“I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?” Louise asked.
“Just Val trying to rope me into a job I don’t want,” Susan said. “It’ll probably give me nightmares.”
I looked her.
“You mean answering the phone doesn’t?” Louise asked.
Susan sighed. “Worse nightmares.”
“Ah hell,” Louise said. “Nothing can get worse than mine. I’ll do it.”
I glanced at her. She’d been around almost as long as Susan. Louise was my unofficial foreman on the remodeling.
“Do you read shorthand?” I asked.
“Is there a woman alive today who doesn’t?” she asked, and she was serious.
“You mean besides Val?” Susan asked.
“Oh, gee, sorry,” Louise said. “Yes, I read shorthand.”
“You’d have to keep all of this confidential,” I said.
“Not a problem,” Louise said, and I believed her. She had kept everything confidential so far.
“Good,” Susan said. “She can do it.”
I shook my head. “I have a lot of material. I need both of you to work on it.”
“Mysterious Val,” Louise said. “Let me take the drinks to my crew and I’ll be back.”
She slipped out of the kitchen, clutching the bottles between the fingers of her right hand.
“You’ll have to work in my place,” I said to Susan.
“Oh, God, Val, that’ll drive you nuts,” Susan said. “I’d offer to take this home, but I don’t want my kids near it.”
“I don’t blame you.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that there was a chance that what was on these papers had gotten Langham killed. “That’s why I want you here.”
Susan frowned, thinking. “Then what about the vestry? It has a desk and good lighting. And no windows, so no one would know we were there. Besides, none of the girls go upstairs.”
“If you’re comfortable working up there,” I said.
She smiled. “I love that room. It’s as close to a secret hideaway as we have in this place.”
She was right. And I thought it appropriate for them to examine materials from Langham’s secret room in our most secret room.
“If Louise agrees,” I said.
Susan smiled. “She will,” she said.
* * * *
They worked throughout the afternoon. I didn’t interrupt them. Instead, I sent the workers home, and stepped in for Susan at the phones. The evening shift arrived with pizza. I was about to go upstairs with some pieces for Susan and Louise when Susan surprised me in the kitchen.
“We found something,” she said quietly.
I knew that Kaplan would be in touch, so I told the two volunteers that if someone came or called for me, I was in the vestry. They seemed surprised. I wasn’t even sure these two new girls knew where the vestry was.
Then I followed Susan upstairs.
The smell of sawed wood was strong here as well. I was in the process of remodeling the former offices and choir room into a women-only gym. At the moment, I still taught my self defense classes at Union South and my friend Nick’s gym, but I wanted a room of my own, as Virginia Wolff said.
The vestry was to the left of the construction zone, past the still closed-off sanctuary. Paneling hid the door on this side, apparently to prevent parishioners from walking in on the minister as he prepared.
Right now, though, the door was half open revealing a well lit little room. It wasn’t as big or as fancy as Langham’s hidden office, but it was beautiful, with lovely paneling that I planned to save, and a ceiling that went almost two stories up, ending in a point that mimicked the church’s closed-off spire.
Louise had lit some homemade scented candles, so the little room smelled like vanilla. The desk was covered with hand-written legal papers. The garbage cans were overflowing with wadded up sheets. The nearby table had all of the journals opened to various pages. A blank legal pad sat on one of the reading chairs I had placed toward the back.
“Where did you get this stuff?” Louise asked.
“I can’t tell you,” I said.
“You need to tell us,” Louise said.
My heart sank. After that step-, only-, half-daughter thing, I braced for the worst. “How bad is it?”
Susan went over to the table. She touched an open journal.
“This,” she said, then touched another, “this,” and another, “this,” and yet another, “and this, all tell the same story. Different days, different years.”
“And the handwriting is a little looser in all of them,” Louise said, as if that would mean something to me.
“What story?” I said, knowing they wanted me to ask.
“You’d recognize it if you could read it,” Louise said. “It’s the sob sister.”
* * * *
We’d been calling her the sob sister from the beginning of the hot line. She had called every Saturday night like clockwork, rarely missing, usually around eleven.
She always told the same story—a brutal, violent rape that nearly killed her, left her ruined and heartbroken, and made it impossible for her to have children. She would sob her story out. The first few times I took the call, her words were almost incomprehensible.
I tried to get her to come in, to talk to someone, to report the incident. I told her I would go with her, and she would always quietly, gently, hang up.
Other volunteers had a similar experience, and finally we stopped telling her to report the incident. We just listened. Every Saturday night. Sometimes there were more details. Sometimes there were fewer. She always sobbed. If we tried to console her, she would hang up.
I’m not sure exactly when we figured out she was drunk—maybe about the point someone gave her the nickname, about the point when we realized we were helpless in the face of her never-ending grief.
The sob sister taught me that not all victims could be healed, and that for some, grief and loss and terror became an everlasting abyss, one they would never come back from.
I had assumed the sob sister was some broken-down drunk who lived in a trailer, or as a modern-day Miss Haversham in a ramshackle house at the edge of town.
I never thought the sob sister was someone as powerful and competent as Dolly Langham.
“You’re sure?” I asked, sounding a bit breathless.
“Positive,” Susan said. She picked up one of the journals. “This is from 1954.”
Then she read the account out loud. It wasn’t word-for-word what I had heard on the phone—after all, Langham had written this in shorthand, with missing articles and poor transitions—but it was close enough to make the hair rise on the back of my neck.
“And this one,” Susan said, “is the day after Pearl Harbor. She speculates on who might enlist, and then—suddenly, as if she can’t control it—that damn story again.”
I held up a hand. I had to think this through. It violated a lot of my assumptions about everything, about the sob sister, about the nature of victimhood, about Dolly Langham.
Who, come to think of it, was a single unmarried woman who lived alone in the family manse after her father died, who had no family, and who seemingly had only her charities to keep her warm.
But she had had a secret life.
As a sob sister. Not the sobbing woman who called my hotline, but as a front-page girl, one of those women writers of the press, the kind who specialized in an emotional sort of journalism nearly forgotten and completely discredited. Nellie Bly, who got herself tossed into an insane asylum so she could write passionately about the awful conditions; Ida Tarbell, whose work on Standard Oil nearly got discredited because of her gender; or even the great Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching campaign almost got her killed, all got dismissed as sob s
isters.
Women who wrote tears.
Dolly Langham wrote tears. Accuser Speaks! It was a piece of sympathy, not a piece of hack journalism. So were other stories, all under the guise of a straight news story, told in a way that would appeal to the woman of the house, the emotional one, the one who actually might change the mind of her man.
“Do you guys remember who gave the sob sister her nickname?” I asked.
“It was before my time. You guys had already labeled her before I got here,” Louise said. “So, you know who she is now. You want to share?”
“I can’t yet.” I said, even though I wanted to.
Susan was tapping her thumbnail against her teeth.
“June seems like so long ago,” she said after a moment. She was frowning. “Maybe Helene nicknamed her. Or Mabel.”
Our oldest volunteers. I adored Mabel. She had campaigned for women’s rights in the teens, and had done her best to change the world then. That she was helping us now seemed a miracle to me.
Helene, on the other hand, drove me nuts. She was conservative, religious, yet determined to make this hot line work. I still struggled to get along with her, but as time progressed, I had learned to appreciate her.
“I think it was Helene,” Susan said. “I have this vivid memory of her passing the call to me one Saturday night just as the phone rang. She said she couldn’t help the sob sister any. Some others were there and the name stuck.”
She couldn’t help the sob sister. Because they knew each other?
“Are there names in any of these accounts?” I asked. “Does she give us a clue as to who this guy is who hurt her so badly?”
“It wasn’t one guy,” Louise said softly.
I glanced at her. Her eyes were red.
“It was a gang,” she said. “A few of the early accounts were really graphic.”
Susan nodded. “And there are no names, at least not that we’ve found.”
“What about in the other papers I gave you?” I asked. “Are there any names in those?”
“Initials,” Louise said. “And I have to tell you, this stuff is gruesome.”
“Yeah,” Susan said. “What was this woman into?”
I shook my head again. “I’ll tell you when I can. The most recent papers, what are they about?”
Susan bowed her head. “You don’t want to know.”
But Louise squared her shoulders. “It’s another group.”
“A group of what?” I asked, feeling cold.
“A group of perverts,” Louise said.
Susan had put a hand over her mouth. Her head was still bowed.
“What kind of perverts?” I asked.
“The kind who like little boys,” Louise said. “They take them from the home, to work. And the boys work, all right.”
Her words were clipped, bitter, angry.
“The home?” I asked, my mind a bit frozen. I’d become so used to dealing with women that the phrase “little boys” threw me off. “Their homes?”
“The boys’ home near Janesville,” Susan said, sounding ill. “My church gives that place money.”
“Please tell me she uses names,” I said.
Louise shook her head. “Initials, though. That and the home might be enough information to figure it out.”
If we were cops. If someone was going to investigate this. I didn’t know if Kaplan could do it. Groups, gangs, rings of organized anything were often the hardest thing to defeat.
“Did they know she was investigating them?” I asked.
“Someone—a E.N.—thought she was asking a lot of questions. She was scared,” Susan said. Then she added, “I got that from the journal, not from her notes.”
“Can you give me what you translated?” I asked. “Not the journals, but the notes themselves?”
“I wish we had one of those expensive copiers,” Louise said. “I really don’t want to write this stuff out again.”
I empathized.
“Just set the papers in a pile right here.” I moved a metal outbox onto the table. “I’ll pick them up if I need them. Don’t copy right now. Keep translating, if you can. If you can’t, I understand. But I sure would like names.”
Susan picked up her pen. Then her gaze met mine. “How do people stay sane in the face of all this crap?”
I thought of the cops I’d known, good and bad, as well as the people I knew who were trying to make things right in the world.
“I’m not sure they stay sane,” I said. “Hell, I’m not even sure they were ever sane.”
I wasn’t sure I was either. But I didn’t say that. I figured both women knew that already.
* * * *
I was halfway down the stairs when I met one of the volunteers coming up. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose was red.
“Call for you,” she said in a thick voice.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded. “Just taking a break.”
She was trying for jaunty, but she failed miserably. A lot of the volunteers took breaks after a particularly tough phone call. Often those breaks took place in the ladies room, and involved lots of Kleenex.
I hurried down the stairs to my desk. Kaplan was on the line.
“I’m coming over there,” he said. “But I figured, given the nature of your business, that you’d want me to let you know first.”
I did appreciate it, but knew better than to thank him. In the past when I noticed him being sensitive, he got offended.
“Do you know where the old rectory used to be?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Go to that door.”
I hung up and hurried back through the walkway into my tiny living room. I had just switched on the lights when I heard a car pull up. I didn’t look through the curtains. I waited, tense, listening to the car engine shut off, the door slam, and footsteps on the gravel. I anticipated the knock on the door, but it still made me jump.
“It’s me.” Kaplan’s voice. I appreciated that he didn’t identify himself. He probably had no idea that I was alone.
I checked the peephole, then unlocked all of the dead bolts. I pulled the door open.
Kaplan was still wearing his heavy police jacket, and his galoshes. His black pants were stained with snow and salt along the hems.
“C’mon in,” I said, standing back.
He nodded, stamped his feet, and entered. He stopped as I closed the door, a look of surprise on his face. “This is your place?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I expected—”
“The hot line, I know,” I said. “We don’t let strangers in there.”
“I remember,” he said grimly. He took off his jacket, put his gloves in the pocket, then ran a hand through his hair. He slipped out of the galoshes as well.
He was wearing a rumpled suit coat under the jacket. “You see the 10 o’clock news?”
“No.”
“Open and shut. Burglars surprised her, knowing what was in the house. Now we’re having an all-out manhunt which will, of course, fail.”
I opened my hand and gestured toward the sofa. His gaze passed over the materials that I had left on the table. “Coffee?” I asked. “Water? Soda?”
“Coffee,” he said. “Black. Thank you.”
I went into the kitchen and started the percolator. Then I hovered in the archway between the kitchen and the living room.
“How do you know it wasn’t burglars?” I asked.
“You mean besides the fact nothing was stolen? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. She surprised those burglars, so they viciously attacked her. The odd thing was there was more than one of them, and still they didn’t have time to take her purse or the diamond earri
ngs she wore or the gold bracelet around her wrist.” He leaned his head back. “There’s so much not right here, and I can’t tell anyone.”
Except me. The tension had left me, and I actually felt flattered, although I knew better than to say so.
“You knew her, didn’t you?” I asked quietly.
He raised his head, and looked at me. “She called me her disappointment.”
I raised my eyebrows. At that moment, I heard the percolator and silently cursed it. “Coffee’s done.”
I poured filled two large mugs, grabbed the plate of five raisin cookies that I had stolen from the volunteers two days ago, and put it all on a tray that had come with the kitchen. I brought the tray into the living room and put it on the end table near him.
I sat across from him on the matching chair that faced the window. “You were a disappointment?”
“Yeah.” He grabbed two cookies, but he didn’t eat them. “Among the other things she did, Dolly Langham gave out two full-ride scholarships every year to the University of Wisconsin. She gave them to the best students from Madison area high schools, no matter the gender.”
“Wow,” I said. “You got one?”
He nodded. “Four years at our greatest state institution.”
“And then you became a cop,” I said.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Like father, like son.”
“And she got angry at you.”
“Said I was wasting my talents.”
“Are you?”
His gaze met mine. “Are you wasting yours?”
I smiled. “Touché.”
We both picked up our coffee mugs. He didn’t add anything, so I said, “You never lost touch with her.”
“I checked up on her,” he said. “She wasn’t young and she lived alone.”
“I’ll bet she appreciated that.” I blew on my coffee, wishing I hadn’t tinged that sentence with sarcasm.
“You got it. She hated it. Not that it made any difference. She still died horribly. Worse that I would have expected.” He sighed. His sadness and regret were palpable.
The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives Page 4
