by Amy Stewart
But we always had a woman or two who managed to stay at home and do the cooking and cleaning while still finding time to commit a monstrous crime. Some of them stitched their drunken husbands into the sheets while they slept and beat them with broom handles. Some of them poisoned their mothers-in-law with spoonfuls of sugar laced with arsenic. Some of them set their houses on fire. They did all of this without ever leaving home.
I wasn’t convinced that giving women the same chores they’d been doing right before they fired the gun or slipped the poison into the sugar would go very far in reforming their characters. I would’ve rather seen them take a course or learn a trade, but we had nothing like that on offer. Instead I tried to keep them busy throughout the day, with the exception of older women like Providencia, whom I permitted to lie down in the afternoon and rest their eyes, as I had known women of that age to do all my life. I could think of no advantage in depriving a stout, mature woman, who had been on her feet all day, of a little rest in the afternoon. And Providencia Monafo looked like she had been on her feet her entire life.
When I took the rags she’d been wearing out to the burn bin behind the garage, I stood for a minute under the gray and chilly sky. The steam heating had only just come on for the winter and it made the jail’s top floor unseasonably warm. The wind stung as it came across the Hackensack River, but it was exactly what I needed. I shook my skirts out and loosened my collar.
The lights were just coming on in the Heath family’s apartment. The sheriff, his wife, Cordelia, and their two children lived in an austere set of rooms on the first floor, facing the river and the drive by which all motor cars and inmates arrived. It couldn’t have been a pleasant place to live, but the sheriff was required to reside at the jail and to supervise it around the clock.
I was about to go inside when I saw a young deputy named Thomas English walk around the corner with a man in chains. He must have been bringing him back from the courthouse next door, where the inmates often had to go for hearings or appeals. Being occupied with his inmate, he didn’t notice that the Heaths’ maid, a young girl named Grayce van Horn, had stepped out of the apartment to shake a rug. He was leading the man right to her.
I saw what happened next but I was too far away to stop it. The inmate turned to the girl and said something that made her shriek and drop the rug. She ran inside and the man made a move to go after her. Deputy English probably had him well in hand, but the sight was too much for me and I ran up the gravel drive and reached for the inmate. I stumbled as I took hold of him and knocked him over, taking the deputy with him. The three of us went down in an undignified heap.
“What did you say to her?” I shouted, my knee in his back and my skirts in disarray.
With his face in the gravel, his voice was faint and tinny.
“Fräulein Kopp, mein Engel.”
I rocked back on my heels. It was Herman Albert von Matthesius, an old German who’d been in our custody since June. He had the dignified face of a scholar, with a high forehead, a sharply chiseled nose, and a strong chin with one dimple squarely in the center. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles that had become dislodged in the commotion.
“I’m not your angel,” I said. I hated that he insisted on speaking to me in German. The situation in Europe was growing graver by the day and anyone caught speaking in the Kaiser’s tongue could be accused of spying or disloyalty. But the sheriff knew that I’d grown up speaking French and German, so from time to time he called upon me to translate. One day von Matthesius heard me speaking in German to an old rail-yard worker who had been arrested for stealing coal. From then on, he considered me his confidante.
There was something sneaky and manipulative about the man, and hearing him speak to me in the old intimate language my mother taught me always made me feel exposed. English was the language of Sheriff Heath’s jail. German was the language of our kitchen table and Mother’s old bed and a closet under the stairs where Norma and I would hide as small children and listen to our parents fight in their mother tongues, before they realized that we had absorbed every language spoken under our roof.
Deputy English scrambled to his feet and jerked the inmate up by the shoulder. “What in hell do you mean by knocking us over? Aren’t you supposed to be upstairs in your chicken coop?” That’s what the guards called the female section. Two or three female inmates together was a hen party. Only Sheriff Heath and Deputy Morris called the fifth floor by its proper name.
I shook the gravel out of my dress. “What did he say to that girl?”
Deputy English squinted at me. He was one of those lean, wiry young men whose sharp and even features could make him look handsome if he tried, or brutal if he let anger get the better of him. He had brown eyes that were flat and expressionless, giving me the uncomfortable sense that he never meant what he was saying. He was too sure of himself and too certain that he knew more than Sheriff Heath or any of the rest of us.
“Leave that to me.” He pulled at von Matthesius’s handcuffs with one hand and put another hand on the man’s back. “And try not to go stampeding over people like a circus elephant.”
The inmate smiled and used his shoulder to push his glasses up on his nose. “I was only offering my greetings to Miss van Horn and her good brother who looks after her.” His voice made a thin whistle through his teeth when he spoke. Deputy English yanked him away without another word and took him inside.
Now I understood. He’d found out something about Grayce and used it to rattle her and, through her, to intimidate the Heath family. Some inmates liked us to know that they had help outside—and that their helpers could find out more about us than we knew about them. It was an old trick, but none of us liked to see it played.
Von Matthesius had a habit of listening closely to the conversations that echoed up and down the jail’s central rotunda and remembering everything he heard. I was careful not to speak of my family at work, but within a week he knew Norma and Fleurette by name, and understood that we lived alone in the countryside. He also knew about Sheriff Heath’s family, and had the nerve to ask his brother Felix to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Heath during one of his weekly visits. On the card was written, “To dear and gracious Cordelia, on the occasion of her birthday, with appreciation and good wishes from a friend and admirer, Rev. Dr. Baron Herman Albert von Matthesius.”
Mrs. Heath had, in fact, celebrated her birthday only two days before. The delivery unnerved her so that she nearly took the children and moved back to her mother’s. The sheriff spent an entire afternoon persuading her to stay.
I knocked on the door to the sheriff’s apartment and called to Grayce. She opened the door, peeked out at me, and let me into the Heaths’ sitting room, where she dropped into a chair with her arms folded across her chest and her chin tucked down into her collar. She was seventeen but had the fat cheeks of a child and a little pursed mouth that looked like it hadn’t yet found much to say. Her hair hung down in two braids, both tied with blue ribbons. The ends were tattered from the Heath children pulling at them.
I sat down across from her. “I’m sorry about that old man. You shouldn’t ever have to see the prisoners. I’ll speak to the sheriff about it.”
She sniffed and said, “My brother doesn’t like me working here and I might agree with him. I don’t know how Mrs. Heath tolerates it.”
I leaned back and looked around the room. There was hardly an inch of fabric Cordelia Heath hadn’t embellished with peacock feathers, butterflies, and damask roses. I’d always felt that one could read a woman’s discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery.
“Mrs. Heath has made it very comfortable.” It seemed like the only decent thing to say.
The baby cried from the next room. We both stood up as little five-year-old Willie stumbled into the doorway. He was a perfect miniature of Sheriff Heath, all dark hair and solemn brown eyes. His sister, the baby crying b
ehind him, favored her mother, with a halo of golden curls and delicate well-bred features.
“Willie, go back to bed,” Grayce said. “Mother wants you to have your nap.”
The boy just stood and stared at us, tugging at his yellow nightshirt. I usually only saw him from a distance, when Mrs. Heath walked the children to a park across from the courthouse in the afternoons and let the boy clamber over a bronze statue of a general from the Revolutionary War. There was nothing for the baby to do but sit on the grass in fair weather and pull out tufts of it. We had no garden at the jail, or yard, or any other place for a child to play.
Willie reached his arms out mutely. Grayce sighed and picked him up. Just as she disappeared into the next room, a key rattled in the door and Mrs. Heath walked in. She was too distracted with her hat and coat to notice me at first, but when she did look up, she gave a startled cry, as if she’d disturbed a burglar.
“What in Heaven’s name?” One birdlike hand flew to her neck and clutched at her collar. She favored old lace that had some sort of pedigree. I suspected a patrician English grandmother as the source.
I said, in what I hoped was a calm and officious tone, “Everything’s fine, ma’am. One of the inmates shouted at Grayce when she stepped outside. It gave her a shock and I thought I should sit with her.”
“I thought you were to stay on the women’s floor.”
Grayce came back into the room and said, “Miss Kopp rushed right over when she saw what happened. That man had no right to speak to me.”
“I’m surprised by you, Grayce,” Mrs. Heath said quietly, composing herself long enough to pull off her earrings and set them on the table. “I thought you were such a level-headed girl. Did anyone see you?”
Grayce looked puzzled. “See me? Outside?”
“I’m sure no one saw, Mrs. Heath,” I said.
She would never say so directly in front of hired help, but she was worried that a courthouse reporter had wandered over and witnessed the scene. Mrs. Heath had an unnatural dread of newspapermen and believed them to be lurking about the jail at all hours, ready with a notebook if any opportunity arose to embarrass the sheriff over some mishap.
“Well, then,” Mrs. Heath said. “You may go on upstairs, Miss Kopp.”
Nothing suited me more. The door leading to the jail’s interior corridor was of a solid and unyielding metal, and I had to put my weight against it to open it.
“Although . . .”
I turned, wearily, and waited. She pursed her lips and tilted her head as if the idea had just come to her. “Couldn’t we have someone else guard the ladies at night? I recall something about you having a home to go to. I’ve never been myself, but I understand my husband spent quite a bit of time there last year when you had your troubles with those men.”
She had the kind of fine, aristocratic face that one sees on porcelain cameos, and she knew how to arrange her features in such a way as to belie the meaning behind her words. I had to remember that I was on duty and should conduct myself as a member of the sheriff’s staff.
“Yes, ma’am. I live out in the country and it’s too far to go every night. Now that the days are getting shorter, I’d have a long walk in the dark. Sheriff Heath thought I should take a cell alongside the female inmates.” I had only recently outfitted my cell with a lamp, a quilt, and a few books and magazines. It was not unusual anymore for me to fall asleep to the sobs of a girl pickpocket on her first night in, the mumbled prayers of a lonely woman afflicted with gout and a penchant for arson, and the symphony of snorts, groans, and whispers sent up from the men downstairs. It was never entirely peaceful, but I’d grown accustomed to it.
A shudder came over me as I heard myself tell the sheriff’s wife that I’d been speaking to her husband about my sleeping arrangements. I hoped she couldn’t see the flush creeping up my neck.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Well. If you’re living under this roof, you must see quite a lot. You will remember not to speak of any disturbance at the jail. The reporters know you, and they will ask.”
She made it sound disgraceful to be the kind of woman known to reporters. In my case, she might have been right. Some people aspired to the society page, but I’d only ever been found among the crime reports.
5
THE NEXT NIGHT a guard summoned me downstairs.
“Sheriff’s outside, miss. Asked to speak to you.”
I was about to call lights-out anyway, so I made sure everyone was in bed and went down. Sheriff Heath had just driven into the garage and was waiting for me there. It had been raining all afternoon and the path from the jail was nothing but a series of puddles with minor archipelagoes of gravel between them. I hopped from one to the next, my skirts hitched up as high as I was willing to take them, but I was entirely soaked by the time I reached the garage.
He was standing by the fire, talking to his mechanic. I ducked under the awning and breathed in the familiar smell of leather and motor oil, wood smoke and sweat.
“We need you at the hospital,” the sheriff said. “Von Matthesius is raving in German. They had a German nurse to translate, but she’s off-duty and they haven’t been able to find her.”
“I didn’t know he’d gone to the hospital. What’s the matter with him?” I worried suddenly that I’d knocked a rib loose when I threw him down.
He lifted his hat and rubbed his temples. “That’s what we’d like you to tell us, Miss Kopp. He has a fever and a sweat, and his heart is weak, but the doctors haven’t been able to find anything particularly wrong. They were about to release him when he coughed up blood and started shouting in German.”
“He could tell them in English,” I said as we settled into the sheriff’s motor car. “He’s perfectly capable of it.”
“But he won’t. He’s making us do it his way. I don’t like it either, but if he’s got something of consequence to say, I’d like to hear it before they release him. After that business with Grayce yesterday, I’d just as soon leave him there.” We rolled down the drive and I buttoned my coat against the cold.
“He didn’t seem ill.”
“But how are we to know? We can’t do much longer without a jail physician.” Sheriff Heath spoke under his breath, as if talking to himself. “It’s unfair to the inmates. They’re locked inside and can’t very well send for a doctor themselves. They depend upon us. But I can’t be the one to decide when to take a man to the hospital. And everybody who comes in here has a bunion and a loose tooth and gout or a fever or some damn thing or another. It’s practically an infirmary already, except we’ve got no doctors, no nurses, and no druggist. We should fix them up a little while they’re here, and not just because it’s our Christian duty, but because we have an opportunity to put them on a path to clean living. Give a man a shower and a hot meal and a Bible to study and hard work to keep his hands busy—that’s how you turn a criminal into a citizen. Not by locking him in a dungeon.”
Sheriff Heath was a quiet man, but he knew how to make a speech. I studied his profile, which was already as familiar to me as my own brother’s. It occurred to me that there was something admirable about a man in his late thirties. He was old enough to know his own mind and still young enough to do something about it.
“Those are fine ideas,” I said. “It’s why the voters put you here.”
“I wonder. Cordelia says the voters didn’t elect me to save souls and only want to see criminals put away. And she was none too pleased to see that business with Grayce make the papers. She says it makes us look like we can’t control our inmates.”
“How did it make the papers? No one saw.”
He shrugged. “I think Grayce talked to a reporter, or her brother did. I told Cordelia not to worry about it. An inmate misbehaved. It’s not even worth writing about, unless you’re a reporter getting paid by the word.”
Main Street was crowded, even in the rain, and it was slow going. We rode along in silence until I said, “What was von Matthesius’s crime? I must hav
e read about it at the time, but I don’t recall.”
It wasn’t actually true that I didn’t recall. In fact, I’d never been told. The crime had been scandalous in some way that had never been satisfactorily explained to me. None of the men—not the sheriff, not the deputies, not the guards—could bring themselves to tell me precisely why some of the men were in our custody.
Sheriff Heath coughed and didn’t look at me. “Serious charges,” he said.
This was the newspapers’ way of hinting at a crime too aberrant to be described in a family newspaper. I’d never heard the sheriff use the term, but perhaps he’d never had cause to.
“He was running a sanitarium in Rutherford and three young men under his employment accused him.”
“Accused him of . . .”
But the sheriff wasn’t telling. “I don’t believe he’s any sort of doctor. You know he calls himself a reverend and a baron. He seems to collect titles whether he deserves them or not. I’m glad to be depriving New Jersey of his criminal mischief, but I don’t know how we’ll endure another year of it.”
“Couldn’t he pay the fine?” Any number of crimes in Bergen County were met with a sentence to be served only if the fine wasn’t paid.
“There was a fine, but he doesn’t have the money. I heard the sanitarium was filled with antiques and paintings. I don’t know what’s become of them.” That was all the sheriff would say.
“Well, I’m glad to go out on some calls again,” I ventured. “I hope this means you’ve found a way to return me to my old job.”
“Is the position of jail matron too dull for you, Miss Kopp?” he asked distractedly, leaning forward to try to see through the glass. The rain made it impossible.
“I only mean to say that I’ve been out on two calls in as many days, and that’s an improvement. I’m sure I can be of better use—”
“I’m sure you can,” he said, but he was hardly listening. “What’s happened up here?”
The Hackensack Hospital was a formidable six-story block of red brick and iron columns. The circular drive in front was so choked with carriages and hulking black automobiles that we couldn’t find a place to stop. Nurses ran back and forth between them, shouting to drivers who could not hear and only blew their horns. Lanterns were being passed around, bobbing and swinging in the dark. By their light I caught a glimpse of a man being carried in by his feet and shoulders. Electric lamps blazed from the entrance to the hospital, but there were so many people crowding the doorway that I could only make out the silhouette of a mob in panic.