Shadows of the White City

by Jocelyn Green

  Sylvie stepped closer, wishing they were somewhere more private. “Stop being ridiculous. There’s no need to be jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous, Sylvie. I am betrayed. There is a difference. I’m betrayed because you are betraying our ideal of life without men. I can see what’s happening,” she hissed, fierce again. Afraid.

  Understanding blunted Sylvie’s irritation, even as she wondered what Kristof must think. “Our ideal was a fulfilling life, regardless of marital status. I never committed to life without men. I only said I wouldn’t waste time pining away for one. Let’s talk about it later, all right? I want to see if any progress has been made on Rose’s case.”

  “Forget it, Sylvie. You do your thing, I’ll do mine. I can get along just fine—”

  “Miss Wright,” Kristof cut in. “I suggest you go home before you say anything else you’ll regret. I’ll escort you to the streetcar if you wish.”

  Beth snorted and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Not a chance. I don’t need your help. And you know what? Neither does Sylvie.” She wheeled and walked away, her heels clicking a strident rhythm until she pushed outside.

  A breeze slipped in, stirring the fetid air. Sylvie crossed her arms, biting back a roiling frustration. “I’m sorry she was so rude to you.”

  “That’s her business. Not yours.”

  Sylvie hesitated. “The people who are closest to us sometimes hurt us the most.”

  He bent his head to hers so the policeman couldn’t hear. “The people closest to us shouldn’t want to. They should be the first ones to lift us up, cheer us on, forgive our faults, and believe we can do better.”

  She felt again that the moment was bigger than their surroundings. She knew without him saying it that he would be the one to lift her up, forgive her, believe in her. If she would only let him.

  “Excuse me,” the officer called from his desk. “Is there something else I can help you with?” Coarse grey eyebrows overhung his close-set eyes. Narrow shoulders beneath his uniform made his protruding belly all the more pronounced.

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you, Officer Thornhill.” Sylvie read his name from his uniform. “I’d like to check the status of a missing person case. I reported Rozalia Dabrowski missing on August sixteenth. She’s been missing since the fourteenth. Could you please let me know if anything has turned up?”

  Gaslight from the wall sconce blinked on his badge. “How old is she?”

  “Seventeen.” Sylvie reached up to shove a loose hat pin back in.

  Officer Thornhill made a clucking sound against his teeth. “We get a lot of these cases, ma’am. Twenty percent of girls in this age bracket, we never hear from again.”

  “We’re aware of the statistics,” Kristof cut in. “Please check the file and let us know what you find.”

  The policeman held up his hands in mock surrender and rolled back in his chair. His feet slurred over the floor and down a corridor, keys jangling the handcuffs at his hip.

  When he returned minutes later, he laid a file folder on the desk and slapped it triumphantly. “Case closed. Lucky we still have the file.”

  “What? You found her? Why on earth wasn’t I informed?” Sylvie strained to make sense of the news.

  Thornhill picked up his coffee mug and threw back the swill before slamming it back on the desk. “It appears this entire case was a misunderstanding.” He opened the file and pulled out an envelope. “I have here a letter from one Rozalia Dabrowski notifying us that she was never lost, she just moved out, and that no police resources ought to be expended to find her. See for yourself. At the bottom, she wrote that she notified you, as well.” He handed the envelope to her.

  With trembling hands, she removed the piece of paper inside.

  This letter serves as proof of my well-being. I’ve left home of my own accord for personal reasons. . . .

  Kristof read over her shoulder. “Is that her handwriting?”

  “It is. And it’s the same paper she used to write me.” There was no use keeping it hidden, now. To Thornhill, she confessed, “A similar note to this one was hand-delivered to my apartment the night of August sixteenth or the early morning of August seventeenth.”

  “Well, there you have it,” the officer said. “According to the file, this letter was delivered to the station in person on Thursday, August seventeenth. Yeah, that’s right. I was working that day. Case closed.”

  “Who delivered the message?” Kristof asked.

  “She did. Rozalia delivered it herself.”

  Letter creasing in her hand, Sylvie pressed a fist to her chest. “What did she look like? What was she wearing?”

  Laughing, Officer Thornhill tugged the letter from her grip and slipped it back into the file. “Lady, I have no recollection of what she wore that day. But I do remember that she matched the description you gave, if you were the one to report her missing.” He consulted the folder again. “Blond hair, blue eyes, five foot five, about one hundred twenty-five pounds. Same birth date and background story. It all checked out.”

  There must be thousands of girls in Chicago like that. She showed him the photograph. “Was it her?”

  “If that’s Rozalia, then apparently so.”

  Kristof looked skeptical. “Was anyone with her when she came to deliver the letter?”

  “Nope.” Officer Thornhill crossed his arms, resting them atop his paunch. “I’d think you’d be pleased. This is good news I’m giving you, considering the alternatives.”

  “I just—” Sylvie fought to regain her composure as she looked at the image of Rose’s smiling face the day she turned seventeen. The photograph had been taken just after she’d received what she’d most wanted: a first-edition copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. “I can’t believe it!” Rose had exclaimed and wrapped Sylvie in a fierce hug. “It must have cost a fortune. I’ll work a month for free to help pay for it!” When Sylvie had refused the offer, Rose had vowed to channel her enthusiasm to turning book browsers into purchasers. It was a promise she’d kept.

  Voices ricocheted from the two wings on either side of Sylvie. “I just don’t understand.”

  “There’s not a lot to it. This is the best possible outcome. Be happy!” Out of nowhere, a brown tabby cat leapt onto his desk and waved its tail beneath Thornhill’s chin. He scratched the cat behind its ears. “Isn’t that right, Sergeant Whiskers?” He chuckled. “This is what happens when you feed an alley cat. He thinks he owns the place.”

  The cat came up to Sylvie and nuzzled its head beneath her hand. As she stroked its silken fur, she couldn’t help but think of Tiny Tim and wonder if he was still with Rose.

  “People say cats are aloof,” said Thornhill, “but not this one. He’s never met a stranger. Not that the feeling is always mutual. Your daughter, for instance, couldn’t stand him.”

  Sylvie balked. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. As soon as Sergeant Whiskers appeared, her eyes started watering, she started sneezing, and she said her throat would close up if I didn’t shut him away. She tried being polite about it, saying he was a handsome cat but they had always made her sick.”

  Sylvie’s fingers dug into Kristof’s arm before she realized what she was doing and released him. Something new was coursing through her, a cocktail of justified suspicion and fear searching for a release that could not be had.

  “I don’t know who came here with that letter,” she said, “but I know it wasn’t my Rozalia. Which means even if Rose wrote it, someone else pretended to be her in order to close the case.”

  Thornhill squinted. “A lookalike, you say? I can’t see why that young woman would come here acting like someone she’s not.”

  “Rose loved cats. They never made her sick,” said Kristof. “The young lady posing as her was hired for her physical likeness, no doubt. But by whom?”

  Sylvie rubbed the goosebumps on her arms. “Someone who doesn’t want Rose to be found.”

  Sylvie wasn’t crazy. But she felt like she was
coming out of her skin.

  She and Kristof had stayed at the police station until Officer Thornhill agreed to talk to his superior about reopening the case. Even that meager concession had taken far too long.

  She paced her apartment, looking out the windows, though night had fallen and all she could see were coronas encircling the lampposts and the shadows that sometimes moved beneath them. Suspicion was the lens through which she heard and saw. Every man coming back to the Sherman House hotel down the block was a man to be investigated. Footsteps belonged to stalkers. Every couple returning from the theater district might be accomplices, villains in their own drama. Closed carriages held secrets and vice. Barking dogs clawed her unraveling nerves.

  The clock in the parlor struck midnight. Another hour gone, and Rose still lost. Another day done, and her daughter still in trouble, wondering why Sylvie had believed the note she’d clearly been forced to write. Dear Mimi . . . Your loving Rose. She should have known by those clues alone. She should have done something, anything. She ought to have acted on her doubts instead of reasoning them away.

  Her father would have believed her. Stephen would not have slept but would have taken up arms and gone after Rose. There was nothing he would not have done—but even so, would he have found her? Could anyone now, or was it too late to hope?

  The clock ticked on. More time spent.

  Shadows gathered inside her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 1893

  “No.” Kristof dropped his hands, and the orchestra dropped the concerto with a discordant crash, notes from strings and winds falling into each other. He looked pointedly at Gregor, who stood apart, in front. As first violin, he had the solo in Beethoven’s concerto for violin and orchestra. “Your attention, gentlemen. Watch my cues. Anticipate.”

  It was eight o’clock in the morning, and he knew full well most of his musicians didn’t want to be there. But he wouldn’t have called this rehearsal if they didn’t need it. They had one more week of concerts to perform at the World’s Fair, and if he had anything to do with it, they would give their absolute best.

  He raised his baton. “Measure eighty-seven.” He cued the strings, pianissimo, a delicate support to the beginning of Gregor’s solo. His brother’s bow flew as he ascended the scale with eighth notes and sixteenth notes. The articulation was perfect, exquisite. But he was fortissimo when he should have been pianissimo, which meant a crescendo had nowhere to go.

  Frustration boiled in Kristof’s veins, but for the sake of the orchestra, he let it go.

  Until Gregor decided to rush the solo, forcing the rest of the musicians to choose—follow Gregor’s unreliable rhythm to stay in synchronization, or follow their conductor’s leading and sound like they couldn’t keep up.

  “Enough!” Kristof bellowed. Again, the music smashed to a halt.

  All except for Gregor. “Just wait, this part is so beautiful, and you haven’t let me get through it once today,” he said, keeping his jaw firmly on the chin rest.

  Kristof could not remember being angrier than he was right now. He stormed off his conductor’s box and clamped his hand around the neck of Gregor’s violin, choking off the solo. “I am your conductor,” he seethed. “Any more insubordination, and you will not be playing that solo at all.”

  Gregor seemed unimpressed. And unpersuaded.

  Kristof wanted to throttle him. Gregor still hadn’t come clean about where he’d gone last night when he’d said he was headed straight home.

  “Calm down, brother,” Gregor muttered. “I know what’s really bothering you, but it won’t do to take it out on me. Now, if you don’t mind, shall we get on with it?”

  Just who was conducting whom here? Kristof turned his back on his brother and took the box once more. “Change of plans,” he announced. “We’re taking the concerto off the program. Take out your music for Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” A lovely piece with zero violin solos. “Cymbals, be ready for your cue.”

  They began.

  This was better. Baton in hand, Kristof felt the music flowing through his outspread arms. This was the piece for his mood, full of angst and drama.

  Gregor was right. Kristof was angry, and though his brother was certainly part of the cause, he wasn’t the entire sum of it.

  The music slowed, punctuated by a brief silence, and began again with bright flutes. Then bows sawed across strings in monotone repetition, the epitome of panic. Of pacing. Of Sylvie as she’d tried to cope last night.

  He’d heard her crying in her apartment, and he hadn’t been able to do a thing about it. Their visit to the police station had shaken her, for good reason. And he found that she could not be stricken without him feeling the blow himself.

  Baton in hand, he waved that aside and poured himself into channeling the rhapsody, conducting it from a walking pace to a robust frenzy up and down the scale, cymbals crashing. Then, putting his finger to his lips, he slowed and quieted them for a few measures before bringing the piece to its rousing, climactic end.

  He was sweating by the time they finished. Mopping his brow with a folded handkerchief, Kristof allowed himself a small smile. “Yes. That ought to please the masses.”

  They sent up a cheer in response. All of them, he noticed, save Gregor.

  At ten o’clock, Kristof finally concluded the rehearsal with a command to be back in their chairs no later than twenty minutes to noon.

  When the hall had mostly cleared, Gregor approached him, and Kristof stepped off the box. “That was a mean trick,” Gregor said. “Taking away my solo.”

  “That’s what happens when the soloist can’t be trusted to follow his conductor.”

  Gregor shrugged. “Maybe the conductor is a little too confining for everyone.”

  Kristof doubted that. “How about you master your job before telling me how to do mine?”

  “Does that mean you don’t still want to do both?” Gregor kept his face perfectly serious, then broke into a laugh. “Never mind that now. I have a surprise for you.”

  “Does this have anything to do with where you were last night?”

  Grinning, Gregor punched his arm. “Come on, I’ll show you. But we’ll have to hurry if we’re going to be back here on time.”

  After locking their instruments in the rehearsal hall, they went out into the summer morning. The white buildings surrounding the basin in the Court of Honor reflected the dazzling sun. Kristof tugged down the brim of his hat.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Off the fairgrounds. Trust me.”

  Tall order. Especially when the mystery journey included taking a streetcar north, to the corner of Harrison and South Clark. It was the outer edge of the Levee.

  Disappointment sank to the bottom of Kristof’s gut. “Tell me this is not where you’ve been spending your free time.”

  “Suspend your judgment, oh holy one, and follow me. And we ought to hurry. I’d check the time, but I don’t have a watch.” He waggled his eyebrows and trotted across the street to a pawn shop on the corner. Turning back, he said, “Yet.”

  Kristof’s dread dissolved as he followed his brother inside. Tables of secondhand goods crowded the small establishment with everything a household might need—or in this case, might need to trade for cash. Furniture, candlesticks, clothing, pots and pans, crockery. Mediocre landscapes in oil hung from the walls in cheap frames. The space was stale and humid, not to mention a nightmare of disorganization.

  “This way.” Gregor threaded between a rack of cast-off gowns and some kind of rusting farm implement.

  Kristof followed him to the rear. There, on the top shelf inside a glass case, was their father’s pocket watch, shining among a display of gold rings and bracelets.

  “Mr. Goldstein?” Gregor called. “A little help over here, if you please.”

  With a flick of his wrist, the proprietor finished dusting a cuckoo clock on the wall, then tossed the rag over one shoulder and shuffled to where the Bar
toks waited. “Yes?”

  Gregor pointed to the timepiece. “If you please. I’d like to show this to my brother.”

  Mr. Goldstein unlocked the case and withdrew the item, then laid it on a square of green felt atop the case. His balding head shone in the fractured sun slanting through a cracked windowpane.

  “I told you I’d find it,” Gregor said.

  Kristof ran a fingertip over the engraved surface, then opened it to see the diamonds in its face. “So you did.” It seemed no worse for wear either, thank goodness. He eyed Mr. Goldstein. “What are you asking for it?”

  The man named his price. For what the piece was worth, it was only slightly north of fair. But even if they managed to haggle him down, it was more than they could afford. “It will be a while before we can claim it.” But for that price, hopefully no one else would beat them to it.

  Beside him, Gregor deflated. “Can’t you at least be happy that we found it? For once in your life, can you enjoy the victory without thinking about what’s next?”

  Irritation crawled over Kristof’s skin. “Not thinking about what’s next is exactly what gets you into trouble.”

  Gregor scowled.

  “If there be nothing else, then, gentlemen . . .” With fingers stained with silver polish, Mr. Goldstein replaced the watch in the case and locked it.

  “How about a deposit?” Gregor asked him. “We’ll pay what we can now, and the rest later. You keep it for us until then.”

  “Sorry, mister. That’s against store policy. We don’t hold things back from customers willing to pay in full.”

  Kristof folded his arms. “How long does something like that typically last before someone takes it off your hands?”

  “Depends. The more expensive items sit longer, sometimes. Then again, discerning shoppers check pawnshops first for hidden gems like this.” Sliding the dusting rag from his shoulder, he resumed dusting his wares.

  Gregor’s lips drew a thin line across his face. “I’ll get it back, Kristof. That’s a promise you can count on. Don’t worry about how. I’ll take care of it.”