But if she were to keep the money a secret, it would be necessary for her to exchange the draught for cash in some place other than New Egypt. There was no bank in the town, and it was unlikely that any shopkeeper would have such a sum. The office of the granite ware factory would doubtless have the cash to cover the amount, but Philo did not want the transaction known to Jacob Varley. She therefore determined to walk to Cookstown, four miles distant, and apply at the bank there.
She went upstairs and told her mother that she must be absent for the afternoon. Philo had prepared the little lie that she would be delivering mail for Mr. Clegg to outlying farms, but Mary Drax did not even ask what would keep her away.
Mary Drax lay atop the covers on the bed and raised a weak hand to her daughter, “Kiss me, Philo. And when you return I want you to fashion a wreath for the door.” She smiled sadly and tugged at the black streamers on Philo’s old bonnet. “We are in mourning for your grandfather, you know.”
Chapter 15
THE PICNIC
The train which brought the morning mail to New Egypt from Philadelphia had also deposited two visitors to the town: a young woman with a dark, unpleasantly smiling countenance and an older man who appeared to be her father. Of Mr. Kilcrease they asked directions for a lodging house in town, and at the lodging house they asked directions to the post office, and at the post office they asked the direction of the house inhabited by Philo Drax and her mother. This information was given to them by Mr. Clegg with some astonishment at the coincidence that he had delivered a letter to Philo Drax not ten minutes before.
The man protested that he had no business with the Draxes, that he only inquired their address because he had heard that the young woman was thinking of going into service.
“Oh, yes?” replied Mr. Clegg with wonder. Everything in creation was a matter of surprise to the postmaster of New Egypt, and the sun didn’t rise in the morning without turning Mr. Clegg out of bed with astonishment at the repetition of the phenomenon. “Well, I don’t wonder at it. What a family for reverses! I was never so surprised in all my life as when poor Tom Drax died in the War. And not fifteen years later, his father-in-law is murdered in his bed. It was a terrible coincidence! And now Philo is to go into service!”
Mr. Clegg watched after his visitors when they left the little corner of his shop which served New Egypt as post office, and noted with vast bewilderment that the girl, who had spoken not a word, led her father in a direction which, in a hundred years, wouldn’t take them to Mary Drax’s door.
John and Katie Slape walked to the edge of New Egypt, climbed a fence, crossed a pasture, and entered the fir forest to the north of the town. They doubled back and, keeping always within the concealing line of the conifers, approached the Drax house. It was recognizable, Mr. Clegg had assured them, by being the only house in New Egypt painted blue with black shutters.
Once they had come within sight of the house, they sat down beneath a tree, and John Slape spread his kerchief on the bed of conifer needles between them. Out of her pocket Katie took a hunk of cheese and a small loaf of bread. These they cut with John’s sharp pocketknife and ate with relish and in silence. Both watched the Drax house across the field and were pleased to see no one enter, leave, pass, or even come near the place. When they were finished John Slape wiped the knife clean on his pants, and as Katie tore apart the rind of the cheese and flung the pieces at squirrels, he sharpened it on a flat stone.
“I’ll watch,” he said to his daughter, and she nodded, brushing the crumbs from her lap.
She held out her hand, and John Slape placed the knife in her palm. She tested its weight and nodded. John Slape took from his pocket a length of string, pulled at it to test its strength, and then tied the knife to his daughter’s hand, so that the blade protruded about two inches beyond her forefinger.
“Try that,” he said.
Katie stood and waved her arm all about her head. Even when she did not grasp the handle with her fingers, the knife remained in place. She nodded.
“Good,” said John Slape. “Now it won’t slip off no matter how much blood there is.”
Katie scratched her neck with her unencumbered hand and set off across the empty field that separated the fir forest from the Drax garden.
“Mind your clothes!” he called after her.
Mary Drax’s screams were heard first by the five dogs belonging to her nearest neighbor. These animals, setting up a fierce howling, secured the attention of Mrs. Libby, who came out into the yard. When Mrs. Libby had succeeded in quieting the dogs, she heard the last of Mary Drax’s cries, which did not dwindle into a whimper but was cut off clean.
She hurried to the Drax house, beat upon the door, and called out to Mary and Philo. No one responded. Mrs. Libby, a stout woman, thought it easier to call for help rather than run for it, so she turned from the door and began to shout for assistance.
Hearing with surprise the door opened behind her, she turned back and saw smiling Katie Slape in the doorway, her entire right arm dripping in blood. In her left she held up a dress belonging to Philo, which she was evidently attempting to keep clear of the gore that liberally splashed her own clothing.
“Philo and I are of a size,” she said to Mrs. Libby with a smile. “I waited for her,” Katie said. “Tell her she can expect to see me again. We’re cousins, you know.” Katie waved the bloody knife in the air.
Mrs. Libby, notwithstanding her stoutness, ran away. And as she huffed down the lane toward the center of town, Katie Slape scampered across the field toward the evergreen forest, still with the dress held at arm’s length from her.
Dr. Slocum was in his garden, and Mrs. Libby encountered him first. She was winded, and though convinced that no one alive remained in the Drax house, considered she might as well bring him as any other. Dr. Slocum had seen men caught in threshing machines, but it was with some trepidation that he ascended the staircase that bore brightly the prints of Katie Slape’s feet in blood so thick it was still undried.
Mary Drax lay on her bed on a coverlet whose pattern was obscured by the blood there. A water pitcher and bowl had been broken against her brow, and there was a halo of fragments about her head on the pillow. Across her throat was a single cut, about seven inches long and very deep, which had severed both carotid arteries. Along the left cheekbone was a wound made by the slashing of a knife, which, however, did not go much beneath the skin. On the right arm just above the wrist was a cut two-and-a-half inches long, from which Mary Drax appeared to have lost what blood had not pulsed out of her slashed neck. There were numerous smaller cuts along both forearms, and one long incision along each thigh, sliced through her dress after she was already dead.
Dr. Slocum, coming to the head of the bed to close the dead woman’s eyes, stepped on her severed ear. Neatly detached from her head with a single slice of Katie Slape’s knife blade, it had slipped unnoticed to the floor.
Dr. Slocum tried gently to prevent Philo from viewing her mother’s corpse and the room in which she had died, but the orphan was not to be deterred. She stood silent upon the threshold. With a single step into the chamber, however, Philo’s courage forsook her, and she retreated quickly. Downstairs, she heard from Mrs. Libby the description of the girl who had appeared in the doorway and who had taken away one of Philo’s dresses. But she did not need to be told that the Slapes were responsible for the death of her mother.
Philo was not even surprised when Mrs. Libby called her into the kitchen and showed her that the girl – obviously after murdering Mary Drax, for her bloody prints were on the shards – had smashed all the cups and saucers against the oven door.
Mrs. Libby pointed at the broken crockery on the floor, put her finger to her lips, and whispered in Philo’s ear: “She said you were cousins!”
“No!” Philo protested. “No, it’s not true at all!”
PART IV
CHRISTOPHER STREET
Chapter 16
CHRISTOPHER
STREET
When they had murdered Richard Parrock and locked Philo in the room with his corpse, the Slapes drove their wagon to South Dennis, not more than six miles distant from the farm. They breakfasted at a farmhouse which advertised room and board for weary travellers, sold the horse and wagon to the owner for a sum small enough to be irresistible but not so small as to excite suspicion, and took the cars to Philadelphia. It was a city they knew and a city in which they felt comfortable. They took up residence in a small hotel conveniently near the theaters.
The hotel room, which was decidedly poor for a family possessing such a fortune, was furnished with a large bed, a dresser with bowl and pitcher, a broken looking glass, a scrap of worn carpet, a chair with its legs wired together, and three chromolithographs pasted directly onto the wall. Within a kind of closet attached to the room was another bed on which Katie was meant to sleep. The chamber’s single window looked out on Twelfth Street.
On the second day after they had taken possession of their room and after they had eaten dinner in the hotel’s dining room, the Slapes sat at different corners of the big bed and talked of what had been done on Parrock Farm. They were amused by what must be Philo’s predicament.
“Old man’ll begin to stink soon,” said Katie, “warm day like this.”
“She’ll be taken up for it,” said Hannah, nodding with satisfaction.
“She’ll tell that we did it,” said John, warning them. The thought had first occurred to him only then.
“They won’t believe her,” said Katie. “She’ll be found with the old man. She’ll be found with the pail and shovel. They’ll say ‘The hired girl killed the old man.’ ”
“He was her grandfather,” John Slape pointed out.
“She is your cousin,” added Hannah.
“No!” said Katie. “Mar hired her on. She was the hired girl!”
John Slape said nothing else. It often did no good to argue with Katie, who, when she wanted or when the mood was upon her, was quite impenetrably dense.
“What’s to be done now?” said Hannah, looking at her husband. “The money’s here.” She glanced toward Katie’s closet; the carpetbag was secreted beneath the cot.
John Slape shrugged. Richard Parrock had possessed a far greater fortune than they had dared hope. Hannah had tried to count the money but became confused at so great a sum. The Slapes could comprehend the value of one hundred dollars, and two hundred dollars by extrapolation from that. But one thousand, ten thousand, twenty-nine thousand dollars held no meaning for them. And having got so much, they had no idea what should be done with it. With a single ten-dollar bill they could live as lavishly as they pleased for a week – and how many hundreds and hundreds of ten-dollar notes there were in the carpetbag!
A few days after their arrival, John spent the afternoon loafing in a barbershop on Tenth Street. There he learned, through an item in the paper which was read aloud by a man whose neck was being shaved, that the body of Richard Parrock had been discovered, and that the servant who was suspected of the murder had escaped.
He hurried back to the hotel in such haste that the inhabitants of the barbershop could only suppose that he felt an apoplectic fit coming on. He informed his wife and daughter of the item in the paper.
“The girl got away then?” said Hannah.
Her husband nodded his head.
“She did it!” cried Katie, who was lying on her bed, in the unlighted closet, with the door closed. Her hearing was acute however, and her voice piercing.
“Hush!” cried Hannah.
John Slape looked at his wife blankly. “The girl will tell that we did it,” he said.
Hannah did not answer.
Katie swung the door open. She lay on her side, propping her head on her bent arm.
“Find her out where she lives,” Katie said. “Let me stop her tongue.”
From having opened Richard Parrock’s mail, Hannah already knew Philo’s name and that she lived with her mother in New Egypt.
“If we’re found out,” said Hannah, “then our money’ll be taken away. Girl and her mother will get it. Girl’s mother was Father Parrock’s daughter.”
John Slape blinked. “They’ll not have it.”
Katie Slape echoed her father, but she smiled. “They’ll not have it.”
So that afternoon Hannah went to the railway station and consulted maps and timetables. Next morning Katie and John took the cars to New Egypt. After Katie killed Mary Drax, she went to the kitchen to wait for Philo’s return and there began amusing herself by smashing crockery. She was disturbed almost immediately by the beating at the door, and after fleeing, she and her father walked through the forest to Cookstown. An hour later they boarded the cars that returned them to Philadelphia. Katie wore Philo’s dress.
Hannah was disappointed that Philo had escaped.
“She’s not much,” said Katie contemptuously.
“Ought not to live,” Hannah warned. “Girl lives, we may be taken up.”
“I’ll go back there, Mar,” said Katie with a grin. “This time I’ll get her.”
Hannah shook her head. “You were seen. Your par was seen. But we’ll find her, and she won’t live to speak our names. We’ll find her out.”
“Are we to stay here?” John asked apprehensively. Philadelphia theaters were very fine, in his opinion.
“Not so near,” replied Hannah. “Not so near Goshen, not so near New Egypt.” She pondered for a moment. “Go to New York,” she said as if with sudden inspiration. “You’ve been in New York,” she said to her husband.
John Slape nodded slowly. “All right, Hannah,” he said. “We’ll go to New York.”
Two days later the Slapes were installed in a rooming house on Christopher Street. Upon leaving the ferry it was the first house they had seen advertising chambers to let. Their three rooms on the third floor were dingy, inconveniently small, and relatively expensive. The house was located so near the ferry that the traffic of dock workers, Jersey travellers, and heavy carts was constant on the street from dawn till after dark. But the Slapes were as content as if they had lived instead in a mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street – this latter address the pinnacle of fashion in the spring of 1871. They liked the noise and the strangeness of the city; their hostess’s food was no worse than Hannah’s own cooking; and in general, their sensibilities were not such as to require much in the way of the amenities of civilization.
The other boarders in the house were two girls who worked in dollar stores on Eighth Avenue, a brokerage house clerk and his recent bride, a seamstress and her crippled daughter, and a distracted Civil War widow who foolishly attempted to subsist solely on her pension. They thought Hannah tolerably pleasant, and her husband, though slightly her social inferior, a fairly civil being. For Katie, however, none of the lodgers had a good word to say. They didn’t like the way she looked at them. They didn’t like the way that, after passing them on the stairs, she would turn and whisper something at their retreating backs. She somehow found out their secrets, and her smile was devilish.
The family, despite their way of keeping to themselves, excited some comment in the household. The Jepsons, as they were known, had no work or known source of income, yet the rent was paid on time, and often Hannah and John were seen returning from a shopping excursion with an armful of bundles. In the evening after supper all three of them would go out together and later be seen on the Bowery purchasing tickets at the dime museum, listening with stolid attention to a mud-gutter band on the corner, or winning prizes at a shooting gallery.
Within a week of the Slapes’ arrival, the distracted Civil War widow found that she could not afford even so low a boarding house as this one, and moved to a place on Mott Street that operated on the European plan. That is, she paid one dollar a week and got her meals where she could. But her Christopher Street lodging was left empty, and everyone was surprised when the Slapes rented it out for themselves, even t
hough it was only a hall room and on the floor below theirs.
Something about the family discouraged gossip, and though all wondered, no one said a word the following week when the crippled daughter of the seamstress passed round a copy of The New York Clipper with this notice circled in violet ink:
KATIE JEPSON – Best clairvoyant on love, health, lawsuits, absent friends, marriage, divorce, contested wills, contracts, patent rights, lost property, partnership, journeys and business affairs. Miss Katie challenges the world: gives names; readings from cradle to the grave. Ladies 25¢ and 50¢. Gents 50¢. From hair $1. One flight up, No. 251 Christopher St.
The same day a placard reading similarly went up in the ground-floor window where the Slapes had first seen the notice “Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties.”
Chapter 17
ANN AND CHARLES CLAYTON
At first, little trade came to Katie. There were too many fortune-tellers in New York already – two had placards visible from the Slapes’ third-floor windows. Katie got a new dress – new to her, that is to say – down on Chatham Street, and in this orange-yellow tarlatan she sat all day in the room which had been vacated by the Civil War widow. From the window she watched those who passed pause at her sign, glance up at her, and pass on with expressions of suppressed alarm. Each morning Hannah frizzed Katie’s hair with a hot slate pencil, both women thinking that this would heighten the appearance of mystery in the girl. Still no one came.
The fact was, custom for fortune-tellers and clairvoyants was not to be got through newspaper space and placards – it was to be obtained only through recommendation. Consequently Katie, who had as yet read no one’s fortune, had no one to sing her praise.
The room which was supposed to be devoted to the exercise of Katie’s clairvoyant powers was turned into a kind of second parlor for the Slapes. Here they sat every day, and Hannah read aloud to her husband and stepdaughter from the Clipper, a weekly New York periodical dedicated to sporting and theatrical news. Hannah circled with a pencil the notice of any exhibition or show or performance that looked to be of interest. After supper, the family would consult, and then with the Clipper folded beneath John’s arm, march out to seek diversion with a curious earnestness that was perhaps the only thing about the family which their fellow boarders found amusing. They saw Jonas Cooper, billed as the strongest man in the world, supported lengthwise on the shoulders of two of his daughters, while a third daughter, seated straddling his legs, lifted a sledgehammer and smashed a large rock that reposed on his chest. They saw Sheridan & Mack’s Special Combination Variety Show, featuring Lola LaTosca and her twin pythons; and at the New York Pavilion they saw a troupe of Circassian maidens, dressed in Oriental costume, languorously draped before a backdrop meant to suggest the interior of a harem. They attended a hop of the Gentlemen’s Sons of the Sixth Ward, and on Saturday night they took the Third Avenue Railroad up to Harlem village to see a performance by Blind Tom, the most celebrated Negro musician in America.
Katie Page 9
