by Amy Stewart
She hoisted her crate unsteadily and I backed out of the doorway.
“But you aren’t concerned about what becomes of us, and why should you be? It’s more important that you keep yourself amused, as unmarried women must do.”
She made it sound dirty to be unmarried. “I’m not here to amuse myself.”
“No? Why, you couldn’t wait to get inside this jail and—” Then she waved her free hand at me in a pantomime of whatever it was she thought I did. “But I’m the one who has to live here, and I’m the one about to get turned out if that old man isn’t caught.”
There was no arguing with her in this state, so I said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. We’ll all be turned out if he isn’t found.”
My effort at sympathy seemed only to harden her. “But you’ll be fine, won’t you?” There was a cruelty in the way she said it.
She stumbled out with her box. The door swung shut behind her and I stood alone in the kitchen, a little sick and unsteady myself.
“I don’t know,” I said to an empty room.
It didn’t seem to me that anyone would be fine if Sheriff Heath went to jail.
THE ODOR OF A WOMAN awash in brandy is impossible to forget. When I was ten, my aunt Adele came to live with us and brought that particular fragrance with her. She was my mother’s older sister, nearly forty, recently widowed, and stricken by an illness nobody would name.
At the time our father was working for a small and unscrupulous wine importer. The goods were cheap and usually adulterated. Port wine might be diluted with the juice of sloes or elderberries, then blended with cheap brandy and unfiltered juice and soaked in wood chips. Wine was mixed with filbert husks or strychnine (useful, in small doses, for adding a bitter flavor), and what passed for champagne was nothing more than Jersey cider mixed with cochineal and gooseberries. When they needed a sweetener they reached for sugar of lead. As long as it was red or gold in color and intoxicating, Messrs. Bonham & Koch would offer it for sale, often in bottles they collected from hotel kitchens and affixed their own labels to.
One of the proprietors—I believe it was Mr. Koch—was arrested after a restaurant in Brooklyn complained about a delivery of murky, foul-smelling wine that stained the teeth of patrons, as if ink had been added, or coal-tar dye. Compounding the trouble was the fact that no import taxes had been paid on the wine, which raised the question of whether it had been smuggled into the country.
Mr. Koch was taken off to jail and my father with him. Although he only spent a few nights there, his employer having paid the right man to secure his release, my father didn’t come home for months after his arrest. Mother told Francis that he was too ashamed to show himself to us. (She was ashamed, too, and never told her daughters any of this. It was only because Francis swept the wine shop after school that he knew about it, and Norma, domineering even at the age of six, insisted that he tell us.)
Aunt Adele was in our house the very minute our father was out of it. Norma and I expected to have to move into Mother’s bed so that Adele could have ours, but instead our aunt chose for herself a closet under the stairs just big enough for, as she put it, “a cot and a candle.” I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to crawl into such a cramped and windowless space at night when an ordinary bed could be had, and Mother went silent and tight-lipped when I asked her about it. I found out the truth one day when Adele was in the parlor being attended by the doctor and I snuck into her cubbyhole to have a look around.
There it was: the peculiar odor of sweet gas and rotten fruit. She kept a brandy bottle under her pillow and hid a few empty ones inside the boots she never wore, because she never went out. Next to them was a stack of clean rags stained brown with old blood and stuck all over with pins. I didn’t know what the two had to do with one another, the stench and the sickness, but to my mind they were the same, and since then I have always associated liquor with secrecy and disease.
When Adele grew weaker she had no choice but to come out into the light, and to submit to Mother’s nursing and my help. That’s when I saw what had sent her into the closet: a surgical wound under her arm that had never closed, the result of an attempt to excise a lump the size of a nutmeg. A bigger one grew back in its place and I feared I could see it, wrinkled and brown as a baby’s fist, when we peeled away the bandage and washed the ulcer with weak but nonetheless intolerable carbolic acid. Adele screamed when we did it, and bit into a rag soaked in brandy.
“She has to have it,” Mother would say. “It’s unbearable otherwise.” I would watch her overturn the bottle into the rag and wet it freely, so that Adele could suck furiously at it while we worked. Somehow the rag made it more like medicine. When Adele went back to bed and Mother thought I wasn’t looking, she tucked the bottle under Adele’s good arm the way one presses a doll against a sleeping child.
Now Cordelia was locking herself in a closet with a bottle and a wound of her own. But unlike Aunt Adele, who came to us willingly, even eagerly, Mrs. Heath snarled at me like an animal caught in a trap when I found her. I couldn’t get near enough to help and hardly dared interfere with the brandy habit of the boss’s wife. I knew of only one way to cure her pain, and it was to find our fugitive.
AT MIDNIGHT THE HIGH, domed window above the fifth floor rattled and creaked in the wind, and when the hail came, the sharp hammering against the glass lulled me in and out of sleep.
I awoke to Sheriff Heath’s voice. “I’m sorry, Miss Kopp,” he was saying.
There was a light coming through the bars of my cell. It receded and I heard his footsteps walking away.
“Sheriff?”
The lantern in his hand stopped swaying and he turned.
“What is it?” I whispered.
He came back. The lantern hung down at his knees and cast a pool of yellow light on the ground. His face took on the greenish-white pallor of the lime-washed walls.
We peered at each other through the bars until it occurred to me that he wouldn’t come in unless I invited him. I pushed open the door and he paced around, looking at my lamp, my comb, and the book I’d been reading.
Finally he said, “You were asleep.”
“It’s all right.” I wore a corduroy dress at night that was no different from what I wore during the day, in case I was called back to duty. It wasn’t as if he were seeing me in my nightclothes. I sat on the edge of the bunk. “You can sit down.”
He sighed and dropped down next to me, leaning his head against the wall.
I’d been torturing myself over Mrs. Heath all night. “I don’t deserve to be here,” I said. “Not while he’s out there. It isn’t right.”
He snorted and said, “Miss Kopp. Do you know how many crooks go their whole lives without once ever being arrested?”
I stared at him and thought about it. “Almost all of them.”
“That’s right. The ones we do catch manage to commit ten crimes before we lock them up for one. You know that’s true.”
I nodded. Prisoners loved to boast about the schemes and cons they got away with before they were caught.
He turned and waved at the windows at the end of my cell block. Beyond them rose the first few buildings at the edge of Main Street, their backs turned to us. In the daylight we could have seen the entire town unfurled below us. The jail stood at the edge of Hackensack, along the river, next to everything else the townspeople didn’t want to look at: a coal yard, a yarn mill, and a cemetery.
“They’re like fish out there, swimming through a net,” he said. “We catch a few of them. We slow them down. But we don’t ever stop them. There will always be more criminals than cops. We don’t win in the end. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course I know that,” I said stiffly. But maybe I didn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t defeat them somehow. In some way, I’d been thinking that the sheriff and I would rid Bergen County of crime if we just kept at it long enough.
“So we lost one. Now we’re going to get him back. But,
Miss Kopp—”
I folded my arms across my chest and tried to tuck my chin down in that formidable way Norma had.
He smiled a little and continued. “Every day some sneak or thief gets away with something. Every day someone calls for help and we don’t get there in time. There’s always a fistfight or a gunshot or a fire set deliberately or a girl gone missing.”
“Yes, but—”
He wouldn’t let me finish. “Yes, but we go back to work.”
I dropped my arms and all the air went out of me. Those were three very powerful words.
“Back to work,” I repeated, trying it out.
“That’s right,” he said with a smile that pushed against the corners of his eyes. “The work of this department goes on. We’re conducting a manhunt, and we will get him.”
“But if we don’t—If you don’t—”
“We will,” he returned sharply. “And in the meantime, I have a jail to run. We’ve eighty-five other prisoners in here. We can’t forget about them.”
I thought again of Cordelia. “But Mrs. Heath doesn’t want me here, after all the trouble I’ve made for you.”
He took a breath and said, so quietly that I had to strain to hear him, “Mrs. Heath cares a great deal about appearances and reputations and titles and honorifics. When I signed on as undersheriff, she saw it as a stepladder to sheriff and then to mayor and then to senator. She wants to sit in a parlor in Washington, D.C., and pour tea out of a silver pot. How does that sound to you, Miss Kopp?”
“Horrible. I’d rather chase old von Matthesius through the gutters.”
He grinned and something broke open between us. “So would I. Cordelia doesn’t understand that. She never will.”
“Well.” I swallowed, almost unable to speak. “Poor Cordelia.” I regretted it immediately. I shouldn’t have poked fun at her.
“I’ve given Cordelia everything a wife wants—children and a nice home,” he said, and then it was my turn to laugh.
“It’s not a nice home.”
He kicked his shoes against the ground and shook his head. “All right. It isn’t the home she wants. But this is the sheriff’s residence, and she’s the sheriff’s wife. I decide who to employ, not Cordelia. What the newspapers say doesn’t matter. I’m going to run this department as I see fit, and if Cordelia didn’t know that before, she knows it now.”
He spoke about his wife with a quiet authority that was familiar to me. It was the same way he spoke to his deputies. It was the same way he ran the jail. For the first time I understood that what was admirable in a sheriff might be less than admirable in a husband.
“Where were you tonight?” I asked.
“Out on a search party. A man came in and told us about an old place in the woods where he thought someone had been hiding and we hoped it was our fugitive. But it was just a tramp.”
“Mrs. Heath wondered where you’d gone.”
“And she asked you?”
“It was . . . less civil than that.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell what I’d seen. “She appears to be under a great deal of strain.”
He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I told her not to worry about it.”
“I don’t know how she can help it. She said people are talking. Someone bothered her on the street.”
“It’s nothing. She was out with her mother and heard an unkind remark.”
He pushed himself off the bunk and put a hand over his mouth to cover a yawn. “I tried to tell her that if an unkind remark is the worst thing to ever happen to the wife of the sheriff, we’ve done all right. She didn’t take to that.”
“She’d have to be awfully tough not to be bothered by strangers gossiping about her family and the prospect of her husband in jail.”
“Mmmm.” He turned to leave and closed the cell door behind him. “That’s just how a sheriff’s wife has to be. Tough.”
We stood in the dark with the white bars between us.
“You don’t have to stay here so much,” he said at last. “You have a home to go to and people who are waiting for you.”
“So do you,” I said.
18
I HADN’T BEEN HOME since I caught Felix. What if they found von Matthesius and required a translator again? What if Felix confessed? I didn’t want to be miles away in the countryside, with no telephone and no auto, if I could be of use.
But since the opening night of Fleurette’s play, I’d been worried about that man I saw speaking to her at the theater. Her play, as childish as it was, put her in front of men who had only one idea about girls on the stage. She loved any sort of attention—I’d seen that already—and thought it old-fashioned to be suspicious of a strange man paying her compliments.
But I knew what could happen. I knew how easily a girl could get trapped. I thought about Lettie, answering Mr. Meeker’s advertisement for a housekeeper, and about all the girls like her I’d seen in just a few months of working for Sheriff Heath. I didn’t like to tell Fleurette those stories, but perhaps I’d sheltered her too much. She was incautious and not at all vigilant about the way men might try to take advantage of her. I hadn’t been cautious enough myself, at that age.
Norma would have admonished her about it already, but she never took Norma seriously. She knew that Norma hadn’t the first idea about what to do with a handsome man offering compliments. I wasn’t sure I knew what to do about it either, but it fell to me to try, so I went home the next day to speak to her.
Fleurette’s bedroom was starting to look like a dressmaker’s shop. Three mannequins stood near the window like guests at a party, their costumes pinned carefully together. Bolts of fabric were stacked in the corner according to color, from a deep purple wool, to a turquoise silk, to a pale lilac chiffon. Her wardrobe doors were flung open and festooned with dresses on hangers, many of which she had made for herself but had not yet worn.
Her taste ran to the fashionable and outlandish, which I had always attributed to an overactive imagination and an allowance for sewing goods that permitted her to be a bit impractical. But as I walked in the room and looked around, I saw that she’d been making herself a wardrobe for a very particular kind of life, and it was not a life that could be lived out here on the farm with me and Norma. She wanted the theater, and dinners in restaurants, and parties at the homes of witty and sophisticated people in New York. She wanted champagne and pearls, and her picture on the front of the playbill, and a string of admirers.
In short, she wanted nothing that I had on offer. I thought suddenly of my own mother, and how it must have been to see me reaching for a life that she couldn’t fathom. I would send off for a correspondence course and she would burn the papers. I thought it monstrous at the time. Now I could only smile a little at how bold she’d been. She was only trying to keep me in her world, when I wanted out so desperately. And now Fleurette wanted out of my world.
She was propped up in bed against three enormous pillows—all the best pillows in our house seemed to find their way to Fleurette’s room and never return—wearing an ivory kimono and her hair in loose curls around her shoulders. I could imagine her, quite suddenly, as somebody’s wife, paging through a volume of Vogue patterns in bed while her husband shaved in the mirror. The thought of it made a tendon in my knee give way and I had to catch myself before I stumbled.
“The farmer’s wife is ill and I’m to take her role tomorrow night,” she said, without looking up from her book.
“You’ll do just fine.” I eased down on the edge of her bed. Then, as casually as I could, I said, “I wish you’d tell me about that young man outside the theater.”
“Why should I?” Her breath came faster, working in and out of her little turned-up nose, but she kept her eyes fixed on the page. Already I’d annoyed her.
“It’s my responsibility to keep up with your friends.” I ducked down to catch her eye, but she shook a wave of dark hair over her face. Between the locks I feared I saw the stain of a lip-stick.
“Don’t you think I see the kind of trouble girls get into?”
In a small voice she said, “It was nothing.”
“Then you won’t mind telling me.”
She put her pattern book down at last. “I can’t possibly recite every word I speak to another person all day long.”
“I just—”
“I’m not like you and Norma. I won’t live on this old farm forever. I’m going to meet people, and talk to them, and go places, like anyone else does. And I won’t answer to you about it.”
“Of course you will.” I tried not to sound too frantic, but this talk of leaving the farm made me uneasy. “You’re no different from any other girl. You might not have a mother or father to tell you where you can go and who you can see, but you have me and Norma. And it’s our business to look after you.”
“All right.” Fleurette pushed her book aside and sat up straighter in bed. “On what grounds will you decide who’s suitable for me and who isn’t? Neither of you have had a single male visitor for as long as I can remember, unless you count the sheriff and his deputies, which I do not. Apparently you never found a man who was agreeable to either of you. So how will you decide whether one is right for me?”
There was a hot defiant look in her eyes. For once, she was not begging or whining. She was issuing a direct challenge, and I hadn’t any idea how to answer. It had never occurred to me to imagine a suitable man for Fleurette.
“I never said you couldn’t talk to anyone. I only ask to know about your acquaintances.”
“You haven’t any right to.”
“But I do. If it’s such a secret that you can’t tell us, then you’re not being properly supervised and we’ll take you out of Mrs. Hansen’s.”
“You can’t do that!” If a girl could stamp her foot while lying in bed, Fleurette would have.
“Of course I can. I pay for your lessons and your costumes.”
“Then I’ll pay my own tuition. Some of the girls at the academy have already said they’d like me to do their spring dresses.”