by Jane Steen
“You’re a clever little girl, Tessie,” said Blackie, showing his three teeth in a horrible grin. “That’s why they let me go all over the Women’s House; they know I ain’t a bit interested in that there. The devil caught me with whiskey, not women. You all could walk nekked down the room, and I’d swap you every one for a nip of firewater.” He wheezed again for a minute. “Little Jo, she tried her tricks on me once, but I told her to go play with her dolls. She said ‘Doll!’ and trundled off, quiet as you please.”
I was fascinated, but unfortunately at that moment Mr. Ostrander arrived. He looked as if he had not slept, and his normally neat clothing was askew.
“Blackthorn, back to the Men’s House,” he said, an edge of venom in his voice. “Don’t loiter round here talking with the women.”
Blackie tipped his greasy hat to the superintendent and shuffled his way toward the back of the house, humming softly. Tess and I turned quickly away to the workroom, but Mr. Ostrander was clearly not interested in us. He glanced toward Mrs. Lombardi’s door, took a deep breath, and marched inside. The door shut with a firm thud.
“Mr. Ostrander is really worried,” Tess said.
I nodded, gazing at Mrs. Lombardi’s door. Whatever part Mrs. Lombardi had played in Jo’s demise, I was sorry that she was facing Mr. Ostrander alone.
Mrs. Lombardi was too busy to talk to me the next day, and I shut myself into the workroom to get away from my newfound celebrity; Edie’s unpleasant temper acted like a watchdog to keep intruders out. We had received the bolts of cotton for the new rooms and had a great deal to do.
After a hard morning’s sewing, a plain meal, nursing Sarah, and attending to her needs, I was ready to sit down with some hemming for a couple of hours. Tess worked quietly beside me; she was less talkative now that she had more absorbing work to do.
At around two o’clock, Mrs. Lombardi poked her head around the door. Edie had taken over at the sewing machine and was making a great deal of noise, so Mrs. Lombardi beckoned me out of the room. I motioned to Edie that I was leaving Sarah with her—she slept very well when the machine was whirring—and slipped into Mrs. Lombardi’s office.
“I promised to tell you about Jo,” she said.
“I already heard something about her from Blackie,” I said. “Was she—did she bother the men?”
“Johanna Mauer was brought to the Farm when she was eleven years old.” Mrs. Lombardi rested her head against the wing of the chair. “I have been trying to find news of her family, but they left to try their luck in Canada, and since then I have heard nothing from them. They will be thinking that poor little Jo is alive and safe here at the Farm, and we have failed her.” She pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers.
“Why did they bring her to the Farm? Could they not afford to care for her?”
“No, they had sufficient money.” She took a deep breath. “Jo was a beautiful young woman; huge blue eyes and fine, shiny hair of that very pale shade of blonde that you sometimes see on small children. She loved pretty dresses, poor simple soul.”
“So what was the problem with her?” I asked, impatient to hear the nub of the matter.
“Men. Jo suffered from some kind of erotic mania. I remember the painful embarrassment on her father’s face as he tried to describe how he and his sons—her own father and brothers!—were constantly awakened to find her in their beds, making an assault on their bodies. They tried putting a lock on her room, but she would spend all night thumping on the door and screaming, and they loved her too dearly to imprison her.”
“She was lucky that they did not want to take advantage of her,” I said, remembering some of the tales I had heard in the refectory.
“They were very moral men.” Mrs. Lombardi frowned. “But some around them were not. Imagine, an eleven-year-old child! It is shameful that there are men who would even countenance such a thing. Of course, her approach to men was, well, very direct. I had to have one of our female staff sleep in the same room as Jo, with the key tied to her wrist.”
“And yet she still became pregnant.”
“She would take every opportunity to give us the slip by day and would head for the Men’s House or the farm buildings. The orderlies were given strict instructions to bring her straight back here if they found her, and the male inmates are frequently lectured about not touching the women. I believe Mr. Schoeffel has bromide administered at intervals to some of the less, ah, inhibited men.”
“But the father of her child must have been one of the inmates or orderlies,” I said. “Unless it was a man who visited the Farm; one of the carters, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Lombardi. “When her condition became apparent, I spent hours trying to identify the man—or the men—she might have been with, by dint of listing every inmate and orderly and asking her if it was he. It was an awful, wearisome process; Jo could barely speak.”
“So did she give you any clue?”
“Yes, we had a name of sorts: ‘Ly-lee.’ And I do not believe it was a resident of the Farm, because every time I gave her the name of an inmate or orderly she would shake her head and say, ‘Ly-lee.’ I believe she was trying to tell me, poor thing.”
A knock at the door interrupted us. Agnes burst into the room, an expression of disgust on her face.
“That Phebe has vomited on my floor again,” she burst out. “I simply can’t have her working for me. She don’t even have the sense to go outside when she can’t hold in the food she steals.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Lombardi, rising swiftly from her chair. “Poor Phebe. And we must disinfect the floor thoroughly. I’m sorry, Nell,” she said, turning to me. “We will talk more of this later.” And she left the room swiftly, followed by Agnes, who trailed a strong smell of cooking behind her.
I raised my eyes to the ceiling, imagining the cold, silent cell two floors above. The rooms were now being converted, and I could not suppose that any clues that remained would be present for long. My next step was clear.
I would go back to the insane wing.
NINETEEN
The door was closed but not locked. I was greeted by a strong smell of paint; drop cloths and ladders littered the corridor. The lock plates had been taken off some of the doors, giving the place a less forbidding air.
The painters, an ad hoc team composed of orderlies and residents, were eating their breakfast in the Men’s House, and the wing was deserted. I wished I had brought a shawl, as it was still cold outside, and the large, barred window at the end of the corridor was open to let out the smell of the paint.
I walked reluctantly to the room where I had last stood looking down at the small, cold bodies that made me think of my father. The faintest outline of the stain by the door still showed on the boards, despite the scrubbing they had received. I squatted down to look; what, I wondered, did this stain tell me? Probably that Jo had died in this very room and had not been moved here. She had last been seen on October the seventh; the weather had taken a turn for the worse around the first week of October, as I remembered well.
By the time I had arrived at the Farm on the fourth of November, the temperature had been firmly below freezing both day and night, and it had not gone above freezing at all—and then only just—until very recently. I counted the months off in my head; five solid months of icy weather. So Jo and Benjamin could easily have frozen to death in the first week of October and lain silently there ever since.
I felt sure that murder had been committed. And yet if experienced officials were satisfied that Jo had foolishly shut herself in, had been unable to get out, and had died of the cold, who was I to dispute their wisdom? I felt myself hopelessly inadequate to my task.
I looked around the room. It was completely padded with a strong, brownish-white canvas but was otherwise bare. A narrow, barred window high up in the wall let in shreds of light through its thick frosted glass. A large lock plate with a keyhole was fixed on the
corridor side of the door; there was no key in the lock. The outside of the door also sported a huge spring bolt.
I tried to remember whether that bolt had been engaged when Jimmy went to open it. I did not think so; it seemed to me that the door had not been quite closed, just stuck in the jamb. This might support the theory that Jo hid in the room by herself. There was only one way to find out.
I stepped farther into the room, nerving myself to act. The padded walls seemed to press inward, and I imagined being in this place for hours, or even days. I nearly bolted back down the corridor, but this might be my last chance to perform the experiment before the room was altered.
I tried several times to shut the door from the inside. It was impossible to get any grip on the padding inside the door to pull the heavy, iron-bound thing shut from the inside. Then I tried grasping the metal lock plate, swinging the door toward me and jumping back, with the considerable risk of shutting my hand in the door. The hinges were well balanced and the door did swing so that it engaged partway into the jamb. I pushed against it; it was still easy to open. I tried the experiment several times, but although I was strong, I simply could not get the door to stick closed. I was glad of that, as I was not looking forward to trying to get out.
By this time my arms were shaking. I took myself off to a corner of the padded cell, as far away from the stain as possible, and sat down on the cold boards to try and work out in my mind if there were another way to shut the door. The hypothesis of an accidental closing of the door was beginning to look weak. I buried my head in my arms to shut out the oppressive cell and tried to think.
The door slammed shut. I heard the spring bolt shoot into place with a hard thud. I leaped to my feet and screamed like I had never screamed in my entire life.
TWENTY
My scream was answered by a hoarse shout of fear. Voices rang out, and footsteps thudded along the corridor. I heard the spring bolt squeak back into its socket and saw the door move about an inch. Then it stuck, and voices—men’s voices—cursed at it volubly. A few seconds later a miraculous grating sound announced my salvation.
I staggered, on legs that had turned to jelly, over to the door and encountered a half dozen open-mouthed faces. One of them had only three teeth.
“Blackie!” I gasped, and almost fell into the man’s arms. One of the other men set up a high keening, and it took two orderlies to silence him.
Blackie set me back on my feet and patted my shoulder in an avuncular way. “You nearly scared us to death, Miss Nell. Jimmy here thinks you’re little Jo’s ghost, I reckon. Jimmy,” he said, turning toward the doughy man, who now had tears running down his moon-shaped face, “You know Miss Nell. She don’t look nothin’ like Jo, so hush now. Why d’you slam the door, anyhow?” he asked the man.
Jimmy smeared snot and tears around his face with his sleeve as he explained that he didn’t want to see the padded rooms open; it scared him to think of the padded rooms. He saw what he saw. He didn’t like this place. He didn’t want to be a painter any more.
“We won’t get any more work out of him,” one of the orderlies agreed. “I’ll take him back to the Men’s House and see if I can find a replacement.” He took Jimmy gently but firmly by the arm and steered him toward the wing door, talking to him all the while in a low, reassuring voice.
Blackie had recovered his usual air of placid amusement, and the drooping corners of his mouth turned up as he looked at me. “Tryin’ to see if little Jo got stuck in there all on her lonesome, were you? If she did, I’ll eat my hat,” and he gestured toward the greasy object perched on his head. A chill ran through my bones. So Blackie, too, thought it was murder.
“Enough of that, Blackthorn,” one of the orderlies said in a peremptory tone. “We’ve got work to do; no use speculating. The superintendent said it was an accident.”
Blackie wheezed a short laugh in my direction and shambled off toward the cans of paint at the other end of the corridor. The orderlies looked at me, and I forced an unconcerned smile.
“Silly of me to be so curious, wasn’t it? I’ve had quite a fright. I only came here to check on the window casements, to make sure I was sewing the—the right sort of tabs on the curtains.”
The orderlies said nothing.
“And I’m quite done,” I added. “I must return to my workroom now. To sew the curtains.” And as steadily as I could, I headed for the door.
Blackie looked at me as I left, an expression full of meaning on his seamed face. I raised my eyebrows at him, and a look of angelic unconcern spread over his countenance.
I was sure that man knew something.
Well, at least I had learned some things. I had learned that it was impossible to shut the door from the inside and that it only got stuck when it had been pushed hard from the outside. It seemed very unlikely that Jo had accidentally shut herself in. And how did she get into the insane wing in the first place? Who had the keys? Logically, this was the next question.
I walked on unsteady legs down to the workroom, where I found Lizzie rocking a squalling Sarah. I apologized, took my daughter in my arms, and prepared myself to nurse her.
Sarah was fussy throughout the procedure and took a long time to settle down afterwards. “What is ailing her?” I asked Lizzie. “You don’t think she’s sick, do you?”
Lizzie’s careworn face crinkled into a rare smile. “I think she’s growing, that’s all. You’ll just have to nurse her more often for a while.” The smile disappeared, and she stepped closer to me. “Your stepfather wants her adopted, didn’t you say?” she asked quietly. “Don’t let them push you into giving her pap or goat’s milk too soon. They do that sometimes, to make the baby wean faster, when they’re looking for a couple to take it.”
I looked at Lizzie in blank astonishment. “Do you think they’re already looking for someone?”
“Mrs. Lombardi, now, she likes the mother and baby to stay together,” Lizzie said. “But the governors, they’re different. Grateful, rich couples are good benefactors, and the sooner the baby goes to live with them, the better. They reckon that a baby that stays with an unrespectable mother gets bad habits.”
Considering my recent decision that I would keep Sarah, this was unwelcome news indeed. As I changed Sarah’s diaper, I tried to formulate a plan of action. My first instinct was simply to take my baby and flee. The weather was getting warmer, and if I set off in the early morning, I could probably make it to the lake port of Waukegan by nightfall. And then what? Without money, what was I supposed to do?
No. I could risk my own life but not Sarah’s. I would need help, and the first person to ask would be Mrs. Lombardi. I had heard that she had helped Tilly—who, surprisingly, wanted to keep her son—find a place in a charitable house in Pennsylvania. Perhaps I could beg Mrs. Lombardi to help me find a solution; although, how could I elude my stepfather’s wishes and still see my mother? It was beyond me.
When I arrived at Mrs. Lombardi’s office, I was surprised to see that she was on her knees on the rug by her desk. She was praying fervently and did not hear me arrive at her open door. She rose swiftly to her feet and hastily snatched her cloak from the coat-stand by her window, twisting it around her neck in one swift movement as she turned to the door. Her face held traces of tears, and her expression betrayed deep distress.
I forgot my own troubles. “What is the matter?” I asked, laying my hand on her arm as she reached the doorway. She had not seen me up to that point.
She seemed to snap back to where she was, and her hand tightened suddenly around my wrist.
“I must leave,” she said. She lowered her voice to the merest breath. “I should not be telling this to an inmate—Nell, can you be discreet?”
“You know I can.”
“Very well. Mr. Ostrander tried to hang himself not much more than an hour ago. His maid heard kicking sounds from his bedroom and found him hanging from the belt of his dressing-gown, which he had tied to the br
acket of his curtains. The stitching in the belt gave way, otherwise he would have died.”
I took a step back. “Mr. Ostrander? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. Let us pray this has nothing to do with the discovery of Jo and her baby.”
And she was gone, leaving me puzzled. What had she meant? Then the full impact of her words hit me.
Could Mr. Ostrander have been the baby’s father? Or the murderer? Or both?
I stayed in the workroom for the rest of the day, cranking the handle of the sewing machine furiously to calm my turbulent brain and help with the thinking process. My future and that of my baby gnawed at my mind, but I tried to put off those thoughts until I had a chance of an interview with Mrs. Lombardi. The question of Mr. Ostrander’s guilt was now my foremost preoccupation.
It just seemed wrong. Mr. Ostrander, with his formal, stiff manner, his mania for efficiency, and his desire to retain control of any situation—somehow, I could not see him in the grip of a helpless lust. He, the father of Jo’s baby?
The light was fading, and I lit the lamp and decided to sew just one more pillowcase before stopping work. Sarah gurgled contentedly in her crib after her third feeding of the afternoon; I was becoming quite exhausted with nursing her, but I was determined to follow Lizzie’s advice.
A noise at the door made me whip my head round in surprise. I relaxed when I saw Blackie, but as he sidled into the room, I detected that there was something different about him. His eyes were brighter than normal, and a faint flush decorated his weather-beaten cheeks. He held himself taller and looked at me with something approaching insolence.
“Have you been drinking?” I asked.
“Just a nip.” Blackie seated himself on an unoccupied table, a relaxed grin on his face.
“Where did you get alcohol?”
Blackie raised a finger to his lips in a gesture of secrecy. “There’s ways and means when the craving overcomes me. Just a little, mind; enough to cover the bottom of the bottle. If I drink more, I’ll want to make a night of it; and if I do that, they’ll find me out.” He nodded, as if to reassure me. “Don’t you worry, Miss Nell. I’m quite as safe drinking as sober. Just a little bit more expansive, you might say.” And he was better spoken when he had been drinking, I noticed. I felt sure there was more to Blackie than met the eye.
