“Colonel Stotz is not in office as State’s Attorney. I was in the police, but I was fired. I represent a private person.”
“Colonel Stotz is an old fool.”
“His office didn’t handle the matter very well. We know that.”
“Say what you mean! They were imbeciles!”
“Well—”
“They were idiots. You’re wasting my time.”
“Miss Doubkov, will you allow me to talk to you for three minutes without your interrupting me?”
“Well, first you be quiet for three minutes.”
She made him wait again. She pretended to count piles of towels. Her hands were trembling slightly. She hated the police, all police everywhere. Just so the police must have closed in about her home in Russia; just so, after their departure, the police must have “smoked” about among their neighbors. But she smelt money in the air—rubles and rubles. At last she lit another cigarette and turned toward him, leaning her back against the shelves, her arms akimbo. “Say what you have to say.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Ma’am, the State’s Attorney’s office has a section dealing with the search for missing persons—particularly for missing persons under conviction. That section has been unable to find any trace of John Ashley or of the six men who rescued him. Four thousand dollars has been offered for information leading to the arrest of either Ashley or the men.”
“Three thousand.”
“The price has been raised.”
“Why are you telling this to me?”
“Because you are the only person who goes in and out of that house—the only observant person, Miss Doubkov! The answers to those questions are in that house. As soon as Mrs. Ashley gets fifty dollars together she will start making payments to those rescuers. She will soon be receiving messages and money from her husband. It is very possible she is receiving them already through some indirect means.”
“Hah! So that is why the police have been opening my letters!”
“Only twice, Miss Doubkov. I didn’t do it; they did it. Remember, I represent a private person. That house is being watched very closely.” He rose and came around the table toward her. He stared into her eyes. “That information is going to come to light, somehow, any day now. Lots of people are going to put in a claim for the money. Why not you? Eh? If you got hold of the principal piece of information, I could arrange that your claim to the money was recognized.”
“And with your low dirty minds you think I would help to send an innocent man to his death?”
“Don’t be a child, Miss Doubkov. There is another governor in office. You don’t suppose a new governor would put his head in that hornet’s nest. Ashley would be pardoned, but he can’t be pardoned until we know the truth. That’s all we’re after—facts.”
“Why are you all so excited about a man you are ready to pardon? Just announce his pardon and he will come back.”
“He might come back, ma’am, but he would never tell us who his rescuers were. I don’t think you realize how many mysterious things lie back of this thing. Who organized that rescue? He didn’t do it from jail, we’re sure of that. Someone was ready to pay those men a lot of money to risk their lives. Who are Ashley’s rich, influential friends? Try to find that out. Who’s behind the boardinghouse? We know to a penny how much money Mrs. Ashley had. We know every stick of furniture that was left in the house. Even if Mrs. Ashley were a very bright woman she couldn’t have got that going alone, and she’s not a bright woman at all. You didn’t lend her money; Dr. Gillies didn’t; Miss Thoms has no money to lend her. We called on their old people: Mr. Ashley’s mother’s dead, but his father’s still alive—runs a small bank in upstate New York. He wouldn’t talk about his son; threw us out of the house. Also, Mrs. Ashley’s parents. There are mysteries here, Miss Doubkov—big mysteries. When they’re cleared up, Mr. Ashley can come back to his family.”
Miss Doubkov walked away from him and lit another cigarette. Mr. Rudge put his business card on the table.
“You write me a letter every month on the last day of the month. Put anything into it that could have the least connection with this matter. And I shall write to you, because information is constantly turning up at our end. What is the son’s address in Chicago? Through what agent is Mrs. Ashley in touch with him? Do you think Mrs. Ashley is getting messages from her husband now?”
“No!”
“You have the opportunity to find out. There is another thing you could do. You call on Mrs. Lansing, don’t you? Your four thousand dollars may be there.”
“What?”
“Has it never occurred to you that Mrs. Lansing may have arranged Ashley’s escape?”
“What is that you say?”
“Mr. Ashley and Mrs. Lansing were—pardon my frankness—lovers.”
“No, they were not.”
“You cannot be sure of that. It is possible that Mrs. Lansing advanced money to start the boardinghouse. All sorts of things are possible.”
Miss Doubkov gave a long low contemptuous laugh. She glanced at her visitor’s card. “Mr. Rudge,” she said, “you know very little about the Ashleys and the Lansings. And you don’t even know what your problem is. You’re barking up the wrong tree. Your business is, first, to find out who killed Breckenridge Lansing.”
“There is no doubt that Ashley killed—”
“Are you a detective?”
“Yes.”
“Then stop talking. Start looking and listening. Are you staying in town a day or two?”
“Well . . . ? I could.”
“You should. Your office made a botch of the trial. Try not to make a botch of your investigation. Learn something about what took place here. Change your clothes. You look like a policeman. Go up the River Road. Pretend to get drunk at some of those places up there like Hattie’s Hitching Post and The Old Brown Jug. Breckenridge Lansing spent two or three nights a week there. He certainly made some enemies. Get to know the men in the mines. Breckenridge Lansing was a pitiful administrator. He certainly made some enemies there. Get to know an old hunter around here named Jemmy. Lansing used to go off on hunting trips with him for a week at a time. Now I’ve earned thirty dollars of your money already. Yes, I will write the letters you want for four months. I am an honest person. If no useful information turns up in that time our agreement is over. You will pay me at the first of the month, not when you receive the letter. You will pay for my first letter now.”
“I’ll put a cheque in the mail this afternoon.”
“No! I don’t want it in writing. You’ll put thirty dollars in my hand.”
Rudge stayed eight days in Coaltown. He visited the linen room four times in order to discuss the Ashley Case with Miss Doubkov. He was learning a good deal about Breckenridge Lansing, although he could not see that it threw much light on the murder. She abounded in further suggestions; she guided his investigations. As for her, she also went promptly to work, but she did not tell Rudge about whatever progress she made. An odd friendship sprang up between them. Soon they were playing cards together in the foul air and bad light of the basement. They won and lost immense fortunes in dried peas collected from the storeroom next door. They told each other the stories of their lives. Finally he confessed that he had been one of the armed guards that accompanied Ashley on the night of the rescue. Hence his dismissal from the police force. He had become a private detective and was engaged by insurance companies, banks, hotels, and jealous husbands. He had become something of an expert on arson and barn burnings. It was enjoyable work. He had been a favorite of Colonel Stotz during several of his terms of office and was now serving him in a private capacity. Colonel Stotz was a very rich man and had dug down into his own pockets to launch a manhunt: Ashley, dead or alive. Miss Doubkov drew from Rudge a detailed account of that famous rescue. Her questions drove him to search his memory for gestures and impressions that had escaped his conscious observation at the time and that he had failed to recall at the official inquiry. His account confirmed her b
elief in the obtuseness of the police. She did not point out to him certain deductions that seemed self-evident.
How stupid men are! Within a week she was convinced that she knew who Ashley’s rescuers were. She had long been fairly certain who Lansing’s murderer was.
The only person aware of these long conversations in the basement was the janitor, Solon O’Hara. Like his cousin Porky O’Hara—third or fourth cousin, cousin many times—Solon belonged to the Church of the Covenant community on Herkomer’s Knob, the religious sect that had found its way from Kentucky into southern Illinois a hundred years ago. They were largely Indian stock though they bore English and Irish family names. It was thought that they engaged in strange religious rites and they were given several derisive names, but they were known to be trustworthy, irreproachable in their habits, and particularly secretive. They were employed all over Coaltown as janitors and caretakers in the Tavern, bank, court, schools, jail, in Memorial Park, the cemetery, and the railroad yards. Except for Porky, none of them worked in stores or held sedentary jobs. Solon knocked at the door of the linen room from time to time, bringing in fresh laundry or replacing the hot irons that Miss Doubkov required when she had finished some work of mending.
Miss Doubkov set about her new task at once. She invited Mrs. Ashley and her two older daughters to “Russian Tea.” Mrs. Ashley was unable to leave her boardinghouse, but the girls accepted the invitation. Lily was seen on the main street for the first time in well over a year. The appearance of a giraffe could not have caused a greater sensation. Miss Doubkov’s attention to everything about her at “The Elms” was redoubled.
Lodgers came and went. Sophia’s savings increased as the larger expenditures necessary to fitting out the house became fewer. Her mother did not ask to see the money or to know its amount. The second winter in the life of the boardinghouse drew near. Lily would be twenty on the New Year’s Day of 1904. She had returned from her dreamy “absence,” but she was not impatient for a more varied life. She seemed to be aware that she would soon have to cope with as much adulation as a young woman could sustain; she could afford to wait. Neither Mrs. Ashley nor Lily nor Sophia found anything to interest them in the procession of guests. Only Constance scanned each face and weighed each disposition. She felt curiosity about all and even affection for some. She was searching for her father. She alone of the Ashleys was demonstrative of affection. Her suffering at his disappearance from the home took the form of astonishment. She was unable to understand why her mother so seldom mentioned him. Throughout her life, even when she had forgotten him in all but the most inward sense, she retained a resentment against her mother for this silence. Mrs. Ashley sat at the head of the table in apparent serenity. She kept the conversation going, contributing the most conventional remarks, to which her beautiful speaking voice lent an air of measured reflection. Dr. Gillies’s eyes often rested with concern on Sophia, his favorite, who would be sixteen next spring. She had lost weight and would be a beauty, too. At intervals they engaged in whispered conversations about her ambition to be a nurse. The thing that worried him about her was that she seemed to be developing in two different directions. There was the practical Sophia, hurrying from store to store on the main street, bargaining, selling ducks, buying her flour, sugar, and cornmeal by the barrel, or, in the house, firmly extracting the money due her from reluctant guests, behaving like a more than usually capable young woman of twenty-five; and there was another Sophia who seemed to have grown younger, who blushed and stammered in any encounter that did not involve her managerial capacity. Her air of happiness had taken on an exalted quality that disturbed him. He feared she was carrying too great a load. On the second Christmas morning of the new era he met her at the door of “The Elms” and placed a package in her hands.
“Merry Christmas, Sophia!”
“Merry Christmas, Dr. Gillies!”
“See if you like that.”
She unwrapped the package, blushing, and read the title of the book, The Life of Florence Nightingale. As he told his wife later, “Her face went to pieces.” She could not speak. She stared at him as though he were a frightening object, murmured a few words, and fled to the kitchen. “She’s starved for something,” he said to himself. “She misses her father and her brother.” There was a lack of affection in the air at “The Elms.” Each of the Ashleys lived apart from the others. “Something’s going to break. Something’s got to give,” he thought.
Mrs. Ashley was never seen outside her house. One night two days after this Christmas of 1903 she stayed up later than usual. The boardinghouse was closed from Christmas Eve to the third of January. There was generally an old lady who was allowed to remain in the house on condition that she went to the Tavern for her dinners and suppers. Porky closed his store and went to live at his grandfather’s home on Herkomer’s Knob. Mrs. Ashley and her daughters took their meals in the kitchen. At this break in the routine they all became aware of an unfathomable fatigue. They slept late and went early to bed. At this break, too, Mrs. Ashley’s hoarseness and insomnia returned. She was filled with longing for her husband and her son, for hope and for change. On this evening, instead of going to bed, she went into the kitchen and baked six of her famous cakes. Mr. Bostwick was always ready to give them a place of honor in his grocery store. At eleven-thirty Lily came down the stairs. She found her mother sitting on a low stool brooding before the empty oven. The cakes stood resplendent on the table.
“Mama, come to bed! Why do you have to cook now? Mama, they’re beautiful, but why are you working tonight?”
“Lily, would you like to go for a walk?”
“Mama! Of course, I would!”
“Put your clothes on and call Constance. Tell her to get dressed.”
“Oh, Mama, what fun!”
All was dark in the town. It was clear and cold. They went to the depot, they passed under the window of the jail, passed the courthouse. They peered through the windows of the post office, trying to see the poster with John Ashley’s photograph on it. They went the length of the main street. They paused before “St. Kitts,” looking long at the house where they had spent so many hours—in candy pulls, games, storytelling, and rifle practice. It would be too much to say that Beata Ashley had felt any affection for Eustacia Lansing; she had never had much to spare. The two women had had little in common—the German and the Creole—but they had got on well together. Neither was a petty woman. But now Beata Ashley was overcome with something near to love for her former friend. If they could only sit beside one another, disdaining that ugly thing that had come between them. Beata Ashley was starved for someone to talk with, to exchange silence with over a woman’s life, over the passing of the years, over the fading of beauty, over the rearing of children, over the presence and absence of husbands, over the coming of old age and death.
“Come, girls.”
They returned home by a side street, passing their church, passing Dr. Gillies’s house. They paused for a moment on the bridge over the Kangaheela River as it flowed with a sound of suppressed laughter under its thin layer of brown ice.
“Oh, Mama,” cried Constance, flinging her arms around her mother as they entered their hall, “let’s do that often.”
It would have been strange if they had happened to meet Eustacia and Félicité Lansing on one of those midnight walks when they, too, stood for a moment gazing at “The Elms,” longing for something they had read about, for something that may not exist—friendship.
Spring is very beautiful in Coaltown. The tulips and hyacinths rise brave, though pockmarked, from the sour ground. The dandelions are briefly yellow and the lilacs promise as best they can. The Kangaheela River shakes off the last pieces of smoked glass along its shores. There is love-making in Memorial Park and, when Memorial Park is full, in the cemetery. As always in spring, there are more accidents in the mines. No satisfactory explanation has been found for this. Mr. Kenny, the carpenter-undertaker, has made those boxes throughout the winter in expect
ation of the spring’s demands. The miners emerging from underground at six are astonished to find that there is still daylight; they take deep breaths and assemble new courage toward feeding and shoeing their families. All those men and women with tuberculosis, up Polktown way, feel better and, with Mrs. Hauserman’s encouragement, pick up heart for their recovery; they resolve to cough less.
So, in its beauty, the spring of 1904 came to Coaltown and with it came Ladislas Malcolm. Few young men applied for admission at “The Elms”; those few were turned away. Neither Lily nor Constance had seen a young man save Porky for almost two years or had been seen by one. Sophia saw young men daily and was accustomed to their jeering smiles and whispered taunts; they were merely “rowdies” and “hoodlums.” Yet the books the girls read were filled with heroes like Lochinvar and Henry the Fifth, or troubling apparitions—burdened with a crushing need of a thoughtful and loving woman—like Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester. The lodgers who came to “The Elms” seemed to them to be “over a hundred years old.”
It happened to be Lily who answered the doorbell.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said Mr. Malcolm, fanning himself with his straw hat. “I hope you can put me up for two nights.”
Blue eyes looked into blue eyes, astonished; they hardened.
“Why, yes. Will you write your name and address in this book? Those are our terms. Your room will be Number Three—upstairs, the second door on the left. The door is open. Supper is at six. We ask the gentlemen who wish to smoke to kindly use the plant room, there, at the end of the sitting room. If you wish for anything, you have only to call us. Our name is Ashley.”
“Thank you, Miss Ashley.”
Mr. Malcolm carried his grip and his samples case to Room Three; then he left the house for an hour. Soon after five o’clock unaccustomed sounds reached the ears of the women working in the kitchen. Someone was playing the piano in the living room, offering a type of music not previously heard there. It was loud; the rhythm was strongly marked and the melody was embellished by arpeggios traversing the entire length of the keyboard. Mrs. Ashley went into the front hall and appraised the newcomer. Her younger daughters followed her.