Mrs. Borowski had devoured Life Among the Indians and couldn’t wait to hear the woman’s firsthand tale, and she sat in rapture. But I found Miss Oatman unnerving, with the blue tattoo covering her chin that made her look like some kind of talking skull. She seemed weary, defensive. No one else seemed to find her tone amiss. I wondered if even an evening’s harmless entertainment was beyond me.
I was deeply suspicious. Was her tale true? Abducted and held prisoner by Indians from the tender age of fourteen but unmolested for all those years? Had her sister, also a prisoner, died of starvation as she claimed? There were countless other ways to die, many of them more excruciating, many of them someone’s fault. I was always looking for angles now, always wondering if people were what they seemed.
Certainly, these days, I never was.
Chapter Eleven
Seduction
I knew the howl of an unhappy child when I heard one. Halfway across the park, I halted at the sound and immediately scanned the horizon for its source. Was it a girl or a boy? How old? And where? I followed as the scream shifted from a long cry to a series of shorter, breathless bursts.
Near the base of a tree, I spotted her. A small, curly-haired girl with a reddened face, her mouth open and trembling. She clutched her leg, and while I saw no blood, her awkward position on the grass made me suspect she had fallen from a low branch above.
“There, there,” I said as I approached. “Everything will be quite all right.”
The girl glared poison at me. I very nearly walked away. I’d never had a good manner with children, having no sisters or brothers nor children of my own who’d lived.
Nonetheless, the girl appeared to be alone, so I continued to draw closer and knelt down alongside her to make sure she wasn’t badly wounded. “Let’s take a closer look at that leg, shall we? Can you tell me if it hurts?”
She shook her head vehemently, but whether she was saying no to my first question or my second, I couldn’t tell.
“Oh goodness! There you are! Violet, what’s happened?”
I didn’t even have time to turn to look in the direction of the woman’s voice before the little girl’s body was swept up into the air, the broad fabric of her striped skirt swinging wide. I brushed the dirt from my own dress and rose to meet the new arrival.
The dark-haired woman cradled the child, her head bent over the smaller one, whispering soft and comforting words directly into her tiny ear. I felt like an intruder standing this close. The girl’s heaving shoulders began to settle. Her crying began to slow.
The woman seemed to notice me then and looked at me over her daughter’s head.
“Oh, what you must think of me,” she said. “What kind of mother am I?”
I didn’t know what kind of mother she might be, but I did know whose wife she was. There had been a very good likeness in the case file. She was Catherine Maroney, the suspect’s wife, the woman I’d come to Philadelphia to find.
“Could you use some help managing?” I asked, not missing a beat. “I’d be glad to see you two home.”
? ? ?
I’d been assigned to the Adams Express case in the early summer of 1858, only days after one congressman beat another nearly to death with a cane on the very floor of the United States Congress, proving how mad our world had become. The transport company Adams Express, our client, had lost a stunning $40,000 in gold from a locked pouch between Birmingham and Mobile. Pinkerton and I deduced that if the pouch hadn’t been unlocked in transit, perhaps it had been tampered with even before it was loaded on the train, and suspicion fell squarely on the shoulders of Nathan Maroney, the Birmingham stationmaster. He’d already been arrested, but the company was hesitant to bring suit without solid evidence. Maroney was Southern, the company Northern. The case was a pure tinderbox.
“They’ve called for a man half horse and half alligator,” said Pinkerton. “Instead, I shall send them you.”
Dispatched to Birmingham to befriend Maroney’s wife, Catherine, I was hastily rerouted along the way to Philadelphia, where she had fled scrutiny. Upon arrival in the new city, I was caught with no plan, no residence, no easy way to find Catherine and her daughter, Violet. Had this been my first case, I might have panicked, but with several years of experience behind me, I simply set to the task.
With careful inquiries and a few timely tears at the station, everything expressed in my well-honed drawl, I found the Society Hill boardinghouse most hospitable to Southern women and secured a room. Then I made a habit of lingering in the places my fellow guests frequented. One of these places was a lovely park along Sixth Street just past Independence Hall, and that was where the sound of Violet Maroney’s cries had reached me, bringing me the luck I needed to break the case wide open.
? ? ?
Mrs. Maroney and I became fast friends. She was a socially gregarious woman, and her isolation in Philadelphia had been a great trial to her. Having found my willing ear, she bent it at every opportunity. She had a habit of complimenting her listener effusively, even when nothing was being said. Oh, you’ll understand. You always understand. I’m so glad you’re here, and isn’t it wonderful to sit like this? No one else is as much a comfort to me as you are. When she began saying these things, I knew they weren’t true—she’d only known me for three days; how could I be a comfort?—but saying them made them true somehow, and I came to expect and depend on her confidences, drinking them up like the roots of a parched plant.
It was hard for me to reconcile our easy friendship with my unfriendly intentions. In a way, I meant this woman harm. If her husband were never convicted, she would be able to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. The money would flow. Her life would be better. My sole purpose was to take that away. And in pursuit of that goal, I would misrepresent myself to her, claim to be someone I wasn’t.