by Amy Stewart
They walked in silence until they reached the training field. No one from camp could hear them, and as long as they were in the open, she would see anyone coming.
She always thought it best to begin an interrogation without any preliminaries. “You weren’t expecting to see Miss Binford tonight, were you?”
“I hoped never to see that girl again.”
“And what about your wife?”
“Mrs. Ward will not permit her name to be uttered in her presence.”
“Does that mean you didn’t say her name after she ran out of the tent?”
Mr. Bernstein rubbed his forehead. “I can hardly remember, I was so shocked.”
“Of course you remember. Do Fleurette and Mrs. Ward know that they were in a tent with Beulah Binford no more than an hour ago?”
He groaned. “No. I shut my trap when you ran out. It isn’t in my best interests to introduce the subject or the girl in the presence of Mrs. Ward. That Binford girl nearly put me in the poorhouse.”
“Yes, I’m sure that whatever happened between the two of you was entirely her fault,” Constance said drily.
“I’d like to know why you allowed her into camp. A scandal like that would close this place down. Or—wait a minute. I know her game. She gave a false name, didn’t she? She always did, back in New York.”
“This camp is not your concern,” Constance said. “What matters now is whether Miss Binford is to be given the privacy she deserves.”
Freeman stood with his hands in his pockets and rolled his eyes up toward the sky, calculating. “Well, let’s see. I know a reporter or two in Washington who could be out here in the morning. What would that headline be?”
Constance yanked Freeman’s elbow for good measure. “You know perfectly well. ‘Disgraced Lady Deputy Snares Beulah Binford.’ Every paper in the country would run it.”
Freeman nodded thoughtfully. “I like that. This might just be the little something extra that we need to put Beulah back on the stage. A lady deputy throwing her behind bars when she tries to shoot another man—”
“Another man! When did she ever shoot a man before?”
“Oh, you’re right,” Freeman said. “It was the wife who was murdered.”
“And the husband who did the murdering! You haven’t even bothered to remember what transpired.”
“Well, there’s no need to go into the particulars now. What I’m proposing, Miss Kopp, is to put you in the very center of our little morality play, as a force for good. Now, I don’t have to tell you how much this might help rehabilitate your own image after all that nastiness during the election last fall. What I suggest is—”
If Constance hadn’t been certain how to handle Mr. Bernstein before, she was now. He hadn’t been damaged a bit by that gunshot. He was already trying to put on a show about it. There was in fact no tragedy, no scandal, that he wouldn’t exploit for his own gain. She wasn’t shocked by it any more than one is shocked by a leopard for wearing its spots, but she saw now that he would never be persuaded to see Beulah’s plight another way. He couldn’t be persuaded at all—but he could be threatened. That sort of bravado in a man always had cowardice hiding underneath it. She could manage a coward.
Constance—summoning up more of Deputy Kopp now than she had in months—gripped him by both shoulders and gave him a rough shake. “You’re not making the suggestions, Mr. Bernstein. You’re going to keep quiet about Beulah Binford. You’ve already ruined that girl’s life once. There’s nothing to be gained by doing so again.”
“But the public deserves to know!”
“Oh, you don’t believe that. You do remember that I saved your life tonight, don’t you?”
“For which I offer my thanks, if I haven’t already.”
“You haven’t,” Constance said flatly. “I just happened to catch Beulah in time. Who’s going to be there to stop her the next time she comes after you?”
He paused to consider that. “She’s not the first girl to point a gun at me. And I don’t imagine she’s a very good shot.”
“Mr. Bernstein, here’s one thing I know about Beulah Binford. She might be quiet, and a little evasive, but she watches and learns. She won’t make a mistake next time.”
He went very still at that idea. “Then what do you propose?”
“I propose you do your utmost not to aggravate her. Leave her alone, and don’t breathe a word about her to the press.”
“But she put a gun on me! Don’t you throw girls in jail for a thing like that?”
“Leave her to me. I can’t appeal to your sense of decency, because you haven’t any, but—”
“Now, that’s unkind!”
“But what I can do is to remind you that if you go against Beulah Binford, or say a word that would damage the reputation of this camp, you will have Beulah to worry about—”
“That’s nothing new.” Freeman tried to summon up his bluster and bluff, but it drained away again when he saw something fierce and—Was it possible? A bit of the rogue outlaw?—in Constance’s eye.
“And you will have me to worry about. If Beulah doesn’t come after you, I will. Am I understood?”
43
“BUT WHY WOULD you threaten him on my account?” Beulah asked Constance the next morning. She’d passed a comfortable night in the infirmary, in spite of her swollen and throbbing nose. There was no ice to be had in camp, but Nurse Cartwright put cold cloths on top of the bandage, which helped a little, and gave her a restorative sip of brandy now and then, which helped a great deal more.
“He deserved it,” Constance said. “I’m going to think of you the same way I’d think of a girl who’s been arrested. You’re entitled to your privacy until your case is sorted out.”
Beulah had, by then, formed a pretty good idea of why Constance knew so much about arrests and cases, but she didn’t say anything about it at that moment.
“Well, I am a girl who’s been arrested, as you well know, but I’d rather not be again.”
“You won’t be.”
Constance couldn’t promise that, and Beulah knew it. “What did you tell everybody, then?”
“I said that a gun was to be used as a prop in the show, and that it discharged accidentally backstage.”
“Do you honestly think that all two hundred girls are going to believe a story like that?”
“Not for long,” Constance admitted. “They’re going to write to their parents. I can’t put a stop to that. Some of those parents will have questions.”
“Then you and I have just enough time to skip out of town,” Beulah said.
Constance smiled at that offer. “I had Clarence send a wire to Maude Miner this morning asking her to pay us a visit. She’ll have to be told the truth. I’ll leave it to her to decide what to do.”
Beulah sat up in bed. “But you’re not going to confess to everything, are you? You’ll tell her my name? You’ll tell her I tried to shoot Mr. Bernstein?”
“I have to. It’s the only way.”
Beulah didn’t like the sound of that, but thought it best to appeal to Constance’s pride. “Doesn’t that look bad for you? She’ll want to know where I found the gun. What are you going to say about that?”
“The truth,” Constance said. “Every word of it. She put her trust in me, and I must do the same.”
Beulah couldn’t tolerate Constance’s noble tone. Police ladies loved to take an honorable stance, and expected warm approval and admiration for it. Beulah wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.
“Go ahead and ruin your own life, if you want to. If I’m found out, I’ll go back to New York and pick up where I left off. But if Miss Miner knows that you led a shooting party in the woods, and that you had Beulah Binford living right under your nose—why, it’ll be terrible for you, and I suppose it’ll close the camp. This is far worse than a few girls sneaking off with their wireless instructor for cocktails and cigarettes.”
“Which you did, too, with Hack and Clarence,” Co
nstance reminded her.
“Oh, you can’t bring them into this!” Beulah had grown fond of those boys. They were so harmless, anyway. Anyone else might’ve plied them with liquor, but they had nothing but warm beer on offer, which was so bitter and flat that only the boys drank it.
“They brought themselves into this when they went off with you into the woods,” Constance said. “They’re soldiers, and they know better.”
Beulah shrugged. There was nothing she could do for Hack and Clarence. “Am I to leave today, or wait for Miss Miner to come and put me out?”
“I’m not convinced that she will put you out,” Constance said. “I think she’ll view this the way I do. You shouldn’t be punished forever for something that happened when you were not much more than a child.”
“Well, you and Miss Miner can believe that, and then I’ll only have the rest of the nation to convince.” Beulah found it hard to talk with her nose mashed in. She didn’t like to accept kindness from the woman who’d done it to her.
“Isn’t it better to come clean?” Constance asked. “You can’t go on like this forever, can you? Living under an assumed name and making up stories about yourself?”
Beulah bristled at Constance’s attempt at fixing her life. “Everyone makes up stories about themselves. Look at you.”
Constance managed to look shocked at this, even though Beulah could tell she’d struck close to the truth. “Me? What story have I been telling?”
“It’s the story you haven’t been telling,” Beulah said. “Who are you, anyway? You go around teaching those girls to shoot a gun, and talking about arrests and cases and all the rest of it, and you certainly are good at throwing somebody down on the ground, by the look of my nose. But you want us to think you’re just a spinster lady from a farm in New Jersey. What are you trying to hide?”
“I don’t know why you want to bring me into this,” Constance said. “I didn’t ask to be camp matron. If Mrs. Nash hadn’t taken that fall—”
“Oh, never mind about Mrs. Nash and her fall! You used to be somebody, didn’t you? You just don’t want anyone to know, same as me.”
Constance leaned against the metal rail at the foot of Beulah’s bed. “I had a little trouble in my last position,” she said. “It was in the papers quite a bit. I’ve just been hoping that these girls don’t follow the crime pages.”
“I don’t look at a paper much myself,” Beulah said, “but why are you trying to hide it?”
“I don’t want to have to answer any questions, that’s all.”
“Why? Are you ashamed? Did you do something terrible?” Beulah felt quite enlivened by the possibilities. “Did you shoot a man? Did you put the wrong girl in jail and leave a criminal out running on the streets?”
“No! It was nothing like that. Only—everything I did was twisted around and misunderstood. Things got blamed on me that shouldn’t have been.”
Beulah settled back into her pillows with a feeling of satisfaction. “Oh, I know all about that. But what are you going to do about it now?”
Constance quaked a little at that, if a woman of her size could be said to quake. “There isn’t a thing I can do. It’s over.”
“What I mean to say is, what are you going to do next? Are you going to be a police lady again?”
“I don’t know why I ought to tell you about it, but no, I couldn’t, after what’s been said about me in the papers. Every police department in New Jersey knows my name.”
“Then go out West,” Beulah offered.
“I couldn’t leave my sisters, and we have a farm, besides.”
“Then you must have some idea of helping with the war effort, if you’re here,” Beulah said.
Constance shrugged. “Miss Miner thinks that she might have something for me at the War Department. Or—well, she would have, if I’d managed the camp properly. Now I don’t know what she’ll say.”
“Who cares about Miss Miner? Why are you waiting for her to tell you what you’re going to do and who you’re going to be? Can’t you work that out for yourself?”
“It hardly matters what I decide to do, if no one will hire me to do it.”
“But you haven’t even tried,” Beulah said. “Did you take the wireless class?”
“Of course,” Constance said.
“Well, so did I. Did Mr. Turner teach you how to spell that detective’s name using different words for every letter?”
“Mr. Bielaski. Yes, he did. I suppose he uses the same name for every class.”
“And did he tell you about how Mr. Bielaski marched in and demanded a job going after the Germans, when one didn’t even exist?”
“Roxie,” Constance said, “pardon me, Beulah—I don’t know what Mr. Bielaski has to do with—”
Beulah wouldn’t let her finish. “How’d you decide to become a police lady in the first place?”
“I . . . well, I didn’t,” Constance said. “The sheriff hired me. He saw what I could do when a man was harassing our family, and he asked me to come and work for him.”
“And then he asked you not to work for him, is that it?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Constance said. “There was an election. Someone else was sheriff.”
“All right, so a different sheriff asked you not to work for him,” Beulah said. “It’s the same thing. And now you’re waiting for Miss Miner to ask you to work for her. Why don’t you decide what you want, and do the asking yourself? That’s what Mr. Bielaski did, and look at him now. That’s what I did, too. I couldn’t hide from the papers forever. I had to go find myself a job, and make my own life.”
“In a strange city, under an assumed name.”
“Well, that’s because I’m Beulah Binford,” she snapped. “The rules are different for me. But what I’m telling you is that I couldn’t wait for things to get better on their own. If I’d hung my head in shame every day for the rest of my life, it still wouldn’t have been enough, would it?”
“Of course you shouldn’t hang your head—”
“Because how much shame is enough? When do you know it’s enough? Does somebody write you a letter and tell you? I don’t think they do. I never got one.”
“Miss Binford, I didn’t mean to suggest—”
Beulah was good and wound up now. “What I’m trying to say is, you can’t wait for somebody else to decide whether you get another chance. What if nobody ever does?”
44
“THAT GIRL IS exhausting,” Constance said, kicking her feet up on Norma’s cot. “They’re all exhausting, now that I think of it.”
Everyone else was either at sewing or cooking class. Norma had stayed behind to hear what transpired with Beulah. As Norma was the only other soul in camp to know Beulah’s identity, Constance hardly had any choice but to talk to her about it. There was no one else to tell.
“If you hadn’t broken her nose, we could’ve put her out first thing this morning,” Norma said.
“I’m not going to put her out,” Constance said.
“You always go soft for girls with bad reputations,” Norma said.
“What is she to do? Her name’s been ruined, but she has to make a life for herself.”
“She can make a life without stealing a gun and shooting at a man,” Norma said. “They put people in jail for that sort of thing, or have you forgotten already?”
“She had a fright,” Constance said. “She didn’t expect to ever see him again. Apparently he’s the one who made sure that she stayed in the papers. She holds him responsible for all her notoriety.”
“As I recall, she had a hand in it herself,” Norma said.
“She was thirteen when it started. Try to imagine Fleurette when she was thirteen, going with a grown man like Henry Clay Beattie.”
“I don’t believe I will imagine that. Are we to go on pretending that she’s Roxanna Collins from Park Avenue?”
“We are, although she’s excused from duties until Nurse Cartwright releases her. I told the nurse
to be generous. A few days in the infirmary won’t do any harm.”
“And you intend to just wait for Maude Miner to show up and sort it out.”
“I am not waiting for Maude Miner.” Constance couldn’t help but sound irked at that. Beulah managed to get under her skin with that talk of always waiting for some other party to decide what her life ought to be. She thought she might put the question of her future to Norma. “This camp of yours hasn’t given me any better ideas about what I might do during the war.”
“It isn’t my camp,” Norma said, “and there are a dozen things you could do tomorrow. You’re free to choose any of them. Most of us don’t have a choice. We’re only any good at one thing. Fleurette’s going to sew, whether she likes it or not, and I’ll be handling the Army’s pigeon program.”
Constance started to register her doubts about that last bit, but Norma plunged on. “You, on the other hand, could go into police or detective work, or find another jail in need of a matron, or run another camp like this one, or do any sort of work with troubled girls at hospitals and missions and the like. You could take up with a travelers’ league like that policewoman in Paterson.”
“Belle Headison,” Constance groaned. “Don’t put me in with her.”
“Don’t you see?” Norma said. “Belle Headison is probably only capable of doing one thing, which is why she’s doing it. You could do a dozen things, but you won’t. You’d rather sulk about an election that ended six months ago.”
Had it been six months? The wound was still fresh. Perhaps she understood how Beulah, six years after the fact, still wanted to rush at Freeman Bernstein with a gun.
“Your trouble is that nothing else is good enough. You would’ve worked for Sheriff Heath forever, if they appointed sheriffs for life.”
“I might have,” Constance admitted.
“If that’s the only job that meets your exacting standards, then you’re out of work for good. You had the shortest career I’ve ever heard of, and I only hope the memories are enough to last you a lifetime.”
“When do you suppose you’ll start running that pigeon division at the Army?” Constance asked, inspired by a sudden eagerness to pack Norma off to another camp.