“What’s the matter, Danny? Don’t you recognize your friend?” Frank asked, shoving Danny until the two were face to face.
He watched Danny’s eyes widen in recognition. Billy seemed incapable of a change of expression.
“What’re you doing here?” Danny demanded of his friend. “What happened to you?”
Billy just stared, as if he didn’t even comprehend the question.
“You’ll have to excuse Billy,” Frank said. “He’s been here for a while, and he’s not feeling too good right now.”
“Billy, say something!” Danny begged, his voice high with fear.
Frank figured the two had been through a lot together, but Danny had never seen his friend like this. It was an ugly thing to witness.
Billy’s mouth was moving, but it took him a minute to find his voice. “Danny?” he croaked.
“Billy! What happened to you? What’re you doing here?”
Billy couldn’t answer, and Frank decided Danny had seen enough. “Put him in the cell,” he told the guard.
Danny put up a fight this time, but he stood no chance against the burly guards. When the cell door slammed shut, Frank looked at Billy, who didn’t seem to comprehend what was happening.
“You can’t leave me here!” Danny was yelling. “I’ll tell you what you want to know! I’ll tell you everything!”
Frank ignored him. He knew better than to believe promises made in panic. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Danny,” he said. “We’ll have a long talk then.”
He took Billy’s arm. “Come on, b’hoyo.”
Billy went meekly, eyes lowered, steps shuffling. He stumbled on the stairs, and Frank had to hold his arm to keep him from falling.
If Frank had wanted revenge for being attacked by this boy, he would be savoring this moment. Instead he felt disgusted.
He took the boy upstairs to the lobby and out the front door. “You can go now,” Frank told him.
Billy’s blank gaze rose to him, not comprehending. “Go?”
“Yeah, go home, or wherever it is you go.”
“I thought…”
“You thought I’d send you to The Tombs,” Frank supplied. “You’re not worth the trouble. Get out of here, and if I ever arrest you again, you’ll wish I’d killed you tonight.”
For a second, the boy didn’t move. Maybe he thought it was a trick, that Frank would knock him down if he moved. So Frank stepped back and waited, slipping his fingers into his vest pockets.
Billy’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and Frank could see him gathering himself.
Before he could blink, the boy was gone, running as if for his life and disappearing into the darkness.
Frank rubbed his arm, which still itched, and walked off in the other direction.
Sarah’s mother introduced Richard Dennis who told briefly about his wife’s devotion to the mission and the work they did. Obviously ill at ease, he still made a moving speech, then introduced Mrs. Wells, who began to speak with a poise that must have impressed even the Deckers.
Sarah found herself mesmerized by Mrs. Wells’s presentation, even though she thought she’d already been thoroughly impressed by the work they were doing at the mission. She’d meant to watch the reactions of the other guests, but she forgot, caught up in the images Mrs. Wells painted of the lost children of the tenements.
Maeve and Gina stood beside her looking young and vulnerable, like the sacrificial virgins Sarah had imagined them to be earlier in the evening. They listened with rapt attention, their young faces fairly glowing with their devotion to the woman who had saved them.
Mrs. Wells told stories of some of the girls she had known. She gave no names, so Sarah could only guess which story was whose. But she had no trouble at all identifying the subject of her final story.
“I wish I could tell you we succeed with all of our girls. The truth is that some of them yield to temptation again when they leave us. One young woman came to us to escape a life of shame and degradation. She was ill and desperate, and we believed she had found a home with us and hope for the future.
“We were wrong, however. She stayed only until her health returned. When she was strong again, she left us, turning her back on God’s love and ours. We continued to pray for her. We pray for every girl who comes through our doors, in the hope that God will protect her and perhaps even bring her back before she is totally lost.
“The girl of whom I speak returned to the man who had first ruined her, believing his lies and trusting one who was unworthy of that trust. The next time we saw her, she was bruised and broken, beaten nearly to death for the sin of loving an evil man.” Several women in the crowd murmured in sympathy.
“We could have turned her away,” Mrs. Wells continued. “We could have reminded her that she had betrayed our faith in her. But we followed Christ’s admonition to forgive seventy times seven times, and we once more offered her a haven. And once again she grew strong. We prayed for her, and she began to change. We saw her accept God’s love. We saw her reject the temptations of this world. She worked hard and learned skills that would help her earn her living honestly. One morning, she set out to start her new life, full of hope and promise. It was a promise she would not live to keep. She was only sixteen when she died.” Some of the guests gasped.
“Most of us would consider her sudden death a tragedy,” Mrs. Wells went on. “Had she never come to the mission, had she died without knowing God’s love, her death
Several women dabbed at their eyes with lace handkerchiefs, and Sarah felt the sting of tears herself.
“The tenements hold hundreds of girls like this. We’d like to reach every one of them, but we can’t do that without your support.” Mrs. Wells continued with a moving appeal, and then she closed, offering to speak to people individually if they had questions about the mission.
A crowd quickly formed around her. Most of them were female and deeply concerned about the plight of young women in the city. Sarah stood back and watched Mrs. Wells answer their questions for a moment, until she noticed Gina and Maeve had been edged out and were standing alone. Sarah decided to rescue them again.
This time even Maeve looked glad to see her. Sarah ushered them away and got them a plate of sweets to nibble while they waited for Mrs. Wells to finish her business.
“I didn’t know she was gonna talk about Emilia,” Gina said to Maeve after she’d sampled a few of the different cakes. “She never did before.”
“Emilia wasn’t dead before,” Maeve reminded her impatiently. “She wasn’t nothing to talk about until she was dead.”
“Mrs. Wells probably thinks her story will touch people’s hearts,” Sarah said.
“You mean make them sad?” Gina asked with a frown.
“That’s right,” Sarah said.
Gina still didn’t understand. “Why would they care? They didn’t even know her.”
“And the ones who did know her are
“I’m not glad,” Gina protested.
“You said you was,” Maeve reminded her. “Everybody was.”
“Just like they’ll all be glad when you’re dead,” Gina taunted.
Sarah tried not to let them see how they’d shocked her. But, she reminded herself, the young didn’t really comprehend death, not the way older people did. They saw it only as a solution to a problem. If they hadn’t liked Emilia because she bossed them around and was Mrs. Wells’s favorite, they’d simply be glad she was gone.
Or maybe one of them had decided to solve the problem herself.
Sarah recalled what she had been discussing with the girls earlier, about Emilia going out to show someone her dress. Perhaps someone had invented that story, someone who wanted to cast suspicion on another. “Girls, would you do me a favor?”
They both looked up. Gina was curious and Maeve, suspicious.
“Mrs. Wells said one of the girls heard Emilia say she wanted Ugo to see her in her new dress. Ugo was her former lover.”
“The one who beat her up, we know,” Maeve said in disgust.
