• 27 •

LATER, BEULAH WOULD look back on that night and recall the scent of murder in the air. They say a hound can sniff a raw kill in the wind. Beulah didn’t have a nose like that, but something smelled wretched. It wasn’t rot and decay: this was a fresh horror. It had a tang to it.

She’d allowed Henry Clay to take her back to the little room she rented, but she couldn’t stay there. The air was oppressive, even long after dark. She sweated, not from the heat but from nausea, the kind that always came over her at the sight of blood. There was an unbearable pounding at her temples. She couldn’t be alone in that state. Around midnight, she crept over to Meemaw’s, slipped inside, and passed a sleepless night on her divan, waiting for whatever was to come.

It was a neighbor lady who told her. Beulah was sitting on Meemaw’s front steps the next morning, sewing a strap on an apron because Meemaw couldn’t see to do it herself anymore.

“Lady got murdered out on the Midlothian pike last night,” said the neighbor, stepping outside to dump a pail of washing-water. “They sent the dogs out looking for the man that did it.”

Beulah knotted the thread, snapped off the needle, and said, “Was she just out walking by herself and somebody got her?”

“Oh, no, she was in a motor car with her husband. A man stepped right out into the road and shot the lady. The husband got out and wrestled the gun away from him, but the fellow ran off. It was too late anyway. The wife was already dead. He drove all the way back into Richmond with her leaning up against him, him driving with one hand and all covered in blood.”

“Haven’t they caught the man who did it?”

“No,” said the neighbor. “I’m staying inside until they do. Looks like a sweet young couple, too. They were only married last August, and the wife had a baby a few weeks ago. Poor little thing don’t have no mama now.”

Beulah tried to make it sound like she had only a passing interest in the story. “Who was it — the lady who died?”

The neighbor shrugged. “She don’t live around here, if that’s what you’re wondering. Last name Beattie. Must be the same ones that own the department store, because I heard they closed down today so all the men could join the manhunt.”

The neighbor went back inside her house and locked the door rather loudly, calling attention to herself by rattling it. Beulah stood up off the step, slowly, and stretched, as if she was in no hurry. When she turned around, Meemaw was standing just inside the screen door, her arms folded across her chest, looking down at her with an expression that Beulah could not read.

“Do not bring the police to my house” was all Meemaw said to her.

“Then I guess I’ll have to go,” Beulah said. She handed the apron back to her grandmother, and wandered on down the street to her own rented room.

It was a strange day, because she stayed inside and did so little. She thought she ought to clean the place, as long as she was housebound, or see what she could salvage from her mending basket, but she found that she could hardly move. She sat in a chair most of the day, near a window but not too close, looking out on the street and wondering if the police had found what they were looking for.

She didn’t dare stir. She had never been so still and quiet for an entire day.

The news came to her in whispers and rumors: a pair of voices floating in from the street through her half-opened window, a glance at the news-stand when she rushed out with a quarter for the egg and butter man. It was impossible not to hear about the Beattie murder. The whole town was swimming in it: the gossip started as a ripple, then swelled to a current that tugged at all of them.

And the story going around town was that Henry Clay’s explanation didn’t add up.

Louise hadn’t been shot by a man standing over her in the road, came the whispers from the coroner’s office. She’d been shot by someone standing at eye level, who very nearly pressed the barrel right up in her face. She hadn’t been shot inside the automobile, either. Her blood was all over the road. There was hardly any in the auto, according to the sheriff who impounded it, except right up underneath where she lay in Henry Clay’s lap while he drove her dead or dying body back to Richmond.

Most damning of all were the dogs. There wasn’t a Virginian alive who wouldn’t believe a bloodhound over a guilty-looking husband. The dogs picked up the scent of the blood where it soaked into the ground, but there was no trail leading in any direction to point out which way the killer went. The dogs just ran in a circle, yipping in frustration.

It was almost as if the killer had driven away in an auto, the newspapermen speculated, tartly.

The worst came the next day, when Louise had been dead only forty-eight hours. An old Negro woman walking along the railroad tracks found a rifle. She took it straight to the police. Henry Clay had claimed that he’d wrestled the gun away from the attacker and thrown it into his auto, only to have it jolted out on the street as he drove hell-bent for Richmond with Louise’s head across his knees. That was a fine tale, except that this gun was found quite a ways down the railroad tracks, suggesting that it had been thrown, not merely dropped, from a speeding vehicle. Now it fell to the police to decide whose rifle it was, and whether it had been used to kill Louise.

Beulah didn’t so much hear the story as she breathed it in, like a poisonous gas that seeped under the door. What kind of man puts a gun to his wife’s head like that? She closed her eyes and tried to picture it: bland, blameless Louise, standing in the road begging for her life, and half-crazed Henry Clay with that rifle he’d been brandishing all afternoon.

If he could kill his own wife like that, the mother of his child, what might he do to Beulah if she displeased him? She didn’t dare think on it overlong. He might yet come after her, if the police weren’t already watching his every move.

When a tap came at her door, she feared he’d done exactly that. Did he think he could hide from the authorities, in her single room? Would he expect her to run off with him?

She wouldn’t answer. She couldn’t. She sank down, silently, into the little wooden chair where she ate her supper every night. With one knee tucked under her chin she held her breath and waited.

Another tap, and a little scratch, like a fingernail against the paint. And then a voice that she knew.

“Beulah, honey? It’s Henrietta. Let me in, quick.”

Henrietta Pitman, her old chum from her days down on Mayo Street, one of the girls Claudia ran with. Beulah wouldn’t call her a friend, exactly, but Henrietta was a girl of her ilk. They were the same — or they had been, at one time.

For that reason Beulah opened the door.

Henrietta rushed in, chased by a cloud of ersatz jasmine perfume. She kept a scarf of yellow chiffon around her head, but that did little to disguise her: Henrietta was a certain type of girl and she looked it. Anyone passing her by on the street could tell exactly who she was.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against it. With one glance she took in Beulah’s surroundings, the dust hanging in the air, the pan on the gas plate where she fried herself an egg every day, her only decent dress hung from a peg on the wall.

Beulah saw in an instant that Henrietta would take in these details and relay them to the girls back on Mayo Street. She would peddle them like the unofficial currency they were.

The first words from her mouth were “You didn’t shoot that woman, did you?”

Beulah hesitated, thinking she might pretend not to know what woman Henrietta was referring to. She waited too long, because Henrietta said, “The police are over at May Stuart’s right now. They think you had something to do with it.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Beulah put in hastily, before Henrietta could infer otherwise. “I was at my Meemaw’s all night. Go ask her.”

“They know you had something to do with Henry Clay.”

“Lots of girls had something to do with Henry Clay.” It was true: Beulah had never been the only one. She hadn’t been loyal to him, either. How could she, in her line of work?

“Well, it’s in the papers that there was another woman. Everybody’s saying that Henry Clay Beattie shot his wife because he was in love with a woman who had his baby and gave it up.”

“That could’ve been any girl in Richmond,” Beulah said flatly.

“They say it was a woman who wore a black veil to his wedding, and then hunted him down no matter how many times he tried to get away, and refused to let him go.” Henrietta looked triumphant about it. How she loved to be in the middle of a mess like this. Beulah hated to give her the satisfaction, but Henrietta was the only one who’d come to her. She hadn’t been given a choice of messenger.

“How’d they find all that out?” Beulah asked reluctantly.

“Louise’s mother. She knew all about that woman, because Louise went crying to her over it. She told the police everything she knew. And now they’re coming for you.”

“Well, let them come,” Beulah said, although she wasn’t at all certain that was the right position to take. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“Then you don’t know anything about Henry Clay and a gun?”

There was some small sound outside — a door closing, a package dropping on the sidewalk — and Beulah, believing it to be a knock at her door, nearly jumped out of her skin.

Henrietta heard it too and looked around uneasily. “I came to warn you. I didn’t have to, but I did it on account of the times we used to have together. You do what you have to do, but I don’t want to be caught here.”

She put her hand on the doorknob. Beulah said, “I could run off to Claudia’s, if I knew where to find her.”

If Henrietta knew, she wasn’t telling. “Don’t bring your sister into this. She got out.”

With that, Henrietta was gone. Beulah could hardly breathe. How far ahead of the police had Henrietta been? How many minutes before they came through the door? Those constables were all friends of her grandfather’s. They’d find her.

If she could sneak over to the station, she could hop on board any train going out of town. It didn’t matter where. Give it a week, she thought. Let Henry Clay confess, if he was man enough to do it, and clear her of any wrongdoing. If he did that, the police might decide they didn’t need to talk to her after all. She packed up the smallest bundle of possessions she could manage and set out for her grandmother’s.

Beulah didn’t have a dollar to her name, but Meemaw was all too happy to make a contribution to the cause of sending Beulah out of town.

“Go on, and don’t tell me where you’re going,” Meemaw said. She didn’t try to hug her, but she did put her thumb under Beulah’s chin and squint at her, as if she was trying to memorize Beulah’s face.

“I’ll be back,” Beulah said.

“You might not,” Meemaw said.

Beulah ran out the door. She was on her way to the train station, with nothing but a little carpet bag under her arm, when a policeman who knew her from her days down on Mayo Street put his hand on her shoulder.