“We need someone who can speak on her behalf,” Constance said, “and testify as to her character.”
He put his shoulders back and said, “Yes, ma’am. It would be my honor.”
She couldn’t help but smile at that. “Not you, Tony. Someone else. A landlord, a neighbor, someone she knew at work? Maybe someone in your family.”
Tony shook his head. “My family didn’t know nothing about her. And I—well, Minnie and me had our troubles. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t around much. And when I was . . . well, we stayed in most nights. We didn’t go out and see people. I don’t think anybody in Fort Lee knew her.”
Constance said, “Tony, don’t you see? If she tells the judge she went willingly, it doesn’t look good for her. He won’t release her if he thinks she’s prone to running off with any man she meets.”
“She doesn’t run off with any man! She . . .” But he faltered as he saw the reasoning behind it. “That’s not fair,” he added, weakly.
“It would’ve been fair of you to marry her, but you didn’t,” Sheriff Heath said.
“Aw, Sheriff! Why can’t she go back to the jute factory, or home to her mother?”
“Her mother and father won’t take her back now,” Constance told him, “and no judge is going to release her on her own. He’s going to want her under someone’s care, a girl of sixteen.”
“Bah,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning down. “She never told me she was sixteen.”
Sheriff Heath leaned in closer. Tony looked at him with the sorrowful eyes of a stray dog. “Listen to me, son. I know you must meet a lot of girls on that boat.”
He shrugged and glanced over at Constance, embarrassed. “Some.”
“Of course you do. And I bet Minnie isn’t the first girl you took down the river for a night.”
“Well. There might have been a few. But they wanted to go, Sheriff! Honest. I never forced anybody.”
He nodded sympathetically. “I know you didn’t. The trouble is, these girls start to get ideas about marriage and children, don’t they?”
Tony let out a long breath. “That’s just it, Sheriff. They don’t want to go home to their mothers! What am I supposed to say about that?”
“Well, you can’t marry all of them, Tony. And you weren’t going to marry this one either, were you?”
He didn’t answer that.
“We have a forged marriage license that we found in your pocket. The prosecutor is bound to turn up your lease, and I’ll bet it says that you and Minnie presented yourselves as man and wife. Do you know what that adds up to?”
He put his head down a little. He looked like a child who’d just been scolded.
Sheriff Heath leaned forward and said, “Look at me.”
Tony did.
Sheriff Heath said, “It means a white slave charge.”
He stepped away from the bars and looked back and forth between the two of them. “I’m no white slaver. I never drugged a girl and I never kidnapped nobody. Let me out of here and I’ll marry Minnie tomorrow. I’ll marry her right now, with these chains on me, if you’ll take us to the courthouse.”
“It doesn’t work like that, son. The prosecutor’s drawing up the charges now. The only question is whether Miss Davis testifies against you or refuses to.”
“She won’t say a word against me because she loves me,” Tony said, a little boastfully. “She was never forced. Do you want her to lie and say she was?”
“It doesn’t matter what we want,” Constance said. “Only—she’s taking the hard road. If she tells the truth, well . . . we just can’t say what might become of her. If you can think of anyone who could speak on her behalf, please tell us.”
Sheriff Heath turned to walk away and Constance followed. Tony shouted after them, “Can’t you do something for her, miss? She doesn’t deserve to be mixed up in all of this, a kid like that.”
He sounded sincere about it. She almost felt sorry for him.
21
JOHN COURTER WAS WAITING for the sheriff downstairs. He couldn’t be bothered to nod at Constance, as there was no civility between the two of them.
“I need the key to the female section,” the detective said, without any preliminaries.
“It’s customary for the guards to bring an inmate downstairs for questioning,” Sheriff Heath said.
Mr. Courter was the kind of red-faced man for whom beads of sweat bloomed constantly across his forehead. Constance felt quite cool and collected by comparison.
“It’s time for me to speak to that poor unfortunate girl of yours. Isn’t that where you have your little fireside chats? Upstairs, in the ladies’ cells, where you girls drink your tea and do your embroidery?”
“Miss Davis hasn’t anything new to say,” Constance told him, “and if she did, she’d say it to me.”
He took a step closer to her and spoke in the manner of a schoolmaster speaking to a young student. “I blame the sheriff here for not explaining to you how a criminal prosecution works. He might’ve thought you didn’t need to know, seeing as how you’re only here to look after the girls. But since he hasn’t told you, I will. I interview the witnesses. I file the charges. You’re the jailer. All you have to do is to hold them in those little cells upstairs until I decide what happens to them. Do you think you can remember all of that?”
Constance was not a woman who was troubled by the idea of shoving a man, or throwing one down on the ground. When she was angry, a certain vigor flowed quite easily into her limbs and made itself ready for a demonstration of might. The only difficulty was keeping it in check.
“Every week I’m seeing girls brought up on frivolous charges,” she said. “Someone has to speak up for them.”
He snorted. “We have people called lawyers who come before the judge to explain the criminal’s side of things. You aren’t pretending to practice law now, too, are you?”
Sheriff Heath said, “John, you know a sixteen-year-old girl can’t pay a lawyer.”
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why she would need one, if she was dragged away by a white slaver. For that matter, why did that Heustis girl require any intervention, if she was innocent of the charges? And why haven’t I seen a report on her? The judge released that girl on your word. I can have her arrested again if I’m not convinced that she’s meeting the terms the judge set out. Or didn’t Sheriff Heath explain that to you?”
“You’ll have your report,” Constance said.
22
WITH A SIGH EDNA straightened her collar and walked up to the door of her parents’ house in Edgewater. It wasn’t her home anymore, and for that reason she hesitated before she walked in, wondering if she ought to knock first. Her brothers never did: they simply bounced inside and hollered out to whoever might be within earshot. But her brothers all acted as though they belonged anywhere and everywhere, while Edna wasn’t sure where she belonged anymore. She certainly didn’t belong at the little yellow house in Edgewater.
She was about to raise her hand and knock when she heard a familiar voice behind her.