She looked to Analee for an answer, expecting it to be a bug bite or a broken toy, perhaps a cookie dropped in the mud. Analee’s expression warned her differently. Constance took the little girl inside and sat with her in her lap.
“Shhhh, now. Shhhhh, honey. Mama’s here. You’re all right. It’s going to be all right now. What’s happened, baby?”
Maggie’s sobs quieted as she twined her arms around her mother’s neck.
“What is it, baby? Did you get scared?” Constance’s own level of anxiety was rising. Her breath felt tight under her collar.
Maggie nodded her head against her mother’s neck, right where her breath seemed imprisoned.
“What scared you so, baby girl?”
“She ain’t been able to say just yet,” Analee said. “I went to bring the clothes off the line, and there she was by the hedge, crying just like that.”
“Where is Delia?” Constance asked.
“She in the kitchen, making a mess with her little set of watercolors.”
“Are you sick, honey? Does your tummy hurt?”
Another shake of the head.
The three women exchanged puzzled glances.
“Here, now.” Constance resettled Maggie in her lap. The child was sucking her thumb. She had not done that in perhaps a year. Constance began to examine the little fingers to see if one had been smashed somehow. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“Uh-uh. That man make me scared, Mama.”
“A man? What man?” Constance had difficulty controlling her voice, keeping it calm when she wanted to scream. She knew without hearing the answer.
“That man out there.” She pointed a small finger in the direction of the kitchen.
Analee was already gone. Constance heard the back screen slam in her wake.
“Out back where, Maggie? Where was he?”
“By the fence.” Maggie’s sobs had ceased, but her breath was ragged. Constance continued to pat her back, relieved at least that she could talk now. “I was playing in the bushes, and I seed him over there.”
“Over where?”
“Outside.”
“Outside the fence?”
The back screen slammed again, and Constance heard Analee’s tense voice trying to reassure Delia, who had abandoned her paints and run to see what was going on now.
Maggie looked up at her mother, nodded again. “I thinked he was playing hide-and-go-seek, but he got my arm and pulled me. Scared me so bad, Mama.”
“Of course it did. Of course. And then?” Constance could barely speak, but she had to conceal her own terror from Maggie. She knew this man, these evil men, would not only ruin a man’s life but would also terrify a child. But how far they would go, she had no inkling. As far as to harm a child?
“He letted me go. Just let go, and I felled down. He said, ‘You go tell your mama now. Tell her I be back.’ And he runned away.” She threw both of her little arms in the air in a sweeping motion toward the end of the alley behind the house.
Not safe. Not safe even here in her own home. Her very children not safe.
Constance stood and hitched Maggie onto her hip, carried her into the kitchen. Assured by Analee, Delia sat again with watercolors not only on the multiple pages of paper, but also on her hands, her face, and her pink checked pinafore.
“Well, Analee, I do believe we will need to clean these girls up a bit before they have their supper.” Constance shifted Maggie into Analee’s arms. For the sake of her children, she must retain her fragile equilibrium. “All right, girls. Run upstairs with Analee and get yourselves presentable.”
Analee took Delia by the hand, shifted Maggie onto her hip, but before she stepped away with the girls, Constance felt her fixed gaze assessing Constance’s steadiness. She turned to Analee, holding the edge of the table. She knew the color was likely drained from her face. She raised her chin and assured Analee she would be just fine. Analee remained reluctant.
“Go on, now. Get these girls cleaned up. I’ll take care of this mess in the kitchen.”
“Don’t throw away my paintings, Mama.”
“I won’t, darling. We’ll pin them up on the side porch when they are dry tomorrow, all right now?” Would even the porch be safe?
“Okay, Mama.”
Analee headed for the steps. Constance knew she had managed a convincing act. When she heard their steps and girlish chatter as they went up the stairs, she turned to Alice, who had been silently watching. The questioning gaze that met hers told Constance all she needed to know about Alice’s own alarm at what had occurred. She motioned for Alice to sit down with her at the kitchen table and laid her folded hands on the tabletop.
What would she tell this stranger? What could she possibly say? In the end, she decided on an authentic piece of the truth.
“My husband was a gambler,” she said.
Neither woman spoke for a moment. Their silence filled the room.
“I see,” Alice said at last. “This is what you meant about Storyville.”
Alice rose and began organizing the watercolors, piling the dried pages one on top of the other, lining the still damp ones along the edge of the table to make room for the two girls to eat their supper.
Constance also rose, wet a cloth at the sink, and began wiping away the spills of paint. As she rinsed the cloth and wrung it to hang it on the bar by the window, Alice spoke.
“You have never mentioned just how he died.”
Constance felt the nausea rising. She held the edge of the cabinet and leaned over the sink, her elbows rigid. She was grateful that Alice gave her time.
“He drowned.” She turned to look at Alice, but only for a moment. “He fell from the train.”
“The train? And drowned?”
“Yes, as the train traversed a trestle over some water, a lake, a pond, a river—I don’t really know—somewhere up the line, he fell.”
“How do you know, then?”
“His body was found by a farmer. The police deciphered his wet papers and came to tell me.” No, not to tell me. To ask me to identify a dead body. But she could not say that. Could not talk about the ordeal at the station and the damaged body and the smell of the morgue and . . . No, she could tell none of that. Not ever.
“I’m so terribly sorry, Constance.” Alice hesitated. “But I’m having difficulty putting the puzzle of today together with any of what you have told me.”
“He was a gambler, Alice. It is my belief that he may have died owing money to the mob in Storyville. They are not above trying to frighten me into handing some or all of it over to them.”
“Would these people really harm a child?”
Would a man shake his infant son to death? Why had Benton been in the nursery just before she found the baby dead? Had he gone in to see about the baby crying as he walked down the hallway? She knew his sudden, unexpected blasts of anger over trivia. She had seen his irritated intolerance of a crying baby anywhere—his own or some stranger’s on the streetcar. It had occasionally been apparent with the girls, but it had been much more so with David—like the intolerance she had seen toward Benton by his own father, so dismissive and full of disdain. She had abhorred that man. How like him Benton had seemed to become after he confided in her once, only once, how his father had caught him with his friend Joey, just adolescents, in a pissing contest, comparing their “equipment.” His father had lashed him bloody with a belt buckle. And had forbidden him to see Joey again. She knew the physical scars. Now she knew how truly deep those scars had been.
Her brain was meandering. Not in appropriate ways. She tried to bring herself into the room again, to be present, polite. This was a conversation unlike any she normally had.
“Yes. There are those capable of such things, Alice. I do not know what they may be capable of.”
“But you are frightened of them?”
Frightened? Of them, of myself, of life. Constance’s breath caught like the edge of a sob.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am very frightened.”
She had come close to saying, “Terrified.” But she was cognizant of Alice’s alarm. Would this incident frighten Alice into leaving? It might.
CHAPTER 26