Girl Waits with Gun (24 page)

She seemed all at once to remember to whom she was talking, and she stopped. “What is it, Sheriff? I'm sure we all have work to do this morning.”

The sheriff was still considering the hat in his lap. “The matter I'm investigating,” he said, “concerns a fire.”

She groaned and leaned back in her chair. “The boarding house. I know. Our family's owned a whole row of them for years, and they've been nothing but trouble. I'm surprised we haven't had a grease fire before now. My husband's planning to sell them all off.”

“Who told you it was a grease fire?” Sheriff Heath said.

“Well, Henry said he spoke to the fire chief and . . .” She stopped in midsentence, her mouth hanging open. “Henry.”

With a sharp look from the sheriff, I stayed quiet. After a minute she began straightening the papers on the desk and said, “But there's no evidence of that, is there? And who would set fire to his own property?” She said it with the contemplative air of a lawyer considering a legal defense.

“I understand your brother had trouble with a girl who lived in that building. Miss Kopp said she worked here. Will she be here today?”

I froze. What was he doing?

Marion looked back and forth between the two of us, but before she said a word, I could tell our interview was over.

“I don't know what Miss Kopp thinks she knows, or what business it is of hers,” she said crisply. “Lucy Blake is no longer in our employ. She left without notice and will not receive a reference. She'd been harassing my brother and, frankly, it's better that she's gone.”

I cringed. I'd kept my promise and never given the sheriff Lucy's name, but I'd given him too much other information. Now he knew.

“I've been told a child is missing,” the sheriff continued.

At that Marion rose to her feet and we reluctantly followed suit. “That girl only wanted our family's money. It was extortion, that was all. If there ever was a child—and I never saw one—it's probably better off wherever it is now.”

She marched to the door and held it open. Sheriff Heath followed and took hold of it gently, closing it again. He spoke so softly that even I had to lean over to hear.

“Someone attempted a bonfire at the home of the Kopp sisters last week. I came by only to ask your brother's whereabouts on that evening and the evening the boarding house burned. Your cooperation would let us handle this matter quietly.”

There was a twitch at the corner of her mouth and I thought she might be considering it. But then she opened the door again.

“Thank you so much for your visit,” she sang out for the benefit of the typists. “We won't be needing any.”

“I WISH YOU WOULDN'T
have brought Lucy Blake into this,” I said as Deputy Morris drove us back to Wyckoff.

“I needed the girl's name,” the sheriff said calmly. “She's a part of this mess. I can't help any of you if I don't know what's going on.”

“She made me swear I wouldn't go to the police.”

“But we can help her if she'll let us,” the sheriff said. “If she'd only come to us when the baby was born, we could have petitioned a judge to have Kaufman declared the father. He would have been made to pay. We've done it before.”

“I don't think a scared young factory girl would have gone running to the sheriff in the middle of the strikes, even if she had known,” I said.

“Well. She shouldn't be so afraid of us,” he said. “And you wanted me to know her name. You always did.”

He was right, but I wasn't going to say it.

“Now she's a missing person,” he continued. “Doesn't that change things? Wouldn't she have wanted you to do something if she turned up missing?”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“We'll take a description from you and we'll start looking,” he said. “And we'll bring Henry Kaufman in as soon as I can get the prosecutor to agree on some charges.”

“Do you mean you have to ask that man for permission before you bring an arsonist and kidnapper in for questioning? What was his name? Courter?”

“No,” said the sheriff. “It's worse than that. I have to ask his boss.”

When we rolled into the drive, Norma and Fleurette were standing outside with one of the deputies. “We have a letter,” Fleurette called to us before we were even out of the car. She was bouncing up and down on her toes the way she did when she was excited. I was beginning to think Norma was right. Fleurette did see this as another installment in a Sunday serial.

Sheriff Heath rushed over and took the envelope from his deputy. “Did he mail it?” he said, holding it lightly by the edges.

He had, which the sheriff considered good news, because it meant that he could take it to a man at the post office assigned to work on Black Hand letters and other such threats sent through the mail.

I read it over his shoulder.

Madam,

You make mistake to bring police in. We settle this ourselves. If you insist on prosecuting Henry Kaufman you will be sorry, for we will blow up your home.

This time we get you, when you run, us shoot you before you pass us in field or street.

—H. K. & Friends

Sheriff Heath looked out at the road and my eyes followed his. Anything could come hurling down that road at us. I'd always felt so secluded in the countryside, so isolated. This is where we'd gone to hide. But we weren't hidden anymore.

Fleurette crossed her arms over her chest and hopped up and down to get warm. The day had grown gray and damp, and the chill was getting into our bones. Norma put an arm around her and rubbed her shoulders.

“I'll put a guard here around the clock,” the sheriff said, his eyes still on the empty road. “We'll be able to see them coming. I don't want you to worry. The next time they turn up out here, they'll all be arrested.”

But he also told us to stay away from windows, and to keep buckets of water around the house in case we had to put out a fire, and to keep our revolvers nearby, even during the day.

So that's the way it would be. We were under siege.

WINTER WAS CLOSING IN ON US
. By the first week of November, we'd already had a few snow flurries. In the morning we had to sprinkle salt on the porch stoop to keep from slipping, and every day we chipped the ice out of Dolley's water trough. Our chickens went through an early molt, shedding their feathers so rapidly that in the morning we'd find the floor of their pen covered in them and think that one of them had been slaughtered by a fox in the night. Francis arranged for a boy to bring us a cord of firewood, knowing that we wouldn't make it to Christmas if it stayed this cold.

The willow trees down by the creek were encased in ice at sunrise. When I walked out to the meadow, I could hear those thin, whip-like branches jangling against each other like the glass on a chandelier. I worried about the deputies stationed out there in the cold, and finally got them to accept a camp stove to furnish some small measure of heat.

It was a few weeks before Henry Kaufman made good on his threat. I awoke to the sound of ice cracking under someone's feet, but I had been so deeply asleep that at first I didn't understand what was happening. But then a twig snapped and I heard a man's soft cursing. In a second I was out of bed and crouched under the window. The revolver was so cold that it was a shock to wrap my hand around it.

I raised my eyes to the windowsill. The glass was covered in a fine, crystalline lacework of ice. I had to stand a little taller to find a spot that was clear enough to see through. From my bedroom I had a view of the meadow and the dead, dry vegetable garden. I could see only a corner of the barn. No light came from its window. I didn't know if the deputy was watching or not.

Seeing no one in the yard, I lowered myself back to the floor and wondered if I should wake Norma and Fleurette. We had only just started sleeping in our own bedrooms again a few nights ago. Now I wish we'd rigged up a bell to signal one another.

I slid my window open a few inches, and as I did, I again heard the crack of ice under someone's feet. I risked another look through the glass. He saw me just as I saw him. His gun was already drawn. I pushed my revolver through the narrow opening and fired.

The bullet hit a tree and he shot up at me. There was a small shudder when the bullet hit the house. A second later I heard the groan of the barn door swinging open. I couldn't shoot again without endangering the deputy. I dropped below the window and waited.

When the man didn't return fire, I stood alongside the window and peeked out. He was running down the drive, a short and stocky figure in a coat and hat. I couldn't say for certain that it was Henry Kaufman, but nothing about his appearance gave me reason to believe it wasn't.

A car met him at the end of our drive and roared away. It was only after the road was empty that I saw the deputy chasing after him, fast but not fast enough.

SHERIFF HEATH WAS ANGRY
with his deputy for letting the man get away, but I forgave him. We could see from the footprints in the ice that our intruder had approached the house from the other side, staying away from the barn so as not to alert the deputy stationed there. Even if he had dozed off for a few minutes (an accusation from Sheriff Heath that he denied), it would have been difficult to get up and out of the barn in time to react. The entire confrontation only took a minute.

“Wouldn't this be a very good time to arrest the man and put an end to all this?” Norma said when the sheriff stopped in the next morning.

“We're still trying to make the case to the prosecutor,” he said.

“But Constance saw him!” Fleurette said. She was sitting at the kitchen table spooning sugar on her toast. The sheriff, Norma, and I were standing in an awkward half-circle around her.

“She thinks she saw him,” Sheriff Heath said. “And I think she did, too. But we have no proof.”

“If only she'd shot him,” Norma said, “we'd have excellent proof in the form of a frozen corpse in the drive.”

“What about the coat and the stickpin and the ring? All those things they left behind?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I've sent my men around to every tailor and jeweler in town. No one recognizes them. The coat was made by a very good private tailor, and the jewelry has no marks. We couldn't get a print from the matchbox.”

“And the letters?” I said.

“I've got someone at the post office working on that. I know it isn't any comfort, but we're doing everything we can.”

“So is Henry Kaufman,” Norma said.

After that, there were two deputies on duty, and the three of us went back to sleeping in the same room. We chose Mother's room because it squarely faced the barn and the road, making it more difficult for someone to sneak up to it. The bullet that had been fired at the house remained lodged in the siding. The wood was sturdy enough to protect us, so we weren't worried about anyone shooting at us through the walls. Our house was powerfully built of wide, thick timbers. It wasn't meant to withstand the ammunition of gangsters, but it seemed to be serving that purpose just fine.

All the same, we moved every piece of furniture in Mother's room to the outside wall. Any bullets coming at us would have to get through the shingles, the crossbeams, and Mother's oak chiffonier.

WE TRULY HAD GONE BACK INTO HIDING
. There was the same sense of dread, of fear, of an ever-present danger pressing in from the outside world, that had hung about the house when we first moved to Wyckoff. I remembered the weight of it from last time, and the sense that I had brought this down upon us all.

Except that then we had a baby to distract us. Now we had a bored seventeen-year-old and a platoon of deputies stationed in our barn on twelve-hour shifts.

Norma scoured the newspaper every day for hints about what Kaufman and his gang might be up to. “There was a raid on a gambling parlor last night,” she would say. “Maybe he got swept up in that.” Any story about an automobile running someone down got her attention, for we knew him to be a dangerous driver. And if there was a fire—any kind of fire at all, even a kitchen fire started accidentally by a maid—Norma cut it out and left it for the sheriff to see.

“Not knowing his whereabouts is the worst of it,” she said one morning. “What's he doing right now? When he's not going after us, who else do you suppose he's bothering?” Norma imagined that he had a long list of similarly situated women to harass and threaten. I said that I didn't think Henry Kaufman was capable of something as methodical as a list.

“No, I'm certain he doesn't keep a list,” Norma said. “But I do wonder if he doesn't have a whole string of us he goes around and torments. I've half a mind to place an advertisement in the papers and form some kind of league.”

“The Henry Kaufman Protection League,” Fleurette said. Norma wrote it down.

“I want to know what he's done with Lucy Blake,” said Fleurette. “Maybe he's got her and the baby hidden in the basement. Has anyone gone to look?”

Norma rattled her newspaper to signal her displeasure with the subject of Lucy Blake. But the girl's story played like a moving picture in Fleurette's head, and it was impossible to get her to stop talking about it.

“Why can't the sheriff find her?” Fleurette continued. “Wouldn't someone have seen her? They should ask at the train stations. Or we could put a notice in the paper about her. Haven't they done any of that? A girl can't just vanish.”

“Oh, girls can vanish,” Norma said without looking up at us.

IT WAS A WEEK
before the next letter arrived. What prompted him to send it I couldn't imagine. We had hardly stepped foot outside, much less gone anywhere near him or his factory. I imagined Henry Kaufman's mind working like one of those swirling, sucking whirlpools that formed without warning at the bottom of the Passaic Falls. They'd arise from nothing and then spin around until something flew out of them—a piece of driftwood, a rubber ball, an old shoe. This was Henry Kaufman, spinning like a dervish until another demented letter came hurling out at us.