Ripper (3 page)

Carver felt suddenly small. “You think I’m a jackass?”

She shook her head. “You
are
different, though. The fact you stood up to Finn at all shows that.” She examined him, as if trying to suss the change, then pointed at his bulging pockets. “Not a great hiding place for apples. Can I have one?”

Grunting, he pulled one out for each of them. She took a bite. “You’ll probably want to stop swiping things from the kitchen until Prospective Parents Day.”

He shrugged. “It’s a waste for me. I’m fourteen, too big to be anyone’s baby, too…
scrawny
to be a good apprentice.”

She didn’t disagree. “Miss Petty says I’ve never been adopted because I’m too smart. Men don’t want anyone putting ideas in their wives’ heads. It’s also why she never suggested me for an Orphan Train. I think I’d go insane working on a farm.”

“I was too
scrawny
for the Midwest.” He used the word again, still hoping she’d disagree. “Just as well. I like it here. Tallest building, longest bridge… What else do you need?”

She nodded. “That’s why I took matters into my own hands. I’ve been corresponding with Jerrik and Anne Ribe. They both work for the
New York Times.
He’s a reporter; she works in the leisure department. They’ll be there to meet me on Prospective Parents Day.”

Carver let loose a loud whistle. “The
New York Times
? That’s almost as good as the
Herald,
isn’t it? Good for you, Delia, really.”

She smiled wryly. “There have been a few women reporters, but they say the best I should hope for is to work for something boring like
Ladies’ Home Journal.
”

“They’d be crazy not to give you
some
kind of chance. That’d be grand, wouldn’t it? Covering murders, exposing crime.”

“Something like that,” she said. She gave him a mischievous look. “Matter of fact, I’ve been practicing on you. Did you find anything in the attic today?”

She took another bite of her apple.

“WHAT?”
Carver said. “How… ?”

“It’s not complicated. I was delivering fresh linen and heard all that creaking. I thought you were a rat until I stepped in and saw you working at that lock. You were so intent, I could’ve been an elephant and you wouldn’t have noticed. You have to admit you have a funny sense of law and order, turning in Finn, bending the rules for yourself.”

Carver stiffened. “At least you know where your mother is; you even see her once a month. She just can’t afford to take care of you. I was dropped at the doorstep in a basket like in a fairy tale. I love mystery stories, but I’m the biggest mystery I know. What’s wrong with trying to find out about my parents?”

Her expression softened. “Nothing, but I really don’t think Miss Petty would hide anything.”

Without thinking, he answered, “Well, she did.”

“Oh? So what did you find?” she said. Seeing his hesitation, she punched his shoulder. “I won’t tell,
Carver. We’ve known each other our whole lives.” She paused, then added, “Well… not if you show me whatever it is.”

Carver was dying to share it with someone. Why not Delia? “Fine, but not here.”

Taking her elbow, he walked her up to an empty second-floor classroom. It was evening now, the only light from an electric streetlamp. As usual, the darkness comforted him. It was cooler here, too. Carver briefly worried Delia would be cold in her thin dress, but when a cool breeze from a cracked windowpane hit her sweaty face, she smiled with pleasure.

He had started thinking how pretty she’d grown when she looked at him sharply. “Well?”

With an exaggerated sigh, he withdrew the letter. She stared at it, aghast. “From your parents? Are they alive? Why would Miss Petty keep it from you?”

He waved her closer. “Read it and you’ll know everything I do.”

Together the pair solemnly studied the paper. Having memorized the words, Carver tried to see past them, to feel his father’s presence, the man who’d held the pen, thought the thoughts. The effort made him nervous, and he couldn’t say why.

He pointed out a word. “He misspells
color.
”

“That’s how they spell it in London,” Delia said. Her brow furrowed deeper and deeper as she read, until it looked like river waves. “It… seems like it was written by a crazy person.”

Carver felt strangely defensive. “Or maybe it doesn’t make exact sense on purpose, like a clue. It talks about a mark, right? It means my birthmark.”

She scanned his face and arms. “Where?”

Eager to prove his point, he pulled his shirt half-off and turned his bare back to her.

“Not quite so scrawny anymore, are you? You’re getting some muscle.”

He tried not to blush. “See it? On my right shoulder?”

She leaned closer. “When was the last time you took a bath? I can’t see anything except dirt.”

He felt her fingers against his skin. The sensation was pleasant until she rubbed hard.

“It doesn’t come off! It’s a birthmark!”

“Sorry. It does look like an ear. Carver… that really
is
a letter from your father, isn’t it?”

He pulled his shirt back on. “So what do I do about it? I can’t tell Miss Petty.”

Delia shrugged. “I’d try to find some kind of official help. Someone working for the city who has access to records, like…”

Carver brightened. “Roosevelt! If you can write to the
Times,
why can’t I write to him?”

Delia looked worried. “I was thinking of a clerk or librarian. The police commissioner? You might as well write to Sherlock Holmes.”

But Carver barely heard her. “He’s been a hunter, a cowboy and a sheriff. I know he’d want to help. And if we met… if I impressed him, maybe I could even get a job, like you and the
Times.
Don’t you think?”

Delia gaped at him awhile before speaking. “I’m sure he’s very busy, you know, trying to eliminate all the corruption in the city, working on solving that murder…”

Carver gave her a grin. “I mean, why not? What do you think?”

“Well,” Delia said slowly. “I certainly think you can
try.
”

THAT NIGHT,
Carver didn’t sleep at all. Instead, in the light of an old hurricane lantern, he toiled over his letter to Roosevelt, revising it dozens of times before the sun rose. In the morning, he mailed it, and that very afternoon started checking for a response.

Days went by without an answer. After a week, he worried Delia was right—he might just as well have written to Sherlock Holmes. By the time Prospective Parents Day came around, he’d decided Roosevelt was a phony, a stuffed shirt who talked big but who couldn’t be bothered with anything that really mattered.

Rather than even try to meet him, Carver stood in a corner tugging at his too-small shirt and feeling miserable. Aside from the suffocating collar, the pants
itched horribly, as if the lining were coated with sand. Worse, the jacket wouldn’t close enough to cover the shirt’s ancient food stains.

Noticing his dour face, Miss Petty said, “Take heart, Mr. Young. Who knows? There could be a surprise in store. Everything changes, after all.”

She was right about that. It had finally dawned on him that his childhood, unhappy as it was, was vanishing. For as long as he could remember, plywood boards covered with Mother Goose characters separated the dining common from the main entrance hall. Now they were gone, creating a vast, open space that took up nearly a quarter of the first floor.

The chipped wooden children’s tables had been replaced with folding adult-size versions, neatly covered in linen. The usually bare windows were covered with borrowed burgundy curtains. There was light all around, too much, leaving no place for Carver to hide from all the strangers.

When Delia joined him in his lonely corner, he worried she was going to criticize him again. Instead, she seemed oddly lighthearted for the occasion.

“You look unhappy,” she said in a playful tone.

Didn’t she get it? He nodded toward the orphans, all milling with a crowd so well dressed that he’d only seen its like strolling down Fifth Avenue on Sundays after church. “It’s like we’re having a… a… what do they call it when the store burns and all the goods have to be sold cheaply?”

“A fire sale?” Delia offered.

“Everyone must go!” Carver said, trailing his hand in the air to indicate the invisible ad.

Ignoring him, Delia tugged at his tight collar. “I offered to
let it out for you. Miss Petty thinks I did nicely enough for the others, even if you think I only readied them for some sort of slave trade.”

It was true. She’d done wonderfully matching the children with suitable clothes, then patching and mending them all.

“And me,” she said, modeling her dress. “Do I look fake?”

She didn’t. He’d almost taken her for one of the visitors when he first saw her. The dress was a shade lighter than peacock blue, matched her eyes and looked new.

“I suppose not,” Carver mumbled.

She tugged at his arm. “Come on, you’re not going to meet anyone standing in a corner by yourself.”

Carver shook his head. “No one’s here for the orphans. They’re here to gawk at Roosevelt.”

At the drinks table a crowd had gathered around a barrel-chested man with a bushy mustache and pince-nez glasses. His teeth were big and white, his eyes small and piercing, and his rasping voice carried to every corner.

“I have the most important
and
the most corrupt department on my hands,” Theodore Roosevelt said. “I know well how hard the task ahead of me is…”

“Nothing but a windbag,” Carver said.

Delia tsked. “How long are you going to stay angry because he didn’t drop every murder investigation to read your letter? You love detectives? Detectives
work
for him. You might say hello.”

Carver slumped back into the wall. “Don’t let me hold you back,” he said.

She cleared her throat. “I have some news. It’s official. I’m to be adopted by Jerrik and Anne Ribe. Not even adopted, really. Mrs. Ribe, she wants me to call her Anne. Anyways, I’ll be more
her live-in companion and assistant. The
New York Times
! Can you imagine? Look, they’re right over there.”

She pointed to a young couple among the crowd surrounding Roosevelt. They were nicely dressed but not quite as stylish as the others. The man, thin, bespectacled, with close-cropped fair hair, had a pad in his hand. He was working hard to try to get Roosevelt’s attention, bobbing up and down like a ferret. The woman, her curly blond hair tied neatly in a bun, kept putting her fingers to her lips as if trying to stifle a laugh at her husband’s antics. Carver liked them at once.

“That’s fantastic, Delia.” He forced a smile to his face.

“So, good things can happen sometimes. Yes?”

“For you! I’ll be selling the papers you write,” Carver said. “I’ll be a street rat.”

“Stop pouting!” She again pointed at Roosevelt. “Mr. Ribe says all the crime reporters keep offices right across from the police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Whenever something exciting happens, Commissioner Roosevelt leans out the window and gives them a loud cowboy yell, ‘Yi-yi-yi!’”

Carver shrugged. “So?”

She swatted him. “Honestly, how can you be angry with a man who leans out the window and shouts, ‘Yi-yi-yi’? Go talk to him.”

“And say what?”

She sighed. “Has it even occurred to you that
he
might be the surprise Miss Petty hinted at?”

Carver furrowed his brow. “Really?”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t more encouraging about your writing to him. I was right, but wrong in the way I told you. I mean to say… even if he isn’t your surprise, sometimes you have to make your own.”

She whirled and walked away.

Was it even possible Commissioner Roosevelt might want to meet him? Did he dare hope again?

Leaving the safety of his corner, Carver edged along the wall. What would he say? How would he say it? As he reached a spot directly behind the punch bowl, Jerrik Ribe finally got his question in: “What about the murder of Elizabeth Rowley? There are rumors the body was—”

“Tut-tut!” Roosevelt responded. It was a gentle, educated phrase, but uttered with such authority it sounded more like, “Shut up!”

“Hardly a tale for the children!” Roosevelt continued. He offered the orphans at his feet a wide grin, revealing the substantial gap between his teeth. Out of nowhere, he frowned. Suddenly, the stout man turned back toward Carver, his instincts as a hunter perhaps telling him he was being secretly watched. For a moment, their eyes locked.

Carver felt something powerful pulse from the stocky man. Roosevelt twisted his head curiously and then went back to the reporter. “I will say this much, in the first five months of 1895, we’ve investigated no fewer than eighty murders. I assure you, in each instance, we are on the case!”

“I’ve heard—”

Again, Roosevelt cut him off. “I’ve faced down rhinoceri, lions and even the former head of the New York City Police and always held my ground. Don’t think I can’t do the same with you. Request an interview through my assistant, Miss Minnie Kelly, and I’ll grant it, but only because she speaks so highly of your wife.”

Satisfied but chagrined, Ribe said, “Thank you, Commissioner.”

Miss Petty handed Roosevelt a glass of punch. He sipped it, smacked his lips and said, “Dee-lightful!”

Unable to bring himself to approach, Carver slipped away. Working for the police… what a dream. Sure, Delia could get what she wanted, but maybe dreams weren’t meant for him.

AS THE
party wore on, everyone except Carver looked like they were having a great time. Seemingly haughty women risked getting dirt on their gowns to bring themselves closer to the children. The men scuffed the knees of their expensive tuxedos for a chat or game.

The only other person sticking to the sidelines was Finn.

If Carver’s jacket was too small, Finn’s was ready to burst. He looked like a trained monkey, the kind that worked with organ grinders selling bags of roasted peanuts.