Isabel Feeney, Star Reporter

  What he’d just done finally seemed to sink in. I settled back in the chair. “Why would your aunt think your mom would get in trouble?”

  “Aunt Johnene didn’t like Mr. Bessemer. She said he was bad news.”

  “Yeah, I guess he was.”

  I glanced at a clock on the mantel. It was pretty late. “Your aunt’s not coming tonight, is she?”

  Robert opened his mouth, as if he was going to lie to me; then his shoulders slumped. “No. Probably not. She does come, but not that often.” He turned pleading eyes on me. “Please don’t tell anybody I’m alone a lot. They might put me in an orphanage or something!”

  “I . . . I’m alone a lot too,” I confided, something I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Mom sometimes worried that I’d get taken away if people knew how often I was on my own. “I’ll keep your secret,” I promised. “You don’t tell anybody about me, either, right?”

  Robert nodded. “Okay.”

  We both got quiet, and I rocked back and forth, thinking. Then I asked a question that wouldn’t stop bugging me. It was a nosy one, but if I was going to be a reporter, I’d better get used to poking around in people’s business. “So, if Mr. Bessemer was so terrible, why did your mom want to marry him?”

  Robert was looking better now that Detective Culhane was gone, as if the cold wasn’t the only thing that had sucked the breath out of him, but he actually got pink when I asked that. “I think . . . I think she was going to marry him partly because of me,” he said. Then he paused, swallowing thickly, before adding, “You know . . . because of what I did to my father.”

  I stopped rocking and stared at him.

  What the heck did that mean?

  Chapter 28

  FOR A SPLIT SECOND I THOUGHT ROBERT HAD KILLED HIS DAD—and maybe murdered Charles Bessemer, too. I had no idea how a kid who dragged one leg and could barely breathe sometimes would get himself and a gun to a dark alley, but what he’d just said . . . well, it sounded pretty darn ominous.

  “You should probably explain all that,” I suggested, scooching the chair out of arm’s reach. He was making me a little nervous. “What, exactly, did you do?”

  But Robert hadn’t been talking about hurting anybody. He was the one who’d gotten hurt. He just blamed himself. “My father thought I was a weakling even before I got polio,” he said. “And then he thought I didn’t fight that hard enough. He thought a stronger son would’ve been able to walk normally again.”

  That was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. “Your father sounds like a bully!”

  Robert just shrugged. “Anyway, he and Mom fought all the time after I got sick. She kept telling him to leave me alone, and he kept saying he couldn’t stand having a kid everybody pitied. Then, one day, he left, and we started acting like he’d never existed.”

  Robert’s voice sounded funny, and I realized he was crying. Which was probably behavior his dad wouldn’t have liked either.

  “Gosh, Robert, I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. I almost wished he’d be more like Flora Bessemer and get mad and vow vengeance. That was actually easier to handle. “But what’s that have to do with your mom and Charles Bessemer?”

  “My mother never said it to me, but I’m pretty sure she was going to marry him because he was the first man who didn’t run away when he met me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know how pretty my mom is.” Robert said that as if it were a bad thing. “A lot of men ask her out on dates,” he continued glumly. “But whenever they meet me, they all stop calling.” He forced a weak smile. “Who wants to get stuck with a crippled kid, right?”

  I still liked Miss Giddings, but it seemed as if she did have terrible taste in men. Or maybe most men were just terrible.

  I felt extra proud of my father, who wouldn’t have turned his back on a lame boy. I mean, I hadn’t really known my dad, who’d died when I was very little, but my mother always told me stories about what a good man he was. I was also suddenly glad that my mom hadn’t brought around a bunch of horrible potential fathers. Maybe her going gray wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  “So Mr. Bessemer liked you?” I asked. “Was nice to you?”

  Robert was done crying. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his pajamas, then shook his head. “Nah. He didn’t really pay any attention to me either way.” Robert rolled his eyes. “He was always too busy fussing over Flora and her commercials and acting to even notice me.”

  “Hey, I met her!” I said.

  “Lucky you,” Robert grumbled, not even asking how or where. He was too caught up in his own story. “Mr. Bessemer had money, too,” he added. “Mom thought that was a good thing.”

  “You’re not supposed to marry for money!” Even I knew that. Had I been wrong about Miss Giddings after all?

  “Not for herself,” Robert clarified. “I overheard Mom tell Aunt Johnene that Mr. Bessemer could afford treatment that might help me walk right again.”

  I didn’t believe that such a treatment existed. But Miss Giddings would probably always hope—and do anything to get Robert help. Maybe even marry somebody she didn’t love as much as she should.

  “I think Mom really believed he’d be a good husband, too,” Robert noted, as if he were reading my mind. “Because—even if he wasn’t always perfect toward her, and had a temper—he could be nice, and he mainly treated her well . . .”

  Robert was talking faster, but his breathing was getting ragged again.

  “I understand,” I promised him. “Really.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “You should rest,” I suggested. “Just for a couple minutes.”

  Nodding again, he closed his eyes, and I didn’t think a full sixty seconds passed before he was breathing steadier, because he was sound asleep. All the stuff he was going through—and had been through—must’ve worn him out.

  I wanted to leave and get some sleep myself, but I sat in the rocking chair watching him almost all night. It just seemed that, for once in his life, somebody besides his mother ought to really stick by him.

  Okay, maybe I dozed off once or twice, like Hastings, with my chin on my chest. For the most part, though, I hovered over Robert Giddings like a dog protecting a bone.

  And when the sun started to come up, I shook his shoulder and woke him up enough to say goodbye, then ran home before Mom got back from the hospital.

  Soon after that, it was time for me to go to work. But when I got to my corner, somebody else was already standing there.

  Waiting, I was pretty sure, for me.

  Chapter 29

  MISS GIDDINGS WAS MOVIE-STAR PRETTY, but something about Maude Collier drew your attention, even when she just stood on a corner with her hands in the pockets of a tailored tweed coat, watching everything around her with a half smile, as if the whole city amused her.

  She looked like she owned Chicago—which, in a way, I guess she did.

  Could I ever look that confident?

  “Hey, Maude,” I greeted her, dumping some of my papers onto the ground and immediately starting to sell the ones in my arms. Some of my regular customers were passing by, and we did our usual ritual of me handing them a Trib and them shoving coins into my palm, which didn’t prevent me from talking. “Why are you here?”

  “I visited Miss Giddings in prison yesterday,” she said. “And I wrote an article based on our talk—”

  “Hey, Mr. Forebush!” I handed one of my regulars a paper and took my cash. Then I turned back to Maude. “And . . .”

  Maude’s eyes clouded over. “I don’t think you’ll like it, Isabel. I wanted to warn you because I think you’ll be upset with me.”

  I froze like a statue, my hand out to accept some coins. And although part of me really wanted to know what was in that story, I first had to ask, “You . . . you came here because you’re worried I’ll be mad at you?”

  “Yes, Isabel,” Maude confirmed, sidestepping. The sidewalk was pretty crowded with men a
nd women, all bundled against the cold. “We’re friends, right?”

  Were we?

  I honestly didn’t know how to answer, but I did think it was pretty nice . . . okay, unbelievable . . . that Chicago’s most famous lady reporter had come to see me. Still, I was loyal to Miss Giddings—and now Robert. “What’s in the story?” I asked warily.

  I admired but didn’t always like Maude Collier—and I’d probably like her less in a few minutes—but how couldn’t I think she was the bee’s knees when she said with a grin, “Hand me those Tribs, Izzie. I’ll sell while you read.”

  Chapter 30

  “PRETTIEST”

  KILLER: MAYBE

  GUN WAS MINE!

  —————

  by Maude Collier

  Colette Giddings, discovered in an alley wearing a fur coat stained by the blood of the abusive man who’d bought it for her, today told detectives she “can’t recall” if the gun found next to her fiancé’s body is the one she recently denied owning.

  “All guns look alike to me,” she said with a pout. “I don’t like them!”

  And yet Giddings, dubbed the “prettiest woman on Murderess’s Row,” has admitted that she earlier lied about having a small pistol, which she kept bedside.

  The gun, she still insists, really belonged to the man she divorced, Albert Rowland, of late employed at Swift’s Meats . . .

  I looked up from reading Maude’s article, my head swirling with all kinds of thoughts and feelings I couldn’t sort out.

  First of all, Robert’s father suddenly had a name. Albert. And a different last name. Rowland. Not to mention a job—at a butcher shop not far from where Maude and I were standing. I passed it every day.

  Had I ever seen Robert’s dad?

  And Maude . . . she’d once again made Miss Giddings look guilty—even worse than before. She’d also made it seem like Miss Giddings had left Albert Rowland, when I knew it was the other way around.

  Yet she’d not only come to see me, a nobody kid, to make sure I didn’t get too upset, she was smiling and hawking my newspapers. And selling way more than I did, because pretty much every man who passed by bought one, then looked over his shoulder at her as he walked away.

  Talk about an unfair advantage!

  And an unfair article.

  But I was starting to understand the reporter side of the newspaper business. I also—finally—got that my being mad wouldn’t change the way Maude wrote about Miss Giddings.

  No—if I was going to get Maude to tell a different story, I’d have to make her believe a different story.

  “Hey, Maude,” I said, giving her the newspaper I held so she could sell that, too. “When you’re done filling up my mom’s money jar, you wanna go see that murder scene? The way I see it?”

  Chapter 31

  “DO YOU WANNA BORROW MY BOOTS?” I OFFERED, watching Maude step carefully through the snow toward the garbage cans where Flora’d caught me snooping. Maude’s high heels were not meant for ice and slush, and she’d fallen behind. “The boots are pretty big. I could toss ’em to you.”

  Maude just laughed and kept picking her way through some deep, dirty ruts. By now, more traffic—auto and foot—had come down the alley. But the spot where I stood was still undisturbed, except for my footprints.

  “And what would you do, Isabel?” Maude asked, still grinning. “Stand barefoot in the snow?”

  I hadn’t thought that through. “We could trade. I could wear your shoes.”

  Like I’d be able to even stand on those heels.

  “Thanks, but I’m fine,” Maude promised. “I’ve walked through worse messes than this to get a story.”

  Immediately, I was curious. “Like what?”

  “Well . . .” She stopped walking for a moment. “I’ve trudged through the ash-covered remains of big fires. And waded into the river to get a better look when a corpse was being dredged out. And of course, I’ve stepped over bodies, sometimes several at once, because this is a violent city.”

  I knew it was strange, but oh, how I envied the way Maude could talk about those things as if they were commonplace. What other woman could claim to have witnessed so much?

  Maude took the last few steps to meet me and didn’t bother brushing snow off of her pretty red-leather shoes. She just pulled her ever-present notebook and pencil out of her pocket. “So, Isabel,” she said, “tell me what you see here that strikes you as important.”

  I felt a little silly at first, but I took out my composition book, too, and said, “Okay. Here goes.”

  Chapter 32

  “SO YOU FOUND FOOTPRINTS LEADING OUT A DOOR—and going nowhere.” Maude summarized the things I’d just told her. We walked side-by-side out of the alley. “And the person wasn’t taking out the trash,” she continued. “Because there was—is—undisturbed snow on the lids.” I nodded, glad that she seemed to be taking me seriously. “Yeah.”

  Maude checked her notebook. “And the pepsin gum, which someone stepped on—after it snowed . . .”

  “Yeah, that too.” I studied her face. “Do you think it’s important?”

  We stopped under the streetlamp where I’d first seen Charles Bessemer, and she frowned at me. “I don’t know, Isabel. It’s not much.”

  I defended my findings. “It’s something. Clues that maybe Detective Culhane didn’t notice, because he was already so sure Miss Giddings was guilty.” I looked at Maude even closer, narrowing my eyes. “How come you were with him at Robert’s last night? Where were the other reporters?”

  “That was a coincidence,” she said. “You led me to Robert. James just happened to show up at the same time.” Her cheeks got pink, and not only from the cold. “I also hound him for information when I’m covering a case he’s on. He might have mentioned going there to talk about the gun.”

  It was the first time I’d seen Maude Collier, self-assured reporter, look even slightly flushed and flustered, and it was my turn to laugh at her. “Jeez, why don’t you two just get married or something!”

  All of a sudden she got serious. “James was married, before the war. His wife died in the terrible influenza epidemic while he was overseas.” She looked down the street, distracted. “It’s complicated, Isabel.”

  Yeah, I guess it was. I could hardly believe that Detective Culhane had been in love once. And now I also understood why he was so somber. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to laugh.”

  Maude met my eyes again. “And I didn’t mean to burden a young girl with all that.” She smiled. “I think you will be a reporter, Isabel, if you can get that much information out of people with just a joking question!”

  For the first time ever, I felt that my dream honestly might come true—and that, while we didn’t always agree, Maude and I really had become friends. Something had changed in the way we’d just talked, almost like we were equals. But friendship or no friendship, I still didn’t exactly understand why she saw Miss Giddings one way and I saw her another.

  Which is why I came up with my most brilliant idea ever.

  “Hey, Maude,” I said. “I have a deal for you.”

  She raised one dark eyebrow, as if she was skeptical—and amused. “And what would that be, Izzie?”

  “You take me to see Miss Giddings tomorrow, we’ll both talk to her, and we’ll both write stories based on the interview.”

  Maude was definitely intrigued. “And . . .”

  “If my story’s good enough”—I gave it a title, running my hand across the air—“ ‘ “Prettiest” Inmate Talks to Crime Scene Newsgirl,’ you’ll convince the Tribune to run it!”

  Chapter 33

  THE COOK COUNTY JAIL, ON HUBBARD STREET, was even more intimidating than the Tribune Tower. The prison wasn’t as tall or as majestic as the Tower—in fact, it was squat and ugly—but it looked like a gloomy castle that might house a king who’d lop your head off for no good reason.

  I was just about to turn around, thinking I could tell Maude, who was late,
that the deal I’d fought so hard for was probably stupid, when I felt a tap on my shoulder and jumped about a mile. And when I spun around, Chicago’s most famous lady reporter, who’d been in that jail a thousand times, was laughing at me. It must’ve been really obvious that I was having second thoughts—which was why, of course, I had to say, as if I could hardly wait to get inside, “You ready to convince them to let a kid visit Murderess’s Row?”

  Chapter 34

  “MAUDE, I DON’T KNOW ABOUT LETTING A GIRL IN HERE . . .”

  The guard who watched the desk just inside the prison’s big double doors didn’t look mean. On the contrary, Morse—that’s what his name tag said—seemed a little nervous himself.

  “Isabel will be perfectly safe with me,” Maude promised, resting one gloved hand on my shoulder. “You know that I am very familiar with this place and its residents.”

  “Plus, I’m on official Tribune business,” I pointed out, stretching the truth just a tiny bit—and probably pushing things way too far by adding, “You don’t want to make the publisher of the city’s biggest newspaper mad, right? ’Cause he’s counting on my story.”

  Morse looked cockeyed at my escort. “That true, Maude?” He jerked a thumb at me. “This kid works for the Trib?”

  The nice thing was, Maude didn’t even have to lie, because I did work for the paper. “She sure does, Danny.”

  The guard still seemed skeptical, but before we had to keep arguing, somebody behind us said, “Let them in, Morse.”

  Maude and I both turned to see Detective Culhane standing there, his arms crossed, watching our whole exchange. I was just about to ask why the heck he wanted me to get involved in the investigation—did he finally want my help?—when he answered my questions. “I’m afraid,” he noted, “that letting Isabel Feeney see the inside of a prison is the only way to possibly keep her out of one in the future.”