Dark Whispers & Other Stories

Dance Girl

One day, while researching a historical novel, I came upon a one-hundred-year-old newspaper story about a small-town girl who'd come to the sinful city of Cedar Rapids and been murdered a year later. I kept thinking about it and this tale is the result.

At the time of her murder, Madge Tucker had been living in Cedar Rapids, two blocks west of the train depot, for seven years.

After several quick interviews with other boarders in the large frame rooming house, investigating officers learned that Madge Evelyn Tucker had first come to the city from a farm near Holbrook in 1883. At the time she’d been seventeen years old. After working as a clerk in a millinery store, where her soft good looks made her a mark for young suitors in straw boaters and eager smiles, she met a man named Marley who owned four taverns in and around the area of the Star Wagon Company, and the Chicago and Northwestern Railyards. She spent the five final years of her life being a dance girl in these places. All this came to an end when someone entered her room on the night of August 14, 1890.

A Dr. Baines, who was substituting for the vacationing doctor the police ordinarily used, brought a most peculiar piece of information to the officer in charge. After examining Madge Evelyn Tucker, he had come to two conclusions — one being that she’d been stabbed twice in the chest and two being that she had died a virgin.

One did not expect to hear about a dance girl dying a virgin.

Three months later, just as autumn was turning treetops red and gold and brown, a tall, slender young man in a dark Edwardian suit and a homburg stepped from the early morning Rock Island train and surveyed the platform about him. He was surrounded by people embracing each other — sons and mothers, mothers and fathers, daughters and friends. A shadow of sorrow passed over his dark eyes as he watched this happy tableau. Then, with a large-knuckled hand, he lifted his carpetbag and began walking toward the prosperous downtown area, the skyline dominated by a six-story structure that housed the Cedar Rapids Savings Bank.

He found a horse-drawn trolley, asked the driver where he might find a certain cemetery, and sat back and tried to relax as two plump women discussed the forthcoming election for mayor.

For the rest of the ride, he read the letters he kept in his suit coat. The return address was always the same, as was the name. Madge Evelyn Tucker. Just now, staring at her beautiful penmanship, tears formed in his eyes. He realized that the two women who had been arguing about the present mayor had stopped talking and were staring at him.

Rather than face their scrutiny, he got off the trolley at the next block and walked the remaining distance to the cemetery.

He wondered, an hour and a half later, if he had not come to Cedar Rapids on the worst sort of whim. Perhaps his grief over his dead sister Madge was undoing him. Hadn’t Mr. Staley at the bank where Richard Tucker worked suggested a “leave of absence”? What he’d meant, of course, was that Richard was behaving most strangely and that good customers were becoming upset.

Now Richard crouched behind a wide oak tree. In the early October morning, the sky pure blue, a chicken hawk looping and diving against this blue, Richard smelled grass burning in the last of the summer sun and heard the song of jays and bluebirds and the sharp resonating bass of distant prowling dogs.

It would be so pleasant just to sit here uphill from the place where she’d been buried. Just sit here and think of her as she’d been...

But he had things to do. That was why a Navy Colt trembled in his big hand. That was why his other hand kept touching the letters inside his jacket.

By three p.m. the man had not come. By four p.m. the man had not come. By five p.m. the man had not come.

Richard began to grow ever more nervous, hidden behind the oak and looking directly down at his sister’s headstone. Perhaps the man had come very early in the morning, before Richard’s arrival. Or perhaps the man wasn’t coming at all.

A rumbling wagon of day workers from a construction site came past the iron cemetery fence, bringing dust and the smell of beer and the cheer of their weary laughter with them. Later, a stagecoach, one of the few remaining in service anywhere in the Plains states, jerked and jostled past, a solitary passenger looking bored with it all. Finally, a young man and woman on sparkling new bicycles came past the iron fence. He saw in the gentle lines of the woman’s face Madge’s own gentle lines.

I tried to warn you, Madge.

His remembered words shook him. All his warnings. All his pleadings. For nothing. Madge, good sweet Madge, saw nothing wrong in being a dance girl, not if you kept, as she always said, “your virtue.”

Well, the doctor had said at her death that her virtue had indeed remained with her.

But virtue hadn’t protected her from the night of August 14. It hadn’t protected her at all.

Dusk was chill. Early stars shone in the gray-blue firmament. The distant dogs now sounded lonely.

Crouched behind the oak, Richard pulled his collar up and began blowing on his hands so the knuckles would not feel so raw. Below, the graveyard had become a shadowy place, the tips of granite headstones white in the gloom.

Several times he held his Ingram watch up to the light of the half-moon. He did this at five-minute intervals. The last time, he decided he would leave if nothing happened in the next five minutes.

The man appeared just after Richard had finished consulting his watch.

He was a short man, muscular, dressed in a suit and wearing a Western-style hat. At the cemetery entrance, he looked quickly about, as if he sensed he were being spied upon, and then moved without hesitation to Madge’s headstone.

The roses he held in his hand were put into an empty vase next to the headstone. The man then dropped to his knees and made a large and rather dramatic sign of the cross.

He was so involved in his prayers that he did not even turn around until Richard was two steps away. By then it was too late.

Richard shot the man three times in the back of the head — the man who had never been charged with the murder of Richard’s sister.

On the train that night, Richard took out the letter in which Madge had made reference to the man he had killed earlier this evening. Cletus Boyer, the man’s name had been. He’d been a clerk in a haberdasher’s and was considered quite a ladies’ man.

He met Madge shortly after she became a dance girl. He made one terrible mistake. He fell in love with her. He begged her to give up the taverns but she would not. This only seemed to make his love the more unbearable for him.

He began following her, harassing her, and then he began slapping her.

Finally, Madge gave up the dance hall. By now, she realized how much Cletus loved her. She had grown, in her way, to love him. She took a job briefly with Greene’s Opera House. Cletus was to take her home to meet his parents, prominent people on the east side. But over the course of the next month, Madge saw that for all he loved her, he could never accept her past as a dance girl. He pleaded with her to help him in some way — he did not want to feel the rage and shame that boiled up in him whenever he thought of her in the arms of other men. But not even her assurances that she was still a virgin helped. Thinking of her as a dance girl threatened his sanity.

All these things were told Richard in the letter. One more thing was added.

Whenever he called her names and struck her, he became paralyzed with guilt. He brought her gifts of every sort by way of apology. “I don’t know what to do, Brother. He is so complicated and tortured a man.” Finally, she broke off with him and went back to the taverns.

As the train rattled through the night, the Midwestern plains silver in the dew and moonlight, Richard Tucker sat now feeling sorry for the man he’d just killed.

Richard supposed that in his way Cletus Boyer really had loved Madge.

He sighed, glancing at the letter again.

The passage about Cletus bringing gifts of apology had proved to Richard that Boyer was a sentimental man. And a sentimental killer, Richard had reasoned, was likely to become especially sentimental on the day of a loved one’s birthday. That was how Richard had known that Cletus would come to the cemetery today, Madge’s birthday.

Richard put the letter away and looked out again at the silver prairie, hoarfrost and pumpkins on the horizon line. A dread came over him as he thought of his job in the bank and the little furnished room where he lived. He felt suffocated now. In the end, his life would come to nothing, just as his sister’s life had come to nothing; just as Cletus Boyer’s life had come to nothing. There had been a girl once but now there was a girl no longer. There had been the prospect of a better job once, but these days he was too tired to pursue it. Dragging himself daily to the bank was easier—

The prairie rushed past. And the circle of moon, ancient and secret and indifferent, stood still.

The world was a senseless place, Richard knew as the train plunged onward into darkness. A senseless place.