On a rainy morning in early September, Eugenia Knox came down to the lobby in black and told Irina that her husband was dying, and that Irina should tell Gerry she’d return as soon as possible. She boarded a train for Utah. The ladies felt a certain relief. “Well, finally ,” said Vinca. “Maybe she’ll be fun again when she gets back.”
Dulcy, who was in a foul mood with a sore tooth, didn’t recall a time when Eugenia was fun. The pain gnawed into her mind, burrowed right through her terror of a dentist, and after she writhed through a second night, Lewis pulled out Walton’s medicine box to rub some lumpy cocaine on her gums. At the first vague glimmer of light, the roosters across the street dueled, the town magpies erupted in anger, and Brach began to sing a hymn.
“Say the word and he’s dead,” murmured Lewis, face in the pillow. “No one will ever know.”
She mixed more aspirin and bit down on a wet cloth. “His wife would know.”
“His wife would clean up after me.”
Dr. Hickman’s office was on the corner of Callender and Second; he looked in her mouth and winced, numbed her gums with a stronger paste that made her brain jump, slid in a needle while an assistant told her to shut her eyes. She couldn’t manage that, and he resorted to lowering a mask onto her face, which cured the problem of the jumpy brain. In the meantime she’d pressed back so hard that her fingers had turned white, and the leather on the chair arms remained dented after the assistant pried her hands free, after the mask had taken effect.
When she woke with a gap in her mouth, they left her slumped in the chair. She listened to them prep their next victim through the thin wall, a cocky man circling dread. The assistant slid back into the room and murmured that people were often difficult and confused when they first came around . Dulcy managed to turn her head and lift her arm; her wristlet told her it was only ten in the morning. Her view took in the roofline across the street, deep blue sky above rich red brick, Joe Wong’s children and other workers pinning up laundry to dry on the roof.
A few minutes later she was back on the sidewalk, rocking on her heels and blinking in the light. She resolved to try for the Elite, a block away—she could ask Irina for the key: who would care, anymore? But the Sanborn surveyors, almost at the end of their Sisyphean task, stood in the middle of Second Street, gesturing at Joe Wong, yelling about tunnels. Dulcy thought first of a fire—Durr stood by the laundry and the studio, looking as if he’d inhaled smoke—but even if her face was too numb to smell, her eyes still worked, and no one seemed to be calling an engine, though onlookers gathered. “What is wrong?” she asked Durr.
Her words probably hadn’t come out clearly, but he didn’t seem to notice. “A dead man,” he said. “In the basement. In Joe’s storage area.”
“Not mine !” yelled Joe. “Under the hotel. The tunnel door all of a sudden open, boxes all over. I have no keys.”
“Not his,” said a Sanborn. “Just in one of those tunnels under the hotel, but certainly dead.”
???
Gerry, in a fresh rage over Eugenia’s departure, was summoned. He told Sam’s competitor, the Post , that Livingston had a Ripper. “A Frankenstein. This body has been butchered to a level beyond my long experience. Eviscerated and reattached.”
This body was too aromatic for Hruza’s Cold Storage, so Deputy Bixby had ice blocks loaded into the shed behind the police station where the disassembled scaffold was stored. Bixby asked Macalester for help, because the county doctor had shingles, and Macalester—retching—took two minutes with the body before he slammed into Gerry’s office. “Your murdered man was autopsied and embalmed,” he hissed. “Badly, but there it is. I assume the death was natural, because the heart, returned to the chest cavity, was malformed.”
“Who?” asked Gerry. “Why?”
“I took the liberty of removing this card from the casket,” said Macalester, flicking the piece of stained paper onto the desk. It was the death certificate for Mr. Errol Arthur Knox, dead since September of 1904, survived by Eugenia Knox, disposition pending.
Within hours most of the story was clear: Eugenia had hidden her husband’s death—hidden her husband—to avoid foreclosure and to continue receiving Errol’s army pension and other payments. There was no money in the Elite accounts, and when Gerry inquired into the real estate the Knoxes had used to secure the loan for the hotel, he found a building with an address fifty feet into the Great Salt Lake.
Gerry owned nothing, and he owed a great deal. He refused to pay for the burial of his uncle, his last relative, and he splintered Eugenia’s apartment until the heavy carpets were crunchy and glittering with all of her gaudy cut glass. Then he sobered up, and the town waited. Lewis thought this was interesting—Gerry might possibly be better off without any family at all.
???
A few nights later, they woke to a woman’s screams from the Braches’ house, on and on, interspersed with smashing glass, a huge slamming sound and silence. “He’s killing her,” said Dulcy.
Lewis was already getting dressed, hopping into the Bluebeard room to see while he struggled with a pant leg. Lights were on up and down the street, and the screams resumed and blended with Brach’s bellow. But someone had a telephone, and an automobile whirled around the corner: Gerry driving the new police car, Bixby in the passenger seat. Dulcy and Lewis watched from the window as the men ran into the house and a moment later dragged Brach out onto the sidewalk. Gerry kicked the minister until he was as bloody as his wife, who watched from her lamp-lit doorway. There was no wind; they could hear the neighbors protest, and Bixby attempted that’s enough, sir, surely , while Gerry raged. “I’m breaking your hands so you can’t use them on her again,” he howled, winded but still flailing and stomping. “Your feet so you can’t kick the lady. I’m tempted to blind you, so you can’t lecture from that fucking God book again, but maybe she’ll just burn it while you’re rotting in my cell.”
???
On September 10, after reading about an earthquake in Calabria—five hundred dead? five thousand? the pope wept to hear the news—Dulcy was making jam when someone knocked. Her fingertips were a bad blue, dead-man blue, from pulling off grape skins to chop with the sugar, the way Martha had taught her. Dulcy had thought of using a new recipe that dispensed with this skin worship, but she’d chickened out, and now she had a steaming copper pot of purple paste.