by Amy Stewart
“I’ll put a guard here around the clock,” the sheriff said, his eyes still on the empty road. “We’ll be able to see them coming. I don’t want you to worry. The next time they turn up out here, they’ll all be arrested.”
But he also told us to stay away from windows, and to keep buckets of water around the house in case we had to put out a fire, and to keep our revolvers nearby, even during the day.
So that’s the way it would be. We were under siege.
WINTER WAS CLOSING IN ON US. By the first week of November, we’d already had a few snow flurries. In the morning we had to sprinkle salt on the porch stoop to keep from slipping, and every day we chipped the ice out of Dolley’s water trough. Our chickens went through an early molt, shedding their feathers so rapidly that in the morning we’d find the floor of their pen covered in them and think that one of them had been slaughtered by a fox in the night. Francis arranged for a boy to bring us a cord of firewood, knowing that we wouldn’t make it to Christmas if it stayed this cold.
The willow trees down by the creek were encased in ice at sunrise. When I walked out to the meadow, I could hear those thin, whip-like branches jangling against each other like the glass on a chandelier. I worried about the deputies stationed out there in the cold, and finally got them to accept a camp stove to furnish some small measure of heat.
It was a few weeks before Henry Kaufman made good on his threat. I awoke to the sound of ice cracking under someone’s feet, but I had been so deeply asleep that at first I didn’t understand what was happening. But then a twig snapped and I heard a man’s soft cursing. In a second I was out of bed and crouched under the window. The revolver was so cold that it was a shock to wrap my hand around it.
I raised my eyes to the windowsill. The glass was covered in a fine, crystalline lacework of ice. I had to stand a little taller to find a spot that was clear enough to see through. From my bedroom I had a view of the meadow and the dead, dry vegetable garden. I could see only a corner of the barn. No light came from its window. I didn’t know if the deputy was watching or not.
Seeing no one in the yard, I lowered myself back to the floor and wondered if I should wake Norma and Fleurette. We had only just started sleeping in our own bedrooms again a few nights ago. Now I wish we’d rigged up a bell to signal one another.
I slid my window open a few inches, and as I did, I again heard the crack of ice under someone’s feet. I risked another look through the glass. He saw me just as I saw him. His gun was already drawn. I pushed my revolver through the narrow opening and fired.
The bullet hit a tree and he shot up at me. There was a small shudder when the bullet hit the house. A second later I heard the groan of the barn door swinging open. I couldn’t shoot again without endangering the deputy. I dropped below the window and waited.
When the man didn’t return fire, I stood alongside the window and peeked out. He was running down the drive, a short and stocky figure in a coat and hat. I couldn’t say for certain that it was Henry Kaufman, but nothing about his appearance gave me reason to believe it wasn’t.
A car met him at the end of our drive and roared away. It was only after the road was empty that I saw the deputy chasing after him, fast but not fast enough.
SHERIFF HEATH WAS ANGRY with his deputy for letting the man get away, but I forgave him. We could see from the footprints in the ice that our intruder had approached the house from the other side, staying away from the barn so as not to alert the deputy stationed there. Even if he had dozed off for a few minutes (an accusation from Sheriff Heath that he denied), it would have been difficult to get up and out of the barn in time to react. The entire confrontation only took a minute.
“Wouldn’t this be a very good time to arrest the man and put an end to all this?” Norma said when the sheriff stopped in the next morning.
“We’re still trying to make the case to the prosecutor,” he said.
“But Constance saw him!” Fleurette said. She was sitting at the kitchen table spooning sugar on her toast. The sheriff, Norma, and I were standing in an awkward half-circle around her.
“She thinks she saw him,” Sheriff Heath said. “And I think she did, too. But we have no proof.”
“If only she’d shot him,” Norma said, “we’d have excellent proof in the form of a frozen corpse in the drive.”
“What about the coat and the stickpin and the ring? All those things they left behind?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’ve sent my men around to every tailor and jeweler in town. No one recognizes them. The coat was made by a very good private tailor, and the jewelry has no marks. We couldn’t get a print from the matchbox.”
“And the letters?” I said.
“I’ve got someone at the post office working on that. I know it isn’t any comfort, but we’re doing everything we can.”
“So is Henry Kaufman,” Norma said.
After that, there were two deputies on duty, and the three of us went back to sleeping in the same room. We chose Mother’s room because it squarely faced the barn and the road, making it more difficult for someone to sneak up to it. The bullet that had been fired at the house remained lodged in the siding. The wood was sturdy enough to protect us, so we weren’t worried about anyone shooting at us through the walls. Our house was powerfully built of wide, thick timbers. It wasn’t meant to withstand the ammunition of gangsters, but it seemed to be serving that purpose just fine.
All the same, we moved every piece of furniture in Mother’s room to the outside wall. Any bullets coming at us would have to get through the shingles, the crossbeams, and Mother’s oak chiffonier.
33
WE TRULY HAD GONE BACK INTO HIDING. There was the same sense of dread, of fear, of an ever-present danger pressing in from the outside world, that had hung about the house when we first moved to Wyckoff. I remembered the weight of it from last time, and the sense that I had brought this down upon us all.
Except that then we had a baby to distract us. Now we had a bored seventeen-year-old and a platoon of deputies stationed in our barn on twelve-hour shifts.
Norma scoured the newspaper every day for hints about what Kaufman and his gang might be up to. “There was a raid on a gambling parlor last night,” she would say. “Maybe he got swept up in that.” Any story about an automobile running someone down got her attention, for we knew him to be a dangerous driver. And if there was a fire—any kind of fire at all, even a kitchen fire started accidentally by a maid—Norma cut it out and left it for the sheriff to see.
“Not knowing his whereabouts is the worst of it,” she said one morning. “What’s he doing right now? When he’s not going after us, who else do you suppose he’s bothering?” Norma imagined that he had a long list of similarly situated women to harass and threaten. I said that I didn’t think Henry Kaufman was capable of something as methodical as a list.
“No, I’m certain he doesn’t keep a list,” Norma said. “But I do wonder if he doesn’t have a whole string of us he goes around and torments. I’ve half a mind to place an advertisement in the papers and form some kind of league.”
“The Henry Kaufman Protection League,” Fleurette said. Norma wrote it down.
“I want to know what he’s done with Lucy Blake,” said Fleurette. “Maybe he’s got her and the baby hidden in the basement. Has anyone gone to look?”
Norma rattled her newspaper to signal her displeasure with the subject of Lucy Blake. But the girl’s story played like a moving picture in Fleurette’s head, and it was impossible to get her to stop talking about it.
“Why can’t the sheriff find her?” Fleurette continued. “Wouldn’t someone have seen her? They should ask at the train stations. Or we could put a notice in the paper about her. Haven’t they done any of that? A girl can’t just vanish.”
“Oh, girls can vanish,” Norma said without looking up at us.
IT WAS A WEEK before the next letter arrived. What prompted him to send it I couldn’t imagine. We had ha
rdly stepped foot outside, much less gone anywhere near him or his factory. I imagined Henry Kaufman’s mind working like one of those swirling, sucking whirlpools that formed without warning at the bottom of the Passaic Falls. They’d arise from nothing and then spin around until something flew out of them—a piece of driftwood, a rubber ball, an old shoe. This was Henry Kaufman, spinning like a dervish until another demented letter came hurling out at us.
This one arrived once again by mail. It was delivered in the afternoon just before Sheriff Heath stopped in to pick up a deputy.
Madam: This is a last warning to you. We git this time the whole bunch of you, we lay for you. We know you and when we get you be sorry for we finish you.
Good-by
Your time has come soon
—H. K. & Friends
“Last warning?” I said. “What does he want from us? Warning before what?”
Sheriff Heath sat down on the divan and closed his eyes for a minute. He looked terrible. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in dark veins the color of a bruise. As he held the letter, his hands trembled. He looked smaller somehow, as if he’d shrunk inside his overcoat.
“Sheriff Heath,” I said, suddenly worried. “You don’t look well.” Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
He gave a shuddering, chesty laugh that sent him into a coughing fit.
“Strange men are firing guns at your house and you’re asking after my health?”
I was about to offer him coffee when we heard a bang and a scream from the meadow. The sheriff dropped the letter and was out the door before I could even make sense of what I’d heard.
Norma had been in the pigeon loft. I saw her running to the creek and Fleurette struggling across the meadow, where none of us should have been alone.
Norma got to her first. Fleurette was crying and pushing at her. Norma tried to hold her but then realized that she only wanted to get to the house. They turned and ran together, slipping in the mud and half-melted snow. Sheriff Heath reached her before I did. He pointed his two deputies in the direction of the creek bed and corralled us into the house.
Fleurette wore a black wool skirt that was soaked through with water and splattered with mud. If she had been wearing a hat, it was gone. She kept covering her face and turning away from us. It was impossible to get a word out of her.
Sheriff Heath saw that he could do nothing for a girl in this condition. He told us to take her upstairs and get her settled down. He would watch the house and wait for word from his deputies.
We took Fleurette to Mother’s fortress-like bedroom, where at last she started to calm down. She let us pull off her wet clothes and wash her face and dress her in a nightgown and a flannel robe of Mother’s. I found no scratches on her, just mud and grass. Once she was propped up in bed with us on either side of her, she was finally able to speak.
“Two men,” she said. “I could barely see them through the trees. They were standing in the creek bed, like they were waiting for me.”
“What did they do to you?” I said.
She wrapped her arms around her chest. “They fired at me and I ran.”
“And you’re sure you’re not hurt?” I wanted to pull up her nightgown and check every part of her, her knees and elbows and the tiny dip between her shoulders, but she held tightly to the blankets and wouldn’t let me.
“What were you doing down at the creek?” Norma asked.
Fleurette looked from Norma to me and back again, her chin trembling. “The water pump was stuck. I just went to get water for the washing. I thought everyone could see me.”
The water pump did have a tendency to stick in the winter. We resorted to melting buckets of snow or bringing up water from the creek when we couldn’t get it moving.
“But there were three men standing about with nothing to do,” Norma said, “and one of us could have given it a try as well. You know we can usually get it going again. Why didn’t you just ask someone for help?”
“That’s enough,” I said. “Sheriff Heath is waiting downstairs for a word from you. Can you describe these men?”
She shook her head and sunk deeper under the covers. “They wore long overcoats and hats with the brims turned down. They were tall men, taller than Mr. Kaufman, I think.”
“And they were standing right in the creek? In the water?”
“They were on the flat rock I use to get across.”
I ran my hand along her forehead and she closed her eyes. Her hair formed a perfect half-circle of brilliant inky black on the pillow. “Stay here and rest. We’ll be downstairs with the sheriff.”
Sheriff Heath and his deputies were standing outside in a tight circle, stamping their feet and talking in low voices. The men had parked an automobile in our neighbor’s field on the other side of the creek and driven off in it. There was nothing but the ruts of tires in the dirt by the time the deputies got there.
We told them what little we had learned from Fleurette. It seemed most likely that the men had been crossing the creek to get closer to the house when she surprised them.
The sky had cleared a little that afternoon and lit up the frozen ground. Sheriff Heath raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare and squinted at me. “They’re getting bolder,” he said. “They’ll slip up soon enough. This is almost at an end. But I can’t have the three of you running around in the woods and splashing in the creek. You have to do as we ask and stay where we can protect you.”
Norma and I just nodded. We were going to have to take turns watching Fleurette.
“Is your sister asleep?” Sheriff Heath asked.
We said that she was.
He reached under his overcoat and consulted his watch. “That’s fine. Let her sleep, and then see to it that she has a good supper. I’ll be back at six.”
“I’m not sure it’s worth the trip,” I said. “I don’t think she’ll have anything more to say.”
He squinted up at the house and back down the road and then said, “I’m coming back to give her a shooting lesson. The three of you will all carry revolvers until this is over.”
And that’s how we came to be standing in a meadow on a bracingly cold November night, struggling to see our fence-post targets against the gathering dark, taking one shot after another as the sheriff braced us by the shoulders and spoke steadily in our ears, slipping the revolvers out of our pale and frozen hands to reload them so that we could fire again and again and again at the menace that waited somewhere out there beyond the creek bed.
34
HENRY KAUFMAN AND HIS FRIENDS had been toying with us the way a barn cat teases a fledgling fallen from its nest: viciously, but unhurriedly. So it was with some relief that we received, in the middle of November, his most serious and specific threat against us.
Now, at last, we had a date and a place.
Madam—We demand $1000 or we will kill you. Give Monee to girl dressed in black at the corner of Broadway and Carroll street, Paterson, Saturday night at eight o’clock. If you don’t pay we will fire your house and take that girl of yours. We know your horse and wagon. We live in Paterson. Ha ha!
—H. K. & Co.
I read it and pushed it to the middle of the table. We all looked at Deputy Morris, who happened to be on duty the afternoon it arrived. When he didn’t say anything, each of us spoke at once.
“Well,” I said. “This time we’ll catch him.”
“A thousand dollars!” Fleurette said. “Is that what I’m worth?”
“Stop that,” Norma said. “And we won’t pay it.”
The deputy reacted to our chorus of voices by standing up and announcing, “This is a matter for Sheriff Heath to decide. You ladies go about your business. He’ll be here soon enough.”
But a storm came on that night, pushing hail and freezing rain across the fields in waves. Every time we thought it had let up, another icy draft blew through. The weather must have delayed the sheriff, and there was nothing to do but wait. The deputies had been on duty for over tw
elve hours. I finally convinced them to come in for a bowl of soup and a hot bun. Ordinarily it was forbidden for them to dine with us, but these men had expected to be home for supper and weren’t. They had to have something.
Around ten Norma and Fleurette gave up and went to bed. I stayed up and walked the dark house for another hour until at last I heard the tires of Sheriff Heath’s automobile in our gravel drive.
His deputies ran out to tell him about the letter, and soon he was standing in the parlor with four of his men around him, the two that were going off duty and the two that were starting the night shift. The room was filled with the smell of wet wool and smoke from the camp stove in our barn. Sheriff Heath took a seat on the divan, placed his hat on his knees, and read the letter to himself. When he was finished, he looked up at me, searching my face for something, then read it again.
“Take a walk around back,” he told his men. “Carry a lamp and check the bushes and the outbuildings. Then wait for me in the barn.”
When they were gone, he said, “Sit down. I have something to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“Just—sit.”
I dropped down next to him and waited. He rubbed his eyes and held his forehead in his hands, breathing so quietly that I thought he had fallen asleep right in front of me. At last he pulled his hands away and turned to look at me, his eyes watery and red.
He swallowed hard. “Miss Kopp. I’ve tried everything in my power to stop this man. I’ve followed him around town, I’ve watched his house, I’ve spoken to his sister and his business associates, and, for that matter, I’ve spoken to him. I’ve tried to build a case for the prosecutor but they fight me on it. They’ve never charged a factory owner with any kind of crime and they’re not inclined to start now. The Kaufmans are a powerful family. They own mills in three states. They can get all the silk men behind them.”