But lately, there’d been less rough-and-tumble and more moralizing. This bothered her, as jail was rarely the best place for a girl gone wrong. The steady uptick in morality cases coming before her was one of the more troublesome aspects of her position as deputy sheriff and jail matron. In the last few months she’d seen a parade of girls brought in under charges of waywardness or incorrigibility: Rosa Gorgio, reported by her own father for keeping late hours with men; Mabel Merritt, caught following a man out of a drugstore; and Daisy Sadler, arrested at Palisades Park for indecent dress.
These girls tended to linger in jail for weeks, awaiting trials for which they had neither preparation nor adequate defense. Often their parents were the ones to accuse them. It was not uncommon to see mothers testifying against daughters, and fathers standing up in court and begging judges to take their unruly girls away. It had become all too easy for parents to turn to the courts when their daughters grew too willful and headstrong for them to manage.
Some of the accused served their sentences there at the Hackensack jail, and others went off to the state prison, but she couldn’t think of a single one who’d been found innocent of the charges and released. Young women were being locked up for months, and possibly years, over offenses that amounted to little more than leaving their parents’ home without permission, or carrying on with an unsuitable man.
Constance couldn’t help but notice that the unsuitable men were never arrested for their part in the crime.
And now here was Edna Heustis, huddled in the corner of a bare, windowless interviewing room on the jail’s ground floor. She was wrapped in a floppy quilted coat entirely unsuited to the weather (thrust upon her by one of the other girls as the officer strong-armed her onto Mrs. Turnbull’s porch), and wore no hat. Her hair rested in black ringlets about a pale and heart-shaped face that would have seemed listless but for something sharp in her eyes and a determined set to her pointed chin. She looked to be about the age of the youngest Kopp, Fleurette, although there was no trace of Fleurette’s vanity about her. By the way she held herself, she gave the impression that she was accustomed to hard work, to which Fleurette, Constance would readily admit, was not.
Officer Randolph of the Paterson police force was sitting heavily in the room’s only chair, resting his meaty forearms across a little table that held the ledger-book. This was where the deputies registered every inmate brought to them.
“The chair is for the deputy in charge,” Constance said crisply, when he did not rise. This earned the slightest hint of a smile from Edna, and a groan from the officer as he staggered to his feet and pulled the chair out in an exaggerated gesture of chivalry.
“We picked her up at a boarding-house out in Pompton Lakes,” the officer said when Constance was settled. He turned his head so Edna Heustis wouldn’t see, then hoisted an eyebrow to underscore the menace to young girls found in such places. His skin hung in loose folds under his eyes and beneath his chin, bringing to mind an old hunting dog that still enjoyed the chase.
Constance wished very much to explain to him that a girl renting a furnished room was not immediately a cause for suspicion, but she knew that if she started down that line, he’d be likely to walk out without finishing his recitation of the facts, and she’d be left with an inmate whose case would be all the more difficult to unravel. The act of holding her tongue was a sort of tactfulness that did not come naturally to her.
“For what crime was she arrested?” was the question Constance settled upon. She allowed her hand to levitate over the column in the ledger-book where this particular bit of history was to be recorded.
“Her mother came in after Christmas to make a charge of waywardness. We only just now had reason to be in Pompton Lakes, and thought why not pick this one up if she’s still there.”
Edna pressed her lips together in a frown at the word waywardness, or perhaps it was the word mother. Constance knew that particular strain of defiance; she’d practiced it herself at a younger age. She nonetheless tried to sound strict with Edna when she said, “What were you doing by yourself at a boarding-house?”
Edna squared her shoulders and looked directly at Constance, her hands clasped in front of her the way a schoolgirl addresses her teacher. “Working, ma’am. I found a place for myself at the DuPont powder works.”
Well, of course she had, Constance thought but did not say. What else did Officer Randolph think she’d been doing there?
“And how old are you? Tell the truth, or we’ll find out easily enough.”
“I passed my eighteenth birthday just before Christmas.”
“There’s no law against a girl of eighteen finding work and a place for herself.” Constance leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest the way Sheriff Heath did when he made a pronouncement on a legal matter. “Why would your mother report you as wayward?”
Officer Randolph shifted and sighed, tugging at his belt as if adjustments would have to be made if he were to stand there much longer. “Wouldn’t this be a matter for the judge?” he put in. “Or the sheriff?” He pushed open the door and looked with faint hope down the corridor, but no sheriff appeared.
Constance’s sense of restraint abandoned her. She wiped her pen and said, “Officer, you’ve brought me a girl who has not, to my knowledge, committed any crime, nor has she any connection to Bergen County that I can see. She lives and works in Passaic County—at least, I hope she still works there. Dear, does anyone at the factory know where you’ve gone?”
Miss Heustis sniffed—although this might have been more for show, as she had already sensed in Constance a co-conspirator and felt she had a role to play—and said, “I asked to write a note for the girls’ superintendent, but the officer said it wasn’t allowed.”
Officer Randolph tried to protest, but Constance interrupted him. “That’s fine. I’ll see to it myself. I take it your mother lives here in Bergen County, which is why you’ve been brought to me?”
Edna nodded. “Down in Edgewater.”
At last Constance discovered the most tenuous of reasons for a law-abiding young woman to be carried against her will to the Bergen County Sheriff’s Department. She made a note of it in the ledger-book, alongside Edna’s name, her birthday, and the charges against her.
Suspected waywardness, she wrote, underlining the first word. Although anyone placed under arrest is, at first, only suspected of the crime, she felt the need to put an emphasis upon it.
Once her particulars had been recorded, Constance stood and took Edna by the arm. “Thank you, Officer. I’m sure you’re eager to get back to Paterson.”
“I—yes, ma’am, thank you.” He looked briefly in the direction of the jail kitchen before he left. On gray and miserable days like this one, officers liked to linger around the jail, accepting a deputy’s offer of a cup of coffee and a little conversation before going back out on patrol. But Constance thought they’d had about as much of each other’s company as they could stand and sent him on his way.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Constance said when he was gone. “Did Officer Randolph ask your landlady about you before he took you away?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And what about your employer? Did it seem to you that he’d stopped first at the powder works to make any inquiries about you?”