Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  “Which Butler Fince found in the cave where Woodworth had earlier discovered the Savage Girl,” Tolle said. “The missing head was battered and rotted and chewed up, but Fince recognized the thing by his brother’s blond hair, which he wore long and stringy.”

  I recalled what my professor had said during our dissection of the teratoma: Human hair is nearly indestructible.

  “You all right, son?” Freddy asked. “You look a little green.”

  Tolle continued, clearly feeling the momentum of his tale. “Fince now thinks he knows for certain who killed his brother, this Savage Girl of Dr. Scott’s. He pursues his detective crusade, finding out that his brother was a regular at the Savage Girl show. Peter and Hank Monk had fistfights over her, which is what led to Butler Fince’s killing of Monk even before he had the whole truth of the matter.”

  “You said animal depredations were present in the cabin?” I asked.

  “I saw the signs myself,” Tolle said. “Hairs, paw prints in blood, and them slash marks.”

  “So it’s clear what happened,” I said. “Peter Fince was murdered by persons unknown, or perhaps died at his own hand. His body, left to rot, was fed upon by scavenger beasts. The head was carried off to the cave by an animal—a coyote, perhaps, or a big cat.”

  “Hugo . . .” Freddy cautioned, shaking his head.

  I couldn’t stand it. The suspicions I had been harboring boiled over. “Because otherwise we are left with the idea that she had some involvement!”

  “If you’re talking about ‘she’ meaning the Savage Girl, that is certainly the conclusion reached by Butler Fince,” Tolle said. “He spent many days making a pest of himself around the Comstock, asking the whereabouts of the creature displayed by Dr. Scott, she who murdered his dear brother, Peter Fince.”

  “It’s too insane!” I cried.

  “Insane or not, it’s what the man Fince believes,” Tolle said. “He had no shortage of informers to tell him just what became of Dr. Scott’s prized exhibit, that she had been taken off by wealthy easterners by the name of Delegate.”

  “Couldn’t you stop him?” I asked.

  “Right in the middle of all this happening, along comes your telegram. And then fraud at the polls stripped me of my office. So I come out here to warn you.”

  “And I suppose you wish payment for this service?” Freddy said.

  Tolle shook his head and rose to his feet, an offended look on his face. “I’m at the Cambridge Hotel, if you want me.”

  “You’re selling a load of rubbish,” Freddy said. “A human head batted around like a football! This Fince fellow is a madman. I wonder you credit anything he says.”

  “Freddy . . .” I said, but he would not be stopped, a barrage of words.

  “There is no Savage Girl here, Mr. Tolle. I don’t know why you approached us. If I judge your purpose to be financial gain, I tell you, sir, I’ll have my fellow Colm here toss you out on the street.”

  “You probably don’t want to be speaking to me like that, Delegate,” Tolle said, glancing over at Colm. “The bad man Butler Fince is headed this way with blood in his eye. I thought you’d want to know. Now that I’ve done my duty, I’ll bid you good-bye.”

  • • •

  The three of us remained sitting in the library after Dick Tolle departed, leaving behind the bitter smell of his tobacco. That and numerous questions.

  Colm thankfully remained mum. It fell to my father to disturb the silence.

  “I don’t believe it of her,” Freddy said. “I’ll never believe it of her.” He smoked a cigar of his own, rather more complex in its aroma than the former sheriff’s bargain cheroot.

  “We took delivery of her wardrobe today,” I said. “For her debut. She tried them on. She looked . . . angelic.”

  “The debut is going forward,” Freddy said, rising from his chair. “Bronwyn will come out as planned—I don’t care what this business portends. And I’m not going to trouble Anna Maria with any of it, nor the girl herself.”

  Clapping both Colm and me on the shoulders, he said, “Do you hear me, you two? Not a word to Bronwyn. She has enough to worry about.”

  Tossing his unfinished cigar into the fireplace, he turned to leave. “I think I’ll take dinner in my rooms tonight.”

  “Colm and I have an engagement,” I said.

  Freddy halted at the door to the library. “This blackguard Butler Fince,” he said. “I saw him kill one man in cold blood. Perhaps, Colm, you could recruit a few of your police friends, ask them if they’d like to make extra income working for us in the off hours, providing security.”

  He walked out. Colm and I remained in armchairs by the hearth, staring into the fire.

  We were not alone but rather were haunted by ghostly presences, joined there in the library by the victims of a string of murders. The waiter at the Palmer House. The Gypsy dancer in the Central Park. Now a wildcat miner in Virginia City. Where, oddly enough, I had also been present, as I had been for the other two.

  In pursuing evidence of Bronwyn’s involvement, I thought at the same time to conceal from Colm my own self-suspicion. I who was at hand for each incident, I who was unstable of mind, I who was . . . what, a raving maniac?

  A series of three mutilation murders in the space of eight months. How many would the country average in an ordinary year? I would have to put the question to Professor James. Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot the assassin John Wilkes Booth in the burning tobacco barn back in ’65, I knew to be an odd-duck preacher who had castrated himself and thrown the offending organ into a fireplace. So perhaps it wasn’t that unusual.

  And Colm, I realized, Colm, too, had been at the scene of every murder. At least in the same general vicinity. I looked over at the stolid soul sitting next to me. “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” said Hamlet. Although, truth be told, Colm didn’t smile that much. He was more all-business.

  After a long stretch of silence, I said, “I propose we continue our previous supposition. That the girl is innocent of any wrongdoing.”

  “And meanwhile carry on with our investigations,” Colm said. “How long do we have before this debut shindig of hers happens?”

  I counted up the days in my head. “Six weeks,” I said.

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt to hire a few more hands,” Colm said. “I know this man Fince by reputation. I don’t care if he ever was a sheriff. There’s a thin line between the law and the outlaw in the West, and I know for a fact he crossed it several times. Once he hung all the Negroes in Rockertoe, Utah, for the fault of a single one.”

  I wasn’t thinking about Butler Fince. I was brooding about Bronwyn.

  “I could hit the bricks, track the man Fince down, break his neck for him,” Colm said. “He’s a loudmouth, and if he’s here in New York, he shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “I want you to stick close to her,” I said. “Whenever she goes out, wherever she is, I want you nearby. I’ll tell Anna Maria that Bronwyn has a new chaperone.”

  “What about you?” Colm asked.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said.

  Colm favored his LeMat, so I was a little surprised when he took an entirely different handgun from his pocket, a nickel-plated Colt revolver with a stubby two-inch barrel. He handed it to me. The compact piece fit easily in my grip.

  “It’s a .38,” he said. “It’ll stop anything coming at you. Called the Sheriff’s Model, but bloody desperadoes have been known to carry one. Folks nicknamed that gun ‘The Last Word.’”

  “I’ll try to measure up to its reputation,” I said, pocketing the pistol.

  20

  In railroading there was such a thing as twinned tracks, rails that went parallel before they diverged, trains running along on both as if unaware of their ultimate fate, upon which track they would eventually be switched.

  That winter I experienced the double life of the Delegate household, one caught up in a frenzy of organizing for Bronwyn’s debut, while Col
m and I pursued an altogether different purpose, one with darker overtones.

  Freddy prepared the way for his triumph with Bronwyn, participating in the debate against Arvald Stockton regarding nature versus nurture. The venue had been set, at the Union, the city’s most exclusive men’s club. I was surprised at the flurry the occasion set off in the popular press, fanned, no doubt, by Stockton’s newspaper connections.

  “‘Resolved,’” Freddy said, quoting the proposition, “‘that nature and heredity dominate nurture and environment in determining human character.’ Mr. Stockton speaks in favor, I in opposition. Thirty minutes each for argument, fifteen for rebuttal, five for summation. Audience declares the winner by acclamation. I plan to carry the day.”

  We sat with Anna Maria and Nicky, just the four blood Delegates for once, not in the aviary but in a second-floor drawing room.

  “I would make hay with the words ‘dominate’ and ‘determining,’ as inexact and fraught with misinterpretation,” I said.

  “Niggling pettifoggery,” Freddy said. “I’ll do nothing of sort. I will simply inform them that I can take any human creature, no matter how feral, from the wild, and with enough care and education I will give them a fully formed, fully moral, fully proper human being.”

  “You know, I wonder at that ‘fully moral’ business,” I said. “Don’t you think Bronwyn might have a little problem with—I don’t know how to say it—the biblical virtue of chastity?”

  “You beastly boy,” Anna Maria said, rapping her knuckles on a side table for emphasis. “Don’t speak like that about your sister. Of course we had her examined by Dr. Bulton. She is intact. She is in fact as virginal as Blake’s ‘pale virgin shrouded in snow.’ Which is a whole lot more virginal than you, I might suggest.”

  “You can’t modify ‘virginal,’” Nicky put in. “No one can be ‘more virginal’ than someone else. Either you are or you are not.”

  “I can’t believe I am discussing this at all, much less with a thirteen-year-old present,” Anna Maria said.

  “I am more ‘the youth pined away with desire,’” I said.

  “Once fallen, forever lost,” said Nicky.

  “Oh, do be quiet, Nicholas,” Anna Maria said, fussing. “I won’t have a word said against her virtue.”

  I had to leave the whole thing there.

  Later in the week, the blue-blooded Union Club members being firmly in the “nature” camp, Freddy lost the debate.

  • • •

  It turned out that Richardson’s was only the beginning. As the month progressed, a steady parade of delivery boys came through The Citadel’s servant entrance, their arms piled high with hatboxes, brown-paper-wrapped parcels, oblong white cardboard cartons with articles of clothing nested in tissue paper.

  “We can hardly blame her for not knowing a thing about money,” Anna Maria said graciously as the stream of packages turned into a flood. “She goes out to the shops, they show her their wares, she says yes. She’s always saying yes. And that Willets boy. He’s even worse.”

  Its provenance was a mystery, but an article appeared in the World that allowed Bronwyn her first brief taste of celebrity. It was, in the way of newspaper stories, something of a fabrication, which did not prevent it from becoming accepted as gospel truth by numberless readers. The real problem, the phrase that set off a scramble of enthusiasm and notoriety, was the headline THE MILLION-DOLLAR WARDROBE.

  “I don’t think so,” Freddy said dubiously upon being confronted by the piece. “The bills are still coming in. I suppose it’s possible. More like half that, I would think.”

  But the damage had been done. The newspaper reported that Bronwyn’s jewel-encrusted debut gown, not yet seen but eagerly anticipated by the public, represented a fifty-thousand-dollar creation. It quoted Hampton Lowell, the self-crowned king of the fashion commentators, as saying that while money wasn’t the key to taste, it could hire a damned good locksmith.

  And then the picture accompanying the article. An engraving, actually, of a photograph commissioned by Monsieur Richardson. Bronwyn in a slim-profiled dress, looking back over her left shoulder, a parasol propped on her right. She had a heartbreaking, shrouded-in-snow look, very much caught in the moment. Nicky bade Richardson to furnish him with the original photograph upon which the World’s portrait was based. He kept it bedside.

  My sister’s favorite color for her frocks, according to the World, was the deepest green, straying past forest to verge upon black, a dark emerald named Delegate green in her honor that season, for the simple reason that she spent so much in the stores.

  “Pray bring me the feather of a peacock,” the ludicrous article portrayed a very un-Bronwyn-ish Bronwyn as saying to a couturier. Pointing to the shimmering green of the plumage, she was said to have proclaimed, “This is the color I must have!”

  A week after the World report appeared, Fifth Avenue saw itself flocked by green-hued outfits, ladies abroad resembling so many just-settled iridescent night moths.

  The Million-Dollar Wardrobe. The man in the street pronounced himself appalled. In a city where three-quarters of the population lived on less than a dollar a day! Man in the Street dearly wished the press would tell him more about this absurd extravagance, a lot more, in order that he might base his outrage upon a firm grounding of facts.

  I have often noticed that journalists are like sheep. Where one goes, others must baa-baa after. The Sun, the Herald, even the New-York Tribune followed with stories of their own. Miss Bronwyn Delegate, the new sensation. Step right up.

  When I returned, later that month, to the balcony gallery at Madame Eugénie’s academy, I noticed a subtle shift in the dynamics of the dance floor. Bronwyn had established herself as a power with which to be reckoned. Given her popularity among the boys, the girls grudgingly submitted to her dominance. You could see it in how the groupings formed, moons around a sun, and in the sidelong glances everyone gave to her, as though checking upon the mood of a duchess.

  From my post amid the potted palms of the balcony, I pretended omniscience, a god lazily monitoring the follies of mere mortals down below, the splitting-ups and coming-togethers, the pairings, the alliances of convenience and those of passion. Only a few years previous, I had gone through the same labored, youthful upheavals. They had seemed to me important then. Now, happening to someone else, they appeared trivial.

  Bev Willets was thankfully absent that afternoon. I thought of him immediately, though, when I saw Delia Showalter enter the hall and move along the border of the dance floor. Bev and Delia had, predictably, taken up with each other. My jealousy was such that I could still feel enraged by this, even though I had officially ended my engagement to the lady in question.

  Delia looked ill, a fact that embedded a shaft of guilt into my conscience. I had seen girls used and discarded by Bev Willets before. Like a clean white linen napkin crumpled and wine-stained after a dinner party. I wondered if it had already happened.

  My former love moved like a ghost amid the dancing students. I watched Edna Croker break off from her practiced steps and cross to her. The two fell into an intense tête-à-tête. Edna returned to the floor and retrieved Bronwyn, then in the midst of a mazurka with a spotty-faced youth.

  Monsieur Henri, dismayed at the disruption to the class, clapped his hands imperiously. The girls ignored him. Taking Bronwyn’s hand, Edna guided her over to Delia. The three of them took up the furious, whispering conversation that the first two had begun.

  I watched it play out in dumb show. Uncomfortable as I was with these particular girls becoming familiar with each other, speculating on what rumors might pass between them—my former intimate, Delia, pouring dark thoughts of me into Bronwyn’s ear—I somehow felt that gossip might be the least of the perils involved. The little trio looked to be seriously plotting, contemplating the overthrow of the government, maybe, or arranging for the demise of Monsieur Henri.

  • • •

  When Bronwyn’s debut mania became to
o much for me, I simply switched to the other Delegate track. Toward the end of January, Colm and I consumed some Zuni cactus buttons with the berdache and went out to Coney Island after a murder.

  It was time for me to return to Harvard. But a family consensus developed that I should not go back to school. I continued to display a mental rockiness (something that Tahktoo said would be soothed by the ingestion of peyote). Plus, my parents relied on me to help with Bronwyn.

  Colm told me that the body we were after had washed up at Coney Island in early January. Why he had picked this one, out of all the deaths in New York, he didn’t reveal.

  “A hunch,” he said, but I knew that could be code for inside information from the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Colm had used his connections to search for mutilation murders in the city, all while we both still maintained that it was absurd to think Bronwyn had anything to do with them.

  Coney Island, so well peopled in good weather, hibernated in the winter. I thought back over our recent New Year’s holiday there, Bronwyn on the seashore. It was even more barren now. The winds blew in slantwise from the Atlantic, pitching up sand, giving the whole scene the feel of a freezing wasteland.

  Colm, Tahktoo and I took to the beach through Norton’s Point, which was probably a mistake, given that it was the most degraded few blocks in the whole of Brooklyn.

  Bedraggled denizens roamed the streets, looking hungry and cold. Under the effects of the cactus buttons I had ingested, I perceived them in weird guises, alternately piggish, bearish and, finally, dolphinish. I had the uncomfortable idea that every person I encountered knew all about me. The dwarflike children on the corners played not with toys but with rocks and bits of bark.

  “My teeth feel funny,” Colm said. He grinned painfully. The peyote gradually loosened its grip. The berdache (who walked within a pulsing halo of silver light) had said the cactus buttons might make me feel better, but in fact I felt worse.

  We finally staggered out of the decrepit neighborhood and headed onto the empty sands, where the sunlight was hammered into a flat sheet of gray. The berdache strayed to the surf, leaving Colm and me to ourselves.