by Amy Stewart
The crowd roared and I took a step back. At any moment someone would turn around and see Sheriff Heath standing there, calmly, his hands in his pockets. They could turn on him, a mob this size.
“No, I’m not going to say a word about any of that,” John Courter shouted. “Why should I? You have the facts in front of you. The inmates are walking right out of jail. You—the taxpayers, the citizens, the voters—you built him this fine stone prison, with bars on every window, and locks on every door, and still they escape! Criminals and madmen walk out whenever they please.”
Sheriff Heath stayed perfectly still and kept his chin at a very dignified angle. He had a way of looking generally at the air in front of him, without meeting anyone’s eye in particular, and this habit was serving him well as everyone turned around to gawk at him.
“Now, you might be thinking that the blame for these escapes rests not with the sheriff, but with his lady deputy, whose name has been in the papers in connection with last year’s escape and the one that took place here just recently. No sheriff in his right mind would put a woman in charge of guarding dangerous criminals. Let them serve tea to the female inmates, and pass out handkerchiefs for the poor unfortunate girls to cry into, but anything more than that puts us all in danger. Common sense tells you that much. Can you imagine your wife guarding a dangerous criminal?”
Sheriff Heath had a calm resolve about him and seemed naturally to know how to be the better man in a situation such as this. John Courter had spotted him—of course he had. But still the sheriff maintained his posture of unruffled detachment.
I, on the other hand, was the very opposite of unruffled. John Courter was, in every way, a small-minded, petty, vindictive man unworthy of public office. I didn’t care to stand at the edge of a crowd and listen to him hurl insults and lies at us.
What made it worse, though, was that the crowd seemed to love it. It was an uncertain time in Bergen County: there was labor unrest in the factories, a mistrust of immigrants who might be German sympathizers, and the very real fear that a munitions depot might go up like so many crates of firecrackers at the hands of secret agents of the Kaiser. And most of all, there was the absolute terror of war—a war we surely couldn’t avoid much longer.
These people were looking for an enemy, and John Courter had one on offer.
It was infuriating. I wanted to march right up the courthouse steps and snatch the bullhorn out of his hands.
But then he continued, and it was just what I’d feared.
“Do you remember Harry Core, the jewel thief who was arrested after the fine work by our police, in cooperation with the police in Newark? Of course you do. A menace to every merchant on Main Street. He deserved to go away for a good long while, but did you know that he was locked up for only a month before he managed to smuggle a file into Sheriff Heath’s jail?”
Here a gasp rose from the audience, and such murmuring and shouting and shifting about that he was obliged to wait for it to simmer down before continuing.
“No, you didn’t! You haven’t read about that one in the papers, because your sheriff kept it from you! My office uncovered the facts, and here they are: So light is the security at Mr. Heath’s jail, and so carefree is life for the inmates, that it’s no trouble at all to slip in a weapon or a file. Baron von Matthesius walked right out last year. Tony Hajnacka jumped into the river. Now Harry Core tried to saw his way out with a metal file. That’s the record of the man running for Congress.”
Now we had reporters rushing toward us. A few of them sidled up next to me, but I refused to look at them. I leaned over to Sheriff Heath and whispered, “This is what Providencia Monafo wanted to tell me. I believe that Mrs. Pattengill . . .”
“Shhhh” was all he said.
Detective Courter still had the podium, and went on as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
“And that’s not the only way they get out of jail. Just look at the morality cases you see coming through this courthouse. You read the paper. You know what I’m talking about. Girls lead lives of degradation and sin, and what’s done about it? A troublesome lady policeman comes along and defends the little minx. She talks the judge into setting free a girl who is morally compromised and diseased—letting her right back out onto the streets that were her downfall. Constance Kopp—and how’s that for a good German name?—would open the doors to our state reformatories and let degenerates and mental defectives walk right out. What do you say to that?”
I was starting to back away. I could sense what was coming, like a stampede of horses that can be felt before it is seen.
Over the roar of the crowd, he called, “She’s done just that, gentlemen! Sheriff Heath’s lady deputy has been sneaking into the Morris Plains Insane Asylum to conspire with the very lunatics your judges saw fit to send there. She has a plan to have them released, and she’s found an unscrupulous New York lawyer to help her to do it. How do you like your tax dollars going to set lunatics free?”
We couldn’t get the reporters away from us. They stood shoulder to shoulder alongside us, their notepads open, waiting to record our every utterance. They were so close that I could count the crumbs in their beards. One of them tapped me with his notepad and I swatted him.
I couldn’t bear to look at Sheriff Heath, but he waved the reporters away in the most ordinary manner, as if nothing had happened, and walked off briskly.
I followed him back to the jail. A few reporters trailed along behind us, but most gave up when it became clear we weren’t talking.
That’s when we saw the leaflets. One was freshly glued to the deputies’ entrance to the jail. When I turned around, I realized that they were plastered to every lamp-post, running in a perfect line all the way from the courthouse, down Main Street, past the library, and on to the train station.
“DEMON DEPUTY” read the title, in bold type across the top.
Under that odious headline was a murky portrait of none other than myself, so poorly printed that one could only make out the general shape of a woman’s suit and hat, and below that a screed against me and Sheriff Heath that read:
Keep Robert N. Heath’s Dangerous Ideas Out of Congress
Temperamentally Unfit
Want of Experience
Failed in Office—Inmates Escaped
Blindly Loyal to Troublesome Lady Policeman Who Frees Lunatics from Asylum
Trained by William Conklin, Now Running to Succeed Him, Equally Unfit
It ended with this:
Vote John Ramsey for Congress and
John Courter for Sheriff
Sheriff Heath tried to rip the leaflet off, but it clung to the door. “Never mind,” he mumbled, and ushered me through before the reporters caught up to us again.
As soon as we were inside, I stopped him. I couldn’t bear to walk to his office before I explained myself. When I took him by the shoulder, I noticed how thin he’d become, and how dark the shadows were under his eyes. This campaign had taken its toll. Now I’d made it worse.
“I’m not trying to free a lunatic,” I said, “but I did go to Morris Plains.”
There was such weariness in his expression. “You saw a good case, and you pursued it,” he said.
“After you told me to stay away. It was reckless of me. I knew I could be caught, but I thought only of . . .”
“You thought only of Mrs. Kayser. That was the right way to think about it.” There was no gladness or pride in his voice, only fatigue. I wasn’t sure he believed what he was saying.
“If it matters, I now have reason to hope that she will be freed. Her husband put her there deliberately so that he could take up with another woman. Mr. Ward has the pictures.”
A flicker of recognition passed across his face. “The telephone call.”
That had been another lie. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
He put a finger under his collar to loosen it and said, “You shouldn’t be sorry. I wish you’d told me, but I can see why you wouldn’t. This damned
election has everything turned around the wrong way.”
I hadn’t entirely unburdened myself. “I knew Mr. Courter was planning something against you, or against me. I just didn’t know what. He threatened me with it the night of the Salvation Army program. If I’d only gone to you then—”
“John Courter threatened you? In my jail?”
“He made it plain that he knew I was pursuing Mrs. Kayser, but he didn’t tell you about it. I couldn’t understand why. He was obviously saving it for the last few days of the campaign, when we’d have so little time to defend ourselves. It still doesn’t explain why he wanted me to know.”
Sheriff Heath shook his head. “Don’t spend your time trying to understand John Courter. And don’t pay any mind to these leaflets. It only reflects badly on their side. The voters know it’s nonsense.”
“The voters know what they read on lamp-posts. You’re going to have to put something out in response.”
“If you mean that you want me to defend you . . .” Sheriff Heath said, looking a little amused by the idea.
“I can defend myself, but you’re going to have to do better by your own record.”
“I could do without a lecture about my campaign. I get one at home every night.”
“I’m not lecturing you,” I protested, so sternly that we both laughed. Something was a little easier between us. Of course I was lecturing him. Norma Kopp herself couldn’t have done it better.
We turned at last to walk to his office. “I know how he found out about Harry Core.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It was Mrs. Pattengill. She must’ve overheard something. One of the guards talking, maybe.”
“I won’t blame this on a guard.”
“No, but it had to be her,” I protested. “Is that how she got released so easily? Did she make a deal with the prosecutor’s office? Was John Courter handling her case?”
He sighed. “I believe he was.”
“How can you be so calm about it?”
“Miss Kopp. Don’t you see that it’s better for us this way? He’s putting all his worst qualities right out on display for the public to see. You notice that he hasn’t said a word about what a sheriff’s actual duties might be, or why he’s best qualified to carry them out. A man who does nothing but cast out hate and blame couldn’t possibly be elected to office.”
“But the crowd loved it.”
“It doesn’t matter about the crowd. Anyone can draw out a few hundred people. What matters is what the voters decide on Election Day. You saw all those reporters. They’re all racing back to their desks right now to see who can write up the most colorful version of that speech. It’ll sell papers, but the voters won’t like it. What they like is a lawman with a steady hand.”
“But—”
“Don’t let him wind you up. He doesn’t even want the job. It hasn’t occurred to him that the sheriff spends most of his time in the company of criminals. He has to live with them. He can’t hate them, or he’d be miserable in the job. There’s simply no way to run a jail if you can’t bring yourself to see things from their perspective, just a little. I don’t think Mr. Courter ever will. He’s been on the prosecutor’s side for too long. It’s his job to put them into jail, to prove their wrongdoing, and to make them out to be evildoers that deserve to be locked away. I suppose that’s well enough for a prosecutor, but with ideas like that he’d hate being sheriff. He’ll be entirely relieved when Mr. Conklin wins and he can stay over there in the courthouse.”
“But if he’s so ill-suited to be sheriff, why didn’t he run for some other office?”
“He could have, but for whatever reason, the party wanted to back him as sheriff. That’s the way it works—at the beginning of the year, the party operatives sit down and have a look at who’s willing to stand for election, and they parcel it out. I suspect they didn’t want Mr. Courter running for an office they actually hoped to win.”
“Then you don’t think he has a chance,” I said.
“He never did.” He shrugged off his coat and dropped into his chair, gesturing to me to do the same. “Miss Kopp, please trust me when I say that the voters are with us. I’ve done this before.”
“But—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought. Please remember that I have far more at stake than you do. William Conklin will do just fine in this election, and you will still have a job and go on just as before. But if I lose, I have nothing. I’d have to get hired on in some sort of business. I’d be a clerk with a ledger-book.”
He couldn’t possibly be serious. “Why on earth would you work as a clerk? Some town around here must be in want of a police chief. If nothing else, you could be a constable. There’s no reason to think you’d have to give up working in law enforcement.”
But Sheriff Heath looked at me sorrowfully and said, “Cordelia won’t have it. That is to say, she won’t have me. She won’t be a policeman’s wife any longer. I’m not to carry a gun or put myself in harm’s way. If I don’t go to Congress, I’ll have to set us up in a new home and find some way, outside of the law, to pay for everything that a wife and three children might want.”
“Three children?” The Heaths had a little boy and a baby coming on two years of age.
He looked shocked: he hadn’t meant to say it. But of course I knew exactly what he meant and wondered why I hadn’t guessed at it already.
“When the time is right, please give my congratulations to Mrs. Heath,” I mumbled.
I understood at that moment why he’d been out every night in the last few weeks, making his speeches and shaking hands. At first he’d tried to avoid his campaign duties, seeing it as a pleasant diversion for Cordelia but little more, but as the weeks wore on, he’d been running himself ragged.
And what took him away from his duties, what caused him to scramble his priorities like eggs in a mixing bowl, was a baby. Not just any baby, but a third baby. One baby is a call to joy, a second baby is a call to responsibility, but a third baby is a summons to put aside all extraneous concerns and to lay one’s shoulder to the wheel for a good decade or two.
Sheriff Heath had the look of a man who’d just put his shoulder to the wheel and would not be looking up until he was a grandfather.
I couldn’t blame him. That was the way of family obligations. I was a breadwinner myself, of course, and understood that the weight I had to bear was light in comparison to that of a man with three young children. It tore at me just a bit to see that he’d been put in the position of having to make a choice between the vocation that mattered so much to him—which was also what mattered to me—and his family.
Of course he chose his family. Anyone would.
If I had allowed myself to think of Sheriff Heath’s defeat at all, I imagined that he would return to law enforcement. He might find work in another town, and he could run again for sheriff in Hackensack in only three years. I suppose I let myself believe that he’d find a place for me, too, and that we might work together again someday.
It was such a faint and fleeting notion that I only just at that moment realized that I’d been entertaining it at all. But now even that idea had been struck down—all over the prospect of a baby in a bassinet.
I am ashamed to admit how much I resented that baby.
30
“a third one doesn’t make any difference,” Norma said as we settled onto the train to Plattsburg. “It hardly costs anything extra to feed it, and it won’t take up any room at first. We used to put Fleurette in a drawer.”
“You did not!” Fleurette gasped. “I’d still be having nightmares about it! That’s like sleeping in a coffin!”
“We didn’t close the drawer,” Norma said, “except when you had the colic. It was the only way any of us could sleep.”
“Never mind about the baby,” I said irritably. Norma had the most maddening way of throwing any conversation off the rails. “I only meant to say that I didn’t unde
rstand why he ever wanted a seat in Congress, and I’ve been especially mystified lately as to why he’s been working so hard for it. Now I know.”
“I don’t picture him working in a shop,” Fleurette said.
“He didn’t say a shop. He said he’d be a clerk somewhere. He could work in an office like Francis does.”
“Selling baskets?” said Fleurette.
“Selling something, I suppose,” I said. “It’s what businesses do. But it won’t come to that. John Ramsey’s hardly bothering to campaign, and Sheriff Heath’s out every night. He’s entirely certain that the voters are with him.”
Norma looked up at me and raised that heavy right eyebrow of hers. “John Ramsey is certain of something, too.”
The timing of Fleurette’s concert at the Plattsburg camp couldn’t have been worse, coming as it did right before the election, but Sheriff Heath encouraged me to go, in fact ordered me to. Although he wouldn’t say it aloud, he probably thought the last few days of campaigning would be easier if I put myself on a train.
“But he didn’t dismiss you, did he?” Norma asked.
“Quite the opposite,” I said. “He wasn’t nearly as bothered by it as he might have been. He said I was accountable to Anna Kayser above all, and that I did right by her.”
“He sounds far too calm for a man whose livelihood is at stake.”
“He doesn’t believe it is,” I said.
“We’ll see about that.”
Fleurette sat with us long enough to coax a few coins from me for the dining car, then left us to join the other girls from Mrs. Hansen’s Academy, who were seated together several rows away. As chaperones we had no real responsibilities at the moment, other than to make sure the girls stayed on board the train, so Norma and I sat together looking, I admit, spinsterly with our books and our carpetbags alongside us.