Katie

  About ten days after this murder, which Katie had been warned was not under any circumstances to be repeated, Hannah came down with a severe cold. About the same time, the marks of Fidele’s teeth, which had disappeared, reappeared as two jagged crescents. Then that injured leg began to swell and be painful to the touch. On Tuesday and Wednesday the pain increased, and the swelling ascended to her thigh. Hannah begged Katie for water, but at the sight of the pitcher that Katie brought, Hannah’s throat began to convulse, and it would not stop until Katie had hidden it in the next room. Katie brought in a teaspoonful of the liquid, but when she put the spoon into her mother’s mouth, Hannah’s teeth clamped shut over the stem and broke it in two. Katie had to pry open her mother’s jaws to extricate the bowl. On Thursday Katie went for the doctor whose sign was raised on a house within sight of Katie’s basement windows. Dr. Fogg examined Hannah, then ordered a consultation. Within three hours, during which time Hannah called incessantly for water and then began to scream every time that Katie put her hand to the pump, Drs. Clark, Thaxter, Tuckerman and Walker arrived at Myrtle Street and could do no more than watch Hannah Slape – in her distraction, Katie had revealed their true name – grow repeatedly convulsed.

  Hannah was pronounced a victim of hydrophobia.

  The marks on her leg confirmed this opinion. The dog that had bitten her was rabid.

  Katie was questioned but, in her confusion, could not remem­ber what it was permitted her to say and what it was imperative she keep secret. So she remained silent and, when pressed, main­tained she knew nothing at all.

  Since nothing could be done, the doctors adjudged Katie a com­petent nurse for Hannah, and Katie remained alone with her stepmother. Hannah grew weaker by the hour. She found no comfort at all except by lying upon the floor in the parlor, this despite dampness and chill. She ate nothing but cold boiled potatoes.

  She called incessantly for water, but Katie gave up any pre­tense of listening to this plea; for as soon as she saw the liquid or even heard it being poured in another room, Hannah went into dreadful spasms.

  On Thursday night it rained, and Hannah screamed for three hours. At last she lost consciousness.

  On Friday morning, as Katie sat turning over the cards of an old greasy pack she had brought with her from New York, Hannah had a spasm so powerful that it lifted her entirely off the floor, and Katie gaped in amazement. Hannah had jumped as high as anything that Young America himself was capable of.

  “Oh, Mar!” cried Katie in admiration. “Do it again! Do it again!”

  Dr. Fogg stopped in that afternoon and pronounced Hannah’s symptoms even more unfavorable.

  “Hydrophobia is the most painful death I can think of,” he said in an undertone to Katie. “I had rather be clawed to death by a tiger than bitten by a mad dog. I only hope that the dog was destroyed.”

  Katie smiled and assured him that the dog would never bite anyone else.

  Hannah moved scarcely at all for the next several hours. Then, in the night, Katie was wakened by her mother’s hoarse whisper, begging for water.

  “No, Mar!” cried Katie, exasperated with the illness. “I ain’t getting you any. So don’t hector me no more about it!”

  Katie was weary of nursing, weary of her stepmother’s demands. On Saturday morning, while Hannah lay in a coma on the floor of the parlor, Katie packed her clothing on top of Philo’s fortune in the carpetbag and walked out of the flat, not bothering even to secure the door behind her. Within the hour she was on her way to Philadelphia, purchasing apples and oranges of a trainboy who didn’t like the look in her eyes.

  She missed meeting Philo on the platform by three-quarters of an hour. The New York train arrived in Boston at half past eleven, and Philo emerged with her wicker travelling case. She put up at the Parker House and, after inquiring about the way to Myrtle Street, discovered that Katie and Hannah were only four or five streets away. She had only to go up to the State House, then down the other side of Beacon Hill.

  Philo put down her black veil and with some trepidation set out to find Hannah and Katie. However, she hadn’t her former fear of them. Her knowledge that John Slape was dead and her memory of his death served in some way to protect her.

  She found Myrtle Street without difficulty and approached the doorway of No. 102a with caution. She saw it first from the opposite side of the street and noted that the door was ajar. She waited for a few moments – not as long as she thought she should, but she was impatient – then crossed over and strolled past with as much insouciance as she could muster.

  She could see nothing through the crack in the doorway. She slowed before the windows and peered in.

  The sun, almost directly overhead, shone through the window from over her shoulder, and Philo could see black-stockinged feet protruding from underneath the table.

  Philo assumed the Slapes had found one victim more. No longer thinking of her own safety, she flung the door of the flat open wide. She was astonished to find it was Hannah who lay underneath the table.

  Her dress was stained with sickness, and the entire room stank. There was bloody foam on Hannah’s mouth, and one of her hands convulsively gripped the leg of a chair. Her eyes were open but glazed. It was obvious, even to Philo, that Hannah Slape was near to death.

  Philo was staggered. Now she wondered what she had ex­pected to find here in Boston. Hannah and Katie, perhaps living high on the fortune they had stolen from her, not yet apprised of John Slape’s death, confident of their safety – yet here was Hannah alone, and Hannah was dying.

  Philo lifted the table out of the way and moved the chairs aside, leaving only the one anchored in Hannah’s convulsive grip.

  The dying woman’s eyes unclouded for a moment, and she stared at Philo.

  “Water,” she whispered.

  Philo went into the kitchen and pumped a glassful. She brought it back and, raising Hannah into a sitting position, held the glass to her lips.

  But when Hannah opened her mouth, foul, discolored phlegm poured out over Philo’s hand and the water was spilled onto her dress.

  Hannah lost consciousness, and Philo lowered her to the floor.

  At that moment a man appeared in the doorway.

  “Is she dead yet?” he asked.

  Philo, wondering, shook her head.

  “I’m Dr. Fogg,” he said. “Where is the daughter?”

  “Was the daughter here?” cried Philo.

  “This morning she was,” replied the doctor.

  Hannah began to choke. Her eyes flew open, her head twisted up off the floor, she spat up a great quantity of the brown phlegm and convulsively tried to take in more breath. The chair leg was still caught in her fist; she lifted it high above her head and brought it down as suddenly. The chair was smashed on the threadbare rug. Hannah Slape fell back dead, with bloody foam covering her mouth.

  Hannah Jepson Slape was the name that went on the death certificate. Philo paid for the undertaker, the burial plot, and the brief service that was read over Hannah’s ravaged body. Philo did not tell the police that the dead woman was wanted in New York for the murders of seven young women and a child.

  Philo returned to New York the day after Hannah’s body was laid in the earth. She had seen John and Hannah Slape die deaths more terrible than she could have wished on them had they stolen her fortune ten times over.

  Yet Philo was not the least shaken in her resolve to find Katie Slape. Katie alone remained.

  Hannah and Katie were quickly forgotten in Boston, even by the neighbors who lived directly above. Katie’s advertisement no longer appeared in the papers, and those ladies who had been most impressed by the young woman’s clairvoyant prowess could not discover her again. Neither mother nor daughter was at all remembered until the following spring when a woman, who had stored her children’s lighter clothing for the winter season, went into the cellar storage room, moved aside some crates, and saw a canvas sack suspended from a hook, with long ropes of slime, shining in
the dim morning light, dangling from the bottom.

  PART XI

  NEW YORK VS. NEW EGYPT

  Chapter 52

  KATIE ALONE

  Katie Slape was stronger-willed than her father, more cunning and more alert. But when it came down to the basic business of getting from one side of a city to another, she wasn’t much more to be relied upon than the unfortunate John Slape. Leaving her stepmother to die alone in the basement flat on Myrtle Street, Katie took up the carpetbag and walked to the railway station, stopping to ask directions three times upon her way.

  She purchased a ticket to Philadelphia, waited an hour on a hard bench, and sat stiffly upright in the cars for the sixteen hours of the journey, fearful that someone would attempt to steal her case and placard. Katie was in no easy frame of mind. She wished it had been her father who had died instead of Hannah. Hannah told you what to do and where to go. Hannah said “Yes, now” and “No, later.” Hannah kept the police away, and Hannah could read to you out of the papers. Katie wasn’t sure why she was going to find her father, because he couldn’t do any of those things any more than she herself could – but perhaps they two together could find someone to take Hannah’s place.

  She had fallen into a troubled sleep on the train, worried that someone would attempt to wrest the carpetbag out of her sweaty, unconscious grasp. The stove was at the end of the car and Katie in the middle. Moreover there was a draft at her win­dow, and she was uncomfortably chilled. Her dreams were fever­ish, disconnected, silent. She dreamt of Hannah’s teeth snapping off the bowl of the spoon that contained the water she had begged for, she dreamt of Miss Ponder biting her leg just as Fidele had bitten her stepmother’s, she dreamt of the hired girl from Goshen, who came smiling to the window of the basement apart­ment, reached in, and snatched away Katie’s treasured placard. Though Katie ran after her, she could never catch up. Then Katie dreamt of her father, lying beneath a vast tree with a rope around his neck. Katie came close to her father in that dream, bent down over him, and looked into his face. His eyes snapped open, and nothing was there but two bubbling wells of blood that overflowed and obscured his face. Katie stepped back, and the blood continued to flow out of his sockets, flooding the earth, until he began to float in it – to float and then to sink.

  Katie woke suddenly with the knowledge that her father was dead. She had not interpreted her dream as prophetic, or as a vision of the circumstances of her father’s death – but rather with that dream had come the absolute certainty that he was dead.

  There was no need then to look for him in Philadelphia. She got off the train in New York.

  She walked in a straight line until, because of water, she could walk no farther. This peregrination left her on Fulton Street within sight of the Brooklyn ferry, a location which, with its crowd and its smells and its noises reminded her of Chris­to­pher Street. Therefore on Fulton Street she asked for a hotel. At the first two she was rejected, since single ladies of ir­re­proach­able character did not travel alone, but at the third she was smart enough to tell the clerk that, her mother having died in Boston, she was waiting here for her father to return to her from Cali­fornia. Her chamber rent was fifty cents a day, but this did not include meals.

  Katie sat very still on Fulton Street, trying to think out what was best for her to do. There was danger, she knew, in remaining in New York, for in New York were those who could recognize her as the daughter of the family that had inhabited No. 251 Christopher Street. Yet she felt more comfortable here, and was far more at her ease than she had been in Boston, even with Hannah to protect her.

  Her money kept her and would have sustained her for the remainder of her life, but the idleness began to prey upon her. She asked the manager of the hotel if she could place her placard in some conspicuous place in the lobby, but this was refused her. Then she reflected that it was perhaps by this placard she would be found out, and she must search out a way to ply her trade that did not involve advertising. After thinking over this problem for a few days, she suddenly remembered that once when she and her parents had gone to Brooklyn for a performance of Le Voyage en Suisse by the Hanlon-Lees troupe of acrobats, she and Hannah, sitting in the ladies’ cabin on the Brooklyn ferry, had been approached by a fortune-teller.

  Five minutes after that memory was dredged up to the sur­face of Katie’s consciousness, she put on her hat and went over to the Brooklyn ferry. She purchased a five-cent ticket and seated herself in the ladies’ cabin. Not trusting the security of the hotel room where she was put up, she brought the carpetbag along with her.

  The ferry ride from New York over to Brooklyn took no more than fifteen minutes, but ten more were consumed on either side, with mooring up and casting off, letting off carriages, deal­ing with recalcitrant animals, frightened ladies, and lost chil­­dren. For inclement weather there were separate ladies’ and gentle­men’s cabins. The gentlemen’s cabin contained only gentlemen, but the ladies’ cabin was mixed, and entertained all ladies and those gentlemen who did not wish to smoke.

  It was about two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon that Katie paid her fare to get onto the Brooklyn ferry, and she was sorely disappointed to find, when she had seated herself on one of the red plush cushions, that there was already a fortune-teller in attendance there: a lady wearing a black crepe dress and a melan­choly smile who moved round the compartment, spoke in a low musical voice to all the ladies present and to a number of the gentle­men, asking if they wished to have the future revealed. Katie watched her with barely suppressed anger and was not even com­forted by the reflection that in such a crowd as this her hammer would have been of no use.

  The lady in the black crepe dress came at last round to Katie. Katie smiled and placed a fifty-cent piece in the lady’s hand.

  “You wish to know the name of the man you will marry?” said the lady.

  “I’ll never marry,” said Katie. She beckoned the lady closer, and when the fortune-teller leaned forward, Katie whispered in her ear, “The crepe is humbug. You ain’t in mourning. Your hus­band run off with a whore. And you’ve got a cancer in your neck.”

  Katie grinned, and the lady in crepe – despite the cold and the cold spray – hurried out onto the deck.

  Katie turned to the lady sitting next to her. “Tell your fortune, ma’am? Only a quarter.”

  Katie worked the Brooklyn ferry every afternoon, making some­times as few as four, sometimes as many as eight trips back and forth. Her best target were the ladies of Brooklyn who had spent a few hours shopping along the Ladies’ Mile and were re­turn­ing home with their purchases. Katie wondered why these – whose lives contained no surprises whatever, other than that they or their husbands might die suddenly and soon or that their children would be imprisoned for ghastly crimes – were always the most eager to know the future. At the beginning or at the end of the workday, the ferry was crowded, and she could not operate in the privacy that was best for her. Sometimes, merely as a change, she would work in the evenings, and for fifty cents tell the fortunes of spooning couples, shopgirls, and counter clerks.

  She made more than enough money to support herself. There­fore Philo’s fortune in bank notes remained undisturbed at the bottom of the carpetbag. The bag itself became a kind of appendage to Katie: it was no longer heavy, it was no longer a nuisance, it was no longer even thought of by her. Once she went to see Young America at the Brooklyn Museum, but when she was told she would have to check her carpetbag before she went into the house, she tore up her ticket and went home again.

  Chapter 53

  HENRY’S MESSAGE

  Jacob and Caroline Varley came to New York to see Mr. Blakey about the progress toward the settling of Nedda Maitland’s estate. They stayed in Nedda’s house, putting up with the ab­horred presence of Philo Drax rather than with the charges of a hotel. Caroline complained, “I do not know why you could not have gone off somewhere for a few days while we were here.”

  “I saw no reason to,” replied Philo
calmly. “I am paid to live here and take care of the house until Mr. Maitland can decide what is to be done with it.”

  “Mr. Maitland is mending nicely under Jewel’s constant ministrations,” said Caroline, with a careful eye to gauge Philo’s reaction to this remark. She gave none. “I suspect there may be a wedding somewhere about New Egypt in the spring. Or perhaps,” she added less vaguely, and looking around the parlor, “we should have it in here. . . .”

  Philo fingered the coral rings in her ears.

  The Varleys returned to New Egypt, and Philo would do no more than send her best wishes for Henry Maitland’s swift and complete recovery. Any tenderer message would never be relayed, she knew, and anything less would have been gleefully reported by the Varleys as downright coldness.

  Philo was helpless. She could not send a letter, for that letter would be impounded by either Jewel or Caroline Varley. She could not go herself, for she would never be allowed into the room where Henry was bedded. She must only wait at a distance and trust that her silence was not misinterpreted.

  Fortunately for Philo, it happened that a couple of weeks later, toward the middle of November, Mr. Blakey was required to travel to Trenton on business. He told her that on his return he would look in at New Egypt. “I would be happy to transmit any message or letter that you would care to entrust to me,” he said.

  To Mr. Blakey Philo had revealed the secret of her engagement to Henry. It was to the credit of both that Mr. Blakey believed implicitly Philo’s story of the proposal, Nedda’s approbation, and the outright gift of the valuable Brazilian diamonds.

  Philo sat down immediately and wrote the following letter.

  November 16, 1871

  Dear Henry,

  There is so much to be said that I cannot begin to write it. I have not seen you since you lay unconscious on the floor of the schoolhouse in Highland, calling out in your dreams for your poor mother. I am living in your mother’s house, employed by kind Mr. Blakey to keep it against your return, which I pray and trust will be very soon. I would be in New Egypt to look after you myself, but Jewel, I fancy, would take my interference ill. Mrs. Varley tells me that there is to be a wedding as soon as you are well, and that the bride’s new initials will be JM. If this is so, then I congratulate you heartily. Please be certain that I receive an invitation. If it should not be so, then please to give JM who is not to be my sincerest condolences. I remain,