by Megan Abbott
“That newspaper article,” she went on. “What will the afternoon edition hold?”
Two hours, and Dr. Seeley went to the newsstand and returned, ashen-faced.
Marion looked at the front page. It was a muted blow; she, beaten now to smoothness, expected no less.
LOVE TRIANGLE AT CENTER OF
GIRLS’ DISAPPEARANCE?
POLICE TRACE PATH OF MYSTERIOUS TRUNKS
FRIENDS SPECULATE THRILL PARTIES
FUELED JEALOUSY AMONG WOMEN
Police continue their investigation of the disappearance of local nurse Louise Mercer and her roommate, Virginia Hoyt. At the investigation’s center are two trunks delivered to the Southern Pacific Station from the girls’ home on Saturday. Police confirm that a friend, Mrs. Everett Seeley, was present when deliverers picked up the trunks, but they are still confirming where the trunks were shipped. Miss Mercer and Mrs. Seeley met as employees of Werden Clinic.
“Mrs. Seeley is cooperating with us,” Sheriff Pete Healy confirmed. “We will be speaking with her today.” The Courier was unable to locate her at press time.
Mrs. Seeley appears to have been a frequent guest at the missing girls’ home since moving to the area last fall. According to several witnesses, the three were immediately attracted to each other and Mrs. Seeley regularly spent the night at the house. But it appears the friendship became troubled in recent weeks.
“There were many men at the house and there were arguments over who was the favorite among different men,” said one source. “The parties were wild and unruly.”
Mrs. Florence Loomis, a friend to all three girls, pointed to Mr. Joe Lanigan, prominent local businessman, as the source of much of the jealousy. “All the girls loved him. He was very kind to them. But Mrs. Seeley was particularly fond of him. She did not like the other girls spending time with him.”
Other friends of the girls’ intimated trouble in recent weeks, including jealous fights and heavy alcohol consumption among the women.
“Something like this was bound to happen,” said Mr. Abner Worth, owner of Worth Brothers Meat Market, who knew the girls. “Mrs. Seeley had a fiery temper and the girls were all prone to drinking and wild ways.”
According to sources at Werden, Mrs. Seeley’s husband, Dr. Everett Seeley, holds a position with Ogden-Nequam Mining Company in Mexico and Mrs. Seeley intends to join him. It is not known whether the girls’ disappearance is connected to Mrs. Seeley’s planned relocation.
Three o’clock, Dr. Seeley looked itchy, scratching his neck, and sweaty-collared, said if she felt safe, he would return to his investigation.
“Where will you go?”
“I need to see how wide the ring expands, Marion,” he said, straightening his tie, twisted so thin from wear.
Marion wanted to remind him he was not a policeman, not a private detective from the Saturday matinee. She wanted to tell him none of it would matter. She thought of Joe Lanigan at his lodges, his friars’ clubs, his Chamber of Commerce gatherings, his men’s clubs, the smokers from which he was always returning, gin-soaked and tomcatted. What did girls like Louise and Ginny matter in the face of that, and what did she, some vagabond wife picked up for dallying and set down in a corner when done?
“Last night when I came home, it was too late,” he said to her. “I was too disordered. I didn’t want to worry you. Now there is no choice. Let me share all I saw, all I’ve learned about this man. Then you will have no doubt we will ensnare him. We must. He is a dangerous…He is…”
She put her hand on his arm. “You can tell me,” she said. Even knowing there would likely be no surprises. The only surprise would be having to look full-face again at what she had blotted out, lo these months. What worse?
He told of a day and a night spent in joints, judas holes, lowdown nighteries and barrelhouses, trailing the wastrels on Thaler Avenue and in Gideon Square. The sad tramps and drifting souls who seemed, somehow, to wear his own face. He saw their sorrow and their weakness and it trembled through him and he could almost not bear it. But he did. And he struck up conversations and no one questioned this shabby man with all the right words and most of all the right look in his eyes, the look of lostness. At last, a man named Farriss took him to a house on Clawson Street where he met a woman named Clara who explained how every four days, the Worth Brothers Meat Truck came to the Dempsey Hotel and you went to the third floor, room 308, and Mr. Worth, only he called himself Mr. Tanner, but everyone knew, would sell you your kit. Whatever was wanted. And sure, she knew Ginny too. Ginny used to work the Dempsey for Joe till the TB got too bad. Louise, sure, everyone knew Louise, Louise was the one before the new one. The new who? The new nurse. Everyone knew Joe Lanigan’s private nurses were also his whores. His private whores, mind you. The new one, word was the new one wasn’t even a real nurse, this one, she was a schoolgirl plucked from St. Monessa’s.
A coldness swept across Marion’s chest.
The nurse. Of course. The nurse. It was like everything else about Joe Lanigan. Seamy, rotten. Ruined.
Looking at Dr. Seeley, she pushed it all away. She looked at him.
“And you mean to go there. You mean to go to where these narcotics are…”
“I do, my dear,” he said, and he kept her gaze. “Marion, if he can so effectively marshal the powers that be in this town to protect himself, we must put the fear in him to offer up those steel walls to you as well. He must find another goat, Marion, from among his drossy minions. It won’t be you.”
“But for you to move back in these worlds…”
“Marion, the more we know about his affairs, the more chips we have at our disposal. We need to put the fear in him. I must go.”
Marion felt a tightening in the air between them. “Everett, I…”
“I will be fine, Marion. You know I will. I am strong for us both now. As you always have been. It is my chance. This is my chance.”
Marion looked at him and he looked at her, his eyes open and waiting, asking her something that he could not say. She looked at him and she could not help but feel the largeness of the moment and it frightened her. It felt like they were spinning on an axis after a life of stillness. Or stillness after four marital years of spinning. She did not know what it meant.
“Of course, Everett. Of course.” She had to say it. And she so wanted to believe it, all of it.
And maybe he was right. Maybe there was more still to uncover about Joe Lanigan, more even than she knew, enough to matter more than his rich-man, gold-cut cruelty, and maybe it could matter. Who was she to guess, given the quaking surprises of the last week, most of all the ones she’d sprung on herself. It is you, Marion, who started the bloodbath. It is you who took hammer to teeth, acid to flesh—would you ever have guessed the limits of your own darkness?
She handed him the hundred dollars. “You will need this, to get information.”
He looked at the money. “I will take fifty dollars. But hopefully I will not need it.”
“Yes,” she said, and his face looked so kind and she felt a warmth rush through her, and through her hands to his. “Thank you, Everett. Thank you.”
TEN MINUTES after he left, she was on the streetcar to Lynbrook Street.
She could hear Louise’s voice prickling in her ear: It is he, it is he, you cannot let him wend so freely, smashing our girl-bones to pieces, stomping on our black-and-blue hearts while he lines his pockets and fills his mouth with sugar, sugar, sugar.
She would need to find him out. He had set things in motion and who knew what would come next?
IT WAS NEARING four o’clock and Joe’s Packard was nowhere to be seen.
Through the back windows she could see two blond-plaited girls chewing on long strings of taffy, listening to the radio. She could hear the radio faintly. Hear the girls’ soft, taunting sister voices, scolding and reckoning with each other. They wore matching Easter dresses, mint green and soft-shell pink, and their backs faced the windows. The taffy was lemon yellow a
nd they were tugging at it and laughing at the program.
Marion wished she might join them, such fun they were having, poking and prodding and nestling against each other.
It was lovely.
She turned away, the rush of feeling too great, and that was when she saw the flicker of white from the corner of her eye.
“Mrs. Lanigan, get back in this house!”
Marion backed up fast against the wall and saw the apparition, for that’s what she appeared, in white, skin pallid, eyes like dark, purple-edged hollows.
Behind the ghostly figure scurried the nurse, pinch faced and grasping. Hooking one arm around the ghost, she grabbed her fast.
“Mrs. Lanigan, you know better,” she said, and the ghost, the ghost who was Mrs. Lanigan, wailed mournfully.
“I don’t know where. I lost my way. You’re trying to make me lose my way,” she moaned, her eyelids and cheeks looking so strange, puffy, like a balloon toy.
“I am doing no such thing,” the nurse scolded, and it was at that moment she spotted Marion.
But said nothing.
“Oh, Jessie, put me down. Put me down. I can’t bear it,” Mrs. Lanigan cried. And Marion saw all her wrecked beauty, drawn tight across old bones.
Without saying a word to Marion, the nurse, this Jessie, seized the flailing woman and shepherded her, roughly, back into the house.
Marion waited.
She knew.
Five minutes later, the nurse returned.
“He’s not here,” she said, hand on her hip, facing Marion in front of a hedgerow. With a beckoning nod, she drew Marion farther into the corner of the lawn, away from the house.
“I know.”
“What do you mean coming here? What good will it do you?”
Any guess Marion had about this nurse and the master of the house was confirmed by this, by this intimate tone. By the way her face showed possession, territorial claim.
“I am at the end,” Marion said. “You replaced Nurse Mercer?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“And you tend to Mrs. Lanigan.”
“As you can see,” she said, “she’s very sick.”
“You keep her still. You take care of her.”
“You know she is very ill. And frightened of the world too. Do you know what I mean?”
“And he has you, he has you to take care of with the medicines…” Marion felt her head thrumming. “And to warm his bed.”
The nurse’s face reddened. But she was smiling too. She pulled a cigarette from her apron pocket and slid it into her mouth.
“Oh, Mrs. Seeley,” the nurse said, “you should see the things I can do. He found me, I was ready to take my vows.”
“You’re the wife’s nurse. You’re her nurse.”
“I take good care, don’t think I don’t,” she said, voice pitching. “She’s so happy she doesn’t know the ceiling from the floor. There’s nothing wrong with it. A man has to have something. Especially a man like that.”
She could hear it now: Marion, you must understand, I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.
“You don’t even know what sorrow awaits you,” Marion said, shaking her head. “You don’t even know.”
The nurse shook her head, shook her head and punched out a vicious, certain smile. “We are to be married, you know. Did you know that? He is all done with you. Yes, I know all about you. But you have your doctor husband. Why don’t you take care to warm your husband’s bed?”
Marion felt something rise up in her and before she knew it she had her hands on the girl, was shaking her. The cigarette fell and the girl turned white, tried to wrest herself free.
“You were his dally, but the dally is past,” she said, pulling at Marion’s hands, tugging from them.
“What can you know?” Marion’s voice rose calamitously. “What can you know? He tosses us all aside. He tossed Nurse Mercer. He tossed her and then—”
“And then you murdered her,” the nurse replied, chin jutting out defiantly. “Murdered her and the other. Those perverse girls. He has told me all about those girls.” She twisted her face into a sneer, but her voice edged hysteria. “Do you mean to murder me too?”
Marion felt no jolt. There were no jolts left to be had.
Louise. Louise. Could it be that he knew exactly what he was doing as she teetered, wounded, toward them that night? With Louise gone, his easy life made even easier. No more fear she might talk of drugs and his wife and who knew what else. Who gained more than he?
Marion’s voice came barreling out. “Listen, you stupid, stupid girl. Listen to me. You tell him this. You tell him: I know all about him. I know all about keeping his wife torpid and senseless up there. I know about it all and I have the proof. Louise knew too. Louise knew, and who is to say he wasn’t glad for the chance to shut her up?”
The girl shook her head violently and laughed, a short bark. “He’s told me you’re mad. Everyone knows you’ve gone mad,” she said, in a jerking, terrified taunt.
Marion smacked her hard across the face.
“I have phoned the police, you know,” the girl said. “I have phoned them.”
“You will go mad too, you wanton child. He will raze you to ruins too,” Marion said, her heart battering in her chest as she turned and began to run across the lawn, to run anywhere.
“Oh, do run, Mrs. Seeley. Don’t you know he’s all done with you?”
Ginny’s syruped tongue saying, Meems, I never would have hurt you and you’re such a silly fool to have shot me dead like a possum in a tree, just ’cause I cracked in two for but a minute. Don’t you know, the fever on me, pen yan in the lungs, loaded up on milkman candy, watching you and Louise clinging and climbing each other, I went mad, just for a second. Just for a second and you murdered me, Marion. I wonder if you went a little mad too. I wonder if you still are. All I know is you put a big hole where my face should be. Oh, Meems, my face…
The weight of her sin finally fell upon her. There was nothing left with which to distract herself, no place left to hide. She had let this shallow man undo her, but she had also undone herself. There is nothing left but to face it, she told herself. There is nothing left but to start paying.
HE DID NOT COME. He did not come. And Marion felt sure it would be the police who would arrive first. She was certain of it.
By morning light, with not a shudder of sleep upon her, she felt she could wait no more, could sit in that mildewed room filled with the dread of a hundred hotel guests before her, the hectic patter of mice behind walls, the feel of dark hours careening toward final despair from a hundred, a thousand past down-at-heels nightly guests, weekly residents, no more.
She put on her hat, hair pushed beneath, and walked, down faced, to the streetcar. It was too early and the cars were not running, so she proceeded on foot. She walked along Thaler Avenue, which snaked its way fourteen blocks to Gideon Square, and everything was still and a forlorn feel was in the air.
There was a low creaking coming from somewhere in the square, and also a high singing, almost a mewl. A man crooning brokenly about a girl whose cousin was a drunkard in Cincy and died with a peach of a bun, and her uncle’s a preacher in Quincy, a nutty old son of a gun. Peering, she could see the man, who was lying at the foot of the center fountain, a stone-struck phoenix rising to the heavens, and he was singing to a girl, she looked like a girl, with her arms wrapped tight around herself, a pitch of blood on her shirtfront and it was the lungs. Was anyone left in this whole lonely world with lungs not patched together as if from tattered muslin and cobwebs? They all came to the desert, like she had, they blew in from all corners, they came to the desert to build themselves anew. Isn’t that what she had done, wasn’t she anew?
She skittered around the square and no one bothered her, and she fancied, with her pitted stockings, her day-worn dress, the dirty tendrils of dark-rooted platinum slipping from her hat, she looked the part. She loo
ked the part, and one poor woman, face a smear of booze-washed sorrow, offered her a glug of grain and Marion almost took it, but did not.
No Dr. Seeley. No Dr. Seeley, but she would not stop.
She called out, “Everett!” She called out, “Everett!” and got more than one answer, but never from her husband.
She wended from a lean-to on one side of the square to a tangle of boys playing three-card molly to the central newsstand opening for the day. And there was an old garage, the owner long gone, the shell of the place all intact, a few stray automobile parts hanging, and a spent cooking fire in the center. She could see four, five men and a woman folded in small corners, sleeping. One man was whittling smooth strokes of rosewood and he only nodded at Marion, who nodded back.
“Everett,” she said, barely a whisper now. “Everett, are you there?”
That was when she saw a hand wrapped around a brown glass quart of Chlorodyne with the Valiant label curling off the side.
And she saw the pale face of Dr. Seeley, skin like wet paper, head resting against a stripped tire, mouth slightly open.
“Everett,” she whispered, moving toward him. “Everett…”
She put her hand to him, the bluing lips, and his eyelids seemed to slide open, but the eyes were dead, black specks floating serene.
Then the eyes shut again.
His skin, the coldest marble she ever felt.
“Haint ever seen one take so much,” came a voice in her ear. It was the man whittling the wood. “Haint ever seen such. He start with the syrup and then one came with the cubes and kit and hence he tore in with the needle too. A starving man, he.”
Marion turned to face him. “And you just watch? Look at him. You just watch?”
The man looked at her. “What do you do?” he asked her. “What do you do, miss? When it’s that way, there is only to watch.”
She turned back to her husband, placed her fingers on his wrist and the pulse sludging, and it was like the time she found him in the bathtub at the Prescott rooming house. He spent three days in the private hospital with the doctor who promised he could wash his brain to clean the habit, but then the money ran out.