Mary Grace flashed her a look. Her eyes were still shadowed. “I thought if I told the policeman… You won’t tell my Mama, will you?”
“Why not?”
“Because I was supposed to be asleep. I like to sit up late, when everybody’s asleep and everything’s real quiet, but Mama yells at me. She says I need my rest. I think she just gets mad because I don’t wake up when she calls me in the morning.”
Sarah could believe this. She could also imagine how a girl like Mary Grace might treasure a few minutes of solitude in a house so full of people. But she couldn’t spend too much time worrying about Mary Grace’s sleeping habits. She had a job to do, one Malloy would probably do much better since he was trained to do it. But Malloy wasn’t here, and Sarah would have to manage somehow on her own. What would Malloy ask if he were here? What else would be important to know?
“Did you… did you hear anything that night? Any noise from Alice’s room or people talking in there?”
“Her room’s too far away, and I fell asleep. For a while, anyways.”
“What woke you up?”
“I guess it was the back door opening. My bed’s right by the window. I saw the man leaving.”
“The man and woman, you mean.”
“No, just the man. And he was hurrying, like something was chasing him, only nothing was.”
“But you didn’t see the woman?”
“No, she never come out, not that I saw. You won’t tell my Mama, will you?” she asked anxiously.
“No, I won’t tell her a thing. But I’m glad you told me. This might help the police catch whoever hurt Alice.”
“I want you to catch him,” Mary Grace said earnestly. “I dream he’s coming back for me. I dream he’s coming right through the window to get me, and when I wake up, I’m shaking.”
“Oh, dear,” Sarah exclaimed, sliding her free arm around the girl’s slender body and pulling her close. “You don’t have to be afraid. He doesn’t know you saw him, so he wouldn’t have any reason to come back for you, and besides, he’s going to stay as far away from this house as he can.”
“Do you think so?” she asked doubtfully.
“I
EVEN THOUGH SARAH had wanted to go see Malloy at once, she headed home instead. After all, she couldn’t go to him with every single clue. The people at Headquarters would get suspicious, and if they figured out that Malloy had put her on the case, he might be in terrible trouble. Besides, he’d said he’d check in with her every few days to see if she’d learned anything, so she would just have to wait until he showed up at her office again. It wasn’t as if she’d discovered the killer’s name or anything. She just knew that a man and a woman had gone into Alicia’s room that night. The woman might have been an abortionist, and if she was, the description might identify her to Malloy, who had interviewed a goodly selection of them. But who was the man? She wished she knew more than that he was tall and straight. She supposed Mary Grace had meant he wasn’t fat, but that could describe half the men in New York. It most certainly described Mr. VanDamm, Sylvester Mattingly, and probably even the groom, Harvey.
But if the woman was the abortionist, and they could find her, she could identify the man for them. If she would, that is. Sarah had little reason to hope the woman would betray someone who had probably paid her for her silence and who was already a murderer. Unless, perhaps, she feared for her life if she
Sarah was in her kitchen, braving the heat to bake some cookies for the Higgins children as a reward for Mary Grace’s information, when someone rang her bell. She opened her door to find one of the dirty, shoeless boys known as street Arabs who made their precarious living any way they could.
“Mrs. Yardley, she says to come quick. Her baby’s real sick,” he told her anxiously, hopping from one bare foot to the other in his urgency to be off again.
Remembering young Dolly and the babies she had already lost, Sarah hurried. On her way out, she captured one of the freshly baked cookies for the boy, who gobbled it up without a word of thanks. The afternoon heat was oppressive, and Sarah took her parasol along with her bag.
Although Sarah was technically a midwife, she was also a trained nurse and was often called upon to treat illnesses as well as childbirth. New mothers always seemed to think of her first if their babies became ill.
“What’s wrong with the baby, do you know?” she asked the boy, who had to slow down so he wouldn’t outpace her. He wouldn’t get paid until she appeared, so he was sticking close to her.
“I don’t know nothing. I was just to fetch you is all.”
Sarah quickened her pace, even though she could already feel the sweat forming beneath her clothes. Maybe she should consider a bicycle, so at times like this she could move more quickly through the city streets. They were all the rage, and even the police used bicycles now. They were one of Commissioner Roosevelt’s innovations, and just the other day she’d seen an article in the Times that the bicycle force was being expanded. Every now and then she saw a story about a “wheel man” stopping a runaway horse and wagon from the seat of his cycle, even though that hardly seemed possible. Somehow she couldn’t imagine herself on one of the comic contraptions, however. Perhaps if she were younger and not so worried about her dignity.
At last she reached the tenement building on First Avenue where the Yardleys lived. Will Yardley stood on the front stoop, apparently watching for her. He shouted something when he saw her and the boy approaching and hurried to meet her. He even took her bag, carrying it the last few paces and up the stairs. Sarah could hear the baby’s cries even out on the street. At least she was still alive and fairly strong, if the volume of her wailing was any indication.
“I told Dolly to send for a doctor, but she wouldn’t have none of it,” he was saying. “She only wanted you. Said you was the one kept this one from dying when it was born, and you’d keep her alive now.”
Sarah was gratified to see that he seemed genuinely distressed by his daughter’s illness. Perhaps he’d finally reconciled himself to the child after all. She would have asked him what was wrong with the baby, but by then they were on the stoop, and it was only a step into the Yardley’s flat.
Sarah found Dolly walking the floor with the screaming baby over her shoulder. Her face was pale, her hair a mess, and she looked near exhaustion. “Oh, thank heaven you’re here, Missus,” she said. “My girl is that sick, she is.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” Sarah asked, taking the squalling infant from her mother’s arms.
“She’s been up all night long, crying, and I can’t figure out what’s the matter!” They had to shout to be heard over Rosy’s cries.
“Will she nurse?”
“Yes, but that just seems to make it worse. When she’s done, she just starts screaming again.”
“Has she been sick at all?”
“Not at all except for the crying!” Dolly said, on the verge of tears herself.
Sarah laid the baby on the kitchen table and checked her for rash and fever. She seemed warm, but considering the weather and the fact that she’d been held against her mother’s body for a while, that was only to be expected. Or perhaps she had a low fever. Sarah listened to the baby’s heart and lungs with her stethoscope and, to her great relief, found nothing wrong there. Having eliminated every serious possibility, she knew the answer.
“She has the colic,” Sarah said.
“The colic? What’s that?”
“It’s a bad stomachache. See the way she pulls her legs up when she cries? That’s because her stomach hurts.”
“But how could she have a stomachache? She don’t eat nothin’ ’cept my milk. Do you think I’m poisonin’ her?” she asked in horror.
“Oh, no, of course not. The colic is something some newborns get. Nobody knows why, and unfortunately, nobody really knows how to cure it. Usually, it lasts for six months-”
“-and then the baby just grows out of it, and it stops. That’s why they call it the six months colic.”
