“Patrice said that some man took you from them,” her mother’s voice quavered, and a strike of guilt hit her low in the gut. “Fern, tell me what is going on.”
“I can’t,” she said, a strangled sob high in her throat. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Her mother didn’t respond. Fern stood in her drawers and bra, waiting. But then the floor creaked as her mother walked away.
She collapsed into her vanity chair, heart thrashing in her chest. A sister for a sister. Did Cal and Rodney have asister? Had Buchanan done something terrible to her? Patrice’s friend, Sarah, had commented about Buchanan’s reputation for sowing his wild oats. But how could he have done something so awful that the Rosetti brothers now wanted revenge?
Fern looked in the mirror, and for the first time, her scars weren’t the first things she saw. She touched her fingertips to the livid purplewelt on her throat, speckled with red blotches. The memory of Cal’s mouth on her skin, his lips and teeth and tongue as he held her to him, burned. His promise that he wouldn’t hurt her had been careful and tender. But it had been a show. A trick.
All of it, a lie.
12
Patrice wouldn’t speak on the telephone when Fern called the next day. Her aunt said she was out, but she had trilled the end of her sentence, which was something she only did when she was lying. Fern had noticed it some time ago, whenever her compliments to Fern, or to the soup courses no one liked, or to the bland décor in the White Room ended up sounding like questions rather than statements.
If her aunt knew what had happened, then it was safe to say that by the end of the day, all her friends and acquaintances would as well. And then there was Sarah, Gloria and Stephen, who would have surely told whomever they could. As Fern sat in the window of her room, a high-necked dress mostly obscuring the bruise, she calculated how much damage had been done to her reputation.
Fern laughed as she stared out onto the street and at the horizon of the lake in the distance, studded with sailboats. It was ridiculous. As if she’d had an enviablereputation to begin with. She’d gone from being the judge’s scarred, hermit daughter to the judge’s loose, flapper daughter stepping out with a criminal. Perhaps her reputation had actually improved.
Several Roadsters drove past the house, but none of them were the buttery yellow of Cal’s. She’d told him she never wanted to see him again but still wondered if he or Rodney or one of their goons would decide their game wasn’t finished. It had to do with Buchanan, Fern now knew, not just her father.
She kept touching the bruise on her neck. Cal had called it a brand, a love bite, and by morning, the purplish-red welt had been spotted with yellow too. She hated herself a little bit more every time she remembered her legs going limp, her breaths coming fast and shallow. She cringed at the heat that prickled along the insides of her thighs when she remembered his blunt, coarse language. His scent of whiskey and musky amber cologne.
A sister for a sister.
Buchanan refused to talk to her when she’d met him outside his bedroom door just before seven that morning. He’d be late for work, he said, and he couldn’t stomach her before breakfast anyhow.
It seemed to take days for the clock to reach noon. Fern’s body felt strung tight and sore. The more she sat or paced, the more she thought about Cal.
A sister for a sister.
Her knees creaked as she stood and went to her closet, where she’d relegated all her daily newspapers to a deep trunk. It got so cold in the turret during thewinter that frost sometimes fogged the inside of the windows, and she used the old papers in the fireplace to help the kindling along. The trunk was too heavy to pull out of the closet, so she sat on the floor and scooped up a stack. Slapping them down next to her, she started going through each one, scanning headlines for anything to do with the name Rosetti. The papers were filled with stories about gangs, robberies and killings, and she followed a number of sob sister stories about innocent young women turned wild by vice and thrown into prison, with some even landing on death row.
Her fingertips blackened as she paged through a dozen papers, then another dozen, only to be rewarded a few times. Rodney had been questioned about a shooting that left a garage mechanic dead, had been fined for a few zoning violations, and arrested for assaulting a Northwestern student at White City Amusement Park. Twice, “Clean Calvin” appeared in the articles, described as his brother’s muscle and business partner at Harris Looms, a textile manufactory in Near South Side.
The natural light in the closet dimmed. Fern brought another stack out onto her bed and turned on the lamp. A mound of discarded papers on the floor grew as she dropped the ones she’d read and opened the next. Her eyes ached, and her neck was stiff when, at last, a headline caught her attention. The article was a fraction of the size of the others on the same page:
Body Found at Harris Looms
Police have questioned Rodney Rosetti after the body ofhis sister, Eugenia, 25, was discovered in the parking elevator behind Harris Looms, Rosetti’s textile manufactory on LaSalle and West Elm. Calvin Rosetti, brother and business partner, is also cooperating. No foul play is suspected.
Fern read it twice more before lowering the paper to the bed. She’d gone through the past two months of daily newspapers. This one was dated from May 30, 1925.
Their sister had died. Buchanan had to have known her too since he’d mentioned her the night before.
Fern clipped the article and went through another week’s worth of papers, searching for anything more on the story. After reading so many sensationalized headlines about murders and arrests and suicides splashed on the front pages, it seemed peculiar not to find anything more on Eugenia Rosetti’s mysterious death.
As Fern stuffed the newspapers back into the trunk, she thought of Buchanan. She knew that he stepped out with several girls. If he’d been to the Lion’s Den, it stood to reason he had made Eugenia Rosetti’s acquaintance. Perhaps he had wronged her somehow.
But she couldn’t believe that her brother would’ve had anything to do with Eugenia’s death.
Fern rubbed the newspaper clipping between her thumb and forefinger, the smell of news ink lingering.
It was nearly five o’clock. She didn’t know when manufactory businesses generally closed their doors for the day, but she did know she couldn’t while away another dozen or so hours before finding out more about Eugenia. She was certainly never going to the Lion’s Den again, and if Harris Looms was the Rosettis’ official business, it stood to reason that Cal might be there.A public place of business didn’t frighten her. Well, not very much at least.
Fern pinned up her hair and then put on a wide-brimmed cloche. It wouldn’t shield her scars, but it would help her avoid eye contact with other people. A heavier makeup application concealed the fading bruise under her right eye, but it did nothing for the purplish brand on her neck.
The Adair family had a driver, but Fern didn’t want to ask Mr. Carlson for a ride. He’d inform her parents of where she’d gone. He might even refuse her until he had permission from them to drive her to Near South Side. So, she slipped unnoticed through the front door and walked north to the nearest cabstand. Almost immediately, a green and yellow Checker taxicab, with its black-and-white line of checkered paint under the squared windows, pulled up. If the driver saw her scars and reacted, Fern didn’t witness it. She wouldn’t look him in the eye as she slid into the back and gave him the address for Harris Looms.
