“I think I can find a Catholic orphan asylum on Mott Street.”
“No doubt,” Sister Mary Augustin said. “But they aren’t there anymore. Sometime after eleven at night and six in the morning they went out into the weather and disappeared. The whole area was combed multiple times, but there’s no trace of them.”
Struck silent by surprise, Anna asked herself why Rosa would do such a desperate thing.
“Were the girls punished or treated badly?”
Mary Augustin looked as though she had been anticipating this question. “I don’t know. My guess is that Rosa wouldn’t stop asking about her brothers and one of the sisters lost her temper and was harsh.”
“Harsh,” Anna echoed. “And you have no idea where they might be. So now all four children are missing.”
“Yes,” Mary Augustin said. “I’m afraid so.”
Anna, at a loss for words, stared for a full minute. “Then we’ll have to find them. Immediately.”
? ? ?
SUPPER BREAK AND Jack sat at his desk in the detectives’ squad room watching Oscar pace back and forth, grumpier with every step. He was hungry and required feeding, and soon Jack would have to get up and go out into the weather or simply resign himself to Oscar’s mood.
“You’d think you’d never got wet before in your life,” Oscar muttered. And: “Now we’re in for it.”
A runner had appeared at the door waving an assignment sheet: on Washington Square a patrolman had come across Italian trespassers on university grounds who wouldn’t be shifted. He had called his roundsman, who was requesting a translator.
“I’ll miss supper,” Oscar groused.
With a pointed look at Maroney’s middle, Jack grabbed his overcoat and hat and headed for the door.
? ? ?
THE WET SNOW gave way quite suddenly to a warmer and gentler wind, and with that the feel of spring had come back into the air. In Washington Square Park Jack felt the subtle stir of things growing, as tangible as sunlight on the skin.
New York University sat across from the northeast corner of the park. More like a church with its tall arches and spires, to Jack’s mind, except for the noise that a crowd of undergraduates were making trying to get a game of baseball going in the park. They’d be covered in muck and mud in no time, but Jack understood the urge to be moving. Oscar did too, from the looks he threw in the direction of the players. He would join in with very little encouragement.
They entered the university through the main doors and heard the argument from across the foyer. The porter’s desk was empty, but the door behind it was open and provided a view of Harry Pettigrew facing off with a small woman who stood close, her face turned up at a sharp angle to scold the roundsman, the traditional posture of mothers with sons twice their size and a bone to pick.
“It’s Harry who’s needing rescuing, so it seems,” Oscar said. “That’s the porter’s wife got him backed into a corner.”
It wasn’t until he stepped into the office that Jack caught sight of the two little girls who sat side by side on the counter. So not intruders, after all, not even street children. These two were too fragile to survive on the street, and so, Jack reasoned to himself, they had run away, or been put out. One of them was crying softly while the other sat stony faced, her arm around the smaller girl.
“Mrs. Conway,” Pettigrew was saying. “No one means these girls any harm—”
“So say you!”
“Hold on, Mrs. Conway,” Oscar said. “Don’t be in such a rush to draw and quarter the poor roundsman.”
While Oscar negotiated a peace between the parties, Jack got a better look at the two children. They were both dripping wet and filthy, hair straggling over threadbare clothes. They shivered with the cold despite the towels that had been wrapped around them and the coal heaped up in the stove.
The older of the two raised her head to look at him directly, and in that moment Jack recognized her. Rosa, if he remembered correctly. The last he had seen her was getting off the Hoboken ferry, her brothers and sister gathered in close. She had been determined to keep the little family together, and she had clearly failed, as he had known she must. Now the last name came to him as well. Rosa Russo.
She recognized him too, because her expression shifted to puzzlement and then, quite quickly, relief. Jack remembered that she had been proud of her English, and he started with that.
“Miss Russo,” he said. “We meet again.”
The argument stopped abruptly as Roundsman Pettigrew, the porter’s wife, the porter, and the patrolman turned to look at Jack.
Pettigrew regained his composure first. “She doesn’t speak English.”
“Of course she does. Don’t you, Rosa,” Jack said, keeping his gaze on her.
The girl drew herself up with great dignity, a small queen finally recognized by one of her subjects. “Yes,” she said. “I am an American.”