THE HOUSE WAS BETTER CARED FOR than most on the block. It had recently been given a fresh coat of white paint, and it sat behind a tidy front garden fringed in a cast-iron fence. Although the garden was covered in gray slush, there were twigs and stalks standing up through the snow, suggesting the possibility of hydrangeas under the windows later on in the year, and a border of daylilies along the walk.
I gave the bell a hard twist. The smoke from some nearby chimney drifted past. The smell of wood burning made me hungry and I realized it had been a long time since breakfast.
After a while I heard a cough and the shuffling of feet. The door opened and the tiniest woman I’d ever seen stood before me. She was as frail as a bird, her small head fringed in white cottony wisps. She wore a gray dress with a collar that buttoned right under her chin, and from under her skirts appeared petite patent leather shoes that could have belonged to a schoolgirl.
She looked me up and down through china-blue eyes. “How do you do?” she said at last.
“I’m here to see Lucy Blake,” I said. “I’m a friend of hers. I saw her in the market recently and she invited me to stop in.”
She swept her eyes over me again, weighing the likelihood of that. “Lucy’s working right now. She’s helping my sister.”
“I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs.—”
“Miss Eldridge,” she said. “I am the younger Miss Eldridge, by ten minutes.”
I smiled. “I won’t be but a minute, Miss Eldridge. I simply must ask her about an important matter. May I come inside and wait?”
The sound of footsteps coming down the stairs made Miss Eldridge turn around. Soon Lucy appeared behind her. Her eyes widened when she saw me.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Lucy said. “Just a friend of mine here to see me on a personal matter.”
Before her employer could object, Lucy was out on the porch, pulling me by the wrist down the stairs to the entrance to a basement apartment.
“We can talk here,” she said quietly, opening the door to a small room that appeared to have been furnished with the Eldridge sisters’ cast-offs. There was a tufted red velvet settee so worn that the bare weave of the fabric showed through, and four mahogany dining chairs with embroidered cushions that looked like they could have been completed when the sisters were first learning to sew. A battered wardrobe and trunk must have contained her clothing, and a shelf above a small sink held washing powders and toiletries. A doorway at the back of the room revealed an alcove just large enough for a daybed.
There was a wood stove in one corner, but Lucy made no move to light it. She was probably given only a small quantity of fuel for the winter. With both of us crowded inside, it would soon be warm enough.
Once she closed the door, she grabbed my hands. “I’ve been waiting for you. Did you bring them?”
“Yes, and I want you to look at them very carefully,” I said, pulling the envelope out of my pocketbook. “I hope you might recognize someone.”
She turned the envelope over, holding it by the edge as if it might burn her. “What does this say?” she said, squinting at the faint writing on the outside. “Ward?”
“That must be the man who hired them to take the pictures. He never came back to pay for them, so Mr. LaMotte—that’s the photographer—he offered them to me.”
She slid the photographs out and looked through them, studying each face before going on to the next one. There were businessmen in suits, delivery boys, and little girls playing on the stoop. She paused for an especially long time over a picture of a woman with a bundle over her shoulder. Even if it was a baby, there was no way to know if it was hers.
After she looked at each one of them twice, she passed them back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t recognize anyone.”
“Are you sure? I thought you might have seen one of them come into the factory. Some associate of Henry Kaufman’s, maybe.” I realized I had no idea what to do next. If the pictures were useless, then I had nothing else to offer her.
She picked at a thread coming loose from the settee. “No. But thank you for bringing them, Miss Kopp.”
“I do wish you would come and talk to Sheriff Heath. I wanted to bring him here today, but now that I see your situation, I wouldn’t want to raise suspicion among your employers.”
She pushed her chin up defiantly. “They already know. The Misses Eldridge have lived very long lives and have seen quite a bit in their time. A girl with a baby hardly comes as a shock to them.”
A little silver bell rang above Lucy’s door and she stood up.
“Wait,” I said, as I followed her out. “Won’t you please think about going to see the sheriff? Surely he could help. Now he’s arrested one of Mr. Kaufman’s friends, and he’s working on—”
She turned around and said, “If he puts Henry Kaufman in jail, I’ll go talk to him. Not before.”
“But—”
There was a hard, defeated look about her. “He set fire to his own boarding house. What would he do to this place?”
At the second ring of the bell, Lucy turned and ran up the stairs, leaving me to latch the door. The diminutive Miss Eldridge stood on the porch and watched me go.