My mouth tastes like bile, and it hurts a little each time I inhale. The pain is the only reason I believe any of this is real.
At the back table, I wrap the coat in tissue paper and then unbutton my own blouse. Blood is splattered across the neck and down the left sleeve. I have no chance of removing the stain on laundry day without the other girls seeing, so I fold it carefully and slip it into the box with the coat. I wrap the evidence neatly with a thick satin bow, and place it on the front desk, ready for delivery.
My corset is also marred with a coin-sized splotch of blood right above my heart, but another would cost at least a week’s wages, so it’ll have to stay. It’s easier to hide, at least.
I have no time to mourn my ruined clothing or a time when I didn’t know what a body sounded like when it hit the floor.
I swing the door to the dark street wide open and toss the cash box out onto the empty sidewalk, knowing it will be gone by morning. I don’t know how to stage a crime scene, but I hope this looks something like a robbery gone wrong.
I’m wearing nothing but my corset, and the night air sends a shiver that reaches straight through my rib cage to my still- pounding heart.
Mr. Hues’s body is splayed out near the base of the staircase. I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and summon a final act of determination to step over it.
If I were a braver person with a stronger stomach and steady hands, I would remove the shears from his neck. But I am not.
I reach into the pocket of my apron, pull out the key, and unlock the door. It doesn’t open all the way, what with Mr. Hues’s torso in the way, but I pry it open wide enough to shimmy through the gap. One step up the staircase, I turn for a last glance at his glassy, open eyes. The same eyes that roved over me so often in life are now unseeing.
Good riddance.
My breathing is jagged, still too shallow and fast as I walk up the narrow staircase to our dark apartment. Blessedly, the other girls are asleep in their iron bedsteads, breathing deeply, soft and quiet.
With a wet cloth from the washbasin in the corner of the room, I wipe the dried blood off my face. I’m not sure if I get all of it—the cloth keeps coming away from my face red—but I can’t stand to look at it anymore. In an apartment full of girls, no one will give a bloodstained rag a second glance. I throw it in my laundry pile and hope I’ve done enough.
I wish I were back in our old apartment on Hester Street, that William was in his bed, and I could wake him and ask what to do. His absence usually feels like a hole in my heart: ever present, but something I can function around. Tonight it feels like a gaping wound: stinging and ugly and desperately urgent.
Most days I try to dam my grief, fearing the dark unknown of its depths, but tonight I let it drown me, hoping if I do, I won’t think about Mr. Hues’s hands on my waist, or his dead eyes, or the way my scissors flew across the room as if by magic.
I sink and sink and sink into nothing but blackness.
I do not dream. And for that I am grateful.
CHAPTER TWO
Chattering voices wake me, and for a single blissful moment I don’t remember the previous night’s events. But I swallow and it burns in my throat, and the images of Mr. Hues pinning me against the wall come flooding back like a faucet of toxic sludge I can’t turn off.
I catch only parts of the girls’ conversation.
“Scissors…”
“Dead…”
“Thank goodness…”
There’s nothing I want less than to leave my warm bed, but until I’m hauled off to jail for murder, I need to remain employed if I don’t wish to starve to death.
My brother’s voice rings in my head. Chin up, sis. It’s going to be all right. It’s what he’d say to me when we were children and I was crying because the girls down the street wouldn’t let me play dolls with them, or when our mother was too lost inside her own head to feed us.
William had an annoying habit of always being right. Right up until he wasn’t.
I swing my legs out of bed and place my feet on a floor that’s so cold, it sends a shiver straight through my core.
The room we all share above the shop is small. Three narrow windows stretch across the wall, letting in beams of dust-flecked morning light. The wood floors are scuffed with years of use. Twelve twin beds, wrought iron and narrow, line the walls, six on each side. Mrs. Carrey’s apartment is on the third floor, up the staircase on the far wall.
It’s Jess who greets me first. “Oh, Frances, thank God you’re up. Mrs. Carrey is downstairs with the police. Mr. Hues is dead.”
I feign a gasp and tug my nightdress up higher over my bruised throat. “What happened?” It hurts to speak.
“We don’t know yet,” Mary answers from across the room, where she sits twisting up her dark hair. “All we know is that the police came up this morning and fetched Mrs. Carrey. I can’t believe you slept through it.”
None of us waste time pretending to be sad for Mr. Hues. Although never openly discussed, all of us suspected what he was.
As if summoned by the act of her name being spoken aloud, Mrs. Carrey bursts into the room, a police officer at her heels.
“Is this the way young ladies look after eight a.m.?” she scolds us.
“No, Mrs. Carrey,” we say in unison, throwing on dressing gowns and coats for some semblance of modesty in front of the officer.
In both hands, he holds our scissors. They clink together with each step.
Mary’s hang off his pinkie, with their copper-colored blades. The long shank and large bolt mark Jess’s. The ones with the coil of cobalt-blue thread around the thumbhole, mine, are missing.
He stops in the middle of the room, bends down, and fans them out across the wood.
“Ladies, if you would be so kind as to identify your shears for me.”
One by one, each girl approaches the pile of scissors.
Allison grabs the ones with the strip of faded red fabric knotted around the thumbhole.
Catherine takes the pair adorned with shiny black ribbon.
On and on until there are no scissors left.
I approach the empty spot on the floor where the shears used to be, hoping I look appropriately confused. I don’t reach out for fear the officer will see my hands shaking. Instead, I clasp them behind my back and grip so hard, it hurts.
“Mine are missing.” I wonder which of the officers had the gruesome task of pulling my shears out of Mr. Hues’s neck.
“What is your name, miss?” he says curtly.
“Frances Hallowell, sir.”
He nods once, says, “Thank you, ladies,” then exits the apartment.
The girls are silent, every last one of their gazes trained on me.
One doesn’t have to be a detective to put the pieces together. I worked late last night. Mr. Hues is dead. My shears are the only ones missing.
I feel unbearably, hopelessly, backed into a corner. I could run away. But I have no money and nowhere to go. I could confess, but there is no way they would believe the truth of what really happened. I was there, and I hardly believe it myself. All I see before me is a path lined with reporters, lawyers, investigators, and prison. The case will be a tabloid sensation, as murders involving young women always are. I can see the headlines now: SEAMSTRESS OR KILLING MACHINE? or perhaps FRANCES HALLO-HELL: INSIDE THE MIND OF EVIL.
Mrs. Carrey turns up her nose and trots across the room, her boots clicking against the wood floors. “Miss Hallowell, a word.” Her back is to me as she says it, which makes it worse, somehow.
Mrs. Carrey’s apartment is an extension of her physical appearance, all propriety and cleanliness. I’ve only been up here once or twice before, despite living just one floor below her for the better part of a year.
She gestures to a pair of leather chairs placed facing a potbelly stove in the back of the room. I pad across her threadbare rug and take a seat, positioning myself just on the edge of the chair, as if I could get up and run at any moment.
“Miss Hallowell,” Mrs. Carrey begins. “I wanted to speak to you before the police have the opportunity to question you.”
The thought of police questioning fills me with a panic I swallow down. She takes my silence as an invitation to continue.
“Did everything look ordinary when you left the shop last night?” she asks.
I imagine the scene: Mrs. Carrey stepping downstairs this morning, finding Mr. Hues on his back, the wound in his neck dark with coagulated blood, his eyes staring at the ceiling, my vomit on the floor next to him. It must have been horrible.
“Yes, ma’am.” Her lined face is difficult to look at, so I train my eyes on the floor. I’ve never been a particularly good liar. William could charm and fib his way out of anything; it’s not a gift I also inherited.
“What time did you finish your work?”
“Around ten o’clock, I believe, ma’am.” This time, the lie comes more easily.
“Make certain you know your story, Frances,” Mrs. Carrey says, and I freeze. But her voice isn’t accusatory; it’s kind.
“I will support whatever you say,” she continues softly. “Whatever that man did to you, I can assure you, he deserved the fate that befell him.”
Mrs. Carrey purses her lips slightly. “I will help you, Frances, but first you must help yourself. You left the shop at ten. You know nothing else. Pretend to be weak and foolish. It’s what the detectives will expect of a girl your age. With luck, they’ll not push you further.”
I stare at her wide-eyed, before nodding once.
From behind her chair, she pulls the delivery box I left downstairs last night. “For Mrs. Arnold, yes?”
“Yes, ma’am, the velvet coat.”
“Good,” she replies. “Do your delivery. Take the back staircase, try your best not to let them see. Make yourself scarce today—it’s for the best.”
The package is heavy in my hands, I picture my bloodstained blouse folded neatly inside.
“Everything is going to be fine,” her voice trembles slightly, and this time, I can tell it is she who is lying. “You are dismissed, Miss Hallowell.”
I rise, still in shock, and exit her quarters. The rest of the girls are in the throes of getting ready, and as I walk through them, they stop—ribbons half-tied, brushes half-pulled through locks of hair—and stare at me.
For the first time, perhaps ever, the apartment is completely silent.
I slip on my long dark wool skirt, button my high-necked white blouse—the only one I have left—braid my hair, and pin on my felt hat, while they all pretend not to look at me.
A horrible realization hits me. With Mr. Hues dead, the shop will likely be forced to close for good.
Their eyes follow me as I walk out the door.
I allow myself one single moment, alone in the rarely used back stairwell, to bite down on my lip and scrunch my eyes closed. But I can’t fall apart just yet.
The cool morning air hangs heavy with the specific New York smell of river water, garbage, and too many people all living in one place. Black smog flows from the smokestacks of the factories on the other side of town. Horses, automobiles, trolleys, and people rush past me in a cacophony of activity.
A group of onlookers has gathered on the other side of the street, their faces screwed up in expressions of horror and delight. A woman in a pink dressing gown sweeps the same spot on the sidewalk over and over again, her wrinkled neck craned toward the shop. A grisly murder is easy entertainment for bored fishmongers’ wives.
A headache still pulses excruciatingly through my head, an ever-present reminder of what a horrible mess I’ve managed to make of my life in twelve short hours.
But being out of the shop gives me the first sense of control I’ve had all morning, and there is relief in that. There’s anonymity in the city. When so many people live on top of one another, avoiding looking in someone’s eyes is a politeness; it’s as much privacy as we’re able to give each other.
The grid of the Lower East Side is imprinted deep in my brain. Mrs. Arnold lives ten blocks away. There’s an alley three blocks from here I should be able to duck down, open the package, and dump my bloodied clothing in before rewrapping the velvet coat for delivery.
I push my way through the crowded streets, eager to rid myself of the physical reminders of last night. I duck under a porter carrying a trunk, weave through a pack of laughing schoolgirls, and dodge a shiny black Cadillac barreling down the road.
I’m almost to the alley of a redbrick townhouse, ready to make a sharp turn, when a body slams into mine, snapping me out of my daze.
I stop short when I see the face of the offender.
“Oliver?” I gasp. The sight of him sends a zip of nerves through me.
“Frances Hallowell!” He sounds genuinely delighted. He’s taller than the last time I saw him. It looks like he’s grown at least an inch in only four months.
He has a boyish sort of face, despite being nineteen already. If I squint, I can picture him as the thirteen-year-old he once was, bounding up our stoop with a baseball in his hand, a mischievous smile cracking his dimpled cheeks. His green eyes are kind but offset by his sharp cheekbones and jaw, certainly features he got from his mother. His father, Judge Callahan, is a lump of a man. My brother was the judge’s errand boy years ago, before he got caught up in the wrong sorts of things with the wrong sorts of people.
Oliver’s wavy brown hair is badly in need of a barber, but his navy-blue suit is impeccable. Better than anything I could make, and I’m not a half-bad tailor. The chain of a pocket watch strung from his breast pocket glints golden in the morning sun.
Seeing him feels something like walking into my old apartment on Hester Street: what was once warm and familiar now only makes me feel a deep, bruising ache of loss.
He seems to be examining my appearance as well—the dark circles under my eyes, the moth-bitten hat placed upon my poorly braided hair, my dingy shopgirl outfit—as commuters flow around us as if we are rocks in a stream.
His eyebrows knit together. “You look… well.” He says “well” like he wants to say “bad.” I don’t tell him he looks well too, because I’m not a great liar and I don’t know how to say It physically hurts to look at you.
“We should…” He trails off, darting his eyes forward.
I stutter a little. “Oh! Y-yes.”
I take off down the street, and he follows me, though I’m fairly certain this wasn’t the way he was headed before he ran into me.
“It’s good to see you, Frances,” he says after a too-long moment of silence.
“Thank you.”
I like to think there is a version of Oliver who would have noticed that I’m profoundly unwell. The Oliver who taught me to play poker one rainy afternoon when William was busy working, or the Oliver who left a brand-new scarf on my bed the winter I turned fourteen.
But I don’t recognize this fancy, Ivy League Oliver who wears the gentle smile on his face like a disguise. It doesn’t touch his eyes the way it used to, when the corners would scrunch up, and he’d slap his knee, laughing at whatever joke William had just told.
It’s all just as well. He doesn’t know me, either, this new Frances who has blood under her fingernails.
I no longer remember how it felt to be the Frances who wrote Oliver’s name in the margins of her schoolbooks. She would have had dozens of moony smiles to give him. I have none.
The last time I saw Oliver was at William’s funeral, where he stood somberly next to my brother’s grave, his black mourning suit worth more than what I make in six months.
Oliver’s father paid for William’s tombstone, for which I will always be grateful, despite not being able to bring myself to visit it. I sent Oliver a letter a few months back, begging for his help in finding William’s killer, but he never responded. Wealthy, educated Oliver was supposed to have been William’s best friend, but he did nothing to save my brother, and now he can do nothing to save me.
&
nbsp; “I’m making a delivery. I’m late,” I add sharply.
“Let me accompany you.”
“I can handle it perfectly well by myself, Oliver.”
He holds up a hand and replies, “I insist,” like a gentleman. It’s unsettling that the boy who used to sneak my mother’s whiskey on the coldest nights of the year has grown up to look so natural in a suit.
On long legs, he walks next to me. I struggle to keep up beside him, fear and anger and grief simmering all the while. I can’t bring myself to look at him, because in his face I only see William, so I look at his shoes instead.
I wish he’d leave me alone.
“I’ve been meaning to come see you,” he says after a moment.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Lie to me.”
“I’m not lying, Frances. It’s been difficult. I’ve—”
I cut him off. His buttoned-up facade is too perfect. I want to poke at it. “It’s been four months, Oliver. You don’t have to pretend you still care.”
He’s visibly wounded, his sculpted face crumpling. “How could you think I don’t care? I loved William like he was my own brother. I—” He chokes on the words.
I am not interested in his excuses, today of all days. “I loved him too. How much we loved him didn’t matter in the end, though, did it?”
He shakes his head. “You can’t truly believe that.”
We pass a storefront that used to be soda fountain, and a memory briefly stops me in my tracks. I’m frozen in time, eleven years old, my socks mismatched, Oliver beside me, us both ordering vanilla ice cream, while William makes fun of us for being boring.
Oliver must see me looking at the building, because he smiles sadly and says, “They watered down their Coca-Colas, but I miss that place.”
“I’m surprised you remember it at all.”
“Why wouldn’t I remember?” His face is inches from mine. His breath lingers on my cheek. My heart races as habit forces me to lean into him. If this were the past, before William’s death, before…
The Witch Haven Page 2