Escape Artist

I interrupted. “Is that why you told folks about her getting on the train with an older man?”

Kathe wanted to stomp me as if I were a bug. “I thought that’s what she did when they couldn’t find her. She told me her plans, Edna. She told me. She said she’d be leaving with a man who said he’d marry her…”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Jake was perplexed.

“I keep secrets.”

“Did you know about the note to the school-the whole plan?”

She hesitated, but then shook her head. “I knew she had to get away. She was afraid of her uncle. He was getting crazier and crazier. Her brothers. My God, they nailed bars on her window. They locked her in right after school.”

“They knew about the older man?” I asked.

“She’d told them, throwing it in their face, I guess. That was a mistake. You know, her uncle told her he’d kill her if she didn’t obey the family. They’re old country German Catholics, you know, severe as everything, and she was just too fun loving. They were always beating her. Her brothers…You saw the welts and…”

I was curious. “Are you sure you didn’t know about the note she slipped on Miss Hepplewhyte’s desk?”

Kathe purposely ignored me. She probably helped Frana in her scheme and had something to do with the letter.

Kathe faced Jake. “I just thought, you know, she’d run away.”

Jake narrowed his eyes. “You wanted her out of Appleton, Kathe.” Flat out, weary.

Silence. “Well, she wanted to go to New York, Jake. She left you, told you to go away. Here you are, traipsing after her, mooning under her window. How does that make me look? We’re together now. Really. Think about it.” Her tone was more strident, clipped. “Maybe I should tell you goodbye and you’d come crawling around my yard, begging and pleading and bellowing like I don’t know what.” Sharp as glass, that voice of hers. His face flushed, Jake rose, nestled his textbook against his chest and moved away.

“Where are you going?”

“You’re happy she’s dead.”

“Jake…”

“You…you wanted her on that train…away from me.”

“I ain’t to blame. Just because she’s dead.”

“You know, Kathe, I can almost understand your jealousy and all. But not this. You wanted her dead.” Spoken out loud, it became an unwelcome epiphany, hitting home. “Well, she’s not on that train, Kathe. She’s dead. Does that make you happy?” He stormed away.

“Wait,” Kathe cried. “Wait. Come back. I’m sorry, Jake. I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I didn’t plan on it like this. I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

Dubious, troubling lines again. Plan what? What was I missing here?

Jake was gone, hidden by a copse of thick holly bushes.

Kathe, teeth clenched, flew at me. “This is all your fault, Edna. Your fault.”

Chapter Nine

Appleton had one big story: the awful murder of the young German girl Frana Lempke. It was everywhere, friends dropping in at the Ferber household and lingering over coffee and cherry-studded Schaumtorte, neighbors talking over back fences, customers at My Store shaking their heads. My wonderful Houdini interview, for a moment the talk of the town, was immediately eclipsed by the gripping account of Frana’s murder. Even the back-to-Jesus street-corner evangelist Mad Otto the Prophet (his name was Hosea Thigpen but long ago someone called him the odd nickname, and it stuck) talked of nothing else. That morning I spotted him standing in a vacant lot on Washington. By noontime, he’d be on College by the Masonic Hall. Most days, and some evenings, he stood on the corner of Lawrence and Cherry, back by the breweries and the railroad tracks, standing on a cabbage crate and screaming Biblical passages at the workers headed to and from their jobs. “Predestination and damnation,” he boomed…“fire and brimstone…the yawning maw of hell…a young innocent taken at the flood…the Doomsday book…the hand of the devil palpable and gripping…God in his awful wrath…”

People always rushed by him, a little nervous. But I filled my reporter’s pad with descriptions of the crazed man. I once suggested I interview him for the Crescent. Sam had grimaced. “Really now, Miss Ferber. The Crescent a soapbox for a madman?”

On Tuesday morning I fielded calls from out-of-town papers, talking with the Milwaukee Journal, even the Chicago Tribune. I told the same practiced story, rote now, succinct; but the calls kept coming. Sharp-eyed journalists, spotting my name in the telegraphed stories, asked for in-person interviews with me and Esther, but Esther’s father, bothered by the attention, had made it clear his daughter was to be left alone.

Yet once her initial squeamishness passed, Esther was eager to talk to anyone. At one point, late in the morning, she unexpectedly appeared at the Crescent office where she had never visited before. She stood at the bottom of those five cement steps, looking around the room as though she’d discovered some new and even lower rung out of Dante’s inferno. “This is where you work?”

“What did you expect?”

“It’s so small. So cluttered.” She squinted. “So dim.”

Sam Ryan grinned. “My theory is that an unpleasant office makes my reporters want to go outside and get the news.”

His sister Ivy laughed. “Except for the bookkeeper, condemned to darkness visible and infernal chicken wire.”

I was happy with their remarks, taken as they were with Esther. Boon was not there, thank God, and Esther conveniently perched herself on the edge of his desk. Earlier, Boon had left on the 7:52 for Milwaukee, one hundred miles away. Through Caleb Stone he’d learned that the Milwaukee police had detained the three drummers who’d left Appleton the afternoon Frana was murdered. Boon, Sam said, was convinced one of these itinerant gentlemen was the killer. All three were seasoned travelers, men in their forties or fifties, each one unmarried and, at least in one case, notorious for idle flirtations with the harried waitresses at the Sherman House dining room. Matthias Boon was convinced one of the three would confess that afternoon, and he wanted to be there. Sam told me it was a wild goose chase.

“What do you think?” I asked Sam when he finished telling Esther about Boon’s hasty trip to Milwaukee.

Sam’s instincts were solid. A reporter’s heart to the core, though a publisher who couldn’t scribe a decent paragraph himself, Sam sighed. “The murderer is still among us.” A twinkle in his eye. “Matthias Boon has a favorite restaurant in Milwaukee, and perhaps a lady friend.”

I mumbled to the rapt Esther, sitting nearby. “Obviously a woman in need of being institutionalized.”

Byron Beveridge walked in and circled around Esther as if she were Eve in the garden, grinning foolishly and bowing. He mentioned that Caleb Stone and Amos Moss were meeting at the high school at noon to “review” the evidence.

“What evidence?” I sat up.

“Well, now that it’s officially a murder, Stone has to go back to the beginning. This isn’t just a runaway girl now.” He waved a copy of yesterday’s Crescent. “The Post is sending a reporter, I hear.”

“Be there.” Sam gestured to me. “You’re already deep into the story. Maybe you’ll see things others won’t.”

Just before noon, I headed to Ryan High School, trailed by an excited Esther. “Do you think they’ll mind if I tag along?”

“I’m assuming the men would demand your presence.”

Once there I learned Caleb Stone had already interviewed the frightened young students who had classes in