The evening ended when my father spoke for the first time. “She was so young.” A pause. “At least she’s spared the agony of life to come.”
The sentence hung in the air, so wrong. Too bitter, too laced with melancholia. This wasn’t my father who lacked my mother’s dark European weltschmerz, the ominous cloud that hung over all our horizons. I’d never heard my father say anything so cynical, so stark, so plaintive. Or so filled with doom.
Suddenly, helplessly, I started to sob. My mother rose and wrapped her arms around me, soothing, touching. My family thought I was crying for the late Frana Lempke. But I wasn’t. I wept for the death of something beautiful in my father.
The next morning the Crescent office hummed. Boon had already written the front-page account, garnered piecemeal from Caleb Stone and Amos Moss, from the other men at the Lovers Lane death scene, even from hasty interviews with Principal Hippolyte Jones and Vice-Principal Homer Timm. I sat at my desk.
“What do you think?” Sam Ryan passed me the typed sheets.
I was mentioned in the article, though gratuitously. “The body was discovered in Lovers Lane by Linus Travers, signaled by his faithful dog Wilhelm, and then assisted by Crescent reporter Edna Ferber and Esther Leitner, daughter of Rabbi Mendel Leitner of Zion Congregation.”
That was it: no more. But Sam Ryan rustled the returned sheets, poring over Boon’s typescript, doodling with a pencil, fiddling with it. Surprisingly, he asked me to share my own observation. I refocused the story that Boon had covered, starting with the mystery of Frana’s leaving the high school, unnoticed. I rambled on and on, never glancing at Boon who sat there, pipe dangling from his mouth, puffing away, while I told Sam Ryan about the mythic chubby drummer secreting the girl away, taking her to New York. I mentioned Frana’s juvenile obsession with becoming an actress. Sam listened, rapt, as did Miss Ivy. Sam scribbled on another piece of paper, rewriting lines here and there, a paragraph. He quoted a line from me, asked me to repeat it, jotted it down. Finally, he handed the sheets back to Boon, wordless. Boon, his lips drawn into a tight, unforgiving line, contemplated the additions to his piece, unhappy, and simply nodded.
“We need a good headline.” Sam was looking at me.
Boon slurred his words. “Girl Reporter Edna Ferber Discovers Body in Lovers Lane. And underneath that: Girl Reporter Frequent Habitue of Lovers Lane.”
Sam reddened, “That’s not very funny, Matt.”
Miss Ivy tsked tsked.
“I’m not trying to be funny,” Boon smirked.
I raised my voice. “You’re not trying to be a gentleman either.”
Sam walked away, baffled, disappearing into the pressroom. When he returned, he stood there in the doorway, staring from me to Boon.
“Miss Ferber, I’m trying to protect your virtue.” Boon’s voice was cloying, sweet. “Why do you want to be the subject of gossip in town?”
I fired back. “Let me worry about my own name.”
Tension in the city room: voices raised, curt responses, silence heavy and arctic. Should I speak again, I would be shouting. Time stopped around us. Abrupt movement from the back room broke our suspense. I jumped. Mac stood there, a smear of black ink on his cheek, a sheaf of copy in his gigantic hands hanging down to the floor like spilled leaves. He was focused on me, which rattled me. I couldn’t make out the impassive expression. Slowly, he turned his head toward Boon, who hadn’t noticed, intent as he was on smiling stupidly at me. The corners of Mac’s mouth twitched.
The door opened, and Byron Beveridge tripped down the five steps, brimming with news. When I looked toward the printing shop, Mac was gone.
“Got the latest on the murder.” Beveridge’s movements were a little too jaunty, his voice too spirited. “Not from Chief Stone, of course, that piece of incommunicative granite, but from Jarvis Hull, who barbers his hair. The coroner says Frana was killed on Friday. Sometime that afternoon or night. It rained all day Saturday and no one went into Lovers Lane. Another thing. It seems the chief interviewed Christ Lempke again, and the man mentioned scaring away a young man from under Frana’s locked, upstairs bedroom window the other night, a young man identified as Jake Smuddie from Lawrence University.”
“I know him.” I spoke in a small voice.
“You do?” Miss Ivy asked.
“He’s a freshman at the University. He used to be Frana’s boyfriend…”
Sam looked perplexed. “What was he doing playing Romeo under her balcony the other night?”
Byron Beveridge kept trying to interrupt. “If you all would let me finish…” We waited. “The uncle said Frana had seen him sometime last year, but had jilted him, forced by her family who insisted she wasn’t ready for marriage. He didn’t take rejection kindly. He’s been a pest at the farmhouse, and Frana’s father once scared him with a blast from a shotgun. Kept coming back like a bad penny or a hungry dog.”
Boon sneered. “Nice friends you have, Miss Ferber.”
I spoke to Byron. “Did Chief Stone talk to Jake?”
“He did. Out at the university. But Herr Professor interrupted and put an end to the interrogation. Said his son had nothing to do with Frana any more, whose death, he said, was the result of a life lived carelessly. Caleb remarked he was not through questioning the boy, not by a long shot.”
I fought the sudden image of the strapping footballer Jake, those strong hands twisting Frana’s delicate neck. No, no.
No.
When I returned home around three to take my father for a short walk, I discovered Kathe helping Fannie with cleaning the parlor and dining room carpets, the beginning of Fannie’s early summer housekeeping. In a hurry to be done, she was dragging carpets to the back clothesline and attacking them with the ferocity of a Saracen warrior. I sought her out in the yard, but Kathe didn’t want to talk about Frana’s death. She closed her eyes and shook her head vigorously when I expressed sympathy. Frana and Kathe were friends-though rivals. When I asked about Jake Smuddie, Kathe glowered.
“Leave him out of this,” she snarled. “He ain’t part of this. He got nothing to do with it.”
I asked her about the rumor of Frana getting on the train with a drummer. “Who told you that, Kathe?”
She turned away, dropping the carpet beater. I’d learned that Caleb Stone and Amos Moss were interviewing the guests at the Sherman House, especially the traveling salesmen there; and I’d heard through Sam Ryan that, in fact, three men had left on the 3:01 on Friday afternoon, alone. Chief Stone was tracking them down. Could one of those men be the murderer of Frana? One of those bilious, portly, scratching men who tucked themselves with their indigestion and gout and sample cases into the worn seats of the Chicago and Northwestern train. When I mentioned the drummers, Kathe looked ready to say something, but stopped.
“Where is Jake Smuddie?” I asked her.
Infuriated, Kathe swung around, eyes blazing. “You leave him alone.”
I suddenly knew where to find the footballer.
Of course, he wouldn’t be at his home. Doubtless Herr Professor wouldn’t lock up the young man as Frana’s parents unsuccessfully tried to do with her. No, watching Kathe assault the carpets in a fury, I realized Kathe would be joining Jake after she left the Ferber household. I knew that Kathe and Jake often lingered, out of both sets of parents’ forbidding eyes, in the gazebo in City Park, the sheltered retreat set back in a grove of white pines, a cool summer haven and now, in serene June, a hiding place. He’d be there, waiting for Kathe to finish her work.