A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves

by Suzann Ledbetter

  The door swung wide. Bony fingers clamped my upper arm and yanked me inside. “Lord above, why didn’t you say so before the whole entire neighborhood got a look at you?”

  The maid’s abrupt change in demeanor was as disconcerting as it was welcome. She ushered me to a hall bench and sat me down. “You wait here whilst I see if Miz Penny’s up to a visit. If she isn’t, I surely am. One way or t’other you and ol’ Abelia will have us a talk in the back kitchen, directly.”

  Before my wits were about me, she’d rounded the stairway’s newel post and was two steps from the landing. I wrenched sideward and called, “Tell her Joby—”

  “Hush your mouth, girl. What I don’t know, I don’t have to lie about later.”

  Dread wrapped my shoulders like a cloak. From the minimal information Shulteis had given me, I’d assumed this was a typical case of a wife punishing her husband’s philandering where it would hurt him most: his wallet.

  Abelia treating me like an answer to a prayer countered that: moreover, fear had flashed in her eyes when she’d stopped me from giving my name.

  I heard her rap softly on a door. “It’s just me, Miz Penny,” she said, her voice as sweet as a mother crooning to an infant.

  I hugged my reticule to my bosom and surveyed the oak-paneled reception hall. Ferns on tall stands graced the corners. An imposing grandfather clock ticked like a snare drum in a funeral cortege. As if made for it, a carved, walnut secretary with a drop-front desk and glass doors fit the nook between a nickel-plated stove and the archway to the front parlor.

  Everything from the marble-topped table with its silver salver for calling cards to the fringed lampshades, Brussels carpets, and gilded ceramic bric-a-brac bespoke…

  Props. My lips curled over my teeth. Scenery arranged as if for a lyceum stage play. This was not a home, much less a happy one—a fact intuition would have provided even if I’d been ignorant of the owners’ marital strife.

  I started when Abelia said, “Get yourself up here and be quick about it. Can’t never tell when that man’ll take a notion to sashay home.”

  The carpet runner muffled my sprint up the stairs. Five of the doors exiting off the gloomy landing were closed. Near the sixth, Abelia’s stooped figure was silhouetted by a slash of wan sunlight. “Wait for me here in the hall after Miz Penny speaks her peace,” she whispered as I passed by.

  Was Mrs. LeBruton enfeebled? An invalid? Ye gods and good Christmas. What manner of stewpot had J. Fulton Shulteis gotten me into this time?

  When I entered the room, the sensation of falling into a cloud dazzled me. Plush white carpet swallowed my walking boots to their uppers. Innumerable yards of gauze-white fabric swagged the pale blue walls like bunting, draped the bay windowed alcove, and festooned the bed’s canopy.

  It seemed perfectly natural for a tiny, blonde angel in a lacy bed jacket to be reposed against mounds of fluffy pillows. The bruise shadowing her right eye and raw scrape at her left cheekbone were anything but.

  “J. Fulton Shulteis is a shyster of the first rank,” she said in a velvety drawl, “but he is unquestionably discreet. I trust you shall be, as well.”

  “Nothing you say will leave this room, Mrs. LeBruton.”

  “Including that I have decided not to proceed with the divorce?”

  My eyes averted to her abraded cheek. A cupboard door wasn’t the villain. Nor would a fall scuff one side of her face and contuse the other. I’d witnessed and participated in enough schoolyard brawls to recognize a backhanded ring mark when I saw one.

  It wasn’t my place to tell her a divorce a mensa et thoro was an alternative. Such a decree leaves the marriage intact but bars a spouse from bed and board, whereas a divorce a vinculo matrimonii ends the legal relation.

  Contrary to other contracts, the marital variety can’t be dissolved by agreement of the parties involved—only by judicial authority.

  Mrs. LeBruton continued, “A note was delivered to Mr. Shulteis an hour ago, instructing him to forgo the bill of divorcement. Abelia insisted I tell you in person.”

  I glanced sideward. Abelia’s gaze telegraphed a plea to extend my discretion to her.

  It was a waste of breath, but I said, “May I ask why you changed your mind?”

  Her response was so long in coming I’d ceased to expect one. “Have you ever been married?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Her hint of a smile was that of a wistful martyr. “Only after a woman has been wed for a while can she understand what is meant by the bonds of holy matrimony.”

  Abelia muttered under her breath. I sincerely doubted it was “amen.”

  “I appreciate the courtesy you’ve shown me, Mrs. LeBruton. Should anyone inquire, I have never had the pleasure of making your acquaintance.”

  The brittle reserve vanished from her lovely porcelain features. She slumped against the pillows. “Thank you. Perhaps someday we will meet under less trying circumstances.”

  “I truly hope we do.”

  I gently closed the door behind me, though I damn well wanted to slam it hard enough to rattle the window-panes. Why in God’s name would any woman stay shackled to a man that beat her? Did Penelope believe the rice powder caked under her eyes hid his monogram? Is that why she hadn’t bothered to blame clumsiness for her injuries?

  That’s how Janey Lou Bakker always explained it when she’d slunk into the mercantile in Fort Smith with a split lip or her eyes blackened and nigh swollen shut.

  “My man Harley says I’m surefooted as a hog on ice,” she said so many times she should have embroidered it on her dressfront to save wind. “Law, I cain’t scratch my head and fry sidemeat what it don’t portend a calamity.”

  Townsfolk shook their heads and murmured that Harley would kill her someday. He did, and a vigilante posse hanged him for it, the night after they served as pallbearers at Janey Lou’s funeral.

  Abelia slipped from the bedchamber like a wraith. She held a finger to her lips and pointed to an adjacent door. I followed her down the backstairs to the kitchen.

  The room smelled of cinnamon, yeast rolls, and a ham baking in its own pot liquor. Bunched herbs were pinned to the white cotton curtains above a spacious, granite sink and the hand-pump that served it. Glass-paned cupboards boasted everyday dishes enough to serve an army. Solid-doored cabinets below the counters would hold all the needed pots, pans, kettles, and tins.

  “I been caretaking Miz Penny since she was twelve year old,” Abelia said. “Her daddy owns a steamship line out San Francisco way. Rich as King Midas and didn’t get that way being kind.”

  She paused, then muttered, “That dear, sweet girl jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. I told her and told her, LeBruton was cut of the same cloth as her father, but would she listen? Ain’t her fault she don’t know what love is. Mine and her mama’s is all she’s ever had.”

  With a grunt, Abelia whisked an envelope from the butcher-block worktable. Prying up a stove lid, she flung the envelope into the fire. The clank of the lid resettling in its groove was as irrevocable as a gunshot.

  When she turned, her eyes were red-veined, but dry. “If it’s the lastest thing I do on this earth, I’ll get Miz Penny away from that son of Satan she married.”

  “Was that her note to Mr. Shulteis?”

  “Oh, you’re a quick one, I’ll give you that.” Abelia fetched a glass from a cabinet. “Miz Penny didn’t have no choice but write it.” Lemonade was dispensed from a jug stored in the icebox. I whimpered at the sight of it.

  “When she told Mr. Rendal she’d had enough of his bedding every slut that cocked a hip at him, he slapped her.” The glass banged the table in front of me. “He said he’d married Miz Penny for her money and that she’d do as she was told, or he’d have his friend the judge declare her insane and lock her up in an asylum.”

  Hatred radiated from the old woman’s very pores. She knew how easily Rendal LeBruton—or any husband—could dispose of a troublesome wife, then quietly divorce her
and take her wealth as his own. It didn’t happen every day, but often enough to be common knowledge.

  I sipped at the cold, lemony-sweet ambrosia, though I wanted to gulp it in a single swallow. Declining a plate of molasses cookies, I asked, “Then why did you burn the note, Abelia?”

  “Because Miz Penny can’t lie worth spit. This way, she don’t have to. For all she knows, it went to that shyster, like she was told.”

  “But her husband is bound to find out it didn’t. I can’t act as Shulteis’s agent knowing his client believes she’s fired him. What happens if Shulteis serves LeBruton with notice of the dissolution? Fulton has put the cart before the horse, when the respondent was a known philanderer.”

  The last remark prompted a mental smite to the forehead. On the eve of our first collaboration, Won Li said Shulteis was rumored to have warned a captain of industry that his wife and sister-in-law were importing a tarnished Charleston belle to prove his adulterous inclinations.

  The wronged wife was Shulteis’s client, but the lawyer had political ambitions. Knowing whose side the bread was buttered on, and which gender has voting rights, Shulteis spared the man embarrassment and ensured his loyalty. A quiet, uncontested divorce was later obtained in another state.

  Hiring me to secure evidence of LeBruton’s alienated affections indicated that LeBruton’s sphere of influence and personal wealth was negligible.

  Abelia’s hand delved her dress pocket. A money clip with quarter-folded banknotes materialized in her outstretched palm.

  “I got nine dollars saved up that says you’ll help me fix things so’s Master LeBruton don’t find out about Miz Penny showing him the door, before it’s too late to stop his evil schemin’. There’s more money—lots more—to come once the dust settles and Miz Penny is free of him.”

  “Oh, Abelia…” I dragged a stool over and sat down, suddenly too heartsick to stand. “Put your money away. Better yet, take it to the depot and buy Mrs. LeBruton a train ticket away from here. A divorce can’t be granted in secret.”

  “Huh. Just ’cause I’m a nigger don’t mean I’m ignorant, missy. There’s a heap of talking that goes on over the back fence. I’m telling you, if we’re real careful, it can be done.”

  She crossed her arms at her chest. “First, do what you was hired for—prove that man is laying with other women.” She snorted. “Shouldn’t take more’n an hour.”

  “All right. Then what?”

  “Tell Shulteis that Mr. Rendal’s fixin’ to spirit Miz Penny away and steal her money. Being a lawyer, he’s liable to know how to kibosh that notion. There’s a fat fee in it for him, too, if he keeps his mouth shut and does a little sidewinding in our favor.”

  “But—”

  “Will you hush up and listen?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You can also tell him that I’ll be seventy-three year old, come October, and I’d sooner hang for killing a lawyer as to die in my sleep.”

  I grinned. Devil take the agency’s percentage. The look on Fulton’s face when I delivered Abelia’s message would be payment enough.

  “What about the legal notice?” I asked. “Any suit filed with the court is public record and must be published in the newspaper.”

  “Nobody ever told me that.” Scowling, Abelia tilted her head to one side. “Are you for certain-sure? No insult meant, but the hem of your skirts ain’t been let down to the ground for too many years.”

  “Oh, I’m certain, all right. Because Denver is the county seat, it must be published here.”

  Abelia clucked her tongue. “It’d be foolish to disbelieve you, but that’s a sprag in the wagon wheel.”

  More like a sinkhole. Legend had it, a fire back in ’63 and the Cherry Creek flood a year later almost wiped Denver City off the map, but neither stilled William Byers’s printing press for long. Special editions of the Rocky Mountain News hit the streets within hours of those disasters.

  “I’ll pray on it real hard,” Abelia said. “If faith can move a mountain, I reckon it can show us the road around one, too.” The bong of the grandfather clock echoed from the foyer. Abelia gasped and tugged at my sleeve. “Lawsy mercy, if you’re still here when that man gets home, our goose is cooked, girl.”

  She hustled me through the front kitchen and into the back. The sunny, whitewashed room was filled with racks of drying linens and unmentionables that smelled of soap and unslaked lime. Flat-and fluting irons of myriad sizes and weights rested on a tin-plated shelf above a small woodstove.

  “Now don’t you come back here again,” Abelia said.

  “Miz Penny, she ain’t allowed no company. Ain’t allowed out of the house neither, unless Mr. Rendal’s with her.”

  I started. “Then how did she make and keep an appointment with J. Fulton Shulteis?”

  “The doctor treatin’ Miz Penny for barrenness is two doors down and a floor up from the lawyer. That’s ’bout the onliest place she can go without that man doggin’ her heels.”

  My fist throttled my reticule’s drawstring neck. Some people wouldn’t recognize a blessing if it tapped a shoulder and said “Howdy-do.” Babies aren’t splints or breathing pots of bee balm. Bearing one to heal a fractured marriage was an abomination.

  Abelia’s palm at my back hastened my exodus out onto a planked stoop. “I shop every other morning ’tween nine and ten at Cheesman’s Drug Store whilst His Nibs gets duded up to do nothing the livelong day.”

  The screen door patted shut against the jamb. “Meet me there come Thursday. I expect to hear something besides ‘Good mornin’, Abelia’ when you do.”

  I was through the back gate and striding down the alleyway before I realized Abelia never had asked my name.

  Three

  It is a fact of life that the greater hurry one is in to go somewhere, the less likely a means of transportation other than shoe leather will avail itself.

  On the off-chance Fulton might still be in his office, I headed for Larimer Street as fast as my tired limbs would take me. Holding my reticule like a shield, I wove around hoards of lollygaggers with naught better to do than get in my way.

  There ought to be a law.

  Percy stepped out the door just as I rounded the corner. He fumbled with the key, his head bent, muttering at the lock as though inanimate objects must be cajoled to ensure cooperation. Papa had been a great one to speechify everything from wagon jacks to Rochester lamps, but his comments were colored the most exquisite shade of blue my ears had yet absorbed.

  “Percy, thank goodness you’re still here.”

  He whirled. Papers flew from his arms like snowbirds taking wing. Bowler askew, his spectacles hanging from one ear, he bellowed, “Now look what you’ve done.”

  “Me?” I knelt to scoop up the foolscap littering the boardwalk. “Ye gods, you’re jumpier than froglegs in hot fat.”

  He righted his hat and eyeglasses, then squatted down beside me. “Please spare me the backwoods colloquialisms. I’ve heard quite enough of them for one day.”

  “I apologize, Percy. I truly didn’t intend to startle you so fierce.”

  He stood. “Whatever your intentions, it’s been an extremely trying day, and as you can see, I have reams of work ahead of me this evening.”

  “Then I won’t bother you another second. I’ll call on Mr. Shulteis tomorrow morning.”

  “He will be in court tomorrow and very probably the next.”

  The image of Penelope LeBruton, the wounded angel imprisoned in a gossamer cage, shimmered behind my eyes. It wasn’t a matter of if her husband would make good his threat, but when. “One question is all I need ask, Percy. Surely he can find time for that.”

  He shrugged and started away. “The trial is in Leadville, Miss Sawyer. He left the city on the noon stage.”

  I assume my expression fell to the depths of woebe-gone, for Percy shifted his weight as though recalling his mother’s instructions on gentlemanly behavior. In a tone as solemn as an undertaker’s, he said, “Might
I in some way be of assistance.”

  Eager as he was to please his employer, Percy was book smart, but he lacked the aptitude for creative thinking. His type, I believed, was better suited for the accounting profession or government work.

  In any event, I wasn’t comfortable divulging the complications of the LeBruton case. Trustworthy or not, Percy hadn’t read law long enough to familiarize himself with its intricacies, which afforded no help to me at all.

  He could forward a letter to Fulton, but it would probably reach Leadville an hour after the attorney quit that city. What a telegram gained in speed, it sacrificed in discretion. Avoiding specifics would render my message unintelligible. “Now that I think about it,” I said, “maybe you can be of assistance.”

  It was obviously not the hoped-for response, but I continued, “That is, if you’d loan me a book on territorial law pertaining to bills of divorcement.” I tilted my head. “Unless you’d rather assist me in my research, it being on behalf of one of Fulton’s clients and all.” A dreamy sigh escaped my lips. “What a delightful evening that would be. Just the two of us. Alone. Together.”

  Blushing to the roots of his sandy hair, Percy could not fit the key in the office’s door lock fast enough. He reexited a moment later with three leather-bound, gilt-embossed volumes, which he foisted into my waiting arms.

  The books were as heavy as flagstones and pinched my corset’s whalebone stays. Five long, sweltering blocks separated me from my Champa Street office—a fact of which Percy was undoubtedly aware and would celebrate with a cup of milky tea, his pinky finger raised in salute.

  I simpered, “I can always count on you, Percy. Why, if I wasn’t a lady, I swear, I’d kiss you smack on the lips.”

  He ducked behind a wall of papers. “Egads, woman. Restrain yourself!”

  Two teamsters dodged around him, chuckling. One said, “Whoo-ee. If’n that pretty gal took a shine to me, danged if I’d fight her off.”

  Percy looked at them, then me, with equal disdain. “Well, I never.”

  The second man drawled, “We done figgered that already, son.”