Girl Waits with Gun

by Amy Stewart

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. Were there other threats?”

  “Yes, a few more, some sent by post.”

  “And what was done to protect you against those threats?”

  Fleurette paused and found me in the crowd. She gave me a long and searching look.

  “My sisters learned to shoot a gun,” she said, with a note of wonder in her voice, as if she hadn’t entirely considered it before. “And on two occasions Constance went to meet the men who were threatening me, to try to stop them.”

  I shivered. She was looking at me as if she were seeing me for the first time.

  “That must have been very dangerous.”

  She thought for a minute and then, in a quiet voice, she said, “I think it was.”

  59

  AFTER THE JURY WAS DISMISSED for the evening and we turned to leave the courtroom, I saw Marion Garfinkel sitting in the back row next to a white-haired man. He had one gnarled hand locked around the brass handle of a cane. As we passed by, she rose and introduced her father.

  “Mr. Kaufman,” I said. “How do you do?”

  He didn’t reach for my hand and I didn’t offer it. Sheriff Heath had been standing right behind me, and with a nod to his deputy, Norma and Fleurette were escorted out of the room. Henry Kaufman and his attorneys had already left by a side door. We waited until the rest of the spectators had filed out and the four of us were alone.

  “Mrs. Garfinkel,” Sheriff Heath said. “We weren’t expecting you. I’m sure better seats could be arranged for you and your father tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine, Sheriff,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll stay for the rest of the trial. I just wanted my father to hear for himself what Henry did to these girls.”

  She turned pointedly to her father, who gave a tremulous nod and spoke in a raspy, uneven voice. “I’m afraid I’ve misjudged my son’s character, miss,” he said. “I thought I knew the boy. It’s a terrible thing to see your own child grown into someone you don’t recognize.”

  “I suppose it would be,” I said, not wanting to imagine it.

  “We could add a witness to tomorrow’s docket if you’d like to testify,” Sheriff Heath said quietly to Mrs. Garfinkel, but she just shook her head.

  “I couldn’t. He’s still my brother. But we won’t hire an attorney to appeal the charges, and we won’t pay his fine. If he’s convicted, he should see the inside of a prison cell. Isn’t that what we’ve agreed to?” She put a hand on her father’s shoulder and he nodded, his head down. He wore a fine linen suit—I could see where Henry Kaufman got his taste for good tailoring—but something about him seemed shabby and defeated. I couldn’t look him in the face but stared at his ears, which were red and overgrown and laced with tiny blue capillaries.

  “Then we have some hope of seeing justice done this week,” Sheriff Heath said. “I’m glad to see you’ve come around to our way of thinking.”

  “Yes, I realize . . .” Marion looked at her father and her voice trailed off.

  We stood awkwardly for a minute, none of us knowing what to say to the other. Finally the sheriff nodded and took my arm to leave. We’d gone down the hall to join Norma and Fleurette when I heard footsteps and turned to see Marion rushing after us, having left her father in a chair outside the courtroom. When she reached us she put a hand on arm and said, “The girl. Lucy. Are she and her boy—will they be—”

  “They’re fine,” I said. “They have a comfortable home. Lucy’s a good mother.”

  Marion’s hand tightened around me. “Of course she is,” she said, with an uncharacteristic quiver to her voice. “Could you tell her—”

  “I don’t think I should,” I said quickly. “Lucy wishes to leave things be.”

  She let me go and turned to look at her father, who was already nodding off in his chair. “Then I’ll tell you,” she said, without bringing her eyes back to mine. “If that boy ever needs a family . . .”

  “He doesn’t,” I said. “He has one.”

  THAT NIGHT, we gave in to Fleurette’s pleas and took our supper in the enormous dining hall that ran the length of the building. The waiters had rolled a wide green awning out over the sidewalk and set out tables for anyone who preferred the dust and noise of the street to the hushed wicker fans cooling the restaurant. We settled indoors, although Fleurette suspected that the circus performers would prefer to dine in the fresh air. She kept her eyes on the sidewalk all evening, hoping for a glimpse of them. We did see five petite but sturdy women sweep through in identical scarlet gowns, their hair arranged in a theatrical style of braids and curls held together with sparkling glass combs. Fleurette suspected them of being trick riders or magician’s assistants. “Or they could be acrobats,” she said. “Did you see the way they walked? Just the way they would on a tightrope.” Norma and I ate our roast chicken in silence as Fleurette chattered on about her plans to run a tightrope across the meadow and begin practicing as soon as we got home. I think we were both grateful for the distraction. It was exhausting to relive the events of the last year in the courtroom, and even the notion of Fleurette dancing on a wire high above the ground seemed soothing by comparison.

  There was a ladies’ parlor on the second floor and a sketch room hung with paintings of sailboats and pastoral scenes of horses on mountaintops. A few young women had brought their sketchbooks and were working at copying the paintings, but we had no interest in it and instead settled in the parlor, where Fleurette had insisted that we take a cup of tea before retiring.

  “We never get to sit in the ladies’ parlor at home,” she said as we settled into dainty armchairs arranged around a little beaded lamp on a table. There were three other groups of women seated in their own tight circles around the room, none of whom appeared to be circus performers, to Fleurette’s disappointment.

  “We sit in the ladies’ parlor every evening at home,” Norma said. “What else would you call it?”

  “But there aren’t other ladies there,” Fleurette said. “At home it’s only us.”

  Norma looked around at the others, all speaking in a genteel hush to their own friends. “I don’t see what difference it makes,” she said. “We don’t wish to talk to any of them, and they don’t seem to take an interest in us.”

  Of the three of us, Norma was the only one who was impervious to the charms of a hotel. Fleurette liked the opportunity to dress up and be seen, and I just liked living in a clean, modern building, with twice the comforts and none of the chores we faced at home.

  Fleurette took as long as possible to finish her tea, but after several conspicuous yawns, Norma convinced her that it was time for bed. We had just begun to climb the stairs when I heard Sheriff Heath’s voice from a room down the hall. I told the two of them to go on and I went back to look for him.

  He was just coming out of a smoking lounge at the opposite end of the hall from the ladies’ parlor. He had his hat in his hand and carried the same brown coat he wore everywhere. There was a long red carpet between us and a series of tiny tables and settees.

  “I didn’t know you were staying here,” I said as he walked toward me.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I was due home hours ago. Mr. Lynch kept me out too late.”

  “Are you all in there planning tomorrow’s strategy?”

  He shook his head. “We’re playing cards. Don’t tell Mrs. Heath.”

  “I didn’t know the sheriff was allowed in card rooms.”

  “Well,” he said, considering that. “It’s a respectable enough card room. There are only lawyers and judges at the moment.”

  “Is our judge there?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “But don’t worry. We have a good judge. The trial’s going just fine, everyone says so. And now we know that Mrs. Garfinkel won’t be paying his fine, so it looks like he’ll spend a little time at the state prison after all.”

  “The state prison? The same one George Ewing hated so much?”

  A waiter came rushing by w
ith a cart covered in a white cloth, and the sheriff and I backed into an alcove off the hall to get out of his way. He gestured to one of the little velvet settees. I sat down and he settled in across from me.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “And by the way, I’m bringing Ewing in with me tomorrow. We still expect him to testify against Kaufman. If I tell him that Kaufman’s going to serve his sentence in Trenton, that will be all the more reason for Mr. Ewing to do everything he can to stay with me in Hackensack.”

  I leaned back and regarded Sheriff Heath in the dim light. We’d been talking about catching and convicting Henry Kaufman for so long that it hardly seemed possible that it was all about to end.

  “I hate to admit it,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else, “but I do feel sorry for the elder Mr. Kaufman. It must be a terrible thing to watch one’s son on trial.”

  “And one’s daughter,” he said. “Although I couldn’t tell how much Mrs. Garfinkel had told her father about the kidnapping charge.”

  “Nor could I. Will she go to jail, too?”

  “I won’t know for a few more weeks. We’re still working on charging the men who helped her. I’d rather put them in jail than Mrs. Garfinkel.”

  “So would I,” I said.

  We sat in silence for another minute or two, but as there was nothing to look at in the alcove besides one another, I began to fidget and then realized that Norma and Fleurette would wonder why I’d taken so long. I rose suddenly, knocking my head on the low ceiling above us, and backed out into the hall. Sheriff Heath followed. He walked with me to the wide central staircase, where I would go up to our room and he would go down. The situation must have struck us both as odd, because we laughed at the same time and then the sheriff said, “Tomorrow, Miss Kopp,” and jogged down the stairs, two at a time, waving over his shoulder as he crossed the carpeted lobby with its blazing chandeliers and went out into the warm blue night.

  60

  OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, the trial proceeded just as we’d hoped it would. Mr. Kingsley’s handwriting analysis was accepted by the judge as thoroughly scientific. Mr. Kaufman’s only hope—that he could persuade George Ewing to confess to the threatening letters and gunshots in exchange for some sort of bribe—fell apart when Mr. Ewing took the stand and gave a simple and truthful account of his role in the attacks against us. He acknowledged that he’d been in the car on the day of our buggy accident and that he’d been with Mr. Kaufman and some other men on a few other occasions, but said that he hadn’t written any letters except the last ones, which contained his signature, and had never taken a shot at our house or thrown a brick through our window. He said that Mr. Kaufman had coerced him into writing those final letters with the idea that they would shift the blame for the entire mess. He added that when he was caught, Mr. Kaufman threatened him harm if he didn’t take responsibility for everything.

  Henry Kaufman took the stand in his defense but had little to say beyond his denial of the charges.

  “Do you admit to having caused your motor car to collide with a buggy driven by the Misses Kopp on July 14 of last year?” Attorney Lynch asked.

  “I do,” he said, “and I have paid my fine.” He spoke woodenly, as if he had memorized the answers. He was paler than when I’d last seen him and a bit thinner. He was no longer a man who looked like he was about to explode. I wondered if his attorney had persuaded him to reduce his drinking before the trial.

  “Do you admit to driving to the Kopp home in Wyckoff to harass them and shoot at them after the collision?”

  “I do not.”

  “Are you the writer of the threatening letters sent to the Misses Kopp from August to November of last year?”

  “I am not.”

  “Mr. Kaufman,” Attorney Lynch said, approaching the witness stand with a sheaf of papers, “did you not provide these handwriting samples to the sheriff’s office, which were used to positively match your handwriting to that of the writer of the letters?”

  Mr. Kaufman leaned forward and squinted at the paper. “I admit to writing the name ‘Constance Kopp’ at the suggestion of the sheriff, but the rest of it was coerced.”

  “Coerced?” said Attorney Lynch with a smile. “By what means were you coerced?”

  Mr. Kaufman looked around until he found me. “She was there!” he said, rising and pointing at me. “She trapped me and forced me to write out handwriting samples against my will.”

  The men in the jury box smiled.

  “Forced you?” Attorney Lynch said, taking a step back in amazement. “By what means does a lady like Miss Kopp force a grown man to do anything he doesn’t want to do?”

  Mr. Kaufman looked down and mumbled something.

  “Could you repeat that for the jury?” Attorney Lynch asked.

  He looked up and said, in a loud, plain voice, “She’s not a regular lady.”

  AFTER HIS TESTIMONY CONCLUDED, the jury took only two and a half hours to convict Henry Kaufman. He was fined one thousand dollars and, having no means of paying the fine, was taken into custody. Mrs. Garfinkel and her father hadn’t returned for the conclusion of the trial, and none of Mr. Kaufman’s associates had made an appearance, either. When he was led away, there was no one to say goodbye to him.

  The verdict was read at two-thirty in the afternoon. By three o’clock we were standing in front of the courthouse saying our goodbyes to the sheriff, his deputies, and the attorneys. The reporters were trying to get Fleurette’s attention, but Sheriff Heath put Deputy Morris by her side to keep them away.

  It was a perfect summer afternoon, with a jewel-blue sky above us and clouds that looked like they had been painted on. A breeze had risen to push the heat out of Newark’s fetid streets, and a willow tree planted alongside the courthouse waved its drooping branches, whispering like the rush of water. Everything looked cleaner and brighter than it had when the trial began. The granite courthouse behind us, the rows of brick offices and shops across the street, and the trolleys running along their tracks, all seemed to speak of a crisp and orderly world in which people could walk the streets in peace. The attorneys and deputies laughed and joked with one another, and they, too, seemed younger and brighter in the light of a favorable verdict and a clear June day.

  We said all the thanks we could think to say and a silence fell over the group. Norma and Fleurette turned to walk to the train station. Sheriff Heath took me by the arm and led me away from them. We walked down the stairs, and then he stopped and turned to me.

  “You had more of a role in this than anyone in that courtroom knew,” he said.

  “Oh—” I looked at him in surprise. “Well. We all did our part.”

  The sun glared on the white steps and he squinted at me with that half-smile, half-frown I still hadn’t learned to read.

  “What you did will serve you well in your new occupation,” he said.

  I laughed. “Occupation? I have no occupation. That’s just the trouble. If we—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “Miss Kopp. I think you’d make a fine deputy.”

  “Deputy?”

  “Deputy sheriff.”

  My throat went dry. I had to swallow before I spoke. “I don’t understand.”

  He smiled and looked down at his feet, then raised his eyes to mine.

  “I’m offering you a job, Miss Kopp.”

  Historical and Source Notes,

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS A WORK OF HISTORICAL FICTION based on real events and real people. My task as a writer was to take the public record—pieced together from newspaper articles, genealogical records, court documents, and other sources—and invent the rest of the story. All of the major events described in the novel actually happened, with a few notable exceptions: There was no Lucy Blake, which means that every part of the story connected with her—the missing child, Constance’s trips to New York, and the scenes at the orphanage—are all fiction. (It is true, however, that children were sent away to live with “strike
mothers” during the silk strikes, and that some of those children did not return.) Although Henry Kaufman did have a secretary named M. Garfinkel, the character of Marion Garfinkel is fictional. Another significant difference is that Mrs. Kopp, Norma and Constance’s mother, died a few years later than she does in my version of events. Also, to my knowledge, Norma Kopp had no interest in pigeons.

  Everything else happened more or less as I described it. I invented dialogue, personalities, backstories, and scenes that helped piece together the stories behind the events described in the public record. Most of the people who appear here as secondary characters—people such as Bessie Kopp, John Courter, John Ward, Peter McGinnis, and Cordelia Heath—are also real people who led lives that I know little about. The personality traits, ambitions, and actions I ascribed to them are my own embellishments to the few facts I do know about them.

  The circumstances surrounding Fleurette’s birth are not entirely known, but the basic facts—the identity of her mother and father, the relevant dates, and the fact that Fleurette grew up not knowing the truth—have been verified through court documents and interviews with Fleurette’s son.

  I used real letters and newspaper articles in the book to help anchor the story in reality. I’d like to acknowledge the following sources for text that I reproduced word for word, or with very slight modifications:

  The incidents described on pages 45–46 are all sourced from New York Times articles in the 1890s.

  The filming of the trolley car accident (page 60) actually happened in Paterson around the time of the Kopp sisters’ accident with Henry Kaufman.

  The text of the letters from Henry Kaufman on pages 84, 154, 227, 234, and 238 come from court records of the original indictment and multiple newspaper accounts, with slight modifications.

  The other crimes Sheriff Heath dealt with, as described on pages 219–20, all actually occurred and were sourced from Hackensack newspapers of the day.