The Black Rose (53 page)

The play was nearing its end, Sarah knew, and Hamlet had some important decisions to make. She had a feeling the poor tortured boy was about to get himself killed.

“… ‘Sir, in my heart, there was a kind of fighting that would not let me sleep… . ’ ”

Lottie was speaking Hamlet’s lines, and Sarah understood exactly. Even after such a long day yesterday, between the session, the steamboat tour, and the lengthy evening banquet, she’d barely slept at all last night. But for once she hadn’t been thinking about the company. She hadn’t even been awake relishing the memory of how Booker T. Washington had promised to try to visit her headquarters someday, perhaps if he came to Indianapolis for the dedication ceremony for the YMCA. Even
that
wasn’t what had kept her awake.

This time thoughts of C.J. had stolen her sleep.

“Did you have any questions about that passage, Madam?” Sarah said, pausing.

“I have a question, but not about
Hamlet
,” Sarah said, barely recognizing the thick hollow of her own voice. She gazed solemnly at the flat prairie land passing by the window, streaked in fiery shades of gold and orange by the twilight sky. The train felt like a hotbox.

“What about, then?”

“What time do they expect this train to get us home tonight, Lottie?”

“It’ll pull into the station by ten o’clock, if it’s on time. Eleven at the latest.”

All the moisture seemed to have been sucked from Sarah’s mouth. “At eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, if C.J. isn’t at home when I get there, where do you think I would find him?”

Sarah could see Lottie’s reflection in the glass, and her secretary’s face seemed to sag. Her perfectly painted lips fell open slightly. She didn’t make a sound.

“You understand what I’m asking you, Lottie.”

“Yes …” Lottie was looking at her lap.

“That’s why you looked so scared when I said I wanted to leave early. Isn’t it?”

Lottie’s reflection didn’t move or answer.

Not for the first time, Sarah longed for real
friendship
from Lottie, not just loyalty. This woman’s reticence had been such an appealing quality before, giving Lottie an air of refinement and accomplishment Sarah had longed to adopt as her own, but now Sarah needed to communicate with the
person
underneath. Lottie and Mr. Ransom spent so much time trying to protect her that Sarah had lulled her own self into thinking there was nothing to be protected from. They’d all begun treating her as if she were some kind of fragile object in a curio cabinet. And she’d liked it, too. She’d liked having so many people standing between her and the truth.

“I think,” Lottie began finally, “it’s best you’re going home tonight.”

Sarah closed her eyes for a moment as part of her winced. But she had to push on. “Go on and tell me, Lottie.”

“If he’s at home, it would be the first Saturday night in a long time. So people say.”

People
? Sarah cringed to imagine how many people might already know what she was apparently to be the last to hear. But she
had
heard before, hadn’t she?

“Tell me where I can find him,” Sarah said.

At this, Lottie sighed so hard that Sarah could feel the other woman’s breath puff against the back of her neck. “Are you really certain about that, Madam?”

“That’s right, Lottie, I’m sure as death. Now speak up.”

“The Hopkins Hotel on Indiana Avenue,” Lottie said, then added in barely a whisper: “Room ten.”

At that, Sarah whirled around to look at Lottie with wide eyes. Lottie had spoken those words as
fact
, not gossip, the sort of fact she had verified on her own—or that she’d heard from someone else who had. Had someone followed C.J.? Lottie herself? Mr. Ransom?

“How long?” Sarah breathed, her heart flipping.

Lottie cast her eyes down toward the book, which she had closed in her lap. “I think … some time after you and Mr. Walker came back from Jackson. Her name is Dora, an Indianapolis girl. She’s one of your agents, Madam. You met her at Tuskegee—”

An agent! Weakly, Sarah held up her trembling palm in a silent plea for Lottie to hush.

Oh, Lord Jesus, help your child
. As soon as Lottie said the girl’s name, she’d roared to life in Sarah’s memory. Dora. Dora Larrie. And her face came to her, too: so young! She’d had the sweetest girlish smile, and eyes so hungry with ambition. Sarah had liked those eyes, which had so mirrored her own, reminding her of how she had been hungry to build her life, too.

C.J. with Dora Larrie? How could anyone be so shameless? And right under her nose!

It couldn’t be an accident, Sarah realized. Oh, God, it was painful enough to imagine C.J. filling his nights in a hotel with any random high-yellow who caught his eye … but Dora Larrie! That must mean there was more to it. A hungry woman like Dora was after something else from C.J., and either he was too stupid to see it or—

Sarah fought not to bring the next thought to her consciousness, but it bubbled up all the same.
Or C.J. is up to something. C.J. is with her right
now, plotting against you
.

Then, like a voice from a nightmare, Lottie spoke Sarah’s darkest fears aloud: “Madam, Mr. Ransom has been worried because Mr. Walker knows your formula. This all came to his attention by accident, because there is some money missing Mr. Walker could not account for. Mr. Ransom believes Mr. Walker may be planning a venture of some sort with this woman. He had Mr. Walker followed, and he and the woman have been to Atlanta more than once—”

Sarah let out a loud choking sound as she forced herself to swallow a sob back into her tight throat. She would not cry. Not here. Not on this train, where strangers would hear her.

Sarah had never fainted in her life, even the night she’d lost Moses, but now she could feel her body melting away from her as the train bumped along the tracks. Her stomach surged, then lay as still as a rock. And her face seemed to burst into flames that sent a feverish sensation all the way to her toes. She sat as still as a statue, unable to move.

Unexpectedly, Lottie clasped Sarah’s hand and pulled it to her breast. Sarah could feel the racing of Lottie’s own heart. “Madam, I’ve prayed so much over it. I wouldn’t know anything at all of this matter, except I overheard a conversation between Mr. Ransom and Mr. Walker. I wanted to say something, I swear to you. It broke my heart to have to keep silent—”

Sarah thought her words would tumble out of her mouth as screams, but instead she could barely hear herself over the whine of the train. “You should have told. Something like this? How could you … ?”

“Mr. Ransom wanted to choose the time, Madam. He forbade me. He’ll be angry I said anything now. He was trying to handle it, and he said he didn’t want to disrupt—”

“You should have told,” Sarah hissed. Those were the only words that came to Sarah’s mind, churning around in her head like the name Dora Larrie. “You should have … told.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Lottie said, her face wrenching with grief. “Madam, I’m s-sorry.”

With a blind flash of anger, Sarah yanked her hand away from Lottie’s grasp. As many times as she’d argued with Lelia and her wild-mouthed niece, Anjetta, she didn’t think she’d wanted to strike anyone as much as she did right now. Not poor Lottie, but someone, anyone. The emotions swamping her were alien to her, stealing her breath and nearly dimming her vision. How could a day that had begun with a routine train ride have turned into this awful moment? Sarah stared at her trembling hand, momentarily not recognizing her own flesh. She would faint now, that was all. She would faint and wake up.

“Should I call a porter to bring you some water—”

“Get up,” Sarah said, still little more than hissing. She already regretted her harsh tones, but she couldn’t help herself. “I said
git
. Don’t even
look
at me.”

Her mouth fixed in an agonized
O
, Lottie frantically gathered her book and handbag together. “Oh, I told Mr. Ransom he was wrong, I swear I did. I told him not to keep it from you. He made me promise… .” Lottie tried to explain, even as she parted the blanket the porter had hung to give them privacy and scurried from her seat.

Something between Sarah’s temples seemed to pop, and her crown suddenly felt weighed down by the worst headache she had ever known. As the train rocked its way toward Indianapolis, Sarah sat rigid in her seat, on the verge of nausea, waiting to faint.

But she never did.

After she walked through her front door, Sarah didn’t bother to turn on any lights in the house, relying on the moonlight streaming through the windows to illuminate her way through the wide hallways. Even in the darkness, her wooden floors gleamed like smoked glass.

Oh, she loved this place! She loved its contours, its shadows, its scents of fresh paint and polished wood and new Oriental rugs. To her, this house always smelled like a new beginning, like the promise of everything she’d spent her life trying to build. But tonight the satisfaction she usually felt when she walked into her home had been smothered by a dread that made her entire frame feel stiff. She didn’t even have to call out to know that no one was home except boarders.

Anjetta had been staying with her, but she remembered her niece was visiting friends in St. Louis this month. And C.J.? Well, she knew better than to expect him to be here. She knew by more than the darkness and quiet.

“C.J.?” she called out nonetheless, still hoping.

She thought she saw a movement, a phantomlike white shirt appearing in the doorway to her office at the end of the hall, but when she blinked she realized it was only a trick of the darkness. There was no one here except her. Sarah’s legs carried her past the Gold Room and the library through the empty doorway that had fooled her. There, in nearly pitch black, she felt her way to the large mahogany rolltop desk where she kept her papers and letters. She opened the bottom drawer on the left side, a drawer she had opened only once, quite accidentally, and never again. This was C.J.’s drawer. Inside that drawer, her fingers were drawn to the metallic cold of the gun’s nozzle. C.J.’s beloved derringer was still here.

She had to find him, and the Hopkins Hotel was in a bad part of town. She might very well need protection.

Without allowing herself to think, Sarah slid the gun into her purse. She bounced it once, enjoying the unfamiliar metallic weight inside. She’d begun to breathe in rasps deep from her chest. It was so hot in here, too, she realized. It felt like none of the windows had been opened in days. A tomb, she thought. That was the word. Her house felt like a tomb.

Sarah went outside to get her automobile.

It didn’t occur to her even once how much she hated to drive herself at night. As she got closer to her destination, navigating her Waverley toward Indiana Avenue, she even forgot to be worried about possibly being recognized by folks who would consider her a strange sight. The woman she was now—with a gun in her purse and a plan in her head that she’d hidden from herself in a darkness not unlike the stifling dark back at her house—couldn’t care less about what such-and-such or so-and-so would think about seeing Madam C.J. Walker tooling around a questionable section of town at this time of night. All she saw were the dim pools of light from her car’s driving lamps and the passing patterns of crushed stone and gravel on the roadway as she drove, her hands tight on the steering wheel. She pressed her foot harder against the stiff pedal, taking the car a hair above the twenty-mile speed limit.

The deserted pharmacies, cafés, law offices, and general stores on Indiana Avenue began to give way to the unseemlier businesses crowded on the opposite end. And the streets, which had been mostly deserted, began to crawl to life. Clumps of colored men, and a few women, appeared on the sidewalks, laughing, chatting, and walking jauntily. More than once Sarah thought she saw C.J. among them. A certain manner of dress. A special tilt of the head. But she stared hard at the faces each time, and as the features came into focus, they were always wrong.

She passed Mooney’s Bar. Avenue Billiards. Then the Liza Hotel, which everyone knew was just a sporting house the law turned a blind eye to, men pooled in a raucous, eager overflow line outside its doors. Another block farther, with a boldly painted red sign, sat a squat brick building called the Hopkins Hotel. There, at the empty curb, Sarah brought her car to a stop. Her engine rumbled and ticked, then died.

Sarah’s breathing had evened out during the drive, but her headache was back.

What am I doing out here?
a faint voice in her brain wondered. But then the name Dora Larrie tightened around Sarah’s chest like a vise, and she stumbled out of her car, giving the door a hard slam behind her. She walked past the faceless stream of cologne scents and perspiration-stained shirts to cross the hotel’s threshold.

Inside, the spare, clean hotel was quiet. The only person in sight was the thin counter attendant, who looked so young that Sarah doubted if he was yet a man. The boy had a brush of facial hair above his lip so thin that it was nearly invisible. He raised his head from a magazine, startled to see Sarah. Maybe he recognized her, she thought.

“Is there a Mr. Walker in room ten?” she asked quickly.

“Uhm …” The boy paused, running his index finger across his register. “Ma’am, see, there might be a Mr. Walker in that room, see … but I ain’t sure if …”

“Give me a key. Right now.”

The boy eyed her as if he wanted to protest. She opened her handbag and pulled a five-dollar bill from inside. His eyes widened. Even after she extended the money, he still stared into the handbag. When he looked up at her, he looked as if he were going to be ill.

Taking the money, the boy turned and found a large brass key on one of the hooks hanging on the wall behind his desk. His fingers shook as he gave it to her. “Now, see, this here is a legitimate ’stablishment, and we don’t want no …”

But Sarah had already whirled away from him, and she didn’t hear his words. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything. Her head felt puffed up, and the only thing in her ears was the sound of the blood rushing through her head, welling up from her furiously beating heart. Instinctively, she ignored the hallway on the lower floor and began to climb the hotel’s wooden stairs. She felt as if she knew exactly where the room was, as if she had lived this moment before. With each clumping step on the staircase, her head whirled.