“I’ll be the sister with the birthday! Or the elderly aunt. Just take me along.”
They were all laughing at that when heavy footsteps stormed the porch and someone pounded the brass knocker hard enough to rattle their saucers. Every girl leapt up at once, flushed and guilty, as if they had, improbably, been overheard and caught. Mrs. Turnbull, having just come up from her lodgings in the basement, bustled past and admonished them to finish quickly and wash their own bowls.
But not a single girl moved, and not a single spoon clanked against a dish, as the door swung open and a policeman’s brusque voice demanded to see a Miss Edna Heustis, who was to be put under arrest on a charge of waywardness and taken without delay to the Hackensack jail.
2
THE FEMALE POPULATION at the Hackensack jail consisted at that moment of a conniving fortune-teller who, among her more colorful aliases, insisted on being called Madame Fitzgerald; a practical nurse named Lottie Wallau, convicted in the overdose of her elderly patient; and Etta McLean, a stenographer who sold company secrets to her employer’s competitor and lived so conspicuously well off the proceeds that she was easily found out. They were housed alongside Josephine Knobloch, who had been arrested for rioting at the Garfield worsted mill (and could be released if she paid a six-dollar fine, but the strikers were united in their refusal to do so). On a cell block by herself sat an old Italian woman, Providencia Monafo, contentedly serving a sentence for murder. She’d aimed for her husband but shot her boarder instead, and thought it a distinct advantage to live for a time behind the jail’s protective stone walls, where Mr. Monafo couldn’t take revenge.
Constance Kopp, the deputy in charge of the female section, usually oversaw eight to ten inmates, but in the dark, cold days following Christmas, women—even criminally inclined women—simply weren’t out and about and were therefore less likely to be seen and arrested. It was true among the male population, too: there was always a drop in January and February, when the weather was simply too disagreeable to bother about stealing a horse or knifing a fellow drinker at a saloon.
It was, therefore, something of an occasion to receive a new inmate. Sheriff Heath announced it from the entrance to the female section. “There’s a girl downstairs. An officer brought her over from Paterson. He insisted on speaking to me?—”
“They all do,” Constance put in.
“I told him that we have a deputy for the ladies and he must tell it to you,” the sheriff said.
“I hope she isn’t terribly old,” Etta called out as Constance turned to go. “We could use another hand in the laundry.” All of the inmates did chores, but Constance tended to save the light work for the older women—in this case, Madame Fitzgerald and Providencia Monafo—which left the younger ones to work the wringer and the steam press.
“I just want a fourth for bridge,” Lottie said. “Madame Fitzgerald cheats.”
“Don’t bring us any more strikers,” Etta added. “They’re so earnest.”
If this was intended to incite a response from Josephine, it didn’t. Constance agreed, privately, that strikers tended to be grimly single-minded and didn’t make particularly good company.
She locked the gate and followed the sheriff down the stairs. Once they were alone, he said, “The girl looks to be about as wayward as my left shoe, but I leave that for you to determine.”
“I wish it could be left to me.” It irked Constance to put a girl in jail who didn’t belong there, even temporarily.
As this was a conversation they’d had many times before, Sheriff Heath merely waved his hand in acknowledgment and went back to his office, leaving Constance to contend with the officer.
It came as something of a relief to Constance that she and the sheriff had developed their own shorthand, and that he so often seemed to know what she was thinking before she said it. She’d never had a proper job before, and hadn’t any idea what it would be like to take orders from anyone, much less a lawman. What if he’d had a temper, or an animosity toward the criminals under his roof, or merely lacked any concern for the welfare of his inmates—or his deputies? Surely such things happened in jailhouses around the country.
But Sheriff Heath was an even-tempered and fair-minded man who seemed to have run for office for all the right reasons. He campaigned for better treatment for his inmates and believed that by directing charity and education to the poor, crime could be eradicated. Although his office put a tremendous burden upon him—inmates had died in his arms, murderers had gone free, and he was often the first to the scene of every form of human suffering imaginable—he managed to maintain his dignity.
And—she wouldn’t hesitate to admit it—she admired the fact that he’d seen something in her that no one else had. He saw that she was strong-willed, with a keen sense of justice and a sharp eye, and that she knew how to put her size to an advantage. A lack of physical strength had long been an argument against hiring women officers, but Constance had plenty of that and wasn’t afraid to use it. Sheriff Heath recognized in her the qualities that make a good deputy sheriff, regardless of sex, and offered her a job on that basis. For that she’d owe him a lifelong debt.
Constance had expected her work for the sheriff to land her in the middle of feminine versions of the same sorts of cases the men handled: thieves and pickpockets, drunkards, brawlers, and the occasional murderess or arsonist. There was nothing stopping her from going after a male criminal, either, and she had, whenever it was called for. She was taller than most of the men she tackled, and heavier than some. Furthermore, it didn’t hurt that Constance had a certain recklessness about her when it came to physical confrontation: she’d been known to hurl herself down a city street and leap on top of a fleeing suspect, with no consideration to the unyielding pavement that would rise to meet them. This habit had left her with a broken rib and more than a few nasty bruises and sprains, but it had also earned her Sheriff Heath’s respect, and that meant more to her than a bloodied kneecap.