Fallen Women (26 page)

After breakfasting, Beret dressed and announced to the butler that she was going out. He told her the stable boy would drive her, as the lad was filling in until the judge found a replacement for Jonas.

“He lived above the stable, did he? Jonas, I mean,” she asked, an idea forming in the back of her mind. When William replied that the driver’s quarters had indeed been there, Beret told him she would find the stable boy herself. “I should like to see what conveyances my uncle has. Perhaps there is one I can drive myself,” she said, not revealing her real reason for wanting to visit the stable.

“But, madam, I can—”

“No, never mind, William. I’ll see to it. That will be all,” and she went out through the kitchen to the large building behind.

Tom, the stable boy, was dressed in Jonas’s uniform, which was short and too tight. He looked ill at ease but self-important, and he stood and bowed a little when Beret entered the room. Beret judged him to be about fourteen. “You want me to take you someplace, miss?” he asked, standing at attention.

“Why, I’ve never been inside the stable. I thought I’d look around.”

“Look around?”

“Yes. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, miss.”

Beret put her hand on the carriage, then walked slowly to a buggy that she thought she could drive if she had to. She glanced around the cavernous room. On the outside, the structure was a smaller replica of the mansion, made of the same stone and brick, with arched windows. On top was a copper weathervane. In an Eastern city, the copper would have turned a dull green from the moisture in the air, but Colorado was dry, and the copper had only faded to brown.

The stable’s elegance was limited to the exterior, and inside, the room was plain, utilitarian. Beret looked at the staircase that hugged one wall. It was narrow and cramped. “Do you sleep up there?”

“Me and Jonas. That is, Jonas did. His room’s bigger than mine.”

“Did you like Jonas?”

“No reason not to, miss. He taught me how to play cards, and he shared his tips with me when somebody give him one, and he let me drink his whiskey…” Tom’s eyes grew big, and he added, “You won’t tell that, will you, miss? The judge wouldn’t like it, and I never drank except at night when me and Jonas was upstairs.”

“I won’t tell.” She started for the stairs. “I think I’ll look around up there.”

Tom appeared confused. “Upstairs, miss?” He started to protest but must have decided it was not his place to question Beret. So he asked, “You want I should go with you? It’s dark up there.”

“I’ll be fine.” She took a kerosene lantern from the wall and lighted it, then started up the steps. Jonas might have hidden trophies of his murderous rampage in his room.

Tom watched her, and then he grinned, relieved. “Oh, I see, you was working with that copper. Jonas told me about that. He said I should watch out for you and not talk to you.” The boy thought that over. “I guess I should have watched out for Jonas, seeing as how he was a crazy man.” He guffawed, and Beret tried to smile at the sally. “Well, you go on up and see what you can find,” he said. “You call me if you want anything. You just call, ‘Tom,’ and I’ll come.”

The lantern in one hand, her skirts in the other, because the stairs were filthy with straw and dirt and manure, Beret went up the steps and found herself in a hayloft. The haymow door was open, letting in light, but the rooms beyond it were dark, and she was glad she’d brought the lantern. The first room was small with space only for a cot—Tom’s room, she thought. The second was not much bigger, but Beret knew it had been Jonas’s. A cot was along one wall, the blanket on it neatly folded, a pillow bare of a pillowslip beside it. Overalls, a second uniform, and two shirts hung on nails on the wall. Newspapers and odds and ends were lined up on a shelf. The room smelled of horses and unwashed bodies, and Beret wished for a handkerchief to put over her nose.

A potbellied stove, its pipe sticking through the exterior wall, was next to a window. The room was cold, and there was little light, but it was a step up from the tenements Beret had visited in New York, and she knew that Jonas had been lucky to be quartered there. Certainly, it would have been better than the crib he had lived in as a boy as well as the quarters he had shared later on with the other newspaper boys. She was surprised at the tidiness of the room. She would have expected the bedcover to be pushed aside on the cot and the clothing heaped on the floor. There was much she did not understand about Jonas.

Beret set the lantern on the cold stove and looked around the room, considering where to start. She went to the shelf and took down the newspapers, wondering if Jonas could read. But of course, he could have read, at least a little. After all, he had been a newsboy. She unfolded the top paper and discovered a story about the murder of Sadie, the crib girl. Beret had not seen it and took it to the window to read it in the daylight.

Last night, just as the revelry on Holladay Street reached its fever pitch, a frail sister was cut down in the bloom of her youth by a fiendish killer. The police believe the same madman who stabbed Lillie Brown, the soiled dove who was later identified as Lillie Osmundsen, the niece of Denver Judge John Stanton, is responsible for the death of Sadie, a crib girl who worked out of a hovel on upper Holladay.

No one witnessed the foul deed. Police say the body was discovered by a member of the sisterhood this morning.

Sadie was lying on the bed of the dwelling that served as both home and place of business, her clothes torn and bloody from where she had been stabbed over and over. Her hands were clasped together in death in an attitude of prayer, as if in her final moments, the wanton woman was asking a power much greater than any she had ever known for forgiveness for her sinful ways and begging for everlasting life.

Why did reporters write such nonsense? It was self-righteous and degrading to that unfortunate girl. Her death had been foul. Why couldn’t the reporters leave it alone? The man hadn’t seen Sadie’s body, because the corpse had been hauled away by the coroner before any of the newshounds arrived. Had someone told him Sadie had posed in prayer as death came on her, or had he just made that up? Probably the latter. Beret remembered that Sadie’s arms had been crossed over her body, not in prayer but in defense against the blows. Beret glanced at the rest of the article, which was written in the same overblown prose and filled with more errors, then thrust it aside. She could only wonder at the stories that would run about Jonas—perhaps in newspapers that already were being sold by newsboys—scarring her uncle by association. Perhaps she did have a duty to protect his reputation, and her aunt’s, as well.

Beret went through the other copies of the
Rocky Mountain News
. The next one had a front-page story about Lillie’s death. Subsequent editions followed the death, but as the killer was not apprehended, each day’s follow-up was farther back in the paper than the previous one. Beneath the
News
were copies of the
Denver Tribune,
and the
Republican,
all with stories about the murders. Beret thought that Jonas must have saved all the accounts he could find, perhaps reading them late at night by the light of the kerosene lantern, as he sat on his cot reliving his evil deeds. Maybe he had read the newspapers to Tom, hinting that he knew more about the killings than the reporters or the police.

The shelf was high, and Beret could not see what else was kept there. She did not want to search it with her hand for fear of touching a rodent. So she found a box in the hayloft and dragged it into the room, climbing on top of it to peer onto the shelf. That must have been where Jonas kept his treasures—two rocks that Beret thought might be ore samples and a silver penknife. The knife was an odd thing for a carriage driver to own. There was a deck of cards, greasy and dirty, and a tiny metal implement that Beret recognized as a hold-out, a clip used by gamblers to cheat.

The only other thing on the shelf was a cheese box, and Beret took it down and opened it. Inside were a flint arrowhead and a brass button from a military uniform, a cheap pink hair ribbon, a woman’s garter, and a linen handkerchief with an
L
embroidered on it. Beret would compare it with the handkerchiefs Lillie had left behind in the bedroom dresser. There was a penny doll no more than an inch high, without any arms. Beret picked it up and stared at the cheap bisque image, the tiny red mouth. The hair was painted the color of a buttercup, she observed, as she returned the doll to the box.

Lying facedown under Jonas’s treasures was a photograph, torn in half. Beret turned over what had been the bottom part of the picture, which showed the lower half of a woman, her legs in striped stockings. Beret picked up the top half of the photograph with the upper portion of the woman’s body on it. She was dressed in a wrapper that was parted in the front so that it came perilously close to exposing her breasts. The woman leaned forward, her chin on her hand, her head tilted, her mouth in a seductive smile. But the photograph was chilling, because the face had been slashed with a knife and the eyes scratched out. Beret knew prostitutes sold such pictures and thought the woman might be Sadie or Blond Bet, because she had long blond hair. But she did not resemble Sadie, and Mick had said that Blond Bet was a large woman. The prostitute in the photograph was small. As she returned the two halves of the photograph to the box, Beret wondered if the woman might have been Jonas’s mother. There was no inscription, no name on the back.

Setting the box aside, Beret felt along the shelf, but there was nothing else, and she found that disappointing. She had hoped that Jonas would have saved other things. Then it occurred to her that Tom might have gone through Jonas’s possessions, could have taken whatever Jonas had of value or anything he found of prurient interest. Jonas might have kept photographs of other prostitutes, and Tom would have stolen them but left behind the mutilated one. If Jonas had taught Tom to play cards and drink whiskey, wouldn’t he have taught him other things, as well? The idea frightened Beret a little. She didn’t like being alone in the stable with the boy. She would speak with him later, but she would do it outside.

Beret had not found what she was searching for, and looked around the room hoping to discover a hiding place. She took down Jonas’s clothes from the nails and went through them, the pockets, the seams, feeling for anything the boy might have hidden there. Then she opened the blanket and examined the pillow but found nothing. She searched the room, much as she had Sadie’s crib, looking for places where the woodwork had been pried up but nothing looked suspicious. As she walked across the room, she stubbed her toe and looked down. The floorboards gaped, and she got down on her hands and knees to find one that had been pried up. She had almost given up the search when in the corner of the room farthest from the door, she discovered a short piece of flooring that was unattached and lifted it up.

Underneath was a tobacco sack, and Beret took it out, carefully untying the knot in its yellow string. Then she shook the sack, and two earrings fell into her hand. Beret closed her eyes and took a deep breath. There, she thought, the final proof that Jonas had killed Lillie. That would end her doubts. But as she lifted the jewelry, she knew without looking at them that the earbobs were not Lillie’s diamond stars. They were too flimsy. She held them to the light and saw that they were made of cheap metal, fitted with bits of red glass, some of it missing. A strand of coarse blond hair was stuck in a prong holding one of the remaining stones. Sadie had had such hair.

Beret put the earbobs back in the bag and placed it in the cheese box, then searched the hiding place for Lillie’s earrings, but they were not there. Tom might have taken them. Perhaps he had realized that Sadie’s earrings were only junk and left them behind, to be found by the police—or Beret. But he would have taken the diamonds. Even a stable boy would know about diamonds.

Beret returned the box she had stood on to the hayloft, then tiptoed to the steps and listened. Tom was downstairs, talking to one of the horses. She walked noiselessly back to Jonas’s room and gathered the papers and the box and set them on the floor. Then she went into Tom’s room and looked around. The cell appeared to have no hiding places. There were no shelves, only the cot and nails on the walls that held the boy’s clothes. Beret went to the bed and lifted the mattress, uncovering a stack of photographs tied together with a string. She took out the packet, untied it, and found herself staring at more girlie pictures. These were of different prostitutes posed in various stages of undress. One was of a little girl not yet at puberty. Beret knew that children younger than this one supported themselves and often their families with their bodies. What an evil place the world could be. Beret was suddenly chilled by the cold room and wanted to get out of there.

“What you doing, miss?”

Beret had not heard Tom approach, and she was startled. She looked at the boy a moment, and then she spread the photographs on the cot. She was about to ask Tom where he had gotten such images, but she knew the answer, and instead she asked, “What else did you steal from Jonas?”

“He’s dead. He don’t care if I have his things. They ain’t doing him no good.” He reached out a dirty hand, his eyes gleaming as he stared not at Beret but at the images. “Gimme.”

“You had no right to them. The police will want them. What else have you taken from Jonas’s room?”

“Nothing. I don’t steal.” He glared at her in such a way that Beret felt uneasy. After all, Tom had been close to Jonas. Jonas might have bragged of the killings, bragged in such a way that Tom was jealous, had made Tom himself consider what it would be like to kill a woman.

It was the second time Beret had been standing in a strange room, frightened, wishing she had waited for Detective McCauley. She raised her chin, hoping Tom would not see that she was uncomfortable. “I would say you stole these. Shall I ask the police to search your room for contraband, or will you tell me where you’ve hidden it?” She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.