“But, Tetka, Auntie, we will always grieve,” Daniela replied gently. She was the youngest of the three women by more than fifty years, but even she knew that. Grief did not leave. It just became part of the patina.
Lenka’s chin wobbled, and she pursed her wrinkled lips. She withdrew three of the straight pins from the waistband of the dress she was constructing and stuck them between her teeth to cover her distress.
For a moment, the three women were all quiet, letting their work distract them. Many days they had no work—no dresses to sew or alterations to make—and they were grateful for the holiday uptick in business. Once upon a time, when the Koses had made beautiful gowns and expensive suits, when there was more work than they could keep up with, they had turned commissions away. Now they took all comers. Now they haggled over prices and settled for rates Zuzana said they hadn’t seen since Daniel Kos had opened his shop in the old neighborhood on Croton Street. And now, Daniel, Eliska, Pavel, Aneta, and Vera Kos were gone.
The rows of mansions on Euclid Avenue were gone too, the ballrooms demolished. The wealthy people who once danced in them danced no more. Mark Twain had once called it one of the finest streets in America. But Millionaires’ Row was now like the rest of downtown Cleveland. Penniless and abandoned by those who had built her.
The Koses had never lived on Euclid Avenue, though they had profited from her patrons. Instead, they’d saved and toiled and built a grand house on Broadway Street, not far from East Fifty-Fifth and Our Lady of Lourdes Church, and just across the street from St. Alexis Hospital. It was the community where the wealthiest Czech immigrants banked and lived and worshipped and became Americans. It was the home where they now sat, Daniel’s great-granddaughter and his two remaining children, carrying on a legacy that would most likely die with them.
“It’s a nice, big room . . . We can get a good price for it,” Daniela attempted again. “A higher price will attract a certain sort, maybe a doctor. Dr. Peterka’s never had any trouble renting out the rooms above his clinic. We’re so close to the hospital. We’ll rent it out in no time,” Daniela explained. She omitted the fact that it was already done. She had until January 10 to get her aunts used to the idea.
“We’ll be butchered in our sleep,” Zuzana warned, not even looking up from the seam she was carefully unpicking.
Lenka moaned, the sound rising and falling like a yowling cat. She still had pins sticking out of her mouth and couldn’t do much more than that.
“Teta,” Daniela pled. “Please don’t say things like that.”
“We live right next door to a funeral home. If the Butcher lived here, he could throw his victims on the Rauses’ front steps. Save everyone the trouble,” Zuzana mumbled.
Daniela had known that convincing her two aging aunts would be difficult.
“No. I take that back. He would most likely only leave an arm or two,” Zuzana muttered. “Or maybe a head, wrapped in the victim’s trousers or chopped in half and put in a basket like poor Flo Polillo.”
“You say her name like you knew her.” Daniela sighed.
“I know she was a human being who didn’t like having her head lopped off,” Zuzana sniffed.
“They never found her head,” Lenka said, tsking. “I wonder what in the world he did with it?”
“We need the money, Tety,” Daniela said.
“We need our peace of mind more,” Zuzana retorted.
“The papers say he’s powerfully built—tall and strong. He would have to be to lug the bodies to the base of Jackass Hill. Maybe we should just rent the room to someone weak . . . and small,” Lenka suggested, hopeful.
“I still think he rolled those men down the hill and then walked down to arrange his bit of theater,” Zuzana inserted.
“The papers said there was no indication of that. No drag marks or broken underbrush. No sign on the bodies at all that they’d been dragged or tossed,” Lenka argued. The two of them had speculated about this same thing a thousand times over the last two years, as had all the papers.
“I would feel so much better if he only killed men,” Lenka confessed, and Daniela felt her lips twitch. Her aunts were delightfully undiplomatic.
“Well, so far, he doesn’t seem to kill old ladies,” Daniela said. “So I think you are safe.”
“But you’re not old, Daniela,” Lenka argued. “It is you I am most afraid for.”
“No. But I’m also not his type. And you know it.”
“You’re not a hobo,” Lenka said.
“No. I am not.”
“And you don’t live in Kingsbury Run,” Lenka said.
“Though we live mighty close to it,” Zuzana interjected.
“And you don’t frequent houses of ill-repute.” Lenka kept her tally going.
“Not often.” Daniela nodded.
Her aunts gaped at her, their stitches forgotten, momentarily stunned. Daniela grinned and their shoulders wilted.
“Though if we do not rent our empty room, I might have to consider it,” Daniela warned.
Zuzana slapped her leg in censure. “Stop that. Now it’s final. You are young and beautiful, and we can’t have a boarder in this house while you are living here.”
“I will always live here, Tetka.”
“Oh, Daniela, my dear. Don’t say that. Don’t say that,” Lenka chided. “There is a man out there for you. He is coming. I know it.”
“Then he will have to move in with us,” Daniela said. “Because I live here.”
“A man in the house . . . imagine it,” Lenka whispered. And they were right back where they started from.
Irene had a black 1935 Lincoln Model K town car parked in her garage that Malone could drive to Cleveland. He wanted something new. Something clean and shiny that hadn’t been hers. But he settled for hardly used.
“You bought it, Michael. You might as well use it,” Molly told him.