Sisters On the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Sisters on the Case Introduction

  Sister Death

  Hearing Her Name

  Frighted Out of Fear; or, The Bombs Bursting in Air

  Guardian Angel

  Never Too Old

  Murder for Lunch

  The Whole World Is Watching

  I Killed

  Maubi and the Jumbies

  Estelle Is Dead

  Steak Tartare

  Animal Act

  Lady Patterly’s Lover

  Not Just the Facts

  Ninjettes

  The People’s Way

  For the Common Good

  A Family Sunday in the Park: V. I. Warshawski’s First Case

  You May Already Be a Winner

  Dies Irae

  About the Author

  About Sisters in Crime

  Copyright Notices

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, October 2007

  Copyright © Sara Paretsky

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  For Anna Katherine Green,

  and all the other women who blazed a trail

  for Sisters in Crime to follow

  Sisters on the Case Introduction

  Women writers and their detectives have been an important part of crime fiction since its beginnings. Who doesn’t know Miss Marple or Peter Wimsey or Ebenezer Gryce and Amelia Butterworth? Wait: Butterworth? Gryce? Those aren’t household names.

  A century ago, they were. Both were detectives created by Anna Katherine Green, one of the most successful crime writers of the last hundred years. At a time when America’s population was a quarter what it is today, Green’s books usually sold around a million copies. She was President Wilson’s favorite genre writer, she knew all the luminaries of the day, and her detective, Ebenezer Gryce, anticipated Sherlock Holmes by a decade.

  Gryce did the same kind of forensic research as Holmes, examining medical evidence, typefaces, fabrics, buttons, and drawing conclusions based on physical evidence. Green was the first English-language writer to create that most beloved figure in crime fiction: the series character, whose insights and foibles are opaque to other figures in the story, but well-known to the reader.

  In 1897, Green added Amelia Butterworth as an amateur aide-de-camp to Mr. Gryce. On more than one occasion, Ms. Butterworth’s own insights saved Mr. Gryce from making a serious blunder. In 1915, Green created a bold new phenomenon, Violet Strange, a female private inquiry agent. Almost a century before V. I. Warshawski’s arrival on the scene, Anna Katherine Green had created not one but two women detectives.

  There are a number of differences between Ebenezer Gryce and Sherlock Holmes, but the biggest is this: Anna Katherine Green is out of print, while Conan Doyle never has been. Green is part of that long tradition of women whose voices fall off the margins of the page into obscurity.

  In 1986, in a small room at a Baltimore hotel, twenty-six women came together over stale sweet rolls to discuss the hurdles we had to jump as we built our careers as crime writers. We were concerned that our own hard work and talent weren’t enough to keep our own voices on the page.

  The issues discussed ranged from the isolation that affects all writers, to the marginalization of novels by women—they stayed in print about a third as long as those of our male colleagues; they were reviewed (as we later learned) with a seventh the frequency. At crime conferences, we might be told that it was wonderful we had a hobby, so that we didn’t make heavy demands on our husbands when they came home from work. Libraries with restricted budgets would buy works by men, because, as one librarian put it, women will read books by men, but men won’t read those by women.

  Many readers of crime fiction didn’t know we were alive, let alone producing wonderful novels. Indeed, from 1960 to 1985, a woman had a better chance of winning the Nobel Prize in Physics than she did of winning the Mystery Writers of America’s prize for best novel of the year.

  I had been hearing about these issues for almost a year from women all over the country. With the support of my editor at Ballantine, Mary Ann Eckels, I convened the Baltimore meeting to see if my sister writers cared enough about these problems to organize and change them. Out of that meeting grew Sisters in Crime, and 2006-2007 marked our twentieth anniversary; this collection celebrates that milestone.

  In 1987, when about a hundred women were involved, we decided we needed a structure to help keep people in touch with each other, and to make sure the concerns of all the members were heard. We formed a steering committee: Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Charlotte MacLeod, Nancy Pickard and I were writers; Kate Mattes owned a bookstore; Betty Francis, a corporate executive by day, was a reader with thought-provoking insights into both books and organizations.

  That spring, we decided on our first two projects. One was tracking book reviews to see how women fared in the major national publications, and in our own regional papers and magazines; the other, the brochure Shameless Promotion for Brazen Hussies. Too many of us had been raised to think that onl
y a brazen hussy tooted her own horn—and we knew that if we wanted people to hear about us, we were going to have to start shouting our names in public. A few years later, Carolyn Hart, Linda Grant, and Sharyn McCrumb undertook a heroic effort in creating Sisters’ Books in Print, so we’d have a publication to take to bookstores and libraries.

  In the last twenty years, the organization has grown to nearly four thousand members worldwide. What’s truly wonderful is that readers have grown with us. At first, bookstores or libraries looking at our Books in Print would try a few books by our members. These disappeared off the shelves so quickly that they tried a whole shelf, and that grew in turn to an entire wall. Over and over, bookstores told us they heard from women who said, ‘‘I hadn’t read a mystery since I outgrew Nancy Drew, because the characters just didn’t speak to me. Now I’m finding dozens of books with characters I can identify with.’’ We in Sisters in Crime feel proud of our role in growing the market for mystery readers.

  Since 1987, we’ve had twenty presidents with very different profiles and ideas, but we’ve all shared one goal: the support and promotion of books by women, to make sure that we don’t fall off the page again.

  The stories in this collection are by the women who helped build the organization. We were honored from the start by Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s involvement. A distinguished writer with a long history of important novels, she brought our voice to the larger mystery community; we received recognition and respect sooner than we might otherwise have found either. She has written another important story for this collection, ‘‘Dies Irae,’’ set in her youth, during the waning days of Prohibition. As always, the voices of her characters bring them vividly to life: two sisters, living side by side but distinctly not in harmony.

  Charlotte MacLeod, also on the original steering committee, died several years ago, but we are delighted to have one of her stories, ‘‘Lady Patterly’s Lover,’’ to include here.

  Altogether, there are twenty stories. They show the different sensibilities of the women active in the crime-writing world of the last two decades. P. M. Carlson, with her sparkling homage to Chicago’s theater scene in the 1880s; Nancy Pickard, always taking new risks, showing us an unusual twist on the mob; and Linda Grant, pushing maternal love to its extremes. Libby Fischer Hellmann turned to Grant Park during the 1968 riots over the Democratic convention for inspiration, while Susan Dunlap’s ‘‘Hearing Her Name’’ shows some of the legacy of those turbulent times. Sue Henry’s elegiac prose is awe-inspiring in ‘‘Sister Death,’’ while Barb D’Amato chills in a different way in ‘‘Steak Tartare.’’

  Dive in; see for yourself what sisters who are on the case can accomplish.

  Sara Paretsky

  Chicago, February 2007

  Sister Death

  by Sue Henry

  I am grown old now and weary, and speak more often with Death, though we have yet to strike a bargain, she and I. Still, she comes at times to sit on the low, three-legged stool by my small fire and croons to herself under her breath.

  Then we may trade memories for a space, before she goes out again, for, given a cup of herb tea, she is willing to share rambling reminiscences, half forgotten. And I am comforted, if a bit nostalgic, at recalling past times and company.

  She is well acquainted with Fate, for they are cousins. Time and again I see them together, like shadows in their long, gray dresses, the lace edges of their windblown petticoats repeating the color and rhythm of the ivory foam on the leaden sea, as they move slowly along above the cliffs of the cove to watch the tide come in over the jagged reef beyond the harbor.

  Quiet and unassuming is Death, and has a refined and exquisite sense of timing and taste. She patiently does not initiate, but responds in serenity and forbearance to inevitabilities. She has a liking for old familiar things—songs, tales, her few living acquaintances— especially those of us on whom she must soon lay her cool hand.

  I think she is reluctant to treat with me because she has grown fond of my hearth and companionship. Few enough there are willing to keep company with Death, and she is lonely. Unseeing, most villagers pass her on the road, for she is invisible to the incredulous. They go by with a small shudder, or perhaps a gasp of self-conscious laughter like a sob. She turns her head to watch them, a stoic patience in her clear gray eyes, acknowledging their fear with tolerant understanding and sympathy.

  Some are intuitively aware of her presence. A crippled veteran of the last war once mentioned a figure he feels keeping pace beside his slow, uneven gait, but who is never there when he turns his head. Soon he will recognize and welcome her, I think.

  It must be a disappointment and a burden to be feared, and it is sad that most cannot understand that Death is not the dreaded calculating haunt they imagine, but generous and gentle as a mother, well acquainted with grief.

  She has a lovely, poignant smile. Out of her solitude she values compassionate company of an undemanding kind. Some nights I shake off the shades of sleep to find she has slipped in out of the dark to sit contemplating the coals of my banked fire, elbows on thin knees, chin and hollow cheeks cupped in the graceful curve of her palms and long, slender fingers.

  She has the hands of a young woman, does Death, soft, comforting, and as beautifully translucent as old porcelain.

  Once, when I was far gone with a winter fever, she laid one of them on my brow. It was cool, compelling, and she smiled faintly, but then swiftly removed it and shook her head a little as the hint of a frown drifted across her face. Willing I was, for, as I said, I am weary of being lame and as wrinkled as one of last autumn’s leftover apples. But she refused me and has since touched me not, careful never to brush so much as a fingertip against my hand in accepting a cup, so she must find some value of her own in our relationship.

  I am not impatient, for I know that one day soon her gray cousin will follow Death in at my door and there will be no hesitation in the matter. For the time being, we are sisters of a kind and strangely closer than husband or kin. Sometimes, when the pain flares up in an evil lump and flutters like a bird within the cage of my ribs, she reaches one thin, pale finger to draw a slow circle through the tea in my cup. When I have drained it, if I sit very still, the agony slides away and I grow drowsy in the comfort of my own fire, glamoured by its flickering ribbons.

  The winter was long and dark this year, and spring laggard to appear. But lately there have been a few days warm enough to go out into my greening patch garden of herbs and sit on the bench in the sun to watch the gulls float high over the cliffs of the cove. There I rest, and sort through my memories like an old gypsy with a bag of bright buttons. I recall days and hours, and people I have loved and lost into the long passage of my years, and find that often I can remember them more clearly than those of last week, or even yesterday. It is at times more difficult to recall the name of the boy who brings my wood, or to decide if it was two days or two weeks ago he last knuckled cheerfully on my door.

  I was sitting there this afternoon, warming my brittle bones and watching a redbreast hop along the low garden wall after a beetle, when I heard a merry whistle and the boy came swinging up my path, a bundle of sticks on one shoulder and a grin of greeting on his crooked mouth.

  ‘‘How be you, auntie?’’ he asked, laying the bundle by the door and a gentle hand upon my shoulder.

  I glanced up and was sad and cross to see, among the old, fresh bruises on his face, and worse than usual. One eye had swelled near shut and a split in the corner of his lower lip still oozed a bright bit of crimson.

  As he wiped it away with the back of a hand, his sleeve fell back to reveal dark bluish purple discolorations—clearly the result of his stepfather once again taking out spite where he was able, leaving the marks of his cruel fingers in the flesh of the boy’s forearm.

  I sucked breath through my few remaining teeth and, recognizing the helpless anger in my eyes, he gave me a smile, shook his head, and shrugged shoulders already well muscled from rowi
ng the boat and hauling nets out of the sea.

  ‘‘Ah, auntie, they are but trifling and petty things, already mending. Shall I carry you up a fish when we return?’’

  I turned my gaze down to the harbor and narrowed my eyes to pick out the figure of the brutal man who stood by the boat, shaking a fist and hallooing an impatient demand for the boy’s attendance.

  ‘‘Best you be off, or he’ll make the next blow even less to your liking,’’ I suggested. ‘‘And be you cautious, for he would care little if you came not home, but drowned out of reach of shore.’’

  He gave me only another quick smile for answer, but I caught a hint of thoughtful anger and resentment in his eyes as he turned to scramble away down the steep path to the crescent of sand below, then trotted along to join his tormentor, earning another clout for his trouble.

  With an ache of fury and fear hard under my breastbone, I watched them cast off and turn the boat for open water, the boy spending all possible effort to keep even the sweep of the long oars, while his persecutor rested in the stern of the heavy craft. As they cleared the reef and headed into the stronger waves of open water, a hint of motion drew my eyes back to the shingle and told me I was not alone in my concern for that particular departure.

  Not high on the cliffs, but close together where the boat had rested and the incoming tide lapped the narrow beach, stood those two familiar cousins, petticoats aflutter in the breeze, each with a comforting arm of reassurance about the other’s waist. Patiently, their consideration focused on the pair in that small shell of a vessel moving inexorably away over the rocking surface of the endless gray sea. When it disappeared around the headland, they turned and paced away slowly, stepping together, growing smaller to my sight until, far along the shingle, the cliffs loomed between us and they too were gone.

  A long time later, clouds, dark and growling a heavy threat of oncoming rain, slid across the sun and it grew cool and breezy, even in the shelter there beside my cottage door. Unwilling to surrender my vantage point until I saw the boy home safe, I grasped the stick that I keep against the bench beside me to pull myself, stiff as a rusty gate, to my feet and tottered inside in search of my old blue shawl and a cup of water to soothe my throat, parched with disquiet.