Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (28 page)

“All right then,
I’ll put my cards on the table.” The marshal glanced over her shoulder. Had he
spotted Mario? “I was sent to fetch you from that train. Got a personal call from
Mitchell Palmer because it involved a neighbor of his, John Kingston. Yes, your
employer. Kingston arrived at a mass grave in Virginia—shrouded, as if the flu had
killed him. But he wasn’t gone, he was just— Well, there the details grow fuzzy. In
need, let’s say, of clarifying.”

“Mr. Kingston?” She couldn’t hide her shock.
“I thought he must have died.”

“But not at home? You never saw him
sick?”

“No.” There was danger here in the particulars. But it was accurate to
say, “He never telephoned. Didn’t check if the children were— I thought certainly he
was dead.”

“As I said, some points needed clarifying. We contacted Union
Station. Found you’d bought a ticket using your own name.”

“You went looking
for his servants? What ‘points’ could we—I—clarify? Mr. Kingston can’t think I had
anything to do with . . . well, whatever happened to keep him away.”

“What he
thinks is someone else’s concern.” His tone worried Ella. “I was there to learn what
you
had to say.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me? Immediately ask
me?”

“By the time I knew you were the one to question, you’d lied to me. That
concoction about Georgetown. I found it interesting. And,” he showed the dimple, “I
had no objection to dinner.”

She recalled her terror, her confusion, all alone
that night in Chicago. How close she’d come to being robbed, perhaps worse, before
finding a pawn shop and getting money for a room. Because this marshal had no
objection to dinner?

“You think I’m stupid because I’m young and female,” she
said. “But I saw the two men outside with you. Three marshals to question one girl?”
She could see she’d surprised him. “Why should it take—?”

“You ask this, after
having eluded us?” Was that a hint of admiration on his face? “But reassure me,
then. You don’t know how it came to be, your employer carried away for
dead?”

“The last time I saw Mr. Kingston’s face,” she said, “he was ordering
me put out for the death wagon.”

“Put out still living?”

“He thought I’d
die before it came.” She was gratified by the flash of dismay on his face. “But I
didn’t. Cook found me in the morning. She said Mrs. K. banished her husband to his
club. In case the sickness got on him, from helping carry me down. She didn’t want
the flu spreading to the children.”

“She sent her husband away at the height
of a pandemic? You didn’t find that . . . cold?”

“Everything about the
Kingstons was ‘cold.’” She would leave it at that. “But when the baby got sick, the
maid phoned Mr. K.’s club. He hadn’t shown up. The next day, when the older children
. . . I’d been told Mr. K. kept a girl. In an apartment close by.” She shifted as
more people walked past, their gesticulations too close to her face. “I called the
front desk there, but it was too late at night. I got no answer.”

“Kingston
kept a girl? Young, like yourself?”

“You’re asking was I—?” She tried to pull
away. “So what if Mr. K. came back? Why should I know anything about it? I was a
servant, not a . . . a . . . Why question
me?”

Kingston must have
noticed the missing jewelry. His entire family dead, and still he’d noticed. His
wife had boxes full, and Ella left most of it untouched. But the rich were like
dragons, fierce in their instinct to protect treasure.

“Is he angry I didn’t
leave a note? To say when the children died? The wagon men keep lists, don’t they?
Which bodies are taken from which houses?”

Killy said nothing.

“Why did
he set the police after me? Just please say it and stop stalking me.” Her voice
cracked with frustration.

“Stalking?”

“Yes! Yes. It’s like Champawat.
Where a tiger followed villagers for miles to—”

“I remember. Accounts of it
filled the papers. A dozen years ago, was it?” He glanced over her shoulder again,
his eyes narrowing. “She was a tigress, though, I think. Not a male.”

Ella
tried again to squirm out of his grip.

“There was another story like it, turn
of the century. It caught my fancy when I was a schoolboy. Did you ever hear of
Tsavo?”

He kept looking beyond her. Had he spotted Mario?

“No. What does
it have to do with—?”

“If you like stories of hunter and hunted. It’s about
two
man-eaters.”

He was playing with her. Dragging this out. Did
he know what she and Mario had planned?

“Maneless lions, this pair. Males who
hunted together, even drove prey toward each other. Males of the species don’t do
that, you know. They’re solitary, uncooperative. But these even shared a lair full
of human bones.”

“And did they pinion their prey too? To exasperate and
demoralize it?”

“In a way.” He smiled as he loosened his grip on her
shoulders. “The British were certainly demoralized. Trying to build a railroad
bridge over the Tsavo river, in Africa. They laid hundreds of miles of line—useless
to them if they couldn’t get the bridge done. But the beasts kept pulling workers
from their tents, dragging them off. Raiding the camp hospital as if it were a
pantry. The railway tried everything. Deep thorn fences. But these lions, unlike
others, were willing to crawl through. They tried enormous bonfires, but they were a
unique pair, no fear of fire. The railroad even brought in a tribe of fierce
hunters. But they soon ran away, convinced the lions were devils.”

“Please,”
Ella begged. “Whatever you need from me—”

“The workers abandoned the camp—what
else could they do? They went on strike, you might say.” He showed his dimple again.
“Finally the British sent in a crack shot, a young lieutenant colonel. He hired the
best game hunter on the continent to help him. And they set off—”

“Are you
arresting me? Or just toying with me before you devour me?”

His laugh was low
and chilly. “The game hunter, for all his prowess, was eaten alive. But the colonel
soldiered on. Every night he positioned himself in a tree to wait. It was weeks
before he got off a clean shot at the first lion. Hit it, all right, but it didn’t
fall. It vanished.”

The first lion vanished. In this twisted allegory, was
Ella the first lion? And Mario the second? Or was the marshal talking about
Nicky?

She felt as if she’d scream from the stress. Surely the marshal hadn’t
boarded her train in Chicago just to ask what she knew about Kingston. Whatever her
employer told Palmer, it couldn’t possibly involve her. She’d been delirious with
flu when Mr. K. left R Street. No, if Palmer phoned a marshal, it was either about
the stolen jewels or about Nicky. But which?

Killy leaned closer to Ella, his
eyes just inches from hers. “The wounded lion didn’t die. He waited till the dead of
night, then came back. The colonel shot it again. And again, it retreated. Then came
back. Shot again. And a third time. And again. And again. Varying intervals between
attacks so they’d come as a surprise.”

Was he warning her not to run? Telling
her he’d never stop finding her?

“In the end,” he said, “it took five enormous
bullets—firepower made to bring down charging elephants.”

“Let me go,” she
said. “I’ve told you what I know about Mr. Kingston, which is nothing. He wasn’t
there when I was brought back in. I never saw him again.”

“But the second
lion,” Killy continued, “was even worse. For weeks, the colonel tracked him. And all
the while, the rail line sat useless without a bridge over the river. Do you
understand what I’m saying?”

She held her breath. She
didn’t
understand. He seemed to think he was telling her something, but what?

“The
colonel put five bullets into that beast too, one after another. But like the first
man-eater, it didn’t fall. It kept charging him, up there in his tree, as if he were
throwing pebbles. He pumped in another three, reloading at a speed he prayed would
save his life. Even so the lion died ravaging the tree limb just beneath his
feet.”

“Is there a moral?” She could barely get the words out.

“I don’t
know if I’d call it that. But it’s hard to know exactly who’s stalking whom.” He
glanced past her again. “It’s a matter of your perspective. Don’t you think so? We
talked last time about the Sedition Act. It’s a common belief here, with the unions,
that the government uses the law to hunt their members. Along with aliens,
Anarchists—”

“Of course it does! The entire leadership of the I.W.W. is in
prison. I can’t count how many people I know myself, put in jail or onto boats. Or
beaten with impunity by vigilantes. You don’t deny there are lynchings almost every
day. Yet Congress won’t outlaw them. The President praises the Ku Klux Klan. So
whatever you’re driving at, with this story of yours? If it’s meant as a parable,
you’re
the lions.”

He shook his head. “Have you a notion how many
bombs we’ve intercepted? And worse,
not
intercepted? Packages mailed to
judges and senators and bureaucrats . . . as if these men open their own mail. You
were a servant once. Would you fancy living without your two hands, your face a mass
of scars? Does anyone but a beast place a bomb in an armory or a church, where it
might kill anybody unlucky enough to pass by? Where you have a law, yes, the
enforcement may be flawed. Its provisions may be too broad. But at least its intent
is to offer security. To keep people safe. A bomb, though? It may as well be a
man-eater. It comes at a person in that way. Suddenly. Without measure or
remorse.”

“You think that’s not true of lawmen? My mother was killed when a
sheriff named McRae deputized anyone he could find, anyone with malice and a gun, to
meet a ferry boat of union women and men. Going to parade and sing for the
shingle-weavers. Eleven solid minutes they fired into a docked boat. And the
strikers at Ludlow? The National Guard shot them while they slept. Torched their
tents—wives and children burned alive. Those aren’t the actions of beasts? Why not?
Because they had uniforms and not tiger’s stripes? Because they had
badges?”

Around them, the drizzle made passersby seem indistinct. As if they
mattered not at all. As if only this mattered, only deciding who was the hunter and
who the man-eater.

The marshal drew a long breath. “You worked at a shirt
factory before you went to the Kingstons,” he said. “You had no other references.
Why should they choose a factory girl to care for their children?”

“I—I’d
taken care of children before.” This turn of conversation startled her. She tried to
gather her wits. Was there a trick inside the question? Certainly Mr. K. hadn’t
taken Palmer into his confidence on this. “Children in our tenement.”

“You
should tell me the truth.” Killy’s hands slid down her arms. He took both her hands
in his. It shocked her. She had the strange fancy he wasn’t baiting a trap but
rather offering a lifeline. When she didn’t reply, he said, “All right, then, how
about this. At the Kingstons’, why did you call for the wagon? It was an expense for
you, wasn’t it? And you were going anyway. Why not simply walk away?”

“I
couldn’t do that. Abandon little Muriel and John to the mice? And Cook and Maid, who
were so kind to me? To think of them with flies— No. I had Cook’s coins. It wouldn’t
have been right to leave her there and use them for . . . for myself.”

Her
confusion twisted deeper. One minute, the marshal seemed to be talking about Nicky.
About enforcing the law, as if there were no difference between draft dodgers and
bombers. The next, he was asking again about the Kingstons. About money. As if he
had Mrs. K.’s jewels in mind.

If only she knew which crime he suspected. Which
pitfalls she should avoid.

Somewhere close by, she knew, Mario was watching
them. What would he make of this? She and a marshal quibbling back and forth like
drunks at a speakeasy. And the marshal holding her hands? (What did she herself make
of it?) Would Mario suppose she was offering Killy information?

Her stomach
knotted.

Killy stared down at her as if reading a book in her eyes.

“You
should let me go,” she said. “I’ve hurt no one. I cared for all of them, all who got
sick after me. I tried my best to keep them alive. Cook and Maid were my friends.
And I loved the children. It’s true I didn’t stop to think how it would be for Mr.
K. To come home and find no trace of them, no note. But I . . . I just couldn’t stay
longer.”

“After two years there, you leave without a reference? And no means
of support?”

So it
was
the jewels, then. Ella stood very still. She
felt the danger as if it breathed down her neck. The marshal had Kingston’s word
that the gems were missing. She’d left no address or request for wages from the
estate. And she’d lied to someone she knew was a lawman. They’d need no more than
that to convict her. She’d get years in prison, or at best, deportation to a country
she’d left as an infant. A country where she knew no one. Where girls like her
starved or sold their bodies on the street.

She suddenly understood what Killy
was trying to draw from her. But did he consider it a defense? Or was he just
looking for a reason to feel disgust?
Justification for what he knew she’d
find in prison?

“You think you’ve guessed it,” she said. “Why I didn’t stay to
collect a reference. Well, you’re right. Yes, I was just a factory girl. And no, Mr.
K. would never have hired me if I hadn’t . . . Well, he called it an
‘accommodation.’ You’ll say I should have stayed at the factory, I’m sure, to
preserve my precious honor. But my lungs were already hot with cotton dust. My honor
would have left me begging in an alley, one more coughing girl.”

She felt hot
tears spill down her cold cheeks. It was misty out here, though, and she kept her
face still. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.