Kathe gasped. “I can’t live in that place no more. It’s a house of…of dead people.”
“Kathe, your father did not kill Frana. You know that.”
“Do I?” That answer made me furious. I wanted to slap the stupid girl. “Yeah, I know that. But everyone thinks he’s guilty.”
“Not so, Kathe.” I kept the fury out of my voice. “Reasonable people don’t believe it…”
Kathe cut me off. “People look at me on the street. Like…like…” She trailed off. “People don’t talk to me.”
I understood something. “Like Jake Smuddie?”
Kathe pouted. “Yeah.”
“Well, Kathe, you accused Jake Smuddie of murder.”
“I did not,” Kathe was no longer sobbing.
“Sort of. You were angry with him.”
Hands on hips, she swung around. “Well, he left me, you know. Frana always came first. And ever since that day in the park he won’t see me.”
“But he didn’t kill Frana either.”
“Then who did?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Help me, Edna,” Kathe pleaded.
“Me? What can I do?”
Kathe’s tough facade disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “You know people. In town. Talk to them.” Her lips trembled. “I just want things to go back to where they were before. You know. Back then.”
“Kathe, for God’s sake, things can’t go back to where they were. Frana is dead.” I thought of Jake Smuddie, hidden in that park gazebo, searching for an escape from his father’s regimented world. “And you have to accept that Jake is gone from your world.”
Kathe flared up, drawing her cheeks in, a sudden gesture that reminded me of a squirrel gnawing on an acorn out back. “We’ll see.”
My Lord. For a simple girl she could run the gamut of emotions from weepiness to sullenness to anger to pouting…to desperation. And then optimism. Each level, I considered, having the depth of oilcloth.
“I don’t mean to offend you, Kathe. I’m just trying to make you see…”
“Oh, yes, you did,” she snarled. She threw back her head so that her fair hair caught the light “Of course you did.”
“Kathe, I’ve been wondering about something. That afternoon Frana disappeared, you seemed to know so much about it-I mean, the story of the older man, the rumor of Frana on that train. You said she told you what she intended to do, her plan to sneak out of school. You knew about that note. You must have asked her who the older man was, no? She told you everything…” I stopped. Kathe’s face tightened. “What?”
“I did ask her.”
“And?”
“She’d just smile. A secret. She’d write me from New York.”
“So you helped her?”
“Well, you know that. She was afraid Miss Hepplewhyte might spot her near the office and she’d have to explain. So she had me drop the note off when Miss Hepplewhyte stepped out. Frana slipped it to me. I put it on her desk. So what? I ain’t committed a crime, you know.” A hard look, challenging.
“Did you know what it said?”
A pause. “No, it was sealed.”
“But you did it.”
“Of course. It was part of Frana’s plan to leave Appleton with that…that man. She said she’d be on that train.”
“But it didn’t work, Kathe. Frana got murdered, and Jake is gone.”
Kathe trembled. “It ain’t my fault, Edna. You can’t blame me. I was just trying to help a friend. That’s what friends do, you know.”
I deliberated. “Kathe, you were always with her. Did you help her sneak out that afternoon?”
“No.” One word, hard.
“Did you see anything?”
“How could I? I was in the library that period. Last period. I mean, I knew something was gonna happen, but I didn’t know what.” She swallowed a laugh. “The funny thing is, you know…One of the boys-Johnny Marcus, that clown-yelled something to me about Frana the prisoner locked up in the tower like Juliet. Everyone jumped in, buzzing, about her creepy uncle. They looked at me like I knew what was going on. In a loud voice I yelled, ‘Frana ain’t gonna be happy everybody is laughing at her.’ And then everyone laughed and hooted and carried on. Some of the serious students slammed their books shut, mad as hell.”
“And what did you do?”
A pause. “I laughed as loud as the rest.”
“Frana was your friend.” I glared at her. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“I got lots of friends, Edna.” She narrowed her eyes. “Unlike some people I know.”
I ignored that. “Yet you helped her with that note.”
She closed up. “Leave me alone, Edna. I mean, could you just leave me alone?”
After supper my mother decided that the Ferber family should pay a condolence call to Frana Lempke’s family. Frana’s mother Gertrud often did her shopping at My Store. At Christmas she bought religious figurines-the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, camels, sheep, little Bohemian figurines in gaudy blue and red and green. “A small, quiet woman, but a good woman. Not the brash army of women who move like stampeded cattle through my aisles, their ample hips sending goods willy-nilly.”
Fannie had baked one of her succulent apple pies, dipping into the barrel of winter apples in the cellar. Entering the house, I’d smelled the aromatic confection-the pungent sweep of cinnamon and nutmeg, the savory butter crust, the fleshy winter apples diced and soaked in cider. I was happy to see a second pie on the pie rack, cooling-this one for the family.
Dressed in funereal black broadloom and corduroy tie and black silk and black taffeta bonnets, the Ferbers left home, Fannie swinging a wicker basket with white linen cloths covering the pie. We walked to the edge of the farm district beyond the fairgrounds in the Sixth Ward. The Lempke farm sat on a little promontory that edged a bank of black hemlocks, a tiny farmhouse with pine-slatted roof and whitewashed clapboards, a house that seemed haphazard, a room tacked on as needed, so that the whole effect was one of chance, mishap, even chaos. Dilapidated, with a sagging lean-to on one side. Broken stone paths wound through untrimmed bramble bushes, thickets of wild rose, and I could see, beyond the sagging honeysuckle-covered picket fence, the meager fields beyond.
I knew Frana’s father and brothers worked at the Appleton Paper and Pulp Works on the river. The men did the filthiest, smelliest jobs in the acid vat rooms. At home they worked their piddling truck farm of tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, potatoes. A few autumn melons. The mother tended the hencoops and the pigsty out back, while the brothers labored in the barn where the horses, cows, and goats clamored in the dark, tight recesses. An orange-brown mongrel dog barely lifted its head as we stepped onto a creaky porch; nearby a cat squeaked, leapt over the railing, and then climbed into a Rose of Sharon bush.
Gertrud Lempke seemed surprised that anyone would visit but looked grateful, thanking us too much, apologizing for the disheveled parlor with its hand-hewn chairs and rag rugs. She rushed off to brew coffee. There was one photograph on the wall, a sepia-toned portrait of a mustachioed German military officer with much braid and ribbon; and I thought of the Old Testament God, judgmental and contentious. Mrs. Lempke served us a strawberry strudel, but not the apple pie. From my chair in the parlor, I could see that confection sitting on a rough-board kitchen table among the unwashed supper dishes.