by Amy Stewart
“Miss Kopp!”
I turned around. He was standing by himself in the entrance to the garage, his hands stuffed in his overcoat.
“You won’t know where I am tonight. You won’t be able to see me. But I’ll be watching every minute. I won’t take my eyes off you.”
I swallowed the mixture of dread and apprehension welling up inside of me, then nodded and set off for Broadway.
The streets were dark, but not entirely empty. Four young couples went running past me, laughing and calling out to one another, maybe on their way to a dance. A few workmen walked silently along, the ends of their cigarettes glowing and bobbing like fireflies.
Paterson’s downtown ended just past Straight Street, giving way to three-story apartment buildings meant mostly for people who worked in the shops. Each one had an identical patch of grass in the front and a little flower bed that held geraniums in the summer and mounds of dirty snow in the winter. Smoke rose from the chimneys, and sometimes I could catch the smell of someone’s dinner: a pork chop in a pan, onions and sausage stewing over a burner.
Sheriff Heath’s men stayed just ahead of me. Every time I reached an intersection, I caught a glimpse of them crossing the same street one block away. As I approached Auburn, the deputy stationed there ducked into a doorway’s shadows. I was careful not to look directly at him, and I made a point of not looking up at any of the windows around him to see if the reporters were watching me.
I arrived at Broadway and Carroll sooner than I’d expected and stood for a few minutes on each corner, studying the layout of the streets and the walkways, looking for an escape route, or a place to hide, should I require one.
On one corner stood a nondescript brick building that might have housed small offices. There were very few windows facing the street, and no lights in any of them. Across the street was a flower shop, also dark and shuttered. The corner opposite was a vacant lot, which was mowed and cleared, but strangely frightening to me for its emptiness. A vision came to me of a girl in black standing in the middle of the lot, her arms reaching out for the money she’d been promised, the dry stubble of last summer’s grass and what remained of the snow all around her. It made me shiver to think about it.
I crossed the street to stand in front of a dilapidated wooden building that might have once been used as a workshop for a furniture maker or a blacksmith. It occurred to me that Sheriff Heath must have been hidden away somewhere, perhaps behind one of the building’s boarded windows.
It had to be eight o’clock by now. There was no sign of a girl in black. In fact, no one had passed me on the street, and only two automobiles had driven by. I wondered what Norma and Fleurette were doing at home. Were they thinking of me this very minute? I tried to picture them, moving from window to window, watching for signs of trouble.
I’d been clutching the handbag under my arm for so long that I’d forgotten it was there. I reached in to make sure the revolver was aimed out in front of me. Just then I heard a loud bang that made me jump and nearly drop the bag. Down the street I could see one of the deputies leap out into the intersection to check on me.
It must have been a motor misfiring. I stepped out into a pool of light cast by the moon’s reflection so that whoever was watching could see me.
A figure came striding up Carroll Street. In the darkness I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Finally I made out the shape of a long skirt and a broad-brimmed hat.
Was that her? I couldn’t tell if she was wearing black. Everything was black.
I shifted my handbag so I could feel the butt of the revolver through the leather. In spite of the cold, I was hot under my collar. A trickle of sweat ran down my chest, and another followed the same course along my spine.
As she got closer, she slowed down. Had she seen me?
I took a quick look around to make sure no one else was approaching. Several blocks away I saw two men cross the street. Somewhere a motor rattled and stalled. I noticed all the sounds I hadn’t heard before: the guard dogs barking from behind the mills down on the river, the basement vents releasing hissing steam from the boilers, the distant wail of a baby who could not be comforted.
The girl got within a block of me and turned down Van Houten. She must have walked right past Deputy English. Was I expected to follow her? She’d given me no indication that I should, so I stayed at my post. Another automobile rolled by a few blocks away. There was the sound of a train whistle, then the ragged cough of a phlegmatic old man.
Finally a trio of men approached from the garage on Auburn. I recognized Sheriff Heath from the outline of his hat and his overcoat. I could also make out the figure of Deputy Morris and one of the reporters I’d met yesterday.
When they reached me, Sheriff Heath said in a low voice, “It’s nine o’clock. We’ve waited long enough. Either they’re not coming, or they spotted us and ran off.”
“What about that girl on Carroll?” I asked.
He shook his head. “That wasn’t her. English followed her home and talked to her. She didn’t know anything about it.”
I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding my breath. I let it out at last. Sheriff Heath reached over and took the revolver from my handbag. “Let me carry this,” he said. “You’ve done your job.”
On the way back to the garage, he introduced me to the reporter, a man named George Pieters who worked for the Paterson paper. “George is a good friend of mine,” Sheriff Heath said. “You can count on him to get the story right. I told him he could ride along with us and ask some questions on the way. You tell him whatever he wants to know. Tomorrow a bunch of them are going to come out to the house to get their interviews. They all wanted to talk to you tonight, but I told them to let you get some rest. Nobody’s filing a story until tomorrow night anyway.”
On the way home, the reporter asked me to explain again, in my own words, how this mess got started and what we’d done to try to stop it. He wanted to know what our house looked like when we returned home from the beach and found it in a state of preparation for a bonfire, and how I’d learned to handle a gun, and what would make a woman take the unusual step of arming herself with a revolver to protect her sisters from harm.
I looked out the window at the black night and the dim outlines of dairy barns and trees in the distance.
“My sisters and I have no one but each other,” I said at last, “and if anyone should take up a handgun in their defense, I will be the one to do it.”
38
THE PAPER WAS FOLDED on the kitchen table when I got up Monday morning. I lifted it up and saw an empty square where the headline should have been. The missing headline was returned by pigeon post a few hours later and I pasted it back in place.
GIRL WAITS WITH GUN
Miss Kopp, Annoyed for Months,
Goes to Place Named in Letter—
Home Guarded at Night
MISS CONSTANCE KOPP, who spent a large part of Saturday night under police guard waiting for the writer of Black Hand letters to appear to claim $1000 that had been demanded, said today that threatening letters were the least of the troubles that have placed the home of herself and her sisters in a virtual state of siege.
For weeks the house has been guarded night and day by armed men, but despite this the women on the place have been shot at by unknown prowlers whom Miss Kopp says come to the place in an automobile.
“One evening just after dusk I happened to look out of my bedroom window and saw a man standing near a tree not 50 feet from the house,” said Constance Kopp. “He was on our property and I asked him what he wanted. There was no response, so I fired a shot through the window screen. Immediately he fired several shots back at me and I fainted from fright.
“On another occasion when Florette had gone down to the stream that runs through our land to get a pail of water, a man who was hiding in the brush nearby fired two shots at her.
“And yet, one, at least, of the County officials pooh-poohed our stories and refu
sed to credit them.
“Why, these desperate but cowardly individuals even broke into our home one afternoon during our absence and piled up our best furniture in one room.
“None of us dare to go away from the house after dark without our revolvers, and we have a dandy magazine gun that we would love to turn loose on one of the skulking night prowlers, for that’s all they are.”
In response to the Black Hand letter sent to her home, Miss Kopp waited at the corner in Paterson until nine o’clock on a Saturday night but no girl dressed in black approached seeking $1000. Miss Kopp then left for her home. She had a revolver concealed in her muff and was ready to use it.
Sheriff Heath and some of his deputies patrolled the neighborhood of Broadway and Carroll Street in an automobile for an hour, closely watching Miss Kopp and all women dressed in black who passed this corner.
The Misses Kopp are attractive young women. The family is well to do. The authorities have granted the young women permission to carry revolvers.
“If we ever catch a strange man sneaking around our house after dark we will use the revolvers,” said Miss Constance Kopp.
“YOU’VE NEVER FAINTED IN YOUR LIFE,” Fleurette said, slapping the paper down on her sewing table. “And I’m going to write in and tell them how to spell my name.”
Accounts of our ordeal ran in the New York Tribune, the Sun, the New York Herald, the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, and all the New Jersey papers. They got quite a bit wrong. One claimed that I stood on a street corner in Newark, several misspelled Fleurette’s name, and all of them appended my quotes with more fanciful language. “Oh, for a Chance to Shoot at the Nasty Prowlers!” read one headline, which sent Fleurette into a fit of giggles.
“The papers have made a joke of our situation, which I knew they would do,” Norma said. “I wish you would have told me you were thinking of speaking to them so I could have told you not to.”
“You don’t suppose Constance kept it from you intentionally, do you?” Fleurette asked, a look of mock surprise in her eyes.
Norma stirred her coffee to cool it and held the paper up again, tucking her chin down in a way that pushed the smallest roll of fat out from under her neck. It was a gesture of double-chinned disapproval that old ladies employed to great effect. I sometimes thought that Norma could not wait to reach a very elderly age and make full use of the gravity that one acquires later in life.
“There will, of course, be terrible consequences for exposing us in this manner,” she said, “and I can hardly imagine what Francis will say, or poor Bessie, who has been nothing but kind to us and will have quite a shock today when she reads her paper.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen Francis already this morning,” Fleurette said. “He must be saving it for Thanksgiving.”
I had taken quite a chill on Saturday night and sat sniveling under an afghan reading the other papers while Fleurette let down the hem on a dress she’d outgrown. Norma finished her coffee and laced up her boots to take another batch of pigeons out for a ride. It was bitingly cold out, but the sun was shining and the roads were clear. Dolley had hardly left the barn in the last few weeks, and Norma had decided that both the horse and the pigeons needed some fresh air.
“Are you going to be well enough to travel on Thursday?” Fleurette asked as she snipped at the threads on her dress. “Because if you aren’t, we’re leaving you here with your own guard. I am not missing Thanksgiving.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, “and I certainly hope the deputies will get the day off.”
“Oh, no, I’d like to bring a pair of them to dinner. Can you imagine Francis’s face if we brought a police escort?”
IN FACT, Sheriff Heath was not at all willing to leave us unguarded on Thanksgiving. “I’ll bet Kaufman and his gang won’t take a holiday,” he grumbled when he stopped by on Tuesday to deliver another deputy to our barn. We were taking our customary walk around the property. “They’ll drink whiskey all day and drive around all night making a mess for my men to clean up. The holidays are the worst days of the year for us.”
The wind picked up and lifted my hat. I pushed it back down over my ears.
“You shouldn’t even be out in this cold,” he said.
“I’m fine. I just caught a little chill. But surely your men want a day to spend with their families.”
We passed the barn, where Deputy English was watching the chickens peck at the frozen stubble in their yard. He touched his hat and nodded.
“Oh, I’ll give them the day off,” the sheriff said. “But they’ll be called in if there’s a shooting or robbery, which I guarantee will happen before sundown. I’ll be the one on patrol on Thursday.”
“What will Mrs. Heath say to that?”
“Mrs. Heath—” He stopped and looked at me, that curious searching look that I couldn’t decipher. There was something sorrowful about him all at once, but as soon as it came over him it went away again.
“Mrs. Heath is married to the Sheriff of Bergen County,” he said briskly, “and she knows the sacrifice required.”
39
I AWOKE ON THANKSGIVING MORNING to a world frozen in place. A northern storm had blown through the day before, leaving behind an unusually cold, clear sky. Every window in the house was entombed under a plate of ice. Icicles hung like daggers from the roof. There was no hope of moving the water pump, and none of us wanted to brave the frozen meadow to see if there was still water flowing in the creek. We broke icicles off the porch and melted them in the kitchen so we could wash up before we left for Francis and Bessie’s. There were two jars of plum preserves left in the pantry and a nice package of salted pork from our neighbor, so we wrapped those in a tea towel and brought them along.
Sheriff Heath arrived just as we were getting ready to leave. “I wish you’d let me drive you,” he said. Norma just grunted and pushed past him to harness Dolley.
“We’re afraid of what Francis might think,” Fleurette said.
“We are not afraid of Francis,” I said. “We’ll be fine. The crooks don’t come out until tonight, right?”
The sheriff watched as Fleurette went to join Norma in the barn. She wore a stylish dress of reseda-green silk, gathered a little more tightly at the waist than I would have allowed had I any idea what she’d been working on.
“That girl has grown up in the time I’ve known her,” he said.
I sighed and shook my head. “And I’m afraid the kidnapping threats have only gone to her head. She thinks she’s quite the desirable little prize. I don’t know what we’re going to do with her.”
“Keep her on the farm as long as you can,” he said.
“I don’t know how much longer that will be. But for today—”
“Today you should ride alongside her and keep an eye on the road. Pull down the storm curtains so no one can see you. Are you taking your revolver?”
“I am. But you don’t think I’ll need it?”
“I hope not.”
Norma and Fleurette rode around front in the carriage. Dolley stamped at the ice and great clouds of steam came from her nostrils. I climbed up and squeezed in next to Fleurette.
“I’ll drive past your brother’s house a few times later today,” the sheriff shouted as we turned to ride away.
I nodded and watched as he strode to the barn, a small figure in a gray and empty landscape.
FRANCIS AND BESSIE lived in a neighborhood of modest but thoroughly modern bungalows in Hawthorne. The homes were snugly built and outfitted with good plumbing and gas and new electrical wires. Each home sat next to a driveway and a garage built more for automobiles than carriages, although as we drove down the street, I saw that a few people still kept a horse stabled.
They were the first to occupy their home. After they moved in, the smell of sawdust and varnish hung about them for months. At Bessie’s urging, Francis painted the house a cheerful cornflower blue and installed window boxes that sported primroses or geraniums, depending on the sea
son. Every room blazed with electric lamps, even the children’s room, and all the furniture came from Rafner’s on Grand Street. Mother had been shocked to walk into their house for the first time and see that they had purchased a complete living room set, exactly as advertised in the newspaper. She’d been even more shocked when Norma pointed out that it had been listed for $195, with a charge account that offered a year to pay.
They purchased the walnut dining room set as well, which came with a china cabinet, a velvet seamless rug, and a buffet mirror. “I suppose I don’t have to go down the hall to see that you bought the bedroom outfit, too,” Mother had sniffed, “when we have a farmhouse full of furniture you could have taken.”
But Francis and Bessie didn’t want the furniture from the farmhouse, and for that I couldn’t blame them. Their house was entirely new and, as Francis liked to say, “free of defects,” by which he meant that it was free of gas leaks and drafts and the dark, hulking cabinets and monstrous carved chairs that represented our mother’s Austrian girlhood. Theirs was an American house, a house of the twentieth century, and her old things had no place there.
Francis met us outside, unhitched Dolley, and walked her around back where she could get some water. The three of us stood on the front lawn, feeling too uncivilized to go inside. Had we really been sleeping with revolvers at our bedsides and shooting at strange men in the dark? Were we really in so much danger that the sheriff himself had to follow us around? It didn’t seem like we belonged in Francis’s cheerful cottage, this tidy place giving off warmth and light and the rich fragrance of Thanksgiving dinner.