“Horse thief?” Constance asked.
“Goats,” he said. “I have a note from Detective Courter. That marriage license of Anthony Leo’s looks to be a fake. It’s two months old, and obviously just for show. I don’t think this is his first time to try it with a girl.”
“That’s quite a trick,” Constance said. Under better circumstances, she might have argued that the couple should be given a stern lecture and left alone for a week or two, so that they might marry and right the situation themselves. But when she tried to imagine Fleurette living in that cheap furnished room, with the lingering stench of gin, and a man who would go so far as to trick her with a false promise of marriage, she knew what she would want. She’d want every lawman in the country kicking down the door to rescue her.
“What does Miss Davis have to say about it?” the sheriff asked.
“She refuses to talk, except to say that the police are telling lies.”
“What did she tell you about this business of her running around with other men?”
“Nothing,” Constance said. “She denies it all. Who accused her?”
“A constable heard it from the landlord,” the sheriff said.
“The landlord? Is that the baker downstairs?”
“Apparently so. But Anthony Leo says that she’s a good girl, and that if we’d set him free, he’d marry her.”
“Well, he would say that if it would get him out of jail. I suppose this means we’re back to illegal cohabitation, and they’re both guilty,” Constance said.
“I don’t know about that. It looks to me like she was conned,” Sheriff Heath said. “I wish she’d tell you if she was.”
“I just don’t picture this as a white slavery case,” she said.
“What do you picture?”
“Well, you read about girls locked in bedrooms or drugged and draped about on chaises, and a man at the door deciding who can go in.”
“That might be how it is in the Sunday magazines, but this is what it looks like in Fort Lee,” Sheriff Heath said. “This girl obviously had no money and no one to turn to, and Mr. Leo saw an opportunity. We’re going to treat her as the victim until we’re told otherwise. Put her on the witness’s meal plan.”
Constance didn’t think that an extra sausage with her dinner would be of much comfort to Minnie, but she made a note of it. “Has anyone spoken to her parents?”
“That’s for you to do. They reported her missing months ago.”
13
EUGENE AND EDITH DAVIS made their home in one-half of a plain, flat-fronted clapboard house at the unfashionable end of Catskill. The larger homes had all been turned into summer cottages for New Yorkers, which left the year-round factory families to make do with what was left. Every house on the Davises’ street was similarly carved into two or three apartments, with front doors added where windows once were, and kitchens tacked on awkwardly in the back, under low roofs that served as porches where one might, in fair weather, climb out a bedroom window and take the night air.
Some of the houses had little shops on the ground floor offering services to the summer crowd—shoe repair, laundry, tailoring—but they were all closed for the winter. With no one around to pass judgment on the appearance of the place, brooms and shovels sat on porches and gray wash-rags fluttered from second-story windows. The entire neighborhood looked as if it wasn’t expecting company.
Mrs. Davis had been watching from the window and opened the door before Constance could knock. She was one of those women who was as wide as she was tall, which is to say that it took some effort for her to lean back and take Constance in from head to toe.
“Ooooh!” she sang out at the sight of her. “You’re taller than my girls.”
“Is Minnie Davis one of your girls?” Constance asked.
She stood back and surveyed her again. This time her eyes landed on Constance’s badge. “She was, until she run off.”
“Your daughter’s been found, ma’am, and she’s safe and well. I work for the sheriff in Hackensack. Might I come inside?”
“She’s safe, is she?” Mrs. Davis screeched. “I thought she had the devil inside of her.”
Constance took a step back in shock and looked up and down the street, certain that half the neighborhood had heard her. She could only assume that Mrs. Davis was partly deaf and wondered if she might be only partially sane, too.
“I couldn’t say, ma’am. I’ve come to ask you a few questions, and to talk about what we might do for Minnie.”
Mrs. Davis gave a resigned shrug and stepped aside. Constance found herself in a place that was immediately familiar: a seamstress’s work room. If Fleurette had taken in mending from the neighbors, rather than sewing costumes for the theater, her sewing room would have looked just like this. There was an old treadle machine with a pile of crumpled work-shirts to one side and a stack of folded, mended trousers on the other. On the floor were boxes of fabric scraps and a heap of old coats in need of fresh sheepskin. Along every window-sill were jars of buttons and pincushions stuck all over with rusty pins and needles.
Mrs. Davis dropped into a wooden chair outfitted with a sagging cushion she’d made herself from scraps. Constance pushed a roll of wool batting off an armchair and sat across from her.
“I take in mending,” she called, as if trying to make herself heard across a great distance. “Washing, too, in the summer, when the city people get here.”
Constance thought it a strange way to begin, considering she’d come with news of her daughter. “You must’ve been terribly worried about Minnie all this time.”
“Worried? She done wrong, and she knows it. She was too ashamed to even tell us directly. Couldn’t do nothing but send a letter. And that was only after we went down to the police, thinking she’d fallen in the river.”
She was still nearly shouting. Constance had to force herself not to draw back.
“She wrote you a letter?”
“Her father wanted to burn it, but Goldie snatched it from him. She’s a bad girl, too.”
“Is Goldie . . .”
“His other daughter. She’s older than Minnie and should’ve known better. Ada’s the only one of them worth anything, and she’s married and gone. She belongs to my first husband, bless his soul, so that tells you something.”
She crossed herself at the mention of the man’s soul and sat back in her chair with an enormous, deflating sigh.
“I take it that you and Mr. Davis were both widowed?”
“That’s right. He had to raise mine, and I had to raise his. Don’t ever do it. Other women’s children are always trouble.”
“Is Mr. Davis expected home soon?” Constance entertained an unreasonable hope that Mr. Davis might be easier to talk to than his wife.
Mrs. Davis sat up straight and patted her hair, which was gray but streaked in black, and of such a coarse texture that it was impossible to see where she’d pinned it up. It seemed to mass together of its own volition at the back of her head.