by Amy Stewart
This one drew a grin from Sheriff Heath and Captain Anderson, and a bit of good-natured laughter from the inmates, but they took the pledge.
Fleurette leaned over just then and whispered, “Who was that man I saw here earlier?”
There was a knot in my stomach as I recalled it. “John Courter.”
“The one who wants to be sheriff?”
“Yes.”
The captain folded his prayer book and recited the last line of the pledge from memory. “To endeavor to always live an exemplary life, and to act in such a way as to entitle me to be called a good citizen.”
“He missed the sermon,” Fleurette said.
The prisoners’ voices rumbled through the room, repeating the words, more or less in earnest.
“It wouldn’t have done him any good,” I said.
21
“i hope you cured Cordelia Heath of holding tea parties at the jail,” Norma said the next morning.
I laughed in spite of myself. I never did like the idea of the jail being treated as a backdrop for speeches and luncheons.
“As a campaign event, it was most unusual,” I said. “My unionists were striking against a factory owned by one of the ladies’ husbands, and my murderess answered the questions put to her a little too honestly. I wish the sheriff hadn’t allowed it, but he has a hard time saying no to his wife.”
“But as a concert, it was smashing,” Fleurette said. “The inmates loved our singing.”
“We all did,” I said, but it was more out of habit than anything I could recall of the concert. “The strange thing is that Mr. Courter came to speak to me.”
“What does he want with you?” Norma asked.
“He wouldn’t come right out and say, but he was hinting at something. He knows I went to Morris Plains.”
“I knew someone would find out,” Norma said. “You’re hard to miss. What did Sheriff Heath say?”
“That’s just it. Mr. Courter only wanted me to know. He left without telling the sheriff.”
Norma was bent over our dining room table, where pasteboard, toothpicks, glue, string, and bits of wood were scattered across the drawings that she and Carolyn Borus had been working on. She appeared to be making a miniature house and refused to answer questions about it.
She put down a little pen-knife and said, “Then he’s threatening to expose you to the sheriff, but he hasn’t done it yet.”
“That’s what it seemed like, yes,” I said. “The trouble is, he made no demands of me. He didn’t say what he wanted me to do.”
“Well, surely he was warning you away from the asylum,” Norma said.
“But why? He might not like me meddling in the Kayser case, but why not go to the papers with it? It’s unlike him to be discreet.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want it made public that there’s trouble with the case,” Fleurette offered. “He might not want the papers looking into what happened to Anna Kayser.”
I looked back and forth at the two of them, puzzling it out. “He’s had nothing to do with her. This wasn’t even a criminal case.”
“Well, it’s plain as day that he wants you to leave her alone, and he might want quite a bit more from you,” Norma said. “He can tell Sheriff Heath anytime he wants. It puts him in charge, doesn’t it? Hand me that pot of glue.”
Fleurette and I were waiting for some sort of explanation about the miniature building project Norma had undertaken, but none was forthcoming. Norma never saw any reason to explain herself.
“I hope it’s to be a doll-house,” Fleurette said. “Mother never let me have one.”
“It could be a working model of the jail,” I offered.
Norma ignored us, pushed her spectacles up on her nose, and rolled her sleeves past the elbow. When it became apparent that we weren’t leaving without an explanation, she said, “You’ll remember our plan for a message station in Ridgewood.”
“We’ve been trying to forget about it, but we can’t,” Fleurette said. “It was only this summer. Give us time.”
Norma’s pigeon society, formed with such enthusiasm the year before, had, over the last several months, dwindled to only a few civic-minded women who enjoyed keeping birds and appreciated any activity that put them in the out-of-doors. One of those women owned a small lot behind the druggist in Ridgewood. Norma had the idea to build a pigeon loft there and to home a small flock, so that they could be checked out the way one checks out a book from the library. A person living in the countryside, or someone too ill to go out and post a letter, could take a pigeon home until such time as a message needed to be transmitted back to the druggist. They would simply slide a note into the tube that all such pigeons wore around their ankles, and then release the bird, which would fly directly back to its home loft in Ridgewood to deliver the message.
Believing that the druggist would be pleased to learn that a new method of relaying news between doctors and patients would be installed directly behind his back door, Norma marched in one day to tell him about it. She marched out a few minutes later, having received only scorn for her ideas and opposition to her efforts. When she persisted, the druggist even took his case to the town council, arguing that a pigeon loft in the middle of town would be noisy and unsanitary.
Norma attended the council meeting and stood her ground as only Norma could do. By the end of the evening, the members of the council had to concede that a pigeon loft would surely be no less sanitary than the horse stables that had been operating across the street for decades and would, furthermore, make no more noise than a single automobile, much less the scores of them that roared through town.
Although Norma won the begrudging approval of the town council, the druggist refused to participate in the scheme and said that no patient of his would be sent home with a pigeon under any circumstances, nor would he accept any messages relayed by pigeon post. Lacking his cooperation, Norma had put the project on indefinite hiatus.
“The druggist was only wasting our time. It’s just as well that we found a more worthwhile project,” she said.
“I assume that by ‘we’ you refer to the long-departed remaining members of your club,” Fleurette said. “I don’t recall more than one or two of them even being told about the druggist.”
“Only one or two of them were of any use,” Norma said.
“Then what’s your new idea? It’s hard to imagine a more worthwhile project than equipping a druggist with his own flock of pigeons,” I offered, “but you might as well tell us about it.”
Norma looked at me with pity. “Of course it’s hard for you to imagine. You haven’t been thinking about it like I have. What I’ve realized is that our station should be placed on wheels.”
“Wheels?” I walked around the table and saw that, in fact, she’d fashioned wheels from the sawed-off ends of embroidery thread spools.
“I wondered what happened to those,” Fleurette said.
“Yes, wheels,” Norma repeated. “So it can be moved around.”
“I understand what wheels do,” I said, “but why would you want to move a loft for homing pigeons? Doesn’t it have to stay in the same place so they’ll be able to return to it?”
“We wouldn’t home them in the cart,” Norma said, exasperated. “They’d be homed in their own loft. We’ll use the cart to wheel them down the road. From here to Hackensack, say.”
“Wheel them? By horse?” I asked.
“A horse-drawn pigeon cart?” said Fleurette.
Norma could see that we were enjoying ourselves. She ignored us and leaned over the table, peering at an intricately designed hinge made of hammered tin.
“I’m doing my best to follow along,” I said, “but I’m still having a hard time understanding what the people of Hackensack might do with several dozen homing pigeons on a cart. They can only fly back to their loft. What are the chances that someone in Hackensack would have an urgent need to send a message to the particular person who had put the pigeon on the cart that morning?”
“No one,” Norma said. “We would only be doing it for demonstration purposes.”
I was so vexed that I almost walked away. “Who on earth requires a demonstration that it is possible to raise pigeons in one place, wheel them to another, and then release them?”
Norma looked at me like I was a complete fool. “The Army.”
Fleurette and I stared at each other and then turned incredulously back to Norma, who said, “This is just the thing they need in Europe.”
Fleurette leaned over and whispered, “Is she sending her pigeons to France?”
Norma continued as if she hadn’t heard. “They’re going to need the cart to send messages back to our Army camps from the front. I’m building the first battle-ready pigeon transport cart. For when we go into the war.”
“But I keep hearing they have telephone operators in France,” Fleurette said. “Aren’t they able to get messages through on the wires?”
“As long as you don’t mind the Germans listening in,” Norma said grimly, as if she’d already booted a couple of German spies out of the barn.
“Couldn’t the Germans shoot down a pigeon? Isn’t that sort of thing done for sport?”
“They couldn’t shoot one of mine,” Norma said. “My birds fly very fast and at a very high altitude. I’ve already demonstrated that.” (It was true: she’d spent the entire spring sending her pigeons on long flights and timing the speed at which they flew.)
“But if the Army needed pigeons,” Fleurette persisted, “why haven’t they put out a call for them already? They only ever seem to ask for bandages and shoe leather.”
Norma glued three little wooden sticks into place. She was building the back of the cart, where the pigeons could take some air but couldn’t fly away. “The Army doesn’t know what it needs. If it did, I wouldn’t have to write and explain it to them.”
“Does this mean you’re going to Washington? Am I to be left all alone, with you off in the Army and Constance at the jail?”
Norma knew she was being teased, but she answered anyway. “I might go as far as Washington, but most of the camps are up here around the ports. I suspect I’ll go to the Hoboken piers.”
Fleurette considered that. “Do the other members of the pigeon society know that you’re working for the military? Have they even adopted a position of preparedness on the war question?”
Norma dipped her brush in glue and applied it to a series of toothpicks that would form the bars of a detachable crate. She seemed to be counting under her breath.
“The vote was held just now,” she said. “It passed.”
Over the next hour or so, Norma managed to assemble most of the disparate components of the pigeon cart into a working whole. It was an ingenious little contraption that looked like it belonged in a child’s toy set. I was fairly certain that if she ever grew tired of keeping pigeons, she’d have a future in the construction of miniature vehicles.
While Norma worked, Fleurette picked up one of the newspapers scattered across the table and started to read, with increasing fascination, a story on the front page. She sounded out the words the way a child would, and a couple of times she gasped and muttered to herself.
It was unlike Fleurette to notice anything in the paper that wasn’t a theater review or a new dress pattern. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked.
Fleurette stared up at me as if she were looking at a stranger. Then she turned back to the story. “When they say a man’s face has been ruined at war . . .”
I sat down across from her and waited for the rest of it. By this time Fleurette was actually running her fingers over the words in disbelief. Finally she pushed the paper aside and turned her flushed face to me. She always looked like something blooming, and that was never truer than when she was about to cry, and the blood rushed to her cheeks, and the tears rolled onto her eyelashes. I couldn’t help but notice what a very pretty picture she made.
“The Red Cross is building a hospital in Paris for the particular purpose of helping men whose faces have been entirely shot away. Entirely.”
I did manage to read a daily newspaper. I knew all about the hospital in Paris but had very little to offer on the subject. Fleurette picked up the paper again and read to us.
“It says right here that a man came in from the firing line with nothing to show that he ever had a face,” and here her voice floated up into a note of high alarm before she swallowed and read on. “He had only two slits under the eyebrows and a few teeth in the lower jaw. They say his face looked like the crater of a volcano.”
She slapped the paper down, scattering some of Norma’s toothpicks. “And do you know what he wrote when someone came in and stared at him? Wrote, because, of course, he can’t speak. He wrote, ‘Don’t worry about me. I still have my sight.’”
“Some of them don’t,” Norma said.
“Then why haven’t we gone to help?” Fleurette demanded. “We’re a nation of a hundred million. Don’t you think we ought to do something?”
“The Red Cross is helping,” Norma said. “That’s why they’re building the hospital. And you can go down any day of the week to roll bandages or knit socks.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Fleurette interjected, although I noticed that she didn’t leap up and run into town to roll bandages. “We should go over and put a stop to it.”
“If it were that simple, we would’ve gone already,” I said. “Surely you can see that people don’t want to send their sons and brothers into a war that doesn’t involve us. What if Francis had to go? What would you make of that?”
“We should be prepared to go,” Norma said, “which is why I’m making this cart.”
“That’s right!” Fleurette said. “We should be prepared. Why aren’t we running drills and building ships and all of that?”
“We are doing quite a bit of that already,” I said. “But no one wants to pay the war tax. Are you prepared to pay? Are you ready to give up your singing lessons, and make do with whatever old scraps of fabric you have sitting around, and to give up your sugar and your tea? Are you prepared to hand over your wages to the War Department?”
At that, Fleurette sighed and bent over the newspaper again. There we were, the three of us: a diorama of Americans’ position on the war in the waning months of 1916. We were no closer to an answer than anyone else, but we all had the uneasy feeling that something was coming, and we’d be swept up in it.
I had an uneasy feeling about John Courter as well, and no better idea of what was coming, or when.
22
“i might have tortured Mr. Townley to make him agree to see us,” Geraldine said, when we met at the appointed hour a few days later. “I told him that I was a New York attorney and that I had information that might be damaging to his reputation. I believe he thought I’d uncovered some nasty personal business of his. I just didn’t want him running to his wife with the entire story before we had a chance at him. This has turned into quite the house of cards, and I want the cards to fall in the right order.”
There was something brassy and hard-nosed about the way Geraldine talked about him. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” I asked her. “I think you like playing the part of the lady cop.”
“I just might,” she said, as we reached the little brick building that housed Mr. Townley’s office. “I suspect I’d enjoy making an arrest. You do, don’t you? You get a little thrill from it.”
“Well, handcuffs do make a satisfying sound when they land on a pair of wrists.”
A lady in a great fur coat and an elaborately trimmed hat overheard us as we went in the building and gave us a look of affront.
“I suppose it doesn’t do to make a joke about arresting someone,” Geraldine whispered as we went down the hall.
I hadn’t told Geraldine about my run-in with John Courter. It wouldn’t change what we were about to do. The possibility that Mr. Courter wanted me to stay away from Anna Kayser’s case only furthered my resolve t
o see it through. Anyway, the damage was already done: I’d snuck around, lied my way into an asylum, and pursued a case that wasn’t mine. To see it through couldn’t possibly make it worse. If anything, I wanted some answers before I got caught.
Joseph Townley kept no secretary and merely called for us to enter when we knocked at his door. His was a tiny office no larger than a broom closet. A rolling desk was pushed against the wall and Mr. Townley occupied the only chair. He stood quickly and offered the chair to each of us in turn, but after some shifting about we all remained standing.
Joseph Townley was a jowly man with a prominent chin and the expressive eyes of a family dog. He had a thick head of hair that rose up from his forehead in a smooth wave and flopped over to one side. He wore heavy eyeglasses and an agreeably rumpled suit. In fact, he was, in every way, an agreeably rumpled man in the middle of life, with a pleasantly deep voice and a ready smile. Even in the face of whatever news might be coming to him, he was considerate and friendly. He seemed, in other words, too trustworthy to be involved in a scandal.
“I’m sorry we must meet under these circumstances, ladies,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting a woman cop and a lady lawyer. I hope you haven’t come to arrest me.” He gave an awkward laugh. We made him nervous.
“It concerns your wife,” I said.
“Virginia? What’s happened to her? I just had a letter this morning.”
“Then you know where she’s gone?” Geraldine asked.
He looked back and forth at us, confused. “Why—she’s with her sister, over in Newark. There’s a baby on the way and her sister’s been ordered to bed.”
I realized all at once that we’d relied upon Anna Kayser identifying Virginia Townley from our description, but I had no way of knowing with any certainty if she was in fact Joseph Townley’s wife, or another woman of the same general appearance. How many frail, nervous redheads answering to the name of Virginia were in circulation in Rutherford?
Geraldine started to say something, but I put a hand on her arm. “Pardon me, Mr. Townley. Does your wife favor smaller hats, in bright colors? Has she a yellow one, with a red silk poppy in the band? And a dark green hat with a gold military braid that comes around the side? And a floppy sort of velvet hat, with berries made of glass?” I was surprised at how easily I’d recalled that hat-rack. It was only Fleurette’s influence that would ever make me notice glass berries pinned to a hat.