“Foxes would kill it. Small things aren’t safe.”
He walked to the back of the barn, where not even the dim light from the door reached. She continued to stroke the rabbit, crooning at it, until Henry called to her again.
“The lodge is here.”
She leaned her forehead against the hutch. “Goodbye,” she whispered.
She picked her way carefully to the back of the barn. She could barely see Henry, though she heard him moving things around. Then there was a ppffft, and a blue-white flare appeared an arm’s length away. The match moved through the air like one of Clyde’s magic tricks, lighting votive candles in blue and red glass holders.
She turned, letting her eyes again adjust. When she looked back, she saw a sort of altar, made of two sawhorses with planks laid across them, its back flush against the rear wall. Black cloth covered the planks, not quite long enough to reach the floor and hide the coils of rope stored underneath. Arranged on the makeshift altar were numerous pictures, like the oversize cards her mother used to tell fortunes. Pin stepped toward the table and picked up one of them, peering at it in the candlelight.
A newspaper picture of a young girl had been pasted to a piece of shirt cardboard. Not Elsie Paroubek—Pin thought at first it might be Lillian Wulff, the girl who’d escaped from the Gypsies. But while this girl had braids like Lillian, she was thinner, pale and unsmiling. Pin squinted to read the caption beneath the photo:
Alice Porovsky, who has been missing since Thursday morning, was last seen walking from…
The rest of the words were missing. Lightning bolts had been inked above the girl’s head, with colored flowers cut from seed catalogs scattered above them.
She glanced around for Henry, spotted him in the shadows. The flickering candlelight glinted in his eyes: he was watching her. She set the picture down and picked up another card. This, too, had a photograph clipped from a newspaper, a towheaded girl with a huge grin and several missing front teeth:
Parents bereft by Sonya Castillo’s murder. “Who would rob us of our precious angel?” mother cries before fainting.
Stars had been drawn in a circle around the girl’s picture, zigzag lines and a row of Xs. Words were printed at the top in childish block letters:
ALL GIRLS WILL AVENGE THEM!
Pin replaced the card and picked up the next one, and the next, moving around the altar as the candles guttered in their votive glasses.
Every picture showed a different girl’s image, cut from a newspaper. Sonya Castillo, Alice Porovsky, Katy Wilder, Dolly Trent, Lucia DeMarinis, Gunella Edmundson, Irena Novak. Each picture had been glued to a square of cardboard decorated with stars and lightning bolts, flowers clipped from catalogs, along with bunnies and kittens and baby chicks. Some of the girls had their eyes crossed out. One had a line of Xs drawn across her mouth, as though it had been sewn up.
All the girls had been kidnapped. Two had never been seen again. The rest had been murdered.
She set the last card down. Her hand trembled as the candles flickered, blue and red. She counted the cards, searching for her sister’s face among those of the dead or missing. But Abriana wasn’t there.
Her sister had been too old, she realized. None of the girls pictured here were more than six or seven. She looked at Henry.
“In your wallet—that picture of another girl, her name was Abriana. Why isn’t she here?”
His head moved quickly, the pinprick light in his eyes darting like fireflies in the darkness. “Not here, so queer,” he said, his hoarse voice rising anxiously. “Can’t save them all. So small…”
Her stomach flipped: he did know of her sister. Or did he? He might just have saved the article. Or he might have killed her.
She wanted to run, but it was too dark. She swallowed, a bad taste in her mouth. Don’t let him know you’re scared, she thought. Like with dogs, pretend you don’t care. And don’t look them in the eye.
Behind the row of candles, a larger piece of cardboard leaned against the wall. As she reached for it, she heard Henry behind her, breathing hard.
The cardboard was painted midnight blue and covered with gold-foil stars, like you got in school for good behavior. In the center was a photograph of Elsie Paroubek, the same one that had appeared everywhere the year she died. Her hair had been colored with orange crayon, her eyes dotted with midnight-blue paint. Her lips were bright red, and yellow lines squiggled from her hair and face. Pictures of the other girls surrounded her, a halo of children beneath words in yellow paint:
ANNIE ARONBURG
CHILD OF GREAT SOUL
PROTECT US ALL
“You did these,” Pin whispered. She looked at Henry, and he nodded.
She stared at the picture of Alice Porovsky. She would always be missing since Thursday. Pin’s heart beat hard, but she felt calm, so calm, as though her head had detached from her body and floated above it like a balloon, attached by a thread.
This is how those girls died, she realized. This is the man who killed them, and now he is going to kill me.
Bright blots sparked in front of her; she heard a sound like when she’d listened to a conch shell back at Lenore’s place. That’s what the ocean sounds like, her mother had said, but now she’d never hear the ocean. She wanted to see her mother, and now she never would. He would kill her like he’d killed those other girls.
But she wasn’t a girl. She was Pin, a fourteen-year-old boy. She dropped the poster and turned to flee, reaching for the shiv in her pocket. Henry grabbed her wrist.
“It’s part of the Ceremony,” he explained, so close that she could feel his warm breath at her temple. “I protect them. So we don’t forget.”
Still grasping her, he stooped to pick up the fallen poster, set it tenderly on the altar, then reached beneath the altar. She watched numbly, too terrified to scream.
He straightened and held out a shapeless, dark mass—a burlap sack. He let go of her wrist, pushing her against the sawhorse so she couldn’t run, and dug into his pocket to produce a pencil nub. He set it on the altar, then pulled something from the sack and handed her a small square of cardboard.
“Sign your name,” he commanded.
“No.”
“You have to—it’s part of the Ceremony! All brothers of the Black Brothers Lodge have to sign their names!”
Pin blinked, confused. Maybe he wasn’t going to kill her—maybe it really was a ceremony. She picked up the pencil stub, glanced aside to see Henry nod eagerly. Carefully she wrote Pin Maffucci at the bottom of the square. “So—am I a Gemini now?”
“That is never for you to say that!” Enraged, he snatched up cardboard and pencil, tossed them into the burlap sack, and kicked it back beneath the makeshift altar. “Never!”
He gestured wildly at the poster of Elsie Paroubek. “You are not to have touched her! You are not to speak her name! You—”
“Henry!” Light slashed through the darkness, blinding Pin, as a man’s heavily accented voice called out in alarm. “Henry, who in hell is this?”
A tall figure moved behind the flashlight’s beam. Henry’s friend, she realized—the night watchman, Willhie. The man who’d gone to Decatur.
“Willhie!” cried Henry. “You’re back. Sack,” he added, glancing at the floor.
“Who is he?” demanded Willhie, and Pin flinched as he drew closer, pointing the flashlight at her face. “Who are you, boy?”
“A friend, Willhie,” Henry insisted, “he’s—”
She whirled and bolted out of the barn, the sound of pursuing footsteps echoing across the plank floor behind her.
Chapter 55
THEY HAD SUPPER at the Casino Restaurant, where Gina made short work of a Wiener schnitzel. Francis had hurriedly returned to the station house, where he kept a change of clothes suitable for an evening out. But after dinner, Gina didn’t want to go to the Palace Ballroom.
“I work there some nights,” she said, and made a face. “Showing people with two left feet how
to do the fox-trot.”
“You’re a dance teacher, right?”
“Not really a teacher. I demonstrate new dances, show them the steps. Sometimes men get a little fresh, but they’re usually there with someone.”
“Animal dances?”
“That’s right. Grizzly bear, bunny hug, fox-trot, turkey trot. Dime a dance. Anyone gets frisky, Mr. Schneyer shows ’em right out.”
Francis nodded, unsure what to say. He would have thought she’d be too embarrassed to admit such a thing. Or, at the least, that she’d blush while making the confession. Instead, she went on as though she’d been the one to ask him to dinner.
“Let’s go to the cabaret,” she said. “The girls I work with, we go all the time. They have a good singer, Sunday night’s a piano player, but he’s good, too.”
Back out on the Pike, they might have been any couple. Francis hesitated to offer her his arm, but Gina took it on her own. He smiled down at her. A few more good German dinners would put some meat on those bones.
The Woodland Cabaret was on the far side of the park, near the arcade and minstrel show. It was managed by a colored woman named Bella Bynum, who kept a pistol in her pocket and had patented a system of alarms that made her a pile of money. “If I had ten men like her on the force, I could retire,” Hickey often said. When Francis and Gina entered, Bella sat at a table, reading Popular Mechanics magazine.
“Gina! You got a date.” Bella set aside her magazine. She was a few years older than Gina, clad in a stylish blouse with a Ritz collar. “Or this another student?”
“Just a friend,” said Gina.
As Bella turned to Francis, her expression cooled. “I know you.”
Francis shrugged. “I’m off duty now.”
“You stayed on the job long enough to arrest Clyde.”
Francis blushed as Gina raised a warning hand. “I’m sure he had nothing to do with that. How is he, Bella? Did he get hold of Mr. Nelson?”
“He did. That lawyer charges like he’s the king of Sweden.” Bella’s gaze returned to Francis. “Only right thing to do is release an innocent man.”
Francis took Gina’s elbow. “Why don’t we call it a night?”
“’Cause I don’t want to,” she snapped. “And we all know Clyde’s innocent. We came here to dance—will that be a problem, Bella?”
“I guess not,” she said, and waved them inside.
The dance floor wasn’t crowded. The Negro pianist he recognized from the minstrel show, where he performed in blackface. Without his makeup he wasn’t much darker than Gina. He wore an elegant jacket and trousers, rather than the garish stripes and gambler’s hat he sported in the show.
“He looks snappier dressed like that,” said Francis, steering Gina across the room.
“What, did you think he dresses in those loud duds when he’s not on the stage?” She glanced at the piano player, who acknowledged her with a nod and broke into “Peacherine Rag.” Gina turned to Francis. He offered her his arm, and they stepped onto the dance floor.
Francis was a good dancer. Gina feigned surprise that he could fox-trot. After a few songs she asked, “Do you know the Texas Tommy?”
Francis shook his head. She peered over his shoulder to catch the pianist’s eye. Without missing a beat, he began playing “King Chanticleer.”
“Like this,” proclaimed Gina. “Watch me.”
Francis followed her lead, stooping to set his chin on one of her shoulders and his hand on the other. She did the same, standing on tiptoe to reach him, and segued into a two-step, moving faster than he would have thought possible. She pulled him close and began to spiel, whirling so that her hair tumbled around her face. Francis caught flashes of the other dancers watching them, their expressions ranging from disapproval to shock.
When the song ended, Francis loosened his tie, grinning as he walked her toward a table. Gina sat across from him, breathless and flushed, as Francis ordered two schooners of beer from a passing waiter. Gina raised her glass to him. “You’re a pretty good dancer, Francis.”
“Not so fleet with the newer styles. That Texas Tommy’s a hot one.”
“You learned fast.”
“If I learned slow you would’ve trampled me! Where’d you learn to tough dance?”
“That’s not a tough dance. A girl I worked with at the milliner’s used to live in San Francisco. She taught me.” She took a long swallow of beer. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”
The pianist launched into a slower melody, and the couples on the dance floor arranged themselves into tipsy approximations of a waltz. Gina set her glass on the table and stared at it, as though divining something there. At last she looked up.
“Why aren’t you married?”
Francis found himself too tongue-tied to respond to such a question. Unperturbed, she asked, “What about a sweetheart?”
He shook his head. “I had a girl, but…”
“She broke the engagement?”
“No. She died.”
“Oh!” Gina’s arch expression crumpled into dismay. She covered Francis’s large hand with her small one, gazing at him with such heartfelt pity he felt ashamed.
“It was three years ago,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound diffident. “No—four, I think.”
“Was that before you left the Chicago police?”
He let his breath out in a long whoosh. He’d hoped that, as a newcomer this summer, Gina might have been immune to Riverview gossip. But why should she be? Her job on the Pike would make her privy to more secrets than he knew himself. “It was,” he said at last.
“Do you miss it?”
“I do. Very much so.”
He gazed at Gina curiously. How odd that she didn’t ask, Do you miss her? The truth was he didn’t miss Maura, not really. She was an ache that flared up sometimes, after too much drink or not enough sleep, then subsided with sunrise. But his detective work had been so deeply ingrained that its loss felt like losing a part of his body, like the strange pains that amputees were said to experience after an arm or a leg was removed in surgery.
“What sort of policeman were you?”
“A detective sergeant. An investigator.”
“You were the man who investigated the Black Hand. That was why you lost your position. That’s what I heard.”
He shrugged, avoiding her gaze. For an instant her fingers tightened around his, and then she withdrew her hand. “We lived in Little Hell before we came here, me and Pin. Those men do the work of the devil. I wish you had been able to murder them all.”
“I wish they’d been brought to trial. And that I’d kept my position.”
“It must have hardened you, that work.”
He looked at her in surprise. “I would hope not. Why would you think that?”
“You’re here…” She opened her hands to indicate the room around them, the half-dozen drunken couples on the dance floor, swaying to the melancholic strains of “Solace.” “Not a day after that girl’s murder.”
Francis gave another awkward laugh. “It does sound hard, when you put it like that,” he admitted. “I guess I just don’t give much thought to things when I get off duty.”
Gina laughed. “I’m flattered.”
He downed the rest of his drink, flustered. “That wasn’t what I meant to say. I just—I thought you might enjoy doing something sociable. As a distraction after last night. I’m very sorry your son was the one who had to see that.”
Gina said nothing. Francis finally asked, “Would you like another beer?”
“That would be very sociable,” she said, and smiled.
He signaled the waiter. They sat without speaking until he returned with their beers, listening as the pianist played another wistful tune. Francis raised his glass to Gina. He tried to think of what to say. “Have you—have any of your predictions ever come true?”
“No. I’ve never done anything like this before. I was a frock-hitcher, but girls don’t want fussy plumes and silk peonies anymor
e, not unless it’s for a garden party. A friend worked here last summer and said I could make money pretty easy.”
“And is it? Easy money?”
“It’s money. Never enough, but that’s nothing new.” She sipped her beer. “Mostly I worry about Pin. After last night…”
As her eyes welled, Francis broke in, “It’s a terrible thing—but it would seem much worse if you had a daughter, instead of a son.”
Gina’s mouth twisted. He wasn’t sure if she was fighting a sob or trying not to laugh.
“Maybe I should see you home,” he said gently. He glanced at his pocket watch. “It’s getting late. May I see you home?”
The Pike seemed strangely deserted when they stepped back outside. The Hippodrome’s angel shone brilliantly, but the other attractions had gone dark.
“That’s odd.” Francis stared at the coasters, black and skeletal in the hot night. “It’s too early for them to shut off the lights.”
Gina remained silent, and Francis kicked himself for ruining the evening by talking about his past. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound.
“Do you think you might enjoy doing this again one night?” he asked.
Gina tilted her head to look up at him. “I might be persuaded. Under the proper sociable conditions.”
Francis let his breath out. “I’ll see if I can arrange for that.”
They had reached the Great Lagoon, where the angel’s reflection broke into fragments as wind stirred the dark water. Gina glanced in the direction of her shack. “I hope Pin’s back home.”
“He’s a brave kid—I know some sergeants would have gone faint if they’d seen what he did.”
“Clyde,” she said without looking at him. “You know he’d never do such a thing.”
“I do. But my word doesn’t count for much.”
“Still, couldn’t you—”
“Bacon!”
Francis turned to see Anton Magruder running toward them. “There’s another one,” he gasped.
“Another what?”
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