Frog Music (38 page)

“Did you get that scratch from a bullet?” the youngest-looking girl asks her.

Blanche shakes her head and shuts her eyes again.

Another one tries: “Is it true you went crazy in the deadhouse and dragged her corpse about?”

“Chut!”
Maria shushes them loudly.

“Well, if we’re obliged to squeeze so tight we might as well get some conversation out of her,” the first mutters.

The carriages drag slowly through the hillside cemetery, a little city divided into neighborhoods. Carved signs mark out the sections belonging to the firemen, the typographers, the Protestant orphan asylum. The Chinese vault, where bodies are kept ready to be sent back to their homeland, is strewn with what looks to Blanche like the remains of a banquet: rice, joss sticks twisted black, singed squares of that curious pretend money they make out of paper stamped silver or gold.
Low Long
, she once asked her lodger,
why do your lot work so hard?

The shoemaker told her that they had to save up enough to send themselves back,
either-either
.

Either what?

Pay for journey back, Miss Blanche, dead or live
.

So their bones wouldn’t lie restless in California, you see. Blanche considers the bleak question now: Where will her bones end up?

They pass a much bigger, tonier cortege; hear violins. She feels oddly nettled that Jenny’s isn’t the only funeral in town.

They come to a halt now. She cranes out the window and sees the black-suited
croque-morts
lifting the coffin down and placing it at the side of a pit with freshly spaded edges. (The soil is reddish, bone-dry.) The women spill from the carriage, shaking out their skirts. No priest, Blanche suddenly realizes, which means no eulogy, no requiem. Are they going to put Jenny in the ground without a word? No music, even? That doesn’t seem right.

The sky is white-blue, steely hot. Rain on a funeral sends a soul to heaven, Blanche remembers, but no chance of a drop today. Now, there’s a curious thought: Jenny in heaven. Angels, robes? Somehow Blanche can’t imagine her anywhere but San Francisco, always wandering down some steep street, just out of sight.

The pallbearers are lifting off the wreaths and the fringed pall. Blanche pushes near enough to see the coffin. A glass plate set into the lid. She wriggles closer, not caring whose foot she steps on. But the light is bouncing sideways, so Blanche can’t get a last glimpse of the face. It’s as if Jenny is setting off in some futuristic machine toward the stars.

Gravediggers in dusty overalls lower the coffin on straps. Then pull the straps back up, loose now. They glance around for instruction. Nobody seems to be in charge. The staff from Gray’s stand still, as if their duty is done. Sosthenes Bonnet has covered his face with his hands, Blanche notices.

In a shaky voice, an elderly woman strikes up what sounds like a hymn.

Through all the tumult and the strife

I hear the music ringing—

Most of the small crowd join in, some of them dissonantly. Sosthenes Bonnet’s rich old voice comes in on the third line.

It finds an echo in my soul—

How can I keep from singing?

Blanche remembers Jenny singing. She did it like breathing. The child star could have stayed on the stage, warbling and strutting with her parents, pleasing the crowds. Could have done any number of things. To think of all the lives Jenny tossed aside so she could live this particular one. And who’s to say she ever regretted it?

After a couple of verses, the hymn peters out. The diggers hoist their shovels.

A wave of anticlimax weakens Blanche’s legs. What now?

The old actor is making his halting way from the grave back to the carriage, leaning on Durand’s arm.

Blanche seizes her chance. “Monsieur Bonnet?” she calls, hurrying up.

“It should have been Paris,” she hears him complaining to Portal, on his left.

“Monsieur Bonnet?”

He blinks at Blanche rheumily.

“Mademoiselle Beunon,” supplies Durand. “She was with Jenny in San Miguel Station.”

The expressive face contracts. “Mademoiselle.” A sketched bow. “I was just remarking that my daughter should rest in Paris.”

“Not at all,” says Blanche too sharply, following his gaze to the pit that the gravediggers are starting to fill in. “Jenny loved this city ever since she saw it burning.”

“Burning?”

“Saw it from the ship, the day you landed,” Blanche prompts him.

He shakes his head.

“She told me—” Blanche starts.

“There’d been a fire some weeks before, I believe,” says Sosthenes. “Blackened stumps everywhere. But nothing burning anymore, no. They were rebuilding already.”

“But Jenny insisted—”

Portal scowls at Blanche and takes the old man by the elbow.

“Jeanne was barely two when we came to this place,” says Sosthenes with a sorrowful smile. “How could she remember anything of the journey?”

Blanche is thrown. Is the man’s memory gone, or was Jenny’s deceiving her? (Even at twenty-seven, Jenny had had a long time to lick grit into a pearl.) Was she spinning a yarn, setting the stumps alight again to transform her ordinary arrival into a hero’s landing? How many of her anecdotes were fictions, Blanche wonders, and did Jenny even know the difference anymore?

Sosthenes is walking away, and Blanche remembers what she really needs to find out. She raises her voice. “How many years was she in the Industrial School?”

He turns, gapes. But he’s not denying it.

“Leave him be, mademoiselle,” protests Durand.

Blanche presses on. “Couldn’t you have saved her from that?”

“Saved our Jeanne?” Durand is trying to move Sosthenes toward the carriage, but the old man twists away and comes back to Blanche. “If we could have saved her from her own nature,” he says with a trembling mouth, “we wouldn’t have had to ask the judge to send her to that place at all.”

Blanche blinks at him. “You
asked
him?”

A
proper family
, Jenny quips grimly in her head,
that’s a guarantee of happiness
.

“I begged him on my knees,” admits Sosthenes with a grandiloquent gesture. “It was said to be a sort of quarantine for the young—a house of refuge from the corruptions of the City, so that delinquents could be reformed before they fell into serious crime.”

How could Jenny have paid regular visits to this poor excuse for a father? Brought him a share in her earnings? “Did you ever see the skin on her back?” Blanche demands.

His face crumples like a page. “We didn’t know what it was like in that place,” he says. “We had so little notion—”

“Scarred,” she interrupts, “like the hull of a goddamn boat!”

Tears are scoring his cheeks now, which gives Blanche a certain satisfaction.

Durand and Portal, waiting for Sosthenes some yards away, are looking daggers at her.

How did Jenny mislay her rage? Blanche wonders. She had a talent for starting a row but none for holding a grudge, it seems. She kept her chin high, her scars covered up, her gun in her pocket. Bicycled past the Industrial School regularly, and instead of burning the place down, she just tossed gumdrops and lozenges over the fence.

The father takes Blanche by the hand; she flinches from his hot grip. “Jeanne was unmanageable, uncivilizable,” he confides. “
Un enfant sauvage!
With my wife not well and our younger girl in tears all the time—I simply—how could I have been expected to—”

“How convenient,” barks Blanche. “Pack one off to rot in the reformatory and the other to die in the asylum.”

“Our Blanche didn’t die, only the baby,” Sosthenes says, confused. “They’d have sent word, wouldn’t they?”

“What baby?” She’s nearly shrieking.

“My daughter was
enceinte
, you see, though I never knew the exact, ah, circumstances. At the asylum—the poor creature, he didn’t live a week.”

Blanche is almost too angry to speak. Another baby? Jenny’s nephew. Was this one nudged along toward his death? she wonders. Did anyone in the asylum feed him, even? Hold him? All the missing children. Washed into the world against their will, to do their time, a day or a year, before being sent out of it again.
P’tit
, she cries out silently,
P’tit
.

Durand’s cook is at Sosthenes’s elbow, leading the old man away from Blanche. “Stop harassing a grieving old man,” Portal throws over his shoulder.

Guilt paralyzes Blanche. What right has she, of all people, to accuse?

Jenny’s father sobs something as he goes. “It’s all true, Adrien.”

Adrien
.

No. The cook? Portal, the cook at Durand’s?

Wait. It’s a common enough name, Adrien.

But how common could it be among Frenchmen in San Francisco who were friends of Jenny’s? A cook who might well have been a
mac
until he lost all his money. (Jenny’s money, Blanche thinks with renewed fury.) Who knew Jenny long enough, well enough, to tease her and take her teasing; to persuade his boss to buy her frogs; to weep like a baby when he heard she was dead at twenty-seven.

The cemetery’s almost deserted now. The carriage of doves has left without Blanche.

She starts walking east, toiling through the thick air. Her parasol wobbles overhead, weighing down her arm. She’s busy trying to make sense of Jenny; she’s flabbergasted. To try to kill yourself over a man because he’s wrecked your life—and then, years later, to treat him as a friend?
Forgiveness
, is that the word for it? It seems too simple a term for whatever happened between Jenny and Adrien Portal. Some deeper alteration, then? When Jenny left off skirts and put on pants, did some old scars not bother her anymore—did they no longer feel like hers?
You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet
. Had Jenny managed to convince herself that she’d metamorphosed into someone entirely new?

“Miss Beunon!”

Cartwright, trotting behind Blanche. Where did he come from? She shakes her head furiously.

“A single question.”

She marches on.

“Please.” He pants. “Help me make sure your friend’s story doesn’t fade away.”

“It’s on every front page,” she snaps.

“It’s been only a day and a half. By Monday she’ll be lucky to get a paragraph at the back between stolen watches and run-over dogs.”

Blanche halts. Purses her lips. “What’s your single question?”

“Are you acquainted with a man called Lamantia?”

Her mouth falls open. The journalist couldn’t possibly know she spent last night with Lamantia at the Palace Hotel, unless the
Chronicle
’s having her followed. “No,” she says automatically, turning her eyes away from Cartwright’s blue-glass-covered ones.

He persists. “I think you’ve heard the name, at least? He’s an importer on Market Street.”

She keeps shaking her head. It doesn’t sound as if he knows about the Palace. Curiosity’s like a pebble in her shoe. “Why does he matter, this Lamantia?”

“I don’t know for sure that he does. But he was in San Miguel Station on Wednesday morning.”

When she and Jenny were off frog-hunting on Sweeney Ridge? Blanche steps away from the newsman in confusion and panic.

“Yesterday Mrs. Holt told me about a stranger getting off the train on Wednesday,” adds Cartwright, keeping up with her. “A big man, dark, citified. She hadn’t thought to mention it to Detective Bohen, because it was on the day
before
the murder!”

But what could possibly have taken Lamantia to San Miguel Station? The Sicilian wasn’t even aware of Blanche’s connection to
that crazy girl in pants
till she told him about the murder yesterday. Unless—

Blanche stumbles, almost falls. On second thought, wasn’t it rather overdone, his insistence that he’d heard nothing at all about the case? Too
busy to read the papers
. Perhaps he wasn’t too busy to hire someone to track down his
bella bianca
after Blanche dropped out of view for a couple of weeks and left him pining. Didn’t Madame volunteer the fact that he’d been making inquiries at the House of Mirrors? How much had he paid Madame for the information that Blanche was at San Miguel Station?

Her pulse drums in her throat. What if Lamantia came down and made further inquiries about the women visiting from town? What if he somehow got it into his head that this eccentric frog girl was responsible for his favorite’s absence from the House of Mirrors?
This so-called friend
, that’s how he’d described Jenny yesterday. What if Lamantia, wanting to bully Blanche into accepting his permanent protection, formed a wild plan to scare her away from her riffraff connections by …

By what, gunning her friend down in front of her? This is ludicrous. But what does Blanche know about the man, really, except how he fucks?
Let me look after you as you deserve
, Lamantia wheedled at the Palace. Him being the killer makes no sense, but since when have men’s cravings to own women ever made sense?

“Miss Beunon?”

She waves Cartwright away. She has to think. Because if by any chance Lamantia is behind the murder, then that would mean Arthur and Ernest are … well, not
innocent
, that word will never fit. They’re snakes in the grass, child-stealers, brutes at the very least. But if they didn’t shoot Jenny, they’re not quite demons. A notion that chokes Blanche like a pair of hands around her throat. Can Ernest possibly have been sincere yesterday at the apartment when he railed against her for defaming his friend as a murderer? When he gave her one last chance to make things right and get her baby back? A chance Blanche threw away today at the inquest like a used handkerchief.

“Mrs. Holt said the gentleman wandered around as if lost,” Cartwright rattles on,” but then he struck up a conversation with the chicken farmer.”