Quiet Dell: A Novel (50 page)

“Now, Mrs. Fleming, just answer the question,” Morris cautioned.

“Well, she had accounts in . . . her maiden name, and in the name of Lemke, Dorothy P. Lemke, her married name.”

Morris led her to the point. “And did she sometimes write her name as D. A. Lemke?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “Her given name was Dorothy Ann.”

All this to ascertain that Lemke’s signature on the Gore Hotel register, D. A. Lemke, was in fact the Dorothy Lemke who returned to New England in 1924 to live with her aunt and work as a lady’s companion.

Gretchen Fleming blinked in the lights. Emily continued writing testimony in shorthand, for there was no way of knowing what she might need to quote. She drew a tight, automatic script and closely observed the witness, and Powers, and the performance of one for the other.

“When did you first find out that your sister was corresponding with this defendant?”

“June, the twenty-fifth, or twenty-seventh it was . . . she told me about how she was going to be married to a man out in Clarksburg, West Virginia.”

Law attended Gretchen’s testimony; she was mistaken about dates and kept correcting herself. “I will ask you to state whether you received notice that your sister was dead in Clarksburg.”

“Yes, sir, I received notice.”

“Did you come here, and did anyone come with you?”

“I did, with Mr. Fleming, and my aunt, Mrs. Rose Pressler.”

“Did you see your sister here, then?” Morris spoke as though Dorothy might have been crossing the street.

“Yes, sir, in the undertaker’s room, in the morgue.”

“Tell the jury, Mrs. Fleming, whether or not you identified your sister there at the undertaking establishment.”

“Yes.”

“And how could you do that?”

The spectators in the opera house grew hushed.

“By the shape of her body, and . . . she had the same round face I have . . . and very even teeth . . . I could tell that it was her.”

“Was there any mark upon her body or her abdomen?”

“Yes, sir, she had an operation in 1927. She was in hospital two months, and stayed with me two more . . . she had quite a scar . . . her appendix removed, and her right ovary.” Gretchen spoke clearly. “It was a very bad sore, and I had to treat that sore . . . some four or five weeks . . . it discharged . . . it left a particular scar.”

Ugly, Emily imagined, puckered, the shape of the drainage tube. So Gretchen had nursed Dorothy, who might have died of infection if not for her sister’s care. But she survived.

The questions continued, and the scenery began to sway, almost imperceptibly, and then in a subtle rippling, as though someone had brushed against it from behind. Powers looked away, and put a hand to the side of his face, as though to shield his eyes.

Could Gretchen identify the clothing her sister wore at the morgue?

“Yes . . . same dress she left my house in . . . that jewelry, a brooch, was on her dress right up here . . .”

Morris kept his questions short and clear. “The coat I hold in my hand now, marked ‘Exhibit Lady’s Fur Coat’ . . . Whose coat is this?”

Gretchen seemed subtly agitated. Emily wondered if she felt ill, or just exhausted.

“That is my sister Dorothy’s coat . . . she bought that in New York . . . last Christmas.” Gretchen touched a hand to her hair, as though to steady herself. She identified her sister’s handwritten endorsement on “Exhibit Lemke check, sum of $2,754.22, Worcester County Institution for Savings,” and on “Exhibit
Pressler check, sum of $1,533.01, Worcester Mechanics Savings Bank.” Both were dated July 28, 1931. It was obvious from the exact numbers that Dorothy had withdrawn the entire contents of the accounts.

The scenery panels of forest trees were noticeably swaying, and Emily heard laughter in the press corps. “Breath of the angels,” someone whispered, chuckling, and “Try his manacles, a backstage door is open.” Perhaps. The opera house was drafty. Powers alone seemed inured to the cold, but he hunched now, brought his arms to his head, and covered his ears.

Morris gave Gretchen Fleming the sheet from the Gore Hotel register. “Is that signature of ‘D. A. Lemke’ your sister’s writing?”

Of course it was.

Law, on cross-examination, asked only “At the time you saw the bodies at the morgue, the body of what you believe to be Mrs. Lemke, the remains were in a very badly decayed condition, were they not?”

Gretchen Fleming answered, “Yes, sir, they were.”

“And much swollen,” Law said.

“Why, I did not notice the swollen so much.” She glared at him.

Emily wanted to cheer.

•   •   •

Annabel finds herself upon a stage she knows. The production is well along. Women in the box seats cover their faces with the gauzy veils of their hats, to see and not be seen. Annabel smells the perfumed hankies they touch to their eyes and noses, but the spider that scuttled over her sits just here in his swivel chair, reeking of the ditch. She moves amongst the painted trees, a swaying waltz to show the limbs in motion, and turns in measured time, trembling the ropes that dangle in the wings.

Slumped in his chair, Powers feels the air upon him. She spins the wheels on his chair so fast that he feels a buzzing under him, and she follows when he stands and swears, his hand upon the book. Women are weeping now, but she is drawn away. The footlights
cast their blinding gleam onto sunlit fields, a flat sea of waving grass. Seasons have blinked by and the blond grandsons are riding the smoky tractor in spirals, each with a foot braced on a fender. Annabel sees the farmhouse far off, and their grandfather at an upstairs window. His share of the land will go to the boys in equal parts, to keep them on the farm; they are good workers and good boys, and land is the only protection.

The old man pulls a chair, a straight wooden chair made on his own lathe, to the window. All that winter, words he couldn’t read in the newspapers, and photographs.

The boy was off, a broken clock, a complicated works. He jabbered and mimicked, cunning, watchful, hoarding things and then creatures, concealing all until the father found pieces on the rubbish lot behind the store: birds, young kittens, his wife’s small dog. The boy was twelve. The father beat him. Forced him to bury it all by lantern light, keep it secret.

Secret. Afraid in his sleep. A weapon near his bed, but the boy wasn’t interested in guns or fighting; he wouldn’t make a soldier. He liked soft things like himself, and now the father knew why. The father knew, and saved him in the lake. Beat him, at fifteen, sixteen, for stealing. Beat him for drinking. One summer, Gypsies camped near town: a child, old enough to walk, missing and never found. Send Harm to America.

America, so vast he hoped the boy would disappear, but all those years, he traveled, a welter in a caravan. Took names, threw them down like parts on a heap. The tractor turns round, back toward the barn and the house.

He looks at his land and wishes for a cold wild storm.

•   •   •

Law stood at the lip of the stage as though to present the main attraction. “Mr. Powers, you are the defendant in this case?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I will ask you to state what is your name, and where you were born.”

“My true name is Herman Drenth.”

“Now he tells us,” said Eric, not bothering to speak quietly.

“How do you spell the last name?” Law asked.

Powers wore an expression of affable satisfaction. “D-r-e-n-t-h.”

Law went on to elicit short facts: born in the Netherlands, 1892; came to this country in 1910 at age eighteen, to West Virginia in 1927, married and settled in Clarksburg.

“He’s thirty-nine,” Emily murmured to Eric, “not forty-five. Another lie.”

Law looked pleased. “Been a resident of Clarksburg ever since?”

“I have.”

“Mr. Powers, I will ask you to state if you knew, in her lifetime, Dorothy Pressler Lemke?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Under what name were you known to her?”

“Well, I was first introduced to her . . . by the name of Harry F. Powers.”

“Where and when?” Law stood by, listening.

Powers obliged. “In this city . . . either late in the summer or in the early fall of 1930. I just don’t remember . . . I forget just what place. . . . I happened to be walking along and met her.”

“Who introduced you?” Law asked.

“Charles S. Rogers,” answered Powers.

This same Rogers, Powers now told all assembled, put Asta Eicher on a train for Denver. Emily glanced at Eric, who shrugged.

Law drew Powers out. “I had known Mr. Rogers since the winter of 1925. . . . I was on my way to Canton, Ohio, and he was walking along the highway, and I just gave him a lift.”

Emily marked the phrasing. A journey, joined.

“About when did you last see him?” asked Law.

“The last time I saw Mr. Rogers was June of this year . . . at Park Ridge, Illinois.”

Law went smoothly on. Had Powers “entered into any correspondence or developed your acquaintance further” with Mrs. Lemke, after their introduction in Clarksburg?

Powers looked mildly puzzled. “Well, I don’t hardly know how to explain that without causing misunderstandings in the court.”

His tenor voice was completely without accent, Emily noted. “Don’t hardly know” was an affectation; his English was that of an American with a few generations of established family behind him.

Asked how he “came to write” to Mrs. Lemke, Powers again described Rogers. “Mr. Rogers was the man who . . . showed me a list of names, and . . . called my attention to Mrs. Lemke’s name, and says, ‘This is the lady you met some time ago, last fall’ . . . but I did not recall that . . . the meeting had only been for a few seconds. . . . I had to go to the bank and the bank was about to close, and so I did not talk to them much that afternoon.”

“Rogers,” Eric said quietly. “Grim cupid, traveling around with Dorothy Lemke.”

“Well, by the way, let us go back to Rogers,” Law said, as though merely wondering. “Where was his home; where did he live?”

“I can only tell you what he told me . . . that his home was in Pittsburgh . . . but he was mostly . . . here in this state, in Fairmont, West Virginia; that is, he made his home there, according to what I understood.”

All thirdhand knowledge for which Powers was not responsible. Skillfully false, Emily thought, and so practiced.

He told a version of his history with Dorothy Lemke: first trip to see her July 9 or so, for three days, but “not much of a feeling . . . just like acquaintances.”

Powers, not a suitor constricted by employment, described coming “home from the first trip” on the seventeenth or eighteenth and finding two letters from Lemke, inviting him “to take a vacation with her.” He left July 20, to arrive in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, on the twenty-third, where “she was employed,” and stayed five days.

Driving here and there, Emily noted, three or four days at a time, on what funds and for what purpose, and bread lines in the streets.

“You were known to her at that time under what name?” Law prompted, as though to be helpful.

“C. O. Pierson, or Cornelius O. Pierson, or whatever it might be,” Powers said mildly, as though names were of no consequence.

No law against deceiving lists of women, was the implication, or renting a post office box to manage one’s replies. Emily gazed at the jury, whose faces betrayed no expression.

Law asked if Powers had met or visited any of Mrs. Lemke’s relatives.

“I met Mr. and Mrs. Fleming and their family . . . Northborough, I believe the name of the town is.” Yes, they’d remained overnight. At no time did he refer to Dorothy by a first name; they’d stopped because “she had two trunks over at her sister’s house that she wished to ship to Fairmont, West Virginia . . .”

“And who lives in Fairmont?” Eric asked sotto voce. “Why, Charlie Rogers lives in Fairmont.”

As did Cornelius Pierson, Emily thought; he’d likely told Dorothy, as he told Asta Eicher, that he lived at the Fairmont Hotel, the best in the area. As for the post office box in Clarksburg, he was often in Clarksburg on business, and came and went at the hotel frequently; he could not expect a reception desk to handle his mail.

“Now,” Law said, “to whom were these trunks addressed?”

“To myself.”

“Under what name?”

“C. O. Pierson.”

Of course, for that’s who he was at the time. Emily sighed.

During his visit to Mrs. Lemke, Powers stayed at the Uxbridge Inn, where “every day . . . she would come there to see me.” Mrs. Lemke wanted to visit friends in Fairmont, West Virginia, and in Paris, Illinois. “She expressed her desire for me to go with her there for a sort of vacation, and for the purpose of becoming better acquainted.”

He then explained a “misunderstanding” during the ensuing “vacation” that rendered him the wronged party. “We had taken a room apiece and each . . . had retired.” It was a summer evening and
still daylight. “I decided to go and talk to Mrs. Lemke awhile . . . her door was halfway open. . . . I could see Mrs. Lemke with her back toward the door. I walked in on my tiptoes like, thinking to play a little joke on her, not letting her know I was near.”

Emily glanced up at William and found him looking directly at her. Powers on tiptoes. A little joke.

“She was reading a letter . . . and grabbed that letter which she was reading, quickly, and tried to tear it.” Powers sat forward as though to create suspense. “I could tell there was something secret about that letter . . . a letter and a picture in a little frame. . . . I recognized this picture as a man I had met. . . . I noticed the postmark off of the letter and it was mailed from Clarksburg.” Powers said he withdrew the letter against her will and read it. “This man was to meet her in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, . . . at the appointed place, and it ended with the word of ‘Love.’ It was signed, ‘Cecil,’ ” Powers emphasized. “This picture is the man I recognized as . . . Cecil Johnson.”

Might the fog roll in more heavily? Not at all, for the Lemke checks were cashed in Uniontown, and this rambling story was why.

“We drove to Uniontown,” Powers said.

“That would be the morning of the thirtieth of July?” pandered Law.