by Amy Stewart
“I told you. I work for the sheriff. Constance Kopp is my name.”
He tilted his head from left to right and back again, calculating. “Lady detective,” he said, stalling.
It wasn’t an interesting line of conversation for me, so I didn’t give an answer.
“Louis was just a boy. He shouldn’t have seen some of those things. And the doctor—if that’s what he was—he had Louis too scared to tell anybody. Said he’d have Louis committed to the boys’ reformatory if he said a word about Beatrice. Louis thought he could do it, and maybe he was right. Poor kid had nightmares about that place. I bet he still does.”
“Beatrice?”
“The girl. Beatrice Fuller.”
“The one Louis thought he’d killed. He thought he’d given her too much chloroform.”
He nodded. “She was the one the doctor was going to marry. Well, I guess he did marry her.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”
A man came outside and shouted for Frederick. He took a step away from me and said, “You don’t know? I thought you worked for—”
“I do,” I said hastily. “They just didn’t give me all the particulars.”
He made a little tsk sound and looked back at the factory. “You don’t know nothing. Look, von Matthesius owed somebody a lot of money. He kept trying to figure out ways to get his patients to stay there longer so their families would pay more. He kept them sick, you understand?”
I nodded, a little sick myself at the idea of it.
“And this girl Beatrice—it looked like her parents had half the money in New York. He had her father convinced that Beatrice was a very special girl, she was going to blossom under his care if only he could have more time, nonsense like that. One day he comes up with this idea to get Beatrice to marry him. She hardly knew her own name, he had her on so much dope. He called his old minister friend over and had a wedding right there in his living room. That’s when Louis and I went to the police. We were too late to stop the wedding, but her parents had it annulled and he went to jail. That’s all I know, miss.”
“What about the other patients? What did he do to the others?”
He turned away, shaking his head. I called after him. “How do I find Alfonso Youngman?”
“Haven’t seen him,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Last I heard he was over at the Warren. It’s a kind of a—you know, a stopping-over kind of place. In New York. Over on the East Side.”
My fingers had gone numb in spite of the gloves and I rubbed my hands together the way one goes about starting a fire. Frederick Shipper had said all he was willing to, but it was enough. I’d begun the day with nothing, and now I had a flophouse on the East Side, a girl named Beatrice, and two boys with nothing but bad memories they wanted to put behind them. What did Sheriff Heath have?
11
I REALIZED AS I LEFT the glassworks that I would pass Carmita, the street where von Matthesius kept his sanitarium. I’d never seen the place but I had a dark and disagreeable feeling about it. There was no reason to think he’d be hiding there—it was too obvious and easy to search—but I approached it nervously, with a tight and breathless feeling. I’d never broken into an abandoned building before, but if I found it empty I knew I must try to get inside.
Carmita was a wide street lined with high and graceful trees that had shed their leaves, leaving a latticework of bare branches against a dismal low sky. The homes were comfortable but not luxurious, with deep front porches, second-story gables, and brightly painted shutters. On either side of the street the lawns sloped gently down to the sidewalks.
The sanitarium was no different from the other houses on the block. I stood looking at it and tried to imagine what had gone on inside: respectable families, cheated of their money, and nervous patients, too weak and drugged to know what was being done to them. Considering von Matthesius’s cruelty and treachery, the house should have been one of those dark old ruins built of stone and rough wood, with a turret reached by a narrow unlit spiral staircase, a suspicious-looking trapdoor leading into a dank, forgotten basement, and iron bars across the windows to keep the patients from escaping.
But it was nothing like that. It was a stately home painted brick red with a row of white columns in front and a pair of doors outfitted in brass knockers. Hydrangeas held on to their papery blooms under the windows. Three brick chimneys rising from the roof suggested the possibility of companionable warmth within.
There was no sign identifying the place as a sanitarium, but that was probably the custom in neighborhoods like these. The patients would rather not be seen going in or out of a place that might house the infirm and insane. Well-to-do families liked to be assured of their privacy.
They would have been thoroughly deceived by such a genteel and discreet place. I would have, too.
The front door was padlocked and the windows curtained against curious eyes. I crossed the lawn and took a walk around the house. In the back, where the neighbors couldn’t see, the windows did have bars across them. Those must have been the patients’ rooms.
Through the shuttered first-floor windows in back I caught a glimpse of the cooling room and a large kitchen beyond it, outfitted with two stoves and two sinks as an institution of this nature might require. Under a rock on the back steps was a long-forgotten bill from the dairy, and a coffee can filled with the ends of old cigarettes, now swollen and swimming in rainwater.
Only one other window gave me a glimpse inside. A curtain had come loose and through one pane I could see into an empty room and another room beyond it. There were a few gold picture frames leaning against a wall, and a couple of odd chairs and tables scattered about, but it looked like the place had been emptied. Where were the lavish antiques and rugs I’d heard about?
I pushed at a few window frames and kicked at all the doors, but nothing would budge. There was no way in without breaking a window. I went around the house one more time, and then I saw a basement door at the back, painted the same color as the rest of the house and easily missed.
It didn’t have a proper doorknob, only a metal latch rusted shut. I tried to force it open and couldn’t. The only tool at hand was that old coffee can. I emptied it of rainwater and forced the lip of the can between the latch and the door jamb. I had to lean on the can hard enough to crush it, but it served its purpose and pried the latch open.
The door was still stuck. There must have been another lock inside. I gave it a good hard shake and nothing happened. Having no other way to gain entry, I stood back, lifted my skirts, and put everything I had into one hard kick. There came a splintering sound and I feared I’d taken it right off its hinges, but in fact I’d only torn the inside latch away from the door jamb. As I stepped down into the cellar, the rusted screws caught on my coat.
Fleurette had always been terrified of cellars, and of spiders and dust and small dark places of any kind, but they didn’t bother me. I only found them uncomfortable because I had to stoop down so low to get through them. The cellar had a hard dirt floor and a few wooden shelves lined with empty glass jars. There was an old rocking chair in one corner and a broom with a broken handle, but nothing more. I turned around to look again at the door. The latch looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. If anyone had been in the house recently, they hadn’t come this way.
A short staircase led up to the kitchen, where I saw nothing that I hadn’t already seen through the windows. The house had the stale musty odor of a place that hadn’t been aired out in months. My boots made a hollow echo as I stepped into the dining room, empty except for a sideboard with a broken mirror, and into the parlors beyond. The only furnishings left behind had something wrong with them. There was a music cabinet missing a leg and knocked over on its side, and a faded rug with a burn mark in the center. Piles of papers sat around the corners of one room, but I found nothing worth keeping, only newspapers and medical journals and invoices from a grocer and a tailor.
I ducked low as I climbe
d the stairs so I wouldn’t be seen going past a window. Every creak of the steps echoed around the empty rooms. I found myself wary of disturbing the stillness of the old house and treaded lightly.
Upstairs, the rooms were furnished in a dormitory style, with steel cots and old washstands. Darker spots on the wallpaper showed where pictures had been removed. In one room was a child’s iron crib, with a pile of old pillows inside it, their ticking split and the feathers curling out from the seams. I found a fifty-cent alarm clock underneath the crib, its face smashed, and a tattered piece of lace that looked like it had been picked off the hem of a dress.
A room at the end of the hall held medical equipment: an old pair of crutches, an invalid chair whose reed seat had splintered, and a pile of yellowed contraptions made from elastic and webbing that I took to be hip supports, trusses, and those corrective braces meant to force the shoulders back. A brittle package of strengthening plasters sat on the window-sill.
Someone had taken everything of use out of the house. Whoever did it must have had a key, because I saw not a single window or door that looked like it had been forced. I paced around for another minute or two just to kick at loose floorboards and look into grates. It gave me an officious feeling to knock around the house and tap on things, but feeling officious was the easy part of the work and turning up something that might have been of use was quite another. Nothing I found meant a thing.
I left the way I came and latched the cellar door from the outside so it wouldn’t look like it had been disturbed. Just as I walked away, the rain started again. I hurried back to the train station but slowed down in front of Louis Burkhart’s shoe store. I hadn’t noticed before that there was a sign for a doctor’s office just up the street, perched on a slight rise that overlooked all of downtown Rutherford.
Some good had to come from this day. I ran over and rapped on the door.
A sign bolted to the house advertised the services of W. C. Williams, MD, with office hours from one to two and again from seven to eight-thirty in the evening. It was already the middle of the afternoon, but I persisted in knocking a second time and twisting the brass bell.
The door sailed open and I faced a man of about thirty with a fine thoughtful face and thinning hair that flew away from the top of his head. He looked impatient but not unkind.
“Office hours, miss,” he said, pointing to the sign.
“I know, but I’m just on my way to the train station and hoped I could stop and—”
He interrupted and said, with a forced smile, “If you’re well enough to catch a train, you probably don’t need a doctor.”
“It isn’t for me.” I had to put my hand on the door to keep him from closing it. He looked disgruntled about it and crossed his arms.
“It’s Mrs. Burkhart, above the shoe store. Do you know her? She’s right over there.” I turned to point in the direction of the store, which was quite near. “Her son is Louis Burkhart. His father died a few years ago, and it’s just the two of them now, only she’s terribly ill and I don’t see how she’ll recover unless somebody goes and sees her.”
He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of resignation and stepped out on the porch. “Burkhart Brothers? The shoe store?”
“That’s right. You might have heard about what happened to that boy. He was one of the orderlies who brought a complaint against Dr. von Matthesius, who was running a sanitarium over on Carmita.”
The doctor gave me a long and puzzled look. “Come inside.”
I followed him into his parlor, where the morning’s fire had been reduced to a few powdery coals in the grate. I nonetheless went to stand in front of it and pulled off my gloves. Although the parlor was situated in the front of the house, just off the entryway, it didn’t seem to be set up to receive patients. There was a low divan of tufted green velvet and two chairs to match, and at the end of the room, near the fireplace, was a wide writing desk against a wall of bookshelves. Next to a typewriter sat a stack of paper with an ashtray on top of it.
Dr. Williams saw me looking at the books and said, “Go ahead.”
They were mostly novels, poetry collections, and paper-bound journals. “These don’t look like medical books,” I said.
“Medical books are very dull, so I keep them by the bed if I have trouble sleeping. Do you read much poetry?”
I shook my head. “I see it in magazines sometimes.”
“That’s about all anyone does. Now, how are you involved in this? I heard the damn fools at the hospital let that lunatic get away.”
I turned away from the books. “I work—well, I had been working for the sheriff, but I’m not here on sheriff’s business. It’s purely a personal call. I’d like to leave some money with you to look in on Mrs. Burkhart.” I reached into my pocketbook and handed him ten dollars.
He took it but said, “I don’t know what condition the woman is in or what treatment she might require.”
“Won’t that be enough?”
“It might be more than enough if I’m only to pay a visit. How would I get it back to you?”
“Don’t send it back. She’ll need all the help you can give her. You might have a look at that boy, too.”
“What’s the matter with the boy?” He was writing my payment down in a ledger book as he spoke to me.
I didn’t know how to explain it, even to a doctor. “He suffers from a nervous condition. He had a terrible fright and he seems not to have recovered. He’s very much afraid of being sent away on account of it. I don’t think he has any sort of job or goes to school or does much of anything but look after his mother.”
“I won’t send him away if he’s not making trouble for anybody.”
“He isn’t.”
He picked up his bag and went back to the door. I followed him out.
“Dr. Williams, would you know any of Dr. von Matthesius’s associates? Anyone who might be helping him to hide?”
“He’s no doctor, I know that. And I’ve no idea about his associates. I only know what I read in the papers. It’s a fine mess and I hope they catch him, but I don’t suppose they will.” He said good-bye and jogged down the porch steps ahead of me.
Any other detective would have gone directly back to New York to question Alfonso Youngman, but I was the sort of detective who was required to attend theater performances. Fleurette would never forgive me if I missed her stage debut. Von Matthesius might have been my responsibility, but so was Fleurette. There was a train leaving soon for the city, but I went the other way, back to Wyckoff, back home.
12
I FOUND OUR SITTING ROOM empty and the house silent. Already my own home looked foreign and unfamiliar. There was my mother’s glass-fronted cabinet holding teacups and curios from her childhood, and across from it an old grandfather clock that had never quite worked right after getting knocked down last year. We’d been gradually lifting the lace doilies from the backs of the chairs and hiding them away. We were too attached to anything made by Mother’s own hand to throw them out but too stifled by their pretensions at Old World gentility to want to look at them any longer.
Everything seemed to belong to the past, to some other era that existed before my prisoner ran away and before I left home to hunt him down. What I was doing would have been unimaginable to my mother. The traces of her, left behind in this room, sat in hushed reproach.
Fleurette was upstairs in my bedroom, in front of a large mirror, surrounded by face paints and powder puffs. When she turned to look up at me I jumped back in unrestrained horror.
“What have you done?”
She giggled and grinned, exposing teeth stained red with lip-stick. Her cheeks were a shocking cherry pink, her eyes smudged with black graphite, and the complexion above her neck line was of a chalky whiteness I’d never seen on a living human before.
“Do I look like a farm girl?” came Fleurette’s voice from behind a marionette’s face.
“You already were a farm girl. Now you look like the kind of girl
they arrest in dance halls.”
That only made her gaze more lovingly into my mirror. “I’m a farm girl who goes to the city and falls in with the wrong sort,” she said dreamily.
“Is that in the script?”
“No. In the script I’m the daughter of a farmer who steals a potion that lets him grow the biggest pumpkins at the county fair.”
“A farmer who cheats at the county fair? Is that the worst thing that happens in this play?”
Fleurette sighed and dabbed at her neck with the powder. “Mrs. Hansen had an overabundance of young students this year owing to the retirement of another teacher, so we had to find a play that was suitable for children. It’s a dull role.”
“At least you weren’t cast as the pumpkin.” I took out my handkerchief and scrubbed the color off her cheeks.
She wrinkled her nose and pulled away from me. “The part of the pumpkin will be shared by three boys whose talents are well-suited for it.”
“And what happened to your gingham dress?” She was wearing a rest frock of heliotrope crêpe de Chine, cut with the sort of slouching low waist popular on Madison Avenue but rarely seen in New Jersey farmhouses. I used to look over her patterns and fabrics before she got under way, but she discovered that all she had to do was to talk at great length about hems, ribbons, buttons, and pleats, and I would grow bored and ask her to please proceed without my supervision. The result was that Fleurette was making herself into a Vogue sophisticate before our eyes.
“I’ll change in a minute.”
“I thought you might have dressed for the members of the pigeon club.” Fleurette had invited everyone she knew to this performance, and several of Norma’s club members would be attending.
She groaned. “If I ever come to you and ask to marry one of the men from Norma’s pigeon club, promise me you will forbid it and lock me in a tower.”
“Is that how it’ll happen? You’re going to come and ask my permission? What about our brother?”