Escape Artist

detectives in Sherlock Holmes or Anna Katherine Green mysteries acted. I’d just finished reading The Filigree Ball, though I disliked mystery romances. All that bother about nothing. Folderol. This murder was the province of those men, with Chief Caleb Stone, the best of the sorry lot, obviously thrown off by the severity of the crime.

Murder had its own rules…or the breaking of rules. I understood that, but I also sensed, emphatically, that this assembly of Appleton gentlemen was delirious with confusion, from the good sheriff himself to Johnny Mason, the local town drunk and all-around handyman, who was positioned over the body.

Dr. Belford mumbled to Caleb Stone as the body was hoisted into the dark mortuary wagon. “Some fool strangled the poor girl.” Said simply, an awful declarative line. Caleb Stone winced.

Head spinning, I stood and walked toward the men. At that moment I heard labored breathing and turned to see Matthias Boon, late on the scene, pipe in his mouth, reporter’s pad in his hand. He stopped short and nearly barreled into me. “Miss Ferber, what are you doing here?”

“I found the body.” I pointed to the disappearing wagon.

Boon rocked on his heels, ended up on tiptoe, hoping to become as tall as I, but he pivoted and teetered, much like a wind-up children’s toy my mother sold in My Store at Christmas.

He sneered through his teeth. “Were you looking for it?”

I frowned and lied. “Frana was a friend of mine, Mr. Boon. My friend Esther is her close friend, too.” Boon stopped looking at me, staring instead at Caleb Stone and Amos Moss, their heads huddled close together, looking like confused referees debating a call at a Lawrence University football game. He headed toward them, pompous as a rooster at daybreak, when I said to his back, “I’ll write up the murder for the Crescent.”

Boon faced me, his face purple with rage. “What did you say?”

“I’m a witness.”

He stepped up to me, narrowing his eyes. “Look, Miss Ferber, this is news.”

“Precisely. I’m a reporter.”

“I’m a reporter,” he mimicked.

“I know the story from the high school through her disappearance, and I’ll put together a piece…”

He interrupted, venomous. “You’ll do nothing of the kind, Miss Ferber. You forget that I’m city editor, and murder is my story.”

“It’s my story. I’m part of it.”

He slid his tongue into the corner of his mouth, making his moustache shift like a caterpillar realigning itself on a tree branch. “All the more reason for me to handle it. Reporters are dispassionate, objective, they…”

“I can tell the facts…”

“Like your Houdini piece, I’m afraid. You do love the flight of fancy, the…”

“The fact of murder, sir, calls for a bitter realism.”

“You’re not Theodore Dreiser, Miss Ferber.”

“And you’re hardly Joseph Pulitzer.”

“No matter. This is a man’s province. Consider yourself one more person to be interviewed for the story. By me. You will not have a byline here.” He turned away to see the mortuary wagon creeping its lugubrious way out of Lovers Lane, and Caleb Stone and Amos Moss and the other officious men already leaving the park. Boon cursed loudly. I’d heard Sam Ryan use every profane word in some sinister devil’s dictionary. Nothing surprised me anymore. Now and then Mac exploded in a volley of scatological fury from the pressroom. After a year on the Crescent, I’d considered using some of the vocabulary myself. So Boon’s blustery “Shit!” simply made me laugh. He went charging after Caleb Stone who tried to avoid him.

That evening’s meal, supervised by Fannie, was roast beef, browned and crusted at the edges, pink in the center, juicy and rich; cloud-light mashed potatoes, a well of hot butter pooled in the center of each heap, with thick, steamy gravy; and winter squash blended with a dash of ground pepper and maple syrup. On the counter was Fannie’s creation: the three-layer chocolate fudge cake, the one the family deemed Alpine Mountain, towering, with peaks of chocolate and vanilla icing.

Ordinarily I would have ravaged such a meal, famished, but tonight, dispirited, I had no appetite for food or conversation. The Ferbers were a chatty family. Not my father, to be sure, who’d retreated into monosyllables, but the three fiercely strong women shared vignettes of shopping, passersby, public figures, politics, sewing, chicanery, life’s obstacles: all of it, none of it. Tonight the family scarcely spoke. Fannie pouted. My terse and shaky summary of the horrendous day had silenced them all. Sitting there with mounds of food on the ample table, with that delectable cake beckoning, we lapsed into mournful silence.

The evening ended when my father spoke for the first time. “She was so young.” A pause. “At least she’s spared the agony of life to come.”

The sentence hung in the air, so wrong. Too bitter, too laced with melancholia. This wasn’t my father who lacked my mother’s dark European weltschmerz, the ominous cloud that hung over all our horizons. I’d never heard my father say anything so cynical, so stark, so plaintive. Or so filled with doom.

Suddenly, helplessly, I started to sob. My mother rose and wrapped her arms around me, soothing, touching. My family thought I was crying for the late Frana Lempke. But I wasn’t. I wept for the death of something beautiful in my father.

The next morning the Crescent office hummed. Boon had already written the front-page account, garnered piecemeal from Caleb Stone and Amos Moss, from the other men at the Lovers Lane death scene, even from hasty interviews with Principal Hippolyte Jones and Vice-Principal Homer Timm. I sat at my desk.

“What do you think?” Sam Ryan passed me the typed sheets.

I was mentioned in the article, though gratuitously. “The body was discovered in Lovers Lane by Linus Travers, signaled by his faithful dog Wilhelm, and then assisted by Crescent reporter Edna Ferber and Esther Leitner, daughter of Rabbi Mendel Leitner of Zion Congregation.”

That was it: no more. But Sam Ryan rustled the returned sheets, poring over Boon’s typescript, doodling with a pencil, fiddling with it. Surprisingly, he asked me to share my own observation. I refocused the story that Boon had covered, starting with the mystery of Frana’s leaving the high school, unnoticed. I rambled on and on, never glancing at Boon who sat there, pipe dangling from his mouth, puffing away, while I told Sam Ryan about the mythic chubby drummer secreting the girl away, taking her to New York. I mentioned Frana’s juvenile obsession with becoming an actress. Sam listened, rapt, as did Miss Ivy. Sam scribbled on another piece of paper, rewriting lines here and there, a paragraph. He quoted a line from me, asked me to repeat it, jotted it down. Finally, he handed the sheets back to Boon, wordless. Boon, his lips drawn into a tight, unforgiving line, contemplated the additions to his piece, unhappy, and simply nodded.

“We need a good headline.” Sam was looking at me.

Boon slurred his words. “Girl Reporter Edna Ferber Discovers Body in Lovers Lane. And underneath that: Girl Reporter Frequent Habitue of Lovers Lane.”

Sam reddened, “That’s not very funny, Matt.”

Miss Ivy tsked tsked.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” Boon smirked.

I raised my voice. “You’re not trying to be a gentleman either.”

Sam walked away, baffled, disappearing into the pressroom. When he returned, he stood there in the doorway, staring from me to Boon.

“Miss Ferber, I’m trying to protect your virtue.” Boon’s voice was cloying, sweet. “Why do you want to be the subject of gossip in town?”

I fired back. “Let me worry about my own name.”

Tension in the city room: voices raised, curt responses, silence heavy and arctic. Should I speak again, I would be shouting. Time stopped around us. Abrupt movement from the back room broke our suspense. I jumped. Mac stood there, a smear of black ink on his cheek, a sheaf of copy in his gigantic hands hanging down to the floor like spilled leaves. He was focused on me, which rattled me. I couldn’t make out the impassive expression. Slowly, he turned his head toward Boon, who hadn’t noticed, intent as he was on smiling stupidly at me. The corners of