Bury Me Deep

Part Five

The Golden State Limited pulled into the station just after seven. A scant thirty-six hours had passed, the same bleary-eyed hobo she had noticed the day before still curled in the corner of the platform, leaning against a jutting wall, shielded from wind and the eyes of conductors.

Thirty-six hours, Marion thought, and I have changed forever.

She had done the things and she would not speak of them again. She latched the trunks. She soaked the towels in the borax solution. When she was sure the corridor was empty she tacked the towels to the bottom of the door, closed it and left the St. Curtis Hotel, not bothering to check out.

She left with only her purse.

No one said a word.

It was easy.

How easy it was, it shamed her more.

On the trip home, lulled by the pills and the churn of the train, she slept dreamlessly.

IT WAS NOT SO EARLY, but the streets were echoey and lonesome. The heat had already lowered fierce, settling like an iron pressing to her face and neck.

The streetcar rattled her slowly across town. She put a hand to her jaw, felt the dampness of her dirty hair. Her clothes gave off musky odors and her body too, which was radiating an unclean heat. Her eyes felt to be popping from rusty sockets.

“Lynbrook Street,” the conductor bellowed, and suddenly her heart rose up in her chest.

There it was, his cool, careless fortress, indifferent and immaculate, one stray silver roller skate dangling from its leather strap on the steep slope of the front lawn.

She flitted up the lawn as fast as her shaking legs would take her.

Without stopping, nearly pressing her body against the heavy door, she raised her good hand and clapped the knocker as hard as she could, her whole body swinging into it.

He would answer her. He could speak to his actions.

“Yes?” The door opened and the prim nurse in the white collar and starched apron squinted out at Marion, eyes straining from the sunlight, that house so dark, like a funeral home or a cinema.

“I need to see Mr. Lanigan immediately,” Marion said, trying to stand as upright as possible, as upright as this nurse who looked and smelled as clean as freshly boiled sheets.

“He’s not here, ma’am. Shall I relay a message?” The face, unmarked, empty and serene. Serene as only a young girl’s could be. What was she, twenty? Twenty-one? Marion, ma’am, was once twenty, twenty-one, a million years ago.

“I will see him. I will see him now,” Marion said, voice jangling wildly, a trilling hurdy-gurdy. How dare he hide himself away behind the nurse’s skirts like a little boy. “Please tell him I’m here and he’s to show me his Shanty Irish face.”

“He’s not here, ma’am. But I shall give him any message you would like to—”

Marion felt herself lunging forward. The words tumbled forth, uncontrollably. “Do you mean to tell me he’s not here at this early hour? Why, he is a married man, is he not? A family man with children? And he is not at home at just past dawn? Is that what you mean to say?”

In her head, worse still, voices scurrying, saying, This, a man so degenerate, so dissolute and perverse that he stalks the streets for girls all night like a vampire, like Jack the Ripper.

She could not control herself.

She could not even stop her mouth from gaping and cawing and shrilling like a handsaw. The nurse, standing there so calm, so cool-browed, as if to mock her, to mock her as a hysteric, a madwoman.

“Ma’am, I do not know what you mean,” the nurse said, firm and unflustered, a Sing Sing prison warden in handkerchief cap and bib. “Mr. Lanigan is in the mountains on a hunting party with friends. He returns later in the week.”

Marion could hear a thudding in her head like a wood plank thwacking against a hollow wall.

“Is that what is claimed?” she said, her voice now a wheeze. “Am I to believe that?”

“I have to attend to my duties, ma’am,” the nurse said, trying to close the door. Oh, wasn’t life ever so easy for her? Wasn’t this just another nuisance in a day of nuisances, of filling syringes, pushing pillows about, standing straight in sickrooms, counting clock ticks. What did she know of sorrow, of life?

“You tell your esteemed employer,” Marion said, nearly biting her own tongue, “you tell him that Mrs. Seeley has returned home and he’s to see me and if he declines, he will not like what happens. He will not like it one bit. There’s things I can do. You tell him that. You tell him that.”

MRS. GOWER was not home and the rooming house was hushed as Marion bolted up the stairs to her room, and her head was still doing the thudding and she felt things crawling under her nails, under her skin, and she was not going to take any more pills, and she was going to cover herself in water and never let dirt or ugliness touch her again.

Joe Lanigan, you have broken, burned and beaten me and still I am here. I wear on even as you seek to obliterate and undo me. Even as you have ruined me twice, three times over. Ravishing me, ravaging me and razing me. I stand here still.

The door whinnied open and the familiar smell of old wood and butcher polish, of mothballs and Breath O’ Pine felt like a warm coat and she let it fold over her.

But as she stepped in, eyes adjusting to the light from her window, she saw something moving on the bed, and for one fleeting, appalling moment she was sure it was Louise and Ginny, spread out nude and bloodied like some nightmare come to life. A penny dreadful with bodies under groaning floorboards calling out to guilty souls.

It was only the start of a scream before she shoved her fist to her mouth and slammed the door shut behind her and the thing shifted and her eyes drew together.

“Is that you, Marion?”

And the body—the man—turned and set his feet to floor, and there was Dr. Everett Seeley. There was her husband, or was it? He looked so different. She had not seen that ruddy color on his cheeks in so long, since they married, perhaps, and those knotty cheekbones were draped softly now, his dark hair no longer baby wisping but richly toned, molasses dipped.

He rose and began to walk to her, and then she knew it was him, knew by the familiar slope-shouldered, defeated gait. His eyes, they were soft suddenly, as if with tears.

Before she could take a breath, his hands were gently on her shoulders. He tried to embrace her, but she was still clasping her purse to her chest with both arms, like some rogue-threatened waif.

“Marion, I am a few days early. When I received your last letter about your cough returning, and that you needed money, well, I was concerned. You know how it felt to me to leave you here. I shall never forgive myself for it, even as I saw no other choice. One of the mine captain’s sons was heading up this way and offered me a ride, so I took it.”

He was talking, but Marion could not follow, her eyes growing wider, her fingers digging helplessly.

“But, you see, Marion, I arrived last night and found you gone. Were you staying with those girlfriends of yours? Marion, do you intend to speak?”

She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t believe she was seeing him. She wasn’t sure he was even there. But his hands, they held her arms so firmly, they spanned her, and his face, she knew it so well, or she did once. Now it was more like a photograph, like the snapshot she kept in her Holy Bible, the one where he stood proudly in front of his brand-new 1927 Model A Ford.

“Marion, you must know there is nothing you cannot say to me. Not after what I have put you through. Marion, believe me, there is nothing—”

Her knees hit the floor and stars were everywhere.

THE AMMONIA SPIRITS tickled her nose and her lashes fluttered fast. On her bed, her legs turned at funny angles, she saw Dr. Seeley, still there, squinting at her, face drawn in concern.

“Marion,” he said. “Marion…”

There could be no dissembling. She could not reckon any more dissembling. She could not teeter one more atrocity upon the towering bank.

“Dr. Seeley,” she whispered.

“Yes, Marion.”

“Dr. Seeley, you must forgive me.”

And she told him.

“MARION,” he said to her, holding her shaking hands in his, having listened for an hour or more to her litany of mortification. The illicit lunches, the parties, the seduction, the descent into sin and, finally, the bloody night and everything thereafter. She told him as best she could.

His mouth remained open, but he could not speak, and his face—everything that had been moving in it stopped moving. It seemed to sink in on itself. It had turned old once more in that hour.

By the time she disclosed the dark day she left town with those trunks and, far worse, the things she had done to the bodies within them, his eyes dimmed and something happened. When his eyes fastened on her once more, it was as though he were looking at a stranger, an alien thing. The beast or witch that had taken possession of his dear blond wife.

Turning from her, he rose and walked to the window. She watched him, watched his stillness. She watched him for what seemed ages and more.

“Murder,” he finally whispered, his hand curling over his mouth, as if to muffle his own voice. “It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t that.”

“No, no,” she said, and her voice sounded funny, a scratchy hiss. Crazily, it reminded her of Ginny’s. “But it feels the same. What have I done, what have I done.” She brought her hands to her face and her body began rocking. It was like a scene from a melodrama. The sinning wife’s mad scene.

But he would not turn to face her. He would not look.

“Marion,” he said, “it is clear to me now, and it should have been when I received your last letters, each more desperate, that you had fallen into such despair that you…you lost all reason. Lost all reason at all.”

“I did,” she rasped. “I did.”

“Things happen, Marion,” he said, finally turning toward her, eyes ringed red and feathered through, “when we fall off the path we’re meant to follow. Because of my weakness, I took you off the path and placed you at peril, and dangers that never should have touched the farmost edges of your life have hit you square in the heart.”

“I didn’t wish to harm her—,” Marion started, feeling her face wrenching as if she might sob. But she didn’t. “I don’t know what has become of me. I don’t know myself.” Her own words frightened her.

But looking, she could see his face softening, his eyes. She thought he must be the kindest man who ever lived.

He sat down beside her. She thought he might touch her, but it seemed he couldn’t. Not yet.

“Marion,” he said, “I understand the… the indignities you’ve suffered on my account. And for my behalf. I never meant for you to have this kind of life. You were not meant to have this kind of life.” He looked across the room and she knew he was looking at their wedding portrait, which sat on the small dresser. “You are a pure and good girl. It has always been as it first was, as the first moment I saw you. Do you recall, Marion? At the hospital, you on the stairwell above, carrying a stack of bedding—brilliant white—and you’d stopped to look out the window on the landing. The sun was coming off the lake and you were struck by it. That’s what I decided. You were struck by the light and you stopped even with arms heavy and you were looking at the light, it broke across your face and it was like some biblical illumination, it was like something you’d see in a very old book with gilded pages. That’s how it was.”

And then this, to bring you to this low state. He didn’t say that, wouldn’t say that. But should have. That’s what she thought. Here she was, a ruined girl, a girl who’d let liquor cover her face, who’d let a man’s hands between her knees, her thighs, who’d set herself before a man, knees on carpet, begging him to drag her down to awful places.

A girl who’d held a gun in tensile fingers and shot the life out of some slip of a thing. Shot the life out of her.

Somehow that last thing mattered less. Somehow that mattered less than that she was the girl who let a man bring his hand, dusted with that tingling white powder, between her legs, and he… and he… how could that have… how could she…

He put a hand to her lips and said, thusly, “Marion, what I see now shakes me to the core. But that is because it is me. Do you see? The shame is mine. The shame is mine. I took you from your father’s parsonage. I took you from the leafy, God-loving groves of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I sunk you in the pits of hell.”

Eyes shining with sudden brightness, he added, “It is my stake to redeem you.”

TAKING HER ARM in one hand and his medical bag in the other, he walked her down the hallway to the bathroom. There, he tended to her wound and redressed it. She did not wince. He watched her a moment, then said, “Marion, did he give you any medicine? Did this man give you any pills or powders?”

She dug in her pocket and held out her sticky palm, showing him the last of the pills Joe Lanigan had given her.

Dr. Seeley put his nose and tongue to one and asked her how she felt after she took them, taking her chin in his hand and lifting it and peering into her eyes. Then he dropped them down the sink drain while Marion watched from the doorway.

“Marion,” he said when he returned, sitting her back down on the bed, “promise me you don’t have any more of those. They will knock your nervous system to a fare-thee-well. You want to get hold of yourself. It’s important, if we’re to get through this, that you get hold of yourself.”

“Yes, Dr. Seeley, yes,” she said. But then she remembered his letters and how he always told her to settle herself, to take things as easy as she could, to come home at five o’clock and rest and eat and sleep in a decent manner. He told her, as lonely and bereft as she might feel, she must use self-control and not indulge in sorrow and malaise. The scolding, like the other one, the other one who said, while feeding her pills, You must pull yourself together here…. You can’t fall to pieces on me. Both of them scolding her, reprimanding her, as if they had no part. As if they had no share in the chaos.

“Dr. Seeley, though, Everett, what do you know of it? What do you know of keeping hold of oneself?” Her voice sounded low and nasty, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Not a soul knows more than me, Marion,” he said gravely. “Not a soul.”

And she supposed it was true. “You’ve managed, then,” she whispered.

“I’ve been simon-pure for four months, Marion. I haven’t touched the stuff. I haven’t dipped once.”

It was the longest since she knew him, since the Indiana State Hospital when he nearly died.

“What will I do? I wonder what I will do,” she said, her voice low, her face down.

“I will figure things out, Marion. I will.”

And she believed he would. He was not a man who took his responsibilities lightly. He was not a man of fancy, a man of caprice. He was a sober man, a man of purpose. A man on whom whole communities could rely, a family man, a family doctor, a trusted citizen, a pillar.

Were it not for that dark spot on his brain. The spot, it was there, and you couldn’t cut it out or wipe it away. It was there and changed everything.

“The dark spot,” Marion murmured as she sat beside him. “Now it is mine.”

AT FIRST, Dr. Seeley suggested they leave that night, take a train to Eagle Pass, Texas, and then move on to Coahuila.

Not without seeing that Mr. Lanigan, Marion persisted. Not without that. She had to see him for herself. She had to see him and see that it was true, that he had abandoned her to this, and he would have to say it to her face. The look in her eyes startled Dr. Seeley.

“Marion, that would be a mistake.”

Marion raised her fingertips to her temples and tried to stop the shaking in her chest. “But, Everett,” she said, and her voice sounded tinny, like a machine. “I think it best that I go to work tomorrow. Explain that the girls ran off with these men. I don’t think we should raise suspicions.”

“I suppose,” Dr. Seeley said. “Yes. But in the meantime, I will be making inquiries. I will be making inquiries about this Joseph Lanigan.”

“I have told you all I know,” blurted Marion.

“I know you have, dear,” he said, “but you may not know everything.”

WHEN HE SAW HER lying bolt-straight trying to sleep, he took pity and gave her the smallest amount of chloral hydrate. She woke many times in the night and twice saw him sitting by the window, looking out. She wanted to call to him, but she could not make the words come.

She had to speak with Joe Lanigan. She had to.

DR. MILROY summoned her to his office. He told her she looked quite pale and hoped she was well. “I am sorry to have missed work yesterday,” she said.

“Mrs. Curtwin tells me you have news of Nurse Mercer,” he said sternly. “You mean to say she has simply gone and left her post?”

“Yes, sir,” and she explained, as she knew to, that Louise and her friend Ginny had decided to strike it out in California.

“I am quite sorry, Doctor. It was all very sudden.”

“I should say it is. I have not heard a word from her. Am I to assume she has vacated her position?”

“I’m afraid she has, Dr. Milroy.”

“It all seems very rash,” he said, shaking his head, hands across his chest in contemplation. “She has always been a spirited woman. And her friend. The both of them. How they are. I don’t understand it myself.” He shook his head.

Marion began to speak but stopped herself.

“But I’m not one to cotton to rumor, not I,” he went on. “And with this new development, well, I suppose it’s just exuberance. Perhaps a bit too much exuberance.”

“Perhaps, sir.”

“She has a suitor? Does she intend to marry?”

“I can’t say, Doctor. You see, it was all very headlong.”

“Well, there’s to be no gossip, Mrs. Seeley. I won’t tolerate that. I don’t want the community to think we employ the kind of women who…who are intemperate. Reckless.”

“No, Dr. Milroy. I won’t say a word.”

“Fine. Please take care to empty her locker, Marion. You can forward her things along to her.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Mrs. Curtwin tells me you wounded your hand. Let me take a look. What happened?”

“Oh no, Doctor. That’s not necessary. The file drawer caught it,” she said, marveling at her growing talent for deceit. “It’s fine.”

“I’ll take a look,” he said, then smiled. “And I won’t bill you.”

“Oh no, Doctor. My husband, you know, he’s a physician. He wouldn’t like that. I’m sure you understand.”

Dr. Milroy harrumphed, slapping his leg. “Damned if I don’t, Mrs. Seeley. God bless you both for taking me as a roué.”

The poem torn from a book and affixed inside of Louise’s locker. Marion poked her head inside to read the rest. The last stanza intoned,

At the bottom there was a watercolor image of a lily of the valley and Florence Nightingale.

I will not dwell, Marion said, to herself, I will not dwell… I will not let it be real, not real. It is not real.

Marion briskly shoved Louise’s things—a spare uniform, a nail file, a set of hairpins—into a laundry bag. In the back was one of Louise’s starched nurse’s caps and as Marion scuttled it into the bag she saw a silky red tendril still clipped under the bobby pin affixed.

It was Joe that did that. It was Joe. I’ll take the weight on my wretched soul for Ginny, but I had to do it to live. But I won’t take Louise. Never Louise. Not Louise.

Still her heart blooms forth its beauty.

She leaned her head against the locker and took long breaths, long, scraping breaths. Her lungs, they were hurting. They were hurting like it’d come back, like the consumption had come back, coating and enrobing her lungs, seeking to tear them to bloody pieces again.

She could look no longer and swept her arm through the locker and shoved everything into the large sewing bag Mrs. Curtwin had loaned her.

Her face flared hot and cold at once and she banished thoughts of Louise, Louise struck down, but not by her. Not by her.

IT WAS THREE O’CLOCK when the telephone call came.

“Marion, what do you mean coming to my home? And when did you return? I can’t fathom you, Marion.”

“Did you catch any bucks?” her voice slid out, cool and polite. Oh, it was a strength in her that she could steel herself so tightly, so enwalled. Three, four days prior, could she have managed such control?

“Marion, I was only gone one night. It was critical, Marion, don’t you see? Everything needs to proceed as it normally would.”

“That nurse of yours said—”

“Don’t worry about that. What did you do? The trunks, Marion?”

“You abandoned me, Mr. Lanigan. You left me—”

“Marion, you don’t know what you’re saying. You need to calm down.”

I am calm. You should see what’s inside of me. You see the tempest in there and you would marvel at my calm. “I guess you better see me if you want to know about the trunks,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could.

“I will come to the rooming house. I will be there at six o’clock.”

“No. Not there,” she said calmly.

She told him he had best arrive at the clinic, the third-floor storage room, in thirty minutes or he would not like what she would do.

HE WAS ALREADY waiting when she arrived, and he held his sennit-straw hat in his hands and she could scarce believe it had been only three days since she’d seen him last. Looking at him now, she wondered, Who was this man?

And he so tidy in his natty suit the color of creamy pistachio nougats, his Scotch-grain brogues, that great lemony sweep of hair across his forehead, an opal tiepin flashing as he turned. But he did turn and he turned toward her, and he reached out and the flesh on her arm quilled.

What had she imagined, that it would all disappear, that the feel of his hands would suddenly fall to her thoughtless as a ticket taker, a train conductor?

“Oh, Joe, I just…” But she stopped herself from curling into his arms like a lost kitten. She stopped herself.

“Marion,” he said, and his eyes, she saw them, they were strangely blank. Blank like a man in an advertisement. Blank like a curtain had closed.

“Joe, I think you need to explain yourself. You left me to fend for myself. You have done what you said you’d never do. I had to take care of things as best I could.”

“Where are the trunks, Marion?” he said, setting his hat down on one of the supply carts. “You must tell me.”

“They’re in Los Angeles,” she said. “They remain there.”

“You’re to tell me everything. I need to know.”

“I will tell you no more than I have. I don’t know what you mean to do, Joe. But I know what you have done already.”

“What have I done, Marion? Now, truly.”

“The trunks are there. I left them there. I am telling all the lies. I have told all your lies, told them for you.”

“Marion,” he said, and there was just the faintest dampness on him. She could see it now. “Marion, I…” He crossed and uncrossed his arms. She could smell his heavy cologne and sense his nerves rubbing against each other. “Marion, I think you should leave town immediately. To Mexico. To your husband. It’s not wise for you to stay. The risks are too great.”

“But you intend to stay?”

“I have no choice. My family is here,” he said carefully, “and my business. And my stake in…in what happened is not the same either.”

“What can you mean by that?”

“Marion, you know what you did. For my share, I was protecting you.”

“How can you say such things? I was protecting myself.” It all seemed like an old dream now, Ginny’s twisty weight on her, the look in her mad eyes, the squirming danger of her. And the blast. “You know Ginny came at me with that gun. You know the gun exploded in our hands.”

“I only know what you told me. And things can get twisted, Marion. Your distinctions may not matter and, well…You must see now that I will make sure my name is not brought into this. I will not let it happen and it won’t happen because of what I am in this town. There are levers and switches and keys and I know which way they all go. The point is, Marion, I have more money for you and it should be sufficient to carry you to Mexico and—”

“Oh yes,” Marion said, her jaw rattling, her face filled with heat and rage. She had put her soul in jeopardy for this man. This man.

“Do give me those funds.” And she held her hands out, palms up.

He looked at them, at her outstretched hands, and smiled a little. “Marion, I…” Then he reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out an envelope, as before, idling at the train station. He rested it on her palms. “My, Marion, where is my little flower, my little prairie girl?”

Marion felt her chest leap. “You have wretched nerve to say such…,” and her voice betrayed her, and she only let out a shallow gasp. She refused to cry for this man.

He looked at her. “I wonder if I was acquainted with you at all, or if you were some kind of cunning witch. They were, you know. Louise and Ginny. Casting spells and laying curses like backward things. Those polluted girls. But you too, I think. You find ways to get what you want.”

She felt her arms give out, the envelope dropping to the floor, and she began shoving him, violently. “How dare you…How dare you…”

But he was strong and clasped her forearms together and told her to hush before she was heard.

“I’m sorry, Marion. I am. You must see.” And his voice softened ever so slightly. “I did love you. I did as much as I’m able.”

She looked at him. She looked at him and his eyes, not blank, but dead.

There were remembered things tearing through her, things she’d felt sure she would not summon again, most of all the way he could curl his hand under her hair and hold her face in his palm and make things happen inside her that made her buckle, made blood surge through her, brought tears to her blinking eyes.

She would not remember that again, this was the last time, and it was a battering loss.

He was leaving, he was halfway to the door. But he was not done yet. She lifted her chin high, ready for it.

“I look at you, Marion,” he said, “and all I see is death. I see dead girls and sorrow. It is not fair, but there it is. I can’t look at you without thinking of that night. Your beauty is blinding but behind it I see death.”

There it was. There it was. And all the breath left her body, and her heart stopped, hammer struck.

But no. He could not have that too.

She bent down and picked the envelope off the floor. Opening it, she saw what looked like one hundred dollars, more than she had ever seen in her life. And all she was worth.

As she walked to the door, she tucked it cooly under her blouse. I like to keep my money close to my heart, Louise always said, every time.

MARION SAT AT HER DESK, her face still, her spine erect.

To her left, she saw, on top of her typewriter, the satchel with things from Louise’s locker, just where she’d rested it. For one crazy moment, she thought, I guess I had better send these along…

Taking a breath, she reached over and opened it.

She could almost feel Louise just over her shoulder, coarse curls brushing up against the back of her neck, breath on her ear.

It was little more than a modest pile of papers and sundry items. Tucked between nursing association pamphlets, Welcome to Werden! A Manual for New Staff, old schedules, an announcement for a meeting of something called the SEIU, there was a snapshot of Louise and Ginny, their faces bursting with glee, arms nestled around each other, standing in front of a building somewhere, sometime when Ginny, wee teeth showing, was healthier, had such vim and flesh on her elfin bones and her blond curls jangling and Louise must’ve been laughing something fierce because her head was thrown back and her long throat so white and lovely and the two of them like sisters, like dear sisters with arms locked together forever. Forever.

And behind that, another snapshot of Ginny, this time with another girl, a blond and delicate girl. Here Ginny was sicker, head leaning, cheeks pulled across bones, eyes darkened, but with that sly grin of hers. She was seated on the sofa, as always since Marion knew her, knees bent and legs tucked to chest tightly, and the other girl, her arms were stretched happily around Ginny’s legs, sweetly adoring Ginny. Ginny and her wily-angel, serene devil ways. It was adoration, to be sure, because the blond girl, cheek resting on Ginny’s white dimpled knees, was Marion herself. So she knew.

Now, looking, hand wrapped round her mouth, Marion did not let out the cry but swallowed it whole. Oh, Ginny, why did you do it? Why did you come fast upon me with that gun? Slugged dope? Delirium? But it seemed a dreadful rage. Something like, Will you two leave me now? Will you abandon me to a Bugville camp and kick up your heels across the Great Golden West without me? Why, you will… but not if I can stop it. Not if I can stop you.

Marion dropped the snapshots into the satchel, but as she did she noticed, beneath them, a tidy stack of prescriptions tied with string. She pulled the knot loose and saw they were all nearly identical. Most listed Dr. Tipton as the physician, and several Dr. Jellieck, both of whom worked at the clinic. In the back of her head she remembered Louise shaking her head and saying, These docs, Marion, they do the nastiest things when your eyes shut, or you turn corners, or, God help you, set foot on a stepladder. I got an eyeful of Dr. Tipton just last week…. Dr. Jellieck, Marion remembered seeing at the party at the El Royale Hotel. The one whose large gray shoulder nearly concealed the face of the woman whom she had been certain was Louise. Friends of Joe, both, no doubt. What man in this town, what man in possession of any small measure of sway or license was not a friend of Joe Lanigan?

It was then she noticed all the prescriptions were for Veronal and chloral, scopolamine, paraldehyde and more.

Six months of them, dating from January to March 1930.

All for a Mrs. Joseph Lanigan.

It seemed enough medication for two patients or more. Enough to keep a forgotten wife watching shadows on walls in blissful nothingness, a tingling oblivion.

Marion remembered Louise saying she’d worked for Mrs. Lanigan as a private nurse for a short time.

She has the Bright’s, Marion had said. And Louise: Is that what they’re calling it now?

“MRS. CURTWIN, when Nurse Mercer started here, where was she coming from? Where was her last employ?”

Mrs. Curtwin perched her glasses higher on her nose and sighed. “Oh, she was a private nurse for a fine lady.”

“And she left that position for this one?”

“Yes, she did.”

“For a higher salary?”

“Mrs. Seeley, that’s none of my affair.”

“I just wondered,” Marion said. She could feel Mrs. Curtwin’s haught. She knew she must use it. “I mean, I thought I knew her well and now, the way she just picked up and left. I wonder if I knew her at all.”

Mrs. Curtwin’s face broke like a bubble, so easy it was. “Oh my, it’s good you found out before it’s too late. I can’t begin…I shouldn’t say. But you can believe when she came here, she made such ridiculous insinuations to Dr. Milroy and some of the others. Claimed the man she worked for—a very prominent businessman whom we all know well and respect and admire—was not managing his wife’s health properly. Her charges were baseless, of course. She relented at last. Slander, that’s what it was. She’d kept it up, she’d’ve been run out of town on a rail. That’s what they would have done where I come from. I’m from Cincinnati, you see. We don’t abide such flagrancy.”

MRS. LANIGAN up high in her tower, stuffed full of a druggist’s trunk, puffed like some huffing hothouse flower. And Louise seeing and knowing and no one to listen. So she makes her choice.

You choose your fights, Marion, she once said. Some of us have fewer choices, alas.

Louise, breath sweet filmy rum on her ear, whispering words she never said but words so true, You must understand, Marion, I am a person of goodwill. I can count my bad deeds on one white hand. And I see your delicacy, Marion, your goodness. But it’s a goodness easily worn. You haven’t earned it. You haven’t had to rescue it. You haven’t had to scrub with horsehair brush the soft flesh on the inside of your thighs, rubbing away things left behind by three gentlemen in pale suits who caught you practicing dance steps behind the church on a summer night. Or have you? Because that, my darling, would be some stroke of chance.

ON THE STREETCAR, she sat, hands folded, her face dry and powdery. The numbness, it was a relief, really. She felt as a shell, as a shell, and Joe Lanigan had gouged everything out and it was all gone and she was this walking, rattling shell.

With nothing left in her center, with that surging fever that had fallen on her these many months, with that fever gone, she could no longer fight off thoughts of the girls. The girls.

Suddenly, they loomed before her, gorgeous, slinking phantoms with crooking fingers.

She could see them there on the streetcar, Ginny sprawled across three seats, blue-white skin pulsing, eyes glittering and teeth too, like some glossy vampire. Louise standing regal, red hair flaming, and one long arm reached out, dangling fingers toward Marion, smile sly and knowing, saying things, saying things, but what…

Oh, Louise, you had so much more to tell me. So much more and I…

DR. SEELEY WAS GONE for many hours and Marion had expected him there when she came home from the clinic and he was not and now supper had come and gone and Eddie Cantor sang “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” on the radio and Marion cleaned out her wound and looked in the mirror at the dark roots spreading through her platinum hair.

Earlier in the evening, she had planned to show him the prescriptions she had found among Louise’s things. As the hours passed, though, she changed her mind. The thought of sharing yet another revelation of her lover’s many sins was more than she could stand. Instead, she tucked the stack in between her underthings in her dresser drawer.

Dr. Seeley did not return home until after one o’clock, and when he did he told Marion he was so very tired and felt like the world was such a wicked, irredeemable place that only the thought of her waiting for him in their humble room made him go on. He clasped her hands in his and they were cold.

She asked him what he had found.

He told her he had begun the day by visiting a doctor at the state hospital. He asked him, colleague to colleague, about the pharmaceutical suppliers in the city.

“Oh, Marion,” he said, as he ran water from the basin through his hair. “Marion, how could I have left you in a place, exposed to such dishonest men?”

“It is my fault,” Marion said. “I surrendered to him. Even knowing he was a man who dallies and deceives.”

“Marion, it is beyond all that,” he said, shaking his head. “I paid a visit to Valiant Drugs today.”

Marion’s head jerked. “You didn’t see him? He’s never in his stores. He—”

“No, Marion, but I wanted to see…I wanted to see what kind of man he is, I suppose. I had some suspicions, based on what I learned at the hospital, so I went to one of his stores.”

He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a small bottle, much like the countless ones Marion had seen, had served from, had even drank from, on Hussel Street.

He set it on the bed between them. Then he reached into another pocket and set before her a vial and a packet of pills, much like the ones Louise always had.

“Understand, I did not tell the young man at the counter that I was a physician. This corn liquor, or what have you, this vial of—Marion, this one here is a barbiturate, do you understand? He’s a wet druggist. I asked the right questions, I asked the right way—and you know I know the right ways. And this is what they gave me.”

She nodded.

“I talked to a man buying a pint of such-named cough syrup,” Dr. Seeley went on, excited. Marion could not remember him so excited. His eyes glittered. “Marion, I could see it on him. The bad stuff. He was… as I was. And he said before he struck gold at a card game he’d bought the rough magic down on Gideon Square, that area. He said it was the same stuff, different quality. I need to see if it goes that far for our man. He said everything is for sale there. I will see what ‘everything’ means.”

The darkest parts of Marion’s heart shimmered forth darkly. For what of this did she not know, really? And to be reminded was shameful.

She could not bear to tell him that there were no surprises here. That she had known, even as she had not really worked it through. That she had known but hadn’t considered it enough to judge it wrong. That she knew and hadn’t cared at all.

DO YOU REMEMBER, Everett, when we first met? You took me to dinner at the Rotary Club, which was the finest place I’d ever been. I took you to a meeting at the church and you had never been to anything like that before. I had to sing a song that night, do you remember? It was my turn. I had to sing a song; it was “O Africa, dark Africa, God’s love has set us free” and you thought that was so funny because you had never seen anything like it before. Because you were a man of the world.

LYING IN BED, his breath fast, his fingers twitching against the mattress, his body squirming.

“Oh, Marion, when I think of this man and what he has done.”

It is I, she wanted to say, but somehow didn’t. The weight on her, she couldn’t keep saying it, she was too tired to say it. He would never believe her anyway.

“I know,” he said, and he touched her arm light as a feather, “there’s probably more even than you could say.”

She turned slightly and watched his profile, moonlight shot, a drooping silhouette of an aging statesman, sunken to ashy folds.

“Things he…Bedroom affairs for which you lack even the words. Words you don’t have in your head, much less on your tongue. Such words.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Oh, Marion,” he said, and he laid a tentative hand on her. She felt his breath catch.

That was when she understood. Understood what he was asking of her without asking.

She would give him something. Under coverlet here, she would. She knew how to now and she would do those private things for him that she had not known of just six months before. Things Joe had shown her. In the dark, under softly worn coverlet, she would.

But she knew he would hate himself for it. Not her, never her. She would give him this and this kind and good man, this noble man would only hate himself for it.

AND IN THE MORNING, trying to meet her eyes, yet not meeting them, Dr. Seeley walked her to the streetcar and then rode with her to the clinic and helped her off and kissed her soft on the forehead.

“Marion, I want you to tell them today.”

“Tell them?”

“Marion, I must insist we leave…”

“I see.” She knew he was right, but it was hard to make that matter.

“Today I will see what more I can learn about him,” he said, and it struck Marion that he could not seem to say Joe Lanigan’s name aloud to her. “But we would be foolhardy to remain any longer. Those bodies are bound to be found and identified, no matter how many steps you took to…You can tell the clinic that your husband has come to retrieve you and bring you to Mexico with him. They will understand.”

“If I leave, might that raise suspicions?” As much as she knew its urgency and even after the things Joe Lanigan had said to her the day before, the thought of leaving panicked her.

And it was hard for her to look at her husband. She tried to forget the things done in that creaking bed the night before. He would not forget. Where did one go from there? Everything between them had changed twice over.

“Better to raise their suspicions, Marion, than to bear them out entire.”

“You know best,” she said, and she was sure he did.

What choice had she? Joe Lanigan, her corrupter, was no longer hers, would permit her to fall to the guillotine before he sullied his overcoat. It had to be.

She tried not to think of the stretch of years before her. Of the mine doctor’s wife in remote Mexico, days spent without child, they could never seem to manage that either, never could seem to bring her to term. So what would it be? What would her days be? She tried not to imagine that.

Instead, she walked into the clinic as if it were any other day, as if all were not in ruins around her.

AS FIVE O’CLOCK APPROACHED, Marion typed a resignation letter. She could not bear to speak to Dr. Milroy. She could not. She slipped the letter under his door and left quickly. The whole ride home she feared she might see him, even as she knew he never took the streetcar. Drove the same gleamy Packard Joe Lanigan toured around town in. The very same one.

Mrs. Gower gave her a sharp look when she walked in the door of the rooming house.

“You have visitors,” she whispered. “Earlier, another man was here. From the newspaper. He said he had to speak with you and he left his telephone number. I don’t like this kind of business, Mrs. Seeley. This is not the kind of house I run.”

There in the frayed, lavender-cloyed living room she found them, like gentleman callers come to tea. There were two, Officer Tolliver, whose head kept hitting the chipped chandelier, and Officer Morley, who had a mustache like John Gilbert and was very kindly to Marion and told her he had never seen such pretty eyes. They said they just had a few questions about her friends Louise Mercer and Virginia Hoyt. They asked if they might speak to her in the drawing room.

“Is there something wrong?” Marion asked, trying so hard to think. Almost convincing herself, with Officer Morley’s genial face, his relaxing way, that everything would be just fine. “Have the girls gotten into trouble?”

“We’re just checking into some things, Mrs. Seeley, and we were told you saw the girls before they left town.”

“Yes.”

“And did they tell you where they were going?”

Marion nodded. Smiled lightly. Tried not to twist the handkerchief in her hands. Tried not to tug at the bandage on her hand. Tried to make herself believe her own story. It was a good story, wasn’t it?

Joe Lanigan’s instructions stretched out so cleanly, like pressed sheets. It was easier each time. She told them that the girls said they had met two men and these men were very handsome and invited them to join them in their automobile on the way to Los Angeles, where there were many jobs and fine times to be had. They were the kind of girls who liked to pick up and move, you know. Anyone will tell you. Denver. Illinois. Nevada. They had been to many places. Marion, will you send our trunks along, they had asked her. And she had called a delivery service and they had come and picked up the trunks and that was the last she had heard.

“What was the address they gave you?”

Marion felt her head whirling uncontrollably. What was she to do here? If she said Southern Pacific Station, they would call the station and the man would surely remember her, wouldn’t he? He would remember her and say that the trunks belonged to a young woman and then and then…there seemed no way out. If they called the delivery service, what would those men say?

“They filled out the slips. I don’t know. Some general delivery address, maybe?”

“They didn’t intend for you to have any way to reach them?”

“They said they would write when they had an address,” Marion said. “I’m sure I will hear from them soon.”

“Mrs. Seeley,” Officer Morley said, and he looked deeply into her eyes. His face was so kind, and he was so gentlemanly, and Marion felt safely curled in the warmth of his voice. “I don’t want to alarm you, but you should know. Their landlord was concerned about the girls. It seems they owed quite a bit of back rent.”

“Oh,” Marion said. “The girls have slender means. We all have a rough time of it these days, don’t we?”

“That we do, Mrs. Seeley. You can imagine the landlord was eager to at least gain possession of items in the home. He understood there to be a radio, silverware and some other more valuable items. I assume they shipped many of those things?”

“I assume so, yes,” Marion said. She wondered where the girls stowed their pawn tickets.

“Mrs. Seeley,” Officer Tolliver broke in, “you should know. There was blood found in the house. Do you know why that might be?”

“Oh,” Marion managed before all the warmth slid from her face, from her head and chest. There couldn’t be any blood left. She’d cleaned it from floor to ceiling. “Oh no.”

“A small amount. On a pair of curtains.”

A vision floated before Marion of her fingers twaining the front curtains, looking for headlights. Whose blood might that be, she could not guess. But it was there.

“Oh my goodness.”

“Did you actually see the girls leave with these men?”

“No, I never saw them leave. I never met the men.”

“It may be nothing, you understand, Mrs. Seeley,” Officer Morley said, one hand to her forearm, gentle. “It may be nothing at all.”

“I wish I could… I just don’t know.” Everything was going to pieces and who knew what they might…Who knew what Joe Lanigan…Who knew?

“All right, Mrs. Seeley. But please, keep yourself available to us, will you?”

“Of course,” she said, and her thoughts, so rambling, so jangled, stopped suddenly on an idea. “And say hello to Sheriff Healy, will you? He visited the girls often. What a wonderful man.”

Officer Tolliver looked at her, eyebrows lifted. “The sheriff, eh?” And he shared a glance with Officer Morley. “Well, Mrs. Seeley, we thank you for being so helpful. You let us know when you hear from those girls, now, won’t you?”

“You will be my first step,” she said.

EVERETT WAS AGAIN not home and it was late, very late. Hours Marion spent going over the policemen’s questions in her head. They shuttled around and she couldn’t stop them. There was no way to shut them off.

As the hours passed, she tried to pack. She tried to organize herself. She cleaned her gashing wound. She replaced buttons on her husband’s sagging shirts. Her face was damp. She felt a fever coming. She felt she was falling into some dire state and there was no stopping it. Her knees rubbery, she felt a faint coming on and cursed herself.

Lying on the bed was worse, though. It was a buffering quiet like cotton in her throat. It made her head go funny. Somehow, somehow, lying there, she came upon the feeling of Louise and Ginny in the room with her. She could feel them there. She could smell Ginny’s avid perfume in her hair, feel Louise’s fingertips on her hand. And then it was like they were beneath her somehow, under the bed, writhing, trying to crawl free. She felt if she looked to the floor, she would see their glowy white arms, splayed hands, reaching, tugging at the carpet, trying to pull themselves out.

She would have done anything for one of Joe’s magic pills now.

But her husband had sent them down the drain.

Down the dark belly.

There would be decades with him. Decades.

He was a good man, a kind man.

Oh, he was.

IN THE PITCH OF THE NIGHT, the doctor returned and told her he had so much more to share about Joe Lanigan and she wanted to say what did it matter, what did it, and she told him about the police, but he did not seem concerned. He seemed to expect it.

“Marion, do not worry. Tomorrow first thing, we will buy our train tickets, and by midday we will be gone.”

In early morning, as they walked down Mrs. Gower’s stairwell, the newspaper on the front landing caught Marion’s eye, and Dr. Seeley’s too.

With trembling fingers, Marion read about the blood found on the premises and how the police were pursuing the possibility of violence. Most of the article, however, swelled with the breathless first-person account of one Florence Loomis.

“Do you know her?” Dr. Seeley asked.

“Yes. She was a friend. She was at the house a lot, at least.” The sight of plump and smeary Mrs. Loomis, tight as a drum on New Year’s Eve, flashed through Marion’s head. Once, she remembered her tearing her blouse open and asking Sheriff Healy to arrest her for gross indecency.

Marion looked back down at the article. There was a photograph of Louise in her nurse’s uniform and one of the house, which looked grim, menacing.

“‘According to Werden Clinic staff,’” Dr. Seeley read, “‘the girls left town last weekend with two unidentified men on their way to California. Their belongings were shipped by a friend, Mrs. Everett Seeley, who also works at the clinic. She could not be reached by deadline.’”

Marion thought of the reporter who had come to the house, knew he would be back.

Dr. Seeley read on: “‘Neighbors said the house was often the site of “gay parties” that lasted until the early morning hours, the most recent marked by frequent trips to the local drugstore for ginger ale. The women’s loud voices intermingled with those of many men and kept neighbors awake for most of the night.

“‘“They are a peacocky pair,” said Mrs. Loomis, who befriended the young women last year. “They came to town with nary a nickel between them. They were dreadful poor and I helped them.” Mrs. Loomis, who said that the girls had recently borrowed thirty-eight dollars and an electric hair-waving iron from her, added, “Good times, that’s what they wanted. They had many friends to help them out. I tried to talk sense into them, but they would have none of it. I’m not surprised by any of this. They entertained many men. Men in this town.” While Mrs. Loomis would not mention any names, she added that she would help the police in any way she could.

“‘One neighbor confirmed that one of the most frequent guests was Mr. Joseph Lanigan, owner of Valiant Drugs and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Lanigan could not be reached for comment.

“‘The sheriff’s office refused to reveal any details about the investigation but police were a constant presence in the Hussel Street residence today.’”

Dr. Seeley set the newspaper down and looked at Marion. “They will be speaking to him soon.”

“I know,” Marion said.

“Do you know what he intends to say?”

Marion looked at him. Your beauty is blinding but behind it I see death. That’s what he had the nerve to say to her. The stuff of tear-lashed confession magazines. That was what he had said.

“Marion, have you seen him since you’ve returned? Have you…been with him?”

“No. No. I saw him only once,” she said, “at the clinic. He made me see that…I am alone.”

“You’re not alone, Marion,” Dr. Seeley said. “You’re not.”

She looked at him and it felt a glimmer of long ago, he the elegant doctor spiriting her away, rescuing her from something, even.

“He gave me one hundred dollars,” Marion blurted, ashamed she had not mentioned it before. But to have mentioned it would have meant revealing she had seen him. Seen this man whose name her husband could not bear to utter. She opened her purse and showed it to him.

“We will need it,” Dr. Seeley said.

THEY WALKED STRAIGHT OUT the front door and to the streetcar. Dr. Seeley said they should leave their things at the rooming house. There should be no appearance that they had gone. But they would not return.

They rode downtown to a small hotel with a fraying fringe overhang—the Kenwick Arms, the electric sign had said before its globes had burned out.

They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Leroy and it was not until Dr. Seeley had shut the creaking door behind them and the dust motes rose and settled that Marion asked him what in fact his plan was.

“Leaving town now has become hazardous. Police will be watching the train station. This way, we have perhaps purchased a day, maybe two. I have thoughts. I have thoughts. We may shore ourselves up by culling as much on this man as possible.”

“How will that stop the law?”

“He has powerful friends. That is clear. After the news story he will be rounding up his horses. Marion, he does not intend to go to the gallows. We will not let him place you there in his stead.”

“That is his plan, back to the wall,” Marion said, surprised by the coolness in her voice. The hardness wedged tight between teeth. What had happened to her? Where was the shuddering young girl, gone forever? In some strange way, she was glad. That girl was her doom.

“That newspaper article,” she went on. “What will the afternoon edition hold?”

Two hours, and Dr. Seeley went to the newsstand and returned, ashen-faced.

Marion looked at the front page. It was a muted blow; she, beaten now to smoothness, expected no less.

Three o’clock, Dr. Seeley looked itchy, scratching his neck, and sweaty-collared, said if she felt safe, he would return to his investigation.

“Where will you go?”

“I need to see how wide the ring expands, Marion,” he said, straightening his tie, twisted so thin from wear.

Marion wanted to remind him he was not a policeman, not a private detective from the Saturday matinee. She wanted to tell him none of it would matter. She thought of Joe Lanigan at his lodges, his friars’ clubs, his Chamber of Commerce gatherings, his men’s clubs, the smokers from which he was always returning, gin-soaked and tomcatted. What did girls like Louise and Ginny matter in the face of that, and what did she, some vagabond wife picked up for dallying and set down in a corner when done?

“Last night when I came home, it was too late,” he said to her. “I was too disordered. I didn’t want to worry you. Now there is no choice. Let me share all I saw, all I’ve learned about this man. Then you will have no doubt we will ensnare him. We must. He is a dangerous…He is…”

She put her hand on his arm. “You can tell me,” she said. Even knowing there would likely be no surprises. The only surprise would be having to look full-face again at what she had blotted out, lo these months. What worse?

He told of a day and a night spent in joints, judas holes, lowdown nighteries and barrelhouses, trailing the wastrels on Thaler Avenue and in Gideon Square. The sad tramps and drifting souls who seemed, somehow, to wear his own face. He saw their sorrow and their weakness and it trembled through him and he could almost not bear it. But he did. And he struck up conversations and no one questioned this shabby man with all the right words and most of all the right look in his eyes, the look of lostness. At last, a man named Farriss took him to a house on Clawson Street where he met a woman named Clara who explained how every four days, the Worth Brothers Meat Truck came to the Dempsey Hotel and you went to the third floor, room 308, and Mr. Worth, only he called himself Mr. Tanner, but everyone knew, would sell you your kit. Whatever was wanted. And sure, she knew Ginny too. Ginny used to work the Dempsey for Joe till the TB got too bad. Louise, sure, everyone knew Louise, Louise was the one before the new one. The new who? The new nurse. Everyone knew Joe Lanigan’s private nurses were also his whores. His private whores, mind you. The new one, word was the new one wasn’t even a real nurse, this one, she was a schoolgirl plucked from St. Monessa’s.

A coldness swept across Marion’s chest.

The nurse. Of course. The nurse. It was like everything else about Joe Lanigan. Seamy, rotten. Ruined.

Looking at Dr. Seeley, she pushed it all away. She looked at him.

“And you mean to go there. You mean to go to where these narcotics are…”

“I do, my dear,” he said, and he kept her gaze. “Marion, if he can so effectively marshal the powers that be in this town to protect himself, we must put the fear in him to offer up those steel walls to you as well. He must find another goat, Marion, from among his drossy minions. It won’t be you.”

“But for you to move back in these worlds…”

“Marion, the more we know about his affairs, the more chips we have at our disposal. We need to put the fear in him. I must go.”

Marion felt a tightening in the air between them. “Everett, I…”

“I will be fine, Marion. You know I will. I am strong for us both now. As you always have been. It is my chance. This is my chance.”

Marion looked at him and he looked at her, his eyes open and waiting, asking her something that he could not say. She looked at him and she could not help but feel the largeness of the moment and it frightened her. It felt like they were spinning on an axis after a life of stillness. Or stillness after four marital years of spinning. She did not know what it meant.

“Of course, Everett. Of course.” She had to say it. And she so wanted to believe it, all of it.

And maybe he was right. Maybe there was more still to uncover about Joe Lanigan, more even than she knew, enough to matter more than his rich-man, gold-cut cruelty, and maybe it could matter. Who was she to guess, given the quaking surprises of the last week, most of all the ones she’d sprung on herself. It is you, Marion, who started the bloodbath. It is you who took hammer to teeth, acid to flesh—would you ever have guessed the limits of your own darkness?

She handed him the hundred dollars. “You will need this, to get information.”

He looked at the money. “I will take fifty dollars. But hopefully I will not need it.”

“Yes,” she said, and his face looked so kind and she felt a warmth rush through her, and through her hands to his. “Thank you, Everett. Thank you.”

TEN MINUTES after he left, she was on the streetcar to Lynbrook Street.

She could hear Louise’s voice prickling in her ear: It is he, it is he, you cannot let him wend so freely, smashing our girl-bones to pieces, stomping on our black-and-blue hearts while he lines his pockets and fills his mouth with sugar, sugar, sugar.

She would need to find him out. He had set things in motion and who knew what would come next?

IT WAS NEARING four o’clock and Joe’s Packard was nowhere to be seen.

Through the back windows she could see two blond-plaited girls chewing on long strings of taffy, listening to the radio. She could hear the radio faintly. Hear the girls’ soft, taunting sister voices, scolding and reckoning with each other. They wore matching Easter dresses, mint green and soft-shell pink, and their backs faced the windows. The taffy was lemon yellow and they were tugging at it and laughing at the program.

Marion wished she might join them, such fun they were having, poking and prodding and nestling against each other.

It was lovely.

She turned away, the rush of feeling too great, and that was when she saw the flicker of white from the corner of her eye.

“Mrs. Lanigan, get back in this house!”

Marion backed up fast against the wall and saw the apparition, for that’s what she appeared, in white, skin pallid, eyes like dark, purple-edged hollows.

Behind the ghostly figure scurried the nurse, pinch faced and grasping. Hooking one arm around the ghost, she grabbed her fast.

“Mrs. Lanigan, you know better,” she said, and the ghost, the ghost who was Mrs. Lanigan, wailed mournfully.

“I don’t know where. I lost my way. You’re trying to make me lose my way,” she moaned, her eyelids and cheeks looking so strange, puffy, like a balloon toy.

“I am doing no such thing,” the nurse scolded, and it was at that moment she spotted Marion.

But said nothing.

“Oh, Jessie, put me down. Put me down. I can’t bear it,” Mrs. Lanigan cried. And Marion saw all her wrecked beauty, drawn tight across old bones.

Without saying a word to Marion, the nurse, this Jessie, seized the flailing woman and shepherded her, roughly, back into the house.

Marion waited.

She knew.

Five minutes later, the nurse returned.

“He’s not here,” she said, hand on her hip, facing Marion in front of a hedgerow. With a beckoning nod, she drew Marion farther into the corner of the lawn, away from the house.

“I know.”

“What do you mean coming here? What good will it do you?”

Any guess Marion had about this nurse and the master of the house was confirmed by this, by this intimate tone. By the way her face showed possession, territorial claim.

“I am at the end,” Marion said. “You replaced Nurse Mercer?”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“And you tend to Mrs. Lanigan.”

“As you can see,” she said, “she’s very sick.”

“You keep her still. You take care of her.”

“You know she is very ill. And frightened of the world too. Do you know what I mean?”

“And he has you, he has you to take care of with the medicines…” Marion felt her head thrumming. “And to warm his bed.”

The nurse’s face reddened. But she was smiling too. She pulled a cigarette from her apron pocket and slid it into her mouth.

“Oh, Mrs. Seeley,” the nurse said, “you should see the things I can do. He found me, I was ready to take my vows.”

“You’re the wife’s nurse. You’re her nurse.”

“I take good care, don’t think I don’t,” she said, voice pitching. “She’s so happy she doesn’t know the ceiling from the floor. There’s nothing wrong with it. A man has to have something. Especially a man like that.”

She could hear it now: Marion, you must understand, I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.

“You don’t even know what sorrow awaits you,” Marion said, shaking her head. “You don’t even know.”

The nurse shook her head, shook her head and punched out a vicious, certain smile. “We are to be married, you know. Did you know that? He is all done with you. Yes, I know all about you. But you have your doctor husband. Why don’t you take care to warm your husband’s bed?”

Marion felt something rise up in her and before she knew it she had her hands on the girl, was shaking her. The cigarette fell and the girl turned white, tried to wrest herself free.

“You were his dally, but the dally is past,” she said, pulling at Marion’s hands, tugging from them.

“What can you know?” Marion’s voice rose calamitously. “What can you know? He tosses us all aside. He tossed Nurse Mercer. He tossed her and then—”

“And then you murdered her,” the nurse replied, chin jutting out defiantly. “Murdered her and the other. Those perverse girls. He has told me all about those girls.” She twisted her face into a sneer, but her voice edged hysteria. “Do you mean to murder me too?”

Marion felt no jolt. There were no jolts left to be had.

Louise. Louise. Could it be that he knew exactly what he was doing as she teetered, wounded, toward them that night? With Louise gone, his easy life made even easier. No more fear she might talk of drugs and his wife and who knew what else. Who gained more than he?

Marion’s voice came barreling out. “Listen, you stupid, stupid girl. Listen to me. You tell him this. You tell him: I know all about him. I know all about keeping his wife torpid and senseless up there. I know about it all and I have the proof. Louise knew too. Louise knew, and who is to say he wasn’t glad for the chance to shut her up?”

The girl shook her head violently and laughed, a short bark. “He’s told me you’re mad. Everyone knows you’ve gone mad,” she said, in a jerking, terrified taunt.

Marion smacked her hard across the face.

“I have phoned the police, you know,” the girl said. “I have phoned them.”

“You will go mad too, you wanton child. He will raze you to ruins too,” Marion said, her heart battering in her chest as she turned and began to run across the lawn, to run anywhere.

“Oh, do run, Mrs. Seeley. Don’t you know he’s all done with you?”

Ginny’s syruped tongue saying, Meems, I never would have hurt you and you’re such a silly fool to have shot me dead like a possum in a tree, just ’cause I cracked in two for but a minute. Don’t you know, the fever on me, pen yan in the lungs, loaded up on milkman candy, watching you and Louise clinging and climbing each other, I went mad, just for a second. Just for a second and you murdered me, Marion. I wonder if you went a little mad too. I wonder if you still are. All I know is you put a big hole where my face should be. Oh, Meems, my face…

The weight of her sin finally fell upon her. There was nothing left with which to distract herself, no place left to hide. She had let this shallow man undo her, but she had also undone herself. There is nothing left but to face it, she told herself. There is nothing left but to start paying.

HE DID NOT COME. He did not come. And Marion felt sure it would be the police who would arrive first. She was certain of it.

By morning light, with not a shudder of sleep upon her, she felt she could wait no more, could sit in that mildewed room filled with the dread of a hundred hotel guests before her, the hectic patter of mice behind walls, the feel of dark hours careening toward final despair from a hundred, a thousand past down-at-heels nightly guests, weekly residents, no more.

She put on her hat, hair pushed beneath, and walked, down faced, to the streetcar. It was too early and the cars were not running, so she proceeded on foot. She walked along Thaler Avenue, which snaked its way fourteen blocks to Gideon Square, and everything was still and a forlorn feel was in the air.

There was a low creaking coming from somewhere in the square, and also a high singing, almost a mewl. A man crooning brokenly about a girl whose cousin was a drunkard in Cincy and died with a peach of a bun, and her uncle’s a preacher in Quincy, a nutty old son of a gun. Peering, she could see the man, who was lying at the foot of the center fountain, a stone-struck phoenix rising to the heavens, and he was singing to a girl, she looked like a girl, with her arms wrapped tight around herself, a pitch of blood on her shirtfront and it was the lungs. Was anyone left in this whole lonely world with lungs not patched together as if from tattered muslin and cobwebs? They all came to the desert, like she had, they blew in from all corners, they came to the desert to build themselves anew. Isn’t that what she had done, wasn’t she anew?

She skittered around the square and no one bothered her, and she fancied, with her pitted stockings, her day-worn dress, the dirty tendrils of dark-rooted platinum slipping from her hat, she looked the part. She looked the part, and one poor woman, face a smear of booze-washed sorrow, offered her a glug of grain and Marion almost took it, but did not.

No Dr. Seeley. No Dr. Seeley, but she would not stop.

She called out, “Everett!” She called out, “Everett!” and got more than one answer, but never from her husband.

She wended from a lean-to on one side of the square to a tangle of boys playing three-card molly to the central newsstand opening for the day. And there was an old garage, the owner long gone, the shell of the place all intact, a few stray automobile parts hanging, and a spent cooking fire in the center. She could see four, five men and a woman folded in small corners, sleeping. One man was whittling smooth strokes of rosewood and he only nodded at Marion, who nodded back.

“Everett,” she said, barely a whisper now. “Everett, are you there?”

That was when she saw a hand wrapped around a brown glass quart of Chlorodyne with the Valiant label curling off the side.

And she saw the pale face of Dr. Seeley, skin like wet paper, head resting against a stripped tire, mouth slightly open.

“Everett,” she whispered, moving toward him. “Everett…”

She put her hand to him, the bluing lips, and his eyelids seemed to slide open, but the eyes were dead, black specks floating serene.

Then the eyes shut again.

His skin, the coldest marble she ever felt.

“Haint ever seen one take so much,” came a voice in her ear. It was the man whittling the wood. “Haint ever seen such. He start with the syrup and then one came with the cubes and kit and hence he tore in with the needle too. A starving man, he.”

Marion turned to face him. “And you just watch? Look at him. You just watch?”

The man looked at her. “What do you do?” he asked her. “What do you do, miss? When it’s that way, there is only to watch.”

She turned back to her husband, placed her fingers on his wrist and the pulse sludging, and it was like the time she found him in the bathtub at the Prescott rooming house. He spent three days in the private hospital with the doctor who promised he could wash his brain to clean the habit, but then the money ran out.

Holding his hand, she felt a panic all through.

Five seconds.

Five seconds she gave to thought. She could run for help and then, while they tended, flee. She could walk away knowing that Everett had tended himself many times after too much, much too much, had taken care of himself a dozen, perhaps a hundred times or more and always stood again. He knew what to do, he did. She knew he would want her to run. He would want her to save herself. She ran through this thought, but for five seconds only.

There were things she had done that she had never guessed she could do.

Things that had now seeped into her bones and changed her forever. Seeped into her bones and now she was sick from inside out. Diseased and lost.

But this, abandoning him, this thing was the thing she could never do. She was glad to know it about herself. There was something left.

“WHERE IS THE NEAREST HOSPITAL?” she asked the man at the newsstand, and he told her it was two blocks and she said, breathless, “Can you summon a policeman?” and he looked at her long and hard, and said he would.

It was while turning to run back to her husband that she saw her own photograph, in clinic garb, spread across three different early editions, hanging six sheets abroad the top of the stand. All the headlines shrieked in her ears:

She did not stop long enough to read further. She did not stop at all.

Tearing back to the garage, to Dr. Seeley, she gazed up at the phoenix wings towering over the center of the square and thought they might block out the sky entire.

Something in her lifted, something in her lifted and the weight, all the weight, it was gone. In her head, she heard strands of wavery ukulele and could see Ginny dancing, white arms curled about her like those arching wings, dancing and dancing and head tilted, smile hooking, and dancing and dancing…

THEY TOLD HER that her husband would be fine. They told her that he had consumed large quantities of morphine and she nodded, as if not knowing, and wondered what they must think of her that she might not know what caused the thousand thatch marks on the doctor’s legs and those arms with ribbons of scars cross-threaded like a corset.

Oh, Doctor…

The nerve in his cheek twitched, his eyes fluttered open, and he saw her there. She could see the recognition flood across his face and it was awful. She felt awful for him.

“Oh no, Marion…,” he said. “No. I was trying to find out…I thought I was saving…Marion, I did try so…I did try…I…” His face looked a hundred years old and his eyes filled.

Looking down at him, she rested her fingers on his chest. “Doctor, I am to blame. It is me. It is mine.”

Then, quietly, he said to her, “Leave now, Marion. I will repair it all. Flee now. Go to the train tracks.”

She shook her head.

“You must hurry,” he whispered. Then, looking down at his whittled arm, he said, “This is my sin to bear, but I love it so”—and then the faintest of pauses—“more than you, Marion. That is too terrible to say, but it does what love can’t. The world is so dark. But what the needle gives…I wonder if you could understand, Marion.”

And he looked at her with red-ringed eyes. “It adds to truth a dream.”

She saw the way he was, she saw it flickering there before her in an instant, but she shook it away, she had to shake it away. She told herself she did not understand and would not believe him.

She reached out to him, but he turned away and faced the wall. She could not get him to look her way again. She said his name a dozen times or more, but he was still.

Behind her, a doctor said that two policemen were waiting to see her. The patrolman who had brought them to the hospital had alerted them and would she see them now. He was sorry to rush her, but the detectives were quite insistent.

Standing beside Dr. Seeley’s bed, she touched her fingers to his warming flesh and said something quietly to him, and the words, the voice itself came from a place she did not know and she couldn’t even be sure what she’d said, other than it sounded like you, you, you, the last word in a song stuttering on the phonograph: you, you, you, you…

And the detectives did not wait for her, for when she turned around there they were.

THREE HOURS LATER, three hours of questions and Marion hardly managing a word, just repeating the same stories Joe Lanigan had rat-a-tat-tatted into her head and, with each repetition, the stories getting more jumbled, disjointed, a motion picture with the reels out of order.

Somewhere in her head, she wondered how they identified the bodies. She thought she heard them say something about a Los Angeles police detective matching Louise’s body to missing-person photostats and a nasty voice from somewhere in the dark shanks of her head sneered, You should’ve burned her face. You should’ve burned her face with acid or fire. My God, my God.

She gave them nothing, could not fix her head around anything.

They asked and asked and asked.

But her head was a dust bowl.

Somewhere in her, she was building armies to prepare herself, to fortify herself because she knew it was time. She was nearly ready, nearly ready to tell everything because she felt her guilt and shame more purely than ever and knew what must be done.

But her thoughts were scattered and she worried about Dr. Seeley and her words jumbled in her mouth and she could not hold on to them. She began to doubt the soundness of her own mind.

Joe Lanigan, did you even exist? Did you live to ravish me and then disappear into thin air but to stand behind doors, voice rattling through telephones, creeping under floors, whispering commands, puppet string twisted around your heavy hands as you lift your fingers and everyone dances, dances for you?

They spoke sternly, the edges in their voices sharpening. Even that nice Officer Morley, Detective Morley, grew impatient—he told her she knew more, and he was asking about packing slips and train tickets, and wasn’t it funny that a woman perfectly matching her description had taken that train herself to Los Angeles? Had left the Southern Pacific Station in Los Angeles with those trunks? Could she explain who this woman was if not she?

For a moment, the picture of Sheriff Healy, in full uniform and tin star, twirling Ginny around in the girls’ living room, stuttered into her head.

“Sheriff Healy, is he—”

“Don’t even bother,” said the long-necked one, Tolliver. “Don’t even bother. The sheriff knows all about you. Knows the kinds of things you girls had going on there. It went bad between you three, did it?” He zippered his fingers in the air, a perfect triangle.

Marion looked up at them and said nothing.

You must see that now that I will make sure my name is not brought into this, Joe Lanigan had said to her. I will not let it happen and it won’t happen because of what I am in this town. There are levers and switches and keys and I know which way they all go.

And they kept talking and talking, about witnesses at both train stations, at the soda fountain on Hussel Street, everywhere. She had been seen everywhere. Everyone saw her and identified her and there was no hiding. Even people who could not have seen her said they saw her. Lever, switch, key.

“It was you, Mrs. Seeley, wasn’t it?” said Morley. “It was you on that train and it was you who came to claim those trunks? And if you didn’t know what was in them, why did you tell the station agent that the trunks contained game meat? It was you, Mrs. Seeley, and you knew those trunks held the remains, the butchered remains, of your friends, did you not?”

…and finally

Did you murder those two girls, Mrs. Seeley?

And she stuttered and started and finally gathered herself, gathered herself and summoned Louise’s stalwart hauteur. She thought of Louise and she brought Louise to herself and rose tall in her chair and said, keenly, “Do I look to you, do I look to you gentlemen like the kind of person who could murder two women and do the things you’ve said, that you keep saying, who could cut her girlfriends to pieces and pack them in boxes and perform untold horrors upon their bodies?”

They peered down at her, these two tall men looming and hanging over her.

“And I don’t think I will talk anymore. I don’t think I will. I can’t talk anymore now and I believe I will have a lawyer.”

She was placed in the holding cell.

JOE LANIGAN. Joe Lanigan. Would you really nail me to the cross?

I believe, Joe Lanigan, you would.

She sitting here behind a crossbar and what of Joe Lanigan, sprawling bedwise with his nurse-whore?

Prescription slips, tales of dirty deeds, broken-faced dope peddlers pointing shaking fingers—what did any of that matter? Who would believe her now? Who would believe this dirty thing, wasted and unclean, with drug-addicted husband, this dirty thing a monster in waiting? Who would believe her?

She would mount those gallows steps. She would.

BY THE TIME the detectives reclaimed her, not two hours later, she had toiled herself into some state.

“Where is my lawyer? Where is he?” she asked. She could not keep still. She could not stop her hands wringing. Her head was so full. Her head was so full she could scarce hold it up.

“You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Seeley,” Tolliver said, looming, it seemed, two feet higher than two hours before. “What would you need a lawyer for?”

“You’ll have your lawyer,” Morley said. “But right now, we’ll have some more answers first.”

She looked at Morley, and then at Tolliver. They had some bounce in them, some light in their eyes. They seemed more confident, sprightly. She felt they were circling in, circling in.

“I’d like to know where Mr. Joseph Lanigan is,” she blurted before any sense or thought could stop her. But why should it stop her? Wasn’t this the end of the line? Wasn’t it? Grab any rope, grab and hold on. “Have you brought him in for all these questions?”

“Why would we do that, Mrs. Seeley?” Morley said, looking over at Tolliver and back at her.

“He was friends with the girls, now, wasn’t he? He was friends and spent as many evenings with them as I. He’s there behind everyone you mention. He’s behind them all, lurking. He’s behind Mr. Worth who goes to the papers and says I had a fiery temper and the girls were prone to drinking and wild antics, and all these so-called witnesses and all this. He’s behind them all.”

She felt her face grow stiff. Had she gone too far for nothing? Had she only ensnared herself? She stopped. She put her hand to her mouth and bit it. She bit it like an animal and her skin broke fast and blood swelled across her lips, the salt tingling. She didn’t know what she was doing. She started to laugh and the sound of it was terrifying.

“Mrs. Seeley,” Morley said, face turning white. “Mrs. Seeley…”

They bent down toward her. The way they were looking at her, like they realized suddenly they had captured a tigress, a madwoman, right there before their eyes.

SHE SAT in the holding cell. It might have been many hours, she couldn’t be sure. She knew it was all over. She did.

There was a guard with a harelip and a rolling gait who kept coming in and talking to her. He told her there were reporters all the way from Los Angeles, even New York City, outside. He told her that they were trying to take pictures through the bar windows, had she seen them? He had made them stop, wasn’t she glad? He waved one of the daily papers in front of her and told her that the first four pages were all about her, and wasn’t that something. He said he wasn’t supposed to show her, but did she want a peek? The headlines flashed before her: “SUSPECTED MURDERESS’ DEATH TRUNKS HORRIFIED HOTEL STAFF” and “THE WEIRD ‘SISTERS’: Did Fatal Kiss Spark Blonde’s Jealous Rage?”

It is all over, Marion thought, and I am somehow glad. It is my time to speak. It is my time to lay my sins bare.

“I am ready,” she said. But before she knew it, her head wobbled and her chest turned to fire and she felt herself falling again.

THE POLICE DOCTOR was peering over her with his aluminum headlamp glaring like a magnificent third eye.

“I fainted,” Marion whispered. She who’d not fainted in her life now twice in three days.

“Correct,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of cloves. Marion thought of Christmas back in Michigan, of clove-spiked oranges dusted in cinnamon hanging on snow-pattered windows at school. Had Christmas passed this year? Why couldn’t she remember the mistletoe and the holly pricking her fingers?

He kept peering.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Glad about that,” he said, “but why don’t you tell me now about the hole in your hand.”

Marion looked down at her bullet-torn palm, then back up at the doctor, who tilted his head, watching her closely.

“I’m not talking. I’m through talking,” she said, feeling peaceful, half dead. This was to be it. This was to be it and suddenly it felt so perfect. “The only talking I will do now is to confess. To confess all. I will bear the sins no longer. I will walk those gallows steps head held high.”

“Mighty strong words, miss,” he said, taking her hand in his and turning it over. “But I don’t guess you heard.”

“Heard?”

He took an alcohol-daubed swab to her hand and she cried out.

“About your husband,” he said. “I guess it’s to me to tell you.”

She felt all the sound go out of the world and then she screamed.

TWELVE HOURS PRIOR, bleary and still broken, Dr. Seeley had dressed and found a doctor’s coat, contriving to secure ten grains of morphine, and so taking, wandered out the hospital doors and hitched rides all the way to the big reservoir on the far northern edge of the city. The jump from the top of the concrete dam was more than two hundred feet and he was found by maintenance workers. The note he left on his hospital bed proclaimed:

The letter was all. When Marion read it, and she would only read it once, she wondered how long it would take her to understand the nature of her husband’s sacrifice.

Part of her wanted to confess everything and clear his name—this was the biggest part. But doing so would deny his ultimate gesture.

Part of her wanted to follow him.

Part of her could feel herself falling, feel the water filling her mouth, her chest. The peace in that.

But part of her, in the winnowing corners of her fevered head, felt very, very differently. Part of her could not stop herself from thinking, hot-teared: Dr. Seeley, you have taken something from me. I was ready. It was time. This was to be my redemption and now it is yours.

“MRS. SEELEY, we know you were trying to protect your husband. We know your motives were pure and selfless. And that will not be forgotten.”

That’s what they told her. Mr. Quint, her lawyer, took the reins fast and handled everything.

What could be more noble, what could be a greater act of love than Dr. Seeley’s keen sacrifice? On lower currents, she knew the answer: for him to have let her choose how to reckon with it, to have left it to her to choose. That would have been greater still. For she had been ready to face her crimes and, most of all, her sins. And now her chance, it was gone.

Privately, Mr. Quint did not believe his client to be of sound mind after her husband’s demise. He did not believe her ramblings about Mr. Joseph Lanigan—hell, he knew Joe Lanigan, had dinner with him at the lodge once a month and went hunting with him every November. What stories lovestruck ladies will tell. Alas…