Bury Me Deep

by Megan Abbott

  Dr. Seeley claimed to have shot Louise Mercer, a nurse at the Werden Clinic, and her roommate, Virginia Hoyt, in a fit of jealous rage, believing that his wife had been seeking the attentions of a local man. The man has never been formally identified, although speculation is rampant that the man in question is Mr. Joseph Lanigan, owner of Valiant Drugs and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce.

  “I knew the girls,” Mr. Lanigan told the Courier. “I sought to help them. Miss Hoyt was sick and they were struggling to make ends meet. I tried to be a friend to them, and to Mrs. Seeley, who was lonely without her husband or family. I tried to bring cheer when I could and it appears Mrs. Seeley wrote to her husband and he misunderstood. It is a tragic consequence.”

  Mr. Lanigan, who just added a new store in the Country Club Park District to his growing Valiant Drugs business, has been widely praised for his generosity in paying for both girls’ remains to be delivered to their families and a small shrine to be erected at the Werden Clinic.

  “I’m a big Mick and I can take it,” Joe Lanigan laughed, laughed all the rumors away, to all the out-of-town reporters who didn’t know that, facts aside, Gentleman Joe Lanigan could never be a part of something as sordid as this, would never dip his manicured finger (oh, didn’t he love his weekly manicures the cute marcelled girls at the Biltmore gave him) into such low revels, this a Lodge man, an Elk, a Mason, for goodness’ sake. Didn’t these Los Ang-e-lees scribes, with their pomade and shiny shoes, grabbing for ink, making the most of their small entr’acte in the crime of the decade, didn’t they know our Joe?

  Sure, his name tripped from tongues in ways that might, in other towns, bigger and smaller, have torn down reputation, his good name: this man, he can never now lead our school board, cannot sit on the council, run for office, run for mayor. But outsiders never would understand, would they? He is one of our own and we know things they never could in their blaring scandal-sheet Babylons. In fact, he carries a new sheen, the love object, the knightly swain, valiant is as valiant does, his acts of kindness spurring crushes, the crushes spurring jealous husbands and jealousy turned tragic, tragic. But tragedy so dogs our Gent Joe, what with that poor sick wife and he to raise two daughters virtually alone. Oh, our Gent Joe. Our Gent Joe. Who wouldn’t stand beside him? He stands for us all.

  I gave for you and gave for you. I would have laid down my pasteboard life for you, Joe Lanigan. But I’m through now. I’m all through. And the nails you struck across my mouth have all been pried loose and my mouth is one hundred miles wide and here I broadcast, my voice tinny, lost but no less your reckoning-day judge, what you have done to me, to those lovely girls, to my dearest Doctor, to us all. I will speak now, Joe Lanigan, with mighty breaths, and will keep speaking until the caul you hide behind is lifted evermore.

  “You’d best get on the nearest train, Mrs. Seeley. Fresh start. Heard your father wired your train fare back east. Be on that train, will you?”

  “Yes, warden. Yes, I believe I will.”

  They gave her a new dress of robin’s egg blue and her old shoes and purse and hat. Her hair was stripped of all peroxide and looked her own again but, squinting in her old compact mirror, she barely recognized herself.

  Instead, she saw Ginny’s plummy smirk and Louise’s soft, piping cheeks and Dr. Seeley’s eyes, his eyes and all the sad tenderness they could hold, that the world could hold. He had held it all, for them both.

  In the tiny mirror, she saw them and felt strong.

  She felt as if her shoulders held wings and she would rise, alight, feet twittering, body rising so high…

  AT MRS. GOWER’S, the house throbbing with memories, Marion sat on the parlor sofa, waiting. Mrs. Gower had left word at the prison that she should come and retrieve her belongings. Marion wondered what could be left. But the old woman appeared with a small banded suitcase, the one Marion’s father had given her on her wedding day.

  Marion felt its lightness, touched its corners, its burnished latches.

  “The policemen came. I gave them everything of that man’s,” Mrs. Gower said, her upper lip twitching. “Your…personal items, undergarments and such, I held them in my own quarters. It’s not right for gentlemen to go through ladies’ private things.”

  Marion nearly smiled. She was remembering something. Could they still be there, tucked between her dainties?

  “I knew how he was,” Mrs. Gower was saying, but Marion wasn’t listening. “The doctor. Your doctor. I could see what he was.”

  SHE HELD THE LETTER in her hand. It had come five days before her release.

  Dear Mrs. Seeley,

  I ask you kindly if you might see me. I will be at my store. Please come.

  —Mr. Abner Worth

  She would see Mr. Worth. She would see Mr. Worth first. She would see him first and then she would see the other. She would see the other because she must.

  She had ideas. She did not trust herself. In there, inside, she was not sound, curled tight in a cell, hundreds of letters of sympathy and calumny each day, the witchy stares of fellow prisoners, the crowded feel in her head, all the time, even when sleeping, although she did not truly sleep. She was not sound, but now she held the suitcase tight and wondered what her path would be.

  THE WORTH BROTHERS MEAT MARKET was not open yet when she arrived, but she peered in the window and there was Mr. Worth, face pale at her sight.

  He unlocked the door and let her into his back office. No, she did not want coffee, not even with a pinch in it, no, she did not want to pause at all. She could scarcely make herself sit in the chair opposite his desk.

  The door ajar, she could smell the meat and see red edges of hanging carcasses. She could almost see them rocking, shaking even though hooked fast.

  In her head she saw visions of him at one of the parties, shirtsleeves rolled up, cranking his hand organ as she warbled, when they all asked her to sing for them and Mr. Worth, “’Twas down where the bluegrass grows, your lips were sweeter than julep, when you wore that tulip, and I wore a big red rose.”

  Sitting before her now, the gin was radiating from him, seemed to be leaking from his skin.

  His blood-thatched eyes settled on her and he rubbed his chin.

  “Mrs. Seeley, I know I’ve wronged you. I know it.”

  Marion looked at him, feeling the wave of surprise only faintly. She could not hold on to anything long enough to truly feel it.

  “It is not you,” she said. “You have nothing to account for.”

  “When I saw what Joe was doing, I might’ve stopped it. I figured from the start you were a cat’s paw in this thing.”

  “No, no,” Marion said. “I know my share in this. I have faced it.” Before jail, she could look at her guilt only in passing, a rustle in the back of her head. Now it was finally hers. She clung to it.

  “At first he told me you murdered them both, but I knew you couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.”

  “I don’t wish to talk about it anymore, Mr. Worth,” she said. “I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.” As she said it, she knew it was true. Joe Lanigan’s sins stacked so high. She would not let him forget them. This was what she meant to tell him. This was what she would say when she said her last piece to him and then let him live with them, if he could. But she knew he could. That was the worst of it.

  “He’s got a new nurse,” Mr. Worth said. “You know about the nurses.”

  “I do.”

  “The last one, the St. Monessa girl, he got tired of her. Too noisy, he said.”

  “I see,” Marion said, looking around at Mr. Worth’s desk, the cloudy bottle, the curling matches spent and piled thick along cigarette butts spread in a fan. She was beginning to feel dizzy.

  “Elsie,” he said. “This one’s Elsie.”

  The name brought a hot flicker of shame to Marion’s eyes. No surprises to be had, were there? She felt something sorrowful rustle in her chest. Elsie Nettle. She pictured the girl’s fawn face on that long-ago night, the wa
y her leg trembled against her in Joe’s car, after everything.

  “I wonder if you know this, Mrs. Seeley,” Worth said, voice softening. “When he drinks, he says things. He says he’s a lost man.” He looked her in the eye. “Says he loves you still.”

  “I didn’t ask for that,” Marion said, hard and rough. “Don’t tell me that.”

  “Says you brought him ruin and hellfire and yet he loves you still.”

  Marion, sprung back to vivid life, looked up fast and wanted to laugh. “Brought him to ruin. Oh, isn’t that a fairy tale, a dreamy little love book to end all.”

  Mr. Worth looked at her warily, unsure. “But I wanted to say I’m sorry, and…your husband. I’m sorry.”

  He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun.

  And she saw it was the pistol, the Colt. The very one.

  “What do you have there?” she asked, thinking she might be ill. The heat, the smell of the meat, the gin swirling.

  “Joe gave me this to hold,” he said. “He trusted me with everything, you see, because he knows things about me. Things I’d rather not share.”

  He set the pistol lightly on the desk between them. “I don’t want him having this over you. I don’t know what he might use it for, or what you might.” He looked at her. “But, on the balance, I’d have it be with you.”

  She was shaking. Her shoes were clacking on the floor. What did he mean by this?

  “I am also afraid to have it with me,” he said. “Lately I have developed weaknesses. There have been moments of despair and…”

  Marion looked at the pistol, that same dire pistol, and felt her blood rush from her head. Blurry with heat, she took off her hat and held on to the desk edge.

  “I took those girls to pieces, Marion,” he said, voice so low as to be scarcely a breath. “Nights, early mornings, I think I cannot live with what I did to those girls.” He looked up at Marion. “Their blood,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Mr. Worth,” she said.

  Looking at him and the heavy sags under his eyes, she wondered what he thought he was doing by giving her this. She had a head filled with bad thoughts of her own to lead her to dark places. She had no room for his. But then she realized he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do and he wasn’t strong enough to keep hold of it anymore. He was shutting a door. By giving her the gun in this way, he was trying to shut a door.

  He should know, she thought, that door never shuts. She curled her finger around the handle of her suitcase.

  Reaching for his glass, he took a long swallow. “Mrs. Seeley, I do feel I must tell you,” he said. “One night, end of a daylong drunk, we boys were up over at the Grand Lodge. Well, he said it to me. He said it to me.”

  “What?” Marion said, steeling herself, teeth gnashing to stay upright. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘I tell you, Ab, I know things now, about myself. I know what I am capable of. It is a shadow self under this one and I’ve seen it. You see it was a chance—Louise Mercer, she was to bleed me dry. She would not be stopped.’”

  Mr. Worth looked at her. “Mrs. Seeley, he told me he shook up the delicate balance. You three girls. That delicate balance. Gave Ginny a big dose, knowing it’d get her all jazzed up. Then told her Louise was itching to get rid of her. Mrs. Seeley, you know Ginny was a jealous girl and a sick one. Joe said he thought to get her riled about you and Louise. He warned her she’d best steal away with Louise while she could. He figured they’d skip town and he’d have thrown off their snaky coils for good.”

  Something flashed before Marion’s eyes, the moments before the murder, Ginny laying her charges before them. Louise knowing something was behind it, saying, I wonder who’s been filling your ear with tongue oil.

  Why, it was Joe, it was Joe. Of course it was Joe. “She’s Pandora,” Ginny had raged, “come to town with her dirty little box to bring us all to ruin.” Was it not Joe Lanigan who had long ago told her, You are Pandora. You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open. Even now, she could picture Joe’s lips to Ginny’s pearly ear, warning her of the same.

  Mr. Worth looked at Marion. “And he’s a cold one, Mrs. Seeley. He is. He says to me, he says, ‘But, Ab, I played the wrong card and Ginny went cockeyed. And I had to fix things. I did. Why, Marion already had the blood on her hands and we were nearly through. It had to end. Had to. And the end was at hand. I was to be through with them all. But then there was Louise, on her feet again.’”

  And Marion saw it again, in her head, in images stuttering together:

  …the way his arm extended, like he was batting off a fly…and Louise slumping to her knees like at a church pew.

  “And he said, ‘Ab, this here is the truth, when I look at it with sharpest eyes, which I do not often do, I cannot fairly say what was in my head. I cannot be certain of it. Does that make a monster of me, Ab? Then that is what I am. Darling, dark Louise. Maybe it was this: that I saw my chance and I blew a hot hole right in her chest.’”

  THERE WERE PLACES too murky ever to see through. The bloody fury of the night and everything storming up to it, none of it was ever going to lie flat and let her run knowing fingers across it and see all the patterns and shapes and meanings for what they were. There was no essence to them. It was all mayhem and blood and now preening sorrow.

  But now, sitting there with Mr. Worth, sitting quietly together, something had turned. Something had turned and she reckoned a path. It was like a fever—a yearlong fever—had broken at last. She knew, with a blooming rightness in her chest, what she would do. Mr. Worth, he was the duelist’s dark second, looming up her side, rapier outstretched, retreating to his meat locker before he could even count her paces. This was all hers. All hers.

  She lifted her small suitcase from the floor and set it on the desk. Mr. Worth’s eyes fluttered gently as she opened its metal latches and raised the cardboard lid.

  Oh, Mrs. Gower, my unlikely sister in arms, she thought. They were there, as they should be, beneath her tin of talc, her garter bands, her small cache of cotton step-ins, petal-soft—things too delicate for policemen’s fingers. They were just where she’d hidden them.

  Mr. Worth began clearing his throat.

  Taking a deep breath, Marion pressed down on the cotton pile slightly, feeling the crinkle of paper beneath, onionskin, tied with a string. The prescription slips. She plucked beneath for the end of the string and tugged fast, her white undergarments floating to the floor.

  “Here it is for you, Mr. Worth,” she said. “Here is your path.”

  She slid the stack of prescription slips across the desk toward him, then closed the suitcase and met his puzzled gaze.

  “Do you know what you are to do with these?” she asked.

  He looked at them as if afraid to touch, as if they were her bloomers themselves. But finally he did, pulling the knot loose and holding the first prescription slip in front of his gin-blurred eyes.

  “Veronal,” he read, “sulphonal, chloral, paraldehyde, more veronal.” He let his fingers run through each one.

  “This is how he keeps her,” Marion said, fighting off a quiver in her voice. “How Mr. Joe Lanigan keeps his wife out of his affairs. She is a prisoner to all this. His fairy dust.” She pointed, waving her finger at the prescriptions. “Do you see how it is?”

  “Why, the thing of it,” he murmured, mouth open, a slanted o of slow marvel.

  “And those doctors. See the names. Those are clinic doctors,” Marion said. “They collude with him. And why wouldn’t they? You all dance so closely, don’t you? You all have fingers knotted in each other’s pockets.”

  Mr. Worth set the slips down and reached for his glass, his hand rattling against it.

  “Mr. Worth,” she said. “Do you now see what you must do?”

  “I see the power these documents might have,” he said, gin to mouth. “I see that.” But he did not look certain. She would have to make him see. To her, it was so clear.

&n
bsp; “Who can guess, Mr. Worth, what else a hungry newspaperman might find? With a taste of fresh blood on his tongue, he might bother to raise the roof on Valiant Drugs too. There are so many hidden trails he might follow.”

  “Take them to the Courier, then,” Mr. Worth said, eagerly. “You should take them.”

  She shook her head fiercely. “Don’t you see? They won’t listen to the madman’s wife. The jailbird, the tainted woman. The public sinner. They will never listen to me. But you, you are one of them. You are them. It is your stake.”

  He looked down again but said nothing.

  It was then that Everett’s face came to her. His vain detective work, perhaps no longer vain. Every four days, his very words returned to her, as if her husband were whispering from his own damp grave, 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. It was his last gift to her, and she must use it.

  “You know your share in so many of these sins of our Mr. Lanigan,” she said, eyes fixed on him. “And I know them too, Mr. Worth—or is it Mr. Tanner?”

  He looked at her. She made him feel it, feel her knowing. My, but she was changed. She felt Louise calling out from her own booming throat. There was a kind of glory in it.

  “Mrs. Seeley,” he warned, “these things are known. They are known and abided by. Encouraged. We are a small town, in many ways.”

  “Was it not you in the Courier, Mr. Worth?” she said, voice rising. “You have friends. You certainly shouted lies to the rafters when last they came calling. Was that not you, speaking of my terrible temper, of the girls’ wild ways? Those girls you took to pieces?”

  His face collapsed before her. She felt an ache in her chest watching it, but she went on.