically from their boat-shaped cocoons and accented with their deep-blue tongues. The new arrivals always tickled Marjory in their awe of Florida’s surprises, unique regardless of the guests’ moneyed stations or wealth of travel experience.

  At the front desk Pearson simply laid his hand on the polished onyx countertop and a sheave of telegraphs and messages were placed into his palm. He moved on without glancing at them. Even though the manager had still not vocally indicated their destination, a bit rude by most standards, Marjory refused to ask, but she could tell by the direction through the hotel and past the open lounges that they were headed toward Pearson’s office.

  At the oak door of the manager’s suite, Pearson acted the gentleman, opening it and allowing her to enter first. He employed no secretary, passed through the outer office without breaking stride, again opened the door to his inner sanctum for Marjory, but stopped his assistant with a single glance and closed the door behind him. Marjory glanced back at the gesture and set her jaw. In mixed company, most especially a man with an unrelated woman, a door closed in private was an unusual occurrence.

  “Please, sit, Miss McAdams,” Pearson said, moving around to the business side of his massive desk. Marjory remained standing, turning away to face the fireplace. The hearth was cold and whisked clean of any ash. It was winter, but rarely did the temperature fall low enough for a fire, especially not in an office that would only be used during the daytime. She glanced at the photographs and framed certificates that lined the mantel. They all had to do with the building of the Royal Poinciana. None held any hint of the personal Mr. Pearson.

  “I have here, Miss McAdams, a telegram from your father.”

  She turned at the pronouncement.

  Pearson slid the typed paper across his desk, the surface of which was immaculately clean and without a single other object on its polished surface.

  “He has asked that you remain in your suite at the beach hotel and await his arrival tomorrow on the afternoon train. He asks also that you refrain from any further contact with the situation in the Styx and not to speak of it to any of the other guests.”

  Marjory stepped across the room and laid her fingertips on the stiff paper of the telegram. She knew that the Florida East Coast rail stations each had telegraph offices and that messages were delivered twice daily, a staple for the businessmen clientele at the hotel, who were convinced they could not be out of touch with their various holdings in New York and elsewhere during their travels.

  She picked up the telegram and without reading it slipped the paper into her pocket.

  “Are you in the habit of reading everyone’s correspondence before delivering it, Mr. Pearson?” she said, knowing she was on thin ice with the manager. But maybe that’s what one does in Florida where there is no ice, she thought, dismissing the gravity of her disrespectful tone.

  Instead of becoming angry, Pearson showed no emotion.

  “Yes,” he said, and Marjory swore she saw the slightest sign of a grin at the corner of his mouth.

  The statement caught her speechless. The brazen possibilities, as well as the potential opportunities of such actions by the manager, only began to form in her head.

  “I shall make sure that my father is aware of the policy,” was the only retort she could form.

  “I’m sure the information will be moot,” Pearson said. “As it is he who instructed me to the policy when I was hired for this position.”

  Unlike with her father and many of his friends, Marjory couldn’t tell whether this man was lying. He kept his gray eyes as blank and unreadable as a washed slate.

  “You may go,” he finally said.

  She formed a vitriolic response behind her tongue, but held it. She spun on one heel and walked ever so carefully toward the door but stopped and again faced the desk.

  “Did you recognize him, Mr. Pearson?” she said. “The dead man?”

  The manager raised his head and looked up through his eyebrows, but hesitated for only a beat.

  “You were there, Miss McAdams, when I asked if anyone recognized the unfortunate soul.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You asked if anyone else recognized him, Mr. Pearson. But you didn’t say whether you did.”

  There was now a twitch in the manager’s cheek. She had perhaps gone too far.

  “You may go,” he repeated.

  Marjory pinched both sides of her skirt and performed a slight curtsey.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and stepped out of the office. Only later did she wonder where the southern accent of her “Yeas sir” had come from. She was sure that it came across as if she were a slave obeying the demands of the plantation owner. She would be in even deeper trouble with her father if that indiscretion was also communicated.

  Marjory made her way outside onto the hotel’s wide colonnade, a broad, covered porch lined with rocking chairs that overlooked the emerald-green yards. There were a few women in the chairs, dressed in their Victorian finery, chatting side-by-side or simply working their embroidery in their laps while enjoying the breeze. Two men in seersucker suits, straw boaters and the white shoes typical of dressed-down vacationers smoked cigars and talked in low voices near one of the white columns. But most of the hotel guests
were in the distance in the Coconut Grove, seated at linen-covered tables under the shade of the palms. The hotel orchestra was playing. Marjory could make out the strains of a Sousa march, “The Belle of Chicago” or “The Bride Elect,” she could never tell the difference. She moved to an isolated spot along the rail and took the telegraph from her pocket.

  my dear Marjory…arriving noon train Wednesday 13…please, please behave and remain charming…will call on you at beach suite in due time to discuss recent matter…until then hold your own counsel…pp.

  Confined to my suite and ordered not to speak to any of the guests of the burning of the Styx and the death of a white gentleman found with a roll of money in his mouth indeed, she thought. It says no such thing! Pearson’s reading of the telegram was typical of a military man’s ciphering, strict and strident, black and white. It’s a wonder the north won the war at all with such men at the switch.

  Her father was asking for her best manners because with him gone she was the only representative of the family on site. Rather than banning her from discussing the situation, her father knew of her inherent inquisitiveness and no doubt wanted to speak with her about the events to gain as much knowledge firsthand before others in his employ.

  That was a far stretch from the angered and distressed accounting offered by Pearson. The true meaning of the message was only reinforced by the signature, pp, which was the endearing term “Pa Pa” that she had used with her father since childhood.

  Marjory tucked the telegram back into her skirts and looked out onto the grounds. The man was after all very well regarded by her father and Mr. Flagler himself. She closed her eyes. Asking him out loud if he’d recognized the dead man! My God, girl, what were you thinking? Still, he had not confirmed nor denied, had he? She set back her emotions and in her head took account of what she’d witnessed at the Styx. In her mind’s eye she marked off the length of the lean-to, where the heels of the corpse lay, then the head. She was astonished that the fire hadn’t consumed the entire mess. She had seen the singed mustache, but hadn’t dared to look closely at the face, burned as it was. She squeezed her eyes tighter.

  It would be best at this point to describe the man and the situation to her father when he arrived tomorrow in simple, vague terms. Was it possible that he would recognize the victim? She didn’t think so. Such a man was not the kind her father would have been acquainted with.

  Marjory still had her eyes closed when the orchestra struck the opening cords of “After the Ball” and she opened them and looked out toward Coconut Grove. Maurice, the band’s conductor, was certainly dancing at his own boundaries, she thought, by playing the popular Tin Pan Alley tune. Then her eye was caught by a dark knot of men moving up the walkway toward the hotel entrance.

  There were three, but only one mattered. He was the shortest of the group but the most imposing. The others were as accessories, flanking out from the substantial girth of Sheriff Maxwell Cox. No one, Marjory thought, would have to second-guess the identity of the notorious sheriff after a single glance. Cox was an imposing keg of a man, almost inhumanly broad in the chest with muscled arms and back curving down from his thick shoulders like oak slats on a barrel. His trunklike legs and hips moved as one, creating a rolling motion, and she couldn’t help think that if he fell he would surely continue to roll like a massive bowling ball to his destination. Marjory involuntarily put the tips of her fingers to her lips to stifle a laugh. Sheriff Cox was not a man to take as a joke.

  She continued to watch the sheriff and his dark-suited entourage move up the walkway to the main entrance of the hotel. She had no doubt that their destination was the very office she’d just left. Cox was the leading law enforcement officer in all of Dade County, which encompassed everything on the east coast from Sebastian Inlet at the north boundary to the new village of Miami to the south. The sheriff had only recently been spending more and more time in West Palm Beach, where money and influence was flowing in on Flagler’s coattails. Pearson’s orders to bring him to the island had been followed with haste and now the big man was here to set things straight. Cox’s southern past came with a reputation of being particularly harsh when it came to Florida’s migrant population, and the very whisper of a white man found dead in a Negro community would have inspired him to inject his authority without wasting time.

  Marjory watched the procession and caught the lyrics of the tune being played for those at tea in the grove, most of whom were no doubt oblivious of the burning of an entire community only a couple of miles from their afternoon merriment:

  After the ball is over, after the break of morn,

  After the dancers leaving, after the stars are gone,

  Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all—

  Many the hopes that have vanished after the ball.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT was the darkness that stunned Michael Byrne, kept him awake and outside on the platform of the caboose staring at the flat blackness of a moonless night. He had never encountered such a lack of light, a total void like a black painted panel of nothingness for miles and miles at a time. He could only imagine the silence because the train’s own mechanical huffing and grinding and clacking overwhelmed all else, but he knew it was out there in that blackness. That unchecked silence made him think of that barroom conundrum: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? He could also only imagine the lack of movement since he stood on this platform and its constant rocking, back and forth, over the uneven and frequently dipping rails. But out there, he could see no tilt or rumble, push or shove, rise or fall. He might have been mesmerized. He might have even been a bit scared. But he wasn’t sleeping. This moving landscape was too strange and awesome for a young man born in the constant sidewalk swirl, cacophonic sound and unavoidable light of the city.

  After Henry Flagler’s business meeting in Philadelphia and after his wife’s numerous boxes and cartons and purchases from Wanamaker’s were loaded, their private car was moved back onto a main track and switched onto yet another southbound train.

  “This is one of Mr. Flagler’s own FEC trains,” Harris said. “Straight to Jacksonville now, lad, no stopping unless Mr. Flagler himself asks.”

  When they hit Washington, D.C., Byrne’s view was restricted to what he could see when the train stopped briefly to take on passengers at the Pennsylvania railroad station at the base of Capitol Hill. Still in the late afternoon light, he could see the glowing white dome of the Capitol Building to the east and the towering Washington Monument to the west. He recalled a night at McSorely’s when a traveler described the monument as a giant spear shooting straight up into the sky, the tallest structure in the world, although some equally drunk Frenchman argued there was a taller tower in Paris that had been built for the World’s Fair. After seeing the marble shaft in the distance, Byrne would now have to side with the traveler, but that night he and the boys had a laugh when the man and Frenchy got into a fistfight over the whole affair and ended up out on Seventh Street lying in a gutter of frozen horse urine, which no one would argue was the lowest point in the United States.

  The train rolled south for the rest of the evening and night. Byrne and Harris took turns walking the cars, again running surveillance on new passengers. “Puttin’ ’em in the iron sites,” Harris called it. But there was no one of interest. Another family, this time with the head of household in attendance, a businessman from D.C. whose shrewish wife stared at the side of her husband’s face when another woman passenger walked through ahead of Byrne to see whether he would look up from the papers he was reading. Two new men traveling alone had taken places in the club car. One was working at a flask in his coat pocket, surreptitiously hitting at the neck of the bottle. He’d be unconscious before eight o’clock, Byrne determined.

  Mr. Faustus had reboarded. He winked once when Byrne passed through the sitting car. But Byrne avoided the subtle invitation to stop and talk, albeit with great reluctance. There was something ab
out the old man’s interest in him that was palpable, or maybe he tested everyone he met on the train. Perhaps he’d even met Danny. Byrne wanted to pick the old man’s brain, find out more on his own rather than judge the man based only on Harris’ cryptic appraisal. But for now he would wait, as the sergeant had warned. Instead Byrne moved along and chose the “binder boys” as his intelligence target.

  “Έvenin’, boy’os,” he said to the group and slid into a seat without asking.

  The three glanced at one another and then the oldest looking of the team slid a bit over and said: “Free country, mate.”

  “You’re on from New York, eh?” Byrne said, using his accent from the street, not kissing up, but unashamedly trying to take advantage of a connection based on Harris’ information.

  “Brewer’s Row in Bushwick,” said one. He was German-looking. Byrne checked his hands, small and uncalloused, his eyes were clear and smart under high cheekbones. Might be the smartest of the bunch, he thought.