? ? ?
ANNA WATCHED FOR a while as Jack worked on the telegrams for his parents and sisters, his usually confident hand pausing over each word. Just at this moment she was glad she didn’t speak Italian, though at some point she would want to know what he had written. She had never heard him speaking to his parents and had no idea if he would be deferential or self-assertive. Italians, she had come to understand, could be terribly formal in certain situations.
He had written a telegram for Oscar, too, but it was tucked under the others and Anna had the idea that she should leave well enough alone. Better not to hover. She made another tour of the room and stopped to watch the storm. The rain was moving across the bay in long sinuous strokes that shimmered in the half-light. She shivered a little but didn’t bother to dig the shawl out of her valise. This kind of shivering was not about the chill in the air, but her nerves.
The room was well kept and comfortable with a dresser, a divan, a desk, and a good wide bed with a thick comforter that would be welcome in the cool night salt air. The innkeeper himself had come to bring them a pitcher of fresh water for the washstand and to lay a fire in the grate, nodding toward the window and the rain in explanation. When he had gone and Jack was still bent over the telegram form on the desk, Anna found herself yawning. She stretched out on the divan and let herself be seduced by the falling rain, drifting into sleep only to wake with a start sometime later when lightning streaked across the sky. A blanket had been draped over her, light and warm.
The room was lit only by the trembling touch of lightning and the fire in the hearth. Jack was nowhere to be seen. Most likely he had gone off to arrange for the telegrams to be sent first thing in the morning. Maybe he had even told her he was going to do that, thinking she was awake, and in fact there had been some vague dream in which she was sitting in front of the coroner with a telegram in her hand. She read it out loud, just five words: Janine Campbell stop. Stop. Stop.
All day she had been successfully forbidding herself to dwell on Monday’s inquest, but it had found a back door into her waking mind. The Russo boy had been in the dream too, sleeping in the arms of a faceless woman.
She got up now and used the water closet and washbasin, and in short order she unpacked her valise and set out the few things she required. The day had been too long and too full of surprises, and she was exhausted. And where had Jack gotten to, anyway?
She cleaned her teeth and let her hair down, forgoing her usual braid because Jack liked her hair unbound. When she was changed and ready for bed she got out the medical journal she had brought along in case she had time to read, and made herself comfortable.
? ? ?
JACK MEANT TO be away for just a few minutes, but the hotel clerk was in no hurry at all; just the opposite, he counted and recounted every word on all five Western Union telegram forms, frowning deeply at the Italian.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t speak this language, whatever it is.”
“It’s Italian, and you don’t need to speak it,” Jack said. “Count the words as you would English. I’ve printed very carefully. The telegraph clerk shouldn’t have any problem.”
“Aubrey doesn’t speak anything but English either,” the young man said.
“He doesn’t need to,” Jack said, again. “Any competent telegraph clerk could handle this. Is this Aubrey around? Maybe I should talk to him directly.”
Aubrey wasn’t available, but he could be fetched if Jack would like to come back in an hour—
Jack would not.
The conscientious, fastidious, and frustrating clerk turned back to his study of the telegrams. He pointed with his stub of pencil.
“If you take out this word and these, and this one, you’ll save—”
“I want to send them exactly as they are,” Jack said.
The young man mumbled to himself as he labored over the short column of figures, adding them three times while Jack fumed silently to himself. Then it turned out that there wasn’t enough change in the cash drawer. If the detective sergeant would wait—
Jack would not. He assured the clerk that morning would be soon enough to collect his change, and left before the young man could find something else that needed counting.
Every once in a while he came across a person who was determined to demonstrate how seriously they regarded the law, as if Jack were watching closely for an excuse to make an arrest. He took the stairs two at a time, stopped to say good evening to a startled older couple with a teenage daughter, and arrived at the door of the room some fifteen minutes later than he had hoped. Mezzanotte, he told himself. You are behaving like a sixteen-year-old. Snap to.