37

“SHOULDN’T I BE THE ONE to meet the girl and give her the money?” Fleurette said.

“No one is giving anyone money,” I answered. “We are not about to take their demands seriously. The only item of value I’ll be carrying is a revolver.”

I was sitting on Fleurette’s bed, watching her search her wardrobe for the proper ensemble in which to rendezvous with a blackmailer. She produced a cape with a fur collar and red velvet lining, and a hat that had a hidden pocket in the band.

“That cape would look ridiculous on me,” I said, “and, besides, the sheriff wants me in dark, sensible clothes. It’s going to be freezing tonight, and who knows how long I’ll be standing out there.”

Fleurette wrapped the cape around her own shoulders. I had to admit that it suited her. She looked like a woman of mystery, someone who might carry a thousand dollars to a lady in black and live to tell about it. She fixed her bright and lively eyes on me.

“Would you shoot her?” she asked.

“Who?”

“The girl in black. The one who’s coming to collect the money. Would you fire at her?”

“No! I’m not going to shoot a girl who’s been roped into this mess. Besides, the sheriff and his deputies will be all around me. All I have to do is stand in a conspicuous location and wait.”

Fleurette twirled around and the cape flew about like a wild bird coming to land on her shoulders. “I would do a much better job of standing in a conspicuous location,” she said.

I smiled. “I know you would.”

Norma walked in, eyeing the frivolous garments Fleurette had thrown on the bed.

“You aren’t wearing any of that,” she said.

“Of course not,” I said.

“I don’t see why we bother employing deputies if the women of this community have to go out and catch their own criminals.”

“They can’t do this without me. You know that.”

Norma frowned and crossed the room to look through a pile of handbags that Fleurette had tossed on a chair. She discarded a fringed teardrop-shaped bag of yellow silk, a beaded purse made to look like a butterfly, and a velvet pouch meant to hold binoculars at the theater. “These won’t do for carrying a revolver,” she said. “You’d get all tangled up in these frills if you needed to fire it.”

“I won’t need to fire it. Why are you two so convinced that I’m going out to gun down an innocent girl tonight?”

Norma looked at me sorrowfully, as if it pained her to see how little I understood about my own situation.

“He wouldn’t have you carry it if he didn’t think you might need it.”

 

I’D BEEN PACING THE HOUSE for an hour by the time I heard the sheriff’s tires in the drive. There were two deputies riding along, and two more would stay with Norma and Fleurette. Before he let me in the car, Sheriff Heath asked to have a look at my shoes to make sure I could run in them. I lifted my skirt and he looked down, then gave me a half-smile when he saw that I was wearing the boots I usually wear to muck out the barn.

“Good girl,” he said quietly.

He reached for my handbag—a sensible leather traveling bag we’d found in Mother’s closet—and inspected its contents. It was empty save for the revolver, which he pulled out and checked for bullets.

“You have nothing else of value? No jewelry around your neck or combs in your hair? No money tucked away?”

He was standing so close to me that I thought he might start rifling through my coat pockets.

“Nothing at all.”

We gave each other a level stare. I had the feeling he was sizing me up one last time.

“All right,” he said. “Then let’s go.”

No one said a word on the drive to Paterson. We parked at City Hall, several blocks away from the meeting place. We disembarked and I stood shivering in the garage, looking around at the ghostly old timbers and wondering what these walls had seen over the years. Had they ever watched anyone do what I was about to do?

“We can’t get too close without attracting attention,” Sheriff Heath explained. “You’ll walk from here.”

“From here!” Never in my life had I walked down a city street at night unaccompanied. But I regretted saying it. Sheriff Heath looked worried suddenly, as if he just realized he’d made a mistake in asking me to do this.

“I’ll be fine,” I said quickly.

He shook his head. “No. You’re right. Someone should be with you. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll send my men with you, but they’ll each walk one block over. Morris will stay a block to the east, on Fair, and English will walk a block to the west on Van Houten. I’ve got a deputy stationed on Auburn in front of the garage where the reporters are. He knows to watch out for you. You’ll pass him on the way, but you’ll walk on the opposite side of the street, and you won’t look at him or signal to him unless you’re in trouble.”

I agreed to that and the three of us set out for Broadway. Deputy Morris went first and cut to the left, which would take him down a narrow street occupied mostly by cobblers and tailors and other such shops whose doors had closed hours ago. Deputy English waited a few minutes and then followed him, cutting over to the right to walk down a street populated with small churches and a girls’ school. When Sheriff Heath gave me the nod, I left too, but he called after me in a whisper.

“Miss Kopp!”

I turned around. He was standing by himself in the entrance to the garage, his hands stuffed in his overcoat.

“You won’t know where I am tonight. You won’t be able to see me. But I’ll be watching every minute. I won’t take my eyes off you.”

I swallowed the mixture of dread and apprehension welling up inside of me, then nodded and set off for Broadway.

The streets were dark, but not entirely empty. Four young couples went running past me, laughing and calling out to one another, maybe on their way to a dance. A few workmen walked silently along, the ends of their cigarettes glowing and bobbing like fireflies.

Paterson’s downtown ended just past Straight Street, giving way to three-story apartment buildings meant mostly for people who worked in the shops. Each one had an identical patch of grass in the front and a little flower bed that held geraniums in the summer and mounds of dirty snow in the winter. Smoke rose from the chimneys, and sometimes I could catch the smell of someone’s dinner: a pork chop in a pan, onions and sausage stewing over a burner.

Sheriff Heath’s men stayed just ahead of me. Every time I reached an intersection, I caught a glimpse of them crossing the same street one block away. As I approached Auburn, the deputy stationed there ducked into a doorway’s shadows. I was careful not to look directly at him, and I made a point of not looking up at any of the windows around him to see if the reporters were watching me.

I arrived at Broadway and Carroll sooner than I’d expected and stood for a few minutes on each corner, studying the layout of the streets and the walkways, looking for an escape route, or a place to hide, should I require one.

On one corner stood a nondescript brick building that might have housed small offices. There were very few windows facing the street, and no lights in any of them. Across the street was a flower shop, also dark and shuttered. The corner opposite was a vacant lot, which was mowed and cleared, but strangely frightening to me for its emptiness. A vision came to me of a girl in black standing in the middle of the lot, her arms reaching out for the money she’d been promised, the dry stubble of last summer’s grass and what remained of the snow all around her. It made me shiver to think about it.

I crossed the street to stand in front of a dilapidated wooden building that might have once been used as a workshop for a furniture maker or a blacksmith. It occurred to me that Sheriff Heath must have been hidden away somewhere, perhaps behind one of the building’s boarded windows.

It had to be eight o’clock by now. There was no sign of a girl in black. In fact, no one had passed me on the street, and only two automobiles had driven by. I wondered what Norma and Fleurette were doing at home. Were they thinking of me this very minute? I tried to picture them, moving from window to window, watching for signs of trouble.

I’d been clutching the handbag under my arm for so long that I’d forgotten it was there. I reached in to make sure the revolver was aimed out in front of me. Just then I heard a loud bang that made me jump and nearly drop the bag. Down the street I could see one of the deputies leap out into the intersection to check on me.

It must have been a motor misfiring. I stepped out into a pool of light cast by the moon’s reflection so that whoever was watching could see me.

A figure came striding up Carroll Street. In the darkness I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Finally I made out the shape of a long skirt and a broad-brimmed hat.

Was that her? I couldn’t tell if she was wearing black. Everything was black.

I shifted my handbag so I could feel the butt of the revolver through the leather. In spite of the cold, I was hot under my collar. A trickle of sweat ran down my chest, and another followed the same course along my spine.

As she got closer, she slowed down. Had she seen me?

I took a quick look around to make sure no one else was approaching. Several blocks away I saw two men cross the street. Somewhere a motor rattled and stalled. I noticed all the sounds I hadn’t heard before: the guard dogs barking from behind the mills down on the river, the basement vents releasing hissing steam from the boilers, the distant wail of a baby who could not be comforted.

The girl got within a block of me and turned down Van Houten. She must have walked right past Deputy English. Was I expected to follow her? She’d given me no indication that I should, so I stayed at my post. Another automobile rolled by a few blocks away. There was the sound of a train whistle, then the ragged cough of a phlegmatic old man.

Finally a trio of men approached from the garage on Auburn. I recognized Sheriff Heath from the outline of his hat and his overcoat. I could also make out the figure of Deputy Morris and one of the reporters I’d met yesterday.

When they reached me, Sheriff Heath said in a low voice, “It’s nine o’clock. We’ve waited long enough. Either they’re not coming, or they spotted us and ran off.”

“What about that girl on Carroll?” I asked.

He shook his head. “That wasn’t her. English followed her home and talked to her. She didn’t know anything about it.”

I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding my breath. I let it out at last. Sheriff Heath reached over and took the revolver from my handbag. “Let me carry this,” he said. “You’ve done your job.”

On the way back to the garage, he introduced me to the reporter, a man named George Pieters who worked for the Paterson paper. “George is a good friend of mine,” Sheriff Heath said. “You can count on him to get the story right. I told him he could ride along with us and ask some questions on the way. You tell him whatever he wants to know. Tomorrow a bunch of them are going to come out to the house to get their interviews. They all wanted to talk to you tonight, but I told them to let you get some rest. Nobody’s filing a story until tomorrow night anyway.”

On the way home, the reporter asked me to explain again, in my own words, how this mess got started and what we’d done to try to stop it. He wanted to know what our house looked like when we returned home from the beach and found it in a state of preparation for a bonfire, and how I’d learned to handle a gun, and what would make a woman take the unusual step of arming herself with a revolver to protect her sisters from harm.

I looked out the window at the black night and the dim outlines of dairy barns and trees in the distance.

“My sisters and I have no one but each other,” I said at last, “and if anyone should take up a handgun in their defense, I will be the one to do it.”