He started to hack again as she retreated, wondering why she hadn’t said yes. She wiped off the smear on her jaw and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She could hear someone walking in the room directly above for the first time. Old school friend : even her gothic mind couldn’t believe someone would have shadowed her on the train from Seattle, only to have her choose a town where he’d lived for months. She hadn’t known where she would get off the train, or whether she’d have the courage to leave at all. The leaving was one of the things that still stunned her every night.
Irina’s strong, fast steps rumbled up the stairs, then passed to the hall above Dulcy’s patch of ceiling. The man moved to his door and spoke, and the notes of Irina’s voice rose. The door slammed, and Dulcy heard Irina’s quick retreat. Lewis Braudel’s window scraped open, and a moment later cigarette smoke winnowed through Dulcy’s own window, still ajar.
Mr. Maslingen, barricaded in his Butler castle, is rumored to have received a suicide note from Miss Remfrey, posted in Spokane. The Remfreys, wishing to end this sad chapter, have expressed frustration at not being allowed to read their sister’s last words.
—The Seattle General, March 1, 1905
chapter 12
Women of the World
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Dulcy spent most of the morning after the stabbing flat on her back in bed, listening to her ceiling. Twice she left the bed to watch Lewis Braudel cross the street and disappear east, a third time in the company of a laughing Samuel Peake. Between these sightings, she never saw Braudel return to the hotel, and his pacing always caught her by surprise. He liked a counterclockwise pattern.
She didn’t know whether to stay or run.
Irving brought her coffee, but his jabber cleared nothing up. Between crime communiqués—the dead man had a pretty wife, and the killer had loved the pretty wife—Dulcy learned that the man from the train was from New York—a state Irving had left as a toddler, whose population and variety he could not parse—and that people paid him to write. Mr. Braudel liked women, but he was fairly discrete; he liked to drink but not to wretched excess. He had been in and out of the hotel for the last two years, since Samuel had moved to town, and he had otherwise traveled, and was often ill. Irving enjoyed Braudel tremendously and had been worried by the length of his last absence. As he said, over and over, without helpful details, when he delivered the day’s gore-laden newspaper.
“He travels for business? What sort of business? To Seattle, or San Francisco?”
“He travels for the sake of writing about things.”
“What kind of writing?”
Irving, who could not read well, looked annoyed. “Newspapers for sure, but a book, too.”
Dulcy was supposed to meet Margaret, but she sent word that she was ill. When Margaret came by, openly admitting curiosity about the knifing rather than concern about Dulcy’s health, Dulcy took a roundabout approach: why was Irving so worried about a Mr. Braudel?
Margaret was friendly with Samuel Peake, and she knew quite a bit about Lewis Braudel. Samuel and Braudel had gone to Columbia together, and Samuel said Braudel had caught malaria during the Spanish War; this explained much of Irving’s worry. There was a rumor—a flutter among the local women—that he’d been with the Astor Battery, the Ivy League crew of young heirs who’d volunteered to fight in Cuba, but Samuel had laughed at the gossips, and said that Braudel wasn’t quite an heir, and that after he’d fallen sick he’d simply stayed on in the Philippines as a reporter.
“Ah,” said Dulcy. “But why be here?”
Margaret stood at the window, watching the flash through the studio roof as Siegfried Durr worked. “Well, why not, Maria? He’s visited Samuel often, and he’s written quite a bit about Butte, Clark and all, and I’ve heard he’s having an affair with a woman in Bozeman. It doesn’t matter where he is between assignments, and now he writes his own books. He fashions himself lazy, but he’s been too many places for that to be true. He wrote his novel under a pseudonym, which just makes it all fun instead of tragedy. It’s very, very racy, and so he only wants me to tell the ladies about the journalism when he speaks to the club. But it certainly makes him more interesting, and you’re a woman of the world—you’ll love it, if you aren’t offended.”
Some sarcasm: Margaret had begun to sense that Dulcy’s sensibilities weren’t fragile. It was only now that Dulcy realized that Braudel had written the book she’d read in Denver, the false memoir by one Maximillian Cope, that she’d used for so much of the late, great Edgar’s experience. She finally looked convincingly ill.
Margaret left for crackers and bicarbonate, and Dulcy went back to her study of the ceiling and Lewis Braudel’s footsteps. She could stay or she could flee for a new place—the Midwest, the South, California, Europe. Some days she felt as if she knew no one on earth, and on others she counted all the people she might see on a new sidewalk, who might remember her from a dinner in Manhattan, a Buffalo wedding, a clinic in Minneapolis, a bank; all the people she’d forgotten to Walton, Victor, a glass of wine, time. If she couldn’t remember their faces, how could they remember hers? How could this matter?
But this missed the point. He had remembered, at least something. He didn’t need to have followed her to recognize her, depending on what he remembered from the train, depending on whether he’d read the news about Leda Remfrey and put the two women together. In the middle of the night, he’d roll over, and open his eyes, and understand.
Perhaps she could pay him off. Perhaps she’d leave and come back after he’d died of malaria or worked his way through the women in town.
She stayed inside for the rest of the day, ordering her meals up. Samuel visited, having heard she was ill. He brought his favorite brand of stomach pills (“Take two or three. Did you eat something blue?”) and a deluge of useless information: Lawrence Peck and Albert Inkster had both loved Mrs. Peck, who has not been seen since the day of the attack, and had probably bolted for family in San Francisco. Samuel was hysterical with disappointment: finally a violent sex scandal but the guilty man was obvious. There’d be no prolonged trial, no secrets, no news. It was a tremendous waste of murder.
When he bounced out her door, she listened to him climb the stairs to Braudel’s room, and then she listened to them laugh for much of the next hour. It enraged her. Nothing in her life was funny at all.
The next morning, after she heard Braudel head down the stairs and watched from the window as he crossed the street—moving quickly, like a well man—she emerged, and none of the lobby regulars stared at her as if she were a rediscovered confidence woman. A train was pulling in, and she hurried down the block, through the soapy steam from Joe Wong’s laundry, worried by whatever ghosts might disembark.