by Amy Stewart
Before I could say anything about that, she added, “And don’t you dare tell me that a seamstress is a poor occupation for a sister of yours. It’s far more respectable than police work. If Mother were alive, she’d be happy to see me sewing and horrified to see you down at that dirty old jail.”
I reached out to put my hand over her ankles but she pulled them away. I tried to speak kindly to her anyway. “I just can’t watch you put yourself in danger. Not after what we went through last year. It was you they were threatening to kidnap. Everything we did was to keep you safe.”
She picked up her book again and flipped through it rapidly, blinking back tears.
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you seen him again?”
“Not yet.”
I tried very hard to sound calm. “What does that mean?”
She wrapped a strand of hair around her finger and looked up at me. “He promised to take me and Helen to a show on Broadway when he had the money.”
“You can’t possibly go to New York with a man. Nor can Helen. Girls your age go on a train with a man and—well. I won’t have it. I’ll speak to Mr. Stewart about it.”
She sniffed.
“You know we wouldn’t have allowed it. I’ll take you to a show myself if you want to go.”
“It’s dull to go places with you!”
“Then we’ll bring Norma along too.”
She smiled to herself and I hoped we’d understood each other. She put her book down and looked up at me as I turned to leave.
“Haven’t you caught that man yet?”
“No. But we will, and then I’ll be home more. Although Sheriff Heath has promised to make me a deputy. I don’t know what things will be like after that.”
Fleurette brightened at the possibility. “Does that mean you’ll be out chasing after criminals at all hours? Won’t that be awfully dangerous?”
“It’s dangerous for the criminals,” I said. Fleurette giggled and I made my exit while a fragile peace still hung in the air between us.
THE LIGHT WAS ON IN NORMA’S ROOM. She’d taken recently to wearing Mother’s old spectacles when she read, claiming farsightedness, but I suspected she mostly wore them so that she could regard me suspiciously over the rims. When she looked up at me, they slipped so far down her nose that she had to reach her hand out to catch them.
“You could get your own pair,” I said. “We could have them fitted to you.”
“I like these fine.” She was reading an article in Popular Science about a German druggist who filled prescriptions by carrier pigeon before the war. He’d devised a means to attach a camera to his pigeons so that they might fly over enemy camps and take pictures. There was a photograph of a pigeon with a contraption strapped to its breast by means of elastic bands. Next to it was one of the pictures claimed to have been taken by the bird from a vantage point high above a river. We studied the pictures together for a minute.
“I don’t see how it could manage the weight,” Norma said, “but this leaves us no choice but to carry out a trial.”
“Or risk the Germans gaining the advantage for its pigeon fleet?”
She nodded grimly and I thought she really did believe it was a matter of military superiority. “It isn’t correct to call pigeons a fleet,” she said as she studied the pictures. “Although a flock sounds too frivolous. I think we’ll call them squadrons.”
She took up a pencil and made a note of that in the margin, then put the magazine away and turned her attention to me. “I heard you talking to Fleurette.”
“I just want her to be careful.”
Norma passed a pillow to me so that I could lean against the bedpost. “She doesn’t want to be careful. She wants to be on her own. She’s been talking about getting a furnished room with Helen.”
I groaned and loosened the buttons around my collar. “And who does she think is going to pay her rent?”
“She’ll take in sewing. You know that. What else do you expect her to do?”
“I haven’t any idea,” I admitted. “I’ve been happily avoiding that question for years.”
“Well, we can’t let her move into town and do as she pleases. She’ll fall for the first traveling salesman who knocks on her door.”
“Norma!” It was unlike her to bring up my past, but she was right—I had been Fleurette’s age when I gave in to the attentions of a traveling salesman.
Norma deployed her spectacles in her most dramatic fashion. “Back when we were girls, I don’t remember you ever even mentioning a boy before one turned up in our parlor. Imagine how it would be for Miss Girl About Town, who would throw open the window and invite them up.”
“I’d rather not.”
“I suppose that man you arrested didn’t have von Matthesius in his pocket, or I would’ve read about it by now.”
“He won’t talk. We can only hope that he was helping to keep von Matthesius in hiding, and that without anyone to help he will slip up.”
“Well, you’d better do something more than hope.”
I reached down to unlace my boots. “I don’t know what else to do. It’s been almost two weeks. The sheriff has his men out looking every day, and we’ve spoken with everyone who was involved with the case.”
“Why was he arrested in the first place?” It infuriated Norma when the newspapers resorted to euphemisms like “serious charges” and “sensational testimony” in the name of propriety and didn’t tell her what she really wanted to know.
I described what I’d learned about the sham treatments offered as nervous cures, and patients being drugged and made to appear sicker than they were so that their families would pay for a longer stay, and about von Matthesius taking payment in the form of paintings and heirlooms when the families’ money ran out. I told her about Beatrice Fuller and his shameful attempts to force a marriage upon her, and the bravery of the boys who went to the police to stop it.
“Then you haven’t been to see everyone,” Norma said.
“Who else is left? Alfonso Youngman is dead, and Beatrice Fuller is in California. The sheriff has said he can’t force her grandparents to tell where she is.”
Norma tapped the end of her pencil on my knee impatiently. “You don’t need them. You need the minister.”
“What minister?”
“The old man he called in to perform the wedding when that poor girl was too drugged to stand. He’s the only other criminal in this mess. I don’t know why you haven’t spoken to him.”
19
THE GERMAN REFORMED CHURCH was a small whitewashed building of a style that was common a hundred and fifty years ago. It was clad in clapboard that ran from the earth to the heavens, and from its roof arose a spire topped with old copper streaked in verdigris. Around the sides were the kind of tall, skinny Gothic windows that encouraged those inside to look inward, not out onto the world. The church sat proudly atop a plain carpet of lawn, with not so much as a shrub or flower box to suggest that there were pleasures to be had in this life. The only advantage to the secluded upbringing my mother imposed upon us was that we had managed to avoid spending our Sundays in such strict, austere places as the German churches of Brooklyn and northern New Jersey.
It had taken us a few days just to find Reverend Weber. He hadn’t testified during the trial due to an illness. The sham marriage he performed had been witnessed by several people, and the certificate signed properly, which meant that there was little doubt or controversy over his role in the matter. Because of this, his name did not appear in any records of the trial, and it took quite a bit of digging through the prosecutor’s notes to find it. As soon as we did, we went directly there.
Sheriff Heath pushed open the heavy front doors of the church. We leaned in and squinted at the dark and oiled pews only long enough to see that there was no one inside. A footpath led around back to the rectory, where my knock was answered by a frail old man so bent over by rheumatism that he had
to contort himself to look up at me.
“Guten Tag,” he said in a raspy voice.
“Einen guten Tag auch Ihnen,” I answered. “Mein Name ist Constance Kopp, und mein Begleiter ist Herr Heath. May we come in? I’m here about a member of your congregation.”
That must have been enough German to satisfy him, because he nodded and opened the door.
We stepped into a small, shabby sitting room meant more for the accommodation of visitors than for the comfort of the rectory’s inhabitant. There was no wide and cushioned settee, no lamp for reading, and in fact no books or pictures or personal effects of any kind. A collection of mismatched straight-backed wooden chairs were placed in a precise semicircle, in anticipation of a serious conversation among several uncomfortable visitors. Only one of the chairs was equipped with arms and a withered old cushion. I took this to be the reverend’s. On the wall hung a single cross and a devotional calendar printed by the church.
Reverend Weber settled into his chair, and Sheriff Heath and I sat down across from him. Because he was so badly stooped over, we found ourselves staring at a few strands of white hair combed over a scalp as bare and fragile as a baby’s, with blue veins running underneath skin that was at once pink and red and a strange chalky white. He had to turn himself sideways to look at us. His lips trembled and his eyes were pale and watery.
“We’re looking for a man you might know,” Sheriff Heath said. “He’s gone missing and we very much hope you can help us find him.”
“Oh, dear,” the old man said. “Missing?”
“It’s more that he’s in hiding. He escaped while under guard at the hospital two weeks ago. I’m speaking of Dr. von Matthesius.”
His mouth dropped open and his chin wavered. I could tell he was working on a response and I didn’t want to give him too much time to think.
“Reverend, it’s dangerous for all of us if an escaped prisoner is on the loose,” I said. “The sheriff has deputies out looking every day. They’re armed and ready to shoot if they have to. Someone could get hurt—someone who has nothing to do with it. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”
He looked down at his swollen and twisted knuckles. He shook his head and said quietly, “I’m afraid I couldn’t help you.”
“You’d be helping Dr. von Matthesius,” the sheriff said. “We’ve already arrested his brother, who we believe was helping to keep him. Now he has nowhere to turn.”
“Felix is in jail?” Reverend Weber said, leaning forward as if he hadn’t heard it right. “Is someone going to take his things?”
Sheriff Heath and I glanced at each other, puzzled, and then he said, “Yes, we’ve come in my wagon and we can take his things this afternoon.”
The old man waved in the direction of a door just behind him. The sheriff and I stood up and went over together, both of us trying to act as if nothing were out of the ordinary. The door opened into a little dark and windowless room, too small to be a bedroom, filled to the ceiling with small pieces of furniture, wooden crates, a few trunks and suitcases, and paintings in heavy carved frames.
Reverend Weber hadn’t risen from his chair, but he twisted himself around and watched us. “He said he’d have most of it sold by now. It’s taken too long. People don’t want those old things.”
Sheriff Heath rubbed the back of his neck and took a long breath. “This must have come out of the sanitarium. I suppose Felix was raising money for his brother.”
“What’s that?” the reverend called.
Sheriff Heath went back to the little circle of chairs and knelt down in front of the old man so he wouldn’t have to strain his neck to look up. “Reverend Weber. These things don’t belong to Felix. Some of them could have been stolen or taken from people under fraudulent pretenses. If we find that Felix has broken any laws by selling them—and I think we will—you could be charged for helping him. Do you understand?”
The sheriff sat back on his heels while Reverend Weber whispered to himself. His lips worked furiously but no sound came out. He had a cane in his hand, and it wobbled under his grip.
I sat down next to him and took his other hand in mine. “Haben Sie eine Ahnung wo er sich versteckt?”
He shook his head. “Nein.”
Sheriff Heath looked up at me. “He says he has no idea where he’s hiding,” I said.
The sheriff looked back and forth between the two of us for a minute, his arms folded across his chest. Then he stood and wiped the dust briskly off his trousers. When he spoke, it was in the voice he used to read the riot act to strikers or to give orders to a room full of deputies.
“Reverend, here’s what you’re going to do for us. Write a letter by way of general delivery addressed to Dr. von Matthesius and tell him that the rest of his things have been sold and that you have the money for him. That’s all you have to do. For your willingness to help us capture a dangerous fugitive, we’ll make sure that no charges are brought against you.”
Reverend Weber craned his neck up at us, then shrugged with the helpless air of a man who’d been outmaneuvered. “I don’t see any harm in writing a letter, but I can’t say that it will get to him.”
“We’ll take care of that.” The sheriff looked around the room for writing paper.
“Over there.” The old man pointed a shaky finger to a desk in the corner. I didn’t think he’d be able to manage a pen and paper, but he wrote in a surprisingly bold and clear hand and before long we had three letters to send.
“Good work, Reverend.” Sheriff Heath shook his hand and spent a few minutes running back and forth, carting von Matthesius’s things to his auto. “I’ll send a deputy for the rest,” he called, and we rode off.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him so exhilarated. “What makes you think he’ll inquire about general delivery?” I asked.
“Oh, every kind of clandestine correspondence is sent that way now,” Sheriff Heath said cheerfully. “You can pick up more criminals at a general delivery window than you can at a ten-cent flophouse. We’ll get him.”
We drove directly to the post office in Hackensack, where Sheriff Heath and I walked past the lines of people standing at the windows and down a little hall off to the side. At the end was the postmaster’s office. The sheriff walked in without knocking. We were greeted by the soles of a man’s shoes propped up on a desk, the rest of him concealed behind a newspaper. A mess of curly black hair appeared above the paper, followed by intelligent gray eyes and a shout of “Bob! What have you got for me?”
“May I first introduce you to Miss Kopp,” the sheriff said, as the postmaster scrambled to his feet. “She’s the jail matron, and she’s working on a case with me.”
“You are!” He looked me over with genuine interest. “How’d you manage a job like that?”
“She earned it,” Sheriff Heath said mildly, then he turned to me. “This is Mr. Fulton.”
“How do you do?” I said.
He dropped his newspaper and shook my hand. “Better all the time.”
“Mr. Fulton is the father of four very troublesome girls,” the sheriff said with only the slightest trace of a smile.
“I’m sure they’d be shocked to hear themselves described that way by the sheriff,” I said.
“Oh, they know they’re troublesome, but no one’s bothered to tell them that they’re girls,” Mr. Fulton said. “Our eldest goes out hunting with her uncle, and the twins want to play baseball, and the youngest is convinced that she’ll be a doctor and spends all her time bandaging the others. We had to stop her before she turned the kitchen into a surgery and strapped her sister to the table. Not one of them is going to marry if they don’t settle down.” He made a face of mock horror that he couldn’t sustain. Already I liked Mr. Fulton very much.
“I don’t know about that. They might surprise you,” I said.
“They surprise me every day! Last year the four of them took it in their heads to run away together. They must have thought their mother and I wo
uldn’t notice that they’d been studying the train tables all week. When they tiptoed off with their little rucksacks, I called your friend Robert Heath here and had him run over to the station and pick them up. They spent a night in jail under a charge of waywardness and vagrancy.”
“You didn’t!” I gasped.
Sheriff Heath nodded briskly. “It taught them a lesson.”
“It did no such thing,” Mr. Fulton said. “They had the time of their lives. Didn’t even want to go home the next morning. Nothing rattles those girls. I’ve always said that they’ll either be cops or outlaws, and now, Miss Kopp, I’ve got some hope that one or two of them might take the legitimate path.”
Sheriff Heath gave a polite little cough. Mr. Fulton said, “I’m sorry, you’ve got business, Sheriff. What is it?”
We showed him the letters, which were already sealed and addressed by Reverend Weber’s hand. Sheriff Heath told him very little about the case, only that we were trying to catch a man and needed the clerks at the windows to watch for him.
Mr. Fulton nodded and turned the letters over in his hands. “One for us, one for Paterson, one for Manhattan. I’ll get them out today.”
“You’ve done this before?” I asked. “Tried to trap a man like this?” I hadn’t any idea that general delivery was used so often by criminals and fugitives.
Mr. Fulton’s eyes widened. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe what people get up to by mail. The Postal Service almost put an end to the general delivery plan a few years ago. We kept hearing complaints from the clerks at the windows that they had an unusually high number of young women coming to claim letters. Both married and unmarried.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Well, some of our clerks came to believe that the mails were being used to carry on clandestine correspondence. They raised a big fuss over it in Chicago and wanted the whole program shut down.”
“Over a few love letters?”
“That’s not what they called it,” Mr. Fulton said. “The papers accused us of supplying ‘a bit of the machinery by which young girls are led into the devious paths of sin,’ or something along those lines. I was more concerned about gangsters and Black Handers, but it was the idea of girls and sin that got everyone talking. Now they ask for identification and keep lists of everyone who picks up their mail at the general delivery window.”
