“Everyone comes into the store and talks of Frana,” my mother told me. “But everyone thinks it’s…amusing. Like it’s a foolish little-girl adventure.”
“Well, Frana can be a foolish girl.”
“Strangely, her mother stopped into the store just before noon. A nice woman, but not a talker. I asked her about Frana and she just nodded, looked a little embarrassed. You know what I think? Frana came back home last night, and now the family is a little ashamed of the fuss that’s been made.”
“But I wonder just what she’s up to?” Fannie asked.
I kept my mouth shut.
It rained all day, and Fannie sat by the kitchen window, staring out at the empty clothesline. I avoided her, sensing she was ready to do battle.
Sunday morning was bright and clear, and in the early afternoon I wandered to Esther’s house, where we sat on the veranda, sipping coffee and chatting. Later, buoyed by the welcome sun, we took a stroll, drifting in the placid June air, a gorgeous day, the slight breeze rustling the sycamores and sugar maples. We meandered off the Avenue, headed toward the river by way of Lovers Lane, the quiet promenade of overarching elms and birches, with its hard-packed dirt lanes and the rough-hewn fences. There old men walked ancient hounds, college freshmen from Lawrence University rode their fashionable bicycles, and sixteen-year-old girls sat on the moss-backed hillocks under the aromatic white pines and read Ella Wheeler Wilcox verse aloud…
Most of my most fanciful dreams happened when I sat, alone, on the benches there.
We rambled toward the river, my favorite destination, but our ramble was cut short, when, nearby, Old Man Travers, a man in his nineties who periodically drifted into town from his shack in the mud flats and announced that he was the rightful heir to the throne of Slovakia, started making gasping sounds as he pulled at his border collie who was straining on his leash. The animal would have none of it, yipping in counterpoint to the doddering owner. Esther and I stopped, watched, and saw Old Man Travers crumble to his knees, moaning. Panicked, we rushed to help the old man-Don’t die don’t die don’t die-only to discover, as we neared the gasping, choking man, that his faithful border collie Wilhelm was pawing at the body of Frana Lempke.
Chapter Eight
I sat by myself on a bench. Esther’s father had taken her home. I’d refused to leave, my reporter’s instinct taking over, but, more so, I had to grapple with my own dreadful, numbing discovery. I’d never seen a body before and certainly not a murdered body-nor of a person I knew, maybe not a close friend but a school chum. I preferred to sit quietly, thinking, watching, shaking, removed from the frantic men assembled near the dead body. I’d already told Chief Stone my story, which was no story, really, watching Old Man Travers topple and then…the gruesome sight of sad Frana lying there, her fair hair, as light as moonshine, askew about her head. The eyes wide open, startled, yet glassy. The face ashen and contorted, as though she couldn’t believe her life was ending so horribly.
Caleb Stone and Amos Moss strutted around, out of their element, as Dr. Belford, the district coroner, pulled up in the dark-curtained death wagon. A crew of bustling men-ten or more townsmen-circled the body, trampling the scene. Shouldn’t they keep their distance? In the damp spongy mud perhaps a few foot indentations, left behind, might be evidence. Or maybe a bit of clothing, a hair, or…or what? I tried to think of how police or detectives in Sherlock Holmes or Anna Katherine Green mysteries acted. I’d just finished reading The Filigree Ball, though I disliked mystery romances. All that bother about nothing. Folderol. This murder was the province of those men, with Chief Caleb Stone, the best of the sorry lot, obviously thrown off by the severity of the crime.
Murder had its own rules…or the breaking of rules. I understood that, but I also sensed, emphatically, that this assembly of Appleton gentlemen was delirious with confusion, from the good sheriff himself to Johnny Mason, the local town drunk and all-around handyman, who was positioned over the body.
Dr. Belford mumbled to Caleb Stone as the body was hoisted into the dark mortuary wagon. “Some fool strangled the poor girl.” Said simply, an awful declarative line. Caleb Stone winced.
Head spinning, I stood and walked toward the men. At that moment I heard labored breathing and turned to see Matthias Boon, late on the scene, pipe in his mouth, reporter’s pad in his hand. He stopped short and nearly barreled into me. “Miss Ferber, what are you doing here?”
“I found the body.” I pointed to the disappearing wagon.
Boon rocked on his heels, ended up on tiptoe, hoping to become as tall as I, but he pivoted and teetered, much like a wind-up children’s toy my mother sold in My Store at Christmas.
He sneered through his teeth. “Were you looking for it?”
I frowned and lied. “Frana was a friend of mine, Mr. Boon. My friend Esther is her close friend, too.” Boon stopped looking at me, staring instead at Caleb Stone and Amos Moss, their heads huddled close together, looking like confused referees debating a call at a Lawrence University football game. He headed toward them, pompous as a rooster at daybreak, when I said to his back, “I’ll write up the murder for the Crescent.”
Boon faced me, his face purple with rage. “What did you say?”
“I’m a witness.”
He stepped up to me, narrowing his eyes. “Look, Miss Ferber, this is news.”
“Precisely. I’m a reporter.”
“I’m a reporter,” he mimicked.
“I know the story from the high school through her disappearance, and I’ll put together a piece…”
He interrupted, venomous. “You’ll do nothing of the kind, Miss Ferber. You forget that I’m city editor, and murder is my story.”
“It’s my story. I’m part of it.”
He slid his tongue into the corner of his mouth, making his moustache shift like a caterpillar realigning itself on a tree branch. “All the more reason for me to handle it. Reporters are dispassionate, objective, they…”
“I can tell the facts…”
“Like your Houdini piece, I’m afraid. You do love the flight of fancy, the…”
“The fact of murder, sir, calls for a bitter realism.”
“You’re not Theodore Dreiser, Miss Ferber.”
“And you’re hardly Joseph Pulitzer.”
“No matter. This is a man’s province. Consider yourself one more person to be interviewed for the story. By me. You will not have a byline here.” He turned away to see the mortuary wagon creeping its lugubrious way out of Lovers Lane, and Caleb Stone and Amos Moss and the other officious men already leaving the park. Boon cursed loudly. I’d heard Sam Ryan use every profane word in some sinister devil’s dictionary. Nothing surprised me anymore. Now and then Mac exploded in a volley of scatological fury from the pressroom. After a year on the Crescent, I’d considered using some of the vocabulary myself. So Boon’s blustery “Shit!” simply made me laugh. He went charging after Caleb Stone who tried to avoid him.
That evening’s meal, supervised by Fannie, was roast beef, browned and crusted at the edges, pink in the center, juicy and rich; cloud-light mashed potatoes, a well of hot butter pooled in the center of each heap, with thick, steamy gravy; and winter squash blended with a dash of ground pepper and maple syrup. On the counter was Fannie’s creation: the three-layer chocolate fudge cake, the one the family deemed Alpine Mountain, towering, with peaks of chocolate and vanilla icing.
Ordinarily I would have ravaged such a meal, famished, but tonight, dispirited, I had no appetite for food or conversation. The Ferbers were a chatty family. Not my father, to be sure, who’d retreated into monosyllables, but the three fiercely strong women shared vignettes of shopping, passersby, public figures, politics, sewing, chicanery, life’s obstacles: all of it, none of it. Tonight the family scarcely spoke. Fannie pouted. My terse and shaky summary of the horrendous day had silenced them all. Sitting there with mounds of food on the ample table, with that delectable cake beckoning, we lapsed into mournful silence.