Bury Me Deep (18 page)

With trembling fingers, Marion read about the blood found on the premises and how the police were pursuing the possibility of violence. Most of the article, however, swelled with the breathless first-person account of one Florence Loomis.

“Do you know her?” Dr. Seeley asked.

“Yes. She was a friend. She was at the house a lot, at least.” The sight of plump and smeary Mrs. Loomis, tight as a drum on New Year’s Eve, flashed through Marion’s head. Once, she remembered her tearing her blouse open and asking Sheriff Healy to arrest her for gross indecency.

Marion looked back down at the article. There was a photograph of Louise in her nurse’s uniform and one of the house, which looked grim, menacing.

“‘According to Werden Clinic staff,’” Dr. Seeley read, “‘the girls left town last weekend with two unidentified men on their way to California. Their belongings were shipped by a friend, Mrs. Everett Seeley, who also works at the clinic. She could not be reached by deadline.’”

Marion thought of the reporter who had come to the house, knew he would be back.

Dr. Seeley read on: “‘Neighbors said the house was often the site of “gay parties” that lasted until the early morning hours, the most recent marked by frequent trips to the local drugstore for ginger ale. The women’s loud voices intermingled with those of many men and kept neighbors awake for most of the night.

“‘“They are a peacocky pair,” said Mrs. Loomis, who befriended the young women last year. “They came to town with nary a nickel between them. They were dreadful poor and I helped them.” Mrs. Loomis, who said that the girls had recently borrowed thirty-eight dollars and an electric hair-waving iron from her, added, “Good times, that’s what they wanted. They had many friends to help them out. I tried to talk sense into them, but
they would have none of it. I’m not surprised by any of this. They entertained many men. Men in this town.” While Mrs. Loomis would not mention any names, she added that she would help the police in any way she could.

“‘One neighbor confirmed that one of the most frequent guests was Mr. Joseph Lanigan, owner of Valiant Drugs and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Lanigan could not be reached for comment.

“‘The sheriff ’s office refused to reveal any details about the investigation but police were a constant presence in the Hussel Street residence today.’”

Dr. Seeley set the newspaper down and looked at Marion. “They will be speaking to him soon.”

“I know,” Marion said.

“Do you know what he intends to say?”

Marion looked at him.
Your beauty is blinding but behind it I see death.
That’s what he had the nerve to say to her. The stuff of tear-lashed confession magazines. That was what he had said.

“Marion, have you seen him since you’ve returned? Have you…been with him?”

“No. No. I saw him only once,” she said, “at the clinic. He made me see that…I am alone.”

“You’re not alone, Marion,” Dr. Seeley said. “You’re not.”

She looked at him and it felt a glimmer of long ago, he the elegant doctor spiriting her away, rescuing her from something, even.

“He gave me one hundred dollars,” Marion blurted, ashamed she had not mentioned it before. But to have mentioned it would have meant revealing she had seen him. Seen this man whose name her husband could not bear to utter. She opened her purse and showed it to him.

“We will need it,” Dr. Seeley said.

T
HEY WALKED STRAIGHT OUT
the front door and to the streetcar. Dr. Seeley said they should leave their things at the rooming house. There should be no appearance that they had gone. But they would not return.

They rode downtown to a small hotel with a fraying fringe overhang—the Kenwick Arms, the electric sign had said before its globes had burned out.

They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Leroy and it was not until Dr. Seeley had shut the creaking door behind them and the dust motes rose and settled that Marion asked him what in fact his plan was.

“Leaving town now has become hazardous. Police will be watching the train station. This way, we have perhaps purchased a day, maybe two. I have thoughts. I have thoughts. We may shore ourselves up by culling as much on this man as possible.”

“How will that stop the law?”

“He has powerful friends. That is clear. After the news story he will be rounding up his horses. Marion, he does not intend to go to the gallows. We will not let him place you there in his stead.”

“That is his plan, back to the wall,” Marion said, surprised by the coolness in her voice. The hardness wedged tight between teeth. What had happened to her? Where was the shuddering young girl, gone forever? In some strange way, she was glad. That girl was her doom.

“That newspaper article,” she went on. “What will the afternoon edition hold?”

Two hours, and Dr. Seeley went to the newsstand and returned, ashen-faced.

Marion looked at the front page. It was a muted blow; she, beaten now to smoothness, expected no less.

LOVE TRIANGLE AT CENTER OF
GIRLS’ DISAPPEARANCE?

POLICE TRACE PATH OF MYSTERIOUS TRUNKS

FRIENDS SPECULATE THRILL PARTIES
FUELED JEALOUSY AMONG WOMEN

Three o’clock, Dr. Seeley looked itchy, scratching his neck, and sweaty-collared, said if she felt safe, he would return to his investigation.

“Where will you go?”

“I need to see how wide the ring expands, Marion,” he said, straightening his tie, twisted so thin from wear.

Marion wanted to remind him he was not a policeman, not a private detective from the Saturday matinee. She wanted to tell him none of it would matter. She thought of Joe Lanigan at his lodges, his friars’ clubs, his Chamber of Commerce gatherings, his men’s clubs, the smokers from which he was always returning, gin-soaked and tomcatted. What did girls like Louise and Ginny matter in the face of that, and what did she, some vagabond wife picked up for dallying and set down in a corner when done?

“Last night when I came home, it was too late,” he said to her. “I was too disordered. I didn’t want to worry you. Now there is no choice. Let me share all I saw, all I’ve learned about this man. Then you will have no doubt we will ensnare him. We must. He is a dangerous…He is…”

She put her hand on his arm. “You can tell me,” she said. Even knowing there would likely be no surprises. The only sur
prise would be having to look full-face again at what she had blotted out, lo these months. What worse?

He told of a day and a night spent in joints, judas holes, lowdown nighteries and barrelhouses, trailing the wastrels on Thaler Avenue and in Gideon Square. The sad tramps and drifting souls who seemed, somehow, to wear his own face. He saw their sorrow and their weakness and it trembled through him and he could almost not bear it. But he did. And he struck up conversations and no one questioned this shabby man with all the right words and most of all the right look in his eyes, the look of lostness. At last, a man named Farriss took him to a house on Clawson Street where he met a woman named Clara who explained how every four days, the Worth Brothers Meat Truck came to the Dempsey Hotel and you went to the third floor, room 308, and Mr. Worth, only he called himself Mr. Tanner, but everyone knew, would sell you your kit. Whatever was wanted. And sure, she knew Ginny too. Ginny used to work the Dempsey for Joe till the TB got too bad. Louise, sure, everyone knew Louise, Louise was the one before the new one. The new who? The new nurse. Everyone knew Joe Lanigan’s private nurses were also his whores. His private whores, mind you. The new one, word was the new one wasn’t even a real nurse, this one, she was a schoolgirl plucked from St. Monessa’s.

A coldness swept across Marion’s chest.

The nurse. Of course. The nurse. It was like everything else about Joe Lanigan. Seamy, rotten. Ruined.

Looking at Dr. Seeley, she pushed it all away. She looked at him.

“And you mean to go there. You mean to go to where these narcotics are…”

“I do, my dear,” he said, and he kept her gaze. “Marion, if he can so effectively marshal the powers that be in this town to pro
tect himself, we must put the fear in him to offer up those steel walls to you as well. He must find another goat, Marion, from among his drossy minions. It won’t be you.”

“But for you to move back in these worlds…”

“Marion, the more we know about his affairs, the more chips we have at our disposal. We need to put the fear in him. I must go.”

Marion felt a tightening in the air between them. “Everett, I…”

“I will be fine, Marion. You know I will. I am strong for us both now. As you always have been. It is my chance. This is my chance.”

Marion looked at him and he looked at her, his eyes open and waiting, asking her something that he could not say. She looked at him and she could not help but feel the largeness of the moment and it frightened her. It felt like they were spinning on an axis after a life of stillness. Or stillness after four marital years of spinning. She did not know what it meant.

“Of course, Everett. Of course.” She had to say it. And she so wanted to believe it, all of it.

And maybe he was right. Maybe there was more still to uncover about Joe Lanigan, more even than she knew, enough to matter more than his rich-man, gold-cut cruelty, and maybe it could matter. Who was she to guess, given the quaking surprises of the last week, most of all the ones she’d sprung on herself.
It is you, Marion, who started the bloodbath. It is you who took hammer to teeth, acid to flesh—would you ever have guessed the limits of your own darkness?

She handed him the hundred dollars. “You will need this, to get information.”

He looked at the money. “I will take fifty dollars. But hopefully I will not need it.”

“Yes,” she said, and his face looked so kind and she felt a
warmth rush through her, and through her hands to his. “Thank you, Everett. Thank you.”

T
EN MINUTES
after he left, she was on the streetcar to Lynbrook Street.

She could hear Louise’s voice prickling in her ear:
It is he, it is he, you cannot let him wend so freely, smashing our girl-bones to pieces, stomping on our black-and-blue hearts while he lines his pockets and fills his mouth with sugar, sugar, sugar.

She would need to find him out. He had set things in motion and who knew what would come next?

I
T WAS NEARING
four o’clock and Joe’s Packard was nowhere to be seen.

Through the back windows she could see two blond-plaited girls chewing on long strings of taffy, listening to the radio. She could hear the radio faintly. Hear the girls’ soft, taunting sister voices, scolding and reckoning with each other. They wore matching Easter dresses, mint green and soft-shell pink, and their backs faced the windows. The taffy was lemon yellow and they were tugging at it and laughing at the program.

Marion wished she might join them, such fun they were having, poking and prodding and nestling against each other.

It was lovely.

She turned away, the rush of feeling too great, and that was when she saw the flicker of white from the corner of her eye.

“Mrs. Lanigan, get back in this house!”

Marion backed up fast against the wall and saw the apparition, for that’s what she appeared, in white, skin pallid, eyes like dark, purple-edged hollows.

Behind the ghostly figure scurried the nurse, pinch faced and grasping. Hooking one arm around the ghost, she grabbed her fast.

“Mrs. Lanigan, you know better,” she said, and the ghost, the ghost who was Mrs. Lanigan, wailed mournfully.

“I don’t know where. I lost my way. You’re trying to make me lose my way,” she moaned, her eyelids and cheeks looking so strange, puffy, like a balloon toy.

“I am doing no such thing,” the nurse scolded, and it was at that moment she spotted Marion.

But said nothing.

“Oh, Jessie, put me down. Put me down. I can’t bear it,” Mrs. Lanigan cried. And Marion saw all her wrecked beauty, drawn tight across old bones.

Without saying a word to Marion, the nurse, this Jessie, seized the flailing woman and shepherded her, roughly, back into the house.