Gustave paused, drew a shaky breath. “Then they locked up Frana at home, the crazy uncle in control, and I panicked. One night, before they barred the window, she slipped out of her house. That night I said we couldn’t get married, and if she was having a baby, she should say it was her football boy. She went crazy. She threatened to tell her family about me, tell everyone I was the one.”
He glanced at Mildred, whose eyes were moist and half-closed. “I knew what I had to do, but I didn’t know how to contact her. I’d told Mildred how Frana was driving me crazy, the flirtations, following me around. She said we needed to write her a note, tell her in writing to stop. Threaten her with the police. But I wrote a different letter, sealed it, and Mildred slipped it to her that afternoon. I was in Milwaukee.”
“Gustave.” Mildred’s voice was flat. He wouldn’t look at her.
“I planned the escape. I told Frana to write that letter supposedly from her uncle, slip it onto the secretary’s desk the next morning, destroy my letter, and meet me that afternoon around two, watch for the door to open. We’d run away. Late that morning I stopped at Homer’s office, dropped off a note for Mildred, and managed to drift in with the students until I got down to the auditorium. I had to hide in that hot, brutal room for hours, waiting for two o’clock. I’d closed the panel latch but stuck a piece of wood so I could spring it open. And then Frana was there, all excited. We ran off. She was laughing so hard. ‘You love me, not her,’ she kept saying. She actually thought we were getting on a train to New York.”
He paused and seemed lost in thought. When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. “I got crazy and grabbed her. The next thing I knew she was lying there, dead.” He twisted his body again, a hand brushing the stage door, but Mac tightened his hold on him. Gustave flinched. “You know, I had no choice. She chased after me.”
Something was wrong. I felt it to my marrow. Gustave’s long confession seemed rehearsed, a performance. His last lines, delivered in a whisper, struck me as false. Now he turned to face Mildred. She was staring at him, her expression one of anger mingled with disgust. She stood there, monumental, in that doorway, her fingers gripping the doorjamb. He gave her a thin smile.
“Miss Dunne,” I began, now seeing it. “This is not the whole story. You saw your plans for a longed-for marriage sabotaged by a foolish little girl. Perhaps this weak man mentioned that Frana expected marriage, that she was carrying his child. A scandal, your name bandied about town. Perhaps that witness who saw a young girl running off with a man also saw you and Gustave returning. He said a couple. Perhaps you helped plan…”
Sam Ryan spoke up. “Miss Ferber, perhaps we’d best not go there.”
“But…”
“Miss Dunne is a member of an old Appleton family and…”
Mildred’s face turned scarlet as she sputtered, “How dare you?”
“I dare.”
Sam interrupted me. “Miss Ferber, stop this now.”
Mildred Dunne’s hand tightened on the doorjamb.
“Who had the most to lose?” I asked the men. “Mildred.”
Gustave was looking at me, his gaze unfocused.
I went on. “I keep thinking of the witness who saw that man and woman walking back. At one point the man was leaning against a tree, and the woman pushed him. Perhaps the man was bothered by what…”
Sam, wishing away the unthinkable: “He said the woman was laughing loudly.”
“That doesn’t defeat my argument.”
And he thundered. “Miss Ferber, please. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Quiet in the lobby. The line stunned me, not because it was comeuppance but it made me recall Fannie’s hurling the same remark at me. I’d said those words to Kathe, and Fannie, attacking me, had said, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
In a rush of images, I recalled Kathe’s conversation. I’d asked her why she wasn’t with Frana that afternoon and she’d told me she was in the library. She’d described a boisterous scene, the clown Johnny Marcus joking about Frana’s captivity, the other students chiming in, adding to the joke, even Kathe, disloyal, barking her laughter.
“You left the library that afternoon, Miss Dunne,” I said.
She didn’t answer, but I could see her face twist, her eyes question.
“Miss Ferber, stop.” From Sam.
“Kathe talked of all that noise. You famously demand silence there. You condemn those who whisper. You must not have been there. Where were you?”
She sputtered. “I…”
I raised my voice. “You never leave the library unattended. Riots will follow, laughter, tomfoolery.”
A small voice, laced with fear. “A meeting. Mr. Jones called a meeting…I had to stop in his office…a second.”
“I guess if we question the principal about this meeting you had at two in the afternoon he’d deny it. I hazard a guess…”
Mildred began to speak but her words were garbled, thick. We all waited. Slowly, that one fierce hand still gripping the doorjamb, she looked from me to Sam to Mac. When her eyes caught Gustave’s, they hardened. She looked ready to lash out, but then the hand slipped from the doorjamb, fluttered around her face, and her head started to roll back and forth, a doll’s head with the wiring snapped.
“Stop her,” she mumbled so low I thought I hadn’t heard it. She started to sob in short, hiccoughy gasps, and then closed her eyes. “Gustave…backed off…unable. And she was standing in front of me, taunting. ‘Why are you here? He loves me, not you.’ Laughing, foolish, her hands on her belly, mocking me.” She shot me a sharp look. “I slapped her. The next thing I knew she was lying there at my feet.” Her voice swelled, hysterical. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. Finally I was going to be…happy.” A deep wail escaped from the back of her throat, a trapped animal’s cry. “Wrong, all of it. All…Why? I was promised…Why?”
Suddenly she started to rock against the doorjamb, arms flailing, head bobbing. She still spoke but the sounds she made were dark noise. She hugged her chest, seemed ready to topple. That awful moaning unbroken now, she disappeared back into the office, and I watched her drop into a chair, her arms still wrapped around her chest, her body rocking, rocking, rocking.
When I turned my eyes away from Mildred Dunne, I expected to see the men staring into the room at the distraught woman, the sad woman who had just confessed to the unthinkable. I expected someone to go to her, someone to summon Chief Stone. But no: the men were all staring at me, and the look in their eyes was one of reproach and disapproval. Sam, with a face I’d never seen before, was shaking his head back and forth.
In the other room Mildred Dunne was beating her fists against her chest. Her careful pompadour had unraveled; long strands of hair covered her face like a veil.
At that moment Homer sobbed so loudly we all turned toward him. He covered his face with his hands and slowly sank to the floor, his legs stretched out before him. We watched as he crumpled up, but my eye caught the magnificent poster of Houdini in the display case. Powerful, fierce, resolute, brilliant, Houdini’s muscular physique dominated that space. And under it lay a shattered man, loose-jawed, a man in pieces.
Gustave was mumbling something to Sam Ryan. “No one understands. She was so beautiful. No one understands…beautiful girls have a special power, a…lure, a control over men that cripples, corrupts. Temptation.”
“You killed beauty.” My verdict was plain.
Gustave sneered, his hatred palpable. “There is no way you can ever understand, Miss Ferber. Not a chance in hell.”