by Anne Nesbet
“Where shall we go now?” said Darleen, hopping a little from foot to foot to try to keep just slightly warm. “Where do you live, Victorine? Even if they aren’t the tenderest of cousins, those guardians of yours must be frantic after getting a ransom note on their door. Shall we take you right home?”
Victorine shook her head and rubbed her arms to warm them up.
“I think —” she said. “I think, in fact, perhaps we’d better not. Darleen, promise you will not judge me an unreasoning or ungrateful person. It must seem very dramatic, I’m sure — practically a story out of the photoplays — but I’ve been considering everything, you know, and I simply can’t go back to the Brownstones.”
Victorine took a breath to steady herself, and then they walked on because it was too cold to stand still. (Also, it is easier to have deep conversations when you are both in motion. The motion relieves the pressure somehow and lets your secret heart think about peeking out at the world.)
“Victorine, are you sure?”
“I believe I told you the sad truth,” she said. “About my distant cousins and guardians, the Brownstones, not caring for me a bit. I had to come to that conclusion after a few weeks of close observation. They care only about my fortune.”
“But how can that be?” said Darleen. She felt sorry to the core for Victorine, left so alone in the world. She also found it very exciting and new, to be walking in the middle of the night with someone who could use a phrase like my fortune so matter-of-factly.
“I’m quite sure of it,” said Victorine. “And Darleen, I’m afraid it gets worse: the dreadful Mr. Brownstone and his equally dreadful sister, Miss Brownstone — although the way they behave together, I wouldn’t call it, to be honest, fraternal —”
“Fraternal?” said Darleen. Perhaps it was because Miss Berryman had spent her life traveling the world, but she did use the strangest words as if they were as ordinary as bread and butter.
“I mean, they are not exactly, to my mind, like brother and sister,” said Victorine. “But then again, I have no brothers or sisters of my own, so perhaps I am not a proper judge. But there is something in the tender way they conspire. Well, never mind.”
“Conspire?” said Darleen.
“That, I am sure of!” said Victorine, with some heat. “They are always conspiring! Plotting and conspiring! And since the moment they swept through the doors of our home, I must be honest, they have not shown me a speck of human warmth. Instead, they seem to spend their time rummaging through Grandmama’s rooms, taking the paintings off the walls, and — I do believe, though it’s shocking to think of it — selling them.”
“How awful!” said Dar. “And just when you needed truly kind people around you. Oh, you poor thing!”
“You understand me,” said Victorine. “Darleen, I have to say, that in itself is a comfort. I’m afraid I have been very alone in the world the last few months.”
What a horrible story Victorine was telling!
“Oh, and there’s more about those Brownstones. When I saw what they were doing with all of Grandmama’s dearest possessions, I was — I’m ashamed to admit it — I was incensed. I was angry! So much so that I did something rather unwise. I quite sneakily crept downstairs one afternoon when they were out and called up Grandmama’s lawyer, old Mr. Ridge, on the telephone, and I told him what they were doing.”
“Well, good for you!” said Darleen, impressed that Miss Berryman felt so confident about using a telephone. There was a telephone at the Matchless studios, but only Aunt Shirley dared to use it. “Did he help?”
“Quite the opposite, as things turned out. He came to speak in person to the awful Brownstones, and they denied all wrongdoing, their voices simply oozing with honey. I did not exactly listen at the door of the parlor, mind you. But I heard the tone of their awful voices, and I heard the way Mr. Ridge’s words softened and quietened, and it was clear to me that they had managed to pull, as they say, the wool over his eyes. He went away and did not return. Grandmama used to say of him that he was a fine person, within certain strict limits. I’m afraid my telephone call forced him a little beyond his limits. It came to nothing. And then of course the Brownstones were quite furious with me. Oh, Darleen, their eyes were simply terrible! And Mr. Brownstone — the ‘two-eyed man,’ I call him secretly —”
“But aren’t most men two-eyed?” asked Darleen.
“Well, yes, but the thing is, his eyes you can’t help but notice because one of them is much lighter brown than the other one — almost as if it belongs to a different person, you know.”
“Oh, how interesting!” said Darleen. She had certainly heard before of people having only one eye due to some unfortunate accident — Uncle Charlie told awful stories about how that old Fire-Bug Lukes (father of Jasper) had had a run-in with a poker that left him with an eye patch and a bad temper. But someone with two entirely different-colored eyes! That was new. “I’d like to see that, I think.”
“You wouldn’t want a furious Mr. Brownstone near you at all, I’m quite sure,” said Victorine. “He stormed at me terribly for making that telephone call on ‘his’ telephone, and then he became even angrier and said it was time I forgot my poor Grandmama — imagine saying that! — and then he had the servants take my mourning clothes away, and in general he made the most terrible, angry threats. He called me a ‘thorn in his side’ and even said — I shudder to repeat it — that it would be better for everyone if I had never been born.”
Darleen gasped. This Mr. Brownstone sounded as bad as any villain in a photoplay!
“Oh, poor Victorine!” said Darleen with all her heart. “How awfully, awfully frightened you must have been.”
“Frightened and very alone,” said Victorine. “The disaster with Mr. Ridge was only a few weeks ago, and it was not until Thursday that they so much as spoke to me again, to say that I would be allowed to go to the opening of the Strand Theatre — and we know how that turned out! I’m sure they simply rejoiced to think the kidnappers had rid them of their ‘thorn.’”
“So we won’t take ourselves to the Brownstones,” said Darleen, after a moment or two of trying to sort out all the pieces of Victorine’s sad story. “I guess we’d better go right to the police, then.”
Victorine shook her head.
“No, but Darleen, don’t you see? That won’t do either,” she said. “The police will feel obliged to follow the Law, and that means they’ll send me right back to the Brownstones. But now you will understand: I don’t trust those people an inch, and I don’t want anything to do with them. I can’t risk being sent back to the Brownstones.”
Darleen had to take a moment to digest this last bit of logic.
“You were kidnapped, and now you are running away?” she said finally. “Is that it?”
“It sounds strange when you say it right out loud that way,” said Victorine. “But perhaps yes. So what shall we do now?”
Darleen didn’t hesitate a single wink.
“We head uptown!” she said. “We’ll take ourselves right up to the 125th Street ferry, that’s what! What time is it, I wonder? We’ll get on the first ferry we can, back over the Hudson to Fort Lee.”
“Goodness!” said Victorine. “Whatever’s in Fort Lee?”
“Oh, just Champion, Eclair, Pathé, Solax, and Matchless,” said Darleen.
Victorine tried to look polite. “What are those? Racehorses?”
“No, no!” said Darleen after letting one — only one — wild scrap of laughter escape from her throat. “Not racehorses — studios! The studios that make the photoplays! And anyway, that’s not the most important thing about Fort Lee. The most important thing is my own dear Papa. He’ll have been waiting for me to get home for hours now, and he’ll be so dreadfully worried. They’ll all be worried. And I’m sure he’ll be kind to you while you decide where you want to run away to.”
And she pulled Victorine along the sidewalk. They had been going roughly the right direction already, which was no
rth. The numbers of New York streets got larger as you headed north, so that was a helpful guide.
“You’re very lucky to have a Papa,” said Victorine in a musing-and-shivering sort of way as they crossed the streets in the chill of night. The pavement smelled very slightly of water, and of course of all those other city middle-of-the-night smells, some of them not very nice but all of them rather exciting if you’re not used to running through the biggest of big cities in the middle of the night.
Dar was so glad Victorine was there with her so that she didn’t have to walk through the night alone. And then she thought of how alone poor Victorine had been these past months, with her beloved Grandmama dead and those awful, selfish, very distant cousins moving in to take control of everything and be cruel to the one lonely girl left behind.
“I know it,” said Darleen with feeling. “I do know how lucky I am to have my Papa. And I used to have a Mama too, but she flew away from bad lungs years ago. She caught a chill and was gone. And that’s why . . .”
She was inching so close to confessing the existence of that feeling inside her. A conversation can sometimes hover right on the edge of a cliff while we wonder whether or not to leap (or climb). What was it about walking in the night with someone that made all your inmost secrets want to come sneaking right out into the cold but interestingly pungent air?
“That’s why I must never fly away. It would rebreak his heart, you know, and he’d never survive it. We have to get home to my Papa as quickly as we can and show him I’m still here despite everything. Here and with my feet on the ground.”
It was so late that it was almost early.
“If only we had some money,” said Darleen, “we could find somewhere warm to have coffee or cocoa while we wait for the ferry to start running. I don’t even care for coffee, but it’s medicinal, says my Aunt Shirley. Anyways, it seems like the right thing to drink when a person’s as cold as we are. But that’s if we had money.”
“Of course, we do have a little money,” said Victorine. “I carry an ironed bill hidden in a special pocket at all times. It’s only prudent! You never know when you’re going to find yourself standing on the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the night. For instance!”
She smiled.
Although New York City never sleeps, this morning it seemed to be dozing. It was very early, in New York’s defense, and it was a Sunday. But finally Darleen was able to pull Victorine in through the doors of a place called Murphy’s for some hot medicinal coffee and a fried egg.
“We must look very bedraggled,” said Victorine with some satisfaction. She took a nice slurp of her coffee.
The man at the next table startled himself out of a doze, checked the time, and sprinted right out of Murphy’s, leaving his newspaper behind.
Victorine leaned over to take a peek at the headlines. “‘Sunshine This Afternoon,’” she read aloud. “Well, and thank goodness for that. I’m chilled to the bone already. ‘A Rainy Morning Forecast, with Clear Skies Later.’ And the rest of the news seems quite terrible. I don’t think I want to read about Sing Sing Prison.”
“Let’s flip the front page over,” said Darleen. “See? They put the funnier stories under the fold. Look — the Pope doesn’t like the tango!”
Victorine shook her head and tapped the story right above.
“I don’t know, Darleen,” she said. “This one says there’s a poor woman who is ill of mercurial poisoning, and they don’t know who she is! That isn’t exactly funny, is it?”
“Makes a good story, though,” said Darleen. “And look here, some man bid an enormous amount of money for a baby. But the mother said no!”
Dar was so tired she couldn’t even exactly remember what a five with five zeroes following it was called.
“Selling babies does seem wrong,” said Victorine. “Even for half a million dollars, it can’t exactly be the right thing to — Oh, my, look at this!”
A headline was shouting in the lower-right corner of the front page:
“YOUNG BERRYMAN HEIRESS NABBED AT STRAND!”
“Desperate Search Underway for Richest Girl in World”
“Guardians Distraught”
“On the first page, too!” said Darleen. Only the most important stories could squeeze onto the front page of the newspaper.
“Shall I read it out loud?” said Victorine, but then they looked around and saw the waitress’s beady eyes flicking their way.
“On second thought, I’ll use my quietest murmur,” she said. “Come close, Darleen.”
It was very short, but then again, it must have been squeezed onto the front page at the very last possible second, since their adventures had started only the evening before.
“‘The grand opening of the new Strand Theatre was apparently the scene of a terrible crime last night, when Miss Victorine Berryman, young heiress to the Berryman fortune, was kidnapped by bandits who came equipped with brazen intention and a motorcar. The little girl, in the care of guardians since the death of her grandmother, Mrs. Hugo Berryman, had been brought to the theatre by her loving guardian, Miss Brownstone —’”
“Loving!” Victorine paused to exclaim, but still under her breath. She tapped that last phrase with her finger. “I should say not! But I’ll continue.”
“‘— who reported the poor girl had been taken off by bandits in a white motorcar.’”
“White!” whispered Victorine and Darleen together, and they shook their heads. That motorcar had been black as onyx, and anyway, what self-respecting kidnapper would ride around in a white motorcar? Wouldn’t that stick out like a sore thumb?
“‘Guardians Mr. and Miss Brownstone are said to be distraught after the receipt of a ransom note reportedly demanding millions and threatening the worst if their demands are not met in the briefest period of time. There seems little hope that young Miss Berryman’s ransom and rescue can be arranged with the necessary haste, since there are still legal barriers to the Brownstones’ ability to touch the Berryman fortune. Poor Little Rich Girl, indeed! All New York holds its breath, hoping for a swift and positive resolution to this tragic crime. A massive search is underway. $25,000 reward offered for information.’”
“Well!” said Victorine, sitting back in her chair. Her eyes were flashing. Perhaps even coffee is not as galvanizing on a damp morning as reading (somewhat inaccurate) news of your fate on the front page of the New York Times.
“‘Massive search’ means everyone will be looking for me, I’m afraid,” said Victorine darkly. “So that they can simply fling me back into the hands of the Legal Terrors, Mr. and Miss Brownstone. Who will probably try mercurial poisoning next, for all I know. It’s indeed bad news for Miss Berryman, I’d say.”
Darleen was paging swiftly through the rest of the newspaper.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Bad news for us Darlings too.”
“More bad news?” said Victorine. “What do you mean?”
“There’s not a peep about Daring Darleen in this whole paper. Not one word. All that planning and arranging for nothing!”
For a moment Victorine looked puzzled, and then it was clear that she understood. She put her hand over Darleen’s to show how sorry she was about the failure of the Darlings’ clever publicity scheme, just when the Matchless studios so needed a financial boost. Darleen shook her head.
“Oh, don’t, Victorine. It’s all right. Just our bad luck, is all. Of course a real kidnapping should drown out a fake one — that’s only what’s right. Still, Aunt Shirley and Uncle Charlie will be awfully disappointed.”
The good news was that the ferry would be departing soon. Fueled by the coffee, they trotted down the street to the place where the ferry docked.
The ferry was a big boat with a gaping, cavelike mouth — a mouth so large it could swallow whole motorcars! There were a few of those lined up now, waiting to be allowed on the ferry. That was a convenient thing, to be able to take your motorcar right across the Hudson River with you from New York
City to Fort Lee or the other way around. There were some horse-drawn carriages waiting, too, of course. The horses stood mostly quietly in the morning air. Maybe they were eyeing the motorcars with some suspicion. (Motorcars can be noisy, explosive beasts.)
Darleen had been on the ferry a number of times and knew that on a weekday, it would have been simply brimming with photoplay people heading to the studios in Fort Lee. It seemed very quiet now, but Victorine was looking around with bright, interested eyes.
“Let’s pay,” said Dar. “We’ll need a nickel each.”
Once they had paid their fares, Victorine grabbed Darleen’s arm.
“Is there always an enormous, sour-faced policeman at the entrance gate?” she said.
“No, never,” said Darleen. “Why?”
But she looked and saw that this time there was. He must have been more than six feet tall, that policeman, and broad as a well-muscled tree. And one eye was screwed almost shut. Maybe that was just the way he liked to see the world, or maybe he had learned over the years of being a policeman that squinting that way made him look scarier.
He stood there, that muscular tree trunk of a man, and seemed to be scrutinizing the people getting on board as he swung his nightstick in thoughtful circles.
Without saying anything to each other but acting in unison, almost like a single four-footed creature, Dar and Victorine found themselves scooting back, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible while they figured out what was going on with this fellow and what it was he was scrutinizing.
A man asked a joking question of the policeman, and he grumbled in response:
“ . . . young lady . . . high-toned type . . . gone missing this morning . . . suspicious circumstances . . .”