Girl Waits with Gun
Page 17
“We’ve come all this way. We should dip our toes in the water,” I said.
The beach was almost silver, shimmering in the sunlight like a mirror. It had grown unexpectedly warm since our arrival, and all at once it felt more like August than October. I pulled the laces out of my shoes and—after looking around to make sure no one was watching—rolled off my stockings. The pleasure of immersing my bare feet in the warm sand made me shiver. Norma gave a little half-smile of surrender and soon she was barefoot, too. Once Fleurette saw us, she ran up and took us both by the hands, dragging us to the water. For an hour we splashed and kicked at the sand and chased the seagulls like any ordinary family at the beach.
We spread out our picnic and two boys came around selling lemonade and pretzels. Fleurette wanted us to buy something in honor of her birthday, so we did. We ate our pretzels in the sand and then stretched out on our backs to look up at the sky. The little waves barely made a sound at all when they patted the shore. The gulls whooshed down next to us to inspect our empty lemonade bottles and lifted off again. I must have fallen asleep, because the next time I looked around, Fleurette had left us and gone to stand by herself and look across Long Island Sound toward the distant and endless Atlantic.
28
AT FIRST, there was no point in pretending that the baby wasn’t mine. Fleurette’s bassinet stayed in my bedroom for the first year so that I could nurse her and get up with her in the middle of the night. But during the day, Mother took her from me.
“She has to learn to come to me,” she said.
I knew she was right. I knew that, years later, Fleurette couldn’t have an inexplicable bond with one sister that she didn’t have with the other. The girl needed to grow up with one mother, and it had already been decided who that mother would be. So my mother was the one who held her and fussed over her and decided how to dress her and when to bathe her.
She only handed the baby to me when it was feeding time. I would take her into the pantry and crouch down on a little stool we’d put there for that purpose. It was just the two of us in the dark, surrounded by tins of baking soda and breakfast tea. Fleurette would look up at me through enormous black, uncomprehending eyes as she fed. She was looking at her mother, as any baby would when it nursed. With her eyes open but her mind unformed, she was witnessing the great secret of her life, one that she was supposed to forget, and would forget.
In those moments I felt like I’d stolen her. If she fell asleep I would sit and hold her, matching my breath to hers there among the preserves and pickled beans, counting the minutes until my mother’s footsteps would come across the floor and the door would open.
“You know better,” she would say, and take her from me.
Norma wasn’t particularly interested in the baby. She was a teenager, still finishing school in Ridgewood, and happily occupied with farm chores in her spare time. She and Francis bought a pair of goats, they built a chicken coop and figured out how to raise a flock, and they put up a fence to keep the deer away from the vegetable garden. The two of them kept so busy that no one even noticed that they’d built a pigeon loft as well. It wasn’t until an incubator appeared in the kitchen that we realized what Norma had in mind.
Baby pigeons were far more interesting to her than baby humans, but she took her turns with Fleurette anyway, sitting with her on the kitchen floor and watching the gray fledglings hop around in their crate of wood and straw. Sometimes Norma would take one of the baby birds firmly in her hand and hold it out to Fleurette, its legs splayed and its wings pinned behind it. Fleurette would reach one finger out to the bird’s downy undercarriage and laugh uproariously.
Everything made Fleurette laugh. She was at the very center of a world created just for her, and she knew it.
29
NIGHT CLOUDS OBSCURED THE MOON over our house. We maneuvered down the drive in total darkness. Fleurette had fallen asleep on the ride home and slumped over against me, warm and heavy. Norma brought Dolley to a stop and was about to jump out and check on her birds when I saw it.
Our front door was open.
We both reached for Fleurette at the same time, which made her squeal.
“Shhhhh.” I felt around under her feet for the picnic basket, where I’d hidden the revolvers. Fleurette caught a glimpse of them and gasped.
“What are those?”
I backed out of the buggy and took her chin in my hand. Her eyes were wide open now and frantic. “Be very quiet,” I whispered. “If anything happens, go straight for the dairy and pound on the door until they let you in.” She nodded. I pressed Dolley’s reins into her hands.
Norma had stepped out on the other side of the buggy. I tilted my head in the direction of the open door. We advanced toward it and she took a gun from me. We were almost to the porch when, from the other side of the house, the kitchen door burst open and half a dozen men scrambled out into the black night.
I chased after them, stopping just long enough to get them in my sights and fire.
The shot exploded across the meadow and sent a flock of crows screeching into the sky. By now the men had reached a bank of trees along the road and I could hardly see them. I took up my skirts and ran, but then came the kick of an automobile starting and the sound of tires grinding in the dirt.
By the time I reached the road, the black bulk had sputtered and motored away. I fired again and again into the darkness it left behind.
Gunpowder smoke and dust drifted around me in a cloud. It took a minute to clear, but once it did I took a deep breath and willed my hands to stop shaking. Only then did I turn to look back at our darkened house, and the dim figure of our horse in front. I couldn’t see Norma or Fleurette.
I’d left them alone.
I ran back down the drive and Norma met me at the buggy. Both of us reached for Fleurette at once, as if we needed to feel her pulse.
“I didn’t dare shoot once you started to run,” Norma said.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I think they’re gone.”
We started to lift Fleurette out of the buggy, but she shook her head and stayed planted on her seat.
“We can’t go in,” she whispered. “What if he’s waiting for us?”
“Who?” I asked.
“H-Henry Kaufman.”
Norma and I both laughed at once, but it was a nervous, trembling laugh. “He never goes anywhere without that gang of his,” I said. “If he was here, he ran out with the rest of them.”
I turned to the open front door and shouted. “Did you hear that, Henry Kaufman? If you were here, you’re gone now!” I fired my gun in the air, high over the house, to make my point. Norma flinched and Fleurette covered her ears, but I didn’t care. I’d had enough of Henry Kaufman and I refused to be afraid of walking into my own house.
“Let’s go.” I stepped inside, feeling bold from the gunfire still ringing in my ears. Norma picked up our porch lamp and lit it as we went in.
Our grandfather clock was overturned in the foyer, surrounded by a mess of broken glass. We picked our way across it, stumbling over magazines splayed open and scarves and hats that should have been on our coat rack. Norma lifted the lamp, and it was only then that we understood. The house had been ransacked. Every piece of furniture in the parlor was piled in the middle of the room: upended chairs, overturned tables, desks with the drawers knocked out of them, and the divan, standing awkwardly on its end. Pictures had been torn from the walls and thrown into the pile, the glass broken out of the frames. Vases and lamps and even the contents of a knitting basket were strewn about.
The occasional table near the door, where we kept our mail, had been thrown into the drawing room, atop another pile of furniture. Books had been pulled from their shelves, and a potted rubber tree that I would have thought too heavy to move was on its side, surrounded by dirt and broken ceramic. Even the rug was rolled up into the rough, uneven pyramid made by our things.
“Did they take anything?” Fleurette asked at last.
By then we’d reached the sitting room, and all three of us smelled it at once. Smoke.
This time Norma ran on ahead, reaching the kitchen first and shouting for us to bring a blanket. Seeing nothing we could readily extract from the mess around us, we followed her in. They had started a fire on our kitchen table, setting flame to the newspapers we’d left there that morning. There was nothing left of them but dry and drifting ashes, and a few corners still curling and flickering. Now the lace tablecloth was giving way, each filament glowing orange before crumbling to black. The flames cast a weird light around the kitchen and the smoke drifted to the ceiling like a miniature storm cloud.
I pulled my coat off and Norma and I slammed it down on the table and beat at it while Fleurette drew a bucket of water. Soon there was nothing but a soggy pile of tweed and ashes on the table, along with the broken remains of the crumb-covered plates we’d left there that morning.
The three of us dropped into our chairs, panting and coughing a little, staring at the mess in front of us. The intruders had left the kitchen door open when they’d fled. It had a tendency to close on its own, but it was still open just enough to let in a draft of cold air. Our eyes wandered over to it.
There was a metal can just outside the kitchen door. Fleurette started to ask what it was, but I already knew.
“Kerosene. They were building a bonfire.”
SOMEONE HAD TO CHECK THE BEDROOMS UPSTAIRS. After a moment of indecision over who should go—we were too exhausted and confused to think clearly—we walked through the downstairs rooms together, locking doors and windows as we went. Norma and I each kept a revolver pointed in a different direction.
“Where did you get those?” Fleurette asked.
“Sheriff Heath,” I said quietly, out of the side of my mouth.
“Why would he give you . . .” And she trailed off as the answer occurred to her.
“Because of this,” Norma said grimly. “Because he knew something like this might happen.”
Once I was sure no one was hidden downstairs, I left them standing by the front door and ran up, pounding the stairs as loud as I could to announce my arrival, rapping my gun on each door before I entered. But our bedrooms were empty and untouched. Fleurette’s chemise still dangled from the bedpost where she’d left it. Norma’s treatise on pigeons was open on her nightstand. The thought of those men running through our rooms, touching our things, sent another jolt through me and my knees almost buckled.
Downstairs, Norma and Fleurette had already begun to sort through the mess and try to make sense of what happened. “Norma found a box of matches outside the kitchen door,” Fleurette called to me, “and they’re not the kind we use. She thinks they heard us ride up and didn’t have time for the kerosene, but threw a match on the table before they left anyway.”
I nodded, my arms crossed over my chest. “It must’ve been something like that.”
Norma came in from the parlor with a man’s overcoat hooked over one finger. She held it out at arm’s length. “They left this behind.”
Fleurette reached for it. “Can a coat have fingerprints?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe the buttons. But let’s be careful.”
Fleurette took it from Norma and held it up in the dim light of the porch lamp. It was a thick wool coat, navy blue, lined in silk the color of rhubarb. There were leather tabs at the cuffs and collar, and buttons that must have been made of brass but looked like gold. It might have been hand sewn: as we leaned in, we saw no label advertising a department store or even the city of manufacture.
It was a beautiful piece of work, something worn by a man who appreciated fine tailoring. But it was also quietly terrifying to have the shape of the man who had been in our house suspended there from Fleurette’s arms. I took it from her and found a place for it on our coat rack. We all stepped back and watched it like it might turn on us.
Something on the coat gleamed and caught the light. It was a gold stick pin topped by a diamond.
“Just the sort of thing a vain man would wear,” Norma said.
We took up the lantern and made another turn around the wreckage. We found a handkerchief that didn’t belong to us, and a man’s gold ring. I couldn’t see a jeweler’s mark, but I held it carefully by the edges, hoping it might yield a fingerprint.
“We’ll take this to the sheriff tomorrow,” I said. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”
“We can’t possibly stay here!” Norma said.
“Where do you expect us to go? I’m not about to wake up Francis at this hour. He’ll never let us move back in here if he finds out about this.”
Fleurette shuffled across the floor, kicking away the pieces of a ruby cut-glass bowl we’d always believed unbreakable. When she reached the stairs, she called over her shoulder, “I can’t look at this mess any longer. If they come back, you two can just shoot at them and we’ll clean it all up tomorrow.”
“Get in my bed,” I said.
When she was gone, Norma whispered, “I won’t sleep in this house.”
“I don’t intend to sleep. But there’s nowhere to go, unless you’d like to ride into Hackensack and ask the sheriff to take us into the jail for the night.”
Norma deliberated over that for a minute. “If it’s to be a choice between Francis and the Hackensack jail, I suppose we’ll manage for one night.”
We made one more check of the doors and windows together, then climbed the stairs and took up the same positions we’d occupied before. I wrapped myself around Fleurette, and Norma spread out her blankets under the window. The rifle leaned against the wall again, but this time Norma settled down with a revolver next to her, and I did too. Fleurette curled into a tight ball and stared at the wall. At some point in the early morning, her eyes closed. I listened to her breathe for hours.
30
THIS TIME WHEN I WENT TO TOWN, no one stayed at home. We were up at the first light and packed a few valuables and keepsakes into the buggy in case the men returned while we were gone. I rolled the intruder’s coat into a pillowcase, along with the ring, stickpin, and the matches we’d found. It made me queasy to touch all of it, but no one else would.
Fleurette tried to take the reins but I wouldn’t let her on the grounds that I didn’t know who we might be passing on the road. So Norma drove and I sat with my arm around Fleurette and my hand over my handbag with the revolver tucked inside. Along the way every black automobile looked suspicious to me. An engine misfired and I pushed Fleurette to the floor, eliciting a yelp of protest.
“Stop it!” she said. “He’s not going to come after us on the street in front of everybody.”
“He has before,” I said.
“Stop it anyway,” Norma said over her shoulder. “You’ll give me a nervous fit if you keep jumping around like that.”
I didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive, but I slid my hand in my bag anyway. I found the cold weight of the revolver calming.
We arrived at the jail in Hackensack before nine o’clock. It was a new building and a decidedly odd one, designed, according to the Board of Freeholders’ wishes, to look like a medieval fortress with turrets and tiny windows of the sort one might use to shoot a cannon at attacking armies. The Hackensack River ran alongside it like a moat. The edifice had been mocked in the papers as being a waste of taxpayers’ money and looking more like a playhouse for schoolboys than a serious building with a public purpose.
And like most medieval fortresses (I supposed, not having visited any others), it did not feature an expansive and welcoming entrance. We walked around the building once, unsure which of the locked, windowless doors were intended for our use. At last I shrugged, climbed some stairs, and pounded on the door that looked most promising.
A harried, red-cheeked woman in a yellow apron answered the door. A perfect angel of a baby sat on her hip, its face framed in bl
ond curls. I took a step back in surprise.
“Oh,” I said. “We meant to go to the prison. We’re here to see Sheriff Heath. Did I . . .” and I trailed off, looking up at the building for some clue as to where I might have gone wrong.
“This is the prison,” she said brusquely. “And it also happens to be my home.”
She looked so affronted by this that I thought she expected an apology from me, but I wasn’t sure what I’d done.
Fleurette started to say something. Before she got us into even more trouble, I said, “I’m so sorry to disturb you. We’re here on an urgent matter for the sheriff.”
The baby was starting to squirm in the cold air. She closed the door slightly so that he was behind the door and out of the wind. “I know,” she said. “He saw you coming from the third floor and called down. He’ll be here soon as he can.”
Again she stared at us. Her mouth was a hard blank line.
Realizing that we weren’t going to be invited in, I said, “Where would you like us to wait?”
At that she exhaled a tired and exasperated sigh, looked out at the empty drive that ringed the prison, and pushed the door open. “I suppose you’ll come in. The great minds who designed this building seemed to have forgotten about a public entrance or a waiting room.”
We followed her inside. To my surprise, the room was furnished like an ordinary living room, with overstuffed chairs and a fireplace and children’s toys strewn about.
“It looks like someone lives here!” Fleurette said.