Bury Me Deep

by Megan Abbott

  “You must make your reporter believe you. You must make them all believe it,” she said, voice firm, focused. “Make them see Mr. Lanigan’s day is past. Make them see the profit in it, if you must. Use whatever secrets you hold to make them see.”

  There was a long pause, a hundred years or more, but then his chin began to shake up and down. Something was happening. His eyes sharpened.

  “Can I, Mrs. Seeley?” he asked, voice speeding up. “I see. I do see. For that night, he may have us both to the wall. But not on this. And I can move things, Marion. I know it. I know this town just as he does, after all. I have seen all manner of things. Oh, if you knew—I have done all kinds of favors. I have worn the blinders time and again.” He peered at her. “Marion, do you fathom it: I have secrets even darker than this.”

  She looked at him and knew it to be true.

  “Can you shine the light on him, Mr. Worth? Can you take these scraps and spin silk for us?” and she felt her voice begin to break. It was all so much. “Can you do it, Mr. Worth?”

  His eyes were strangely brightening. Something was lifting. His visage seemed to take new shape, those fallen features resolving themselves once more.

  “I can,” he said, voice rumbling, near-oratorical. “Believe me, Mrs. Seeley. Do. It will redeem me.”

  “It will,” she said, and she knew she had given him a great gift and she felt larger. She suddenly felt like Louise’s noble emissary from beyond the grave. And wasn’t she?

  She knew exactly what she was to do. She had set things in motion and now, now—she had given him his weapon and he hers. Abandoning the suitcase, even the purse, at the meat market, she carried only the pistol in the smocked pocket of her dress.

  SIX BLOCKS AWAY, at the soda fountain, she made a quick telephone call. It was just as she guessed. He was not at home. But that was fine. It was as it should be.

  Walking up Lynbrook Street, watching the three-story manse heave into sight, she felt composed, focused. But when she arrived on the doorstep and rang the bell, her breath began to catch, her chest hammering so loudly she almost did not hear the voice on the other side of the door.

  “Who is it?” the whisper came, and it was Elsie Nettle’s sibilant shush.

  The voice so delicate, a sparrow wing rustling, Marion felt her back straighten, her head rise. She felt her blood come back, surging through her. She would do this.

  “Open the door, Elsie,” she said, her voice like smooth iron.

  “I told you on the telephone…Mrs. Seeley,” the voice came back. “I told you he is not here.”

  “I’ve come for you, Elsie Nettle,” Marion said. “And you’d best open this door.”

  And she did.

  It took fifteen minutes, no more. They sat quietly in the front parlor, the air heavy with motes and the tang of sulphur and tar oil. She saw the trembling in Elsie’s doe eyes and knew it would not take long. In quiet tones, but with a firmness she had mastered as if overnight, Marion told Elsie that everything would change tomorrow, that the magnificent house of cards Mr. Joseph Lanigan had erected with his sweet scented hands was about to fall, one flick from her dainty fingers, plus one butcher’s thumb, and gone, gone, gone. “You know what goes on. You tend to her. You fill her full of all those potions. If you stay, you will be lost,” she warned. “You’re not lost yet, or I would not have your ears now. If you stay, you will fall with him.”

  At first, Elsie said nothing, could scarcely raise her delicate doll head. Finally, she murmured, in the quietest of voices, “But, Marion, it was you. You delivered me to him.”

  “I know it,” Marion said. “I put you here. I set you out for him. I did everything but lift your schoolgirl skirt for him. And now I’m taking you away. I would not leave you here, Elsie. For all the world.”

  And Elsie, still that mountain girl from Fool Hollow, not so broken yet, relented, even reaching out for Marion’s cold hand.

  They climbed the stairs to the third floor, past the gust of slow decay radiating from the sickroom in the center of the house. And Marion watched as Elsie packed her small bag with her two uniforms, two day dresses, her undergarments, everything so shabby, save a new lilac hat for Sunday Mass.

  Elsie, at Marion’s direction, telephoned the clinic to request a doctor to visit Mrs. Lanigan that evening, as she had quit her post and would be leaving town immediately.

  Then, they walked out of the house together and Marion escorted Elsie, hand in hand, to the corner. When the bell clanged and the streetcar to the train station shuttered to a halt, she put Elsie on it, and watched her leave, the ribbon on her Easter hat fluttering behind her.

  THERE WAS ONLY one step left to take. Now he would hear her, the man himself. With the pistol in hand, she would have him listen, and then she would be done. My, who would’ve reckoned her power, she asked herself. Not she, but there it was and she held it close.

  She began walking again, in her head a million speeches unfurling, each larger and more damning than the last.

  She walked to the lodge, which was dark, and to the Dunlop and the Dempsey and to the big new restaurant on Monroe and finally to the El Royale Hotel, which sparkled dustily in the foreground, reminding her of a long-ago night when a girl like her walked to that same hotel.

  …walking alone into the cavernous Thunderbird Dining Room, a sea of dark suits and mustaches, and “Joe Irish is looking for you, bunny rabbit,” and she was fast in the arms of Gent Joe himself, tuxedo black as India ink, and she looked up at his eyes, his eyes smiling, his face doing smiling things as if there were never any such thing as shame in this world…

  Walking, hearing her own feet clitter lightly on pavement in the dark of the city weeknight past ten, and everything was beginning to tilt, and inside the thought of seeing Joe Lanigan, it was doing things to her, doing rough bewitchments, and she could not sort it all out and she began to wonder if she would be able to say her piece. The words will come when I see him, she told herself. I will not be able to stop them.

  “I’M LOOKING FOR MR. LANIGAN,” she told the bellhop sneaking a cigarette by the bank of rear doors.

  The boy grinned and jerked his head toward the banquet hall, its gold-curtained entrance sprawling across the rear of the lobby.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she walked through those curtains, feeling their velvet tendrils. And she kept walking, through the raucous spasms of the cavernous hall, the dark flocks of red-faced men huzzahing the floor show, through the glittered, confettied folly of it all, kept walking until she found him in the farthest corner, snug behind the massive, gold-painted bandstand. As if on cue, a chorus girl in his lap.

  Joe Irish, Gent Joe, Mr. Joseph Lanigan did not notice her from his dim perch and the music was loud and bumptious, and seeing his face after all this time almost broke her, almost split her into so many pieces, seeing that sheaf of yellow hair, the smile, curling and confident and filled with forget.

  He was able to put things away, stow them in far places, on high shelves and in deep dresser drawers, and forget them, and forget things about himself, and he could even, when he wanted, pull them down and show them to people and calmly put them away again as if they were not his.

  But she could not, she could not and how dare he put her in a creaking drawer in some hidden room he seldom went, how dare he put her there and put what he had done there too when she could not, when it flooded through her every minute of every day and when he did too and Joe still did too, still flooded and overtook her.

  And he is here, and those bright girls and that sad, kind doctor are not and…and…

  “It had to end,” a voice muttered, her own. She began to wonder what she really meant to do. The words will come when I see him, she had told herself, but there was a quivery fear in her now because she no longer knew herself. The new self, the old self or that quaking self in between.

  He turned and, in turning, spotted her. Oh, there it was, she caught it, she did, the gaudy fear crashing across his face
. It was beautiful and made her feel she could do anything.

  But he recovered in an instant and then it came again, that sly, cunning mask he could drop across his face at will. A reckless choice, but he made it anyway.

  “My honey-locked jailbird, there she is,” he clucked amid the din, and she thought for a moment that he might slap his other knee, the one free of the showgirl’s lovesome bottom, and bid her to sit and join his bawdy party.

  But he was not quite so foolish. He saw her face, saw the things in it, and quickly, cleanly removed the feathered showgirl from her roost and pushed her on her way, giving Marion his eyes, his face, newly painted sincere. She knew that dodge too. She knew all his dodges.

  “You locked me away,” her mouth spilt forth, “threw the key in the sand, but here I am and guess what I have done. Guess what awaits you, Joe Lanigan.”

  But her words, they were buffered, near soundless. There was nothing but cymbals and lurching slide trumpets and the hoorahs of hundreds of jostling tuxedoed men, their pleated shirtfronts popping loose as they pressed and churned around her, one shouting, reaching out with clambering hands, “Where are the girls? I’ll take this new-minted one, if you please.” She pushed herself closer toward him, the two of them now shadowed beside the quaking bandstand.

  Trying again, she felt a rushing in her mouth, like she might choke.

  He looked at her, he waited, that bolt of lustrous hair, the violet nosegay on his suit. She fought off a fearsome wave of soft, broken memories of him and he, sensing it, raised his hand slightly, as if to reach for her own.

  The sight of it filled her with fresh horror.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Marion,” he said. “In my way, I have.”

  Something vaulted up inside her and she felt her body jerk forward, her hand plunging into her pocket and reaching for that pistol, which, in a dark blur before her eyes, was suddenly at the far end of her arm outstretched.

  The thing jumped in her hand, the tiny Colt did, and it was only then that she knew she had fired it. A pierce in her ear and her hand had lifted so high, to the top of a thick column, a bullet wedging in the carved oak.

  She spun around, gun in her hand, but the music screeched on and only a handful of men crushed right behind them could be bothered to lift their nuzzling heads from their girls, from their creamy follies. The sound of the gunshot, so thunderous in the Hussel Street living room, barely a whisper here.

  Those who did see stood stock-still, one pink-faced man hissing excitedly, It is she!

  She thought they would descend upon her, but they saw the thing in her hand, they had heard it. They could scarcely believe their eyes.

  “Marion,” she heard him say, and she looked at him, his face slipped to white. “Marion, no. Marion, no, don’t you see?” He looked anxiously at the clutch of men motionless, fear struck, not ten feet from them. “Marion, your husband’s sins, don’t make them your own.”

  This was what he said to her. The feckless words whistling in her ear, and before she could think, her arm lifted again and she pointed this time at him, trying to rise, shirtfront showgirl-spangled. She felt the charge through her entire body as the bullet lacerated his knee, the crackling loud and victorious, the blood a glory shot.

  He cried out and she had never heard such sounds from him, a dreadful bleat, and the men staggered back from them both.

  It was all so stunning. She felt her body lifting, radiating. Looking around, she thought, Have I bullets enough? I may shoot them all.

  His eyes were so wide and his face lowered, sinking into the spray of violets on his lapel.

  From somewhere in the din, a recognition of the sound, a drunken voice crying out, “They’ve got fireworks!” and another pulling a pistol of his own, waving it gleefully as if in some Wild West saloon.

  She didn’t care, didn’t care at all. She held that gun and felt its heat in her hand. In ways old and churchlike she knew it was not right. But part of her felt shooting him in that dark, hollowed heart of his would be the rightest thing she’d ever done. Righter somehow than anything that could be done.

  “Marion,” he said, voice slipping into her ear. “I know what I am. Believe it.”

  It was his return blow and it landed. She felt it all. He was saying, You knew me. You knew what I was. You ran toward it. Don’t forget how you ran toward it.

  She thought of Everett, at the end, staring into the dank center of things, she thought how that descent must have felt, the softest curl of oblivion, the place he’d been trying to reach since he first took hold of the needle’s giddy bloom. Was that for her? To end and end and end?

  It adds to truth a dream.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.” The weight of the gun in her hand, his sorrowful face, she felt herself sinking.

  Something rattled in her, the blood memory of Ginny, face crumpled like shiny paper. She had done such things. She had seared and hammered and destroyed. She had turned herself into such a dark thing, for him. To tear his sneer away with a hot bullet, would that redeem her now, redeem her lost friends, her direful, doomed husband?

  Or would it only bury his sins, bury them with him?

  And after, she would be lost to the abyss that would follow, which would swallow her. That black whorl of nothingness she now knew so well.

  Fighting it, she thought of Mr. Worth, she imagined his furtive connivances, the gin-drenched whisper to the right reporters. He would not fail. It will be, she knew it. Tomorrow, the next day and for weeks to come, the newspapers will do their dance—and they will, God help that butcher of mine, she thought—and, with each screaming headline, all these men, these fickle, sad little gents with their hunger and their loneliness, will throw Joe Lanigan to the wolves to save their own skins. Beat back the blood, Marion, she told herself. Let these silk-coated confederates eat his black heart. It is their world. Let them to it.

  She looked down at him, clinging to his shattered knee, the white of bone shining through the pants leg. He looked so small.

  “Now it is your turn to watch me,” she said, looking once more into those lost, careless eyes of his. “There are levers, switches, keys and I know which way they all go.”

  SO FAST IT WAS, so slight was she, the music still caroming and the frenzy of the party, the orgiastic throng…a man with red whiskers—Mr. Gergen, with a mustache now?—called out, Stop her! Stop her!

  But Marion was already pushing through the kitchen doors behind her and the dark alley beckoned forth.

  SHE WOULD GET HER MIND BACK, her head on straight, her thoughts ordered, her heart thumping for something other than ardor and grief again. And when she did, this would all come storming back and she would feel the ponderous weight of everything, so fiercely it would knock the breath out of her.

  But that time was not yet. And now all she felt was righteous and unbound.

  Ten minutes later, by the tracks, a few yards from a pair of tramps, itching to lash on, she saw the freight train hurtling toward her. There has to be something, she thought, looking far off into the distance. There is something.

  The air was simmery hot, the engine whistle wailing inconsolably. She could hear the wheels sparking, coming on so hard. The tramps, they were kicking tin cans into the ravine and getting ready to run.

  She would get on that train and they would not find her. They would not want to. And if they did, it mattered not. She was gone.

  Author’s Note

  THIS NOVEL is inspired by the true story of Winnie Ruth Judd, the “Trunk Murderess,” also known as the “Tiger Woman” and the “Blond Butcher.”

  In October 1931, the bodies of two Phoenix women, nurse Agnes “Anne” LeRoi and her roommate, Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson, were found in a pair of trunks abandoned at Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. After a four-day manhunt, twenty-six-year-old Winnie Ruth Judd turned herself over to the police, claiming she had shot her two friends in self-defense after a vi
olent quarrel in their home.

  The following day, a rambling letter written by Mrs. Judd to her husband, Dr. William Judd, was found in the drainpipe of a Los Angeles department store where Mrs. Judd had been hiding in the days following the murders. “I’m wild with cold, hunger, pain, and fear now, Doctor darling,” the letter’s closing lines read, “if I hadn’t got the gun from Sammy she would have shot me again. Forgive me…. forget me. Live to take care of me, [illegible] as I am sick, Doctor, but I’m true to you. I love you. The thots [sic] of being away from you set me crazy. Shall I give up? No, I don’t think so. The police will hang me. It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defense. Love me yet, Doctor.”

  The shocking nature of the crimes set against Winnie Ruth Judd’s blond angelic looks made the case irresistible to the public and popular press. Headlines screeched, “‘Hungry for Love’ Her Notes to Mate Show,” “Gay Revels Revealed, Narcotics Hinted in Killing,” “Mind Inflamed by Drugs Blamed in Trunk Murder” and “‘Had to Fight,’ Slayer Cries.”

  A sensational three-week trial ensued. The prosecution claimed Mrs. Judd had murdered her two friends in cold blood as they slept in their beds, and dismembered one of the bodies in order to fit them both into a pair of packing trunks for transport to Los Angeles. Their account appeared to contradict much crime scene evidence as well as Ruth’s own injuries, including a bullet wound in her hand. Still, Mrs. Judd’s defense attorneys, believing the fix was in among Phoenix authorities, were already planning for an insanity plea. In February 1932, Winnie Ruth Judd was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

  The intervention of Sheriff John R. McFadden, however, brought a dramatic turn of events. Winnie Ruth Judd, who had not been called to testify at her own trial, divulged to the sheriff further details of the events surrounding the murders, including the involvement of a popular and influential Phoenix businessman.

  A hearing was convened by grand jury request, finally permitting Mrs. Judd to tell her story. She recounted a harrowing argument with her two friends that became so out of control that Sammy Samuelson threatened her with a gun: “[Sammy] had the gun pointed right at my heart. And Sammy used to take spells…and she would look—oh, she didn’t look like herself at all…and she had the gun pointed right at my heart, and I grabbed the hand with the gun.” A struggle ensued and the gun went off, wounding Mrs. Judd and killing both Miss Samuelson and Mrs. LeRoi. Mrs. Judd went on to claim that the crimes had been concealed and the dismemberment arranged by one J. J. “Happy Jack” Halloran, one of the town’s civic leaders and Mrs. Judd’s rumored lover. She said that Halloran persuaded her that she must not go to the police. “Why, he scared the life out of me,” she told the court. “He told me not to call my husband or the police. I must not mention this to anyone, that he would take care of this himself.” She added, after her arrest, he promised her if she kept quiet about his role, she would be protected.