Katie

by Michael McDowell

  “Maybe splitting up would be best,” said Hannah. “For a time. Mark you a calendar, John, and meet together on a date.”

  “I’ll go to Philadelphia, you go to Boston.”

  “Where am I to go?” demanded Katie.

  “Who do you want to go with?” asked Hannah.

  Katie looked from her father to her stepmother. She touched Hannah’s sleeve. “You’ll take better care of me.”

  Hannah nodded. John said, “I don’t like to be alone.”

  “Won’t be for long,” his wife assured him. “Give you money, John. Go to that hotel where we stayed. Put up there, and there’s theater every evening.”

  “What if I run out of money?”

  “Give you five hundred dollars. Ought to keep you.”

  Hannah went down to the kitchen to dismiss the two servants. John went upstairs to board up the hole in the fourth-story wall. Katie went into the bedroom, took out the carpetbag and stood before a cheval glass. She grinned and swung the bag to and fro and made believe that she was walking to Boston with it.

  Chapter 37

  ELLA’S FORTUNE

  As Philo and Ella retreated hastily along Christopher Street away from the river, Ella attempted to convince her friend that with her disguised dress and heavy veil, there was no way in the world that she could have been recognized by Katie Slape.

  “She was looking at you from across the street, wasn’t she? And how many times has she even seen you? Do you think your own mother’d know you in that outfit, Philo?”

  Philo wasn’t to be comforted or convinced. “Katie Slape’s eyes tore off my veil,” she said wildly.

  The two young women took refuge in a bakery at the corner of Hudson and purchased half a dozen sweet cakes.

  “You know they’re there,” said Ella. “You know that family is a universe of putrescence. Now let’s go down to Centre Street to police headquarters.”

  “And tell them what?” demanded Philo. “That a crazy girl who tells fortunes murdered my grandfather? The police will telegraph Cape May Court House and discover what? That I’m the one who’s suspected of the crime. Tell them what? That the family living at No. 251 Christopher Street stole thirty thousand dollars from me? Do I look as if I had misplaced such a sum recently? Tell them what? That Katie Slape sliced up my mother with a razor, and only waited her chance to show me a little bit of her knife? Katie’s twenty years old and her dress is vulgar – but who’s to believe that she’s an assassin?”

  Ella looked around uneasily. Philo’s whispered vehemence was drawing attention.

  “Ask your friend what to do,” Ella suggested in a low voice.

  “Mrs. Maitland?”

  Ella nodded.

  Philo walked immediately out of the shop and hailed a cab. Ella was aghast at the extravagance, but Philo only said, “Katie Slape murdered my mother. John and Hannah Slape stole my fortune.”

  In a quarter of an hour they were on Twenty-sixth Street, but there the servant informed Philo that Mrs. Maitland was some­where down on the Ladies’ Mile, shopping with Miss Jewel for their Saratoga wardrobes.

  Philo and Ella found the same cab positioned at the corner of Broadway, and it carried them back downtown.

  “I don’t know what to do,” admitted Philo.

  “Wait,” said Ella. “Just wait.”

  “Katie saw me. What if they leave town?”

  “She couldn’t have recognized you.”

  Philo turned away hotly. “You don’t know her, Ella.”

  Ella sat back in the cab and smiled.

  “I think I want my fortune told,” she said.

  “No!”

  “Why not? She don’t know me from the chief Celestial down on Mott Street.”

  “She saw you standing with me.”

  Ella shook her head. “I’ll change my dress and my hat. I’ll borrow a little paint from Nellie. She’ll never know me.”

  Philo was doubtful. “What good will it do? What will you discover?”

  Ella shrugged. “I’ll keep my eyes open, that’s all.”

  The driver took them to West Thirteenth Street. Ella altered her appearance to an extent that astounded Philo: with a too-tight dress, false curls, and a complexion of chalk and rouge, she didn’t look at all like herself.

  “You take up a position in that bakery shop,” said Ella as they were on their way to Christopher Street once again. “Sit yourself down with a cup of chocolate and a plate of cookies and watch for me to come out again.”

  The Slapes’ two servants had been dismissed summarily, given five dollars in lieu of a week’s wages lost, and warned that if they said a word about anything at all they’d have their tongues sliced out of their throats. They did not question Hannah’s threat. Katie had taken the placard from the first-floor window and placed it carefully at the bottom of the case that she was to take to Boston.

  Hannah was counting out the money John was to live on in Philadelphia when they were all disturbed by a knock at the street door.

  “Is it the police?” cried John.

  Hannah went downstairs.

  Katie followed her stepmother with a hammer.

  John went all the way down to the cellar and unchained Little Dick, who barked furiously and attempted to bite his master’s hand.

  Hannah opened the street door to a tall, angular young woman, who said, in a shrill voice, “I’m come to have my for­tune read!”

  “Sign’s down,” said Hannah shortly, and started to close the door.

  The young woman thrust her hand inside. “I’ve got the blues and dumps something monstrous. I’m desperate to know—”

  “Go away!” cried Hannah, but Katie, with a smile, reached round and pushed Hannah’s hand from the doorknob.

  “Walk in,” said Katie. “And I’ll show you a picture of your true love.”

  Little Dick came bounding up the cellar stairs, barking hoarsely.

  The three women in the narrow corridor fell back in alarm.

  Little Dick stopped before them, growling, but Katie lifted the hammer high and brought it down to a spot expertly calculated to crush his skull. The dog collapsed dead at her feet.

  The young woman who had just entered turned and tried the handle of the door, but Hannah slammed it shut.

  “Walk up,” said Katie, waving toward the stairs with the bloody hammer.

  “No,” the young woman replied nervously, “I don’t think I will . . .”

  “What’s your name?” Katie demanded.

  “Ella.”

  “What other name?” Katie stood on the bottom stair and grinned. Ella stood between Katie and her stepmother, who guarded the door. John Slape had appeared in the cellar doorway, and stared stupidly at the dead dog.

  “Ella LaFavour.”

  “You were born in Canada,” said Katie, “In eighteen fifty, under the sign of Cancer. A young man is greatly in love with you and would give all he is worth to marry you.”

  She turned and ascended the stairs.

  “Walk up,” said Hannah grimly to Ella. “Walk up.”

  “The number six is lucky for you,” said Katie, beckoning with her hammer. “The number fifteen very unlucky. Beware of it.”

  Ella followed Katie up the stairs.

  “Today is the fifteenth,” Katie remarked, and turned at the landing.

  Ella hesitated, but Katie reached over the railing and took hold of Ella’s arm, pulling her upward.

  “If you had married this young man who is in love with you, your children would have been called Ella, Henry, and Philomela.”

  Ella stopped suddenly.

  “Why won’t I marry him?”

  Hannah and John Slape stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up. Katie grinned down at Ella around the turn in the stairs and, leaning over, fingered the sleeve of her dress.

  The smell of the dog’s blood filled Ella’s brain.

  “You’ll die on your birthday,” said Katie.

  “Today is my birth
day!”

  Katie raised the hammer high.

  Chapter 38

  NO GOOD

  Philo waited in the bakery shop half an hour for her friend be­­fore she became convinced that something was dreadfully wrong. She stood up hastily to go, but then she reflected that per­haps Ella had been only one of several young ladies desirous of having their fortunes told and was waiting her turn. She ordered another cup of chocolate, another plate of cookies, and waited another half an hour.

  At the end of that time, she nervously paid for what she had consumed and walked out of the shop. She went down Christo­pher Street toward the river, this time on the same side of the way as the Slapes’ house and keeping as close as she might to the house façades.

  Katie would see her approach only if she leaned far out her parlor window.

  Philo came all the way up to No. 251 and stood several mo­ments before the house, wondering how she ought to pro­ceed. She still wore her veil. She spun her horsehair bracelets round and round her wrist in perplexity.

  All the curtains of the house were drawn. Philo mounted the steps and knocked at the door. No one answered her summons. She tried the knob and the door swung open.

  The morning was hot, and the dead dog had begun to stink. Its blood stained the runner in the dim hallway.

  The door closing of its own accord shut Philo in the house.

  She called out Ella’s name timidly.

  There was no response, no movement in the house, and Philo called Ella’s name more loudly.

  The dead dog seemed a presage of greater evil.

  Philo stepped over the carcass and peered into the first-floor parlor. It looked as if it hadn’t been swept in weeks.

  She descended the stairs to the kitchen and the dining room, which – common to all boardinghouses – were below the level of the street. The fire had only recently died down in the stove. A table in the kitchen, set for two, bore the remains of a poor meal abandoned before half finished.

  Philo took the cloth from the dining table, brought it back up to the entryway and draped it over the dead dog.

  Calling Ella’s name again she mounted the stairs.

  Ella lay on the landing. The false side curls she had worn were drenched in blood and hung down over her face.

  Philo brushed them aside and closed her friend’s filmed, staring eye.

  Neighbors had seen the Jepsons depart with their baggage at about half past ten o’clock that Saturday morning, headed toward the ferry. Philo had discovered the corpses of Ella and the dog at half past eleven.

  The barber around the corner knew the Jepsons’ servant girls, having recommended their employment. The police questioned the young women. They had been dismissed at half past nine o’clock that morning and knew nothing more at all, but they ner­vously ventured the opinion that the Jepsons had been up to no good for a long time.

  The Jepsons’ “no good” was found quickly enough. The boarded-up hole in the fourth-story wall led the police into the ad­­joining house. Their lanterns in that shuttered building showed them spots of blood all the way down to the cellar. And in the cellar were six heaped mounds of earth and a seventh grave re­cently dug and waiting for its victim.

  Saturday night was expended in the exhumation of Katie’s victims: one young woman who had died of a cracked skull, three young women who had died of causes yet to be determined, one young woman who had been buried alive, and a three-year-old boy (inhumed with his mother) who had a mouth full of hard candy and a paring knife embedded in his throat.

  Notice of the horrific discoveries appeared in Monday morning’s papers. There was straight reportage of the findings, interviews with policemen on the scene, neighbors’ opinions, a description of the last victim, speculations of the whereabouts of the villainous family, and the appended rumor that their real name was not Jepson, but Slade or Slate.

  Readers of the city’s newspapers might have found out much more about the Jepsons if the newspapermen had been able to find the young woman who had discovered the corpse upon the landing. Police headquarters had her statement, her name, and her address; but when the reporters called at Mrs. Classon’s rooming house on West Thirteenth Street, it was to find a parlorful of somber young women who could only lament the death of their treasured Ella and give the information that Philomela Drax was packed up and gone – they did not know where and would not have said if they did.

  In the next week, drawings of the Slapes (still under the name Jepson) appeared in the newspapers. These were taken from like­nesses on file in a photographer’s studio on lower Broadway where the Slapes had gone to have cartes de visite made up, singly, and as a family group. A substantial reward was posted for their arrest.

  They were variously thought to be in Ohio, in Canada, on the Isthmus of Panama waiting to catch a packet to San Francisco. They were disguised as Hindus and living in Delancey Street.

  They had murdered a family in Kentucky, they had robbed a bank in Maryland, they had cheated prisoners at Andersonville.

  Hannah had committed suicide with a homemade guillotine, John had been scalped by Indians in western Kansas, Katie had been killed by a stray bullet in a tavern brawl.

  In fact, John Slape had shaved off his beard and was living in the hotel on Twelfth Street in Philadelphia. His day was spent at the barbershop, where he was vaguely remembered from having visited there some months before, and in the evening he went to the theater – but Philadelphia entertainments, he maintained, didn’t compare to what you could get in New York.

  Hannah and Katie had rented rooms on Myrtle Street in Boston. Katie advertised quietly as a card reader, and Hannah, merely to occupy her time, did piecework sewing dolls’ bodies for a Tremont Street toy manufacturer.

  Philo’s carpetbag and Philo’s fortune had found one more quiet home, beneath the bed that Katie and Hannah shared.

  PART IX

  SARATOGA SPRINGS

  Chapter 39

  JEWEL’S DISAPPOINTMENT

  Upon discovering the corpse of Ella LaFavour, Philo had fled the house on Christopher Street. She understood several things. One, that the Slapes were no longer in the house, for if they had been she would not have got out alive. Two, that the Slapes had recognized her on the street, for Katie – Philo was certain Katie was responsible for Ella’s death – would have had no other reason to murder her companion from that episode. Three, that it was Philo’s responsibility to get to the police as quickly as possible so that the Slapes might be apprehended.

  Not allowing herself to remember how short a time before she had sat beside Ella in the cab, or watched her as she applied paint at Nellie Stanwood’s mirror, or walked with her from West Thirteenth Street, Philo ran toward the ferry, where she sup­posed a policeman must be on patrol.

  She found one without difficulty, and told him of her friend’s corpse on the stairway of No. 251. The policeman rapped his truncheon loudly on the sidewalk, alerting other officers in the neighborhood, and hurried to the place where Philo’s best friend lay weltering in gore.

  Philo took a cab to Centre Street and there related to three detectives all she knew of the Slapes. She was chided for not having come forward sooner, but Philo was certain that her tale – without the ineluctable evidence of Ella’s crushed head – would have carried little weight with the harried New York police, who had a sufficiency of unsuppositious criminals to occupy them.

  News of Ella’s death had preceded Philo to West Thirteenth Street. Mrs. Classon sat with surprised eyes in the parlor and wondered what on earth could have made Ella want to have her fortune told on a Saturday morning. “Fortune-tellers,” she said in her wispy voice, “spiritists and mediums – they can’t work but at night . . .”

  Philo’s involvement in Ella’s death was not known in the rooming house, and Philo did not see fit to acknowledge it. Ella had introduced her into the household, and it was through Ella that Philo had allowed herself to feel a part of that strange community. But now with Ell
a gone – so suddenly gone – Philo felt alien. She looked around at her chamber and stared at the women who peered in at the door and whispered consolingly with as great wonder as if she had gone to sleep in her same bed the night before and waked this morning in a pasha’s harem.

  She began to pack her belongings, but found that, because of the number of new acquisitions, she could cram scarcely a third of her clothing into the wicker case in which she had brought all her worldly possessions from New Egypt.

  Leaving all there then, she departed Mrs. Classon’s and walked up to Twenty-sixth Street. A cab would have seemed too con­fining. She kept recalling to mind the dim, close atmosphere of the stairway on Christopher Street that stank of old grease and newly spilt blood. Distraught and silent, Philo felt that there wasn’t enough open air in all the world for her just then.

  Mrs. Maitland was in the guest chamber occupied by her niece. Jewel was examining with satisfaction all that morning’s purchases.

  “Philomela!” cried Mrs. Maitland in surprise when Philo appeared in the doorway.

  “Philo!” Jewel’s greeting was an undisguised grimace.

  Philo started to speak, but her voice choked off.

  Mrs. Maitland rose quickly and went to Philo, crying, “What’s the matter, dear?”

  Even in her extenuated grief, Philo refused to break down before Jewel Varley and so begged a few minutes’ private conver­sation with her employer. Mrs. Maitland led Philo into her own chamber while Jewel sniffed to the maid who was assisting her, “Did you see that dress she had on? Four rags sewed together with a three-penny flounce . . .”

  Jewel pretended that she had no interest in the conversation between distressed Philo and concerned Mrs. Maitland, but once or twice she asked the attendant maid what she thought the purport might be.

  The maid didn’t know, but twenty minutes later that same maid was summoned and sent out of the house.

  Jewel was indignant that her assistant had been withdrawn to prosecute some senseless errand of that hired person, Miss Philo Drax.

  At tea that afternoon Mrs. Maitland said to an ever more astonished Jewel, “Our plans have changed.”