Into the Whirlwind (25 page)

Mr. Durant shot to his feet. “Your behavior is disgraceful! You have everything a little girl could ever wish for, and all you do is spit on it. Now, stand up and apologize to Miss Knox.”

Sophie wore the mutinous expression Mollie had seen hundreds of times. The girl kicked the sugar bowl to the side, spraying a fan of white sugar into the sodden rug before standing up. “I’m sorry, Miss Knox,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “I’m sick of dolls, and I’m sick of tea parties.
I want to do something hard
.”

Hard? Mollie remembered Sophie stooping over to haul bricks from the rubble. The girl had done so only because she would get nothing to eat otherwise, but once Sophie got moving, she rarely complained. In fact, the only time Sophie had gotten angry was one evening when she’d filled a whole wheelbarrow with salvaged bricks and Ulysses had refused to come look when Sophie ordered him to. Mollie had taken pity on the girl and gone outside to see the wheelbarrow, filled to the rim with useable bricks stacked in perfect order. “Well done, Sophie!” Mollie had said, genuinely impressed. Sophie had beamed as though she had just put the final touches on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Mollie looked at the girl, who was staring at the carpet beneath her feet. A glance around the room showed Mollie that the girl had been showered with toys and dolls and new clothes. All splendid, but Mollie would have been bored too. When she was Sophie’s age, her father had entrusted her with enameling the watch dials. It was gritty, exacting work. It took hours of baking before the beauty of the dials would finally emerge, but the sense of satisfaction Mollie earned from accomplishing
something hard was more fulfilling than playing with any gorgeously embellished doll.

“Sophie, how would you like to come and help at the new factory?” she asked, stunning even herself. “There is plenty of hard work to be done preparing the foundation. Hauling gravel. Leveling the ground.” She glanced up at Mr. Durant. Mollie realized she had overstepped her boundaries, but he did not appear taken aback. Rather, he was intrigued. Sophie simply looked stunned.

“You would need your father’s permission, of course,” Mollie said. “This is a real construction site, and there is no room for temper tantrums or little girls who do not follow instructions. Perhaps we can find something for you to do for a few hours to see if it suits you.”

After her initial surprise, Sophie resumed her nonchalant air. “I don’t care,” she said.

But Mr. Durant did. Pulling Mollie aside, he shared his years of frustration in trying to mold Sophie into a decent child. Sophie’s mother had nearly died during childbirth and was unable to care for the infant in the following months. When Charlotte Durant was finally able to rise from her sickbed, she’d showered the baby with every conceivable luxury, bringing musicians to play for the infant and seamstresses from Ireland to stitch delicate garments. And when Sophie grew older and expressed dissatisfaction, her parents funneled more and more her way to appease the child’s voracious need for attention. She was a smart girl and knew exactly how to play her parents off each other in order to win ever more extravagant shows of affection.

“But ever since she got back from the church,” Mr. Durant said, “she can’t stop talking about it. She rambled on about the blind man that she read to. The bricks she salvaged. She claimed to have hated every minute of it, and who wouldn’t have? I
saw the blisters on her hands and the scrapes on her arms, but why can’t she stop talking about it? I think . . .” He paused as he rubbed his chin, his face drawn in thought. “I think the girl had a sense of purpose at that church. Maybe that was what appealed to her.”

Mollie supposed it was possible. How long could a child gorge on an endless stream of amusement without becoming bored? Hard work was not easy to become accustomed to, but it provided a sense of satisfaction beyond compare. Silas Knox had taught her that. It was why he had been so determined to find work for the wounded veterans. Without a sense of purpose, the spirit withered and died. Even humble work like cleaning the workshop floor or hauling bricks provided the seeds of dignity the human spirit craved.

She bit her lip. “I am serious about no temper tantrums. The men on the worksite are all volunteers, and I can’t have Sophie making their jobs any more difficult than they already are.”

Mr. Durant’s answer was swift. “If she misbehaves, send her back. But I think this may be what she needs. Sophie is an intelligent girl, but we have never asked much of her.”

“Will your wife object?”

“Almost certainly. Charlotte will think I am trying to punish the girl, but I think perhaps this will be the greatest gift Sophie has ever been given.”

“Mollie, stop it.”

Someone shook her shoulder, but she threw the hand off. She needed to get Frank out of the building before the roof collapsed and burned them both alive. She pressed forward harder.

“Mollie,
stop it
, love.”

She jerked awake. Alice was beside her, dressed in her
nightclothes and bracing her arms on the straw mattress of the top bunk bed. Something still felt terribly wrong as Mollie clutched the blankets to her chest and glanced around the barracks. She was safe. It was dark and other women were snoring, the smell of new pine boards thick in the air. It was only a nightmare. Mollie took a deep breath, hoping she hadn’t made too much of a ruckus. Alice slept on the bunk directly below Mollie, so she had probably felt Mollie tossing about.

“Another nightmare?” Alice asked.

Mollie didn’t even need to answer. Ever since the fire, they both had suffered from horrible dreams, and they weren’t the only ones. It was rare for a night to go by when Mollie didn’t hear at least one of the sixty women or girls who lived in this barracks whimpering at night. “It was something about Frank,” Mollie said. “He was trapped in a building, but I couldn’t get to him. Or maybe it was the new factory, but that doesn’t make any sense.” Mollie twisted the corner of the scratchy wool blanket between her fingers. “Do you ever dream about Frank? Or only about the fire?”

Alice shook her head. “I can never remember after I wake up. I just remember the panic, so bad I can hardly breathe.”

“Frank is always in mine,” Mollie said. “He is always just out of reach. He is trying to shout something to me, but I can’t hear because of the roar of the fire.” She rolled over onto her back, staring at the bare plank ceiling a few feet above her nose. “I feel so guilty for what happened. If I hadn’t been so full of pride, we would have been living in Zack’s house on that night and Frank would still be alive.”

Alice’s answer was swift. “Don’t you go talking like that,” she said in a fierce whisper. “The only people responsible for what happened to Frank are those thugs. If not for you, Frank would have died on the night of the fire.”

Mollie rolled back onto her side so she could look at Alice. “If we find out who killed him, I wonder if it will make these awful dreams go away.”

“All I know is those thugs had better pray to be caught by the Chicago Police Department,” Alice said darkly. “If anyone from the 57th gets ahold of them, there won’t be enough left to identify for burial.”

Alice was probably right, but the police had lost interest in the case. With so much to be done keeping order in the city and no quick leads rising to the surface, they’d moved back to more pressing issues. Frank’s case was filed away and would grow old unless Mollie or someone from the 57th kept it alive. With no blood family, the mark Frank Spencer had left on this world was already growing dim. He had once been a powerful lawyer, helping shape the legal landscape that transformed Chicago into a city bursting with industry, lumber mills, stockyards, and shipping. All that had come to a crashing end after the war. Unable to practice law in a regular sense, he withdrew behind the sheltered walls of the 57th Illinois Watch Company, and there he had been the linchpin around which they all relied. For wisdom, for a steady head. Sometimes simply for spinning tales in the long afternoon while they worked.

Now, in the rush to rebuild, her waking hours were filled with so many concerns, memories of Frank were being crowded out. Only guilt remained.

She had to find out who’d killed Frank. She pushed up on her elbow to meet Alice’s eyes. “None of the watches with your twining rose vines were ever sold, were they?”

“None of them,” Alice confirmed.

The watches that had been stolen that night featured the distinctive pattern of rose vines curling around the rim of the watchcases. If any of those watches surfaced, it would be easy
to identify them as the watches stolen that night. That ought to provide the police with a white-hot lead that could be traced back to the killers.

In the morning, she would ask Colonel Lowe to take some men off the construction project and start haunting the pawnshops in search of those watches.

18

A
lice quickly sketched from memory the distinctive rose vine pattern that graced the covers of the stolen watches, then distributed the drawings to Colonel Lowe’s men.

“I don’t know much about fencing stolen goods,” Mollie said to Colonel Lowe, “but there are plenty of pawnbrokers on the south side of town.”

With three of Colonel Lowe’s men searching the city for the stolen watches, Mollie could funnel all of her energy into the creation of her watches. She had missed her first deadline to supply a jeweler in New York with a shipment of watches. For a woman who had never once been late to class, work, or Sunday services, missing that deadline for her only remaining contract was a humiliating blow.

The New York jeweler had been understanding. It was only a month after the fire, and he knew the 57th had been among the destroyed businesses. By now, the stark photographs of the barren landscape were circulating all over the country. To Mollie’s surprise, the New York store had generously doubled their order, but only if the watches were delivered before Christmas.
We are pleased to help our brothers in Chicago
, the telegram had read.

“Christmas!” Ulysses had said. “Does that New York jeweler know what sort of wizardry goes into building a watch? Would he ask Michelangelo to deliver the
Pieta
by Christmas? Would he ask Milton to write
Paradise Lost
by Christmas?”

“Ulysses, all I ask is that you deliver engraved cases by December. I’ll take care of the rest.” Although, as Mollie scanned the attic workroom, she knew time was not her only challenge. The attic was less than a third of the size of her old factory on East Street and too cramped for all of the employees to work at once.

“We will operate around the clock,” she said. “The brewery never shuts down, and neither shall we.” If the watch technicians arrived at six o’clock in the morning, they could assemble the internal mechanisms, finishing their day’s labor by two o’clock. Then the artisans would come in, clear the worktables, and begin pressing the engraved cover designs, finishing up by ten o’clock at night. The last shift would be the enamelers. Enameling required a lot of space and time in order to fire the ovens. It would make for a grueling schedule, but it was the only way they could meet that Christmas deadline.

The only task in which Mollie was unskilled was the artwork. She could build watch mechanisms, as well as lay and fire enamel. Because she was the one who ordered the around-the-clock schedule, Mollie felt obliged to share in the miserable shifts. She would be working from three in the morning until the early afternoon, but if it meant she could deliver those watches to New York in time for Christmas, it would be vindication. It would be proof that she had survived the fire and had salvaged her company from the ashes.

It was eight o’clock one morning when a message arrived. She would recognize that bold scrawl on the envelope from across the room. Her breath caught in her throat. She didn’t want to read Zack’s apologies or excuses for what he had done. Zack
was a master at undermining her defenses and playing with words to ease her into a false sense of security. He was likely to try to sweet-talk her into compliance, minimize what he had done by covering it over with a layer of frosting until she was intoxicated by the sugar.

She ought to return the note unopened, just to demonstrate how immune she was to his flattery.

She ripped open the flap and grabbed the note.

Mollie. I hope you are over your sulk. If so, please join me this evening for a walk by the river. Wear your hair down.

Zack

Unbelievable.

She crammed the note back inside the envelope. The coals in the enameling oven were still warm. Before she could think twice, she shuffled across the workroom floor, grabbed a pair of tongs to twist the metal door handle of the oven open, and tossed the note inside. If Zack was looking for a fight, she wasn’t coming out to play.

At least three days per week Mollie went to the property on East Street to monitor the progress. The process of clearing the land had gone quickly, but it took two weeks to excavate the basement, frame the walls, and lay the French drain. To her surprise, Colonel Lowe had rolled up his sleeves and participated in the manual labor. “Jesus was a carpenter, and I am not too proud to do the work,” he cheerfully said. “Besides, the more hands the better, if we are going to get this built before it gets too late in the season.”