Girl in Disguise Read online

  Then the pressure vanished. A small, sweet miracle. The world came back. I sucked in air, and it hissed between my teeth. My forehead felt wet. I tried to rise or speak up. My body wouldn’t obey.

  A hand, gentle and insistent, settled on my shoulder. “Rest,” came a voice—Jay Harrington’s—and I wondered whether he was speaking to me or to Sarah or to both of us.

  Chapter Ten

  Truth

  By the time two policemen in uniform arrived, I felt well enough to stand, though the right side of my head was still bleeding, and Pinkerton kept telling me to sit down. I refused and insisted on hearing Wilder’s confession.

  He quickly named his three accomplices and detailed their wrongdoing. As we thought, they had only meant to find out from her where her husband’s money was hidden or to hold her for ransom if she would not tell. He had simply crammed the fabric meant to muffle her cries too far down her throat. He had no experience in this, after all. Once she went silent and he removed the gag to check her, it was already too late, and there was no saving her. At least he had the decency to cry while he told us how they’d killed her from sheer stupidity. I knew it wouldn’t help Jay Harrington to know the details, nor did it help me. But at least justice would be done. He had pretended to hang her to cover the crime; now, he would hang in earnest.

  Three days later, my head still buzzing from time to time, I went to Sarah Harrington’s funeral. She had been a much-loved woman, and there was a large crowd of crows to lose myself in. She had sisters, cousins, friends, all there to lament her untimely passing, seeking comfort in the mourning crowd. Tears and howls abounded. I didn’t cry, but the melancholy that had descended upon me when I saw her dead body only deepened as I saw her laid to rest.

  Having stepped into Sarah’s life, however briefly, I felt a kinship with her. I knew it wasn’t possible that she could know that we had gotten justice for her, but I hoped for it anyway. Her killer had been found. He would pay with his life for hers. I wondered whether his death would balance the scales in some way. I didn’t feel bad about the part I’d played in leading to Wilder’s death; he deserved the punishment, and I had no doubt he would have killed me too, if he’d had the chance, if it would have saved him.

  After the service, as the dead woman’s real friends and family sought comfort in one another’s familiar company, I could no longer pretend I belonged. I wasn’t sure where to go, so I headed back to the office. It was a long walk, but I had nowhere else to be.

  When I climbed the stairs and opened the door to the inner office, Pinkerton sat there in a small puddle of light from the desk lamp, bent over his ever-present ledger.

  “Welcome,” he said. “Talk a while?”

  “Sure.”

  My bones seemed to hum with fatigue, and my mind wouldn’t stop racing. When Pinkerton brought out the bottle of whiskey, I didn’t protest. I’d never liked the taste of whiskey to start with, and I hadn’t gotten used to it. The burn didn’t agree with me. But I liked the sleepy feeling in my limbs afterward, and the burn I dealt with. It felt like a kind of penance. Perhaps, I told myself, I should feel penitent.

  Pinkerton poured me a glass.

  “One for yourself too,” I said.

  “Don’t care for the stuff. But you need it. Drink up.”

  We sat in silence a while. I wasn’t wearing the dead woman’s dress anymore, but a grateful Jay Harrington had donated several of her gowns to our costume closet, not wanting anything in the house to remind him of her. I could see them from where I sat. I had nothing to say really. But I enjoyed being in the company of one of the few people in the world who understood how I was feeling in that moment and why. Often, that had to be enough.

  I wasn’t surprised when he eventually broke the silence, only by how he chose to do it.

  “Lie to me,” said Pinkerton.

  So we were to play a game. I wasted no time beating around the bush or questioning his motives. I said, swallowing hard, “I have no regrets.”

  “Lie. So, then, what is your biggest regret?”

  “Charlie.”

  “In what way?”

  “I never should have married him. My parents forced me to.”

  “Aren’t you innocent, then? Since you were forced?”

  “I could have found a way,” I said. “There are always choices. I could have run away. Spat in his face. Starved myself. Jumped in the river. Anything.”

  “Given up the baby?”

  A lead weight plunged from my throat to my belly.

  “Baby?”

  “Oh, Warne,” he said with not a little sadness. “I knew from the beginning you were leaving something out. Didn’t take a genius. There are many reasons a woman might want a husband but only one reason she might need one.”

  “There was no baby.”

  “Lie.”

  “There wasn’t,” I said, “in the end.”

  I tilted the liquid in the glass, trying to center myself, trying to focus. My voice was softer as I confessed, “Not a live one, anyhow.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “Me too,” I said simply.

  “Not Charlie’s, then?”

  “No,” I said. “A young man named Paul. A good friend.”

  Even after all this time, I could see Paul’s face clearly in my mind. A wry smile, a noble nose, eyes that danced with warmth. I’d trusted him and no one before or since. Six months we’d known each other, at the theater in St. Louis. A stagehand and an actor’s daughter. Six months, and that was all.

  “You don’t strike me as the type to get carried away in the moment, even at a young age.”

  “He was consumptive,” I said. “A lunger.”

  He nodded. “So you knew you’d lose him.”

  “Yes. He knew he’d die of it. I wanted him to be happy for a moment. He was. We both were.”

  He lowered his head as he spoke, and I couldn’t read the emotion. Disapproval? Wry humor? Titillation? “So your favor to him was to surrender your womanly virtue?”

  “As I told you when you hired me,” I said, “someone has to be first.”

  I smiled, then, to let him know it was all right. That part of it, I’d made my peace with. That part, I didn’t regret.

  And he smiled back, patted my hand, and tipped a heavy pour of whiskey halfway up the glass. I reached for it with silent gratitude.

  I told him the rest briefly. Weakened and fading fast, Paul died a month later. Two months after that, my family traveled to Boston so my father could appear in The School for Scandal at the Newbury. When my traveling sickness didn’t subside after the journey was over, I began to suspect I was with child. After that, it was only a matter of weeks until my parents found out, cursing me as a whore and a burden and threatening at last what I’d always feared in secret: utter abandonment, casting me out into the world alone. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been as bad as what actually happened. Only days later, my father shoved me toward Charlie Warne with a sum of money to sweeten the pot. I found out much later they’d only met twice, over cards. The rest was inevitable.

  Perhaps I should not have spoken of it. That night, I dreamt terrible dreams. The gore that streaked the bed. The animal sound of my own screams. The child, who I never saw, not more than a glimpse of a blue elbow smeared with red blood. Perhaps a midwife could have helped, but there was no one to call her; I was alone. The doctor afterward had said there was no way of knowing what could have made the difference. Charlie had been on a riverboat bender and didn’t return until two days later, or so I was told. I was mad with fever by that time. The infection nearly killed me, the doctor said, and no other child would ever take root in my womb. I had no memory of the week. Only its first hours, which I would have given anything to forget.

  The night of Sarah Harrington’s funeral, I awoke from the nightmare of my memo
ries, my bedclothes soaked with whiskey sweat. It was not even midnight.

  It was a strange end to a strange day, one of the longest of my life.

  But strange days were becoming more and more common in my life after choosing the path of the Pinkerton operative.

  • • •

  The first year of my employment flew by, and before I knew it, the second chased after it. Sad President Pierce left office, replaced by the bachelor Buchanan. Both the North and the South hoped that his presidency would bring them something they wanted, though in the end, we could not both be right.

  I grew more confident in my work but could not shake the feeling that the other operatives regarded me as a mere curiosity. I confided in Mrs. Borowski, who was my best confidante though she was no longer my landlord. As we lounged in a beer garden on a warm afternoon, I told her everything.

  “And Bellamy! That one. He still looks at me as if I were a dog riding a bicycle.”

  “And how do you look at him?”

  I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. The suds swirled in my empty mug. “What do you mean?”

  “As an obstacle?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Not a person?”

  “Of course he’s a person.”

  “But do you credit him that way? With thoughts and feelings, the same as you? Everyone is just doing what he thinks best, Kate.”

  “But they’re wrong.”

  “And likely, they think the same of you. They think you’re mistaken, and you think they are. What’s the difference? You need to treat them with respect, no matter what. Eventually, they will do the same.”

  “That could take a long time.”

  “What’s your rush?” she asked and took a long drink of her lager.

  She made a good argument. Who cared what they thought? I was able to do what I needed to do. And every time we brought a criminal to justice, I felt the flood of excitement course through my body, and there was no better feeling. I had found a good place in a bad world, and there was nothing else to be done but stay in that place as long as I could and do my work as well as I could do it.

  In the fall, it seemed only a curiosity, if a tragedy, that a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas brought down a ship with four hundred souls aboard. But then the news spread that there had been an unearthly amount of gold—two million dollars!—aboard as well. The Ship of Gold went down in September. The Panic began shortly after.

  The month the banks closed was the worst. Once-comfortable people who’d lost their savings in bad investments became desperate, quick to turn to crime. And the enterprising criminals of the Midwest were quick to take advantage, setting up snow jobs and long cons that made the victims of the crash believe they could make a quick buck and get back to where they’d been. But there was no going back; there never was. We kept busy, to say the least.

  But we had reason to fear for our future. The Panic was a disaster for the railroads, and our fate was utterly entwined with theirs. Ohio Life’s collapse, plunging grain prices, declining settlement in the West—it all added up to less for our friends at Illinois Central.

  And I found that the more I worked with the Pinkerton Agency, the less I found myself thinking about anything else. By the end of the year, Mrs. Borowski nearly had to drag me away from the office to socialize. I canceled plans with her on short notice twice in a row, so when she proposed tickets to an Olive Oatman lecture, I agreed and promised I would not renege. I was glad she persisted, as I didn’t want to lose her friendship. Still, even as we sat in the audience looking up at the woman at the podium, I found myself thinking like a detective.

  Mrs. Borowski had devoured Life Among the Indians and couldn’t wait to hear the woman’s firsthand tale, and she sat in rapture. But I found Miss Oatman unnerving, with the blue tattoo covering her chin that made her look like some kind of talking skull. She seemed weary, defensive. No one else seemed to find her tone amiss. I wondered if even an evening’s harmless entertainment was beyond me.

  I was deeply suspicious. Was her tale true? Abducted and held prisoner by Indians from the tender age of fourteen but unmolested for all those years? Had her sister, also a prisoner, died of starvation as she claimed? There were countless other ways to die, many of them more excruciating, many of them someone’s fault. I was always looking for angles now, always wondering if people were what they seemed.

  Certainly, these days, I never was.

  Chapter Eleven

  Seduction

  I knew the howl of an unhappy child when I heard one. Halfway across the park, I halted at the sound and immediately scanned the horizon for its source. Was it a girl or a boy? How old? And where? I followed as the scream shifted from a long cry to a series of shorter, breathless bursts.

  Near the base of a tree, I spotted her. A small, curly-haired girl with a reddened face, her mouth open and trembling. She clutched her leg, and while I saw no blood, her awkward position on the grass made me suspect she had fallen from a low branch above.

  “There, there,” I said as I approached. “Everything will be quite all right.”

  The girl glared poison at me. I very nearly walked away. I’d never had a good manner with children, having no sisters or brothers nor children of my own who’d lived.

  Nonetheless, the girl appeared to be alone, so I continued to draw closer and knelt down alongside her to make sure she wasn’t badly wounded. “Let’s take a closer look at that leg, shall we? Can you tell me if it hurts?”

  She shook her head vehemently, but whether she was saying no to my first question or my second, I couldn’t tell.

  “Oh goodness! There you are! Violet, what’s happened?”

  I didn’t even have time to turn to look in the direction of the woman’s voice before the little girl’s body was swept up into the air, the broad fabric of her striped skirt swinging wide. I brushed the dirt from my own dress and rose to meet the new arrival.

  The dark-haired woman cradled the child, her head bent over the smaller one, whispering soft and comforting words directly into her tiny ear. I felt like an intruder standing this close. The girl’s heaving shoulders began to settle. Her crying began to slow.

  The woman seemed to notice me then and looked at me over her daughter’s head.

  “Oh, what you must think of me,” she said. “What kind of mother am I?”

  I didn’t know what kind of mother she might be, but I did know whose wife she was. There had been a very good likeness in the case file. She was Catherine Maroney, the suspect’s wife, the woman I’d come to Philadelphia to find.

  “Could you use some help managing?” I asked, not missing a beat. “I’d be glad to see you two home.”

  • • •

  I’d been assigned to the Adams Express case in the early summer of 1858, only days after one congressman beat another nearly to death with a cane on the very floor of the United States Congress, proving how mad our world had become. The transport company Adams Express, our client, had lost a stunning $40,000 in gold from a locked pouch between Birmingham and Mobile. Pinkerton and I deduced that if the pouch hadn’t been unlocked in transit, perhaps it had been tampered with even before it was loaded on the train, and suspicion fell squarely on the shoulders of Nathan Maroney, the Birmingham stationmaster. He’d already been arrested, but the company was hesitant to bring suit without solid evidence. Maroney was Southern, the company Northern. The case was a pure tinderbox.

  “They’ve called for a man half horse and half alligator,” said Pinkerton. “Instead, I shall send them you.”

  Dispatched to Birmingham to befriend Maroney’s wife, Catherine, I was hastily rerouted along the way to Philadelphia, where she had fled scrutiny. Upon arrival in the new city, I was caught with no plan, no residence, no easy way to find Catherine and her daughter, Violet. Had this been my first case, I might have panicked, bu
t with several years of experience behind me, I simply set to the task.

  With careful inquiries and a few timely tears at the station, everything expressed in my well-honed drawl, I found the Society Hill boardinghouse most hospitable to Southern women and secured a room. Then I made a habit of lingering in the places my fellow guests frequented. One of these places was a lovely park along Sixth Street just past Independence Hall, and that was where the sound of Violet Maroney’s cries had reached me, bringing me the luck I needed to break the case wide open.

  • • •

  Mrs. Maroney and I became fast friends. She was a socially gregarious woman, and her isolation in Philadelphia had been a great trial to her. Having found my willing ear, she bent it at every opportunity. She had a habit of complimenting her listener effusively, even when nothing was being said. Oh, you’ll understand. You always understand. I’m so glad you’re here, and isn’t it wonderful to sit like this? No one else is as much a comfort to me as you are. When she began saying these things, I knew they weren’t true—she’d only known me for three days; how could I be a comfort?—but saying them made them true somehow, and I came to expect and depend on her confidences, drinking them up like the roots of a parched plant.

  It was hard for me to reconcile our easy friendship with my unfriendly intentions. In a way, I meant this woman harm. If her husband were never convicted, she would be able to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. The money would flow. Her life would be better. My sole purpose was to take that away. And in pursuit of that goal, I would misrepresent myself to her, claim to be someone I wasn’t.

  But I found a way to make my peace with misrepresentation. We were all misrepresenting ourselves to each other after all. To live in this world daily was to traffic in the business of leading other people astray. Thanks to my upbringing, I’d had more experience with that than most. Now, it was my profession.

  After a week, I had heard Cath Maroney complain countless times of how lonesome she was in this Northern town, how resentful she was to be exiled. I had tried a number of times to shift her subject, wondering aloud why her husband was not with her, asking the reason for her stay in Philadelphia. But she lied smoothly, claiming her husband had sailed to England for a time to resolve an issue with a family inheritance, and she never even mentioned his Christian name.