by Adam Selzer
Someone drops a book and I crouch down, thinking it was a gunshot.
When I read the old papers today, I feel painfully aware of the fact that everyone in them is dead. Maybe a few of the babies in the cute baby picture contests are still alive and in the nursing home. Or maybe they were until I ghosted them over the summer.
I turn the reader to maximum brightness so I can’t see my reflection in the screen. I’m a little afraid it won’t be my face looking back.
And almost as afraid that it will be. I can’t look at myself right now.
In an issue of the Chicago American I find a photo of Lillian that I haven’t seen before—one from the day the Wind Blew Inn burned. She’s sitting down, wearing a round hat, a sort of blazer, and a shirt. She does look like me. If Cyn showed people this picture, and then they saw some hazy, translucent version of me in Bughouse Square, they’d totally believe I was Lillian’s ghost.
The photo is pasted over a large shot of firemen hosing down the burning inn, which, itself, looks like a saloon in a western or something. Above the picture is a headline saying “Wind Blew Inn Blown Out.” A caption says “Chicago’s Little Bumhemia Closes Its Career in a Trail of Smoke.”
The article has a big new clue for me: the reporter described Virginia as a disgruntled former employee who had threatened to get even, and was now the chief suspect for starting the fire. So if she and Lillian had been a couple at the time of the trial a few weeks before, as I’ve been suspecting, they must have had one hell of a falling out.
I lean back for a second, imagining there had been a big misunderstanding when Lillian kissed someone in a play or something. Maybe the day before the fire, Lillian was sending Virginia telegrams, or whatever the 1922 version of texting was, saying “Please don’t hate me,” but Virginia wouldn’t listen.
Or maybe they were just never a couple.
Either way, I wished I could hug Lillian via microfilm.
The papers were always patronizing to Lillian, and here in the American’s article on the fire, they describe her as perfectly happy and gay (not that kind of gay, the old-fashioned kind), shaking her bobbed curls as the cops haul her in on suspicion of torching the place herself for insurance money. (They let her go when they found out there was no insurance.)
I take about twenty pictures of the photo on the screen, making sure I have the best version I can get, then move on to other reels, other papers, other articles, just trying to give my brain enough to focus on to shut everything out.
Article after article goes by on the screen.
Just when I’m starting to feel dizzy and nauseous from watching them whiz by, I finally spot a clue.
Chapter Twenty-Two
WIND BLEW INN INMATES FREED ON TEA STORY
Chicago Herald-Examiner, Feb 15, 1922
To the uninitiated, The Wind Blew Inn, 116 E Ohio St, was revealed as a composite of red bandana handkerchief tablecloths, candles, Russian tea, sooners, cigarettes, and gallon and pint bottles in the Boys’ court yesterday.
The thirty-nine defendants testified that the only stimulant they imbibed at the inn was tea. Fifteen girls and twenty-five young men were charged with being inmates and Miss Lillian Collier, proprietor, with being the keeper of a disorderly house. Detectives from the East Chicago Avenue station raided the place early Sunday.
“A boiler-maker must play the piano,” according to Albert Otto, who maintains a rooming house at 118 E. Ohio (next door to the inn). “The noise those young upstarts make has driven away my best roomers.”
Sergeant Shutz testified that when the officers made the raid, they discovered the patrons in unconventional attitudes, “cuddling up and smoking cigarettes.”
Miss Collier and her mother, Mrs. Nellie Lieberman, told the court that nothing stronger than tea was served in their restaurant. The police had been called several times in the past when outsiders were known to have brought “hip liquor” with them. They became annoyed when the disturbers were found to have escaped on their arrival.
“Because of their tender years,” Judge Lawrence C. Jacobs decided to drop the charges against all but Pat Sturgeon, 35, who was fined $25 and court costs, and Lillian and Virginia Collier, whose case was continued until March 24.
So, the part where the article called Virginia “Virginia Collier” was interesting. Probably just a mistake on the reporter’s part, or a typo, but it could have suggested that they were considering themselves married or something. At least in February. Before whatever falling-out made Virginia a chief suspect in torching the inn two months later.
But the big clue is that it says that Lillian’s mother was named Nellie Lieberman. From that, I can assume that Lillian’s real last name (or maiden name or whatever) was Lieberman.
My phone is still on airplane mode, but I walk into the computer bank outside the microfilm room and sit down with all the homeless guys who are using the out-of-date computers to search for jobs and porn. I load up a genealogy site, type in “Lillian Lieberman,” and solve the mystery of what became of Lillian Collier.
Lillian Lieberman, born 1901, first appears on the record in a 1905 census of New York. By the 1910 US census, she was a girl living in Baltimore with her parents, Nellie and Meyer, and her sisters, Martha and Bertha. When she was fourteen she published a poem called “The Coming of Love” in the local newspaper.
A 1920 census form has Nellie, Meyer, Bertha, and Martha Lieberman, plus a daughter listed as “Lillian Coltie,” living in Chicago. That was why I hadn’t found her in the 1920 census before; there was a major typo when they transcribed it. From birth dates, I can see this is almost certainly the same family from the Baltimore census ten years before.
Now that I know her parents’ names and her sisters’ names, I’m able to put more pieces together pretty easily.
I find a 1919 New York marriage record of a Lillian Lieberman marrying a guy named Herbert Collier, but I’m not certain it’s her. If it is, she would have only been seventeen when she got married. And Herbert was apparently out of the picture the very next year, when Lillian was in Chicago with her family.
From other records, I’m able to find that her mother’s maiden name was Bensonson. And that she and Meyer came over to the States from Russia. Having Meyer’s date and place of birth make it easier to sort him out from the other Meyer Liebermans—there were a lot of them—and pull up his World War II draft registration card from the early 1940s, which had a section for him to write out the name and address of someone who would always know his name and address. In that space, he wrote “Mrs. Lillian Gerard,” a daughter who was living in Hollywood.
That starts me looking up “Lillian Gerard.” There were more than one, but in the 1930 census, there’s a Lillian Gerard living in Los Angeles with her husband, Franklin Gerard, his brother Charlie, and Mrs. Gerard’s divorced mother: Nellie Bensonson.
That pretty well clinches it: this was her. Lillian Collier became Lillian Gerard and moved to California sometime in the 1920s.
Looking her up under that name opens the floodgates.
Lillian Lieberman-Collier-Gerard became a writer, publishing under the name Nellise Child (“Nellie’s child”—clever). She published two mystery novels in the 1930s, plus two more serious “literary” novels and a whole bunch of plays, one of which, Weep for the Virgins, was produced on Broadway by the radical Group Theater, though it only lasted a week. She hung out with Irene Castle—whose hairstyle I now have—and wrote the last play she was in.
She even wrote a section for a book of Chicago murder stories. When I see that, I freak out a bit and say, “Oh, no way,” right out loud, attracting a bit of attention from the rest of the people around me.
Lillian Collier became a murdermonger.
Somewhere along the line she married again, this time to a guy named Abner Rosenfeld, and by the 1960s she seems to have been going by the name of Nellise full time. According to the Tribune obituary for Nellise Rosenfeld, she died in Chicago in the early
1980s and was buried at a Jewish cemetery in the suburbs. The obit gives the maiden name of Lieberman, mentions a sister named Martha, gives her birth year as 1901, and says she was a member of the Dramatist’s Guild. This is her, all right.
This is all fascinating, but the main thing that it drives home for me is this: Lillian Collier didn’t die of tuberculosis in 1925.
Edward Tweed was lying when he said he knew for a fact that she had, and had proof somewhere in his files. He wasn’t just repeating an urban legend or exaggerating a story or stretching the truth; he was outright lying to my face.
This makes it seem a lot more likely that he’s lying about Cyn, too.
The lingering dread begins to retreat.
Once I’ve collected all the basic facts of Lillian’s life, and picked up a copy of the script for Weep for the Virgins, I decide that I’d better leave now if I want to see her grave today, so I head back to the train. It doesn’t feel as scary underground as it did a couple hours ago. The fact that I’ve caught Edward Tweed in a lie is an incredible relief.
I still don’t know how he knew about Zoey, but I’m a lot less inclined to believe his explanation now.
As I ride along I turn my phone off airplane mode and send Mom a text saying I’m fine. She’s sent me a bunch of worried ones.
Then I send Zoey a text saying I found Lillian. Even after everything, and even knowing she probably won’t even read it, I still feel like I want to tell her this.
For a while I just lean back, watch the city go by through the window, and stop worrying about what Zoey might tell people about me long enough that I can just miss her. I miss talking to her. I miss her telling me how cute I am. I miss having someone to tell my stories about the tours to.
And I wish she could help me figure out what to do now.
From the train station I run home through the rain. It’s coming down hard when I get in the hearse and start driving. By the time I get to Arlington Heights, where Shalom Memorial Park is, it’s absolutely pouring.
I know there isn’t going to be a clue here. Lillian won’t be sitting on her tombstone waiting to give me all the answers. But I want to see her grave, and maybe now that I’ve figured out her story, I can figure out more of my own.
The woman at the desk at the cemetery office gives me a confused look when I come in.
“I didn’t think any burials were scheduled today,” she says.
It takes me a second to figure out that she saw the hearse pull into the parking lot and thought I was there in some official capacity.
“No burial,” I say. “I’m just looking for a grave.”
“In a hearse?”
“It’s my ride. I live above Raskin’s funeral home.”
She nods a bit and gives me a cautious look, like she thinks I’m a weirdo who’s going to dig a grave up to use the skull in a love spell or something, but I give her the name of Nellise Rosenfeld, and she digs through the files, then directs me to a plot in section twelve.
“Not the best day for finding it,” she says. “Might be underwater.”
“I know. I just want to see it for myself.”
“Relative?”
“Research topic. This woman took Chicago by storm in 1922. She’s kind of my idol.”
“Isn’t that nice?”
Thick raindrops blotch against the windshield as I steer through the drenched grounds. I get turned around a couple of times and nearly drive into puddles deep enough to drown me—or at least mess the hearse up. When I get to section twelve and step outside, the ground is pretty well flooded. If I wasn’t in my boots, I’d be getting soaked.
The marker, a simple plaque, is underwater, but I find it. I can just make out the name ROSENFELD in gold. Below that on the left, it says: NELLISE: 1901–1981. Beside that is: ABNER G: 1896–1984.
“Well, well,” I say, in my best spy voice, even though I know she can’t hear me. “At last we meet, Nellise Rosenfeld . . . or should I say . . . Lillian Collier?”
I stand there on her grave, letting the rain hit the both of us, for a long minute. I wonder what she looked like when she was an old woman, a few months shy of eighty. I imagine her at that age now, under the ground, laughing as I say her old name and saying, “Lillian Collier. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. A long time.”
I wonder if Abner even knew about her days as a flapper.
Or if she ever saw Virginia Harrison again after that fire.
When I get too soaked to do anything but shiver, I get back into the hearse, turn on the heat (hearses have better heat than you’d guess), and think about texting Cyn.
I need to talk to her. The fact that Edward was lying about Lillian doesn’t necessarily mean Cyn isn’t planning to kill me, or that she didn’t kill Saltis, but turning me into a ghost in a far suburban cemetery would do her no good whatsoever. I’m about as safe as I can be out here.
So I send Cyn a message.
MEGAN:
You at work?
SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:
Home. What’s up? Your mom has called me twice.
MEGAN:
Arlington Heights. Shalom Memorial Park, Section 12. Come at once. Emergency.
SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:
On my way.
Then I sit in the car for a bit—it’s gonna take her a while to make it this far out of the city, especially in the rain. Traffic always slows down in the rain.
I let the sound of the drops on the roof of the hearse sort of hypnotize me, and try to meditate a bit. As usual, I can’t. I calm down with the OED.
Some good OED words for sex include “meddling” (1398), “Venus exercise” (1507), “hot cockles” (1627), and “Moll Peatley’s jig” (1711).
Then the word “barney-mugging” pops in my brain. It isn’t in the OED, but googling shows that it was a flapper term for sex. For a minute I think maybe Lillian’s ghost whispered it in my ear, but I must have just heard it somewhere before. Surely no one comes back from the dead just to teach people fun new words for intercourse.
But, then again, that’s exactly how I’d want to spend my afterlife.
When Cyn’s truck pulls up, I step into the rain and I motion her over to the grave site. She sloshes through the swampy grass.
“Who’s this?” she asks. Then she looks down and reads out “Nellise. Interesting name.”
“It was a pseudonym.”
“What was her real name?”
“In 1922 it was Lillian Collier.”
Cyn looks up at me, and her damp face lights up.
“This is her?”
I nod.
“You’re sure?”
“Airtight. I found record after record. She became a mystery writer and a playwright under the name Nellise Child.”
“Seriously?”
“She had a play on Broadway. It only lasted a week and papers still called her a ‘girl playwright,’ even though she was thirty-five, but still.”
“Yeah.”
“She even wrote some true crime, so she was technically a murdermonger.”
“Wow.” Cyn stares down at the gravestone, then smiles. “Can we talk in the car? You’re gonna catch your death in this rain.”
I nod and we get into the hearse. The heater is still running.
“So, you found her,” says Cyn. “How did you do it?”
I run her through the stories about the mystery novels, the murdermongering, and Irene Castle. She listens intently, then says, “You could be her reincarnation, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Or maybe I’m her ghost,” I say.
She laughs. “Nah. You’ve aged since I was your babysitter. Ghosts don’t do that. Not real ones.”
She doesn’t say anything or react in any way that makes me think the idea of me being, or becoming, Lillian’s ghost is anything she’s been plotting.
I show her all the documents I’ve saved to my phone. Articles where she talks about hopping freight trains from Californ
ia to New York with her dog, Prince Otto, to get her play produced. The new 1920s stuff I found. I see when I’m flipping through them that there’s an article in the Tribune archives with the name “Nellie Lieberman” too, but a missing comma made it less apparent that she was Lillian’s mom.
Then, as Cyn reads through an article I found about “Lillian Gerard” from the 1940s, I just blurt out the question.
“Why did you tell my mom about Zoey?”
She looks up from the article. “I thought your mom seemed surprised when I mentioned that. She didn’t know about her?”
I shake my head.
“You and your mom tell each other everything. You’re like the Gilmore Goths.”
“Well, I don’t tell her that about, like, sexting or freaky stuff. God.”
“I thought you’d at least tell her you had someone who was important to you.”
“I was afraid she’d tell me how stupid I was being.”
Cyn looks guilty, then gives me a hug as she apologizes and says we all do stupid things for love. “Look,” she says. “Obviously I didn’t tell your mom about the stories or anything. I just asked if you were okay and mentioned that I knew you were having girlfriend trouble. That’s all. If I knew it was that big of a secret, I never would have said a thing.”
I nod. And Cyn looks back at the phone, reading the rest of the article about Lillian from when she was a 1940s housewife who wrote novels. When she finishes, she smiles and hands me back my phone.
I stare for a second, then ask the really big question.
“Did you tell Edward Tweed about Zoey too?”
She gives me a surprised look, then laughs like I just asked her if she could drive me to Italy in her truck.
“Of course not,” she says.
“Seriously. It’s okay. Did you?”
“Megan, I would never tell that man anything personal. If I was in front of him in line at KFC, I wouldn’t want him to know if I was getting original or extra crispy.”