“I had dropped a pen, and Daisy was helping me find it,” said Sara. They got up, and for a moment Sara thought she might swoon. She planted herself in her chair. “Can I help you?”
“I have more applications for apartments. They keep coming in, even if there is no room.” She placed the envelopes on the desk. “You look peaked. Is there anything I can do?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Haines.”
Once Mrs. Haines had left, Daisy put her fingers to her lips. “Not a soul, I promise.”
“Do you think Mrs. Haines heard what we were talking about?”
“Not unless she pressed her ear against the door, and I doubt she’d stoop that low.”
The woman was always sneaking around, appearing right when Sara least expected her. She had a stealthiness to her so that even her skirts didn’t swish when she walked.
Daisy was true to her word, but on the day Sara was scheduled to go downtown and take care of matters, a newspaper article described in great detail a recent crackdown on abortionists throughout the city. Doctors and their patients were being arrested in raids, and the punishments were severe, as a lesson to anyone who tried something similar.
She told Daisy they couldn’t risk it, not until the raids stopped.
For now, she would have to live with the consequences.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
New York City, September 1985
Bailey opened one eye. She was in her bed, in her room at the Dakota. That was the good news. The bad was that her head felt like it contained several large rocks, in addition to her skull, and her mouth was as dry as Death Valley.
Her last memory of the evening was Tristan sticking his head into the room where Melinda and Tony and a couple of other hangers-on were hiding out, and shaking his head. He didn’t say anything, just gave Bailey the look of a parent who is very, very disappointed.
She hadn’t lasted a week out of rehab before diving back into the joyride of Manhattan nightlife. Melinda was the first person she’d like to blame, but she knew from the treatment center that the fault lay only with herself. She’d dressed up, gone out with people she knew would drink and do drugs, and figured that she’d be strong enough to say no. Unbelievably stupid.
She opened both eyes and followed the dust motes as they drifted above her. The apartment was a dirty construction site, there was nowhere comfortable to sit and recover, and she was stuck here all weekend. She’d gotten a message on the answering machine saying the workers would be back on Monday, so there was solace in that. Tony had made arrangements to cover the cost for the month.
Desperation sucked. Her intentions had been grand, but she was still back in the same gutter. No rich, snobby boyfriend to bail her out. No one at all. The silence of the apartment weighed on her like a malevolent ghost, judging her for every transgression.
Bailey wedged her way into the maid’s room shower, which was more like a half bathtub wedged in a corner. Wet and bedraggled, she trudged to a local diner and had some scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. By the second cup, the rocks in her head had diminished in size, and her thoughts came clearer. As did the shame.
But now what? She’d overslept and missed the early AA meeting, but a glance at the crumpled brochure in her purse showed another one at noon. In the meantime, she needed a distraction from her self-loathing.
Instead of taking the elevator back up to the apartment, she hit the down button and descended into the storage area of the Dakota. The place was cool and quiet, and she doubted Renzo worked on weekends. He was probably off with a girlfriend or working on a project outdoors with other like-minded guys who preferred building a shed to engaging in conversation. He wasn’t her type at all. She preferred the skinny artists with a penchant for declaring love at first sight. Tortured boy-men who were only too happy at first to reassure Bailey that she was beautiful, that she was worth adoring. After a few months, every last one of them inevitably drifted away. She’d been a parasite, leeching their love and validation. No wonder she was alone.
Bailey turned on the light and looked around the storeroom, eager to heave large things about and use up some of her pissed-off energy. The three trunks in the corner would be a good place to start. The top one wasn’t too heavy and she let it thump to the floor. Curious, she opened the latch.
On the very top was an old-fashioned gown in a navy plaid. The lace around the collar had yellowed, but the strong smell of mothballs indicated that the worst of the intruders had been kept away. Bailey lifted it and held it up against her. The hem reached her ankles, but the waist of the dress was ridiculously small. She put it aside and kept digging. A pair of high-topped leather shoes in black that would be trendy today. Four corsets and a couple pairs of drawers had turned a dingy tea color from their original white, but were still intact. She dug deeper, looking for anything that showed which apartment the trunk belonged to.
She shut it and as the dust blew off the top, she spied the initials M.C.C. engraved in gold. But no other labels or identifying tags.
The second trunk was labeled T.J.C.
Now, that was something. Theodore Camden, it must be. And Theodore Camden’s wife had been named Minnie. What were the chances that some other residents had the exact same initials?
If these items, many of which were in good condition, were worth some money, Melinda might be able to sell them and perhaps pay Bailey a commission. The trunks had obviously been sitting down here, untouched, for decades. Renzo would probably be glad of the chance to clear them out.
The T.J.C. trunk was, disappointingly, locked. She’d have to find a key or figure out how to break into it. The last trunk, the one on the very bottom of the pile, wasn’t made of the same top-grain black leather. This one was brown and worn. The initials carved on the top in black, not gold, read S.J.S.
The latch was locked but she was able to snap it open with a twist of her wrist. Inside were the same period of dresses, but shabbier. All hues of brown and gray, and some of the materials were so itchy they made Bailey’s skin crawl just looking at them. Near the bottom of the trunk, she found a silk evening gown in a dusky rose, and within its folds was a mask made of peacock feathers, of all things.
She pulled out a sailor suit made for a baby. It was the old kind, more like a dress, and the little blue tie had hardly faded at all from its original navy. And a couple of silk scarves, in different shades of blue. If they hadn’t smelled so musty, Bailey would have been tempted to make off with them.
Tucked in one corner was a delicate glass bottle the color of the sea, with a label on the outside that read DR. WALKER’S VINEGAR BITTERS. She put it aside. It was far from valuable, and she would smile whenever she saw it on her windowsill.
Underneath everything was a traveling booklet for a Sara Jane Smythe, from Fishbourne, England. The date she came to New York was stamped on her booklet: September, 1884. As Bailey leafed through it—there were no other markings—a photograph came loose.
A woman with thick, dark hair and a wry smile stood in front of two girls and a boy, holding in her arms a baby wearing the exact sailor suit from the trunk. The baby’s head had moved during the photo, as had one of the girls’, so they were blurry and ghostlike. She could make out what looked like a sailboat behind them.
A typical late-nineteenth-century photo. No sense of laughter or animation. But she liked this better than the false, toothy smiles that slid out of Polaroid instant cameras, because to Bailey they offered a truer sense of the subjects, not their flashy masks.
The door to the storage room slammed shut, the sound reverberating around the cement walls like a gunshot. Bailey leaped to her feet, still holding the photo. She stood, frozen in place, wondering what had just happened.