Bury Me Deep

Part Six

“I’m a big Mick and I can take it,” Joe Lanigan laughed, laughed all the rumors away, to all the out-of-town reporters who didn’t know that, facts aside, Gentleman Joe Lanigan could never be a part of something as sordid as this, would never dip his manicured finger (oh, didn’t he love his weekly manicures the cute marcelled girls at the Biltmore gave him) into such low revels, this a Lodge man, an Elk, a Mason, for goodness’ sake. Didn’t these Los Ang-e-lees scribes, with their pomade and shiny shoes, grabbing for ink, making the most of their small entr’acte in the crime of the decade, didn’t they know our Joe?

Sure, his name tripped from tongues in ways that might, in other towns, bigger and smaller, have torn down reputation, his good name: this man, he can never now lead our school board, cannot sit on the council, run for office, run for mayor. But outsiders never would understand, would they? He is one of our own and we know things they never could in their blaring scandal-sheet Babylons. In fact, he carries a new sheen, the love object, the knightly swain, valiant is as valiant does, his acts of kindness spurring crushes, the crushes spurring jealous husbands and jealousy turned tragic, tragic. But tragedy so dogs our Gent Joe, what with that poor sick wife and he to raise two daughters virtually alone. Oh, our Gent Joe. Our Gent Joe. Who wouldn’t stand beside him? He stands for us all.

“You’d best get on the nearest train, Mrs. Seeley. Fresh start. Heard your father wired your train fare back east. Be on that train, will you?”

“Yes, warden. Yes, I believe I will.”

They gave her a new dress of robin’s egg blue and her old shoes and purse and hat. Her hair was stripped of all peroxide and looked her own again but, squinting in her old compact mirror, she barely recognized herself.

Instead, she saw Ginny’s plummy smirk and Louise’s soft, piping cheeks and Dr. Seeley’s eyes, his eyes and all the sad tenderness they could hold, that the world could hold. He had held it all, for them both.

In the tiny mirror, she saw them and felt strong.

She felt as if her shoulders held wings and she would rise, alight, feet twittering, body rising so high…

AT MRS. GOWER’S, the house throbbing with memories, Marion sat on the parlor sofa, waiting. Mrs. Gower had left word at the prison that she should come and retrieve her belongings. Marion wondered what could be left. But the old woman appeared with a small banded suitcase, the one Marion’s father had given her on her wedding day.

Marion felt its lightness, touched its corners, its burnished latches.

“The policemen came. I gave them everything of that man’s,” Mrs. Gower said, her upper lip twitching. “Your…personal items, undergarments and such, I held them in my own quarters. It’s not right for gentlemen to go through ladies’ private things.”

Marion nearly smiled. She was remembering something. Could they still be there, tucked between her dainties?

“I knew how he was,” Mrs. Gower was saying, but Marion wasn’t listening. “The doctor. Your doctor. I could see what he was.”

SHE HELD THE LETTER in her hand. It had come five days before her release.

She would see Mr. Worth. She would see Mr. Worth first. She would see him first and then she would see the other. She would see the other because she must.

She had ideas. She did not trust herself. In there, inside, she was not sound, curled tight in a cell, hundreds of letters of sympathy and calumny each day, the witchy stares of fellow prisoners, the crowded feel in her head, all the time, even when sleeping, although she did not truly sleep. She was not sound, but now she held the suitcase tight and wondered what her path would be.

THE WORTH BROTHERS MEAT MARKET was not open yet when she arrived, but she peered in the window and there was Mr. Worth, face pale at her sight.

He unlocked the door and let her into his back office. No, she did not want coffee, not even with a pinch in it, no, she did not want to pause at all. She could scarcely make herself sit in the chair opposite his desk.

The door ajar, she could smell the meat and see red edges of hanging carcasses. She could almost see them rocking, shaking even though hooked fast.

In her head she saw visions of him at one of the parties, shirtsleeves rolled up, cranking his hand organ as she warbled, when they all asked her to sing for them and Mr. Worth, “’Twas down where the bluegrass grows, your lips were sweeter than julep, when you wore that tulip, and I wore a big red rose.”

Sitting before her now, the gin was radiating from him, seemed to be leaking from his skin.

His blood-thatched eyes settled on her and he rubbed his chin.

“Mrs. Seeley, I know I’ve wronged you. I know it.”

Marion looked at him, feeling the wave of surprise only faintly. She could not hold on to anything long enough to truly feel it.

“It is not you,” she said. “You have nothing to account for.”

“When I saw what Joe was doing, I might’ve stopped it. I figured from the start you were a cat’s paw in this thing.”

“No, no,” Marion said. “I know my share in this. I have faced it.” Before jail, she could look at her guilt only in passing, a rustle in the back of her head. Now it was finally hers. She clung to it.

“At first he told me you murdered them both, but I knew you couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.”

“I don’t wish to talk about it anymore, Mr. Worth,” she said. “I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.” As she said it, she knew it was true. Joe Lanigan’s sins stacked so high. She would not let him forget them. This was what she meant to tell him. This was what she would say when she said her last piece to him and then let him live with them, if he could. But she knew he could. That was the worst of it.

“He’s got a new nurse,” Mr. Worth said. “You know about the nurses.”

“I do.”

“The last one, the St. Monessa girl, he got tired of her. Too noisy, he said.”

“I see,” Marion said, looking around at Mr. Worth’s desk, the cloudy bottle, the curling matches spent and piled thick along cigarette butts spread in a fan. She was beginning to feel dizzy.

“Elsie,” he said. “This one’s Elsie.”

The name brought a hot flicker of shame to Marion’s eyes. No surprises to be had, were there? She felt something sorrowful rustle in her chest. Elsie Nettle. She pictured the girl’s fawn face on that long-ago night, the way her leg trembled against her in Joe’s car, after everything.

“I wonder if you know this, Mrs. Seeley,” Worth said, voice softening. “When he drinks, he says things. He says he’s a lost man.” He looked her in the eye. “Says he loves you still.”

“I didn’t ask for that,” Marion said, hard and rough. “Don’t tell me that.”

“Says you brought him ruin and hellfire and yet he loves you still.”

Marion, sprung back to vivid life, looked up fast and wanted to laugh. “Brought him to ruin. Oh, isn’t that a fairy tale, a dreamy little love book to end all.”

Mr. Worth looked at her warily, unsure. “But I wanted to say I’m sorry, and…your husband. I’m sorry.”

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun.

And she saw it was the pistol, the Colt. The very one.

“What do you have there?” she asked, thinking she might be ill. The heat, the smell of the meat, the gin swirling.

“Joe gave me this to hold,” he said. “He trusted me with everything, you see, because he knows things about me. Things I’d rather not share.”

He set the pistol lightly on the desk between them. “I don’t want him having this over you. I don’t know what he might use it for, or what you might.” He looked at her. “But, on the balance, I’d have it be with you.”

She was shaking. Her shoes were clacking on the floor. What did he mean by this?

“I am also afraid to have it with me,” he said. “Lately I have developed weaknesses. There have been moments of despair and…”

Marion looked at the pistol, that same dire pistol, and felt her blood rush from her head. Blurry with heat, she took off her hat and held on to the desk edge.

“I took those girls to pieces, Marion,” he said, voice so low as to be scarcely a breath. “Nights, early mornings, I think I cannot live with what I did to those girls.” He looked up at Marion. “Their blood,” he whispered.

“Yes, Mr. Worth,” she said.

Looking at him and the heavy sags under his eyes, she wondered what he thought he was doing by giving her this. She had a head filled with bad thoughts of her own to lead her to dark places. She had no room for his. But then she realized he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do and he wasn’t strong enough to keep hold of it anymore. He was shutting a door. By giving her the gun in this way, he was trying to shut a door.

He should know, she thought, that door never shuts. She curled her finger around the handle of her suitcase.

Reaching for his glass, he took a long swallow. “Mrs. Seeley, I do feel I must tell you,” he said. “One night, end of a daylong drunk, we boys were up over at the Grand Lodge. Well, he said it to me. He said it to me.”

“What?” Marion said, steeling herself, teeth gnashing to stay upright. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I tell you, Ab, I know things now, about myself. I know what I am capable of. It is a shadow self under this one and I’ve seen it. You see it was a chance—Louise Mercer, she was to bleed me dry. She would not be stopped.’”

Mr. Worth looked at her. “Mrs. Seeley, he told me he shook up the delicate balance. You three girls. That delicate balance. Gave Ginny a big dose, knowing it’d get her all jazzed up. Then told her Louise was itching to get rid of her. Mrs. Seeley, you know Ginny was a jealous girl and a sick one. Joe said he thought to get her riled about you and Louise. He warned her she’d best steal away with Louise while she could. He figured they’d skip town and he’d have thrown off their snaky coils for good.”

Something flashed before Marion’s eyes, the moments before the murder, Ginny laying her charges before them. Louise knowing something was behind it, saying, I wonder who’s been filling your ear with tongue oil.

Why, it was Joe, it was Joe. Of course it was Joe. “She’s Pandora,” Ginny had raged, “come to town with her dirty little box to bring us all to ruin.” Was it not Joe Lanigan who had long ago told her, You are Pandora. You came to town with that beautiful little box I had to, had to open. Even now, she could picture Joe’s lips to Ginny’s pearly ear, warning her of the same.

Mr. Worth looked at Marion. “And he’s a cold one, Mrs. Seeley. He is. He says to me, he says, ‘But, Ab, I played the wrong card and Ginny went cockeyed. And I had to fix things. I did. Why, Marion already had the blood on her hands and we were nearly through. It had to end. Had to. And the end was at hand. I was to be through with them all. But then there was Louise, on her feet again.’”

And Marion saw it again, in her head, in images stuttering together:

…the way his arm extended, like he was batting off a fly…and Louise slumping to her knees like at a church pew.

“And he said, ‘Ab, this here is the truth, when I look at it with sharpest eyes, which I do not often do, I cannot fairly say what was in my head. I cannot be certain of it. Does that make a monster of me, Ab? Then that is what I am. Darling, dark Louise. Maybe it was this: that I saw my chance and I blew a hot hole right in her chest.’”

THERE WERE PLACES too murky ever to see through. The bloody fury of the night and everything storming up to it, none of it was ever going to lie flat and let her run knowing fingers across it and see all the patterns and shapes and meanings for what they were. There was no essence to them. It was all mayhem and blood and now preening sorrow.

But now, sitting there with Mr. Worth, sitting quietly together, something had turned. Something had turned and she reckoned a path. It was like a fever—a yearlong fever—had broken at last. She knew, with a blooming rightness in her chest, what she would do. Mr. Worth, he was the duelist’s dark second, looming up her side, rapier outstretched, retreating to his meat locker before he could even count her paces. This was all hers. All hers.

She lifted her small suitcase from the floor and set it on the desk. Mr. Worth’s eyes fluttered gently as she opened its metal latches and raised the cardboard lid.

Oh, Mrs. Gower, my unlikely sister in arms, she thought. They were there, as they should be, beneath her tin of talc, her garter bands, her small cache of cotton step-ins, petal-soft—things too delicate for policemen’s fingers. They were just where she’d hidden them.

Mr. Worth began clearing his throat.

Taking a deep breath, Marion pressed down on the cotton pile slightly, feeling the crinkle of paper beneath, onionskin, tied with a string. The prescription slips. She plucked beneath for the end of the string and tugged fast, her white undergarments floating to the floor.

“Here it is for you, Mr. Worth,” she said. “Here is your path.”

She slid the stack of prescription slips across the desk toward him, then closed the suitcase and met his puzzled gaze.

“Do you know what you are to do with these?” she asked.

He looked at them as if afraid to touch, as if they were her bloomers themselves. But finally he did, pulling the knot loose and holding the first prescription slip in front of his gin-blurred eyes.

“Veronal,” he read, “sulphonal, chloral, paraldehyde, more veronal.” He let his fingers run through each one.

“This is how he keeps her,” Marion said, fighting off a quiver in her voice. “How Mr. Joe Lanigan keeps his wife out of his affairs. She is a prisoner to all this. His fairy dust.” She pointed, waving her finger at the prescriptions. “Do you see how it is?”

“Why, the thing of it,” he murmured, mouth open, a slanted o of slow marvel.

“And those doctors. See the names. Those are clinic doctors,” Marion said. “They collude with him. And why wouldn’t they? You all dance so closely, don’t you? You all have fingers knotted in each other’s pockets.”

Mr. Worth set the slips down and reached for his glass, his hand rattling against it.

“Mr. Worth,” she said. “Do you now see what you must do?”

“I see the power these documents might have,” he said, gin to mouth. “I see that.” But he did not look certain. She would have to make him see. To her, it was so clear.

“Who can guess, Mr. Worth, what else a hungry newspaperman might find? With a taste of fresh blood on his tongue, he might bother to raise the roof on Valiant Drugs too. There are so many hidden trails he might follow.”

“Take them to the Courier, then,” Mr. Worth said, eagerly. “You should take them.”

She shook her head fiercely. “Don’t you see? They won’t listen to the madman’s wife. The jailbird, the tainted woman. The public sinner. They will never listen to me. But you, you are one of them. You are them. It is your stake.”

He looked down again but said nothing.

It was then that Everett’s face came to her. His vain detective work, perhaps no longer vain. Every four days, his very words returned to her, as if her husband were whispering from his own damp grave, 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. It was his last gift to her, and she must use it.

“You know your share in so many of these sins of our Mr. Lanigan,” she said, eyes fixed on him. “And I know them too, Mr. Worth—or is it Mr. Tanner?”

He looked at her. She made him feel it, feel her knowing. My, but she was changed. She felt Louise calling out from her own booming throat. There was a kind of glory in it.

“Mrs. Seeley,” he warned, “these things are known. They are known and abided by. Encouraged. We are a small town, in many ways.”

“Was it not you in the Courier, Mr. Worth?” she said, voice rising. “You have friends. You certainly shouted lies to the rafters when last they came calling. Was that not you, speaking of my terrible temper, of the girls’ wild ways? Those girls you took to pieces?”

His face collapsed before her. She felt an ache in her chest watching it, but she went on.

“You must make your reporter believe you. You must make them all believe it,” she said, voice firm, focused. “Make them see Mr. Lanigan’s day is past. Make them see the profit in it, if you must. Use whatever secrets you hold to make them see.”

There was a long pause, a hundred years or more, but then his chin began to shake up and down. Something was happening. His eyes sharpened.

“Can I, Mrs. Seeley?” he asked, voice speeding up. “I see. I do see. For that night, he may have us both to the wall. But not on this. And I can move things, Marion. I know it. I know this town just as he does, after all. I have seen all manner of things. Oh, if you knew—I have done all kinds of favors. I have worn the blinders time and again.” He peered at her. “Marion, do you fathom it: I have secrets even darker than this.”

She looked at him and knew it to be true.

“Can you shine the light on him, Mr. Worth? Can you take these scraps and spin silk for us?” and she felt her voice begin to break. It was all so much. “Can you do it, Mr. Worth?”

His eyes were strangely brightening. Something was lifting. His visage seemed to take new shape, those fallen features resolving themselves once more.

“I can,” he said, voice rumbling, near-oratorical. “Believe me, Mrs. Seeley. Do. It will redeem me.”

“It will,” she said, and she knew she had given him a great gift and she felt larger. She suddenly felt like Louise’s noble emissary from beyond the grave. And wasn’t she?

She knew exactly what she was to do. She had set things in motion and now, now—she had given him his weapon and he hers. Abandoning the suitcase, even the purse, at the meat market, she carried only the pistol in the smocked pocket of her dress.

SIX BLOCKS AWAY, at the soda fountain, she made a quick telephone call. It was just as she guessed. He was not at home. But that was fine. It was as it should be.

Walking up Lynbrook Street, watching the three-story manse heave into sight, she felt composed, focused. But when she arrived on the doorstep and rang the bell, her breath began to catch, her chest hammering so loudly she almost did not hear the voice on the other side of the door.

“Who is it?” the whisper came, and it was Elsie Nettle’s sibilant shush.

The voice so delicate, a sparrow wing rustling, Marion felt her back straighten, her head rise. She felt her blood come back, surging through her. She would do this.

“Open the door, Elsie,” she said, her voice like smooth iron.

“I told you on the telephone…Mrs. Seeley,” the voice came back. “I told you he is not here.”

“I’ve come for you, Elsie Nettle,” Marion said. “And you’d best open this door.”

And she did.

It took fifteen minutes, no more. They sat quietly in the front parlor, the air heavy with motes and the tang of sulphur and tar oil. She saw the trembling in Elsie’s doe eyes and knew it would not take long. In quiet tones, but with a firmness she had mastered as if overnight, Marion told Elsie that everything would change tomorrow, that the magnificent house of cards Mr. Joseph Lanigan had erected with his sweet scented hands was about to fall, one flick from her dainty fingers, plus one butcher’s thumb, and gone, gone, gone. “You know what goes on. You tend to her. You fill her full of all those potions. If you stay, you will be lost,” she warned. “You’re not lost yet, or I would not have your ears now. If you stay, you will fall with him.”

At first, Elsie said nothing, could scarcely raise her delicate doll head. Finally, she murmured, in the quietest of voices, “But, Marion, it was you. You delivered me to him.”

“I know it,” Marion said. “I put you here. I set you out for him. I did everything but lift your schoolgirl skirt for him. And now I’m taking you away. I would not leave you here, Elsie. For all the world.”

And Elsie, still that mountain girl from Fool Hollow, not so broken yet, relented, even reaching out for Marion’s cold hand.

They climbed the stairs to the third floor, past the gust of slow decay radiating from the sickroom in the center of the house. And Marion watched as Elsie packed her small bag with her two uniforms, two day dresses, her undergarments, everything so shabby, save a new lilac hat for Sunday Mass.

Elsie, at Marion’s direction, telephoned the clinic to request a doctor to visit Mrs. Lanigan that evening, as she had quit her post and would be leaving town immediately.

Then, they walked out of the house together and Marion escorted Elsie, hand in hand, to the corner. When the bell clanged and the streetcar to the train station shuttered to a halt, she put Elsie on it, and watched her leave, the ribbon on her Easter hat fluttering behind her.

THERE WAS ONLY one step left to take. Now he would hear her, the man himself. With the pistol in hand, she would have him listen, and then she would be done. My, who would’ve reckoned her power, she asked herself. Not she, but there it was and she held it close.

She began walking again, in her head a million speeches unfurling, each larger and more damning than the last.

She walked to the lodge, which was dark, and to the Dunlop and the Dempsey and to the big new restaurant on Monroe and finally to the El Royale Hotel, which sparkled dustily in the foreground, reminding her of a long-ago night when a girl like her walked to that same hotel.

…walking alone into the cavernous Thunderbird Dining Room, a sea of dark suits and mustaches, and “Joe Irish is looking for you, bunny rabbit,” and she was fast in the arms of Gent Joe himself, tuxedo black as India ink, and she looked up at his eyes, his eyes smiling, his face doing smiling things as if there were never any such thing as shame in this world…

Walking, hearing her own feet clitter lightly on pavement in the dark of the city weeknight past ten, and everything was beginning to tilt, and inside the thought of seeing Joe Lanigan, it was doing things to her, doing rough bewitchments, and she could not sort it all out and she began to wonder if she would be able to say her piece. The words will come when I see him, she told herself. I will not be able to stop them.

“I’M LOOKING FOR MR. LANIGAN,” she told the bellhop sneaking a cigarette by the bank of rear doors.

The boy grinned and jerked his head toward the banquet hall, its gold-curtained entrance sprawling across the rear of the lobby.

“Thank you,” she said, and she walked through those curtains, feeling their velvet tendrils. And she kept walking, through the raucous spasms of the cavernous hall, the dark flocks of red-faced men huzzahing the floor show, through the glittered, confettied folly of it all, kept walking until she found him in the farthest corner, snug behind the massive, gold-painted bandstand. As if on cue, a chorus girl in his lap.

Joe Irish, Gent Joe, Mr. Joseph Lanigan did not notice her from his dim perch and the music was loud and bumptious, and seeing his face after all this time almost broke her, almost split her into so many pieces, seeing that sheaf of yellow hair, the smile, curling and confident and filled with forget.

He was able to put things away, stow them in far places, on high shelves and in deep dresser drawers, and forget them, and forget things about himself, and he could even, when he wanted, pull them down and show them to people and calmly put them away again as if they were not his.

But she could not, she could not and how dare he put her in a creaking drawer in some hidden room he seldom went, how dare he put her there and put what he had done there too when she could not, when it flooded through her every minute of every day and when he did too and Joe still did too, still flooded and overtook her.

And he is here, and those bright girls and that sad, kind doctor are not and…and…

“It had to end,” a voice muttered, her own. She began to wonder what she really meant to do. The words will come when I see him, she had told herself, but there was a quivery fear in her now because she no longer knew herself. The new self, the old self or that quaking self in between.

He turned and, in turning, spotted her. Oh, there it was, she caught it, she did, the gaudy fear crashing across his face. It was beautiful and made her feel she could do anything.

But he recovered in an instant and then it came again, that sly, cunning mask he could drop across his face at will. A reckless choice, but he made it anyway.

“My honey-locked jailbird, there she is,” he clucked amid the din, and she thought for a moment that he might slap his other knee, the one free of the showgirl’s lovesome bottom, and bid her to sit and join his bawdy party.

But he was not quite so foolish. He saw her face, saw the things in it, and quickly, cleanly removed the feathered showgirl from her roost and pushed her on her way, giving Marion his eyes, his face, newly painted sincere. She knew that dodge too. She knew all his dodges.

“You locked me away,” her mouth spilt forth, “threw the key in the sand, but here I am and guess what I have done. Guess what awaits you, Joe Lanigan.”

But her words, they were buffered, near soundless. There was nothing but cymbals and lurching slide trumpets and the hoorahs of hundreds of jostling tuxedoed men, their pleated shirtfronts popping loose as they pressed and churned around her, one shouting, reaching out with clambering hands, “Where are the girls? I’ll take this new-minted one, if you please.” She pushed herself closer toward him, the two of them now shadowed beside the quaking bandstand.

Trying again, she felt a rushing in her mouth, like she might choke.

He looked at her, he waited, that bolt of lustrous hair, the violet nosegay on his suit. She fought off a fearsome wave of soft, broken memories of him and he, sensing it, raised his hand slightly, as if to reach for her own.

The sight of it filled her with fresh horror.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Marion,” he said. “In my way, I have.”

Something vaulted up inside her and she felt her body jerk forward, her hand plunging into her pocket and reaching for that pistol, which, in a dark blur before her eyes, was suddenly at the far end of her arm outstretched.

The thing jumped in her hand, the tiny Colt did, and it was only then that she knew she had fired it. A pierce in her ear and her hand had lifted so high, to the top of a thick column, a bullet wedging in the carved oak.

She spun around, gun in her hand, but the music screeched on and only a handful of men crushed right behind them could be bothered to lift their nuzzling heads from their girls, from their creamy follies. The sound of the gunshot, so thunderous in the Hussel Street living room, barely a whisper here.

Those who did see stood stock-still, one pink-faced man hissing excitedly, It is she!

She thought they would descend upon her, but they saw the thing in her hand, they had heard it. They could scarcely believe their eyes.

“Marion,” she heard him say, and she looked at him, his face slipped to white. “Marion, no. Marion, no, don’t you see?” He looked anxiously at the clutch of men motionless, fear struck, not ten feet from them. “Marion, your husband’s sins, don’t make them your own.”

This was what he said to her. The feckless words whistling in her ear, and before she could think, her arm lifted again and she pointed this time at him, trying to rise, shirtfront showgirl-spangled. She felt the charge through her entire body as the bullet lacerated his knee, the crackling loud and victorious, the blood a glory shot.

He cried out and she had never heard such sounds from him, a dreadful bleat, and the men staggered back from them both.

It was all so stunning. She felt her body lifting, radiating. Looking around, she thought, Have I bullets enough? I may shoot them all.

His eyes were so wide and his face lowered, sinking into the spray of violets on his lapel.

From somewhere in the din, a recognition of the sound, a drunken voice crying out, “They’ve got fireworks!” and another pulling a pistol of his own, waving it gleefully as if in some Wild West saloon.

She didn’t care, didn’t care at all. She held that gun and felt its heat in her hand. In ways old and churchlike she knew it was not right. But part of her felt shooting him in that dark, hollowed heart of his would be the rightest thing she’d ever done. Righter somehow than anything that could be done.

“Marion,” he said, voice slipping into her ear. “I know what I am. Believe it.”

It was his return blow and it landed. She felt it all. He was saying, You knew me. You knew what I was. You ran toward it. Don’t forget how you ran toward it.

She thought of Everett, at the end, staring into the dank center of things, she thought how that descent must have felt, the softest curl of oblivion, the place he’d been trying to reach since he first took hold of the needle’s giddy bloom. Was that for her? To end and end and end?

It adds to truth a dream.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.” The weight of the gun in her hand, his sorrowful face, she felt herself sinking.

Something rattled in her, the blood memory of Ginny, face crumpled like shiny paper. She had done such things. She had seared and hammered and destroyed. She had turned herself into such a dark thing, for him. To tear his sneer away with a hot bullet, would that redeem her now, redeem her lost friends, her direful, doomed husband?

Or would it only bury his sins, bury them with him?

And after, she would be lost to the abyss that would follow, which would swallow her. That black whorl of nothingness she now knew so well.

Fighting it, she thought of Mr. Worth, she imagined his furtive connivances, the gin-drenched whisper to the right reporters. He would not fail. It will be, she knew it. Tomorrow, the next day and for weeks to come, the newspapers will do their dance—and they will, God help that butcher of mine, she thought—and, with each screaming headline, all these men, these fickle, sad little gents with their hunger and their loneliness, will throw Joe Lanigan to the wolves to save their own skins. Beat back the blood, Marion, she told herself. Let these silk-coated confederates eat his black heart. It is their world. Let them to it.

She looked down at him, clinging to his shattered knee, the white of bone shining through the pants leg. He looked so small.

“Now it is your turn to watch me,” she said, looking once more into those lost, careless eyes of his. “There are levers, switches, keys and I know which way they all go.”

SO FAST IT WAS, so slight was she, the music still caroming and the frenzy of the party, the orgiastic throng… a man with red whiskers—Mr. Gergen, with a mustache now?—called out, Stop her! Stop her!

But Marion was already pushing through the kitchen doors behind her and the dark alley beckoned forth.

SHE WOULD GET HER MIND BACK, her head on straight, her thoughts ordered, her heart thumping for something other than ardor and grief again. And when she did, this would all come storming back and she would feel the ponderous weight of everything, so fiercely it would knock the breath out of her.

But that time was not yet. And now all she felt was righteous and unbound.

Ten minutes later, by the tracks, a few yards from a pair of tramps, itching to lash on, she saw the freight train hurtling toward her. There has to be something, she thought, looking far off into the distance. There is something.

The air was simmery hot, the engine whistle wailing inconsolably. She could hear the wheels sparking, coming on so hard. The tramps, they were kicking tin cans into the ravine and getting ready to run.

She would get on that train and they would not find her. They would not want to. And if they did, it mattered not. She was gone.