“And what was Jake’s attitude when you spoke to him?”
“Angry.” He reflected a bit. “But more, I think, bewildered. Hurt. This whole thing with Frana Lempke-the way she died-seems to have snapped something in him. That’s all he would talk about.”
“Just what did he say?”
“No confession of spontaneous murder from him, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I don’t believe that he would kill anyone…”
He scratched his chin absentmindedly. “That’s where you and I differ, Miss Ferber. I believe everyone could kill someone. It’s just the circumstances that trigger a episode.”
”I would never…”
“Of course, you would.” He had a deep rumbling laugh. “I’ve walked by North and Morrison on more than one occasion and heard you and Fannie whooping it up like deranged warriors. One of these days I fully expect to lead one or the other of you off in leg irons.”
I waved him off with a grin. “It’ll be me doing the killing, frankly. If ever there was a girl born to be strangled, it’s my sister Fannie…” But I stopped, realized the gravity of my words. Strangle her? Images of Frana Lempke swept over me. “I’m sorry.”
This time Caleb Stone waved his hand in the air. “We’re just talking, the two of us.” He started to walk away. “If you hear anything about young Smuddie, you let me know.”
“Like what?”
“I get the feeling he knows something he hasn’t told us. Something his father senses as well. Maybe I’m wrong. Hard to say.”
“I’ll talk to him.” The chief expected that to happen; I suspected he’d orchestrated our little talk…
“But don’t let me read about it in the Crescent first. Come see me.”
“I’m a law-abiding young woman.”
He tipped his hat and walked away.
By afternoon in the city room I got increasingly angry, feeling that everyone was in league against me. Miss Ivy was out with a spring cold, so it was a male enclave of pipe- and cigar-smoke, belching, and ribaldry, coupled with the excessive use of bodily functions as metaphor for most of what they talked about. I scooted in and out of the office, interviewing a Ladies Auxiliary woman about a spring flower show. Then I interviewed a local milliner and haberdasher about summer fashions-my notes were filled with cotton cheriot, peau de soie, Bishop’s sleeves, Valenciennes lace, and gros de Londres-all of which made little sense to me though I dutifully jotted everything down. Fannie, I knew, would relish such European vocabulary for the fabric that she cut, basted, sewed, and ultimately wore.
But something was not being told to me, a story that the men knew I’d want to know. It had to do with Frana, though it would be indecorous to ask the male club what with its privacies and strict definitions of what could and could not be told to any woman. Lord, if these men could read my random jottings in my reporter’s pad-the suspect behavior I observed around Appleton.
Men shouldn’t have a monopoly on discussing base or foul human behavior, even though they were responsible for so much of it.
I pricked up my ears, busied myself at my typewriter, silently moved alongside them, left the building and yet lingered in the stairwell, eavesdropped. It wasn’t hard to do once I put my mind to it. These men were frantic gossipers who couldn’t wait to blather their news to one another, Matthias Boon sputtering, Sam Ryan lamenting, Byron Beveridge becoming salacious in his comedy. I even spotted Mac standing in the doorway, nodding at Sam, when I returned from walking my father at mid-afternoon. So he was part of the mystery. Noisy, chattering men; boys with their marbles.
What I learned, though, stunned me-I pieced it together, fragment by fragment, a scrap of anecdote, a throwaway line, even a licentious or downright lewd remark. Frana was no longer a virgin-or at least that was the scuttlebutt hinted at by the attending physician who served as medical examiner-word of mouth that seeped through the male world, like sewage into already murky waters. Hardly shocking, though such things were rarely discussed, certainly not among the young folks of Ryan High School. Occasionally, a wayward girl or boy was subjected to public censure and quick removal to a distant relative’s home in Tacoma, Washington, or Ecorse, Michigan. Or to a Home for Unwed Mothers on the East Coast, where such homes, I gathered, were commonly needed, and thus plentiful. No, the revelation about Frana stunned but didn’t surprise. As the day went on, the overheard comments were even more alarming, for the indiscreet doctor-Horace Belford, notorious, I knew, for examining you with half-closed eyes and beer-nasty breath-had also suggested that the misguided girl was carrying a bastard child in that young body.
That news would never appear in any daily paper.
Chief of Police Stone, according to Sam Ryan who mentioned it to Matthias Boon, had told Herr Professor Smuddie about the-in Sam’s word-“problem.”
It added a new and fascinating wrinkle to the mystery of her death, and I thought of Jake Smuddie, dazed and disoriented these days, a wanderer in the small city.
Poor Frana, scared, running, desperate to leave Appleton, still clinging to her dream of Broadway though she carried a child in her body. Who could she turn to for solace? Kathe? Hardly. The lover who betrayed her, touched her…The jilted Jake? Somebody else? Worse, her hideous brothers slouching around that decrepit farmhouse? Little Frana, beautiful and…running scared. My heart ached for her. She didn’t know how to get away.
By the end of the day the story had more spice. Byron Beveridge, lolling at his desk with his feet up, said in his drawling, Southern sleepy voice to Matthias Boon-just as I was walking back into the room-something salacious about Jake Smuddie and Lovers Lane.
“So what’s new with the Frana investigation?” I asked the men.
Silence.
“I gather…”
Matthias Boon interrupted me. “Miss Ferber, isn’t your workday over?”
For a second anger rose in me, the taste of ashes in my mouth. But then a curious thing happened. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter anymore. None of this. Ever since Boon began his campaign against me, I’d bristled and fumed, ready to do battle. Now, sensing another mean-spirited confrontation, I knew to my marrow that the landscape had shifted. Perhaps Frana’s murder had something to do with it. Perhaps Houdini’s rousing praise was part of it. This city room was too small to contain me now. Yes, there was no escaping the resentment I felt at my unfair treatment at the Crescent, but to battle with a pipsqueak like Matthias Boon was a waste of time. I felt calm.
I made a dismissive sound, which bothered the men not at all, gathered my belongings, glanced around at one more pitiful rung of hell…one of the unimportant ones.
That evening, skipping supper and dressed in my take-me-very-seriously outfit of brown chiffon taffeta shirtwaist with a tan linen flounce skirt, I walked to the Lawrence University campus. To gather my resolve, I first strolled among the tree-shrouded buildings of the Methodist university, a place I’d always liked because of its somber appearance and its earnest students. I headed to Eldorado Street, an expanse of elegant white-fenced professorial homes with electric lights and vanilla-soda lives. There stood the imposing home of Herr Professor Solomon Smuddie, his wife Odette, and son Jacob, called Jake, erstwhile Ryan High football hero, now disaffected Lawrence University freshman.
A housemaid dressed in gingham and a French Chantilly cap answered the door and said in German, “Folgen Sie mir, bitte.” She had me wait in an anteroom on a plush burgundy side chair that matched the fabric of the draperies and the window-box seats. An oil painting of a European gentleman hung on the wall, framed in an oversized dark-stained black-walnut frame. The shellacked Kaiser Wilhelm moustache made me nervous.