Miss Rhoades found her the next morning, fully dressed but lying curled up on her bed, staring at the wall. “May, you’ll have to come downstairs,” she said as she drew the curtains. The light in the room had scarcely changed, but the temperature had dropped. December announcing its imminent arrival through the open window.
Miss Rhoades’s hand shook her shoulder. “Sit up. The police are here.”
“The police?” May sat up with a gasp. In fact, she’d been awake for hours, hadn’t slept much at all last night; Faith’s empty mattress haunted her. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing Johnny grasping her arm, the terror on Faith’s face when she mentioned his name.
“Mrs. Van Cleve and some detectives arrived first thing in the morning.” Miss Rhoades looked weary, her teeth clenched, skin pallid. She held a fist to her stomach. “They’re asking to talk to all the former sporting girls.”
“I’m not a sporting girl,” May said, making her voice small.
Miss Rhoades flinched and looked over her shoulder, and now May could hear the buzz of voices downstairs, as though the sudden arrival of these men had disturbed a nervous hive. “I’m not asking,” she said without looking at May. “We told them all thirty-seven of you would answer their questions, whether you worked for a madam or not. Mrs. Van Cleve says it’s imperative that all of you cooperate. Now, come along.”
“What do they want from us?”
“They’re after whatever happened to Priscilla Black.” Miss Rhoades rubbed one of her shins. “Ever meet her?”
May’s breakfast, some crackers she’d kept hidden in a drawer, threatened to come up her throat. She shook her head so hard she saw spots.
“Then you’re lucky,” said Miss Rhoades.
May stood, her knees like butter. She had never met Priscilla Black. That was no lie. Hal had only mentioned the sad condition of the woman’s corpse, which the policemen must have already known. She wouldn’t have to tell them.
Miss Rhoades followed her out. At the door, she caught May’s hand. “You be strong, May.”
But May felt the opposite of strong: she felt as limp as a strand of yarn. She sensed Hal’s presence surrounding her, as though he haunted her now. Since she’d known him, she’d been powerless to resist his commands, and she had a horrible premonition that she’d end up doing exactly what he wanted her to, with Faith.
The reception room, which just the previous night had been warm and inviting and decorated for the harvest, was now permeated with the scents of sweat and wool. An array of police officers with varied facial hair patterns milled about the room in their long blue coats, each with a star on the lapel and a tasseled nightstick in his pocket. The garlands and gourds had been hauled away, as had the dining table, so that two chairs could face each other in the center of the room.
She’d passed Mrs. Van Cleve in the foyer, locked into an intense conversation with Mrs. Mendenhall. Mrs. Mendenhall held her mouth so tensely that her lips had all but disappeared, and Mrs. Van Cleve held forth, her voice, as always, too loud:
“…isn’t your personal home to run as you please,” she admonished Mrs. Mendenhall. “If there’s really nothing to hide…”
Miss Rhoades hurried May past the two older ladies, into the reception room, and gestured to the empty chair. The only officer who’d removed his hat sat in the other. He seemed a bit older than the other men, and had an air of command about him.
Quietly, Miss Rhoades shut the doors, muffling the sound of Mrs. Van Cleve’s voice.
“Good morning,” he said cheerfully, scratching the thick fur of a mutton-chop beard connecting his nose to his ears. “Miss Verdoni, is it?”
May looked at Miss Rhoades, who nodded encouragement. She noticed a younger man in the corner, also in uniform, seated at the scroll-top desk with a fountain pen and paper.
“That’s your given name?” the man asked again. “Assuntina Verdoni?”
She hadn’t heard it spoken in so long. He didn’t quite pronounce it correctly. “Yes, sir.”
The detective grunted, made a note. Behind him, one of his colleagues paced back and forth. One stood watchful at the window, observing the falling snow, the steady dusting turning to fat, swollen flakes.
“You worked in a brothel, miss?”
Subtly, the movement in the room changed. The policeman who’d been pacing slowed; the officer beside the window glanced casually over his shoulder.
May couldn’t look at any of them. She felt as if she’d swallowed burrs. Her hand went to her forehead, her middle finger rubbing between her eyes. Through her fingers, she could still see a bit of Miss Rhoades, enough to catch the woman’s nod.
“It’s all right,” Miss Rhoades prodded her. “You can be honest.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” said the officer, though she could hear the sneer in his voice.
May spoke through her hand. “Just a few times,” she said, very quietly. She felt flayed open.
The police officer launched into another question, but she wasn’t listening. She stared at the seeds of some dried wheatgrass that had fallen to the floor. The one with the pen was writing something down. She’d spoken it aloud, which she’d sworn to herself she’d never do. And now this man would write it down, scratching her greatest shame into the record. Her hands roamed her florid face. What did it matter now, what she’d done after she left the woolen mill? Her dream of returning home, triumphant, to her mother, arm in arm with her new husband, was dead.
Miss Rhoades coughed, calling her back to the room. “They asked who you worked for.”
“It’s not Priscilla Black, so why should you care?” she said behind her hand, her voice thick with tears.
The one with the mutton chops adjusted his hips so that he sat taller in his seat. “We care, young lady, because we’re trying to solve a murder. Answer the question.”
“Agnes Bly,” she said toward the wheatgrass seeds on the carpet.
Agnes hadn’t abused her, not exactly, but hers wasn’t a name May wanted to invoke again. The words brought back the other girls’ teasing, not so different from here.
“The fat ones have a liking for you,” they’d gibed. “The old ones. That one with a missing leg, see him? It’s your turn to take him upstairs.” She’d occupied the lowest rung there, too. With fury in her heart, she’d watched the others take the handsome ones to bed, the young men with elegant figures, the fun ones who brought chocolates and biscuits. May had been left with the ones whose bellies drooped.
Agnes Bly’s was where May had first learned to go to the maple grove. She could go there now, she realized. With a loud, wet sniff, she ran her hand through the front of her hair and over the back, to smooth her bun. She looked the officers in the eyes and smiled, her lips tight.
“There you are,” said the detective, showing his tobacco-stained teeth. “You came here when? How long ago?”
“Just over a year.” She sensed Miss Rhoades shifting uncomfortably, no doubt thinking about May’s time being up.
“And your baby was born…?”
“It wasn’t,” said May.
The men looked anywhere but at her. The pacing one put his hand to the back of his curly blond neck, head turned toward the floor. May stared straight ahead, through the window. The snow was beginning to form peaked drifts like little mountain ranges.
“Come again?” said the detective.
“It wasn’t born.” May swallowed, the burr feeling having returned. This part she could tell them clear-eyed, knowing in her heart that she’d done nothing wrong. Forget what Pearl or anyone else claimed.
She had been pregnant, or at least she’d been convinced she was. It had been just like when Emmanuel was first growing in her belly: her breasts had grown swollen and hard, the nipples darkening to brown. Her curse of Eve, normally as reliable as a post-office clock, stopped abruptly. Despite the horror of not knowing which of the sad sacks the other girls had saddled her with had fathered this bastard child, she’d felt relieved. Now she could go with that gentle old lady in black who came to read her Bible in the parlor of a Sunday, the one who ran the Bethany Home and was only too happy to invite May to stay.
But then her waist had stopped expanding. She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking of it, and had to tuck her trembling hands beneath her skirt. Several weeks into her tenure at the Bethany Home, her monthly curse had returned. One ordinary morning, she’d woken early to knead dough and seen the stains on her sheets. She’d been terrified they’d throw her out, so she told no one. She brought her bedsheets down to the laundry and washed them herself, in the middle of the night. Of course, she couldn’t ask for a sanitary belt, and so she stole dishrags from the kitchen to stuff into her drawers—washed them, too, in the night. The bleeding had just begun to lighten when Pearl found her early one morning, exhausted and half asleep, elbows deep in pink water. Pearl had immediately sounded the alarm to the matron. And after a humiliating examination, the visiting doctor diagnosed May with a false pregnancy.
“Physical symptoms can even occur,” the doctor told Mrs. Mendenhall in her office, talking as though May weren’t sitting right there, red in the face and mortified, as he wiped his glasses. “If the girl believes in it hard enough.”
“We’ll trust May acted in good faith,” Mrs. Mendenhall had declared, “and let her stay the full year.” She’d patted May on the arm reassuringly and sent her right back to her room as though nothing had changed. But May had to watch as the girls who’d arrived the same time as she had grew plump and flushed and had their babies in the spring, while she lingered around the edges as they called her a burden, a liar.
She began to think of herself as a mother of ghosts. Someone who was unfit to raise the first child she’d brought into this world, and who had been so desperate to change her circumstances that she’d conjured the second from thin air.
A year should have been long enough to get herself on her feet, find a husband. But look at the mess she’d made, putting all her eggs into Hal’s basket. Now she’d have to take the job living above the bakery, if that was even still available, and commit herself to a life of hardworking, solitary spinsterhood.
When she dared look up at Miss Rhoades, the matron’s eyes were shining, her mouth pursed in a sad, kindly little frown.
“Let’s move along,” said the detective, tugging at the knee of his blue pant leg. A sliver of hairy ankle emerged at the top of his boot. May glared at the shiny red skin of his nose. She hated him, for making her say all of that out loud before she’d ever had the opportunity to whisper it to a friend.
“Have you ever met, or heard of, Miss Priscilla Black?” he asked her.
“I’ve heard of her now,” May replied. If she answered their questions quickly, maybe they’d let her go. “I hadn’t before.”
He had a couple of drawings on his lap, she saw now, and he passed them to her. The first was a portrait of a proud-looking, snub-nosed woman with streaks of white hair over her ears, the rest black. The edges of the picture were darker than the middle, as though this likeness had been removed from its frame.
The second sketch, on onionskin, made May gasp. The paper crackled in her trembling hands. Someone had crudely drawn a body, naked and swollen, stretched over a table. May’s eyes lingered on the plump thighs, the little bulbous knees, the tongue half hanging from the mouth.
When she handed the sketches back to the detective, he smirked at her, and she wondered what his game was, what effect he hoped shocking her with the drawing would have.
He shuffled the papers. “We’ve an inkling one of Black’s strumpets killed her.”
May considered this. From the moment she’d heard the woman’s name, and Hal’s gruesome description of her corpse, there’d been little doubt in her mind that a man had killed Priscilla. Possibly, now that Hal had revealed himself to be capable of violence, the killer was Hal himself. She’d never imagined one of Black’s girls could have carried out the job.
“Could a parlor girl haul that body?” she asked.
The man didn’t answer. “Apparently, she had a troublemaker in her midst. A dark-haired gal who read people’s futures in a crystal ball. Among other services.” A look passed between the others, a collective grin. “One night in October, the dark-haired girl had some trouble with a customer. Miss Black went up to intervene, and the other girls heard shouting. The next morning, Black was gone. And so was the fortune-teller.”
May felt sick with fear. Faith had appeared here in late October. She could also sense terror emanating from Miss Rhoades, who’d gone stiff. How many girls had this detective interviewed so far, how many were left to go? All one of them had to say was Oh, you must mean Faith Johnson, and these lawmen would march up to the tower and haul her away.
May wet her lips. She was afraid to open her mouth. What if Hal’s attempt to mesmerize her into handing Faith over—what if that led her to turn Faith in? No, his exact words had been “You’ll bring the girl to me…” Not to the police. She could keep Faith safe from these men.
“A woman like Black, I’d guess she was killed by a man,” May said, slowly and clearly, watching the detective’s mouth quirk in doubt. “But if you believe it was one of the girls over at Black’s, why don’t you check the court records? All their names will be there.”
“First thing we did, dearie. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing whether the girls use their real names in court,” he said, calling her bluff. “You lot move to another bordello, choose a different name yet again, and vanish. Like a fart in a skillet.”
May put her hand to her cheek, pretending to be embarrassed by his choice of words. Miss Rhoades pushed away from the wall. “May’s been a good girl, Officer. I think you can move on to the next.” She wrapped her fingers around May’s biceps, drawing her upward.
“Thank you, Miss Verdoni. That’ll be all.” The men watched her leave, their gazes accusatory, penetrative. The air in the foyer felt cool. Mrs. Mendenhall and Mrs. Van Cleve were both gone. Miss Rhoades marched May through the empty corridor toward the cellar steps.
“They know about Faith,” May whispered to Miss Rhoades when she felt certain they were out of earshot. “What’ll happen when it’s her turn?”
Miss Rhoades said nothing. The back of her thin, pale neck appeared frail, but when she whirled around at the top of the steps, her eyes were steely. They softened as she considered May’s face.
“Oh, child,” she said softly, the back of her hand landing on May’s cheek. “It’s kind of you to think of her after what you’ve just gone through.”
“Someone’s going to tell them about her,” May said, feeling tears brimming on the edge of her lashes.
Miss Rhoades’s lip trembled for a second, then stopped. “But you didn’t, and I’m proud of you for it, May. Now, go down and get your work done, best you can. We’ll still need supper on the table tonight. God knows we’ll all be looking for some comfort.”
For the rest of the afternoon, May sought any excuse to come back upstairs to the foyer, to pass the reception room and try for a glimpse at what was going on, but Mrs. Mendenhall hovered by the doors and fixed her with a stern expression each time she wandered by. As the other kitchen girls were called up to take their turns with the detective—Leigh, and then Dolly, the newcomers, Pearl—May tried to read their expressions when they returned to rolling dough and slicing carrots for what would be the evening’s leftover-turkey pie. Had it ever been so quiet, had the silence ever been so thick and portentous, in the kitchen? The girls went upstairs clear-eyed, but came back looking pale, their features drawn, their brows furrowed. They took to their chopping and kneading with agitated fervor. At one point, Dolly’s knife slipped and bit into the pad of her thumb. Even Pearl—her one eyebrow bare, still puckered and red—returned heaving tired sighs. May had feared she’d come back looking smug, victorious at last over Faith, but she didn’t. Perhaps she felt as weary as anyone else to be poked and prodded by the detective, to be forced to relive the past.
Hope crept in, slowly, cautiously. Would the girls of the home have decided, all of them together, to protect Faith, just as May had? It seemed preposterous, given how they’d shunned and belittled her these past weeks. But no one was laughing now. In the face of the officers who used to haul them to court, who looked at them like they were breeding sows, maybe the inmates had chosen Faith.
After what felt like an age, the kitchen clock struck four, when Cook’s apprentices traditionally enjoyed a half-hour rest before dinner. “All right, girls,” Cook said. “Go and put your feet up for a tick; Lord knows you’ve earned it.”
They trudged up the stairs in silence, May sandwiched between Pearl and Leigh. Pearl stopped abruptly in the foyer. In front of her, May could see a wall of blue: all the policemen gathered around the front door, Mrs. Mendenhall standing amid their semicircle, Mrs. Overlock’s taller, narrower frame just behind her. Mrs. Van Cleve stood with the police.
The front door was propped open, exposing the lavender evening sky. The giant snowflakes had petered to nothing.
“We’ve spoken to thirty-six of ’em,” the detective was saying to Mrs. Mendenhall. “You said there were thirty-seven. Where’s the last?”
“Don’t make the man go upstairs, Abby,” said Mrs. Van Cleve. “If there’s a girl you’re hiding in the tower, you should tell us now.”
Mrs. Overlock turned to Mrs. Mendenhall, her mouth fluttering open and closed, as if she thought she should say something. May couldn’t see Mrs. Mendenhall’s face, but she felt certain of what Mrs. Mendenhall would do. Upright, honest, Quaker Mrs. Mendenhall: she’d hand Faith right over to the men. May waited, her stomach clenched, with the other kitchen girls; she had a sense they were all holding their breath.
A sound came from above—someone clearing her throat—and May saw now that Miss Rhoades was coming down the stairs. Mrs. Mendenhall turned to say something, but Miss Rhoades’s expression stopped her.
An invisible conversation seemed to pass between the women, a sort of telepathy. Watching them, her pulse quickening, May understood.
Faith was gone.
May stared through the open door at the frigid landscape; the city had shrugged itself under a blanket of hard snow. She felt something touch her hand, then grab on to it: she was astonished to see that Leigh had reached for her. They held hands tightly, the skin of their palms glued together with hot sweat, as they waited to see what would happen next.
Miss Rhoades had reached the bottom step. She offered a wan smile to the detective.
“I’m afraid I’m the thirty-seventh, sir,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I worked in a sporting house, so I may not be much use. But I’ll do my best to answer your questions.”
Mrs. Van Cleve’s eyes popped open. Mrs. Overlock covered her mouth with her hand. It was hard to read Mrs. Mendenhall’s expression, though her eyes widened, too.
May did her best not to gasp, as Leigh’s fingers tightened even further around hers. She could feel the other inmates struggling not to look at one another, not to make a sound.
The detective shrugged. “Come with me,” he said.
May and the other girls watched Miss Rhoades, her shoulders squared, follow the detective back into the reception room. Mrs. Van Cleve, Mrs. Mendenhall, and Mrs. Overlock were left staring at one another. “Did you know?” May heard Mrs. Overlock murmur to Mrs. Mendenhall, who shook her head.
“You should have,” said Mrs. Van Cleve. “You hired her.”
May would have liked to hear what else they had to say, but the girls were scattering in a swarm now, most to their rooms, and their chatter drowned out the sharp whispers of the three board members. May trudged upstairs, thinking she’d fetch her water pitcher and fill it down at the cistern. With each step, her relief increased. She no longer held Faith’s fate in her hands. She couldn’t lead Faith to Hayward if Faith had disappeared.
The door to her room stood slightly ajar. She must have forgotten to close it. When she stepped inside, it was dark. Someone had drawn the heavier curtain. She went to open it, to let in more light. Behind her she heard the hinges of her door whine shut. Footsteps came toward her, quickly, and she barely had time to yelp before someone clapped a hand over her mouth.
She whimpered against the person’s soft hand as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Blue eyes, as dark as indigo dye, wisps of black hair hanging over the forehead: Faith. She held a finger over her lips. Breathing hard, May nodded, and, slowly, Faith let her go.
“What are you doing here?” May whispered. Faith pointed behind her, to her empty bed. The purple dress lay there, sleeves spread wide. Faith pointed to Kitty Ging’s label.
There were dark circles under Faith’s eyes, as though she hadn’t slept at all the night before. “The dressmaker,” she said, almost inaudibly. May had difficulty hearing her over the sound of her own rapid breath. “We must warn her. I think Hayward’s planning to…”
She made a slashing motion at her throat.
May winced, then stared at the label’s faded pink embroidery: Made by Catherine Ging. In her mind, she watched the stitching unravel, weave through the air, and travel to the center of town, where Hal sat in his living room in the Ozark Flats, the ends of the thread tied to his long, elegant fingers.
He’d been right. She’d bring Faith to him, after all. She was no different from Dolly with her biscuits, or Leigh with the pinking shears. She felt his fingers give a tug, and her stomach dropped.
“I know where Kitty Ging lives,” she whispered to Faith, who nodded keenly. May’s voice sounded strange in her own ears. “I can take you there.”