The Styx

by Jonathon King

  Alone in the suite McAdams again washed the grit and salt sheen of humidity and sweat off her face and then removed her blouse and did the same for her arms with a sea sponge her father had given her as a present from a place in Florida called Key West. She removed her skirt and sat on the edge of the bed and washed down her legs as well. When she was finished she pulled a sitting room chair over to the double French doors to the balcony and then opened them to the beach and ocean. A salt breeze was blowing in, sweeping back the sheerings of the curtains. She sat and crossed her ankles on a European ottoman, and with the wind brushing the silk of her camisole and her bared legs, she dreamed she was flying.

  She was a child in a tree, most likely one of the huge oaks at the family’s vacation home in Connecticut. She’d been allowed to climb there, the rules for young ladies and societal appearances be damned in the summertime, said her mother. In the dream she was high in the upper branches and a mist floated under her, obscuring the ground below. She felt frightened and glorious at the same time, the wind in her face, the gauze below and an odd smell of salt in the air though she knew they were nowhere near Nantucket, which was the only place she’d been to smell the sea. She stepped out farther on the limb, standing up but keeping her balance by grasping the thin branches just above. The exhilarating feeling of simply stepping off, spreading her arms and soaring over the familiar grounds of their summer getaway was glowing in her head. But that glimmer of ultimate danger kept her feet in place. She raised her nose to the wind and closed her eyes. The freedom of soaring, or the fear of death? Decide, my dear. You could fly for seconds or for miles. You could fall screaming for fifty feet, or soar forever. She stepped off. The air in her lungs caught in her throat as she went out and down. She was falling, but at the same time hearing a knock at the door, someone assaulting the wood, the noise snapping her awake in midflight.

  Marjory’s eyes shot open and her hand went immediately to her chest. The knocking was real and shook her awake and she lurched forward, seeing the empty blue sky before her at first and then the horizon, the ocean, the beach, the railing, and finally the floor beneath her.

  “My Lord!” she said and caught her breath, closed her eyes and touched her face. Now she distinctly heard the knocking at the door, stood and realized her state of undress. In reaction she brought her spread palms up in a butterfly pattern to cover her exposed breasts.

  “Uh, coming!” she called out. “One moment please, I’m not decent!”

  When she had draped herself in a housecoat and slipped her shoes back on, she finally went to the front door of the suite and opened it. Before her stood a tall black man, his hat in his hands, the brim pinched between the tips of extremely long and strong fingers. There was a sheen of sweat on his face and he was dressed in the manner of a bellman.

  “Yes?” McAdams said, still out of sorts from her dream but her head clearing by the second.

  “Excuse me, Miss McAdams. I’m very sorry, ma’am, to disturb you, ma’am. My name is Santos, Carlos Santos. I come to fetch you for Mizz Fleury, ma’am. She needs you to come meet her, please and it’s in a hurry, ma’am.”

  His voice was urgent, his eyes also. McAdams stepped back and took a second accounting. He was a muscular man, one could tell by the squared shoulders, the stretch of fabric over his arms and the V-shape of his chest tapering down into thin hips. McAdams recognized the look and then studied the face, clean shaven and with astonishing green eyes.

  “You’re the ball player, yes?” she said.

  “Uh, yes ma’am.”

  “I’ve seen you during the games, the ones with the Cuban Giants that Mr. Flagler displayed out back.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said again, with no less humility at being recognized.

  “If I’m not mistaken, you played third base, yes?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And pitched one game?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The baseball games, always played by Negro teams, were organized by the hotel during the winter months and were a favorite among the guests. McAdams had become quite enraptured during the first season that the Royal Poinciana was opened. The Cuban Giants were an especially entertaining team with a group of athletically talented men who seemed unbeatable. Most of the hotel guests knew of course that relatively none of the players were actually from Cuba but played under assumed names so they would be allowed to participate in venues where Negroes were not allowed.

  “I believe I saw you hit a home run against a Mr. Sachel Paige,” she said, recalling a game from one of those earlier seasons.

  “Yes ma’am. Uh, but Mizz Fleury, ma’am, she really needs to see you ma’am,” he said, taking a step back as if to draw her out of the room by creating a vacuum.

  “Oh, of course,” McAdams said, gathering herself. “Right away, Mr. Santos. If you could wait in the lobby, sir. I will be right there.”

  McAdams dressed in her most conservative black skirt and a ruffled blouse that buttoned high on her neck. She supposed the clothes she selected were in response to the fact that she had been in such a mode of undress when Mr. Santos was just outside her apartment door. She rolled her hair and tucked it up under a straw hat and went downstairs.

  Santos was just near the entryway. She went directly to him and again he drew her outside by backing his large, muscular body away. Not seeing Miss Fleury, she looked questioningly into the black man’s eyes.

  “She’s in the laundry, ma’am,” he answered the unasked question. “She’s holding someone there and can’t come herself, but she needs you.”

  There was no panic in the man’s voice but an urgency that started Marjory’s own blood to step up its pace in her chest. This Santos was obviously keeping his voice low and out of earshot of others, and the conspiratorial feel made her even more excited.

  “Where?” she simply said.

  “The laundry, ma’am.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  Santos motioned to the Afromobile parked at the base of the stairs. Before Santos had the chance to help, she climbed up into the seat. He swung his leg up over the saddle and with powerful strokes set the vehicle moving quickly north down the raked stone path in the direction of the electric plant.

  Santos got them to the laundry in minutes and came to a stop at the front door of the long wooden structure. McAdams had been to the building before because she’d been intrigued that, unlike the hotels she was familiar with in the north, the laundries at the hotels in Florida were not located in the basement. There were no basements in Florida. The water table was simply too high and one could not dig down far before striking water, her father had explained. The next best location was near the electric plant where the commercial style steam laundry machines and the huge, flat mangles for pressing the sheets and table cloths could be easily powered and still kept out of sight of the guests.

  Marjory hopped out of the carriage before Santos could assist, but she did allow him to open the door to the laundry for her to pass. When she stepped into the building she was hit by a wave of heated, wet air and a cacophony of noise that had only been a low rumble from the outside. Here in the midst of the machinery, hissing steam pipes, rotating rolling pins, and the snap of fabric being shaken and folded, it was an assault on the ear.

  Marjory adjusted her eyes to the darkness, there only being a dull wash of sunlight leaking through the windows near the roofline. Before her were a dozen or more Negro women moving as if to a complicated dance from washing to drying to pressing to stacking the innumerable loads of laundry. Santos finally led her to the back of the open work room to a small office with a door where they could talk without shouting. Inside was Miss Ida, standing uncharacteristically still when there was work all around her. Her left arm was crooked at her waist, her right elbow was settled in one palm and her other hand wedged into her brow, a sign of worry or of deep thought, or of defeat. It was difficult to judge. Sitting in a straight-backed chair in the corner was the woman called Shan
tice who had found the body of the white man behind her shack. The young woman’s feet where pulled up so that her heels rested on the edge of the seat and her skirt was wrapped around her legs. She was bent at the waist, her head rested on her knees and she was weeping.

  McAdams looked first at Miss Ida and then at the childlike figure in the corner and said nothing. The muffled noise in the big room settled like a cocoon around them.

  “They’s word out that Sheriff Cox gone arrest this poor girl for the killing of that white man,” Miss Ida said, breaking the silence. Her voice was more tired than Marjory had ever heard it, like it held a century of hard and weary trouble.

  “The sheriff went out to her house and inspected the body. The boys out there who was trying to salvage some of they own possessions watched after him. They said he walked around a bit and done kicked some burnt up trash around Mizz Shantice’s place and dug around with a stick where her eating place used to be. They say he poked into some ash and found a ol’ carvin’ knife that was black from the fire and held it up and stared at it like it was Jesus’ golden chalice itself and then put it in a bag of his.

  “Lanie Booker’s boy said the sheriff done smiled an said, ‘We got ourselves a murder weapon’ an then told the rest of ’em to wrap up the body and put it in the wagon. Then he asked the boys where Mizz Shantice was at an they said she was workin’ at the hotel. While the sheriff was loadin’ that man one of the boys come runnin’ to me.”

  When Ida May was finished with her report she looked up into Marjory’s eyes and the expression may have been, although it was foreign to the woman’s nature, a plead. “It ain’t right, Miss McAdams,” she said. “You know this ain’t right.”

  “Right?” Marjory said, gathering herself. “Why it’s…it’s quite unacceptable.” She looked around at Santos as if he would join her and therefore embolden her reaction of astonishment and disbelief.

  “Why…why we were all standing there ourselves. This slip of a girl could no more kill and drag a man of that size across this room. And with a knife? Good Lord! She would have of had to be standing on a chair to put a knife into such a man’s throat and you saw the wound yourself, Mizz Ida.”

  The girl called Shantice started to rock on the chair, a keening sound coming from her throat.

  “Oh, I am so very sorry,” Marjory said moving over to put her hip against the young woman and pressing the girl’s head into her own skirts. “You weren’t there at all, were you?”

  “I was at the fair, ma’am,” the girl said, avoiding Marjory’s inquisitive gaze. “Mizz Ida. I swear I was at the fair and I ain’t never seen that man before I seen him a layin’ there all burnt up.”

  Marjory looked to Miss Ida with a “see there” look on her face.

  “Surely there are witnesses to that,” she said. “Folks who accompanied her to the fair?”

  Miss Fleury dropped her hand to her lonely elbow, crossing both arms.

  “Logic nor witnesses don’t make no difference in this, Miss McAdams,” she said. “The only thing we need is a way to get this girl off the island and headed back to Georgia country before the sheriff comes an finds her or I’m afraid there’ll be a hangin’.

  “A white man has been found dead in nigger town and that’s the only truth they gone need. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way this will be too.

  “If you can help us get Mizz Shantice here across the lake without being seen, ma’am, that’s all I’m askin’. If you can’t, then I am truly sorry for bringin’ you into it.”

  This time it was Marjory’s turn to be taken aback by the housekeeper’s graphic language. She yawped once, her mouth opening in a circle, and then closing with a perceptible pop. She was not naïve about matters of discrimination and race. Her father had been open about discussing the Reconstructed South and the advent and demise of slavery whenever she had asked. Her penchant for crossing societal boundaries and neighborhoods in New York City had given her a firsthand look at how different classes were used and often abused at the hands of power. She was also familiar with the sheriff’s heavy-handedness and the tacit approval given him by Mr. Flagler and his lieutenants, including her father. The small town of West Palm Beach on the inland side of Lake Worth was booming with the train bringing in supplies and in return shipping out thousands of pounds of tomatoes and pineapples and a dozen other warm-weather vegetables and fruit up to the cold northeast. As the rail workers moved south down the line, they were soon followed by carpenters and masons and construction workers the from North and even the Southern States searching for opportunity. And not just to work at Flagler’s huge hotel projects but to lay the foundations for towns like Juno, Lemon City and Miami itself. With so many people in so short a time carrying so many dreams to fulfill, it was inevitable that tempers would flair, jealousy and greed would hitch a ride, and something would break. Why, an item in The Gazetteer last June reported that the first train car load of keg beer had arrived in town and it wasn’t but two months later that Sam S. Lewis—who was awaiting trial for killing the tax collectors J. F. Highsmith and George Davis in Lemon City—was broken out of the jail in Juno by a lynch mob and then hung from a telegraph pole, his body riddled with bullets. The jailer himself was killed by the mob when he was mistaken for the colored deputy sheriff come to stop them. Marjory couldn’t say for certain, but she often considered that the arrival of copious amounts of beer and men behaving in animalistic ways were somehow connected.

  At the behest of Mr. Flagler, Sheriff Cox had begun to clamp down on the lawlessness of not just the inevitable drifters but also the workers, railroad men out for a night or carpenters out to relax after a day of swinging hammers. There would be no such bad behavior for Mr. Flagler’s rich guest to witness or even hear of in his Eden. The idea of making an arrest and bringing to a quick and quiet close an actual homicide on the island itself would be of paramount interest, and the quicker it was done the quicker would come the praise and reward.

  Miss Fluery’s request for help might pit Marjory against the sheriff, a challenge she rather warmed to, but would also give her opportunity to ask young Shantice questions in a more, shall we say, conducive surrounding.

  “Can you keep her someplace in hiding, Mizz Ida?” Marjory said, looking into the eyes of housekeeper and then to Mr. Santos, who was still standing at the door as if at guard.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Fluery said, “We do know how to hide our own. For a time anyways. Can’t say how long though. That would depend on how hard Sheriff Cox gets to lookin’ an how mad he get when he can’t find her.”

  Again Marjory took a few minutes to chart a course of action in her head.

  “I frankly don’t think it would do well to keep her on the island overnight,” she said. “The sheriff will surely have someone watching the walking bridge to the mainland, and at some point he will begin threatening or simply paying off anyone he can for information as to her whereabouts.

  “Can you row a boat, Mr. Santos?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, sir, I can secure one. If we meet up near the old dredge wharf north of the golf course at say, nine o’clock this evening, I believe you and Mizz Shantice may row across the lake unseen.

  “Can you alert someone on the other side to meet them and take Mizz Shantice in for a couple of days, Mizz Ida? At least long enough for me to consult my father and find a way to calm and control the sheriff?”

  “We know folks on the mainland, ma’am. Folks who we can trust, yes.”

  “All right then, dear,” Marjory said to Shantice in an odd sing-song voice, as if she were talking to a child and not a young woman and a noted prostitute.

  “Don’t you worry a bit, we’ll see that you’ll be safe, dear, and that the truth will be told. You may indeed be back working by the weekend. Now wouldn’t that be fine?”

  Shantice had stopped her tears and keening during the discussion but had yet to raise her face to the others. She looked up now to Miss Id
a, perhaps wondering which of her professions she might again be working, but the baleful expression on the housekeeper’s face gave her a defining clue.

  “I will find her some clothing for traveling,” Miss Ida finally said, speaking perhaps to herself as much as the others in the room. “Some young men’s clothes. We do not want to bring no trouble to our town friends.”

  She turned specifically to Marjory. “We often dressed girls on the old underground railway in men’s clothes so’s not to draw attention to them.”

  “Fine then,” Marjory said. “It’s settled. If you will take me back to the hotel, Mr. Santos, I will prepare to meet you tonight at the wharf.”

  Santos opened the office door and allowed McAdams to pass out into the heat and steam and noise of the work room. A large Negro athlete and a young, high-society white woman moved through a place where neither of them belonged and not a single face lifted to note their passage.

  CHAPTER 9

  ON the pathway back, Marjory redirected Mr. Santos to the Royal Poinciana instead of the Breakers. A plan was forming in her head and she would need accomplices if it had any chance of succeeding. Not that any of those whom she pulled in on the enterprise would have any idea of their involvement. It would be best that way. A bit cruel perhaps, but best.

  When Santos cycled up to the rear entrance of the hotel, this time Marjory allowed him to help her out of the carriage seat and then paid him a dollar for appearances. “Nine o’clock,” she whispered. “The boat shall be there, pulled up into the brush just north of the wharf.”

  Santos accepted the money, held her eyes for a moment and said: “Thank you, Miss McAdams. And I do believe that Mizz Ida thanks you to, just in case you didn’t hear her say so.”

  Inside the hotel Marjory strolled across the ornate lobby with the air of a girl with nothing but leisure to direct her. She nodded to a familiar couple, spoke a greeting to a passing valet and found the nearest powder room where she fixed her hair, her cheeks and her mouth and became presentable to the society that would now surround her. She thought of her dead mother, the lessons passed down at an early age and the decisions she had made on her own: which lessons to follow, which to disregard and which to simply give the illusion of following depending on what company one was in. She had loved her mother dearly, but since her death Marjory had in many ways defied her strict views of comportment in a young ladies’ world. She saw it as payback for leaving her all alone to fend for herself. What she was about to do would have made her dearly departed mother blanch in front of proper company. But Marjory liked to think that in private she would have said, “Atta girl, M,” using the nickname that was only employed when they were alone together.