Katie

by Michael McDowell

  The hotel clerk eyed him suspiciously and alerted the owner that it was very likely that Mr. John Goshen – Hannah had sug­gested a familiar name for her husband to assume so that he would be less likely to forget it – would be unable to pay his bill.

  That evening John was questioned by the owner of the hotel, admitted his inability to pay, and was thrown out onto the street. He hadn’t even fifteen cents to get into a theater, and the very men who had won hundreds of dollars from him in the billiard back room refused to lend him more than fifty cents together.

  John therefore had enough money to go to the theater, and did so, but without any other refuge he returned to the billiard room afterward. He was approached then by a man whom he had seen there before, but whose name he had either never learnt or subsequently forgot.

  The man shook hands cordially with John Slape and bought him a glass of whiskey. He also brought the bottle to a table, where John followed him.

  “Talked to you t’other forenoon,” the man said, and intro­duced himself as Bill Reagan.

  John nodded, though he remembered nothing.

  “Talked of the War and railroads. Said you were a savage down in Virginia.”

  “I was,” said John. John Slape had very little idea of subtlety in human relationships and did not see that Bill Reagan was driving at something.

  “Hear you’re flat.”

  John Slape jingled the nickels in his pocket. “That’s all I got,” he said.

  “Where you put up?”

  “Nowheres.”

  “Come to my place.”

  “All right,” replied John with a grin. He had a place to stay for the night. This was a friendly man, and perhaps Bill Reagan would even tell him what to do about getting money from his wife in Boston.

  John went with his new friend to a dirty little room in a house that leaned precariously out over the river, but before he could ask Bill Reagan what he should do in regard to Hannah, Bill Reagan said, “How’d you like to swell around town with your pockets full of gold?”

  “I would.”

  “You know how to mend track?”

  John nodded.

  “You know how to fix track so it wants mending?”

  John hesitated, then nodded again.

  Bill Reagan sat back with a broad smile, certain that John Slape understood his intent. But John sat so stolidly across the red deal table from him, and stared so earnestly at him over the guttering candle flame, that Reagan realized, after a minute or so of silence, that he would have to spell out the entire matter in detail.

  He did so, describing the trains that went from Saratoga to New York, the number of their passengers, their money and jewels, the ease of waylaying the train in some deserted spot along the river route the track followed.

  “I’d do it,” said John, when he had heard all, “but I don’t have the fare to get up there.”

  Bill Reagan paid John Slape’s fare to Milton, New York, where they put up at the little hotel that had been built within sight of the West Shore Railway. Pretending to be sportsmen, they walked out of the hotel early in the morning with guns on their shoulders and disappeared into the forest. Following the track of the railway north, they scouted out the most remote spot – halfway between Milton and Highland exactly – for the train to be wrecked. Slape marked the rails and ties that would be best disengaged, and Reagan shot a few rabbits so that they would not return to the hotel empty-handed.

  Three confederates were telegraphed and arrived singly over the next couple of days. On Monday morning, the fourth of Sep­tember, John Slape went out of the hotel early and alone, walked up the railway line, and sat in the shade of the tree, watch­ing the trains from Saratoga go by, one by one. It was at this time he was seen by the farmer’s little daughter, gathering berries in a nearby copse. Just at dusk, John was joined by his confederates, who had left the hotel singly, all dressed in their best – thus better to mingle with the passengers of the wrecked train – and they assisted him in drawing the pins from the rails and removing the ties.

  They all returned to John’s comfortable place beneath the tree and waited for the four o’clock train from Saratoga to come by. When they heard its approach, they were careful to back away into the forest in order not to be injured by explosive metal and flying glass.

  Of the five men involved in the scheme, only John Slape was caught. And by the time that he was seen by Philo, the other four had filled their pockets and emptied them again several times into sacks which they had brought with them. John Slape’s confederates walked to New Paltz that night, and from there, next morning, took a train back to Philadelphia. At the station in New Paltz, they were sorry to hear of John Slape’s capture, for his pockets had been filled with gold and jewels and negotiable bonds. They were less disturbed to know of his death – for a dead man did not tell the names of his confederates.

  Chapter 50

  MISS PONDER AND FIDELE

  In order to remain as inconspicuous as possible, Hannah Slape, upon arriving in Boston with her stepdaughter, rented only a basement flat in a house on Myrtle Street a few hundred yards northeast of the State House but far from fashion. This cramped, damp space consisted of a parlor at the front, with two large windows right at the level of the street, a bedchamber behind this that was really no more than a wide passageway, and a kitchen at the back that was larger than either.

  Katie hated the place, complained of its smallness, of the smells from the courtyard, of the noise from the street. Carriage wheels and horses’ hooves sounded only a couple of feet from the windows, and at all hours of the day and night, the curious peered in. But more than the inconvenience of their quarters, Katie complained of inactivity. She wanted to tell fortunes. It was her calling, she maintained to Hannah, and what she did gladly.

  Hannah reminded Katie that her description had been printed in papers all across the country and a list of her victims prepared for the delectation of a reading public long inured to sanguinary horrors. To put out her old placard in the Myrtle Street window would doubtless bring inquiries from the police.

  Yet after two weeks spent in close quarters with Katie, it was finally Hannah herself who suggested again that she resume her old profession. Hannah composed an advertisement, calling Katie “Miss Parrock,” and inserted it into the next day’s Herald. A sign painter on Charles Street made up a placard with the same promises on it for a dollar and a half, and Katie was in busi­ness once more. Simply a new name in the lists brought in the custom of those ladies who had tried all the others already, and those impressed sent others. On Hannah’s advice, Katie was more discreet than formerly, and was deliberately vaguer in her prog­nostications than she might have been.

  Katie worked in the parlor at the front of the flat. Hannah sat in the bedroom or in the kitchen, silent and unmoving, hid behind a green linen portiere, listening to her daughter – and ready to interrupt should Katie begin to reveal something that was better kept secret.

  After some of the sessions Katie would fling aside the portiere and stomp from one end of the flat to the other.

  “She had money, Mar! She had three hundred dollars stuck down her front. I wish I had my hammer!”

  It was necessary to soothe Katie at these times and calm her passion. Who knew how far voices carried in Boston? It was a quieter and closer place than New York.

  “Wouldn’t do us no good,” Hannah would say. “Where would we bury her? In the courtyard, with all the neighbors watching? Who’d dig her grave? Katie, got plenty of money. Wait a while – soon be in New York again. Buy a new house, with a dirt floor in the cellar . . .”

  And this, with a promise of another evening at the theater, mollified Katie for a time. She’d draw the curtains open and sit at the window, smiling at passersby who paused to read the sign and peer through the glass panes.

  The summer passed, and autumn came on. Katie asked every day, “When do we go back to New York?”

  “When it’s cold,” Hannah rep
lied. She anticipated that the five hundred dollars that she had given her husband would last him at least until the first of December. By then, she considered, her family would have been forgotten by the public and the police. They would search out John in Philadelphia and be a family once more. Hannah thought it would be best ultimately to take up residence in some city other than New York – Baltimore or Washington perhaps. But of this she said nothing to Katie, know­ing with what eagerness her stepdaughter anticipated a return to the island of Manhattan.

  Katie accepted the plan, as she accepted all that Hannah sug­gested. But she asked, “What about the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “The hired girl, Mar. The old man’s granddaughter. My cousin. She saw me. She knows who we are.”

  Hannah shrugged.

  “I want to find her out,” said Katie. “I think she ought to be buried in the cellar.”

  “Don’t have a cellar any more,” said Hannah. She looked around. “Live in a cellar.”

  Katie closed her eyes. “I see her on a boat.” When she opened them again, wickedness sparkled there. “I think we ought to tie her up in a sack and throw her in a river,” she said.

  “Got to find her first,” said Hannah. “Can’t get caught,” she warned.

  “Break her legs so she can’t swim, and tie her in a sack and throw her in a river,” cried Katie, and clapped her hands in gleeful expectation.

  One morning toward the middle of October, Katie answered a knock at the door. A lady of an age more advanced than she would have liked one to think stood trembling on the walk and peering down the steps into the dark recessed doorway of No. 102a. She cradled a yapping terrier and whispered soothingly to it, though this did not quiet the animal in the least.

  “Are you Miss Parrock?” she whispered, and looked up and down the street.

  “Walk in please,” said Katie.

  With a nervous little laugh, the lady descended the steps and entered the parlor. Hannah had already retreated behind the portiere and had settled down to a copy of the New York Clipper, which she always read with a sigh for the theatrical splendors of New York.

  The lady’s dog, whom she addressed as Fidele, snarled at Katie in an absurdly high pitch. Katie couldn’t repress a grimace – the dog was small, but Katie hated it – but the fortune-teller turned so that her customer would not see her disgust.

  “He don’t make friends easy,” the lady said with a smile of apology. “I am Miss Ponder.”

  “Sit down, please,” said Katie. “You’re fifty-one next Christ­mas, and you’re being courted by a man who’s twenty-six years old.”

  The lady nearly fell into her chair. “Yes,” she whispered, convinced suddenly and utterly of Katie’s powers. “Does he love me?”

  Katie paused, searching not for the true answer, but rather for the most advantageous reply.

  “He has gambling debts,” she said at last.

  “Then he’s marrying me for my money!” Miss Ponder shrieked, and clapped her hands over her ears. Fidele, her mis­tress’s sure grip for a moment loosened, took the opportunity to jump down from her lap. The dog, yapping frightfully, ran round the table three times, snapping at both her mistress and at Katie.

  Katie snarled back and kicked the dog.

  Fidele, weighing no more than five pounds, sailed across the room and was knocked against the wall. The animal slid dazed to the floor.

  “Fidele!” cried Miss Ponder in anguish.

  “Sit down!” said Katie, wishing she had kicked the dog even harder. “He visits a lady on Goodwin Place every Saturday after­noon.”

  “It is his sister!”

  “No!”

  Fidele staggered behind the portiere.

  Hannah looked up from the paper. She had retained an aversion to dogs since her poodle-stunting days. She took a pepper pot from the table and flung it at the dog. Fidele rushed forward as if crazed, leapt at Hannah, and through three layers of cloth, set her teeth into the flesh of Hannah’s right leg.

  Hannah growled and attempted to shake the dog off, but Fidele held on tightly. She reached down, took Fidele in both hands, and pulled her away. She drew in her breath tightly as she felt the skin of her leg torn.

  “Damn you, dog!” she hissed, and lifted the dog high. Fidele snarled and yapped and twisted in Hannah’s hands, but couldn’t get loose.

  In the front room Miss Ponder heard the scuffle and wasn’t to be prevented from protecting precious Fidele. Forgetting her unfaithful, mercenary fiancé, she stood from the table, and before Katie could stop her, had pulled aside the portiere, calling “My darling, my darling . . . !”

  At that moment, Hannah, who had decided that she could not put down the terrier without its biting or attempting to bite her again, had lifted the squealing, slathering animal high. Miss Ponder rushed in and stopped, appalled. Hannah looked at her – with alarm, knowing she was about to do that which she ought not – and brought the animal down hard onto a pointed edge of the stove.

  The corner pierced the dog’s belly, and blood spewed out over Hannah’s apron.

  Miss Ponder screamed and rushed forward.

  Hannah dropped the dog on the floor. It hissed, and blew blood from its nostrils, and foamed blood at its mouth.

  Miss Ponder bent over the dog, and Hannah backed away, saying nothing.

  She stared at Katie, who stood in the doorway twisting the cloth of the portiere in her hands held behind her.

  “You’ve murdered Fidele!” shrieked Miss Ponder over the dog still twitching in its death throes.

  Hannah watched the dog’s eyes glaze over.

  “It’s near dead,” she said.

  “I’ll have the law,” Miss Ponder hissed, with tears in her eyes.

  Katie’s smile faded. She rushed forward into the kitchen, took from the stove the kettle of water that was on the boil, and poured the contents over the woman’s head. Miss Ponder shrieked, and Katie spilled the boiling water directly into her mouth. Miss Ponder fell onto the floor on top of Fidele. Her skin was already bright red and puckered.

  Miss Ponder was frantic; blinded, unable to scream because her mouth and throat were seared, unable to stand because she was crippled with the pain. Kicking, she overturned a chair on top of her. She flailed with arms that were no more than extensions of pain and shook her boiled, blinded head from side to side.

  Steam rose from her body.

  Katie took a large skillet in which Hannah had prepared their breakfast and emptied out the cooling grease over the woman’s writhing form. Then carefully stepping round her to get behind, Katie brought down the broad flat bottom of the skillet as hard as she could on Miss Ponder’s face.

  With the first blow she crushed her nose, cheekbones, and chin. With a second, delivered at an angle, she caved in Miss Pon­der’s temple.

  The body convulsed twice – but Katie and Hannah knew from experience that Miss Ponder was already dead.

  Chapter 51

  FIDELE’S REVENGE

  Hannah removed the placard from the window and drew the curtains. She turned angrily to Katie. “What do you think we’re to do now?”

  Katie shrugged.

  “Told you, no hammers!”

  “It wasn’t no hammer!” Katie protested.

  But there was still the corpse of Miss Ponder lying in a pool of steaming water on the kitchen floor. Her head was propped on Fidele’s slit belly as on a pillow. Her skin was ripped and black from being seared by the boiling water. Her dress was stained with blood and congealed fat.

  “Where are we to put her?” cried Hannah.

  “Let’s leave her,” suggested Katie. “Let’s go back to New York.”

  Hannah shook her head. “No,” she said, “the police are still after us there, can’t go back there yet.”

  Katie sat down at the table and amused herself by pouring cold tea from one cup into another and then back again.

  There was a knock at the door. Hannah peered through the curtain. �
��It’s another lady to see you.”

  “Let her walk in,” said Katie.

  Hannah pointed impatiently toward the kitchen.

  “That’s why we have a curtain,” said Katie with imperturbable logic. “Go back and wait and let me tell her fortune.”

  Hannah did so and sat beside the corpse for twenty minutes, while Katie told a spinster that she would never find a man to marry and that all her nephews made fun of her nose.

  When that second lady had departed in tears, Katie drew aside the portiere and went into the bedroom. She swung on the doorjamb and grinned at Hannah.

  “Seventy-five cents!” she said. “Can we go to see Young Amer­ica tonight?”

  Young America was an acrobat who had won Katie Slape’s heart. He was booked all that week at the Boston Museum Theatre, and Katie had gone to see him every evening.

  “Help me with this,” said Hannah. She held up a large canvas bag, the seams of which she had been reinforcing with thick cotton thread.

  “Put her in, you mean?”

  Hannah nodded.

  There was some difficulty in this since Miss Ponder’s limbs had stiffened in the last hour and both legs had to be broken in order to fit her in the sack. The dog, entirely rigid, was placed in her crossed arms.

  Hannah sewed the bag at the top, and she and Katie then carried it through a little-used side door in the flat. At the back of a narrow storage room, behind a number of labeled crates, they hung it from a large hook that was embedded in the wall.

  Hannah acquiesced in Katie’s desire to see Young America in his last performance in Boston – on the condition that she clean the kitchen floor.

  Though the weather had been decidedly cool, the bodies of Miss Ponder and Fidele began to stink within only a few days, even before the wound which the dog had inflicted on Hannah’s leg had entirely healed. Their neighbors upstairs complained of the odor, and Hannah explained that she had recently set out poison for rats, and that some of the vermin had evidently expired in holes and corners. Katie and Hannah were themselves not immune to the disagreeable smell, and to cover it they cooked molasses and burned scented candles.