by Amy Stewart
“Where is she now?” asked Madame Zella.
Just down the road in Hawthorne, Fleurette wanted to say, but instead answered, “She moved out to Colorado when she married and has quite a large family of her own, I believe.”
Another card revealed itself. “Ah, yes, I see something buried, but it doesn’t have to mean a funeral. It could be . . . something to do with mining, perhaps?”
“I suppose that’s the sort of business her husband is in,” Fleurette said carelessly, as if she hadn’t thought about this long-departed sister for years. “I wouldn’t know anymore.”
“And this sister . . . it is a name from the beginning of the alphabet . . . a B or a D . . .”
“Dora,” supplied Fleurette, happy to give Madame a victory.
“Yes, Dora, a short name, I see that. Do not ignore any sort of communication from her.”
“Well, I’m not going to Colorado, if that’s what you mean,” said Fleurette, pouting a little. “What about me, and my difficulties? Where am I to go, and what am I to do with myself ? I expected my husband home by now, and children on the way, and my life settled. I’m at quite a loss, and you’ve given me nothing to go on. How am I to decide whether to stay or to go, and what sort of life to pursue? I’m so lonely here. I had friends in the theater, but they’ve all moved on. They were my only family and now what do I have?”
Madame Zella kept shuffling the cards. “I do see you finding your people again, but not as you expect.”
“Then am I to just wait for another husband to come along? Because I don’t think I could love again, but perhaps I’m meant to. I thought you would tell me that, at least.”
This little tirade gave her a great deal of satisfaction. Why couldn’t anyone tell her where to go, or what to do? Fleurette hadn’t done a very good job of working out her own life for herself. Why couldn’t there be a Madame Zella who had all the answers?
Madame knew her business and promptly turned over a few more cards. “You have only to ask, and the cards will answer,” she murmured. “You are to stay here for now. Another month at least. There is another husband in your future, but he is years away. Do not take seriously the next man who claims to love you. He is not the right one. You are destined for quite an active life, in a place far from here. You won’t have to wonder where to go. You’ll be summoned. Patience is your watchword.”
Fleurette sighed, disappointed for herself and for the character she’d invented. A little clock from somewhere within the curtained rooms chimed just then, and Madame put away her cards and stood. “Our time is at an end,” she said. “Come to me again, but not for a month, at least. Your future will have started to take shape by then, and the cards might hold fresh answers for you.”
“I certainly hope they will,” Fleurette said. She handed Madame Zella a few coins, to better impress upon her that her latest customer was free with her money and an easy mark.
It was dark by the time she left the parlor. She walked past the Black Cat on the way home, but did not bother to look within. She didn’t have to search for Louis Herman anymore. She had only to wait for him to come to her.
33
“I’M STILL NOT convinced they could’ve known enough about me to concoct a story I’d so readily believe.” Alice frowned to herself as she set down a tray of little ham sandwiches and sliced cucumbers.
“Madame Zella wouldn’t have needed you to tell her much,” Fleurette answered. She lifted a sandwich from the tray and looked around for the little pot of mustard Alice usually put out. Alice, seeing that it was missing, jumped up to retrieve it. “Didn’t you sign the guest book when you walked in, and supply your name and address?”
“I suppose so,” Alice called from the kitchen. “I don’t really remember that part.”
“That’s why she has you do it at the beginning,” Fleurette said. “Everything that comes after is so distracting that you don’t ever think of it again.”
“Still, Mr. Herman knew so much about my family, and my grandfather . . .” Alice picked at the cucumbers with the only dainty silver fork she hadn’t already handed over to Louis Herman.
“I’m sure you said enough during the reading with Madame Zella to get him started. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you told Mr. Herman even more during your first meeting, and he used that, too,” Fleurette said.
“I just don’t remember,” Alice mused.
“That’s why it works,” said Fleurette. “I’d like to get my hands on that guest book. I suspect it’s full of the names of women who’ve been swindled and never thought to mention that they’d seen a fortune-teller a few weeks before.”
Fleurette and Alice were by then striking up an odd sort of friendship. Alice was home during the day and often bored, and Fleurette found that she couldn’t stand to spend eight hours a day at her sewing machine. She took to dropping by Alice’s around lunch-time, and would happily eat any sort of sandwich and speculate about their case in progress.
“What sort of letter do you suppose he’ll send you?” Alice said. “Do you think it’s always a deceased uncle, or is it a different sort of con every time?”
“He had to be clever about it, if he doesn’t want to be caught,” Fleurette said. “I let slip that I have a much older sister from whom I’m estranged. I expect it’ll have something to do with that.”
“Then you simply told the truth, like I did,” said Alice.
“No, I didn’t. I invented a sister in Colorado, whose husband is in the gold mines. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“But didn’t you tell me that you have a much older sister from whom you’re estranged?” said Alice. “It doesn’t matter if she’s in Colorado or right here in Paterson if you don’t speak to her or see her.”
Fleurette put the sandwich down. She lost her appetite all of a sudden. “We aren’t estranged,” she said. “We just—she owes me an apology, that’s all. It won’t last forever.”
“Sometimes it does,” said Alice mildly. “I didn’t plan never to see my family again. But they won’t apologize because they’re not sorry, and neither am I. We have nothing in common. I don’t even know what we’d say, if we did see each other again. I suppose that’s how it is for you and your sister. Or is it both sisters? You have two of them, is that right?”
“Two, plus a sister-in-law, and a niece and nephew and another on the way,” said Fleurette dispiritedly. Exactly how many relations had she tossed overboard in an effort to put some distance between her and Constance?
“Well, but if they want to control you, and tell you how to live your life, you’ve no choice but to go as far away as you can. Are you really thinking of moving away?”
“Why would I do that?” asked Fleurette.
“You said as much to the fortune-teller,” said Alice. “Or didn’t you mean it?”
“That was only the story I invented,” said Fleurette. “Of course, if my voice was better . . .” She stopped there. She didn’t even like to speculate about returning to the stage, and she hadn’t told Alice about the difficulties with her voice.
But Alice pounced on it. “You have a fine voice. What does your voice have to do with it?”
There was no getting out of it now, unless Fleurette simply refused to answer. “Oh,” she said weakly, “I used to sing. But I was ill last fall and now it seems I can’t quite get my breath back.”
Alice said, “You should be talking to Arthur, not to me.”
“If I’d met him under different circumstances, I might have,” said Fleurette.
“What sort of illness was it?”
“Streptococci turned to scarlet fever. My throat was absolutely ruined. I couldn’t speak a word. I coughed for months. I still do sometimes.”
“Oh.”
Alice sounded so solemn that Fleurette looked over quickly. “What do you mean, oh?”
“Just—how long has it been, exactly?”
“I was sick around the beginning of November, so about six months.”
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“Oh,” she said again. “Well, you never know.”
Fleurette knew Alice well enough by now to detect a false note. “You’re thinking something, but you’re not saying it. You might as well tell me.”
Alice looked at her with pity. Fleurette found herself panicking. The wife of a vocal expressionist might just know a thing or two about cases like hers. It was a wonder she hadn’t thought to ask sooner.
“Arthur would say that it’s too late. He’d say that you have a scar in your throat and it makes your breath catch. It turns your voice rough in places and weak in others. You can learn to speak around it, as you have, but you can’t sing around it. You’ll never make full use of your range again, and there are plenty of other girls who can.”
The truth of it hit Fleurette hard enough to make her shudder. “That’s exactly what it feels like,” she muttered. “That I’m trying to sing around it.”
Alice nodded. “He sees it all the time. You can ask him yourself if you like. Come over sometime and I’ll pretend not to know you. You could disguise yourself a little.”
Fleurette groaned. “I don’t think I could bear to hear any more bad news right now.”
“At least you had a talent for it,” said Alice, which was generous of her, as she’d never heard Fleurette sing. “I just don’t feel as if I have a talent for anything. I just—well, I just sit here all day.”
“But you could do anything you like,” said Fleurette. “Just because nursing didn’t work out for you doesn’t mean the next thing won’t.”
“Yes, let’s say that, why don’t we?” Alice said, a little bitterly. “But don’t you see? It was supposed to be nursing, and then it was supposed to be marriage and children, and when the children didn’t come, I found myself at a fortune-teller and next thing I knew, I’d handed over every penny I had in the world, and now I’m supposed to decide what’s next?”
Fleurette kept quiet. What was next, for either of them?
34
THE LETTER ARRIVED at last. Over three weeks had passed. Fleurette thought it clever of Louis Herman to wait a while, so that the announcement of an unexpected windfall would not follow too closely after the visit to the fortune-teller.
He did not, of course, call himself Louis Herman this time. He was Mr. Van Der Meer, Attorney-at-Law, from Philadelphia but arriving to Paterson on business. Lacking an office in Paterson, he proposed a meeting at a hotel with which Fleurette had some familiarity—the Metropolitan, where many of her assignations with Ward & McGinnis’s clients had taken place. He could promise a quiet corner in the back of the restaurant where her privacy would be assured.
Fleurette took the letter to Alice at once so that they might compare it with the one she’d received. Both letters were typewritten, with a slight skip near the top of the capital S. The signatures (two florid scrawls) looked nothing alike, but were both done in the same bold ink. Both letters were written in a kind of baroque language that did not seem, to Alice and Fleurette, to be the way an attorney would ordinarily conduct business.
Alice’s letter began:
“I write with tidings of a benediction quite unexpected but not, I trust, unwelcome. It is my somber duty but also my legal obligation to inform you . . .”
Fleurette’s, nearly identical, began:
“Please allow me to convey tidings of the most fortunate variety, which I trust you will find unexpected but not in the least unwelcome. As the attorney of record representing certain mining interests in Western states, it is my legal obligation to notify you . . .”
“He ought to find someone else to write his letters,” Fleurette said, feeling very much like Norma with that pronouncement. It was a job poorly done and she felt it necessary to say so. “Anyone can see that they’re nearly identical. And I don’t know why he doesn’t change typewriters. That broken S is a giveaway.”
“It’s a wonder the police have never spotted the similarities,” Alice said.
“They couldn’t, if they’ve never seen the letters,” said Fleurette. “Most women would be ashamed to tell, just like you’ve been. Besides, he probably moves from one city to another as soon as there’s any sign of trouble.”
“Do you suppose Madame Zella goes with him, or does he find a new fortune-teller in each town?”
Fleurette considered that. “It would be easy enough to find out how long Madame Zella’s been there. I might pop in and ask those ladies at the library. If I had to guess, I’d say he travels alone. It’s twice the risk and twice the expense to go everywhere together. The two of them as a pair would be more easily recognized. Besides, he might not use a fortune-teller every time. Who knows how many schemes he’s tried over the years?”
It gave Fleurette a great deal of satisfaction to imagine her adversary as a seasoned criminal, expert in all manner of confidence tricks and swindles. What a thrill it would be to bring down a man like that! Wouldn’t it just show Constance if she put him behind bars while Constance lingered around the perfume counter at Schoonmaker’s?
She shrugged off that idea before it took hold. Constance had a way of creeping around the corners of her mind uninvited. They weren’t even on speaking terms at the moment, but Constance popped into her thoughts anyway, like an old habit she couldn’t shake.
There was nothing of Constance’s investigations in this matter anyway. She wasn’t working in any official capacity, now that Mr. Ward had been scared off of hiring her. This was only a way to keep herself amused and to help a friend—and Alice had become a friend, of sorts.
“I don’t particularly like the scheme he’s come up with for you,” Alice said. “It isn’t nearly as attractive as mine.”
“That’s because he invented it just for me,” Fleurette said. “Or not for me, exactly, but for the character I was playing. I said that I longed for the theater, and for a great big group of friends around me. I practically begged Madame Zella for a playhouse.”
The proposition outlined in the letter involved a theatrical playhouse that had been put up as loan collateral for a stake in a mining operation out in Colorado. The husband of Dora, the long-vanished older sister, found himself in possession of the playhouse when the owner defaulted on his obligations and fled. Now Dora wished to offer the playhouse to Fleurette—or, rather, to the character Fleurette was playing—as a sort of compensation for her years of estrangement.
“I hardly knew you as a child, and now you are grown,” read Dora’s letter, forwarded on by Mr. Van Der Meer, “and now I understand through our attorney that you are a widow. I should’ve done more for you years ago and I hope you’ll allow me to do so now. A nice respectable playhouse down in Florida, with rooms above for an apartment and (so I’ve been told) a few extra rooms to let, would offer you a life in the theater but also the comforts of a true home. I enclose my address if you wish to write to me yourself, but please know that you may trust Mr. Van Der Meer to make all the arrangements directly. He has handled our legal matters for years and we have full faith in him.”
Fleurette was touched by the way Alice took the matter seriously and gave the opportunity careful consideration. “But would you really take ownership of a theatrical playhouse, and a company of actors, and all the entanglements it involves? Ticket sales and rehearsals and leaky roofs and . . . Oh, I don’t know, it all sounds like a bit much.”
“But for a woman who’s been so bored and lonely, it might be just the thing,” Fleurette said. “And it was awfully clever of Mr. Van Der Meer to include an address in Colorado where I might write to this Dora. Of course, it’s only a postal box in Denver.”
“I wonder who would answer if you did write,” said Alice.
“Probably no one at all. I expect he’s only chosen a box-number at random, and hopes to take as much money from me as he can before the letters come back and I realize it’s all a hoax. I’m sure he’ll make every effort to hurry me along before that happens.”
“Oh yes, that’s how he was with me,” Alice said. “
Everything had to happen in such a rush. Past-due fees and back taxes and the like.”
Fleurette nodded and turned the letter over. “I’m going to need something of value to hand over to him,” she said.
Alice laughed. “I couldn’t help you with that. I haven’t any jewelry left to give!”
“Well, neither have I. My most valuable possessions are my sewing machine and my parrot, and neither of them would matter to a crook looking to make a quick profit.”
It was then that Fleurette remembered the emerald—that cheap flashy thing that was meant to come to her rescue but only disappointed her. She’d tossed it in a box of notions and forgotten about it.
“Then again, perhaps I do have a piece of costume jewelry I could offer him,” Fleurette said. “Did he seem to you to know anything about jewelry? Did he eye anything of yours as if he was an expert in gems and the like?”
“Not at all,” said Alice. “He hardly glanced at my things. He just wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them in his pocket.”
“Then I have everything I need,” said Fleurette.
35
FLEURETTE SAILED INTO the Metropolitan looking every inch the grieving widow with a modest (but not too paltry) inheritance to spend. She hadn’t said when, exactly, her husband had died—neither Madame Zella nor Mr. Van Der Meer seemed at all interested in the husband, except to be assured that he was well and truly dead, and had left her provided for in some way. Fleurette had decided for herself that the husband had perished early in the war, so that she might be through her period of formal mourning and into somber dark blue dresses rather than black.
In fact, she wore the very same dress she’d worn on that first night, when Petey snuck her in through the hotel kitchen and up to the room of Mr. Lyman, that kind and amiable man who’d treated her tenderly and doubled her pay. What a promising start that had been! She couldn’t have imagined that a couple of months later, she’d be living on her own, not speaking to her sisters, and steeling herself to take down a notorious swindler, all for . . . well, for no pay at all.