Bury Me Deep

Part Four

They had asked her to come and play cards. She didn’t know what Joe Lanigan had given them for the kitty the previous night while she sat on tenterhooks in his automobile with Elsie Nettle, but whether it was pills or money or both, Ginny sounded gay, calling from the neighbors’ telephone, breathless and cheery, and Marion was relieved. All worries seemed to be forgotten in the giddiness that so overswept the girls as they planned their evening.

Hurrying about Mrs. Gower’s kitchen, Marion made bread-and-jelly pudding and wrapped it in a thick kitchen towel. On the streetcar it sat in her lap, hot and sweating, and when she arrived, her dress was wet and the evening air was barely air at all.

Ginny answered the door, a rare thing, especially now that she was so poorly. She had three curlers in her hair and eyes rimmed with kohl and a deep rouge on her lips.

“We decided this is Monte Carlo night, Mims, and you shall be the Duchess Estrella from Hungary and tonight you risk losing the crown jewels and your mountainous duchy on the Rhine—” The cough started then and Marion reached across to hold Ginny’s arms and they were like kindling bits.

“Did you get the money, Louise?” Marion whispered to Louise after helping Ginny to the sofa.

Louise, who did not appear adorned for Monte Carlo night and looked queasy, sticky, jumbled, said, “No, Marion. Can you imagine. Joe Lanigan gave up neither gold nor grain. Only a jug of the slickery white. He is nearly useless as a sugar daddy, wouldn’t you say?”

Her face was pulled and there were heavy things in her eyes and Marion felt those things tugging at her too, and she placed her hand on Louise’s arm and Louise’s eyes filled for a moment and then she turned back to the stove, where a pan with sauerkraut was simmering.

“Marion,” Ginny’s voice creaked from the sofa. “Marion, none of them came by at all this week. None of them. Not Mr. Worth, nor Mr. McNeary, nor Sheriff Healy, nor Mr. Loomis. Not even Floyd of the mine-black hands. And yet we’re still here.” Eyes jumpy and eyebrows doing strange, twittery things, she looked over at Louise. “But they’ll be back next week, don’t doubt it. With the finest corn and an RCA Victor Electrola with swank Oriental trimmings like Mr. Loomis showed us in the catalog. In the meantime, who needs ’em? I’m entertainment to burn.”

“This is a sorrowful world,” Louise said, and she began pouring from the jug of gin. “One needs victuals. That’s what’s needed.”

The sadness of Louise was spurring things in Ginny, disturbances and peculiar energies that were making her manic to amuse, and these energies were making Louise nerved up and drinking more, and finally Marion surrendered to the witchy electricities and took a glass too because it seemed the only way.

“God made man frail as a bubble,” Ginny sang, “God made love, love made trouble.” She pressed one hand to her chest like Sister Aimee. “God made the vine—then is it a sin,” she asked, lifting her glass, “that man made wine to drown trouble in?”

It was a heavy effort on all parts, but within the hour, the mood was lifting, and the close air of the house filled with sweaty laughter and a glistening on Louise’s cheeks from the stovetop, the gin, Marion’s ministrations, twisting her friend’s hair into curls drawn tight with vitamin oil and looking like motion-picture flappers. “Oh, Marion,” Louise said, smiling, “your hands are like butterflies.”

Ginny, trying to help, singing and frolicking, kept having to plunge her face fast into her skittery kerchief with each grinding hack, and Louise kept shushing her away and Ginny would run to the open window and cough out into the night air. Her energy was all wrong and Marion could feel it but didn’t know what to do about it.

On one such circuit, Ginny, now stripped down to bloomers, ran to the bathroom sink and dunked her head under cold water, then circled back, flouncing on the settee, jamming one skinny leg between the girls, seated on the floor beneath her on lumpen pillows, and belted out, “So, tell us about your triple date, toots.”

Marion, so loose and slippery from Louise’s cooing and their shared girl talk, jolted suddenly to alertness. She had known it would come, but like this? She reached for the jug and poured herself a second glass of the tongue-curling stuff.

“Yes, Marion,” Louise said, eyes now on her, saying it in a jolly way, but Marion couldn’t believe in the jollity. She tried to. She took a sip and tried to do that. “Did you have a snapping time?”

“Oh,” Marion said. “I guess I have become the welcome wagon now.”

“Is that what’s happened?” Louise said, and her voice was tighter now.

Retreating from her own question quick as a crab, Ginny reached for her pair of finger cymbals, which she kept tucked under a cushion. “Shall I do my Salome dance?” she asked, clicking them over her head.

“No, you shall not,” Louise said, head whipping round to Ginny. “You be still, bad girl. And stay seated for a piece and a half. You’re on my scolding list.” She turned back to Marion, eyes so black, the pupils dilated so wide she looked like a Katzenjammer kid in the Sunday comics. Oh, she is stewed, thought Marion.

“All day, Marion, before you arrived, I set to scolding her,” Louise said, waving her arm, pointing fingers at Ginny, who had started to giggle. “She’s been blasting herself with secret frolics passed to her by our very own milkman.”

“He likes to help a sister out, that milkman does.” Ginny trilled. “And who knew he had such bonbons and all I had to do was give him a dimple.”

“Those kinds of candy will not help your blown-out lungs one bit,” Louise said, straightening her back to nurse posture.

“They help my lungs on account of my lungs go poof the minute I blow,” Ginny said, tapping her nose with her fingertip. “I can lick anything with this glow I got on.”

“Oh, Ginny—,” Marion started to say, but Louise, head swiveling back round, shot out, “Elsie Nettle, that wood sprite, that mountain apple-knocker. All angel-face, angel-bottom innocent, Joe Lanigan’s favorite variety. Looked to me like you wrapped her up with a fat ribbon for our Gent Joe.”

“Wrapped her up?” Marion said, not liking the look on Louise’s whirring face. A hot, burring energy, a fitful, angry thing. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Was this Louise’s concern, after all? And wasn’t it unkind of her to shine a spotlight on Marion’s private shame?

“Let’s just say it,” Louise said, thumping the sofa’s edge with open palm. Ginny crawled across the sofa, arms out to her. “Let’s not pretend, Marion. I’d love to pretend with you and just play with you like this, as we are, but I look at those bow lips of yours as you lie, lie, lie.”

“Don’t get yourself in a fit again, Lou-Lou. Don’t let’s,” Ginny said. “You told me to calm myself and here you are.”

“We have… It’s not… It’s not…,” Marion stuttered, but she could feel something ruffling in her, something ruffling and setting off hot feelings of her own. “It’s not your affair, Louise. It’s not your business.”

“Don’t you get it, Marion?” Louise snapped, reaching out to grab Marion’s wrist, but not before Marion pulled it away and rose to her feet. “Don’t you get it? Joe Lanigan is all our business.” She paused, then said, razor sharp, “We’re all in the business of Joe Lanigan.”

“Last night, it wasn’t about you,” Marion blurted. All the while thinking, It is I who had to eat my pride up, had to have it forced down my throat. “It’s a separate thing we have, Joe and I. And you can’t know what goes on with Mr. Lanigan and myself. You don’t know anything about what we have shared.” She could feel the junipers tingling under her skin. My, it was fine gin her lover had brought them.

Louise jumped up, shaking off Ginny’s bluing hands.

“Could you really think that? I wonder, could you? Has he gotten so far between your jerking little virgin legs that you’ve gone cross-eyed?”

“Don’t you say such things, Louise,” Marion said, her face hot. She’d never seen Louise so mad, not ever. “I introduced him to Elsie to be nice. That’s all I have done.”

“You’re telling me he doesn’t have plans to spread-eagle her, Marion? Don’t you know his man ways by now? And she, of all girls. She.”

“She? What? What?” Marion asked. “Why are you both against me?”

“Don’t you know what she’s holding tight, that Elsie Nettle,” Ginny said from the sofa, eyes on the reddened edges of her kerchief. “Marion, I hope to goodness you did not know. Because if you knew, if you knew…”

“What? What can you mean?” Marion said.

“I wonder how you’d dare,” Louise hissed, tongue forking. “I wonder how you’d dare fasten him up with a gal sick through like that.”

“Sick?”

“She’s got ole joe,” Ginny said, pounding her fragile boned forearm down on the sofa. “Nursie Nettle’s got the dread syph. Ain’t I finally the lucky one in some comparison?”

“I don’t believe you,” Marion said, Elsie’s fairy-pure face looming before her eyes. It was impossible. “She’s not got that.”

“She’s got it, don’t you doubt it,” Louise said, grabbing again for Marion’s wrist, which Marion wrenched free. “Look what you’ve set us in for.”

Marion backed up three steps, feeling like the waif in some handkerchief-twisting melodrama. What had she done to deserve such wrath and deceit?

Louise couldn’t stop. “First you start up with him and you don’t dally, no, it has to be a love match, a grand passion, Greta Garbo in the drawing room. Ca-mille,” she said, throwing her head back grandly. “But you don’t see that it’s Gent Joe we’re talking about. Gent Joe, who lifts every skirt hem in ten square miles. And so Gent Joe doesn’t come round so much. You decide you like what he gives you and you gotta get it all the time. So what do you do to keep him? Trot in that sickly nymph all loaded up on Neosalvarsan. Even as you must know she’ll empty what’s left of Joe Lanigan’s pockets and run him through the sick. She’s a filthy thing. Myra Jenks told me. She saw her file. Well, you know those mountain rubes and their ways. You brought her in, Marion. You brought her in.”

“It’s not true,” Marion said, with shaking breath. “You haven’t any right, Louise Mercer, to go spreading such lies. Lies no doubt spread by Myra, who’s a horrible gossip and has had her ire on you for months.” She knew it wasn’t true. She knew how the nurses were, with their careless tales. And then it came into her head and before she could think about it, she added, “Just like with the machine. Just like you did with that X-ray machine. I didn’t forget it.”

“Marion!” Ginny started up fast, then her cough disclosed and she could not go on. Her body, though, it was quaking and her eyes pinpointed. She looked ready for something and it was frightening to Marion. Something was not right with her, like Marion’s cousin, six years old, stayed with them while suffering through rabbit fever and thought Marion’s father a demon and screamed all night.

“You so high and mighty,” Louise snarled, face flaming, moving closer toward Marion, finger pointed, the heat coming off her. “Yet when do you turn your hands up at our offers of cakes and candies? You just don’t wish to think about how we come by them. The doctor’s wife can lay in velvet as she chooses, but where is she when the bill comes? And now things aren’t raw enough for us and you bring her in. You bring her in and crowd over the pot. The pot near empty already. That rotting girl.”

“I can’t know what you mean, Louise. I can’t. Elsie’s an everyday girl like we are, I am, I don’t know what you are, I don’t know it now,” Marion said, feeling suddenly dizzy, feeling suddenly the prickly junipers bursting before her eyes, making her head quaky. Who were these women? she wondered. Who were they and what was she?

“How,” Louise began, then her voice shook apart and she had to pull it together again, breathing deeply. “How…How do you think we live, Marion?”

Marion could see something tear loose in Louise, something tear loose, and she was so lost and the thing in Louise that Marion knew so well, the tremendous thumping heart and all it held, it was there. It was still there. The rest was panic and noise.

Then something struck Marion urgently, even as she realized she had in some dark, unsaid way known it all along. “Louise,” she said, “did you intend to give me to Mr. Lanigan? Was that your idea, Louise? Was I your gift? Your payment, past due?”

“No!” Louise said, shaking her head, shaking it so vigorously her dark red curls unspooled. “He took you. All I could do was keep it under our roof.”

“I think you set me out for him, Louise,” Marion said, her head reeling. “How is that not what you accuse me of?”

“You don’t see, Marion. How do you suppose we make rent? She…,” Louise said, almost a howl, then, pointing to Ginny, “…has not worked in sixteen months. She has had to go to County three times. We can’t afford a clinic like Werden. We’re still paying bills to the last hospital, so behind they smeared me for delinquency. They tried to pin a fence charge on me too for selling our own things. Gifts that were ours to sell. The only shimmer, Marion, the only shimmer we got is the fairy dust Gent Joe has scattered.”

And with this last sentence her face fell in on itself, and her shoulders fell too, and it reminded Marion of something she couldn’t quite name, something she’d seen on a face once, someone’s face, was it her own face? Her own face in the mirror the night Dr. Seeley first did not make it home and the room he had left her in but half paid and she not even knowing for certain if they were still in Nevada or if they’d crossed the border into California. And she with not twelve cents in her battered handbag.

“Oh, Louise,” Marion said, moving toward her, and Louise came upon her fast and embraced her, clinging tightly to Marion and saying whispered things Marion could not quite hear. Secret words too lovely to say out loud.

It was as though Marion could see Louise’s beating heart laid bare, and she knew then how Louise had taken her as her charge and she herself had treated it too lightly, like a gift easily given when it was not. When it was blood meant. How had she missed that? Had anyone taken such care of her before?

“Louise,” Marion said, “I promise, we will get whatever money we need. We will. I will make sure of that. Dr. Seeley is on his way here. He will be here by Easter and he can help us. He will.”

Louise didn’t say anything, but her hands on Marion were so tight.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Louise said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want him to do it. I didn’t think it would really happen. I thought you were just silver trimmings for him to eye. And then he won you over, as he does. You were my friend, but there it was. He took you and it worried me. It grieved me. But there it was. You see what he is now. You see we must fasten ourselves to each other. Tie each other post to post. We must.”

Neither of them was looking at Ginny, both so wrapped in their girl forgiveness and Marion daubing Louise’s tears with thumb and forefinger and Louise vining her arm around Marion’s waist and they pressed forehead to forehead. Back somewhere, though, Marion could feel Ginny, could feel her watching, watching like the green tuning eye on the radio, flickering hot.

“We’re hitched wagon to wagon for the long haul, aren’t we, Meems? Don’t you know?” Louise murmured and nuzzled nose against Marion’s lips and it turned to kisses and Marion felt a funny flush but before she could think twice, Ginny’s voice came crackling out.

“Look at you now, arms all over Louise, after what you’ve done.”

Arms all over, Marion thought. A flash came to her of that private tableau, Ginny’s white thigh slung and Louise’s arm sliding between bent leg, dimpled knee.

Something quivered in Marion’s chest and she pulled fast from Louise’s arms, eyes on Ginny, who was like a snapped trolley wire sparking on the pavement.

All that rabid energy that had been rushing through Ginny all night—like before, like before, in the cold bathtub, she drawling, ugly, I might do anything when it’s like this…. Just you see what I can do. Then, seeing her and Louise like that, somehow worse than her and Louise fighting, much worse. And now there she was, like a cornered thing, teeth bared.

“Propping up that polluted nurse for his pleasures,” Ginny spat at Marion, voice jumpy and rough. “You’re the pretty little leech. Drawing him dry for us. A sharp-toothed little bloodsucker. Must supply Gent Joe with fresh gash. Bring in that slanty little gash. Infecting us all with her, stealing Joe’s charms and dancing high kicks while we can’t make rent and the wheeze from the lungers’ camp, I can hear it from here.”

It was the ugliest words she’d ever heard and Marion wanted to cover her ears.

“No, Gin-Gin, it ain’t—,” Louise started, turning as Ginny rose from the sofa, muslin twining between bare legs.

“She may fool you, Louise, because you are softhearted, but I have long had this prairie flower in my keen sights,” said Ginny, and her face had that aspect Marion had seen but once before, like a white sheet pulled taut and eyes slanting to black arrows and mouth but a red line. “Trying to get her dainty hooks in. She’s been at it for months. And here I get sicker and she slinks closer, playing the innocent, like I don’t know.”

“Ginny,” Marion said, but she couldn’t focus. Ginny’s face, torn flat, was like a stranger’s, some strange girl you’d see in a high-up window at the state hospital and she’d be tapping at it, tapping at you.

“Ginny, don’t you dare,” Louise snapped. “Marion isn’t doing any such thing. She loves you. No one’s doing the things you’re…No one’s doing—”

“Now I know! Now I know!” Ginny crowed, and Louise, as if realizing something, rushed toward Ginny, grabbing her shoulders.

“I wonder who’s been filling your ear with tongue oil,” Louise said, holding Ginny fast between strong hands. “I wonder. Was it really the milkman who gave—”

Ginny pulled herself free, face coloring with angry blood. “She’s fooled and enticed you, Louise. She has her way, you’ll light a shuck with her and leave me to wither. But I will put a stop to it. She’s Pandora, come to town with her dirty little box to bring us all to ruin. She’s a plague and she has ruined us all.”

“No, Ginny,” Louise tried again, voice edging into panic, which edged Marion’s further still. “Ginny, you’re all roostered up and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re not to do this. You’re not to do this.”

“Just you wait until Dr. Seeley returns and I give him an earful of what his wife has been up to in his absence.”

“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare speak of such things,” Marion said, so hot now she felt like her skin was curling from her. “Don’t you dare mention his name.”

“Oh, won’t he like to hear of what dirty deeds under coverlet with Jack Lanigan. Filthy things, abominations, the stuff of whorehouses. Oh, and won’t I add about the pills and tonics and goodness knows. Knowing Joe Lanigan there was a shakerful of snow, wasn’t there, Marion? Wouldn’t he like to know his dear-heart wife was spending her evenings back flat on heaving mattresses, blowing like Cocaine Lil? Wouldn’t he like to know what his wife—”

Marion’s hand shot out and slapped Ginny hard in the face.

“You won’t say a thing, Ginny, you won’t, else you’ll hear what I can broadcast, wild tales.” And once Marion started, she couldn’t stop herself and it came out. It just came out, even as Louise kept pulling on her and Marion tried to wriggle away roughly.

She did not know she was going to say it and never would have thought she would ever say it, but she did.

“I have things I can tell, I have things I can shout to high heavens to shame you,” Marion burst out, grabbing Ginny’s spindly arm with one hand and with the other jabbing her own chest with her thumb. “You know what they say about you two at the clinic, don’t you? Love’s labor’s lost, that’s what they say. Oh, the whispers and winks, and everyone knows how unnatural you two—”

As if in one move, Ginny tore Marion’s arm away and, squirming like a silverfish, she reached in the side-table drawer and drew out the girls’ famed pistol.

“Oh, sweet Mary, Ginny, put that thing away,” Louise said, and it was nearly a wail. “She doesn’t mean it, she doesn’t mean it.”

Marion’s heart galloped wildly and the little gun looked so big and Ginny’s face so frightening, her veins rising from her arms as she lifted the weapon, cording blue up her neck and to her forehead.

“I will do no such thing. I will not have this, Louise,” Ginny said, voice curdling, her cough threatening to overtake her.

Watching her and heart lashing, Marion began backing away, but Ginny was upon her. “Don’t you run, Marion Seeley. Don’t you dare run from me.”

Ginny upon her so fast, Marion felt the back of her head knock against the wall and the pistol pointing straight at her chest. Wriggling away and shoving Ginny, she turned to face Louise, stock-still and white with terror, and Marion heard the sound, the short report, before she could even gasp, and the sound of flesh tearing from her hand. She grabbed desperately at the pistol, singeing hot, and she and Ginny fell to the floor, Marion on top and looking down at twisty little Ginny, that minxing blond thrush, now beneath her, churning under her and spitting and hacking and cursing Marion and cursing her so. “I’ll shoot you, Marion Seeley, for what you’ve done. You will be sorry. I’ll shoot that pretty face to pieces.”

Both pairs of hands wrapped tight on the burning pistol and Louise shouted something in the background, the second shot came like a bolt in Marion’s ears, and her hand felt as if pierced in two and then the gun flew up and there was a third shot.

Ginny’s face crumpled like shiny paper and Marion felt her blood screaming and Ginny’s face, it turned black, and in an instant it was gone.

Marion felt herself spring backward like a jack-in-the-box and thud against the wall. Lifting her head, she saw Louise, looking down at her, fingers to lower lip. Then Marion’s eyes fell to her own hand, her burning hand with gun still wrapped tight. Her other hand torn to pulp, like a bloody keyhole in the center.

“Marion,” Louise said, and that was when Marion saw the gaping red ring on Louise’s dress, just above the hip.

“Louise, you have been shot.” Marion heard her voice say these words.

Looking down at herself, Louise saw the blood, which was blossoming, and then her legs gave out on her and she collapsed to the floor.

JOE LANIGAN was leaning over her and his hand was open and was he going to slap her?

The crack came at her and the burning on her face something fierce.

“Don’t hit me, Joe,” she murmured. “How’d you get here, Joe?”

“You telephoned me, Marion,” he was saying, and he stood back up straight. He still had his hat on, that one with the brim, he said the brim was felted under water by hand, but that couldn’t be, could it, and his linen suit was so white, like vanilla ice cream.

Her hand was in her lap, but it was not her hand but the hand of a carnival clown, big and spongy and not hers at all. And the red from it was everywhere.

“I did? I telephoned you, Joe?” Then she remembered wrapping Louise’s housecoat around herself and running down the street to the soda fountain, which was closed. The old man mopping the floor saw her and let her in. “I burned myself,” she had said, “but my husband is a doctor.” The man shrugged and kept mopping.

She went in the booth and whispered, “Mr. Lanigan, it’s a dreadful thing. Her face is gone. It’s just gone and my hand is hot.”

“Mrs. Seeley, what…”

“Mr. Lanigan, Louise is lying still but what of Ginny and that elfin face crushed like a cigarette?”

“Marion, where are you?”

“I’m in hell, Mr. Lanigan. You never told me how it felt. You should have, so I’d’ve known.”

NOW JOE IN HIS ICE-CREAM SUIT looked down at her, and wet, oh, her temple felt wet, and reaching up she felt the thin tuft of Ginny-blond hair stuck to her forehead.

“Marion, what, what—”

She tried to tell him but the words were floating from her and she couldn’t hold on to them, her blood still rushing so hard, her chest still heaving, and Joe Lanigan’s face, his eyes darting, his mind working, trying to piece it together.

“And the gun exploded, and her face went too.”

“And Louise?”

“I don’t know how. The gun exploded three times. And click-clacked about.”

“I see,” he said, but how could he? He started to walk toward Louise but stopped several feet before her body, sprawled.

“We were fighting about such dreadful things and they were saying these things about you. These horrid things. And Louise, she…”

“What were they saying, Marion?”

“It doesn’t matter, for I am lost. I am lost. I shall go to Mexico,” she said, even as she said it remembering Dr. Seeley was well on his way up north by now. Two, three days away from here.

“Marion, stand up and let me see your hand,” he said, and he helped her to her feet and put his tender hands on hers and she felt certain now he would save her. He would save her.

“You’ve been shot, Marion,” he said. “I can see the bullet.”

“Oh, Joe.” And she leaned toward him, and then his eyes, she caught sight of them, and they were so dark and lost. I have thrown him, she thought. He does not know what to do.

He looked down at the floor and saw the gun there. He picked it up delicately, as though it were a wounded sparrow. Together, they looked at it.

“Marion, what have you done?” he said, and she’d never heard such lostness in his voice.

“I was to be killed,” she said.

“They were base women,” Joe said, still staring at the pistol. “They were degenerate women and I should never have let you traffic with them.”

At that moment, she saw the blur out of the corner of her eye, the pale flash of Louise’s blood-fronted dress from behind Joe.

“Louise,” Marion said, clutching her chest with one hand and reaching out with the other.

Wan as Lazarus, Louise had climbed to her feet.

Joe’s eyes seized on Marion’s and he half turned and saw Louise, like some forlorn ghost, blazing red hair and flushed chest and advancing upon them and it was all only seconds.

It was the way his arm extended, like he was batting off a fly, but the gun in his hand came with it and the crack from its barrel sizzled in Marion’s ears.

Louise slumped to her knees like at a church pew.

Marion and Joe watched her and Marion felt herself go toward her, to lean down and catch her, but the look in Louise’s eyes, the awful surprise in them…

Her mouth opened as if to speak but then nothing came and Marion saw the smoke rising from the hole in her chest. Then Louise buckled and pitched to the floor.

“I WILL TAKE CARE OF IT, MARION,” Joe was saying, as he dragged Ginny’s doll-like body across the room. The sight was one Marion knew she would never forget.

“I will repair this,” he said, his suit jacket now off, his sleeves rolled up, his forearms pocked with blood. “I will repair this as if it were solely mine to repair.”

He had piled the bodies in the corner. They were a heap of worn silk and curls and blood-rimmed sorrow.

“Joe, what can you mean?” Marion managed. “We must explain to the police. Accidents. Accidents. We must explain it.”

“No good, Marion, and don’t think about it or I will have to shut you up about it,” he said, and he lifted the coffee table and moved it off the rug. “Look what you did. Look what you did, Marion. You took a gun to your friends and you’ve made me share a part and you think the police will understand? But I will take care of it. Because you are a sick, sick thing.”

“I am not,” Marion said, wrapping the dish towel around her hand tighter. “Why did you shoot Louise?” Her voice edged into a scream. “Why did you shoot her?”

“Marion, you told me they were trying to murder you. Do you think I’m the kind of man who would not protect you from violence?”

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” Marion moaned.

“I think you do,” he said, and his eyes were cold.

HE ROLLED those girls up in the carpet.

He rolled them up in the carpet like Cleopatra.

Then Mr. Worth came with the Worth Brothers Meat Market truck. When he walked in, his face turned gray. He said some things to Joe and then he looked over at Marion, who sat in the corner still, holding her hand to her chest, looking up and watching them.

“Is she all right?” he asked Joe, and Joe said it didn’t matter, and they carried the carpet out like moving day.

“Where are you taking the girls,” Marion said suddenly, head jerking up, body rising stiffly. “Where are you taking my girls.”

“Marion, look out the window. See if the street is clear,” Joe said.

Twitching, her body feeling as if on strings, she made it to the window and floated a finger through the curtains, peering out to a great black nothing.

“When I come back,” Joe said, “this place must be cleaned, Marion. It must be cleaned top to bottom.”

And she looked up at him in his blood-edged shirtsleeves and one browning strand stretched across the starched shirt.

“It will be clean,” she said, and it was her voice, but it was as if someone else were using it, cranking it from her chest like a windup doll. “It will be clean, Mr. Lanigan. It will be virgin pure.”

LATER, she would remember nothing of it, but the cleaning went on for hours. Carbolic acid and white vitriol. That house had never been so spotless, Marion’s arms red and raw, her wound festering under its wrapping. She could feel the bullet there, small and tight, and her skin puffing around it, cradling it.

Sometime, Joe returned, now in a pearl gray suit and hat, clean-shaven as if on his way to morning church service.

He had found Marion on one of the girls’ beds, hand wrapped in the dish towel.

She didn’t move when he entered the room, he seemed so funny standing there, almost as if he were picking her up for a date.

He was saying some things.

“Worth and I, we took them away. And Mr. Worth, well, he fixed everything, Marion.”

“Mr. Worth,” Marion said, and she didn’t remember him at all, not even the leg of lamb he once brought or his trilling hand organ. “Did Mr. Worth fix the girls? Did he really?” She felt her body shake and jerk. She wondered if she’d dreamt some or all of the night before. How could Mr. Worth put Ginny’s face back together? Mr. Worth, who spent days dressing young beef for the silk stockings in town who could dole out for more than brisket and soupbones. “Are they fine now, Joe? Are they mended? Where are my girls?”

Joe took his hat off, shaking his head. “Marion, Marion,” he said, and he walked toward her and rested a hand on her leg. “You know what you did to the girls. The girls are gone. And now he’s fixed it so we can take them away.”

“Take them away?”

“I had planned that we would take them to the desert and bury them. But after some conversations with Mr. Worth, who is very familiar with those roadways for his businesses, well, he said it was foolhardy. The highway patrol are a constant presence on those roads. The more distance, the better. So we need to get them far away, Marion. Do you see? This is where we need your sweet face.”

He sat down on the bed beside her, taking care not to brush against her hand, nor let the bloody dish towel touch his suit. “I am sorry for my coldness before, Marion, you must see. You are mine and I will protect you. You will see what I have done for you. For us both.”

He helped her to her feet and guided her to the living room, air heavy with bleach, making her stomach spiral.

ALL SHE COULD THINK of was Louise buried six feet deep in the desert, body weighted with rocks. Ginny’s candied mouth open, caught, midcry, and filled brimful with glittering sand.

How could she reckon with this?

In the middle of the room, next to the teetery coffee table, sat two black, silver-latched packing trunks, one very large and one more compact.

“You see, Marion,” he said, arm around her, holding her up. “It’s all taken care of.”

“I don’t see,” she said, clutching fingers to his lapel. “Are we going on a steamer? Are we running to far-flung lands?” And her head twisted loose, and she began giggling and Joe did not like that one bit.

“Marion,” he said, reaching round and grabbing her face in hand. “Marion, you must see what we have done here. You must know what we have done with the girls. Do you see?” Turning her face with one hand, turning it hard, he pointed to the trunks with the other. He pointed to the trunks and Marion would always remember this. His right arm around her neck, hand grooved under her chin like a vise, and left arm pointing, like God himself, down to Earth, down to Adam, down to the black trunks on the unimpeachable floor.

Her girls, her girls. Her girls in those trunks like so much packing. A flash in her head, Louise’s long limbs curled at funny angles, crumpled like a magician’s assistant inside a magic box. And Ginny like some stretched-thin rag doll twisting round itself.

“Oh, Joe,” she said, and she felt her shoulders convulse, but there was nothing in her stomach but gin. “Oh, Joe.”

“Listen, Marion,” he said, voice stern but gentle. “You must pull yourself together here. I need you to help. You can’t fall to pieces on me.”

“No, Joe,” she said, “I won’t.”

“Here,” he said, taking a packet from his pocket. “Take these.”

They were pills and she raised a palm of them to her mouth until he swatted her arm down. “Not all of them, Marion. Not now. One.”

She did as she was told, eyes never leaving the trunks. “Joe,” she said, tongue dusty with the powdery pill. “Joe, how did you get them in there? How did they fit?”

“Worth took care of everything, Marion. Don’t you worry about that. He has,” he said, and there was the sparest of pauses, “operated on Louise and made it all work.”

Marion felt her knees turn to soft dough and she began to drop to the floor.

“What did I say to you, Marion?” Joe said, pulling her back, raising her shoulders high, turning her to face him and then slapping her twice hard across either cheek. Her head rang. “I have done everything, Marion. And now it is your turn.”

HE TOLD HER how it would be. He told her to go home and pack a bag. He told her to telephone the Lightning Delivery Service and have them pick up the trunks and take them to the station and load them on the train and then they would be waiting for her twelve hours later when she arrived in the Southern Pacific Station in downtown Los Angeles. See how he’d rigged it, so she would never even have to touch them? See how he had arranged everything? And she would never have to lay hands on those trunks. Never even have to touch those awful boxes sitting there. Those awful boxes.

“But won’t Mr. Worth… Won’t he…”

“He won’t say a goddamned word, Marion,” Joe said, and it was the first time he had ever cursed before her. “They’re his trunks. He knows I have enough on him to hang him. Horse meat to hospitals. That’s just the start.”

She didn’t know what that might mean and didn’t want to guess. Everything seemed so different with Joe now and yet somehow the same, just with her eyes struck wide, lashed open, there was no hiding. Joe was Joe. And it was a dark thing.

Was this the one who had held her curls between fingers and pressed lips to, tickling stomach, lips on faint down and eyes bewitched?

It was a dark thing.

So she packed her bag and it was all like a dream, fuzzy, ill defined. Later, she recalled running her good hand along the front of her good dress, smoothing its worn cotton.

“WHAT YOU GOT IN HERE, BARBELLS?”

The Lightning Delivery Service men looked at the trunks. One had started raising it onto his dolly and then stopped.

“You joining the circus, angel? Gonna be the Strong Man, or Strong Gal?”

Marion smiled. She surely did. The pills, they were helping. She could feel herself move as if marionette lifted and she recited over and over again Joe’s instructions in her head. He told it to her three times and three times he made her repeat it back to him.

“You sure there’s not hooch in those trunks?” The other man winked. “’Cause we would have to report you for that.”

Marion kept her gentle smile and shook her head, filling out the baggage slips. “Oh no, I’m a Christian, gentlemen.” She did not know where that line had come from, but she was glad for it. It sounded so sincerely meant. Inside, somewhere under the gauze of the pills, there was a whirring terror, but she could barely hear it, a vague purling somewhere far away. And so she returned to Joe’s instructions and recited them with care: “A fellow worker and her friend, well, they packed all their worldly goods in there. They asked me to ship them. They’ve moved west.”

“And left you behind? Damn fools, I’d say.”

“They met some men,” she enunciated, “and went off with them to Los Angeles.”

“Sound like some girls. I’d like to meet those girls.”

“That’s the kind of girls they are,” she said.

“I’ll say. Say, this is going to cost a pretty penny.”

“I have the funds. They left me the funds.” As Joe directed, she showed the men a roll of bills.

“Well, how ’bout that? Those are some girls.”

THINGS BEGAN HAPPENING very fast and all the time was collapsing in on itself, softly falling to the center. It had something to do with her head and something to do with the pills and something to do with everything that mattered being gone.

She did not remember taking the streetcar home, but back at Mrs. Gower’s, she telephoned the clinic and told the weekend receptionist that she was quite sick and expected she would not be at work on Monday.

“Oh, I am sorry, Marion. You do sound rotten. Not yourself at all,” the girl said. “Take care. Hot-water bottle and hot toddy, you know?”

Suddenly, she felt terribly anxious. “I hope Dr. Milroy will not be mad at me for missing work.” As the words came from her mouth they sounded so silly to her, so frivolous she nearly laughed.

“Don’t worry. Everyone likes you, Marion,” the girl said. And Marion replied that she was so glad.

THE PLAN WAS FOR JOE to come to the rooming house at eight o’clock to drive her to the station. She had her head covered with the old cloche hat, as he told her, and she tucked every platinum bit of her hair underneath.

Waiting by the window, she watched her wounded hand and she could smell it and it smelled unclean despite all her ministrations. She took another of Joe’s pills and finally saw his Packard pull up at 8:20, leaving them only ten minutes to get to the station.

“You’re drunk, Joe,” she said as they pulled away from the curb, she with her satchel so heavy and he didn’t help not one bit. He was drunk and she couldn’t believe it.

But he just laughed and steered the wheel. He began instructing her on what to do. What had made sense earlier made no sense now. She said, again, “But, Joe, why don’t we just take the trunks into the desert and bury them? Why don’t we just do that? Why must we send them all the way to California? And why must I go too?”

He waved his hand at her, Masonic ring flashing, and she thought he might strike her again, but he was somehow gay. “I told you, baby doll, I told you. The highway patrol’ll find the trunks before we can blink and it will all come back to you. This way, it’s two girls, two girls notorious for their reckless, aberrant ways, out on a tear to Hollywood for a new life of casual debauch. Who wouldn’t believe that of them?”

She looked down at the ticket in her hand. MRS. H. MACGREW, it said.

“But why must I go too? Why can’t the trunks go without me?”

“You must go to be sure that the trunks are safely in the hands of my associate, Mr. Wilson. He will take care of everything there. What’s more, he will bring you to a physician to tend to your wound. It works perfectly, you see, as Los Angeles is a place I have associates and it is a place you have been before. It will swallow this up. Los Angeles is a place that swallows things like this up whole.”

He pulled an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the seat to her. “Take this,” he said, and she smelled the booze coming off him, from his mouth, his suit, his whole body. There was something in his face too. Something closed and done. “Now, what did I tell you, Marion? What are your instructions?”

“Get off the train at Southern Pacific Station and wait for Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson will find me,” she said, “by the pansies on my lapel.” She fingered the cloth pin on her dress. “Look for a thin man with yellow hair and spectacles and a green gabardine suit. It’s just like a motion picture. Like Mata Hari. That’s what you said. You said I was to be Mata Hari.”

“That’s right, darling, Mata Hari. That’s you,” he said, laughing, eyes gaudy with liquor. It was awful, and the look on his face made Marion, even behind the numb the pills cast across her, feel herself die. She died right there. It was all over. It was all over and she knew that once she got on the train, it would be as if all the lights had gone out all over the world.

For twelve hours she sat in her seat on the Golden State Limited and barely lifted her head. The man seated next to her had a large shiny face and big teeth and a pomaded head of hair that shone across the car like a searchlight, and he told her he was going to work in motion pictures and she should too, or did she already, because she looked the spitting image of Constance Talmadge and had anyone ever told her that.

The man talked for a while, and Marion looked out the window, her hand hidden behind her purse, which contained the envelope Joe had given her, and she knew the hand was aching but she couldn’t feel it aching. She looked into the black pane.

“Honey, there ain’t nothing to see,” the man said, and she could feel the wink in his voice. She wondered, suddenly, seeing his grinning reflection in the glass, if this was how Joe Lanigan was, really was at bottom. Was this him?

But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be, and she would make him love her once more.

WHEN SHE FINALLY FELL ASLEEP, that was when she could shut out Louise and Ginny no longer. They were there, they were in the seats across from her, lounging nudely like lovely harem girls with jeweled fingers and toes, and they were chattering away at her, and Marion could feel herself wanting to laugh with them and it was lovely and they were back. They were putting arms around each other and Ginny was singing “Cheerful Little Earful” and Marion wanted to reach over and squeeze her little thrush cheek and as she started to, as her fingertips nearly touched that flushed face, before, before…before the face blew to pieces, to shimmery black powder, to nothing. To nothing.

To pause and think, to think about what had occurred—the savage thing she had, with fumbling hands, wrought—would ruin her. To pause and think of those black boxes jostling in the freight car behind her, to picture the bodies curled round inside—well, one could not allow thoughts to scamper in that direction and yet go on. No. No. She knew in some way it was God’s wrath fallen upon her for her sinful ways and worse still her rapture over the sin, her openmouthed hunger for it.

And yet thoughts of Joe Lanigan still came. They wouldn’t stop, even now. She couldn’t break it. Nothing could break it. She so wanted it broken for good.

IT WAS LIKELY TWELVE HOURS LATER, the spidery hands of the Southern Pacific Station clock told it, but it felt like a minute or a year and she took another pill, noting sadly only eight left and how would she go on without them?

She found a seat under the arrivals-and-departures board, fluffed her crushed pansy pin and awaited the arrival of Mr. Wilson, who would wave a hand and fix everything, Joe Lanigan’s gleaming West Coast proxy and her savior.

AN HOUR AND TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES had passed when she felt the nerve pulsing in her face. Eyes weary from scanning the crowd, wave after wave of blond men in gabardine, nearly all of whom smiled back at her but none of whom answered to Mr. Wilson, though one said he could be President Hoover if she were so inclined.

Oh, he was not coming. She wondered if Joe Lanigan had deceived her and Mr. Wilson would never arrive—if in fact this Mr. Wilson existed at all. She wondered this, but she could not let herself believe it, not now. She couldn’t slip down into that murky place. It would swallow her whole.

LOOKING IN THE LADIES’ ROOM MIRROR, she felt herself tingling all over. There was a monumentality to the moment. It was so big she was made breathless by it.

Outside, in the bank of telephone booths, she had telephoned Joe Lanigan’s house. “I’m sorry, miss, but he is out on business,” the nurse said. “We don’t expect him until this evening.” Marion could picture her, tray in hand, in that silent house, that dark mahogany corridor, that lonely telephone in that lonely house, the metallic smell of illness choking the air.

She knew of no other way to reach Joe.

Joe had made himself impossible to reach.

For one long minute she was sure that the best, the only, the correct thing to do was to walk back to the tracks and throw herself under the next train like some white-necked heroine from a melodrama. She was certain this was the thing she must do. She was certain of it.

Placing a hand to her face, to her quivering chin and jaw, she asked, Marion, is this the end? Is this the dark pitch at cliff ’s edge?

But it was not. It was not. She would not let it be so. She had found herself in dark corners before, not so dark as this, but dark in other ways—Nights spent lonely as if alone, Dr. Seeley, hollow-eyed and lost, crying to her and skin-popping, and what to prepare her for this, minister’s daughter Dutch Reformed pure and Sunday school in her eyes; this was not for her but it was hers and she had to—she had found her way out before. She would find her way out now. In some ways, she was surprised how fast her blood still ran, how hard her heart still galloped. She was not such a wilting thing. It turned out she was not that thing at all.

Forty dollars remained in the envelope Joe had given her. She had forty dollars with which to save herself.

Her first thought was to abandon the trunks and use her return ticket for the next train home. But the station officials would, of course, find what was inside them and then where would she be, where would she be? It was all too close, it was all right upon her. Those trunks. Those trunks. They were leering, black-hearted things, weren’t they? They were so big, she was sure she could see them through the station walls, through the walls of the claims office and right through into their messy centers.

She felt her throat catch, her eyes turn dun in the mirror. She shook her head, shook her thoughts away, juggled them out of chaos into focus.

Oh, God, one can’t think like this, one cannot, she determined. She just needed time, she needed distance. She needed to figure things out. To slow down her thoughts, to think things through. She tried to concentrate. If only she had time, time to reach Joe, who would have to account for himself, who would have to make things right.

A picture came to her of the Hotel Munn, a shaggy place on Olive Street where she and Dr. Seeley spent six weeks the previous year, awaiting yet another licensing hearing. But the staff might recognize her.

Then she remembered the place on East Fifth Street, above the Blue Bell sandwich stand. The St. Curtis Hotel. She had gone there once, summoned by the manager to retrieve her husband, who had spent four days lounging in the lobby, ascending the stairs on occasion to take his pleasures with bug-eyed hah-peeners in various rooms whenever, as he said, the poppy fleet came in. The St. Curtis, she would go there. It was not a place where anyone was remembered. No one bothered you there. Not even the manager, who’d only wanted his two bits.

“I HAVE COME for those two trunks.”

“Aren’t I the happy fella,” the baggage claims man said, “because don’t they ever weigh a mother-in-law-sized ton and I thought I might have to move ’em to Unclaimed. What you got in them anyway? They sure are stirring up a stink.”

Marion smiled brightly. “Oh, I am sorry.”

“You know,” the man said, eyeing the trunks, “last year, fella up in Montreal, Canada, killed his wife with a claw hammer and shipped her here in a steamer. Ten days en route and stalled in the Plains on account of bad weather. By the time she got here, there wasn’t much left inside but some bones and slime. Only figured her out from her teeth. Her skin had slipped off like a moldy peach peel. Baby, did she stink. I’d’ve taken another shot of the ole mustard they gave me in the Marne over that any day,” the man said, handing her the slips to sign. Looking at her face, he added, quickly, “Aw, I’m sorry. I got a big yap. Are you okay, miss? I made you all green, didn’t I?”

“I’m all right,” she said, fingers delicately to lips. “Just a little travel sick. Will these fit in a taxicab?”

“Between you and me, I think you’re better off hiring a truck. I know a fella runs a hand laundry truck between here and Good Samaritan.”

“Will you phone him for me?” She showed him all her teeth, had not smiled so broadly since playing Little Eva at her grammar school drama pageant.

“Consider him on his way. He ain’t gonna like that smell any more than me, but slap him some extra green and he can hold his nose the whole way.” He paused and looked at the trunks again, and then at Marion. “I am supposed to ask, that wouldn’t be meat in there, would it? ’Cause it sure stenches like meat.”

Marion bit her lip. “I know it’s against the rules, but I promised Mama.” She had no idea where the lie came from, or how she was spinning it with such bright conviction. “It’s just two white-tailed bucks my brother shot up in the mountains. For Mama’s Easter dinner.” Where did such lies come from and from what place did such reserve glide, smooth as churned butter? Was it the pills? Was it Joe Lanigan’s mesmeric speech in her ear? It was as if she had been born to it, and it was so much easier, so much easier to declaim than anything real or true.

“Ham always worked for me,” he said, shaking his head. Mrs. Wilson, she scrawled on the form he handed her. “You’re lucky you remind me of my sister Irene,” he said, stamping the form. “Gee, I miss her. She got the lungs bad.”

THE KEEP KLEEN LAUNDRY DRIVER, chest wide as a squeeze-box, rubbed his chin and tilted his head.

“I know they’re quite heavy,” Marion said, twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. “But I’m not going far.”

“Hell, Fritzie, I’ll help you stack ’em on the hand truck,” the baggage claims man offered.

Sucking on his teeth, the driver nodded. “Could do it for five bones. You got five bones?”

Marion said she did.

“YOU SURE this is the place for you?” the driver asked when they turned onto East Fifth Street. A building on the corner promised INDIVIDUAL LOCKERS FOR 450 MEN, 20 CENTS.

“Yes, I am,” she said, fumbling in her purse for five dollars.

Three doors down she saw the St. Curtis, a sun-beaten awning curling across its narrow façade, iron grills spidering along the windows. Painted just beneath the eaves were the words NOW FULLY FIREPROOF. The Iwaki Cafeteria had replaced the Blue Bell sandwich stand, but the same sign covered the window: GOOD FOOD 5 C.

THE SWEATY MAN at the front desk was leaning over some pocket toy and didn’t look up until Marion had cleared her throat three times. His sleeves rolled up, Marion could see a blurry tattoo of a flaming dove and the word FOURSQUARE.

“A room, please.”

He looked up, squinting. “Sure about that?”

She nodded, dabbing her neck with a handkerchief.

“I’d warn you the cops did a lady bed toss just last night, but you don’t look that sort. Then again, these days, there’s all sorts.”

“I’m just tired,” she said, “and need to rest. You don’t need to worry about me.”

He squinted at her again, then set down his toy and handed her a pen, spinning the heat-rippled register to face her.

She signed Mrs. Dove.

“The gal they rousted, she was tired too. So tired she had to be flat on her back every fifteen minutes for three days straight.”

Marion handed the man a dollar.

“I tried to give her Jesus,” he said, sliding four dimes toward her, “but she said Jesus broke her heart one too many times. How you like that?”

Marion smiled.

“She rooked us for a dollar and a half, that pinkpants did, but left this behind,” he said, picking up the pocket toy, a small tin compact, and displaying it for Marion. One side was a smudgy mirror, the other had a picture of a man in a porkpie hat blowing three rings of smoke. “The gig is you gotta get the cigarette in his mouth,” he said, tilting it back and forth, with great delicacy. “It’s tougher than it looks.”

THE KEEP KLEEN DRIVER wheeled the trunks in for her. After a quick survey of the lobby—the man splayed across the spongy wing chair, hat covering his face, the tins of Doctor Bedlam magnetic powder in each corner, the tiny woman in the red hat with the feather, biting her thumbnail and pacing between the front door and the telephone booth in the back—he said he’d take the trunks upstairs, no charge.

“You be careful now, miss,” he said, elbow leaning on the doorjamb, the hotel room nearly too small to hold Marion, the two trunks and him. “This ain’t a place to be for long.”

She thanked him and assured him her friends would arrive shortly for their trunks.

“Kind of a world,” he said, walking away, “leaving women alone in such places.”

THE SORROW CAME CRASHING IN, it overtook her. She thought she might drown in it.

She fought it off. She tried to make it unreal. But the trunks seemed to grow larger and turn blacker with each passing minute. Standing there, the smell of dirty linens, pest powders, ammonia and something like wet fur stifling, she felt a deep, bone-curling aloneness she’d never known before. It was a sorrowful thing, but it was something else too. For the first time since gazing up, baby-eyed, into her father’s long face, she felt no one at all was looking, no one at all could see. No one could stop her from whatever she might do. And nothing she might do would leave a mark, no one would ever know. She felt drunk with it, braced and grimy and fixing to curl her fists—even as those trunks bloomed larger still.

The trunks, it was true, she could hear them creaking in the hot room, the heat expanding the canvas and pine, stretching the slats. She put her shaking hands on them. That was when the smell first came to her, began to seep into the space. She could feel it climbing up her body, skimming under her clothes, under her fingernails and into her skin. It made her think of the clammy bottom of things, dank and lost and dirt-mouthed. She felt something damp on her ankle. Bending down, she saw the puckering side of one trunk, wet to the touch.

It was all too much. It was so much that it might well have been nothing. She sank to the bed and covered her mouth with the cloth pansy she had unclipped from her dress.

Marion, there are things you are sure you’d never do, Louise had said to her once. Until you have.

SHE TRIED TO FORCE HERSELF TO SLEEP, but in her head there were some thoughts and the thoughts filled vivid-to-bursting pressures in her head: Joe Lanigan sleeping off his drunk, thinking he had rid himself of her, some sash weight wrapped round his ankle.

Joe Lanigan, safe in his rich man’s bed, thinking she would surely end up in some doomy prison cell, so love-struck as to never breathe his complicitous name, or so disordered, so hopeless, who would believe her?

“BUT I’M TELLING YOU, he’s not home yet, miss.” It was that private nurse again.

“You put him on the telephone,” Marion said, and it was a voice she’d not known before, a voice filled with iron vibrating, a blade struck to quiver. “You tell him for me, nurse, that he must speak to me, or he won’t like what occurs. You tell him that.”

“Yes, miss,” she replied, voice trembly.

Marion waited, tucked in the lobby’s telephone booth, the woman in the red hat giving her a witchy stare and clicking her heels on the floor, tugging up the ends of the threadbare rug, throwing dust into the air. It was quite a show. It was quite a show this crimson-lipped tootsie was giving, and it reminded Marion, achingly, of Ginny. For a moment, she thought, Oh, I miss Ginny.

The mind can do what it wants, she thought. It can make anything so.

“Mrs. Seeley.” Joe’s voice hustled into Marion’s ear, and it was his softest, deepest, kindest voice and she found herself wishing he were here, wishing he were still caring for her. “Are you with Mr. Wilson? Has he mended your hand?”

“Mr. Wilson never came, Mr. Lanigan. I had to take care of things on my own. I am trying to fix things, but I…” She felt her throat seal around the words. The gaudy red-hatted woman was now tapping her fingers along the glass of the booth, clamoring at Marion to hurry off the telephone. Her face was nearly pressed against the glass, a face from a burlesque handbill, a carnival poster. Marion couldn’t speak, couldn’t look, couldn’t stop shaking.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Seeley,” he said. “Are you at the station?”

“No,” Marion whispered, voice pitching high, “I couldn’t stay there, don’t you see? I am all alone and the trunks, Mr. Lanigan, the trunks are so large and they can’t be hidden. Everyone can smell them. Everyone can see them. There’s no hiding them.”

“Mrs. Seeley, I want you to listen to me—”

“Don’t forget me, Mr. Lanigan.”

“I would never, Mrs. Seeley. I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t. Tell me where you are and I will reach Mr. Wilson and make sure he comes to you directly.”

Marion felt something crackling in the back of her brain. Joe’s voice, the way he was speaking. The promises and now this.

The woman outside the booth was still rapping on the glass, her shiny red nails rattling away. Marion thrust open the booth door and whispered, rough and raw, “I will call the police, ma’am. Don’t doubt it. I will call the police else I set my nails to your face.”

The woman backed away with a low curse.

“Mrs. Seeley?” Joe was saying.

“Who is this Mr. Wilson?” Marion demanded, face turned back to the mouthpiece.

“He’s an associate. He is my California medical supplier. Tell me where you are, Marion.”

She began to speak, but then stopped herself. A picture came to her, shimmered before her, of that look on his face when he had dropped her off at the station. That look on his face that almost seemed to say, I’ll not see you again.

“I don’t think I will,” Marion blurted. “I don’t feel like I will meet Mr. Wilson.”

“Marion, listen to me, Marion, my darling… I know you are in a dark, obscure place right now. I cannot bear to think of it. Please, Marion, I want you to listen to me and very closely.”

“I don’t think I will,” she said, and hung up before she began to cry. Taking her forehead between her fingers, she told herself she would not submit to despair. She would not.

RETURNING TO HER ROOM, she saw a small card on the floor had been slid under the door in her absence. It read: Dr. Bell, Room 402. Please see me.

She stepped back into the hallway and saw a woman with sunken shoulders walking slowly in the other direction.

“Did you leave this card?” she called out. “Do you work for Dr. Bell?”

The woman turned around, spectacles balancing on the bridge of her nose, and jerked her head, gesturing Marion to follow.

Marion, pulling her own door shut behind her, did follow. Somehow it seemed she was to follow. She kept her purse in front of her bad hand and followed.

The room was larger than her own, was in fact two rooms with an adjoining door. The smell of ammonia was even stronger than in her own. A steel cart stood in the middle of the room, packed with smoked bottles and a tray with a tangle of pokey instruments.

Marion could feel her wounded hand throbbing chalk white and monstrous behind her handbag, which barely concealed it. Looking at the forceps and iodine swabs made the wound seem to pucker and dilate and she felt herself wincing.

“Do you know how far along, Mrs. Dove?” the woman asked her.

“Pardon?” How does she know my name? Marion wondered, and then thought of the man at the front desk.

“Do you know how far along you are? You can’t be more than six weeks.” She was eyeing Marion closely.

“Oh no!” Marion said. “I’m not…No, no. Why did you think—”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Dove,” she said, fingering the stethoscope, which curled around her hand like a licorice rope. “It’s completely discreet, I can promise you.”

The woman’s eyes were soft, and Marion almost felt like consenting, even though there was nothing to consent to. That was how eager and tender she felt, so ready for some comfort. Any comfort.

“You’re Dr. Bell, then?”

“Yes. Listen, Mrs. Dove, it will not take long and then your troubles, which seem so immense at this moment, will be gone.”

“But I’m—”

“Times are hard and fifteen dollars will do the job, Mrs. Dove.”

“But I am not here for that, ma’am—Doctor,” she said. “My troubles are not those troubles. But they are troubles.”

And she set her purse down and slipped off her stained glove, strained and pulled to seam tears by her swollen skin.

“Discretion is discretion,” Dr. Bell said, taking Marion’s hand in hers and turning it slowly for a better look. Metal glinted from the center of her doughy palm. “Three dollars. And you can keep the slug.”

BACK IN HER ROOM, Marion was both satisfied with herself and freshly terrified. The baggage claims man, the driver, the desk clerk, the doctor. How many witnesses must I collect, she thought. How many will know? Every hole I dig myself out of brings in another party who may hang me.

The smell was getting stronger and she knew it was time to decide some things.

She turned off the lamp and the room was quite dark, and when she pulled the blind on the window, there was no light but the thin band under the door.

When she was very young, six or seven, she was afraid of the dark, afraid of the night world and the world of sleep, the creeping, terrible feeling of a sleeping house, a sleeping street, a sleeping town and what dangers might come with she alone awake, wide-eyed. To fight this fearsome battle, she had created a creaky passageway in her head and at the end of the passageway, which took some time to reach, like putting a mesmer on herself, there was a special place of gossamer-winged fairies with ruby eyes, palaces etched from sparkling rock, velvet vales with streams threading through and she herself alighting from a white horse with a mane of flowing silver strands. Oh, each time she went to bed, the place grew grander and she fell in deeper and deeper, sinking herself until she could feel the horsehair against her legs, could feel her hands dug deep into that mane, the mane curling between her fingers, pulling her still closer.

Lying in the dark, she remembered that place, could even see it, dip her fingers into the mossy riverbanks and gaze, wonder-eyed, into the curling clouds of endless sky, remembered how easy it was to make everything else disappear.

Those trunks would have to be opened.

They would have to be opened.

My, there was so much she knew, who might’ve guessed, she thought. Who might’ve guessed my mind could think such thoughts, know such things?

Hospitals, she knew—oh, and there was first meeting Dr. Seeley at the hospital, remember, not dashing, but so dignified, so refined, and the way he tended to patients with tender words and gentle hands and had been so many places, had lived all over and had a snap cigarette lighter from San Francisco and cuff links that looked like little gold monkey fists and he was so patient with her, and listened to her with such care, she a flossy-headed junior nurse volunteer, nigh on eighteen years old but felt even younger—how was it she had forgotten all that?—but hospitals, yes, she knew that they would look at teeth, just like the baggage man said. That’s how they find them out. They look at the teeth. It was hard to think of Ginny having dental records, but she might well.

And then there were fingerprints. She knew all about that from the time the San Diego County Hospital called her to retrieve her husband, rolled on the docks and unconscious, and no wallet but fingerprints on file with the Los Angeles Police Department from the vagrancy arrest, or the practicing-medicine-without-a-license violation.

She unfolded the train schedule.

If she did things now, she could be on the seven o’clock train. Back at work Tuesday and nearly unmissed.

If she did things now.

THE LATEST PILL, she let it roll around on her tongue, she let it scatter its dust around the tomb of her mouth, and her head tingly from the last one and from her trip to her childhood vale, she knew she had worked herself into a way of doing, a way of getting things done.

Next thing, she had walked to the five-and-dime and purchased a claw hammer, a box of matches, six towels, thumbtacks, cleaning gloves and a small jug each of borax and carbolic acid.

It was going to be the opening that would destroy her. She knew that what she would see would never be unseen, what she would see would tattoo itself in dark ridges into her brain forever. Her dark spot on the brain.

Yet she did not pause.

There was no time to pause.

Oh, Joe Lanigan, he would not believe she could ever…Oh, Joe Lanigan, did he not always take her too lightly?

She knelt down and slid open the latches on the larger trunk, chest galloping, heart ballooning up her throat.

She felt it give, felt her fingers tuck underneath and lift.

The air seemed alive with the smell, the air itself seemed muddy, a fog, and Marion’s eyes unfocused and her stomach curled on itself.

That was when she saw the blond hair, like a wig in a shop window, loosely curled and filled with shades of honeycomb, sweet butter, daffodil and, as Marion’s eyes locked into focus, foamed through with black spray.

Then, dipping a gloved hand in, she had to—she had to, don’t you see—she twisted her arm deep, past the shiny black shell, like a mussel plucked from the sea, that had been Ginny’s face. Pushing heel of hand in, she groped deeper, sunk herself into it, fought off the smell and the horror. Her fingers touching everything, her stomach rising in her chest, she felt for teeth, she felt for hard enamel, and in finding, oh, it was an awkward move, and oh, she had to grab a hair hank to make it work, raised the hammer, and punched down hard.

She would not hear the sound. She would not hear the sound of the teeth going.

Then, digging hands in farther, hands sinking into sticky patches of horror, she pulled up both wrists, soft like tuggy blue sponges, and wrapped the carbolic-soaked towel around the bloated fingers, barely fingers, barely solid, but like some loose glove lying limp on top of a dresser. She pressed and pressed. The loops, ridges, slopes and furrows—gone.

Both hands done, she closed the trunk, walked over to the corner of the room, gloves dripping on the towels she’d stretched from trunk to door, and wept. Long, loping tears.

Then she walked over to the other trunk, which looked so small, so dainty, and braced herself for Louise, whose heart she felt beating in her own chest, and whom she now knew loved her with depths as to drown out a thousand Gent Joe Lanigans with his snide beaver coats and shallow heart.

Oh, Louise.

LOUISE’S LUSH THICKET of dark red hair.

And an eye open, turned up, glittering.

The other eye covered by a sleeve.

Something so strange, the elbow resting on her chin. How could it be, her elbow up there like that, a puzzle with the pieces pushed together wrong.

She thought of that old song played on the banjo on summer porches in houses less God-fearing than hers.

It was the thing she must’ve known—he has operated on Louise, he has fixed it so we can take them away—but now seeing it.

Slowly, with such shaping dread even through her medicine fog, she reached for the elbow, the arm and felt the arm rise light, rise, rise, rise, with her own hand. She could lift it as far as the heavens.

So terrible, so terrible, there could be no words.

Oh, Louise, love me yet.