by Amy Stewart
“It was a quarter past two,” Norma said.
We all looked at her in surprise.
“I checked the clock when I went to get my blankets. Constance was too busy messing around with that rifle to notice what time it was.”
Sheriff Heath sat back in his chair to regard Norma from a distance. “A rifle? What were you girls planning to do with a rifle?”
Norma sniffed. “She was planning to protect her sisters. What were you doing?”
He looked at me and back at Norma, perhaps trying to figure out where he stood with each of us. Then he pushed his chair back and asked if he could go upstairs to view the crime scene. Norma told him he could not, and I told him he could. She shoved her chair away from the table and went out the kitchen door without a word. I took the sheriff upstairs and Fleurette followed.
Norma had knocked the glass out of the windows in our mother’s room, swept up the broken mirror and the pins, and wedged boards into the empty panes. The bricks sat carefully in the center of the dresser, like trinkets put on display, the way one might exhibit a starfish taken from the beach.
Sheriff Heath looked around for a minute, glanced out the window, and tested the boards to be sure they were secure. His hat brushed against a little chandelier above the bed and made him duck. I was embarrassed for him to see Mother’s things, the way we’d left them. There was a faint smell of gasoline about him that seemed to take up all the air in the room.
“I’ll take the bricks,” he said, wrapping a handkerchief around them. Then he looked down at Fleurette.
“Did they let you read that letter?” he asked.
I started to defend myself. “Had I known what it said—”
He held out a hand to stop me. “It’s all right. It was directed at her. She should know.”
Fleurette was leaning in the doorway. He put his hands on her shoulders, the way a father might, and she straightened up in surprise. It startled me, too, to see a man handle her like that. She bit her lip and looked up at him with wide, wet eyes.
“These men are serious,” he said in a low voice. “They’re not playing a game. I’m going to do everything I can to keep them away from you, and you’re going to stay away from them. Understand?”
She nodded and took a deep gulp of air. He kept hold of her shoulders. I was standing behind him and found myself watching the way the back of his neck lifted away from his collar as he bent to speak to her. “I don’t want you to leave the front door unlocked. I don’t want you to sleep with the windows open. I don’t want you going down to the creek by yourself, and for that matter I don’t want you to even go to the barn by yourself. If you’re going to town, you take someone with you, and you watch out. All right?”
She could barely answer. “All right.”
I thought he was finished, but he wasn’t. He kept talking to her with that same mixture of paternal warmth and sternness that Fleurette had so rarely heard from anyone. Even Francis had never spoken to her quite like that.
“Keep your eyes down around strangers. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. Don’t open the door for salesmen or delivery boys, unless you’re expecting them. Can you do that?”
Fleurette was staring at him, mesmerized.
“Can you?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“You will stay off streetcars and trains. Don’t have lunch or stop for any reason in a hotel. No hotels.”
“No hotels,” she whispered.
“And listen to your sisters and do what they say. If I’m going to put my men in harm’s way for you, you mustn’t do anything that makes their job more difficult or dangerous.”
She took it all in with tremulous, wide-eyed surprise. At last he let go of her shoulders and said, “I’m going to take a walk outside and speak to your sisters now. I want you to keep yourself busy in here and don’t try to follow us.”
We left her in Mother’s room and walked downstairs together. He let himself out through the kitchen door and I followed him. Norma was in the pigeon loft feeding her birds. She took her time, enjoying making us wait. Sheriff Heath tried to ask a few polite questions about carrier pigeons, but she gave him disgruntled silence in response. When she was finished with her work, she shook a canvas apron off her neck and hung it on a nail outside the loft. She looked at us expectantly, but still she refused to speak.
“All right,” Sheriff Heath said. “Come with me.”
We followed him out to his car, which was parked near the end of our drive. He reached in the back seat and took out a wooden case. Then he straightened and looked around him, surveying the house with its shuttered windows, the old misshapen barn, the neighbor’s hogs in their pen across the way, and our unmowed pasture with the river and the willow trees beyond it. Down the road the dairy cows lowed and slapped their tails against their flanks.
“Would you ladies mind a walk to the creek?” he said.
Norma and I followed him across the pasture, matching his long strides. In a few minutes we were standing under a copse of willow trees, their branches whip-thin and starting to shed leaves. Sheriff Heath scrambled down to the creek bed and set his case down. He straightened up to look back toward the house. “You can’t see much of the house from down here,” he said, mostly to himself.
Then he unlocked the case and we saw that he had two dark blue revolvers with him.
“Do both of you know how to shoot that rifle?” he asked.
“It belongs to our brother,” I said. “We can fire it, but just to scare something off. I don’t think I could hit anything.”
“We could hit Mr. Kaufman, if it came to that,” Norma said. That made the sheriff laugh.
“I hope you won’t have to,” he said. “Now, why don’t you come try this one?”
Norma stood next to him and looked down the length of the creek. With the leaves coming off the trees, we could see all the way down to the end of our property line and into the woods beyond.
“Now, listen,” Sheriff Heath said, with the same stern tenderness he’d shown to Fleurette. “You see the one red tree down there? The maple coming out right where the creek makes that bend?”
Norma nodded.
“Just below that is a big rock. A big white boulder really shining in the sun. Do you see it?”
Again she nodded.
He lifted a revolver from the case and opened the chamber to check the ammunition. Then he swung it closed and pressed the butt of it into her hand. He kept his hand over hers and raised it to the white rock.
“Use the notch on the top to get it in your sights,” he said in a low voice. He was standing so close that he could talk right in her ear. “See the blade at the end of the barrel? Like a half a penny. Use that to line it up.”
She nodded and aimed.
“That’s good,” he said. “Put one foot behind the other like this. Steady feet. Steady hand. Strong arm. Bend your elbow just a little. That’s it.”
Without turning her head, Norma shifted her eyes just enough to meet his. He brought his hand up to pull back the hammer, but before he could, she cocked it with her thumb, looked back at the rock, and fired a shot.
The explosion echoed up and down the length of the creek. I felt it hammer my chest, like another heart beating next to mine. There was the smell of something burning and a ringing in my ears. I couldn’t tell if she’d hit the rock, but she’d fired it to Sheriff Heath’s satisfaction.
She was still aiming the gun straight up the creek when he reached around and took it out of her hand. “That’s good,” he said. “Thank you.” Then, turning to me, “Miss Kopp?”
Norma took a few steps back and folded her arms. I’d never seen her fire a revolver before and she seemed awfully satisfied with herself for having pulled it off.
It was my turn next. The sheriff took my right hand by the wrist and raised it. My fingers curled instinctively around his. He smiled and said, “Don’t hold on to me. Hold on to the gun.”
When he pressed the r
evolver into my palm, it was heavier than I expected and warm from having just been fired. I tried to keep my hand from shaking.
He stepped back and gave me the same instructions he had given to Norma. “Aim straight for that white rock. Plant your feet first. Strong arms. Steady hands. When you’re ready—”
Before he could say another word I pulled the hammer back and squeezed the trigger. I must’ve hit the treetops, not the rock, because a flock of starlings raised a cry and circled in the sky before landing some distance away.
“That’s all right,” he said quickly. “That’s just fine. Now you know what to expect. Fire it once more, and this time think about holding steady when it kicks. Use your sights.”
I squared my stance and aimed the barrel straight at that rock, squinting at the notch and the narrow half-moon at the end of the barrel that were my guides, and fired. I don’t think I hit the rock, but I managed to keep the gun level. Then I stood holding the revolver straight out until Sheriff Heath took it from me.
He pulled three bullets out of his pocket and reloaded it, then bent down to lock it back in its case. After that he stood and offered the case to me.
“There’s one for each of you,” he said. “Don’t let Miss Fleurette handle them. I’d rather she didn’t even see them. Keep them near you at night, but don’t put them under your pillows, and don’t tuck them into your clothing. You’re not to fire directly at anyone. If those men come back, aim in their general direction but shoot into the trees. You’re just trying to scare them off. Understand?”
Norma nodded and climbed up and out of the creek bed. Sheriff Heath followed, then leaned down to offer his hand to me.
I didn’t need it, but I took it.
24
AFTER THAT, Fleurette ceased her theatrical performances, and Norma returned her injured bird to the loft. Its wing had mostly healed but its delivery career was at an end. Fleurette, who hated chores and usually refused to do them, became remarkably obedient following her talk with the sheriff. She patched a hole in the coop where mice were getting in to steal the chickens’ feed, and she painted the fence around the vegetable garden and cleared a patch for spring peas.
Sheriff Heath had his men watching the house, but they weren’t there all the time. They would stop late at night on their way home from tending to some other criminal matter. I grew accustomed to the sound of an automobile idling in the road after midnight. This was why the sheriff warned us not to fire directly at anyone. He was afraid we’d shoot his own deputies. They seemed to understand that too, because they never stopped in front of our house. They always rolled a few yards past our driveway and parked in a wide, bare spot under an oak tree.
I thought a lot about Lucy going to work every day in the dye factory and taking the wages she earned and handing them back to Mr. Kaufman in rent. And I pictured that baby, wherever he was. He’d be learning to talk by now. Someone would be calling to him with their hands outstretched the way people do with little children, but what name they called him I didn’t know.
I did wish there was something I could do for Lucy. But it seemed like every advance I made against Henry Kaufman invited another brick through our window.
“WHO IS HENRI LAMOTTE?” Fleurette said one afternoon as she brought in the mail.
“Let me see it,” I said.
“Not until you tell me who he is.”
“Is the letter addressed to me?”
“I don’t know. It’s addressed to Miss Kopp. It might be for me.”
She stood over my chair with the envelope in her hand. “You’ve already opened it, haven’t you?” I said.
She held it out to me reluctantly. “It could’ve been for any one of us.”
“You know better,” I said.
October 1, 1914
Henri LaMotte, Proprietor
LaMotte Studios
Dear Miss Kopp,
I have found some photographs that may be of interest to you. They were taken last year at the building that was the subject of your inquiry. One of my men had been engaged to photograph the goings-on at that address for several weeks, but the attorney who hired us never paid for his pictures. I had forgotten that we had them until they reappeared just now. If you want them, I will hold them for you until Tuesday. After that I must destroy them. We prefer not to become a repository for unclaimed photographic evidence, although I have apparently let my standards slip. I shall right the ship and sail on!
Au revoir,
Henri LaMotte
“What does it mean? Photographic evidence of what?”
I looked around to see if Norma was within earshot. She must have been outside. I read the letter again.
“It has to do with Lucy,” I said at last.
Fleurette gasped and slid into my armchair, half perching on the arm and half sitting in my lap. She hadn’t done that in years.
“We’ve found a clue, haven’t we?” Fleurette breathed into my ear.
There was a sugary smell that hung around Fleurette, like the crumb tarts we used to bake when she was a little girl. I closed my eyes and the memory of it came over me. I used to tell her that she was good enough to eat, and she would shriek and run to Mother in mock horror.
She twisted around to look at me directly. “Would these pictures help her get her baby back?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll forward the letter to her. She can decide what to do about it.”
Fleurette jumped out of my lap. “But there’s no time! He said you have to come and get them Tuesday. That’s tomorrow. We have to take this to her now.”
I shook my head. “You heard what the sheriff said. We have to be very careful around strangers.”
“But she isn’t a stranger,” Fleurette said. “Just go over there and drop it in her mailbox.”
I turned the envelope over in my hands. “I don’t think I should,” I said. “I believe Norma’s right this time. We need to stay out of Henry Kaufman’s business.”
“But don’t you care about that poor girl?” Fleurette said, a little desperation in her voice. “Try to imagine for one minute what it would be like to be a young mother and lose your baby like that. How would you feel?”
I bit the inside of my lip. She’d never come this close to the truth, and I didn’t want her getting any closer. I’d made my own kind of peace with the past and was not eager to reckon with it again.
But Fleurette was right. Lucy was living with a kind of loss I had never known.
“Don’t tell Norma where I’m going,” I said.
25
ALONG LUCY’S STREET the windows of the old boarding houses were smudged with smoke and steam. Someone was boiling coffee, someone was scorching the bottom of a pot of soup, and someone was frying a fish. In front of one house, a woman in a brown dress bent over a patch of overgrown greens, searching among the tough stalks and seed heads for a few leaves that were still tender enough to eat.
I had put Mr. LaMotte’s letter into an envelope of my own with a note of explanation, hoping to leave it in Lucy’s mailbox and run off before anyone saw me. But when I tried to open the front door to Lucy’s building, it wobbled and fell down, landing in the dark hallway with a bang. It had been torn off its hinges and propped up to cover the entrance.
I backed into the weedy front yard and looked up. One of the windows on the second floor had been boarded over. There were no signs of life in the building—no washing on the clothesline, no lights or curtains in the windows, no clatter of dishes or smell of dinner on the stove. Then, as I leaned closer to risk a peek through the gaping doorway, the odor hit me. Fire.
I jumped back as if the building were still burning. A woman across the street swept her porch and watched me. Three boys played with a ball on the corner, and when it bounced against the street it gave an eerie and empty echo.
A low fence between Lucy’s building and the one next door had been knocked down. I stepped over it and walked around to the rear of the house, which w
as entirely scorched. Blackened timbers had begun to disintegrate in the autumn wind and rain, and the windows were nothing but holes offering admittance to birds and squirrels.
Where a back door might have once stood, there was nothing but a cement threshold and the burnt end of a wooden post. I took a step inside and kicked away a cracked glass doorknob and the blistered lid of an enameled pot. The rattle they made echoed around the hollow and charred interior. Even the staircase was gone. The remains of the bannister hung uselessly from the second floor.
If Lucy had been home, I didn’t see how she could have made it out alive. Everyone on the upper floors would have been trapped.
I don’t remember running to the trolley, but I was on board and halfway to Hackensack before I could hold my hands steady again. At the courthouse I asked to speak to Sheriff Heath.
“He just left,” the girl at the reception desk said.
“A deputy, then,” I said, pushing my hair back under my hat. I was still sweating from my race away from Lucy’s. “I was to come here if—if something happened. Give them my name. It’s Constance Kopp.”
With as bored and indifferent an air as she could muster, the girl went and whispered something to the guard standing on the courthouse steps. “Wait here,” she said, and the guard walked down the steps and around to the jail.
A few minutes later, a gray-haired man in a deputy’s uniform walked in. “Deputy Morris, miss,” he said. He looked at the receptionist, who was watching us curiously. “This way, please.”
He took my arm and we walked down the corridor, where no one could hear us. “Sheriff Heath has been helping me and my sisters with some trouble we had,” I said.
“Yes, miss. I’ve been by on patrol a few times. Has he bothered you again?”
I shook my head. “It’s something else. It’s about a fire over in Paterson. Sometime in the last few weeks. A boarding house on Summer. Did you hear about it?”
