Girl Waits with Gun

by Amy Stewart

  “I think she misses her neighbors even more,” he said. “The inmates and guards are no company for a woman. I hope you’ll come and pay her a visit.”

  “Oh!” she said, flustered. “At the prison? I don’t think—”

  “It’s the safest home in Bergen County,” I said. Sheriff Heath gave me a grateful look. “I’ve been there myself, and I can assure you that Mrs. Heath has made it quite comfortable.”

  “Well, perhaps I will,” she said, without enthusiasm.

  Sheriff Heath cleared his throat and nodded at me. I explained our purpose.

  She squinted up at the two of us. “I don’t remember him, but I’m not the only one who greets visitors. What does the boy look like?”

  “I’m afraid we don’t know,” I said. “When the child was last seen, he was just a baby, and we have only the most general description.”

  She looked up and down the long empty hallway. There were doors on either side, the kind with glass windows and someone’s name in gold lettering. “If he was here, we would have a file.” After looking around again, she said, “It’s almost five o’clock. I don’t think anyone else will be in today. Stay here and let me go have a peek in the office.”

  She disappeared through a door down the corridor. Several nurses and orderlies left for the day, their coats and lunch pails over their arms. They looked at us but said nothing as they walked by.

  At last Mrs. Griggs returned with a stack of folders under her arm. “Here are all the children who came in around that time. What are the names again?” she asked.

  We gave her every name we could think of connected to the case. There were a few dozen files to look through, but she paged through them quickly and shook her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t see any of those names.”

  “Have these children all been adopted?” I asked.

  “Oh, I would think so by now, wouldn’t you? Let me see.” She paged through them again, placing the files in one of three stacks on her desk.

  “These were returned to their families,” she said, pointing to the first stack. “These were put up for adoption and placed with someone. And these are still here, or their files are incomplete. I’d have to make some inquiries to find out what happened to them.”

  I pointed to the second and third stacks. “May I see just the boys?”

  I reached into my pocketbook for some notepaper and wrote down the names in the remaining files. There was very little information to record. In some cases it was simply a date, the age and sex of the child, and a line for whatever name people were willing to supply. I saw no Bobby or Robert or Robbie among them, nor any boy of the right age who would have been dropped off around that time.

  “Are you sure these are all of them?” I said.

  “All but the private placements,” she answered. “Some of our records are sealed at the mother’s request.”

  I shook my head. “The mother is the one looking for the child in this case.”

  Sheriff Heath rose to thank his friend and soon we were outside in the fading afternoon light. The mills had just discharged their workers, and a stream of weavers and dyers and machinists flooded Market Street, each shivering in their work clothes and trudging toward whatever kind of home they knew. Sheriff Heath drove me back to Wyckoff while I sat next to him in silence, my fingers working the edges of the page on which I had written the names of lost and orphaned children and the adults who had deposited them there for safekeeping, or whatever manner of keeping a child might expect in an asylum hospital.

  “I don’t like it,” he said, before I got out of the car. “I don’t picture Kaufman and that gang of his stealing a baby and leaving it at an orphanage. How would they even know what to do with a baby?”

  I agreed. I couldn’t see Henry Kaufman doing a thing like that, either. But I also couldn’t believe he wasn’t involved somehow.

  52

  THAT NIGHT ANOTHER SNOWFALL made Sicomac Road almost impassable again. Two of the enormous plane trees that lined the road split in half under the force of wind and ice, blocking the way until the weather cleared enough for some of the men to come out and chop them to pieces. Low spots in the road had turned into rivers when it rained and were now frozen. When the ice thawed, the ground heaved and cracked.

  In the early morning, a sharp sound propelled me out of bed. Thinking it was a gunshot, I flattened myself against the wall next to the window, which was glazed with ice and impossible to see through. I was trying to force it open when Norma appeared in the doorway, already dressed and wrapped in her winter coat.

  “It was a tree,” she said. “It hit the barn. Get dressed.”

  I did as she said and met her in the kitchen, which was dark and so cold that it, too, could have been covered in ice. She handed me a pair of work gloves and a set of earmuffs. “Watch your step,” she said, and pushed the door open. “It’s frozen solid out here.”

  I choked at the first blast of frigid air. Norma tucked her chin into her coat and trudged ahead, making little snorting sounds as she struggled to breathe. Across the drive were the severed branches of an old elm tree that lost the battle with the storm. Only its roots, just lifted out of the ground, were not covered in ice.

  The barn door was entirely blocked by fallen limbs, making it impossible to get in to tend the animals. Even worse, a low corner of the roof had crumbled when the tree hit it. I could hear the chickens complaining from their roost.

  “Ach. We should have done the roof last summer,” I said into my coat collar.

  Norma grunted. “We’ll do it today.”

  All morning we chopped away at the tree limbs and hauled them to the woodpile. Norma took a hatchet to the smaller branches while I went after the trunk with an old and unreliable saw. It was slippery and dangerous work, with the ice shifting and melting underneath our feet and the limbs sliding out of our grasp. Once Norma slipped on the ice and fell backward, her hatchet flying out of her hand. “Get away,” she yelled, but by the time I saw what I was getting away from, the hatchet had hit its mark, landing atop a fence post in the vegetable garden. I couldn’t have moved anyway. The saw was embedded in the tree at that moment, and my gloves were stuck to the saw.

  Fleurette took her time getting out of bed, although she must have heard us working below her window. When she finally appeared in the doorway and offered to help, we both yelled, “Coffee!” She retreated indoors and put herself to good use boiling coffee, heating rolls, and frying bacon. We refused to go inside on the grounds that once we got warm, we would not want to go out again. Instead Fleurette carried our breakfast to us and kept up a steady brigade of rolls and hot drinks while we worked.

  It must have been after noon by the time we cleared the branches and pushed open the barn door. A chorus of complaints rose from the animals. Dolley stamped and snuffled in her stall and the chickens answered with low cackles. Norma took her hatchet to the frozen water trough while I handed out oats and tossed cracked corn to the chickens. I sat down for just a minute to catch my breath, but as soon as I did my eyes closed and darkness crowded in.

  “Get up!” Norma said. “We’ve got to do something about that roof, and there’s more snow on the way.”

  More snow? I pushed myself to my feet and went to the door. Sure enough, the wind had picked up and brought a few flakes with it. I leaned against the doorway, but Norma butted me with the end of a ladder, pushing me outside.

  I didn’t think I could stay upright for another minute. “Norma,” I said, while she set the ladder up against the side of the barn, “don’t you ever wish it were easier?”

  “What?”

  “This,” I said, gesturing at the snow and the ice and the broken limbs. “Living out here on our own like this.”

  She kicked at the ladder to dig it into the ground. “I’ve always believed that people who strive for an easy life become dull and lazy. And I don’t see the point in living somewhere else, when this place already suits us
so well.”

  “But we might have to. Francis is right. Our money’s running out.”

  “In that case,” Norma said, in a voice that suggested that the matter was closed, “it’s your turn to figure things out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I found this place. I found you, and I found Fleurette.” She looked out at the road—at the very spot where she’d stood when she first declared that we would live here, seventeen years ago. Then she turned to look at me, a kind of hard satisfaction in her eyes. “Didn’t I?”

  For a minute I couldn’t say anything. There was just the hollow, distant sound of the wind and the gathering snowfall.

  “You did,” I said.

  “Yes, I did. Now it’s your turn. Mother’s gone, so who’s stopping you? Go and find yourself a little job that pays just enough to keep us. Doesn’t that sound like something you’d enjoy?”

  “I don’t know what I’d enjoy,” I said.

  “I do,” Norma declared. “You’ve had such a high time running around playing detective. Why don’t you become one of those?”

  She started to climb the ladder. I tried to pull her down but she shook me off. “What are you talking about?”

  “There was an advertisement in the paper last week for female detectives at Wanamaker’s,” she said, looking down at me. “Didn’t you see it? Write a letter and tell them all about yourself, and I’m sure they’ll put you right in.”

  I stood staring up at her. She turned around and kept climbing. The hem of her split skirt, dirty from the mud and snow, brushed against me.

  “Just don’t let us be reduced to living with Francis.”

  “Wanamaker’s?” I said. “In New York?”

  “Take the train,” she called down. “You know how to ride the train.”

  I looked straight ahead at the bottom rungs of the ladder and the weathered old boards of the barn behind them. Had I really just heard my sister tell me to leave the house—not once, but every day—for a job specifically designed to put me in the path of criminals? What had become of us?

  “And I’ve got a job for you right now, if you can stop daydreaming,” she said. “Hold that ladder and pass me the tools.”

  I handed the saw to her, then stood and watched as she chopped away at the jagged edges of the hole, letting the severed shingles drop into the chicken pen below. Once she had a clean edge to work with, I passed some odd-size chunks of wood to her, and she found a way to nail them in place. I could hear her huffing and panting above me as she worked. I was growing stiff and frozen on the ground, my boots buried once again in snow and my fingers so numb I worried they’d lose their grip on the ladder. A vision of that clean and quiet hotel on Fifth Avenue floated before me, with its white sheets and brass lamps polished by a hand I’d never see. In a place like that, I could have an egg brought to me every day, without ever once having to patch a roof on a chicken coop in the middle of winter.

  All afternoon the road was empty and the surrounding pastures silent and still. Smoke drifted over from some distant neighbor’s chimney, but then the wind receded and the snow fell down like a blanket, until even the smoke was snuffed out. When Norma stepped off the ladder, she wore a collar of fresh snowfall.

  That night Fleurette lit the water heater and boiled some extra water on the stove so we could both have baths, but Norma didn’t want to bother with it and I wanted supper first. We sat silently in the kitchen and ate corned beef and potatoes along with the last of the morning’s rolls. I never did get warm enough to do without my coat, so I sat under a mountain of wool and let the snow drip onto the floor below my chair. Norma’s fingers were red and chapped from working on the roof. Fleurette offered to rub some cold cream into them, but she refused, wanting only to take tea and a bed warmer upstairs and go right to sleep. I took an extra kettle of hot water to the bathroom and left Fleurette to do the washing up.

  The bath was steaming when I sank into it, drawing the blood back to my numb feet. I wiggled my toes until pinpricks of pain ran through them and the sensation returned. The tub was too small for me and I couldn’t submerge myself all at once. The only way to get my knees in was to curl in a ball and turn on my side. I awoke just as the water started to cool and put myself to bed.

  53

  BY MIDNIGHT I WAS SITTING UP IN THE DARK, listening to a screech owl call to its mate, and thinking quite suddenly of Lucy. I wasn’t ready to give up on the idea that the child made it back to Paterson. I saw no other way to go about it than to look into every orphan on the list, and then go to the orphanage in the next county, and the one after that. But I wasn’t sure I’d ever get anywhere at that rate.

  When the clock downstairs struck one, I still hadn’t settled on a course of action. I might have dropped off to sleep, but when the clock chimed three I awoke again, thinking about what Sheriff Heath had said. Henry Kaufman did not seem like the kind of person who would know what to do with a baby, even for an hour, even long enough to grab him and then turn him loose again.

  But Marion Garfinkel was that kind of person. She’d know what to do. She’d place him anonymously, claiming that the child was her own. If she needed to, she’d offer enough money to make sure that no one asked any questions.

  What was it she told me when I asked about Lucy’s child? It’s better off wherever it is now.

  And she probably believed that.

  At last sleep caught up with me again and I didn’t move until the chickens started cackling at daybreak. The truth was with me, as if I had known it all along.

  THE SKY HAD CLEARED and the snow had hardened overnight. Dolley didn’t want to be out in it any more than I did, but I nudged her along Sicomac Road anyway. A number of motor cars passed me, each of them honking and swerving and nearly running us off the road. Dolley had never been a high-strung horse, but these black and noisy machines were making a nervous animal out of her. I tried to cluck at her the way Norma did, but she didn’t find it soothing.

  I stabled her for a few hours in Paterson and walked over to the orphan asylum in the gray sludge that had been pushed aside by the plows. In no time at all I was at the front door, relieved to find Mrs. Griggs at her station.

  She was considerably less friendly to me than she had been to Sheriff Heath. When I made my request, she frowned and said, “Shouldn’t Sheriff Heath be the one asking the questions?”

  I stood a little straighter and spoke in the most commanding voice I could muster.

  “He requested my help on a sensitive matter. A girl got into some trouble, and the sheriff thought it best to have a lady make the more delicate inquiries. That’s why he brought me here. If you feel his introduction was not satisfactory, I’ll go now to Hackensack and return with him for a second one. But I know he won’t be happy to be called away from the prison and his important work protecting the citizens of Bergen County simply to do again what he has already done.”

  She pressed her lips together in a disapproving frown. “You know I can’t tell you anything about our private placements. If the mother surrenders a child, the records are sealed forever.”

  I knew that well enough. The same promise had been made to me. “What if a woman brought a child in and claimed to be its mother, but wasn’t?”

  “We’d have a look at the birth certificate. We’d ask for identification or a witness.”

  “But some children are born at home. They don’t all have birth certificates.”

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” Mrs. Griggs asked.

  I could tell that I wasn’t going to get into those files unless I told her what I suspected. I gave her Marion Garfinkel’s name, described her, and told her again the boy’s age and when we thought he would have been brought in.

  She wrote it all down and then scrutinized the paper in front of her. “You’re suggesting the boy was kidnapped.”

  “It wouldn’t be that unusual. Isn’t it possible that someone would try a thing like that to cover up a
scandal in the family?”

  She searched my face thoughtfully for a minute, then rose from her desk and disappeared into the office. After a long wait she returned, clutching a folder to her bosom as if she wasn’t sure she was ready to let me see it.

  “We had only one private placement of a boy that age during the strikes,” she said, easing gingerly back into her chair. “If this is the child you’re looking for, then I believe we still have him.”

  I took a deep breath and dropped into the chair across from her. The realization that I might have done this—that I might have helped Lucy find her son—this sent all the blood to my cheeks and set my heart pounding.

  I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to speak. She set the file on her desk and ran her hands across it.

  At last I said, “Is he here now? Could I see him?”

  “Certainly not,” she said. “If this is a matter for the sheriff, then the sheriff should come and see the child.”

  By then I had my breath back. “Of course he will,” I said evenly. “I only wish to be sure of the situation before I ask him to take an afternoon away from his duties. Do you know anything more about the circumstances under which the boy was brought here?”

  With a long and shaky sigh, Mrs. Griggs opened the file and lifted it toward her so I could not see the papers it held. After flipping through them for a few minutes, she said, “I don’t remember this one, but from what I can see, it was an unusual case. A woman brought the baby to us, but had none of the papers we require—no birth certificate, no letter from a doctor, and no list of family members. She wouldn’t even provide the boy’s name or his last known address. She said that she’d had the baby abroad to avoid suspicion and had only just recently returned. We called him Teddy for lack of another name.”

  “But the mother—the woman claiming to be the mother—that was Marion Garfinkel?”

  She closed the folder. “She gave a very common name and I suppose it could have been false. Our director will have to speak to the sheriff before we can say anything more about it. This may require a hearing before a judge. It’s very unusual.”