Agnes’s expression grew instantly angry. “She had no trouble! She was like an American girl at once! As soon as she started working with those other girls-they are bad ones! They got Gerda in trouble, all the time, trouble. Staying out late at night so she would be too tired to get awake in the morning for work. Going to dancing, meeting strange men.” Agnes shook her head in despair, and Sarah noticed she was rubbing her side without even realizing it. Sarah glanced at the pendant watch she wore pinned to her shirtwaist, making note of the time.
“Lars tried to tell her,” Agnes explained, desperate to make Sarah understand that they had attempted to stop her. “He told her those men would not marry a girl who goes to dancing all the time and stays out half the night, but she would not listen. She would not listen to anyone. I know something bad will happen. I tell her that.”
“And what did happen?” Sarah asked as gently as she could.
Agnes squeezed her eyes shut, as if she could close out the pain. “She did not come home last night. Lars, he goes out to look for her, but he cannot find her anywhere. No one can find her. I hardly sleep all night for fear. And then that police comes here. A police! To my house!” Her eyes pleaded with Sarah to understand her outrage, and Sarah had no trouble doing so. In Germany, the police would never have occasion to visit the home of a respectable family, and the same was true in America.
Then Agnes’s blotched and swollen features crumbled under the weight of her grief again. “They find her today. In an alley. She was… Her face…” It was all she could do to choke out the words. “The police said someone beat her.”
“She was beaten to death?” Sarah asked when Agnes hesitated, the words as painful to say as they were to hear. Only sixteen years old and beaten to death like an animal.
Agnes nodded stiffly, not trusting herself to speak. She took another sip of the water. “They could not tell… from her face… who she was.”
Sarah couldn’t stop herself from grasping at this last fragment of hope. “Then maybe it wasn’t Gerda at all! How can you be sure if-”
“Her shoes,” Agnes said, her voice barely a rasp.
“Her what?”
“Her shoes. She had new shoes. They were… red.” She said the word as if it were vile. “Red shoes, she repeated, silently asking if Sarah had ever heard of such a thing.
She had not. “How… unusual.”
“She said she bought them herself. She said she saved the money by walking to work instead of taking the trolley. But she could not have saved so much money herself. Someone gave her those shoes. A man.” Agnes’s light blue eyes flared with fury. “We knew it, but we could not stop her. She would not listen, and now the police comes here to tell me my little sister is dead!”
She started to cry again, and once more Sarah saw her rubbing her side. A glance at her watch told her the contractions were only a few minutes apart. Agnes was in advanced labor.
“I think you should lie down for a while,” Sarah said. “You have to think of yourself and the new baby. Come on, I’ll help you.”
Agnes looked around as if she had suddenly remembered something important. “My children? Where are my children?”
“Mrs. Shultz and Mrs. Neugebauer took them so you could get some rest. They’ll be fine.”
“My babies!” Agnes wailed as Sarah helped her to her feet, but the shifting of her weight resulted in a gush of fluid from beneath her skirt that succeeded in distracting her completely. Her water had broken. “Mein Gott!” she cried, and began to mutter hysterically in German as Sarah half led, half carried her into the bedroom.
Two HOURS LATER Sarah was washing her hands at the kitchen sink when one of the neighbor women brought over a plate covered with a napkin.
“Mr. Otto will be hungry when he comes home,” Mrs. Shultz explained, setting it down on the table. She was a short woman of ample girth who took great pride in the neatness of her appearance. “How is Mrs. Otto doing?”
“She’s fine. She had another little girl.”
“Already? I didn’t hear a thing!”
“The labor went quickly.” Sarah didn’t mention that the baby had hardly cried. That worried her. That and the way Agnes had shown hardly any interest in the child. Sarah had made sure the baby nursed before Agnes fell into an exhausted sleep, but she was very much afraid Agnes’s milk wouldn’t come in if she didn’t calm down soon. Unfortunately, Sarah couldn’t think of any way to help her, short of bringing Agnes’s sister back to life.
“Did she tell you what happened?” Mrs. Shultz asked. “To her sister, I mean.”
“A little,” Sarah admitted, wanting to hear the facts of the case from someone less emotional about them. “She said Gerda was killed.”
“Someone beat her like a dog and left her to die in some filthy alley,” Mrs. Shultz informed her righteously, folding her arms under her ample breasts. She was also of German descent, but had been in America long enough to have lost most of her accent.
“Do they know who did it?” Sarah asked, drying her hands on one of Agnes’s immaculate towels.
“No, and they will never find out, either, if you ask me. That girl, she got just what she deserved. What did she expect? Going out every night, flaunting herself at those dance houses. No decent girls go to those places, I can tell you that.”
“I’m sure she was only trying to have a good time,” Sarah said, for some reason feeling obliged to defend the dead girl. Maybe because she was so young. Sarah could remember what it was like to be so young and wish for freedom and happiness.
“A good time!” Mrs. Shultz scoffed. “Girls don’t need to have a good time. They should stay at home and help their mothers until they find a respectable man and get married. It’s not natural for a girl to get work and go out alone with no chaperon to protect her. And this is what comes when she does. She ends up dead in an alley!”
Sarah glanced at the door into Agnes’s bedroom, which she’d left open because of the heat. Fortunately, Agnes still seemed to be sleeping soundly, oblivious to the judgments of her neighbor. Still, she pushed the door closed, not wanting to cause Agnes any more pain than she’d already suffered.
“Young women have to work nowadays,” Sarah reminded her. “Agnes and her husband couldn’t afford to keep Gerda if she didn’t pay her share of the expenses.”
“Ach, she didn’t have to run wild, though, did she? Going out every night, wearing those fancy clothes that she couldn’t afford on her wages, not after she gave most of them to Mr. Otto for her board. And those shoes! I heard the policeman ask Agnes if her sister owned a pair of red shoes. That’s how they knew it was her. Everybody in the neighborhood knew about those red shoes. And everybody knows what kind of a girl wears red shoes!”
“Yes, a girl who is now dead,” Sarah reminded her grimly.
Mrs. Shultz huffed, plainly annoyed that Sarah wouldn’t join her in condemning Gerda. “I must get back. My own husband will be home soon.” Sarah wasn’t sorry to see her go.
Sarah looked in on her patient again and found Agnes awake, her eyes brimming with tears. She’d overheard at least part of the conversation.
“That is what they will say about my Gerda now,” Agnes moaned. “They will say she was a bad girl. They will say she deserved to be murdered, and no one will care that a poor German girl who worked in a shirt factory died in an alley. No one will bother to catch the man who did it, and no one will ever be punished.”
Sarah knew this was true, so she had few words of comfort to offer. “At least Gerda has you to mourn her,” she offered.
“She was not a bad girl,” Agnes insisted, trying to make Sarah understand. “She only wanted to be free. That is what she says, all the time. She wants to be free, with no one telling her what to do. That is why she left Germany. She did not want our father telling her what to do and what man to marry. She wanted to make a new life for herself here in America where she could decide for herself what she did.”