Shadows in the White City Page 16

  “Then you know where to find this so-called Bloody Mary, but you’re not going to look into this allegation that she is somehow connected to the Vanishings?” asked Jane.

  “Why not at least pick her up for questioning!” said an excited Gabby.

  Alastair took Jane into the hallway and whispered, “Look, the old bat is out of her head. A complete loon. From day to day, she doesn’t even know who she is, but I’ve known her for years. Can find her almost any night in the drunk tank.”

  “Perhaps she has graduated to more serious crime than public intoxication.”

  “No…no…you amateur detectives…”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, I think this is a dead end.”

  “No! Don’t shut down on this just yet. Hear the girl out.”

  “Bloody Mary’s a vagrant, a regular at the station house.”

  “And like the Phantom has remained invisible until you opened your eyes to him and proved him a fiend.”

  “Bloody Mary is hardly invisible. She’s a public nuisance and a beggar.”

  “But she sounds like she has the habits of a weasel.”

  “More like a rat and smells it. Lice ridden…nobody wants to go near her.”

  “Just hear the girl out, Alastair.”

  “OK…OK…”

  They returned to join Gabby and Audra. Gabby was in midsentence, “And besides, I did some research and Zoroaster is not all bad; in fact, he’s a she and she’s a he, Mother. Ironic, huh?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” asked Jane, blinking.

  “Zoroaster is both good and evil. I showed Audra where it says so in my book on mythology, and she’s accepting us as all from the good Zoroaster.”

  “Sounds promising,” replied Alastair. “Now listen, little girl,” he said, “I have arrested this Bloody Mary on occasion, so don’t go suspecting she’s anything but human, and if she is in any way involved in carving up little kids, she will pay dearly once I have her in my jail again.” He displayed his enormous handcuffs. “So stop your worrying. Just tell me what you’ve seen.”

  She looked, big-eyed, all about the room, from face to face, still reluctant to speak. Gabby tried to dispel the tension with a joke. “If you at any time feel it necessary, you can always shoot Inspector Ransom.”

  Jane and Ransom both glared at Gabrielle, who instantly gasped, realizing what she’d said was not at all funny as she’d intended. “I didn’t really mean…I mean…no Audra, there’s no shooting the inspector.”

  Ransom pulled forth a photo of Anne Chapman in her yellow print dress. “Look, child, did you ever see Anne Chapman—this girl”—he put the photo in her hand—“with Bloody Mary?”

  “Ahhh…no, I didn’t but—”

  Already skeptical of learning anything from the child, Alastair placed another photo and another and another before her. All the remaining victims, some still missing. “Have you ever seen Bloody Mary kicking about with any of these children?”

  “They aren’t street kids like me. They all had homes.”

  “I am aware of that, but did you or didn’t you see them with Bloody Mary?”

  Like a little one-man judge and jury, Audra looked from the photos and up at Alastair, sizing him up, reevaluating him. “I think I ought to take you to my king,” she blurted out.

  “Your king?”

  “Yes, Robin. He’ll tell you; they’ll all tell you who the killer is, that it’s Bloody Mary and no one else.”

  “The same old beggar lady who sells stolen stuff from windowsills and clotheslines?” asked Ransom.

  “That’s her, all right. But her real job is butchering children like me.”

  “And you say you can back this up with others like this Robin fellow’s testimony?”

  “The whole lot of us know it’s her. She’s been after us for months.”

  “Well, then, Audra, dear,” came Jane’s soothing voice, “why don’t you take us to your king and his court?”

  “They’ll beat me if they don’t go for it, they will…but I told King Robin that we gotta trust somebody, and when Miss Jane was so kind to me…I began to tell. Trouble is…if you tell everything, the demons—the bad Zoroaster’s people—they’ll kill you for it.”

  “She told me the demons don’t want adults to know they’re here,” Gabby added.

  Audra clutched her doll tighter. “Zoroasters’re afraid of adults.”

  “Why?” asked Jane.

  “Be-because until adults see them, they stay, like, invisible.”

  Alastair sat on the edge of his chair at this last remark, so prophetic. It was almost word for word what he had said of Leather Apron and the Phantom. So long as they went unseen even in plain sight, they remained powerful and capable of what seemed damn near supernatural.

  “Tomorrow, will you take me to this king of yours, Audra?” said Alastair.

  Secretly, Alastair believed it a wild goose chase, and he expected this would be a monumental waste of time, but it would score points with Jane and with Gabby, he supposed. At the very least, he hoped to make more recruits of the homeless children, convert them into that many more eyes and ears for the police. But they’d have to give him a great deal more than the tattered old, addle-brained, lice-infested Bloody Mary to interest him.

  CHAPTER 11

  The following day

  Below the train viaduct at Ravenswood and Ogden, the Southside of Chicago, as far from the gaiety of the White City as one could be, a ragtag king and court looked Gabby, Jane, and Alastair up and down, some making jokes, some making threats, one lifting Gabby’s skirt with a crooked cane his scepter—and all of them painted with the dirt of Chicago back alleys. The tall, gaunt one with the wooden-crutch scepter was Robin the King, their avowed and respected leader. King Robin of Nightmare Alley, it would seem.

  Robin glared at Audra while he spoke to the strangers in their midst, coolly saying, “What business ’ave you here, you pretty people?” He let Gabby’s skirt fall into place, sat on a rickety orange crate, and raised his scepter overhead.

  One shorter and dirtier boy, calling himself Noel, seemed fearless. “See that green sign over there?”

  “Yes,” replied Jane, following the pointed finger. “It’s a little hard to miss.”

  “Angels love the color green, ’specially dark-as-grass green.”

  “And why do you suppose?” she asked Noel.

  “It’s the best color.”

  “Shut up, all of you!” ordered Robin, oldest in the family.

  “No, blue is,” countered a smaller girl. “Blue’s the color of the Lady of the Lake.”

  Another said, “After night falls on the city is when the angels come out and argue the prettiest color.”

  “A-a-angels come out?” asked Gabby.

  “En masse.”

  “To—to make war on the red armies, not to fuss over colors,” said another girl.

  “Red armies?” Alastair’s tone reeked of skepticism.

  “Armies of the devil Zoroaster,” explained Noel.

  King Robin tempered the others like a storyteller whose audience has gotten away from him. “But sometimes the angels just come out to play.”

  A half-Spanish boy named Hector parted the younger children. “Angels look down from the tallest building in the city,” he began, adding, “always with green, pink, or a golden glow, and sometimes all three colors at the same time.”

  “They eat light so they can fly,” eight-year-old Marty piped in.

  “The angels use the Ward’s building’s lookout tower for their headquarters?” Ransom frowned at the notion.

  Noel said it was so, as if discussing the price of eggs or the weather.

  “You see, there’s a whole great lotta killing going on in Chicago…just like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, you name it,” added Hector. “Lotta kids getting killed all over.”

  Eleven-year-old Audra solemnly added, “The angels study their battle maps all day long in
the tower before they dare go out and kill demons. Hector ought’ve told you that first.”

  “I see.” Alastair had never heard of this strange mythology; apparently every street kid in his town knew it—chapter and verse.

  Robin now said, “You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories. Else, you don’t stand a chance.”

  Hector added, “Yeah, then’s when you disappear.”

  “Gotta be on your toes at all times,” Noel said in a raspy whisper.

  “You mean…or else you disappear like these kids the cops are finding dead?” Alastair asked.

  “Sure…how else do you explain such things?” asked Robin.

  A kid named Mickey added, “It’s the Judge of Hell and his minions against the angels. Simple as that.”

  An older boy who had remained silent, sullen, wary suddenly piped up with, “Christmas night the year eighteen ninety-one, God ran away from Heaven.”

  “God ran away?” Gabby asked, realizing the significance of this to the runaways. Their god was a runaway, too.

  “Yeah, to escape a huge demon attack,” replied Noel. “Tell ’em Hector, Peter. Pete knows the whole story. He taught all’n us.”

  Peter was the sullen one whose eyes had never left the adult strangers. He quietly muttered, “It’s a war…and the prize is Heaven.”

  “A celestial war,” gasped Jane.

  Peter continued. “Yeah, and it’s filled me with caution…caution of everyone—including you people.”

  An excited Audra blurted out, “The demons smashed God’s palace of beautiful blue-moon marble to dust and ashes.”

  “Audra! You’re gonna shut up now!” ordered Robin.

  “What’re you afraid of, Robin?” asked Jane. “We’re here to help you, not harm you.”

  He snorted in response. “Your damned newspapers, the Herald, the Tribune, they don’t print a word of what really matters.”

  “You’re right about that,” said Alastair, thinking how little play the problem of the homeless got in the press.

  “Th-they all keep it secret,” added Noel. “Tell ’em, Robin. Tell ’em!”

  “Shut up, Noel!” ordered Peter, who seemed Robin’s second-in-command.

  Robin stepped ever closer to Gabby, ending so close in fact that she became uncomfortable from his odors and body heat. “No one knows why God’s left us and his own angels to defend this world, but it’s what we gotta do.”

  The others cheered this.

  Jane Francis, as a woman, a mother, and a doctor felt stunned at these revelations, that children so young were coping not only with the streets but with a war between Heaven and Hell, and they found themselves square on the battlefield—their little souls being tugged in both directions.

  Alastair’s thoughts proved similar. These homeless kids not only faced the horrors of the real world, but for some bizarre reason, they had created a mythological world of gods and demons at war over their heads, angels perched atop the Montgomery Ward Tower, riding the Ferris wheel at the fair, lighting on telegraph wires, riding atop trolleys. All this while demons emerged out of holes, sewers, broken windows, and mirrors.

  “What do you make of all this?” Alastair whispered in Jane’s ear.

  She whispered back, “I suspect it is how they cope.”

  “With reality, you mean?”

  “It allows them to understand the daily terror. If one of them disappears, he’s accepted comfort and aid from the enemy. In this case, Satan.”

  Overhearing, Robin declared, “Temptations are everywhere, and so are the portals to Hell.” Using his scepter, he pointed to an abandoned train car, its doors standing open like a giant maw. “The devils sometime offer us safety, a warm place to sleep, a scrap of food, and sometimes the angels don’t have nothing to counter it with.”

  “We’re not with Zoroaster,” said Jane, “I assure you.”

  “Demons oft take a pleasant form.” Robin glared at Jane.

  “And they’ve taken control of the sewers and Ghost Town,” blurted Noel.

  “Ghost Town?” asked Gabby, who’d been absorbed, intent on every word.

  “Street lingo for County Cemetery,” explained Ransom.

  Something in his tone caused a scowl in Robin. The others instantly felt his displeasure, and when he turned his back on Ransom, Jane, and Gabby, stepping off, scepter in hand, the others sheepishly followed after King Robin.

  “Demons feed on darkness and ignorance,” said Jane like an epitaph.

  Gabby added, “Jealousy, conceit, hatred fear, prejudice, bigotry.”

  “Or any negative anything…” added Alastair as all three watched the children go.

  “Like when you can’t stand yourself,” Jane said.

  He looked at her realizing how much alike the two of them really were. “Or your own kind…”

  “But you can’t get away from who you are, now can you?” she asked.

  Gabby suddenly rushed a few steps toward the retreating children. “Wait! You can change things!” This while the children continued disappearing before their eyes. She took a few more tentative steps toward them, seeing Audra lingering behind. “You can build on things, travel, learn, get an education!”

  No one stopped to listen, and Gabby watched as Audra dropped the doll she’d given her. Audra didn’t look back. The doll might be a trap, so she instead raced to catch up to King Robin and the tribe.

  Jane went to Gabby, crouched and lifted the soiled doll, and handed it to her daughter. “Audra may be back for this some day.”

  “You think so, Mother?”

  “There’s always that hope.”

  Mother and daughter hugged, and Alastair saw Audra, just before the tribe disappeared around a final corner, look back to see the embrace.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Alastair, Jane, and Gabby picked their way over broken glass, discarded paint buckets, soiled bedding, cardboard boxes, boards, and brick to finally set foot on a clean street and out from under the viaduct.

  Alastair grumbled, “They didn’t say a bloody word about Bloody Mary.”

  “They’re afraid to say her name out loud,” replied Gabby.

  “Then what makes Audra so brave?”

  “Her father was a soldier in the war.”

  “An angel in the war between good and evil, you mean?” asked Ransom, trying to quash a grimace.

  “No, the War Between the States.”

  Audra surprised them all when she showed up the following day and knocked at Jane’s and Gabby’s door. Ransom was having breakfast with Jane when the girl was ushered in by a smiling, elated Gabby. “I knew she’d come back to us!”

  “We can meet with Danielle’s coven,” Audra informed them.

  “Really?” asked Alastair.

  “Danielle’s coven?” Jane inquired.

  “They stay close to the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter. Can we have another carriage ride there?”

  “First a bite to eat,” suggested Gabby, seating Audra before a plate of warm pastries.”

  While Audra devoured her roll and juice, Gabby rushed out and returned with her doll. Audra and Gabby hugged at the three-way reunion, the doll squished between the young people. It made Jane laugh and Alastair smiled his approval.

  They were soon on their way to meet Danielle’s coven.

  There came a point where the cab could go no farther, and they must walk through a gangway, so-called for the habit of gangs slipping from sight, usually after a robbery.

  Audra led the way. Ransom gestured to the cabbie to hold for their return. To assure the man’s allegiance, Ransom waved an extra large bill in the air.

  Jane whispered, “Do you believe this? How these children live under such pressures. Amazingly, profoundly sad.”

  “Perhaps so, but how is it relevant to my case?”

  “Our case,” she corrected him.

  A part of him wanted to burst her idyllic bubble about Dr. Fenger, tell her of the deal he and Kohler
had cut with Senator Chapman, but he held off. Again he asked, “What’s it to do with our case, then?”

  “I’m not sure, but I have a feeling it is…somehow relevant.”

  They soon found Danielle’s camp—its epicenter an abandoned old livery stable near a burned-down warehouse shell. A nearby drainpipe large enough to drive a horse dray through—part of a reservoir system—ran alongside this area.

  Danielle looked like a youthful man instead of a woman, a sad weariness to her features, but she could not be much older than King Robin. She too held a large stick, cleaned of its bark and varnished, as a scepter, and she too barked at people in the language of muleskinners.

  Once she decided that Alastair, Jane, and Gabby could be trusted, because she trusted Audra, she opened up. Her first words were, “I gotta disagree with King Robin and his followers. This war shouldn’t be treated like some kinda secret holy society that keeps others out. I want converts!”

  Alastair liked this girl’s attitude. She meant to spread the word of the war between Heaven and Hell going on now in the Prairie City and across America.

  As a result, Danielle quickly warmed to her topic.

  “One demon working for Satan is the worst, and children know her by her English name here, but she also has a Spanish name”

  “Bloody Mary,” said Audra.

  Danielle whispered, “La Llorona.”

  “The Crying Woman,” said Alastair, knowing a little Spanish.

  This impressed the homeless children gathered about Danielle, several of whom were Spanish. Alastair raised his shoulders as if to say “what,” when Jane and Gabby stared at him, sharing a look of surprise.

  “The woman weeps blood,” one child added.

  “Blood,” echoed another, “and sometimes black oil tears.”

  “From ghoulish empty sockets.”

  “And she feeds on a child’s terror,” added Danielle. “It’s why you can’t be scared, and why you can’t be a child.”

  Why you can’t be a child, the adults rolled over the comment in their minds, thinking how sad the words, when a sudden chorus of the homeless children began talking over one another.

  Danielle silenced them all with her upraised scepter, a thin stick. “When a child is killed accidentally or murdered outright, La Llorona sings out in delight and joy.”