Carrie said, “I’m going back to the theater. I might see if the ushers know anything.”
Constance thanked her for that. Norma stood with her arms crossed for a minute, her jaw working back and forth but no words coming out.
“Go on upstairs,” Constance said. “For once, just go.”
Norma, miraculously, did as she was told.
Constance sank into an armchair by the fireplace, overcome with discouragement, but she was not to be left alone with her thoughts, because a woman sitting by herself in a hotel lobby with nothing along the lines of a magazine or a bag of knitting to occupy her is quickly taken care of. A man in a red uniform with gold braid on the shoulders rushed over and offered to bring her any sort of delicacy from the hotel’s restaurant. He suggested a pot of tea or a Turkish coffee. He thought she might like a bread pudding in wine sauce or a slice of Boston cream pie. There was something called a Biscuit Tortoni whose virtues exceeded his powers of description, but she understood it to involve eggs, cream, cherries, and coconut.
He believed she would find it restorative. Constance hesitated for a minute, as she was too miserable to take a bite of anything, but then decided that she should defer to his expertise.
Soon there was a dainty table alongside her, and a cup of good coffee, and not one but two desserts, neither of them diminutive. The pastry chef, he explained, insisted that she try them both.
At that very moment, Fleurette stepped off the elevator. If it hadn’t been for the waiter half blocking the view, Fleurette would have seen Constance reaching for the coffee, then wiping a spot of heavy cream off her wrist.
But Fleurette didn’t see her. Constance lifted a hand to the waiter, which he understood to mean that he should stay right where he was. People who work in hotels have that kind of intelligence about them.
Fleurette took no notice of the two of them, or of anyone else in their corner of the lobby. She was headed straight for the front desk. Under one arm she carried something bulky and heavy that became visible only when she hoisted it onto the counter.
It was a portable sewing machine.
Fleurette spoke to the man behind the desk for only a minute, and then took a claim ticket and left the machine with him. She was back on the elevator and out of sight so quickly that Constance thought she might have dreamed it. She sent the waiter away, and took a bite of the Tortoni.
Fleurette was safe. There was nothing the matter with her that Constance could see. She hadn’t been kidnapped, she hadn’t run off, and she wasn’t out having a wild time late at night with the fashionable theater crowd. In every way she looked like an ordinary working girl.
And now Constance understood why Fleurette hadn’t been listed with the cast. She wasn’t on the stage at all.
She finished her dessert—there seemed no reason not to, in light of the foregoing events—and crossed the lobby to speak to the man behind the front desk. He had a long, narrow face and the tiniest round spectacles.
“I saw a young lady come through here with a sewing machine a minute ago,” she said. “Is she the hotel seamstress?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “That’s May Ward’s seamstress. She needs her machine fixed before morning, so a fellow’s coming to look at it tonight. That’s how these theater types are. Get a man out of bed in the middle of the night over an electrical cord.”
He offered to ring the housekeeper if she needed something mended, but Constance waved him away.
“I’ll take care of it myself,” she said.
50
“IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE she’s having any kind of life. As far as we know, she didn’t even go to the theater last night. Do they have her locked in a room sewing every night?”
Norma was trying to put on a show of protest, but she knew she’d been defeated and only wished to argue with Constance over it for the next several hours while they were stuck on a train together.
Constance tried to summon up some pity for Norma. The world must have been a very frustrating place for her, on account of the way it refused to yield to her ideas. Constance tried to speak more gently. “Fleurette went of her own accord. This is the life she’s chosen. We must consider the matter closed.”
Norma said, “I don’t know why she would lead us to believe that she’s on the stage when they’d only hired her on as a seamstress.”
“Only?” Constance said. “That’s exactly why. She probably wanted us to think that this was something—well, quite a bit more than what it actually was. She could’ve been trying to make us proud of her. Did that ever occur to you?”
“I don’t like the idea that she’s lying to us.”
“Well, we lied to her, too, by sneaking out here to follow her around. I’m not sure which is worse. And I want to remind both of you that we won’t ever tell Fleurette what we did. She’d be furious if she found out we followed her.”
“Then we’re to listen to her stories of her splendid stage life, and pretend to believe it?”
“Let her have her little fiction. It’s harmless. She’s always lived half in a fantasy world anyway. Don’t pretend to be shocked by Fleurette telling made-up stories. And, Carrie, I want you to promise me that this stays out of the papers.”
“Oh, there’s no danger of me getting a story out of this,” Carrie said dispiritedly. “Good girls doing what they’re supposed to don’t make the paper. And you’re not giving me much of a story in Minnie Davis, either.”
Constance wanted very much to keep Carrie out of the courtroom when Minnie was brought back for Tony’s trial. “She might testify that she was shown a forged marriage license, but you’re right. It doesn’t amount to much.”
“And nothing ever came of the male visitors she was to have entertained in the evenings?”
“The landlord was the only one to ever say anything about that, and when he was asked again, he couldn’t recall anyone but Mr. Leo’s brother.”
“So there was nothing to those claims?” Carrie said. “They sounded about right to me.”
“Not at all,” Constance said, not trusting herself to say more.
“Then I don’t have much of a story.”
Norma rattled her newspaper and cleared her throat loudly. “I wonder about people who can’t find anything decent to discuss when in close proximity to others on a rail-car.”