The girl in the plaid jacket shot her friend an angry glare, but she turned to Sarah and said, “Excuse me for asking, miss, but do you know… I mean…” She hesitated, glancing at her friend for help, but none was forthcoming. The two stared at each other for along moment, silently communicating things at which Sarah could only guess.
“She wants to know did they bury her in the shoes,” the third girl finally said. She was small and fragile looking, her golden hair glittering in the sunlight beneath the frothy confection of a hat she was wearing. Her lips were very red, and the blush on her cheeks was unevenly applied, larger on one side than the other, making her look like a child who had gotten into her mother’s things. But then Sarah looked into her eyes, and there she saw a steely determination quite at odds with her apparent fragility.
“The shoes?” Sarah echoed stupidly.
“The red shoes,” the plump girl clarified. “They was brand-new. Seems a shame to put them in the ground with her, don’t it? Bertha here was wondering-”
“I was only agreeing with you!” the plump girl insisted.
“Bertha and Hetty both want the shoes,” the blond girl explained patiently, her disapproval obvious.
“To remember her by,” Hetty added hastily, lest Sarah think them ghouls.
Which of course she did, although she decided not to betray her true sentiments. “I can understand that. You were good friends, then?” she guessed.
“We all were,” Hetty said, determined to make Sarah believe her. “Since the day she come to work at Faircloths.”
“She couldn’t hardly talk a word of English,” Bertha added, “but we didn’t care about that. She learned quick, she did. Wanted to be an American, like us. That’s what she always said.”
“You were very kind to befriend her,” Sarah said, and allowed the girls a moment to absorb the compliment before adding, “Since there isn’t going to be a wake, perhaps you’d allow me to buy you ladies a cup of coffee. There’s a shop just around the corner.”
“It’s a little warm for coffee,” Hetty said. “How about some lemonade?”
Sarah was more than happy to supply them with champagne if it meant she’d be able to learn more about the dead girl, so she readily greed. By the time they found the shop, Sarah had learned that the girls were named Hetty Hall, Bertha Hoffman, and the blond girl was Lisle Lasher. They were fascinated to learn Sarah was a midwife, although they couldn’t understand why she’d taken up a trade instead of remarrying. Plainly, they believed-as did most of the population-that a woman needed a man to look after her.
Sarah treated them to cake as well as lemonade, knowing full well their meager salaries would hardly stretch to such an extravagance and figuring they’d be more talkative if they were fed. They sat in the cafe, glad to be out of the sun, and Sarah tried to imagine what questions Malloy would ask these girls if he were here.
“Does anyone have any idea who might have killed Gerda?” she tried, starting with the most important matters.
“I think it was a robbery,” Hetty said between mouthfuls of cake.
“Are you crazy?” Bertha demanded. “What would a robber want with Gerda? She didn’t have anything worth stealing except them shoes, and they was left right on her feet!”
“Which is why he killed her,” Hetty reasoned. “He got mad when she didn’t have any money, and he killed her.”
Sarah glanced at Lisle while Bertha and Hetty continued to bicker over the theory of the robber. She sipped her lemonade delicately, listening but unmoved by their arguments. She was remarkably self-possessed for a girl of her class, her intelligence obvious. Dressed properly, she would have looked at home in Mrs. Astor’s parlor. When she met Sarah’s gaze, she smiled slightly, as if to acknowledge Sarah’s good opinion of her.
“And what do you think, Lisle?” Sarah asked, interrupting Bertha and Hetty’s squabbling.
Both of the other girls fell silent, waiting for Lisle’s opinion. She was the leader of the group, her delicate appearance notwithstanding.
“I don’t think it was no robber,” she said. “A robber wouldn’t of bothered with Gerda, and if he did, he’d never take the time to beat her up. He might smack her a bit, but they said she was beat to death. That takes time, and a robber wouldn’t take the chance of getting caught.”
Sarah hadn’t been mistaken about her intelligence. “I was thinking that it must have been someone who knew her. Someone who was very angry with her, so angry he didn’t even think about getting caught.”
But Lisle didn’t agree. Her red lips turned downward in a frown. “You might think that except…” She glanced at the other girls who shifted uneasily.
“What is it?” Sarah asked. “Do you know something I don’t?”
The girls exchanged wary glances, silently debating whether to share their knowledge with her. Finally, Lisle said, “Gerda ain’t the first girl ended up that way.”
Of course not. Women were beaten to death every day in the city, usually by their husbands or lovers or fathers. Men who took out their frustrations with life by beating those closest to them, those weaker and defenseless. Women who would conceal this violence by telling stories about walking into a door or falling down stairs to explain the bruises. Women so afraid of not being able to support themselves without a man that they would tolerate any abuse in exchange for a roof over their heads.
“I know,” Sarah agreed. “Lots of women end up like Gerda did. That’s why you should be careful about the men you become involved with-”
“No, you don’t understand,” Lisle explained, her voice patient and confident with her certainty. “Gerda ain’t the first girl to get murdered just that way.”
“The same way exactly,” Bertha added, her brown eyes wide with fright.
“They go out to a dance and never come home,” Hetty added, her full lips quivering a bit.
“Somebody beats them and leaves them in an alley, just like a dead cat,” Lisle said bitterly.
“You mean… other girls have died the same way?” Sarah asked, unable to grasp this completely.
“That’s what we just said,” Hetty pointed out, a little insulted. “Somebody’s looking for girls to kill. At least that’s what everybody at Faircloths is saying. The other girls, they was at dances, too, and they leaves their friends to walk home, but they never got there.”
“How many other girls?” Sarah asked, a strange sense of foreboding quivering inside of her.
“Three others,” Lisle said.
“That we know about,” Hetty added.
“Might be more, not from the neighborhood, that we didn’t hear about,” Bertha said.
Their fear was a palpable thing, and Sarah could feel a shiver of it herself. Was it possible that one man was responsible for all these deaths? Sarah understood crimes of passion, where the killer knew his victim and murdered for one of the usual reasons-jealousy, hatred, lust, or greed. But if someone was selecting victims at random and killing them for no apparent reason, then how would anyone ever catch him? She recalled a similar set of murders in London a decade ago and the difficulties the police had encountered in trying to solve them.
Solving a crime when the circle of suspects was small and the motives were discernible was difficult enough, as Sarah knew from her experience last spring, helping Malloy discover the killer of another young woman. Finding a killer whose only connection with the victims was meeting them at a dance seemed impossible! They’d certainly never found Jack the Ripper.
But maybe it wouldn’t be as difficult as she thought. If the connection was the dances, perhaps someone with a trained eye could spot the killer. Sarah’s eye wasn’t exactly trained, but she did have some experience identifying a killer. “Where did Gerda go dancing the night she died?”
The girls looked at each other, as if they were trying to remember. Surely, that shouldn’t be so difficult. Sarah could remember everyplace she’d ever gone dancing in her life.
“Was that the night we was at New Irving Hall?” Hetty asked the others.
Bertha shook her head. “No, it wasn’t that big. Someplace small, I think. I remember we was thinking there wasn’t enough room to dance there.”
“It was Harmony Hall,” Lisle said. “Gerda said she wasn’t having any fun, but she’d met a swell who was going to blow a lot of money on her, so she left with him.”
“Did any of you see who he was?”
