The Year We Sailed the Sun Read online

  “I’m sure that many of you had obligations that might have appeared more pressing than this one, under the circumstances, but I find it to be of great comfort to the family, you see, in a case such as this, to assure them that no harm was ever intended. So would each of you now describe to us, if you will, to the best of your recollection, your acquaintance, if any, with Mr. Edward Farrell, and your own best memory of the events prior to and culminating on Wednesday, February the twenty-first, 1912, that might be, in your opinion, in any way associated with his death.”

  We all just sat there for a minute. And then Sister Maclovius gave Sister Bridget a small poke in the shoulder with her cane (she was sitting just behind her), and the half-a-nun jumped and blushed some more and got to her feet.

  “Sister Bridget, isn’t it?” said Dr. Bracy, checking his notes. “Thank you for getting us started. Would you begin?”

  “I’ll do my best, sir. To the best of my knowledge. Though I wasn’t actually at the scene of the incident on that particular day.”

  I gritted my teeth and waited my turn and tried to think of pleasanter things—getting a tooth pulled, maybe—while the telling commenced, sort of, bit by little bit at first, person by person: the snow that wouldn’t stop and Betty sick in bed and trolleys stuck and broke-down cars and the doll that had to be found to make her better—

  “A doll, did you say?” Dr. Bracy asked. He was adding to the notes on his own pad, while the Weasel Man scribbled madly on his.

  “A china doll,” said Sister Bridget.

  The doll that had been a gift from a boy to his bride—

  “Your brother, you say, Sister?”

  “My brother,” said Sister Bridget. “Harry W. Brickey.” She turned and looked the Rat Man right in the eye. “You remember Harry, Mr. Egan. There were those who called him Two-Bits. The boy who was shot, you know, at Saint Patrick’s itself, coming out of his very own wedding? He used to work for you, I believe, when he was alive.”

  And Thomas Egan didn’t move a muscle, but I know he heard her. His smile looked painted on, all of a sudden, and his face—his nose, in particular—turned a deeper shade of purplish red, while Officer Doyle and Father Dunne sat up board-straight in their chairs, leaning in to listen, looking from Sister to me to Egan and back again.

  “I’m sorry, Sister,” said Dr. Bracy. His eyebrows were crinkled so deep now, they were one shaggy black line. “I’m not sure I understand. Is there a connection between the deceased—Mr. Farrell, that is to say—and this doll you mention . . . The doll I see here, I presume?” he added, indicating Harriet, safe in Betty’s arms, the two of ’em smiling, same as ever.

  And then the words started up again, pouring out—a whole avalanche of ’em—from every direction:

  “Are you saying that your brother . . .”

  “My cousin . . .”

  “My nephew . . .”

  “Your son . . .”

  “You mean she pawned . . .”

  “Pawned what?”

  “But why would she . . .”

  “What would he . . .”

  “Surely you’re not accusing me of . . .”

  “Nobody’s accusing . . .”

  “Accusing whom? Of what?”

  “He slipped!”

  “Ah, for pity’s sake . . .”

  “One at a time, please! You heard the man!”

  “Sit down, Mr. Egan. . . .”

  And meanwhile Daniel frowned and smoothed his moustache, and Miss Downey looked madder and madder, and the weasel scribbled away as if his life depended on it, and everyone else seemed more and more confused, and Betty’s pocket began to twitch—just a little at first and then harder and harder—and she grinned and shifted Harriet to her other knee, and took the ribbon from her own braid and began dangling it just above the lump, until a small black paw stuck out of the pocket and began to bat it about. And Sister Bridget saw it just as I did, and we both made stern faces, trying to get Betty’s attention, but Betty wouldn’t look at us anymore, and all this time Henry the Hired Boy was leaning forward, listening, with his brow knitted in knots, trying to understand the words coming out of the coroner’s mouth now:

  “Would you show us the doll, Miss Brickey?”

  Only just at that moment, the small black lump that was Little Bear came leaping out of Betty’s pocket, waving wildly at the ribbon, his fur standing right on end, and landed directly on Harriet herself, right smack in the middle of her pearls, where he proceeded to get hopelessly tangled—

  “Oh dear . . .”

  “Stop him, Betty!”

  “Watch his paw. . . .”

  “Don’t pull!”

  “Sweet Mary and Joseph, he’s about to break . . .”

  “Her lovely . . .”

  POP! went the pearls, scattering in a dozen directions, while the kitten yowled and Betty laughed and tucked him under her chin, and Sister Maclovius shook her cane at the world in general, and Sister Bridget and Miss Downey and I jumped up and started chasing pearls every which way as they rolled all over the place, and even Dr. Bracy reached down for a couple that had worked their way under his shoe.

  “Well now,” he said, holding them up to the light, his eyebrows soaring. “My, my. What have we here?”

  “It’s all right, sir,” I explained, holding out the handful I’d managed to gather so far. “They’re only paste, that’s all.”

  “Paste?” he repeated. “Are you sure of that, Miss Delaney? Then it’s very fine paste, indeed. . . . Where did you say your brother bought this doll, Sister?”

  And now Thomas Egan was sitting up straighter all of a sudden, and the Weasel Man’s eyes were widening.

  “Careful, ladies and gentlemen,” said Dr. Bracy. “Step gently, now, easy there. . . . Paste, my eye. I saw pearls like this on a duchess once, when I sailed on the Mauretania. Look there, Miss Brickey—that’s right—just there, by the piano. . . . Well now. Better find them all, shall we?”

  Chapter 31

  “Look here, girls! We’re famous!” Marcella announced the next evening, grinning from ear to ear, marching into the slant-walled room after supper and waving a newspaper over her head.

  * * *

  * * *

  DEAD MAN’S PEARLY TREASURE RECOVERED

  * * *

  HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT FOR A DECADE

  * * *

  ORPHAN DAUGHTER TO BENEFIT

  * * *

  * * *

  FOURTH WARD businessman Thomas Egan was an astonished witness yesterday to the unexpected unraveling of a ten-year-old mystery regarding the hitherto secret whereabouts of the property—said to be worth thousands—of one of his former employees, Harry W. Brickey, now deceased. Mr. Brickey, who was only seventeen years of age on March 17, 1902, was killed by an unidentified gunman as he left his own wedding that day, on the front steps of Saint Patrick’s Church, which is located at the corner of Sixth and Biddle Streets, on the near North Side. The groom’s sister, now Sister Bridget Brickey, a novice at the House of Mercy, in the twenty-one hundred block of Morgan Street, explained today to St. Louis County Coroner Dr. Rolla Bracy (during a related inquest) that her brother had had uncommonly good luck at the race track, shortly before his nuptials, and must have been planning to surprise his bride, Miss Maggie Meehan (also now deceased, of natural causes), with the gift of a pearl necklace. “But he never let on to any of us,” said Sister Bridget. “We all thought he was giving her a china doll; that was what he had told the family. I helped him wrap it myself, right before the ceremony. It never crossed my mind that the pearls around the doll’s neck might be real!”

  Mr. Egan was also present yesterday at the aforementioned House of Mercy, at the request of Dr. Bracy, to give information regarding the accidental drowning death on February 21st of another Egan associate, Edward “Eddie” O’Farrell, who along with his employer was attempting to rescue Miss Julia C. Delaney, age eleven, during the recent blizzard. Miss Delaney, an orphan, resides at the House o
f Mercy along with Mary Elizabeth Brickey, age nine, who is the daughter and only living heir of the murdered man and his bride. According to witnesses, Miss Delaney, who was in possession of the younger girl’s doll at the time, had run away from the orphanage and was crossing the frozen Mississippi on foot when the ice gave way, and Mr. Farrell, in his effort to reach her (several feet ahead of Mr. Egan), was swept beneath it, into the river. No trace of him has yet been found. It was in the course of the various witnesses’ accounts of the tragic accident that the pearls—a single strand wrapped double, still adorning the china doll’s neck—came to the attention of Dr. Bracy himself, who immediately recognized their worth, to the amazement of all present.

  When asked what she planned to do with her unexpected inheritance, Miss Brickey declined to comment, but smiled enigmatically. Sister Bridget, however, called the discovery “nothing short of a miracle,” and said that great care would be taken to safeguard the child’s good fortune. Pressed as to the safety of the neighborhood and how she would respond if a thief were to attempt to abscond with the long-lost treasure, Sister’s answer was, “I’d like to see him try.”

  Thomas Egan, meanwhile, though uncharacteristically sober in his demeanor at the conclusion of the inquest, no doubt due to the ongoing shock of his esteemed cohort’s heroic demise, did rouse himself to acknowledge the many personal tributes he himself has received, in the past weeks, in recognition of his own best efforts on the ice, and has pledged his continuing assistance to all concerned, in every way possible.

  “I’ll bet he has!” said Marcella, laughing till the tears ran down her cheeks, once she’d finished reading aloud to us. And the other girls laughed along with her, whether they really understood or not.

  So I tried to smile too.

  “But it’s not enough,” I muttered, before we blew out the light. “It ain’t the whole story. He ought to be under the ice with Eddie.”

  “Ah, sure,” said Marcella. “Of course he should. But it’s better than nothing—no, listen to me, Your Majesty: He lost, don’t you see? And he knows he lost; that’s the best part. He’ll go to his grave remembering that a two-bit nobody who used to push a broom for him had the last laugh, in the end—got away with a piece of his precious pie that was never really his in the first place. And there’s not a bloomin’ thing he can do about it! That’s worse than drowning for a feller like that. And the whole world knows it, too—the whole Patch, anyhow. They’ll be hootin’ behind his back till the day he dies.”

  “Do you promise?” I asked.

  “Promise,” said Marcella. “I know I will, anyhow.” She wiped her eyes. “Oh, my, ain’t it rich?”

  Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even after the others were all snoring in their beds beside me, the pictures kept coming back—Eddie on the ice again, reaching and reaching—and voices, too, a thousand voices, deep into the night. When I’d halfway drift off, they’d start their eternal jabbering:

  Oh! Fair Thomas Egan, too bad you’re going to hang,

  Though no one but your mother dear . . .

  Your father was there, you know. Marched ’em in at the start, playing “Haste to the Wedding,” and out at the end . . .

  . . . out at the end . . .

  . . . things I never told you. . . .

  . . . Hidden in Plain . . .

  “What things?” I mumbled, sitting up straight. And no sooner had I said it than I saw it. I knew the answer. There it was, just as clear as day. I must have known it all along, without knowing I knew; I’d never wanted to know it, but now—ah, sure, ah, sure—I was wide-awake and on the linoleum and running again, just like before, but with Mary’s letter tight in my fist this time; I was out of the slant-walled room and down the stairs and all the way to the cellar, to the laundry girls’ alcove, where I saw a low light burning and found Sister Bridget sitting up in her own bed, reading a fat brown book—The Comedies of Mr. William Shakespeare, it said on the cover, though she wasn’t laughing; she was half-asleep, and I almost didn’t recognize her, without her veil. Her hair was cropped short all over her head—as red as Bill’s, and twice as curly.

  “Papa saw, didn’t he, Sister?”

  I tried to say it as soft as I could, but she all but jumped out of her skin anyhow.

  “Ah, great gobs, Julia! What now? Saw what?”

  “My papa—he must have seen. When the Rats killed your brother—at the wedding, when he marched ’em out—you said they were friends—”

  “Shh, child, hush—”

  “And then he sang the song at the Fair—the hanging song—and they thought he would tell, he wanted to tell, so they killed him, too, didn’t they? That night at the bridge—”

  “Slow down, slow down, Julia—”

  “And Bill knew and Mary knew—the whole world knew—but they never said a word. Nobody ever tells me anything. Mary says I was too young but I’m old enough now, ain’t I, Sister? I’m a million years old; somebody ought to tell me something. . . .”

  “Shh, shh, well of course they should, of course they should, but we can’t talk here, Julia; we’ll wake the girls. Just a minute now, come with me. . . .”

  And then she was up and pulling a nun wrapper around her shoulders and taking me back up the stairs to the kitchen, where she sat me down at Sister Genevieve’s worktable and bustled about, lighting the stove and getting out the tea things, and putting the kettle on. And once she had it all ready to go, just waiting for the water to boil, she sat down with me and took a deep breath.

  “All right, then,” she said, letting it out slowly. “Ask away.”

  So I did. But not so fast, this time . . .

  “Did he see?” I said again. “My father—that day at the church—”

  “He might have,” said Sister. “I was too far back to tell; I wasn’t out the door yet. But he might have. He might have. I always wondered if he did. Though he wouldn’t have been the only one, in any case. There were plenty of others around that morning. Passersby on the sidewalk, traffic in the street—”

  “And no one ever told? Not any of ’em?”

  Sister shook her head. “You know the Patch. It would have been too dangerous. Not just for the talkers, but their families—wives and children—no one could risk it. Oh, there were whispers, of course, like there always are. It wasn’t even much of a mystery: Egan gave the order; Eddie fired the shots. But no one ever said it out loud.”

  “Till my papa sang the song . . .”

  “Till your papa sang the song.”

  I sat there for a minute, cold as ice.

  Sister Bridget hunted up a piece of bread and buttered it.

  “Well, I’ll say it,” I said. “I’ll tell the police. I ain’t afraid of Thomas Egan!”

  “Well of course you’re not. Of course not.” Sister smiled at the butter knife. “I wish you were on the force. But it’s not your job, Julia. The police know as much as you and I do; they hear the whispers just like the rest of us.”

  “Then why don’t they do anything about it? Why’s a Rat like that still walking around smiling at people, acting like he’s a hero?”

  “Because there’s no proof—no evidence, no witnesses, remember? Not a soul left alive who’ll tell it now. Not even Eddie Farrell. It’s just hearsay, after all this time; that’s what the judge would call it. Nothing that would stand up in a court of law.”

  “But it ain’t fair,” I muttered. “It ain’t fair, Sister!”

  A muscle tightened in the half-a-nun’s jaw. “You’re right. It ain’t fair. It’s an outrage, that’s what it is. An abomination. This world’s not a fair place, Julia.” She put down the knife and squeezed my fist, hard. “But you never know, do you? Egan’s luck might be running out. Did you see his face when the pearls broke? And my Uncle Tim—Officer Doyle—he’s been after him for years. He’ll get him one day, if he can be got. If there’s a man on earth can do it.”

  “And if there’s not . . .?”

  “If there’s not�
��”

  The teakettle started whistling.

  Sister stood up to get it. She straightened her back. I swear, she was ten feet tall now. “Then we’ll have to leave Thomas Egan to the real Judge. The true Judge. Nobody ever gets past him.”

  April

  Chapter 32

  It was Wednesday again. The last before Easter: Wednesday in Holy Week and all hell breaking loose at the House of Mercy, where Sister Maclovius had just declared all-out war on winter—or the soggy mess that was left of it—the minute she got her voice back.

  “Spring-Cleaning Day!” she announced at breakfast with the smile we all dreaded—the one that always made Hannah tremble, and Winnie burst into tears. The whole world needed cleaning up, and warming up, too.

  Except for that little fake spring right around Saint Pat’s Day, the mercury in the back-porch thermometer had scarcely climbed above forty the entire month of March. And it had snowed three times just last week—the slushy, mushy, gray-in-an-eyeblink kind of snow that melted almost faster’n it fell and then went pouring into the rivers with the ice-melt and had ’em all on the rise. All the rivers had broke loose now. It wasn’t just our old man Mississippi that was waking up for real, but all the rivers that emptied into it, above and below us, including the Missouri up by Boonville, the paper said—would Bill be sloshing around in the wet? I wondered; I hadn’t heard a word from Jimmy—and all along the Ohio, too, and every little podunk stream that fed any of ’em. The whole country was full to overflowing this year—the bottom half of it, anyway—waterlogged from the waist down. The Post-Dispatch was full of floods and flooding. We weren’t at the danger mark yet in St. Louis, it said, but the people down in Cairo were working night and day, hauling sandbags to their levee, and I was sick to death of all of it. If I never heard another word about another narrow escape from the icy waters, it would be too soon.