Katie

  Philo held up her hand and smiled. “Mr. Maitland, it really is not necessary. I am quite solvent now, and have—” She started to name the sum, but instead said only, “—an amount of money which seems a fortune to me. I have received a little money from the sale of my grandfather’s livestock in Goshen, and I have the proceeds of the sale of Mother’s house. I—”

  “How much is that, Philo?”

  “I have a little more than a thousand dollars altogether.”

  Henry Maitland laughed. “Well then, Philo,” he said, “perhaps you would consider making me a little loan.”

  “Mr. Maitland, I would be pleased to accommodate you.” And she nodded over her plate of boiled meat.

  “You are more resourceful than I had thought. And I must tell you, Philo, that my opinion of your resourcefulness has never been low. . . .”

  Philo was serious a moment. “I wasn’t resourceful enough to prevent Mother and Grandfather from being murdered in their beds.”

  Dessert was brought – two large slices of peach pie – and when Philo and Henry resumed their conversation, it was with more levity.

  “I will trust you then to Mrs. Classon for four months, Philo.”

  “Four months?”

  “I go away tomorrow. I am sailing with a college friend to Brazil, in his pleasure boat. I don’t expect to return until August or September.”

  Philo did not feel she had the right to be disappointed, but that disappointment was apparent in her face.

  Henry Maitland saw it and was glad to see it.

  “I think you should be able to make your thousand dollars last you until August, will you not?”

  “I imagine so,” said Philo, smiling.

  “And if you have not found any employment by then,” said Henry, “I will assist you in your search. Where are your lodgings?”

  He took tablets from his coat pocket and wrote down the address of Mrs. Classon’s boardinghouse.

  “If you should happen to leave there, make certain that you leave word where you can be found.”

  “You are very kind to me,” said Philo seriously.

  “I am merely grateful,” he said, “for your having made my stay in New Egypt as pleasant as it was. I wish—”

  “Wish what?” Philo prompted.

  He thought a moment, then said, looking out the window at the rain that had begun to fall in earnest a quarter of an hour earlier, “—that George would postpone this voyage for a week or so, till fairer weather.”

  And after supper, rather than accompanying her straight back to Mrs. Classon’s, Henry took Philo to Niblo’s Garden, not far from the restaurant, where Philo was enchanted to see La Belle Sauvage. Henry tried to point out the splendor of Mrs. John Wood’s performance in the title role, but Philo had to admit that she was most delighted by Slocum’s Minstrels in the Ethiopian scene.

  She had never spent so pleasant an evening, she thought, though at the end of it she was exhausted. Any three years of her life in New Egypt seemed not to have encompassed the variety and excitement she had experienced in the thirty-six hours she had spent in New York.

  Henry brought her back to Thirteenth Street in a cab. He politely escorted her to the door, shook her hand, and said that he would come after her again in August. Philo waved farewell and went inside the house.

  Three of her fellow lodgers were sitting in the parlor and interrupted their conversation to ask Philo all about the gentle­man who had seen her to the door. She said merely that he was someone whose acquaintance she had formed in New Jersey and that she had run into him on the street quite by chance.

  “Was Mrs. Classon angry that I did not appear at supper?”

  “Ha!” laughed Nellie Stanwood, a blonde girl who was in the chorus at the Union Square Theatre. “She’s used to it. And the fewer of us there is at table, the more everybody gets!”

  Philo had thrown herself wearily into a chair and listened with only half a mind to the three women’s conversation, which wondered at the abrupt departure of one of their number earlier in the evening. No one could determine why Ida Yearance had so suddenly decamped, and they speculated that she had re­ceived good news or bad news, or a proposal of marriage, or a summons to appear in court. Not much later Philo went up to her room to bed.

  She sat at the little rickety table by the window, stabilized somewhat by a book pushed under the shortest of the four unequal legs, and wrote a note to Gertrude declining to return with her to the store the following morning. Then she took off her dress, shook it, turned it inside out, and hung it up on the back side of the door.

  When she turned, however, she looked into the corner where the Morning Glory stove was tilted awry – tilted because several of the tiles beneath it had been pulled out. And crumpled on the floor beside the misplaced tiles was the empty, torn envelope which that morning had contained, in hard cash, the entire of her fortune – the thousand dollars which she had told Henry Maitland would see her through August.

  PART VI

  CHRISTOPHER STREET

  Chapter 27

  KATIE’S LITERACY

  Maud Merrill was a young woman dependent entirely upon her­self in a society that hadn’t much use for unattached females. But Maud was luckier than most in her position: she had em­ployment, she had a beau, and she had the prospect of mar­riage. She worked from eight until six Monday through Saturday at Wagner’s Carpet Salesroom on Waverly Place, and on Sunday a clerk in a bookseller’s on Eighth Street squired her to City Hall Park and held her hand during the concert.

  The bookseller’s clerk had even asked Maud’s hand in marriage, though his offer was contingent upon their obtaining sufficient funds to set up housekeeping. This money unexpectedly came their way through the clerk’s inheriting from an uncle dying in Maine a legacy of fifteen hundred dollars. One thousand of this sum was put immediately into a savings bank, but the young clerk, ravished by his love for Maud Merrill, gave over to her the balance. With it she was to purchase her trousseau, and locate a place for them to live.

  Accordingly, every morning before work, Maud would knock at the door of various rooming houses and ask to see chambers that were to let; and after work, she would do the same. Nothing was right: in too many cases the chambers had already been secured, or they were on the hall, or too dark, or too exposed to the street – and Maud felt that, with five hundred dollars’ fortune behind her, she could afford to wait for the place that would exactly suit her and her husband-to-be.

  One evening, following an advertisement in the Tribune, she found herself on Christopher Street, near the ferry. The To Let sign in the window of the house she had searched out was re­moved even as she was mounting the steps – again she had been only just too late. She looked round her and realized that very probably she wouldn’t have liked this neighborhood anyway. All of New York was dirty and noisy, but Christopher Street seemed particularly so, even at half past six on a Thursday evening. She shrugged her shoulders and turned toward her own rooming house on East Seventh Street.

  She had not gone twenty feet, however, before she was accosted by a man sitting on a stoop. “Miss, Miss!” he cried, and raised a finger to stop her.

  She paused but said nothing.

  “Miss!” said the man, whose appearance was not prepossessing. “Come inside and have your fortune told.” He pointed to a sign in the window of the house before which he sat.

  Maud read the sign, which testified to the prophetic powers of Miss Katie, Extraordinary Clairvoyant.

  “What’s her charge?” said Maud.

  “Fifty cents.”

  Maud might have gone directly in, but she didn’t like this man on the stoop. “She’s my daughter,” he said, but that was no inducement either.

  The door of the house opened, and a young woman with black hair appeared on the stoop. She was eating an apple, and the juice spilled out over her bodice.

  “Here’s Katie,” said the man on the stoop.

  “Tell your fortune,” said
Katie with an insinuating grin.

  “No,” said Maud, who liked the daughter even less than she liked the father.

  Katie eyed Maud closely. “Let me touch your hand,” she said, and came down the steps.

  Maud wanted to run away, but she stood still as before the basilisk. Katie flung the apple into the street, and with her sticky hand she grasped Maud’s fingers and twisted them.

  “Par,” she said, “go inside and light the lamp.”

  With alacrity, John Slape rose from the stoop and disappeared inside the house.

  “I don’t want my fortune read,” said Maud weakly.

  “I won’t charge you,” said Katie. “Where’s your friend this evening?”

  “He’s—” Maud began mechanically. Then she stopped. “Who is my friend?”

  “The man with the black hair and the ears that stick out so far.”

  Maud drew her breath in quickly; the fortune-teller had described her lover exactly.

  Katie pulled her up the steps, but Maud held back.

  Katie leaned over and whispered in Maud’s ear. “You’d best be married soon,” she said. “You’ll have a boy on Christmas Day.”

  Then she laughed loudly, and Maud burned crimson.

  “No!” Maud cried.

  “Come up! Come up!” cried Katie, and drew Maud toward the door.

  Maud trembled as she sat across from Katie Slape. The lamp had been lighted on the mantel, but the principal illumination was the vast spring twilight that burned in the windows behind the clairvoyant, filling the room and Maud’s consciousness with its shining opalescence.

  “I’m not with child!” Maud whispered.

  Katie shrugged.

  “He’ll be born on Christmas Day, and he’ll be called Clifford.”

  Clifford was the name of the bookseller’s clerk. Maud pressed her hand against her belly with the sudden desperate certainty that what this young woman said was true.

  “Will he still marry me?” Maud demanded.

  Katie shrugged and smiled.

  “You know!” cried Maud. “Tell me!”

  “Do you have money?”

  “Fifty cents. Your pa said give you fifty cents—”

  “Pay to be rid of the child,” said Katie, waving away with a sneer the coins that Maud held proffered.

  “Where . . .” began Maud in a whisper.

  “Let me write the direction,” said Katie, and rose from the table.

  “How much will it cost me?”

  “Twenty-five dollars,” replied Katie, standing at the mantel and scratching on a scrap of paper with a pencil. She folded it twice, then handed it to Maud.

  “This is where I should go? What should I say? Will Clifford ever discover what I’ve done?”

  “Read the direction,” said Katie.

  Maud stood and went to the mantel. Holding the paper before the light, she unfolded it.

  On the paper were only scribbles.

  Maud turned, about to speak, but her question was lost forever.

  Katie knocked her once over the head with a hammer, and she crumpled to the floor.

  Katie leaned down, took off Maud’s shawl, and put it under the young woman’s inert head, a precaution against blood staining the carpet. In fact, there was no blood at all, and the fatal wound was not even apparent on her scalp. Katie went through Maud’s pockets and in the first found a small yellow envelope containing three hundred ninety-three dollars in bank notes and gold.

  Katie grinned, then leaned down and whispered in Maud’s ear: “I can’t read nor write, you see!”

  On page three of the Sun for Thursday, 8 June 1871, there appeared this article:

  A DEAD BODY DISCOVERED NEAR

  THE CHRISTOPHER STREET PIER

  SUSPICIONS OF FOUL PLAY

  A Coroner’s Jury Fails to Determine

  the Cause of Death

  Last Friday afternoon between 1 and 2 o’clock a young man named Earl P. Mason, who resides with his mother on Jane Street, went down to the North River just below Christopher Street pier to look after a boat and discovered there the dead body of a woman caught between the pilings. The police were notified, and Coroner Bule was summoned and took charge of the body. A memorandum book found in the pocket of the dead woman gives her name as Maud Merrill, residing at No. 31 East Seventh Street. Subsequent enquiries have determined that the young woman was recently arrived from the country, it is thought from eastern Pennsylvania. She was employed as a binder in the carpet salesroom belonging to Mr. Wagner on Waverly Place. She was last seen alive on 1 June, leaving Mr. Wagner’s establishment at six o’clock with the intention of “seeing about some rooms to be let.”

  Dr. Oliver Shaw made a postmortem examination of the dead woman. The results were as follows: a slight abrasion was found on the forehead, also a small patch of extravasated blood beneath the scalp at the back part of the head; the brain, kidneys and liver contained an unusually large amount of blood; the lungs were filled with air, and the bronchial tubes contained a frothy fluid. Death must have occurred during the night of Thursday and might have been the result of exposure. The injuries to the scalp were so slight as to render it improbable that they could be regarded as causes for death. From the postmortem examination, there is no evidence that death resulted from drowning.

  E. A. Burgoyne, hospital steward at the Tenth Street Arsenal, testified as an expert that in the War he had seen death caused by concussion of the brain produced by a blow which left no more visible outward injury than appeared in this case.

  Upon the above evidence the jury was not satisfied as to the cause of death and accordingly adjourned until next Wednesday evening.

  Chapter 28

  HAMMER VS. SANDBAG

  Maud Merrill was not the first young lady of New York to leave Katie Slape’s parlor in a canvas bag. Before Maud, three other young women had died, victims of Katie’s hammer. All three had been slipped into the North River by John Slape while Hannah kept watch for him. From the murder of these four young women, the Slapes had gained nearly six hundred dollars, which was considerably more than could have been accrued through interest – even on so great an amount as twenty-nine thousand dollars – and a great deal more than could have been accumulated through fifty-cent and one-dollar fees for sessions at Katie’s clairvoyant table.

  Not all women who came to Katie were in danger of their lives – only the ones with money about their persons, and of this small group, only those with few friends in the city. Of course questions pertaining to these two important points, put to a prospective victim, would have aroused suspicion – but Katie never bothered to ask them. She knew already whether her ladies had money or not. Her ability to decide who was to die and who was to live was as unerring as it was uncanny. When a young woman such as Maud Merrill had dropped dead to the floor beneath Katie’s­ hammer, her pockets were searched with perfect assurance that some substantial amount of money would be discovered there.

  Hannah and John never asked their daughter for an expla­nation of this lucrative efficiency.

  However, having come across the notice of the finding of Maud Merrill’s body, Hannah wondered aloud to her daughter if the use of the hammer were not an aspect of her ritual that might be improved upon.

  “Leaves a mark,” said Hannah, and read aloud that part of the article which described the bruises on Maud’s head.

  Katie shrugged. “What does it matter to them? They’re dead.”

  “No, Katie,” said Hannah patiently, “hadn’t been for them bruises, police would have thought for sure she just throwed her­self in the water. But them bruises – someday,” she said darkly, “somebody might be coming after us.”

  Katie grinned, which grin signified Let them try.

  Though Hannah alone continued to be uneasy about the hammer, it was John who provided a solution. He had continued his afternoons at the barber’s around the corner, and there ob­tained sundry information. And one piece of information that looked to be
valuable to the Slapes was the existence of a weapon of mayhem that didn’t leave any mark.

  “Sandbags,” John said. “Take little canvas bags and fill ’em with sand and pebbles till they weigh five pounds or so. Then hit someone over the head, and it knocks ’em into the middle of next week.”

  Hannah shook her head in doubt. “Sand!” she exclaimed. “Can’t kill a man with sand.”

  “Katie’s dealing with ladies,” said John.

  “Same thing,” said Hannah. “Can’t kill a lady with sand in a canvas bag.”

  “It shakes their brains up,” said John. “Maybe it’s to be done three or four times in different places, but it don’t leave a mark.”

  “No,” said Katie, who had listened with interest to this conver­sation between her parents. But her no did not signify doubt, it only expressed her unwillingness to abandon the hammer. Katie liked the hammer very much.

  The experiment at any rate was tried. John prepared several canvas bags with sand and gravel that he got from an empty parcel of land up on Twentieth Street, and Hannah sewed the tops together. Two of them were placed in the drawer with the hammer in Katie’s parlor, and when next a young woman appeared on Christopher Street who had a little money and no friends to speak of, Katie first astounded her with her knowledge, and then while the young lady was standing at the window (Katie told her her true love was standing before a shop half a square down), Katie took out one of the bags and hit her over the head with it. The young lady collapsed, but breathed still. For several minutes Katie beat her about the head and shoulders with the canvas bag and desisted only when one of the lady’s earrings caught in the canvas and ripped the bag open, spilling sand into the battered cavity of her ear.

  Katie stood and called her parents.

  “There’s bruises on her face,” said Katie with satisfaction. She wanted to stick with the hammer.

  “You’re not to hit her in the face!” cried John. “Just on her skull!”

  “Had to hit her eighteen times,” said Katie sullenly.

  “She was dead before,” said Hannah, looking hard at Katie.