THIS TIME WHEN I WENT TO TOWN, no one stayed at home. We were up at the first light and packed a few valuables and keepsakes into the buggy in case the men returned while we were gone. I rolled the intruder’s coat into a pillowcase, along with the ring, stickpin, and the matches we’d found. It made me queasy to touch all of it, but no one else would.
Fleurette tried to take the reins but I wouldn’t let her on the grounds that I didn’t know who we might be passing on the road. So Norma drove and I sat with my arm around Fleurette and my hand over my handbag with the revolver tucked inside. Along the way every black automobile looked suspicious to me. An engine misfired and I pushed Fleurette to the floor, eliciting a yelp of protest.
“Stop it!” she said. “He’s not going to come after us on the street in front of everybody.”
“He has before,” I said.
“Stop it anyway,” Norma said over her shoulder. “You’ll give me a nervous fit if you keep jumping around like that.”
I didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive, but I slid my hand in my bag anyway. I found the cold weight of the revolver calming.
We arrived at the jail in Hackensack before nine o’clock. It was a new building and a decidedly odd one, designed, according to the Board of Freeholders’ wishes, to look like a medieval fortress with turrets and tiny windows of the sort one might use to shoot a cannon at attacking armies. The Hackensack River ran alongside it like a moat. The edifice had been mocked in the papers as being a waste of taxpayers’ money and looking more like a playhouse for schoolboys than a serious building with a public purpose.
And like most medieval fortresses (I supposed, not having visited any others), it did not feature an expansive and welcoming entrance. We walked around the building once, unsure which of the locked, windowless doors were intended for our use. At last I shrugged, climbed some stairs, and pounded on the door that looked most promising.
A harried, red-cheeked woman in a yellow apron answered the door. A perfect angel of a baby sat on her hip, its face framed in blond curls. I took a step back in surprise.
“Oh,” I said. “We meant to go to the prison. We’re here to see Sheriff Heath. Did I . . .” and I trailed off, looking up at the building for some clue as to where I might have gone wrong.
“This is the prison,” she said brusquely. “And it also happens to be my home.”
She looked so affronted by this that I thought she expected an apology from me, but I wasn’t sure what I’d done.
Fleurette started to say something. Before she got us into even more trouble, I said, “I’m so sorry to disturb you. We’re here on an urgent matter for the sheriff.”
The baby was starting to squirm in the cold air. She closed the door slightly so that he was behind the door and out of the wind. “I know,” she said. “He saw you coming from the third floor and called down. He’ll be here soon as he can.”
Again she stared at us. Her mouth was a hard blank line.
Realizing that we weren’t going to be invited in, I said, “Where would you like us to wait?”
At that she exhaled a tired and exasperated sigh, looked out at the empty drive that ringed the prison, and pushed the door open. “I suppose you’ll come in. The great minds who designed this building seemed to have forgotten about a public entrance or a waiting room.”
We followed her inside. To my surprise, the room was furnished like an ordinary living room, with overstuffed chairs and a fireplace and children’s toys strewn about.
“It looks like someone lives here!” Fleurette said.
I turned to tell her to be quiet, but the woman said sharply, “A lot of people live here, most of them thieves and murderers. But you’re in the sheriff’s living quarters. I am Mrs. Heath.”
Mrs. Heath? I hadn’t given any thought at all to the sheriff’s wife, but if I had, I would not have pictured such an unpleasant and disagreeable woman. Although I couldn’t imagine what sort of woman would want to keep up a home and children on the ground floor of this cold, stone structure.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, trying out a smile that wasn’t returned. “I am Constance Kopp, and these are my sisters, Norma and Fleurette.”
The baby squirmed out of her grasp. She set him down and gave me a long look as she stood up. Then she glanced at Norma and scrutinized Fleurette, who was especially pretty in a black velvet riding coat trimmed in rabbit fur. I should have told her to wear something more somber. We were going to a prison, not the opera.
“Bob hasn’t mentioned any sisters to me,” she said.
Just then I heard footsteps. To my relief, the sheriff rushed into the room. “I’m sorry about this, Cordelia,” he said to his wife. She gave him no reply.
“Miss Kopp,” he said, nodding at me. “This way, please.”
I looked uncertainly at Norma, who was wearing a forced and unpleasant smile and clinging to Fleurette’s sleeve.
“I’m sure Mrs. Heath would enjoy some company this morning,” he said. It was more of an order than an invitation. We seemed to be just another disagreeable duty imposed by the sheriff upon his wife. It couldn’t have been easy for her.
I followed him into a bleak corridor. He turned around to slide a metal gate in place behind us and lock it from a key on a large ring he wore on his belt. At the end of the corridor was another gate.
“David.” A deputy appeared to let us in.
We stood in a tiny windowless room with a metal door opposite. It smelled of rust and turpentine wax. The deputy locked the gate behind us and then opened the door. This led us to Sheriff Heath’s office.
It was a pleasant room, lined with glass-fronted bookcases and warmed by a small fireplace. I must have been holding my breath, because I let it out all at once as I sank into a chair opposite the sheriff’s desk.
He didn’t sit at his desk but instead took a chair next to me.
“Are you girls all right? What happened?”
I gave him the most straightforward account I could and presented him with the coat and jewelry. He lifted them out of the pillowcase and examined them slowly. “I wonder what stopped them.”
“I think they heard us. If we’d come home even a few minutes later, they would have had time to pour kerosene all over everything and light quite a bonfire.”
“My deputy rode past yesterday, but he didn’t see anything. They must have come after he left.” He sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I wish we’d caught him,” he said, mostly to himself. “That was our chance. Well, just be sure—”
“Wait,” I said. “That isn’t all he’s done.” A prickly sort of fear came over me as I realized that the fire at Lucy’s had to be connected to what had happened at our house. “You remember the girl I told you about?”
He sighed. “Miss Kopp, I wish you would—”
“Listen! That was the boarding house in Paterson. He set that fire. He went after her first, then he came after us.”
“What makes you think he set that one?”
“He’d already threatened to. She told me herself. She was terrified of him.”
“But Kaufman’s family owns that building. Are you telling me he burned down his own building just to scare off a girl?”
“He might have,” I said. It sounded preposterous when he said it like that, but I knew it to be true.
“But you still won’t give me the girl’s name.”
“I mustn’t. I promised her.”
Sheriff Heath stood and paced around the room. He put his hands in his pockets and kept his head down, as if the answers were written on the leather uppers of his boots. “I’ll talk to the fire chief. And I’ll work on the evidence we’ve got. I’ll send my men around to the jewelers in town, and I know a tailor who might be able to help with the coat. Maybe the matchbox has a fingerprint. Then we’ll have a case for the prosecutor.”
“But what are we to do while you’re out speaking to tailors? Turn our home into a bunker? Guard it in shifts? Keep one revolver pointed at the road at all times?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and ran a hand through his hair. “No. I’ll do that. Take your sisters home and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Just then the door opened and a guard looked in. “They’re ready for you, sir.”
Sheriff Heath nodded and the guard backed out silently.
“Ready for what?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, Miss Kopp. It’s a bad day at the prison. We found a man dead in his cell after Sunday services. I’ve got to speak to the inmates.”
“Oh! I—”
“There isn’t anything to say about it. Go home and look after your sisters.”
There was something lost and uncertain in his face. He opened the door and the guard took me away.