I knew I had much to learn, but I also had a natural aptitude for the work. My initial success with Heck hadn’t been a fluke. The same things that made me miserable as a child—moving constantly from place to place, never knowing if a new person was friend or foe—made me adaptable.
My parents had taught me, in their way. When I was young and they mostly ignored me, I learned not to offend or disturb them. I was always, always agreeable. We moved from place to place, after a year or only a month, and I had to learn new personalities, new surroundings, over and over again. From Charleston to Atlanta, Houston to Bowling Green, then north to Pittsburgh or Portsmouth, wherever my father found a theater that would pay him what he felt he was worth. Everywhere was so different. Some cities felt like they weren’t even in the same country, but I couldn’t let that bother me. I learned to be an invisible visitor, congenial, silent.
When I was old enough to be of use in my father’s schemes, I learned to play my part—a lost girl, a sad girl, a hungry girl—exactly as I was told. As far as I knew, every child grew up sleeping backstage at theaters while her father declaimed Shakespeare’s words as the gravedigger in Hamlet, clowned about in She Stoops to Conquer, and rattled his chains as Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. As far as I knew, everybody fled cities in the middle of the night when some scheme or another angered the wrong mark. As far as I knew, the world was divided into operators and victims, winners and fools. By the time I realized I had options—I didn’t always have to be agreeable or go along—I was already eighteen years old, pregnant, and married to a man I didn’t know well enough to dislike yet.
I couldn’t change those years. But at least I could put everything I’d learned to good use.
To make myself a better agent, I threw myself into learning every skill I could. I read about poisons and found that I could procure no fewer than a dozen deadly compounds from the city’s pharmacists and grocers with little difficulty. I taught myself, huddled in a half-dark bedroom, to pick a wide variety of locks with nothing more than a hairpin. Begging DeForest’s indulgence, I learned to load and fire a hefty Burnside carbine, a standard rifle, and a Colt Pocket Revolver, as well as improving my aim with the Deringer I now carried whenever I felt the case called for it. I even persuaded Mortenson to take me back to the Cook County morgue for another tour, which he did with obvious disgruntlement and not a whit of grace.
I also knew I needed to perfect surveillance, and after I’d been an operative for six months, I fell into the habit of surveilling targets I could easily locate: my fellow operatives. Knowing that any one of them might have been involved in the disappearance of the snake ring, I had a second motive to investigate each and every one. If some information about their character came into my possession this way, so much the better.
I started with Mortenson, who was highly visible in crowds due to his pale aspect, and successfully followed him three nights in a row without being caught out. The first night, he went to a tavern and stayed for several hours, emerging rumpled but firmly upright. The second night, he went to a church—a shorter stay, but no more revealing. The third night, I lurked in the shadows outside the office and nearly bounced on my toes in curiosity to see which way he would go, left or right. In the end, it was back to the tavern again.
Then I tried following Pinkerton himself, but he never went anywhere other than straight to his home, so there didn’t seem to be much to be learned there. Several nights in a row, I shadowed him down the exact same path, right and left and another left and right again, right up to his front door. He never turned or wavered, which seemed right from what I knew of him.
Then, for good or ill or both, I chose to tail Graham DeForest.
Since our shooting lessons, on the occasions that we saw each other in the office, he had always continued to be excessively solicitous. You look utterly lovely today, Mrs. Warne! I suppose there is no surprise in that. But he had not made any physical overtures, and I was grateful. He had been a better friend than anyone else in the agency. I began to believe what he had told me, early on, in the woods: he was on my side. Given his flashy dress and suave manner, I expected he had at least one lady friend to occupy his time. Indeed, I would not have put it past him to have half a dozen.
I knew where he lived—he’d mentioned the intersection several times—so I decided to wait a few blocks from there and watch for him. It was different to catch someone in a crowd than it was to track them from the beginning, and I needed the practice. However, the first night was an utter failure. I would have sworn he never passed me, even as it grew dark outside and then pitch-black. Perhaps he’d come from another direction? Or perhaps I had missed him entirely, turning my head at just the wrong time. Clearly, I did need the practice I’d assigned myself. I went home to a scolding from Mrs. Borowski and a cold plate of stuffed cabbage, gobbled down quickly next to the stove.
Three nights later, I tried again, doing a few things differently. First, I warned Mrs. Borowski I wouldn’t be home for dinner, so she wouldn’t worry. I dressed in men’s breeches and a shirt and hat from Bellamy’s disguise closet, with a heavy overcoat to protect me from prying eyes and the weather alike. Walking the streets as a woman alone, late at night, invited comment. I wouldn’t be well disguised enough to pass as an actual man in speech or manner. But at a distance, it would discourage curiosity.