These Shallow Graves (47 page)

“Goodbye, Jo! Knock 'em dead!” Sarah Stein called out.

“I will, and then I'll bring the bodies to you!” Jo called over her shoulder.

Sarah laughed her noisy honking laugh and waved goodbye with a bloody scalpel. She was busy dissecting a cow's eyeball at their kitchen table. Jo closed the door to their apartment and trotted down the stairs of their building.

They were roommates, Jo and Sarah. Jo had bumped into Sarah in the office of a rental agency. Sarah had come to post an ad for a roommate, as hers had just left to get married, and Jo had come to post an ad for a room. Now they lived together in the Jeanne d'Arc, a redbrick building on Fourteenth and Seventh, in what was called a French flat—a small, self-contained suite of rooms complete with a tiny kitchen and private bathroom. For the first time in her life, Jo could come and go from her home as she pleased, without reasons and excuses and chaperones.

Freedom,
she thought as she pushed the building's door open and walked outside.
It
is
the best thing.

Today was Jo's first day at her new job. She was excited and nervous as she walked downtown. She'd had to work up the courage to apply for it, but her new employer had hired her on the spot, telling her that she was a natural. He'd shown her where she would sit and had introduced her to a few of her new colleagues.

Her weekly paycheck would not be huge. She had the income from her investment account, but she was being careful with its proceeds. Already she'd had to contend with some unforeseen expenses, like galoshes to protect her shoes from slush. She'd never walked the streets in winter before. There had always been Dolan.

After she'd given her tickets to Fay and left Grand Central, she'd gone directly to a jeweler's and sold her watch, a pair of earrings, and a bracelet. She'd paid Katie what was owed to her, said goodbye, and then checked herself into a modest hotel. From it, she'd written to her mother to tell her she wasn't coming to Winnetka because her heart was here, in New York.

Our old world is closed to me now, Mama,
she'd written,
but that's all right. I don't miss it. It's a darker place than I'd ever realized. And there's a new world that I'm just discovering, with so many people in it. Wonderful people. And terrible ones. More people than I ever knew existed, with more stories than I can possibly imagine.

Anna had responded that she was not entirely surprised, and that Winnetka, she now saw, could never hold her daughter.

Please be careful, Josephine,
she'd written.
And always remember that you are a Montfort. It was a good name once. Perhaps you can make it so again.

After half an hour's walk, Jo was well downtown. She suffered a bout of nerves now as she stood on the corner of Broadway and Murray Street, waiting for the traffic to slow so she could cross. She reached into her coat pocket, feeling for the postcard inside it. It had been forwarded to her new address. There was a picture of Lake Michigan on the front. On the back was written:
Wish you were here.
There was no signature, no return address. Jo knew who'd sent it, though, and she hoped that the good citizens of Chicago were guarding their wallets. She felt glad to know that Fay and Eleanor had made it. She hoped they were safe and warm and had plenty to eat. She knew they had each other.

She put the card back in her pocket. She kept it there, feeling for it whenever she needed courage. And she needed it now.

A wagon loaded with beer kegs stopped dead in front of Jo and nearly caused a collision with a lumber wagon behind it. As the two drivers exchanged words and traffic snarled around them, Jo saw her chance. She dashed across the street, past city hall to Park Row, and then on to Nassau Street, where she arrived at her destination. She paused at the door of an imposing nine-story building.
The New York Tribune
was emblazoned above it.

“Fac quod faciendum est,”
she whispered, and pushed the door open.

Jo told the harried-looking woman at the front desk who she was and the woman pointed at the stairwell.

Jo made her way upstairs to the noisy, smoke-filled newsroom. As she walked down one side of it, she saw the city editor chewing out some hapless reporter, and the editor in chief, Mr. Johnson, looking at a group of photographs spread across his desk. He noticed her walk by and gave her a brisk nod. She nodded back. He was the one who'd called her a natural.

There was one more office, down at the very end. It belonged not to an editor but to a senior reporter—the one who covered the crime beat. The door was open. She stopped in front of it, waiting until the man inside, furiously typing away with a pencil clamped between his teeth, looked up and saw her.

“Jo?” Eddie Gallagher said after he'd taken the pencil out of his mouth. “What are you doing here?”

Smiling, she pulled a notepad out of her bag—it was the same brand he used—and held it up.

Eddie stared at it, confused for a moment. Then he smiled. “Welcome to the newsroom, Miss Montfort,” he said. “Nellie Bly better watch her back.” He put the pencil back in his mouth and went back to his story.

A smile,
Jo thought.
It's something. It's a start.

She kept walking, to the very back of the room, where the cubs started out. She sat down at a battered wooden desk that had nothing but a typewriter and a stack of paper on top of it.

For an instant, she saw herself as she had been the day she'd gone to the
Standard
's newsroom to give Arnold Stoatman her father's bequest.

That girl was gone. And so were the illusions she had carried.

Jo had come full circle and found herself back where she'd started, back where she wanted to be.

Working on stories.

And writing her own.