Murder in a mill town (3 page)

And, clearly, so she had.

“Have you asked your daughter’s friends and associates if they know where she might be?” Nell inquired.

Mrs. Fallon nodded as she stroked the doll’s back. “I musta talked to everyone in Charlestown, or tried to. Some of ‘em, like them girls she worked with at the mill, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. Others, they’d talk, but there wasn’t much they could tell me. One day Bridie’s there, the next day she ain’t. She just up and disappeared. Went off to work Saturday mornin’ and just never come home.”

“Saturday?” Nell said. “I thought you said she disappeared Sunday.”

“Ah.” Spots of pink blossomed on Mrs. Fallon’s cheeks. “Fact is, she, uh, well...”

“She didn’t never come home on Saturday nights,” her husband said. “That Virgil, he’d meet her at work and them two would head off somewheres to...well...”

“I see,” Nell said. “But she usually returns the following day?”

“Every Sunday evenin’ by six o’clock,” Mrs. Fallon said, “on account of that’s when Virgil has to have Ollie Fuller’s cart back to him.”

“Ollie’s a coal dealer up in Charlestown,” her husband explained, “but he don’t work on the Sabbath, so he lets Virgil rent his cart from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday.”

“Where do they go in the cart?” Nell asked.

Mrs. Fallon shook her head. “She didn’t like to talk to me about it. She knew how I felt. Father Dunne at Immaculate Conception keeps askin’ why she ain’t in church on Sundays. What am I supposed to tell him?”

“I still say Jimmy might know somethin’ about all this,” Mr. Fallon told his wife. “If you really want to find her, you’ll ask—”

“I said I’d do the talkin’,” she muttered. “Didn’t I say I’d do the talkin’?”

“Jimmy?” Nell asked.

“He isn’t important,” Mrs. Fallon answered quickly.

“He’s Bridie’s husband,” Mr. Fallon said.

Mrs. Fallon glared at her husband, her blush deepening to a livid, blotchy stain.

“Ah,” said Viola.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Gracie said.

Oh, dear.
Nell and Viola exchanged a look.

“I should think Gracie would be happier playing somewhere else right now,” Viola said. “Perhaps we can ask Miss Parrish to—”

“No!”
Gracie wrapped her arms around Nell’s neck and clung tightly. “Don’t want Miss Pawish. Want Miseeney.”

“Speaking of naps,” Nell said, “isn’t it about time Hortense went down for hers?”

“No, no, not yet,” Gracie protested. She usually tucked the doll into her cradle when their midmorning snack was delivered to the nursery.

“Close enough.” Setting the little girl on her feet, Nell said, “I wonder if Mrs. Fallon would like to help you put her down.”

Mrs. Fallon, still cuddling the doll as if she were her own baby Bridie, hesitated for a moment, then smiled. “Why, yes, I...I’d be happy to. More than happy,” she added with a look of gratitude that gave Nell a pinch of guilt, seeing as this was really just a ruse to get her out of the room.

The novelty of sharing this task with someone new evidently appealed to Gracie, who promptly took Mrs. Fallon’s hand and led her away.

“So,” Nell said as Mr. Fallon sorted through the tray of sandwiches, “it would appear as though your stepdaughter has one too many men in her life.”

He snorted in affirmation as he plucked a sandwich from the pile. “She was paintin’ on the lip rouge when she was still in short skirts, that one. Weren’t no better than she ought to be, right from the get-go.”

Weren’t?
“Do you think she’s dead?”

He chewed and swallowed, then started rummaging through the stack again. “A girl like that never comes to no good, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

“Tell me about her husband,” Nell said. Viola followed the interrogation quietly, content to let Nell conduct it as she saw fit—clearly her purpose in having called her down.

“He’s a deep-sea fisherman, gone for weeks, months at a time. They been hitched about a year. God knows what he was thinkin’, marrying a jade like Bridie. She was the kind that needs a keeper.” Stuffing the sandwich into his mouth, he added, “
Is
the kind,” as an afterthought.

“So, her husband—Jimmy, is it?”

“Sullivan. Jimmy Sullivan.”

“What kind of person is he?”

“My wife thinks he walks on water, but he ain’t no saint, let me tell you that. He’s got a short fuse, that Jimmy Sullivan, and he’s a bruiser. Makes a pretty penny fightin’ other bruisers bare-knuckled when he’s in town.”

“Has he ever taken those fists to Bridie?” Nell asked.

“Once or twice, when she was beggin’ for it—makin’ eyes at other men, comin’ home drunk... What man wouldn’t, with baggage like that to keep in line? Even my wife told Bridie it was her own fault. Tried to make her stop slippin’ around on Jimmy while he was off fishing. Said adultery was a sin, said she ought to know better.”

“Did Jimmy know she was unfaithful?”

“He suspected, on account of the whispers, and seein’ how she acted with other men. She always denied it, though, and a pretty wench has a way of makin’ a man believe what she wants him to believe. But he was away more than he was home, and when the cat’s away...”

“So there were other men besides Mr. Hines?”

“Oh, she gave it away pretty free, least till Virgil come along at the end of May. I never knew their names, them others, but all summer it’s been ‘Virgil this’ and ‘Virgil that.’”

“When did she move back home?”

“June. Jimmy come home a few days early and caught the two of ‘em in the act. Gave Bridie a black eye, but he didn’t lay a hand on Virgil. Told him he knew it was all Bridie’s doin’, that she was like a bitch in heat, and... Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, looking back and forth between Nell and Viola.

“We’re both quite unshockable,” Viola said, with little smile in Nell’s direction.

“So he just let Mr. Hines go?” Nell asked.

Mr. Fallon nodded. “Said there wasn’t a man alive could resist a hot little piece like Bridie when she was shovin’ her...uh, self in his face, so he didn’t blame him one bit. Said he’d get off without a beatin’ long as he took Bridie out of there and kept her away for good. Told him if he was smart, he’d learn to keep her in line with his fists, ‘cause it was all she understood.”

“Did Mr. Hines take that advice, do you know?” Nell asked.

He shook his head. “She’s been livin’ with us since June, and I ain’t seen no fresh bruises, but could be he’s the type to just hold it all in till he can’t take it no more.”

Or the type to hit her where it won’t show,
Nell thought.

“If them two run off together,” Fallon continued, “and she makes a fool out of him like she done with Jimmy, no tellin’ what might happen.”

Reaching for another sandwich, he added, “Or already has.”

*   *   *

“I feel sorry for her,” Viola said after the Fallons had left.

“Mrs. Fallon?”

She nodded. “And Bridie, too. It’s easy to label someone a fallen woman, and dismiss her as worthless, but these things are—”

“Complicated?” Nell finished with a smile. It was a familiar refrain from Viola, for whom life wasn’t sketched in black and white, but rather painted up layer by layer from a palette of infinite hues and shades. And, too, hadn’t Mr. Hewitt saved her from her own youthful indiscretion by marrying her after she became pregnant, by another man, with Will? Like Nell, Viola Hewitt knew all too well the many factors that could tempt a female into sin...just as she knew the repercussions, despite having been spared them herself.

Viola said, “I have a favor to ask of you.”

Nell sighed.

“If I could look into this myself,” Viola said, “I would. But with these pointless legs of mine...”

“Mrs. Hewitt—”

“You were such a help to me last winter, after Will was arrested. I know you can find out what became of Bridie. You’ve got a way about you. People trust you. They tell you things. And you’re so savvy, so perceptive.”

“I did a great deal of stumbling about and backtracking last winter,” Nell said. “I drew more wrong conclusions than you know.”
You infer too much,
Will used to say.
Far too many facile assumptions.
And he was right.

“Harry won’t help,” Viola said. “Mr. Hewitt won’t help. That poor woman has no one to turn to but me. And I have no one to turn to but you.”

“I’ve got Gracie to look after.”

“She’ll sleep till three or three-thirty, and then Miss Parrish can watch her.”

“You mean you want me to do this right now? Today?”

“In a situation like this, time is of the essence. I’ll have Brady drive you up to Charlestown in the brougham so you don’t have to bother with a hackney. And I’ll give you a letter introducing you and asking for cooperation and so forth. That might help smooth the way a bit.” A classic Viola Hewitt understatement. She was one of the two or three most eminent ladies of Boston, a renowned philanthropist and the matriarch of one of its oldest families. Her name opened doors all over the city.

Nell studied the pattern on the Oriental carpet, reflecting on all Viola Hewitt had given her in the past four years, the most precious of which was Gracie. Looking up, she met Viola benevolent gaze. “You know I can’t refuse you anything.”

“Thank you, my dear.” Reaching across the space that separated them, she squeezed Nell’s hand. “You’re not just my legs, you know. You’re the daughter I never had, even more so than Gracie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“This here’s the weaving room,” said the young mill girl who’d agreed to guide Nell to Bridie Sullivan’s former workstation, hollering to be heard above the mechanical din that filled the Hewitt woolen factory.

To call such a cavernous space a room was like calling Boston Harbor a little inlet. High-ceilinged and about a hundred yards long, it occupied the entire third floor of this huge stone edifice. Hundreds of power looms whirred and clacked and rumbled as scores of young women—some of them little more than girls—trotted up and down the aisles, tending them. Midday sunshine flooded the vast whitewashed space through banks of tall windows, their glass frosted lest the workers be distracted by the view of the stream that had powered this mill before Mr. Hewitt replaced water power with steam.

“Bridie, she worked on them machines over there, with Ruth and Evie.” The girl pointed to two young women struggling together to adjust the leather belt connecting a loom to the line shaft overhead. One was tall, sturdily buxom, and brown-haired; the other plain and petite, with sallow skin and thin cornsilk hair scraped back into a knot at her nape. Like the other mill girls, they wore aprons over their threadbare dresses, the skirts of which were hemmed short, displaying their shoeless feet and ankles.

“The tall one’s Ruth,” the girl yelled. “Ruth Watson. Little blonde is Evie Corbet.”

“Do you think they’d talk to me?” Nell asked loudly.

“About Bridie?” The girl offered a doubtful little shrug. “If they do, they won’t have nothin’ nice to say, I’ll tell you that. They never did take to her, and since she got herself sacked, them two been doin’ the work of three.”

“Sacked?” Nell asked. “Bridie was fired?”

“Sure, why do you think she ain’t here no more?”

Nell wondered if Bridie’s mother knew she’d lost her job, and decided she did. Mrs. Fallon hadn’t wanted to tell Nell about Bridie’s being married, probably because it would mark her as an adulteress. Most likely she’d wanted to withhold all unflattering information about her daughter, at least until Viola had agreed to help her.

 “You might want to wait till Ruth and Evie ain’t workin’ to talk to ‘em,” the girl advised. “Foreman’ll get mad. Maybe during the noon dinner break. It’s comin’ up presently.”

Nell thanked the girl, pressed a half-dime into her hand, and went outside to wait.

*   *   *

Hewitt Mills and Dye Works was housed in a complex of buildings laid out at drearily precise right angles, ruining an otherwise bucolic setting. Anchoring the arrangement was the woolen factory, a colossal stone box surmounted by a disproportionately puny cupola. It was like a village unto itself, this compound, with its own store, its own church, and rows of brick boarding houses in which the mill girls lived.

Trees had been planted in soldier-straight lines punctuated by the occasional stone bench. Seating herself on the bench least likely to be seen from Harry Hewitt’s office window beneath the cupola, Nell peeled off her black crocheted gloves, withdrew her little leatherbound sketchbook and mechanical pencil out of the chatelaine hanging from her belt and executed a swift drawing of the woolen factory.

At precisely twelve noon, a bell within the cupola started clanging. Within seconds, mill employees were streaming through the front door into the welcoming sunshine. Most of the females headed for the company boarding houses, where their dinner presumably awaited them. A few lingered in the courtyard to chat with each other or flirt with the men.