by Amy Stewart
She came down in her flannel gown and bare feet. “What’s the trouble?” She stood at the bottom of the stairs with her arms folded over her chest. “You look stricken. I hope you’re not about to tell me that Sheriff Heath has asked you to run off with him, because I’ve noticed him looking at you very strangely and it makes me wonder exactly what he’s got on his mind. If he’s taken any license, I’ll go right over there and—”
“Norma, stop it!” I was still trying to untangle myself from the mess of paper and fabric Fleurette had left sitting in the middle of the room. She’d pasted some kind of false fur to it. I suppose it was meant to be a fox or a wolf.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” I kicked the thing away in frustration. “Nothing’s wrong, except that I was finally let out of that jail long enough to do a deputy’s job and had some hope of earning my badge, but now that crazy old German has run off and it’s my fault and I’ve gone and ruined everything.”
“You’ve trampled the sheep dog,” Norma said, clearing what was left of Fleurette’s prop from the floor. She pulled a sweater off the divan and wrapped it around herself. “Did you say you’re getting your badge?”
A door banged open upstairs and Fleurette called down. “What happened?”
“I’m afraid there’s been a mishap with the sheep dog,” Norma shouted.
“It’s a goat,” Fleurette said, and soon she was downstairs, too, eyeing the remains of her creation. She wore a shawl of red Japanese silk and gold fringe that hung down to her feet and brought to mind a very expensive piano drape.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was dark and I didn’t see it.”
“You’ll make it up to me.” She bent down and patted it on what was left of its head. The creature had buttons for eyes and one of them dangled precariously, so she snapped it off. Then she looked up at me again.
“Why are you here in the middle of the night shouting about an old man?”
I put my hat on the rack and started to shake my coat off, then noticed how cold it was and thought better of it. “Never mind.”
“Constance was just telling about some unpleasantness at work,” Norma said.
“You work in a jail!” Fleurette said. “Of course it’s unpleasant.”
“What I was trying to say,” I nearly shouted, making them both take a step back, “was that I let an inmate escape tonight.”
“You didn’t!” Fleurette gasped.
“Of course she didn’t,” Norma said.
“I did.”
“But it wasn’t your fault,” said Norma. “You haven’t been given enough responsibility to have anything be your fault.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Sheriff Heath must be to blame,” she continued, “or that other one we don’t like. What was his name?” From Norma’s pocket came a rustle of paper and I thought she was preparing to write it down.
“No one else is to blame. I was guarding an inmate at the hospital and the lights went out and in the confusion, he ran off. It’s the worst thing I could have done.”
They stared at me. I kept my eyes on my feet, which seemed very far away and looked like they belonged to someone else.
At last Norma cleared her throat. “Well. It isn’t really the worst thing you could’ve done. Prisons do burn down, you know. There was that fire in Toronto last year that started with a guard’s cigarette and a mattress on the floor, and . . .”
“Thank you, Norma,” I said, dropping into a chair. “That lifts my heart. Letting a prisoner escape is far preferable to lighting the place on fire.”
“Although Sheriff Heath might not think so at the moment.” Norma perched on the arm of my chair.
“Of course he doesn’t. He sent me right home. He wouldn’t even speak to me himself. He had Morris do it.”
“Mr. Morris was here? And you didn’t ask him in?” Fleurette ran to the window to see if he’d left.
“He wasn’t here,” I said wearily. “He just put me in a hansom so I’d be out of the way.”
I couldn’t stand to listen to them anymore. I pushed Norma off my chair and started up the stairs to bed.
“Sheriff Heath had no cause to send you home,” Norma said, following me upstairs. “Although in this case, there is one thing—”
“Not tonight,” I said, and slammed my bedroom door.
7
“CONSTANCE!”
Norma was rapping on my door.
“Are you awake?”
She knocked again, louder this time. “Didn’t you hear me? Sheriff Heath’s outside.”
I pulled the blanket around my shoulders and went over to the window. He was standing in the drive next to his motor car, talking to Fleurette.
Norma came in wearing her barn coat and boots. She disapproved of sleeping late and her expression let me know it.
“He’s been out all night. You should’ve been out there with him.”
“He sent me home.” I looked down at the top of the sheriff’s hat. He was stooped over slightly to listen to something Fleurette was telling him, his hands in his pockets.
Norma came and stood next to me at the window. “It’s good that he’s here, because I’ve made up my mind about what you ought to do and now you can go downstairs and tell him about it.”
She waited for me to ask. I didn’t.
“I’ve decided that if you had charge of the old German, then you ought to go find him yourself and bring him back. Why should you sit at home when you’re the cause of all the trouble?”
Norma, who had never had a job, who rarely left the house except to run her pigeons down the road, was telling me to go out and hunt a fugitive.
“Thank you. It never occurred to me to just round him up.”
She put her shoulder under the window sash and grunted until it gave way. The sharp bite of the wind came in, and the smoke from a distant chimney, and the odor of mud and wet leaves.
“What are you doing?” I tried to push the sash down again but it was too late. Fleurette heard us and looked up, and the sheriff followed.
“He’s waiting for a word,” Norma said, “and I don’t like him skulking around here all day. Are you going down or aren’t you?”
I was shivering in my nightgown and my bare feet had gone white. I climbed back into bed. “I’m not.”
“She’s coming down!” she shouted, and slammed the window shut before he could answer.
“I don’t know why you’re so eager to send me out on a manhunt. You used to consider it a fine idea to keep us all away from the criminal element.”
Norma pushed me over with her knee and sat down next to me. “If it becomes known that you’ve disgraced yourself in your very first professional position, you won’t find another. No one will hire the girl who let the prisoner escape.”
“I hadn’t realized.”
“But if you’re the girl who captured the fugitive, that puts the matter in a different light, doesn’t it?”
She sat, breathing very noisily, awaiting my answer. I turned back to the wall and closed my eyes, then heard her walk over to my dresser. When she returned, there was a rustling of paper and she smacked me with something—a rolled newspaper, a heavy magazine. Then she pulled the blanket off my bed, sending a rush of cold air up my legs.
“Norma!” I tried to take it back but she was already folding it and seemed prepared to take it with her.
“You’ve got nothing else to do anyway. You’re of no use to either of us. We dislike your cooking, and we’ve already hired a boy to do the vegetable garden. He’s much better at it than you were. We’re going to eat a cucumber for the first time in years.” She clamped the blanket under her arm and went to work on the bedsheet.
I sat up and pushed my hair away. She stripped my bed of anything that might have made me comfortable, and then paused and looked down at me the way she looked at a broken fence board before she took a claw hammer to it.
“If you’ve no emplo
yment, then Fleurette won’t get her singing lessons.”
“Hand back that blanket.”
“And if we can’t keep body and soul together, I suppose we’ll sell the farm after all. Francis might have some ideas about that.”
I didn’t want to know what our brother would say. There seemed to be no getting rid of Norma and she was bent upon making my bedroom uninhabitable. I went to the wardrobe and shoved my arms into an ugly old green dress that looked as terrible as I felt.
“Or we could find a husband for Fleurette and he’ll look after us.”
“That’s just fine.” My stockings tore at the ankle but I yanked them on anyway.
Norma stood in the doorway and watched me wrap my hair into a knot and stick pins in it. “Although our troubles are nothing compared to Sheriff Heath’s,” she said. “He’ll go to jail for this.”
My hair dropped all around my shoulders and the pins went everywhere.
“Jail?”
I MARCHED OUTSIDE and Norma followed me. “Is it true they’ll put you in jail?” I shouted.
Sheriff Heath stood a little straighter in his coat and tipped his hat at us.
“Miss Kopp,” he said.
Norma ran along behind me and called, “I was on my way to telling you last night but you had such a case of nerves you couldn’t listen.”
I came to a stop right in front of Sheriff Heath. Dark patches sagged under his eyes. His skin had that pasty cast that people get when they stay up all night.
“Is it true?” I asked him.
He swallowed and looked around at the three of us. “There is a law,” he said, his voice a little hoarse, “that a sheriff can be jailed in place of a criminal he allows to escape. But it’s rarely enforced and you needn’t—”
“I should be the one to go to jail.”
“You won’t. It’s the sheriff’s responsibility if an inmate escapes.”
“It certainly is,” Norma said, recalling everything she knew on the subject with the brisk cheer of the well-informed. “It’s one of the reasons a sheriff must furnish a bond. Your bondsmen are going to be very unhappy with you. They’ll have to pay the prisoner’s fine, and I’m not so sure you wouldn’t face a trial and a jail term.”
I took Sheriff Heath by the arm. He looked down in surprise but I held on to it. “You can’t go to jail. What about Cordelia and the children?” I couldn’t imagine the disgrace.
“We’ll get him,” the sheriff started to say, but Norma talked right over him.
“Well, Mrs. Heath couldn’t stay in the sheriff’s quarters if he was in jail. She’d have to find somewhere to go. Don’t her parents live in Hackensack?”
Fleurette had been watching us from under the brim of a heavy velvet hat. “Would they really put a sheriff on trial?”
“Of course not,” he said, but it was a quick and automatic answer and I didn’t believe it.
“It’s possible the prosecutor’s office would take pity on you and spare you a trial,” Norma said. “You have managed to keep at least one friend in the prosecutor’s office, haven’t you?”
Of course he hadn’t. Sheriff Heath ran a hand over his mustache and I thought he might lose his patience with Norma. I sent her and Fleurette away, for which he gave me a little nod of gratitude.
When we were alone, he said, “I’ve put men at all the train stations. We’re going around to the hotels, and asking anyone who—”
“I know. You’re doing everything you can. But nobody really knows where to look.”
He coughed into his fist. “We’ll get him. Although the papers have it for the evening edition.”
The papers. They would hound him for weeks over this. “I hoped you might catch him before the press got hold of it.”
“We didn’t.”
I couldn’t face him. I looked out at the barn and the dry meadow beyond it. “Let me go with you.”
“Miss Kopp.”
“I might be of some use. He’ll speak to me.”
He lifted his hat and pushed his hair aside. “I’m doing my best to keep your name out of it. You don’t need another scandal in the papers, you and your sisters.”
He was trying to protect us. His kindness only made it worse. “It doesn’t matter about my name in the papers. But I won’t sit out here while the rest of you go and . . .” I choked on the very idea of waiting around on our sleepy old farm while the other deputies were out searching.
“It’s exactly what you’ll do,” he said. “Get some rest for a few days and then come back to the jail when you’re ready to work.”
“I’m unfit to work at the jail. I let a man go. You’ve no choice but to dismiss me.”
He started to answer but thought better of it. I might have convinced him that I was right.
I took a step back toward the house. Something turned over inside of me. It had seemed impossible only a few minutes earlier when Norma put it before me, but now I could see it plainly. There was only one thing for me to do.
“Never mind. I’ll go alone. I’ll find him.”
I took a few more steps backward in the gravel. He wore a look of defeat and exhaustion and put a hand on the hood of his motor car to steady himself. “It isn’t safe for you to go chasing after a fugitive. I won’t allow it.”
“But you sent the other deputies!”
“You’re not a deputy.” There was something definitive about the way he said it.
I should have stopped myself right there, but I couldn’t. “That’s your fault! It’s been two months. I was a deputy before and I should be—”
He took off his hat and slapped it against his leg. “Damnit, Miss Kopp, I believe last night showed why you’re not a deputy.”
We stood only a few yards apart but the distance between us had never been greater.
“Pardon me,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
But it was too late. Of course he meant it.
“They’re not putting you in jail for something I did,” I said quietly. “I won’t have it.” I stepped inside and slammed the door shut behind me.
Norma and Fleurette had been listening from the foyer. I leaned against the door and the three of us stared at one another. Sheriff Heath answered with a roar of his engine. His tires sprayed gravel behind them and he was gone.
Norma had my coat over her arm and my hat in her hand. When I took the hat from her I saw that she was also holding my revolver.
“I suppose you heard him,” I said. “He’s right.”
Norma pushed my coat into my chest and waited until I’d put it on before handing me the gun.
“It’s nonsense,” she said.
“He hasn’t any ideas about finding him.”
“Yes, well, he’s a man of limited intellect, and if he had more than one idea at a time they’d die from overcrowding.” Norma was absolutely bristling with the sense of occasion that had come over her. She looked me over impatiently and reached up to take me by the shoulders. “You look wretched, but I know you’ll put that to some advantage. Let’s get you on a train.”
8
THE GREAT OPEN waiting room at Pennsylvania Station received me the way a cathedral receives the lost and desperate. Even in the middle of a dreary late October day, with the sun fighting for a place between the broken clouds, there was a sanctity to the light. It gained something by its passage through the grand high windows, and when it fell on the faces of the brusque businessmen and fashionable young girls and haggard old working men in their crumpled hats, it bestowed upon all of them a generous glow that seemed to come not only from the glass above, but from the plaster and stonework all around. I turned my face up to it and closed my eyes. There, in that column of weak light, I felt revived.
But not forgiven. I didn’t want forgiveness. I wanted nothing but my inmate, back in jail where he belonged.
Norma’s notion of how to prepare for a manhunt consisted of tucking four ham and potato sandwiches into a hamper alongside three messenger pigeons, it be
ing her idea that I would release the birds if I caught the man or if I needed rescuing. I tried to explain that it would do no good to send a message to my sister in the countryside if I was in urgent need of assistance, and, besides, the pigeons seemed intent on getting into the sandwiches and were quite likely to break out of the hamper and fly home on their own once they’d eaten my lunch. Nonetheless she packed all of this into the buggy and took me to the train station in Ridgewood, where I agreed to eat half a sandwich but take no more, and persuaded her to set the pigeons free.
I intended to go first to von Matthesius’s brother’s apartment on the chance that he might be hiding there. We all took turns signing in visitors to the jail, and Felix had been to see his brother often enough that I knew the address. Beyond that, I hadn’t any sort of plan, and felt as shaky and skittish as a newborn colt as I wove through the train station, past the leather-skinned shoe-shine men snapping their rags and whistling, the newspaper boys with bags slung over their shoulders, a lunch counter where girls in hobble skirts perched on stools and ordered sandwiches and buttermilk, and a vast empire of ticket booths offering fares to San Francisco, Denver, and other unimaginably distant places.
On Seventh Avenue I was confronted by an icy wind for which I was ill-prepared. I gathered my collar around me and leaned against it, my head down, my cheeks stinging in the cold. I felt strangely conspicuous, as if everyone in New York knew that I was a disgraced former jail matron who had let a criminal escape.
Fortunately, no one even bothered to look at me. It was the great blessing of a busy city that one could be invisible in a crowd, but it was a blessing for the criminals, too. I forced myself to keep my head up and my wits about me as I marched uptown. After a few minutes I wondered if I should have looked around for a taxi or a trolley, but the blocks were short and the walk invigorating, so I kept to it.
When I reached the park, I walked around Columbus Circle, past the theaters and great dining halls and the enormous old carriage house that had already given way to a concern selling motor cars. Just to the west was a down-at-the-heel neighborhood of squat brownstones and dingy shops bearing the names of every Irish, French, and German family ever to sail across the Atlantic. There were derelict old saloons alongside fishmongers, dental parlors, and Yiddish tailors offering to buy old trousers.