Escape Artist

parents waiting downstairs. She opened the door to Frana’s bedroom at the back of the house, and in the first flush of gaslight I saw one small window crisscrossed with bars, with nailed wooden panels. Shivering, I felt we were violating the dead girl’s bedroom; but I was surprised by the small space, a crawlspace, really, with sloping ceiling just under the roof, a space that was probably a closet converted into a bedroom. A small wrought-iron bed was covered with an old, faded down-feather quilt embroidered with folk patterns, ripples and cascades of red and green floral patterns. It was torn at the edges, with bursting fabric at the center. A simple homemade bureau with a missing drawer was painted a dull green, a stolid paint intended for a floor; and the wide-planked flooring was covered with an oval rag-weave rug, the threads loose. A shadowy mirror in a dull brown frame was nailed by the back window, most likely to catch the sunlight in the morning. On the dresser stood a water pitcher, some brushes, pins, and inside an unclosed wardrobe, I spotted Frana’s dresses, her bonnets, her finery.

A Wisconsin nun’s cell, cloistered and forgotten among the leftovers of a family. But on the wall just inside the door Frana had pinned pages torn from magazines and newspapers, stories of New York and Broadway and theater, of well-known actresses. A grainy print from a magazine like the Century or Scribner’s-with a black-and-white likeness of Lillian Russell. There were also some glossy chromolithographs from magazines like Demorest’s, with bright, blotchy colors, actresses like Mary Allibone in her celebrated role as Juliet, the wide-eyed, winsome tragedienne staring into space, hands extended, hair askew. It was a popular print, the one used on the poster when Allibone performed at the Lyceum. Unframed, ripped, tacked on, the print stared back at me, haunting; a talisman of color in an otherwise drab lifeless room. It blazed like a noontime sun in its shadows. I could scarcely turn away from it. It was compelling… awful.

Suddenly I felt faint and wobbled. I’d disliked the vain and fickle Frana with her ribbons and her lace and her fluttery coy manners, her cheap flirtations, her prettiness. We talked now and then, we socialized, we moved in similar circles of young people. In this monastic chamber, illuminated by that midnight sun of an actress in her glossy colors, I saw Frana as a lonely, desperate girl, a lost child in the home of pain, overwhelmed by a new world. I wished, all of a sudden, that I’d paid attention to her. There were things we could have told each other. Maybe.

But maybe not.

Chapter Fourteen

Caleb Stone stopped to say hello as I walked up College Avenue, heading to My Store, and he was uncharacteristically eager to gossip. I was hoping his organ-grinder monkey Amos Moss was elsewhere, but Caleb I liked. I didn’t think him too bright, yet I considered him honorable and fair. We chatted about some ruckus he’d broken up at a beer hall, and he joked, “Not really headline news, I’m afraid, Miss Ferber.” Then the usually laconic chief told me that Jake Smuddie was no longer attending classes at Lawrence University, which surprised me.

“You probably know that he sits in that gazebo in City Park.” He leaned into me. “I sat with him. He was a little testy with me. Seems to think his father sent me over to bring him back to the college.”

“And had you spoken to his father?” A little testy myself.

Caleb Stone nodded. “The father-Herr Professor-did speak to me. He’s worried about his lad, of course, but I said that the boy ain’t doing anything illegal, so far’s I can tell. Not going to your classes at the university ain’t a crime, though it’s a questionable choice of behavior for someone whose father is a high muck-a-muck on the faculty there.”

“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