Karen Memory (9 page)

I was spending the time with the notebook I don’t care if people see, sketching away at my idea for curtains for Priya. I’d do those first, I decided, though they’d need lining to hide the seams between the patchworks, because they was just rectangles. They’d serve as practice for the duvet and maybe for cushions.

It was all busywork, of course, to distract myself from what I was really thinking. That I needed—
needed
—Priya to stay. So she had to want to stay. So it was up to me to make her comfortable. To make her like it here.

And of course I was all at the same time painfully aware that if I made it too obvious I was scrabbling after her I’d just drive her away. Anybody who just wants a dog to kick isn’t somebody you’d want to be loved by, my da used to say. Nor somebody you’d ever give a dog, Mama would always answer.

Time went by, and people drifted in and out of the parlor. By three on the big grandfather clock by the library door, the last of the johns had either done his business and gone out or settled in for the night with the girl of his dreams. Those picketers we’d had earlier apparently didn’t stay up past ten, so they was long gone, too, and in their absence custom had picked up a bit. Me, I was just starting to think about some supper—I could smell the mutton with garlic and the huckleberry sauce wafting out from Connie’s cookpots every time the hall door was opened—when, muffled through the brick walls, I heard Pollywog start in to screaming out in the alley.

I say I heard, but we all did. “Christ, what now?” Miss Francina said, heaving herself up from the chair where she’d been bootless, toasting her socks by the parlor fire. Crispin was already on his feet, grabbing up an old train signal lantern we keep beside the door. Miss Bethel ducked under the bar pass-through with her shotgun ready. Effie jumped up beside me, and so did Miss Lizzie. Madame’s office door creaked and I heard the thump of her cane, but Crispin was already out the door and I wasn’t letting him and Polly face whatever it was alone for as long as it might take for Madame to get down the stairs. If Polly needed rescuing, then by God we were there to effect her rescue.

I bolted out behind him, in between Miss Francina and Miss Bethel.

Pollywog’s real name is Mary, from which comes Polly and therefore, by the irrefutable logic of affection, Pollywog. She’s got that straight blond hair like I described, and maybe not a whole mess of common sense, but she ain’t in general a screamer. She’s got a lot of regulars; the johns who want her usually
only
want her, and I think it is as much to do with her big blue eyes and her listening expression and her trick of petting their hair back as it is to do with her trick hip.

There weren’t nothing in sight from the front stoop. I looked this way and that—and up the ladder, for good measure—but them red lamps burned steady in the still air and there was nobody in any direction. Polly screamed again—breathier this time, like a balloon running out of air—and I caught sight of the colored-glass glow of Crispin’s signal lantern vanishing around the corner to my right.

I lit out after him, Miss Francina and Miss Bethel on either flank, Effie at our heels. Miss Francina was still stocking foot, but that didn’t seem to slow her none.

“Aw, shit!” Crispin’s voice, and I braced for a crash or a thud of fist on flesh, but all that came was Pollywog’s sobbing. I rounded the corner in time to see that it muffled as Crispin pulled her face into his coat. In the light of the gas lamp beside the kitchen door, I could make out the dustbins we lined up against the scaffold holding the street fill back. There also was a pile of rags and a spilled pail of peelings—Pollywog must of dropped it—beside them.

We lot all planted our heels and piled to a halt like characters in a funny strip. Fortunately, it was Miss Bethel who bounced off my back, not Miss Francina. And fortunately, she did it with her forearm and not the shotgun. Half-carrying Pollywog, Crispin started drawing her the way we’d come, back toward the front door. Her face never came out of his shoulder.

“She hurt?” Miss Francina asked as they passed our little huddle by.

“Look to the girl on the ground,” Crispin said. “If there’s any use to it.”

“Fucking shit,” said Effie, echoing and enhancing Crispin’s sentiments. I didn’t say it myself because my mouth had dropped open and was hanging there as if I was a hooked fish, gasping.

The dustbins were dustbins. The dropped pail of peelings was exactly that. The pile of rags …

It was a girl. Or a woman.

Miss Francina, unsurprisingly, got herself together first. She darted forward, heedless of the peelings and her stockinged feet, and dropped a knee beside the prone figure. As if her moving freed us all from some paralysis, I stepped up, too. Miss Bethel stood over us with the gun held easily, and Effie made a sideways triangle to her, watching back the way we’d come. We all trusted Crispin to bring the folk inside up to speed and all.

I stepped around the girl on the ground. She was a sister, a stargazer like us. And she didn’t have the look of one of the dockside whores—she was white, for one thing—but she weren’t no parlor house girl. A streetwalker, rather, a ragged robin, sprawled half on her front and half on her side. Her face was lost in her tangled brown hair. Her boots were down at the heels and her hem was draggled and tattered.

She wasn’t wearing stays, and the back of her dress was torn to ribbons and sticky brown with old blood. She’d been flogged.

At least blood that old didn’t make me want to grab one of those dustbins and hide my head in it while I upped my chuck.

Miss Francina laid the back of her hand against the woman’s cheek and paused a moment, head bowed. Then she looked up and found Effie’s gaze. “You get Crispin back out here,” she said. “And a cudgel and a lamp, and your pistol. And you and him run and get the constables, fast as you can.”

“We should get that girl inside,” Miss Bethel said as Effie vanished in a patter of footsteps. Two runs for the constables in two nights, that were a mite unusual.

Miss Francina shook her head. “She’s past help, Beth. We should wait for the brass knuckles and their whistles.”

Miss Bethel said, “This is a threat.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Miss Francina said, but her expression agreed with Miss Bethel. “Karen honey, would you run and fetch my boots?”

*   *   *

As it turned out, there wasn’t much wait for the law. And it wasn’t the constabulary. By the time I came back with Miss Francina’s shoes—boots only by courtesy, as they was the frilliest, silliest girl shoes you’ve ever seen, and on the largest last—and gave her a shoulder to lean on while she put them on standing, there was a thump of much heavier boots coming down the ladder.

We all turned—we being Miss Bethel, Miss Francina, and me, because Miss Lizzie was keeping the other girls in the library for now. Which was just as well; having them all gathered around sobbing or staring or sobbing
and
staring would of been more than I could of handled. The tromp of big boots turned the corner, and—

I felt the skin around my eyes stretch as Marshal Bass Reeves stomped into view.

He’d divested himself of his duster and spurs, but he still had a pistol on each hip. Now he wore a town suit—maybe gray, in the lamplight—and a silk kerchief tied into the gap of his shirt. Still the same pair of boots, though, with the stirrup scuffs in the arches.

Under his big gruff mustache, he looked grim.

“Ladies,” he said, and we parted before him like the Red Sea. He could of been our Moses, I suppose, but they say the Negro Moses was a woman and she lives in New York.

Miss Bethel is never at a loss for words, and it was her who said, “How did you know to come here?”

The Marshal crouched beside the girl. He touched her shoulder with some gentleness. The shadow that crossed his face at the sight of her ribboned back was no trick of the lantern light. He looked down again.

I couldn’t read the Marshal’s face, because the brim of his big hat covered it as he crouched, so I looked at the creases across the toes of his boots and wondered how many states and territories they’d seen. He pulled a glove off—they were town gloves now, pearl kidskin, such as none of us nor the dead girl were wearing—and gently took her wrist. The shreds of dress across her back rustled.

There was no wind down here in the well. It was just from him moving her. She weren’t stiff yet.

“Marshal, she’s beyond any help but God’s,” said Miss Francina.

He didn’t look up.

“She’s got to be dead,” I said. “The blood … the flogging—”

She had to be dead. Did I
hope
she was dead?

Would I want to be dead if it was me?

“I’ve seen men survive as bad,” he answered. “Women too.” But as he stared down at his fingers on her floury-looking wrist, I knowed the answer wasn’t what he would of wanted.

He pulled a compact out of his breast pocket and opened it. He held the mirror under her nose for two, three minutes before he shook his head.

Marshal Reeves looked up at me and heaved a tired sigh. “That’s a right pisser.”

“I did say,” said Miss Francina. The Marshal raised his eyebrows at her, tilting back his hat. She sighed. “But you just had to see for yourself, didn’t you?”

“It’s a character flaw,” he allowed.

Miss Bethel said, “You didn’t answer how you knew to come here.”

She sounded suspicious, even though the silver star glinted on his town coat just as it had the duster’s lapel. Possibly because of it. You learn a little something about the law when you work on your back.

“I was on my way here, actually,” he said. He smoothed the ragged robin’s hair and stood. Easily, his gun belt creaking but his breath untroubled. “I wanted to talk to Miss Wilde and Miss Memery here about what happened … well, I guess now it’s yesterday. It occurred to me that you might know something about the man I’m hunting, and I didn’t think in your line of work you ladies would be abed yet. I passed your man and your girl on the street, and they saw my star. They went on to find a roundsman.”

As if his words had been a harbinger, I heard a distant whistle blowing. The shrill cry was taken up by another, and another after that, until the night echoed with them—tinny, thin, and frail.

I looked at the girl again. I wanted to cover her. “She can’t of been thrown. We’d have heard the thud.”

“She’s not one of yours, then?”

“In that dress? Madame wouldn’t let her scrub floors dressed like that, let alone entertain clients,” Miss Francina scoffed. I knowed it was to cover her horror—she hides the softest heart in the house, and Signor isn’t the only one who knows it—but the Marshal gave her a sidelong glance.

“Look at her face,” the Marshal said.

“I’d prefer not.”

His lips stretched into a moment’s grim smile. “Fair enough. She wasn’t thrown.”

I said, “So somebody got her down here—down the ladder—and left her.”

“Someone did,” the Marshal said. “Which makes me think even more that you might know something that could help me find the man I’m looking for.”

Miss Francina twined one perfect yellow corkscrew curl around her finger—how she keeps her hair unmussed I’ll never know—and pursed her lips at him. She said, “Something tells me you’d better come inside, Marshal. You and Karen go on. Miss Bethel and I will wait for the constables.”

Chapter Seven

I said how Bea is a slip of a thing, all eyes and fingers and crinolines, and how she’s still learning her English. What I might not have said is how she’s kind and clever … so when I walked into the library with Marshal Reeves I shouldn’t of been surprised to find her sitting with Priya on the long divan. Signor was cuddled up in Beatrice’s skirts and Priya was wrapped up in a knit afghan Miss Francina had made. They were chattering away in French.

Or rather, Beatrice was chattering. Signor wasn’t saying much. And Priya was answering, haltingly, and her accent was worse than mine—which was saying something, because mine was no better than wretched. But she was feeling her way through complete sentences, albeit simple ones and with the verbs all cattywumpus. At least Beatrice was laughing at her, the same’s she laughed at me. But that, I reckon, was the moment when I started to figure out just how smart Priya really was. Because she hadn’t listed French as one of her accomplishments to Madame, and I’d bet my toenails that she had been desperate enough to stay that she’d have mentioned anything she might be able to do that would be of the least little use at all. Which meant she’d picked up what she was doing now in whatever time she’d spent with Bea this evening—not much if she’d been roused by the fuss not a quarter hour before—and while I had been out that afternoon.

They both looked up when I came in, and Beatrice bounced to her feet wearing a worried look none of us would ever let a john catch us in. That was probably why it smoothed away again the second the Marshal stepped through the door behind me.

Girls in my profession know a little too much about men. The ones who want to know a woman as a person are fewer than you’d hope, and most of those don’t even realize it about themselves. They don’t care who a woman is, or what she’s scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear. Easy enough for me; it’s my job, ain’t it? I’m not as good at it as Pollywog, but I can mostly keep my face straight on my skull.

Harder if you have to live with one and play that role all night and day, without your sisters to keep you from going starkers. I can’t imagine being married to most men.

Well, maybe a man like Da. But I suspect most women don’t even know that men like Da are possible.

Anyway, the Marshal came in and I saw Bea and Priya both assemble their sweet, stupid faces in a hurry. What was funny was I saw him noticing them doing it and I saw the sharp little twist of his frown when he did. He got control of it again right quick, and I was left with the strange thought that everybody in that room just then was wearing a mask for the purpose of not upsetting one another.