Don't Dare a Dame Read online

  Willie appeared, wiping his hands on a bandana which he stuffed in a back pocket. With his small stature and in ordinary garb instead of his postman’s uniform, he looked like a kid again. He was opening his mouth to speak when he halted with a startled look. He came a step closer, pretending to squint.

  “Are those stitches, or are you already sprouting hair on your face like my mam?”

  Maire nudged him.

  “Shush, now. She was in a wreck. Thank St. Christopher it wasn’t worse.”

  After the fussing from everyone else, Wee Willie’s cheerful assumption that I was resilient assured me I was.

  “How about a taste of whiskey?” he offered. “It’s not often Maire and I get to sit and visit without that crew of ours under foot.”

  “Just a dab,” I said. “Plenty of water.”

  He left to get it while Maire and I talked. I wondered how she managed to keep her living room neat as a pin with kids running around. When all of us had glasses, we toasted the old times.

  “Now,” said Willie. “What brings you around?”

  “Thought you might be able to run down some information for me.”

  “Something for one of your cases?” Maire’s eyes sparkled. “I can step into the kitchen if you want it private.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s for something I’m working on, yeah, but nothing hush-hush. I was wondering if maybe you could find out who was delivering mail in the Percy Street area back in 1913 Maybe a few years before that.”

  “Before the big flood.” Willie wiped his lip with the back of his finger. “Looking to learn about someone who lived around there, is that it?”

  He’d always been a quick little devil, but without much interest in actually studying.

  “That’s exactly it.” I saluted him with my glass.

  “Sure, I’ll ask around. You’d be surprised how many old postmen there are. All that walking and fresh air keeps us healthy as horses.”

  The four kids pounded in again.

  “Ma — it’s cold,” complained the girl.

  “That’s what happens this time of year, love.” Maire whisked a hanky from her pocket and wiped the girl’s nose.

  “When’s dinner, Ma?” asked one of the boys.

  “As soon as you all wash your hands and I have a look at them.”

  They scampered off and I stood to go. Maire and Willie rose too.

  “Come on, Maggie, stay and eat so we can have a proper visit. I made enough for an army. Meatloaf, mashed spuds, cooked carrots. That’ll go easy on your poor mouth.”

  How could I resist?

  Thirty-six

  Willie called me Sunday afternoon to say he’d found the man I needed to talk to. The gent was retired now, and Willie called him Old Ben, though he didn’t appear a lot older than Billy and Seamus. We met in the little café on Percy Street the next morning. Old Ben was wiry like Willie, but taller. When he talked you could see he was missing a top tooth on one side of his mouth.

  “How’s the pie?” I asked once we’d introduced ourselves.

  “Too much lard in the crust.”

  “That’s what I thought too.”

  I ordered a slice of gooseberry, though, along with my coffee.

  “Willie Ryan tells me you’re a private detective.” The retired postman pulled his eyebrows together in a way that warned me a lecture was coming.

  “That’s right.”

  “Doesn’t seem like the right kind of work for a woman to do.”

  “Plenty of people tell me so.”

  He held his frown for several more seconds, then shrugged.

  “Your funeral, I guess. Me and my wife raised three girls and none of ’em works. All found good husbands.” He ate some pie. “So what is it you want to know about this neighborhood before the flood?”

  “I’m trying to locate a family who lived on the street behind Percy. On the alley side of the street. Or possibly just across Wayne on the corner. They had a little girl.”

  “What was their name?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you would. That or which house they were in.”

  He gave the exhale of the long suffering.

  “I switched from that route to one near downtown ten, fifteen years before Willie got hired. That’s why he didn’t know I’d ever had it, I reckon. Once you start learning names for a new route, it doesn’t leave space for those old ones.”

  I felt my hopes teeter. He shoved his saucer away and scrubbed at his mouth with the paper napkin, rolling the napkin into a ball and tossing it down in a sign he was finished.

  “Still,” he said as he got to his feet, “walking that bit of the route might bring something back.”

  ***

  When I’d called to make arrangements with Old Ben, I’d offered to pick him up at his house. He’d said that after all those years spent walking, he now got a kick out of riding the trolleys. That’s when we’d agreed to meet at the café.

  Now, as we retraced his long-ago footsteps, I could see he enjoyed it. I found myself mesmerized by his rocking pace. Its gentle rhythm could carry a person through miles and more miles in the course of a day.

  “Looks like they took a big old tree root out there. Used to be an awful hump in the sidewalk,” he noted when we’d left the little business district for the residential street behind. Several minutes passed, and then he chuckled. “This house here had a silly little dog that would open an eye and look at me when I came, then go right back to sleep. Now that one over there — and I know you’re not interested in that side — but those people had one of the meanest dogs I’ve ever seen.”

  He continued in that vein while we walked both sides of the block I was interested in and then crossed Wayne.

  “Was there some sort of tall building here on the corner?” I ventured.

  Old Ben tipped his cap back and peered into the past.

  “Just a two-storey house, like most along here. White. Not as big as this new one they put up, but it had a wrought-iron fence and the sweetest-smelling lilacs.” He thought a minute. “It was kids you was interested in, wasn’t it? Two little scallywags lived here. Boys, though. Used to hide in those nice bushes and jump out whooping like red Indians.”

  We went back to the block behind where the drugstore had been. This time Old Ben frowned at the houses we passed the same way he had at me.

  “The trouble is, I remember children at some of the places,” he said. “But I can’t say if it was before the flood or ten years after, right before I changed routes.”

  “That’s okay,” I encouraged. “Just point out any that come to mind.”

  “Boys there...” He pointed and muttered. “Boy and girl there, but must have been older. He joined the Army during the war.... Nice family back there. I think they had a girl, and it was the saddest thing....”

  He recounted the same tale the grocer had told me about a family that had gone to be with a dying relative when the flood hit.

  “Now this house here had a couple of kids and a baby, but I don’t remember when. And there...” He stopped in front of a gray house two down from where the menswear store would have been. With hands on his hips he nodded his head. “The ones who lived here had two girls. Perfect little ladies. Didn’t play outside much.”

  I thought of Maire and Willie’s daughter, running out on a raw autumn day and holding her own with her brothers.

  “And I know they were here before the flood. Afterward, when it drained and was nothing but muck, when I started my rounds again, I remember passing here and seeing the doll carriage they used to play with caught in the bushes. The water had carried it out of the house with a doll baby in it.”

  Gooseberry pie lurched in my stomach. What if that was the doll the little girl had been talking about?

  I jerked my thoughts away from that direction. Too much had happened since I started asking about the girl. This was no goose chase over a doll. Besides, her mother had told the policeman that the gi
rl had been talking about a mannequin — not a toy.

  “Did they come back after the flood?” I asked hoarsely.

  The old postman shook his head. “Don’t know where they went. Lots moved in with relatives, if they had any who’d been lucky enough not to get hit hard themselves.”

  “What about a name?”

  He squinted at the door of the gray house as if expecting the two ladylike little girls to come through it pushing their doll buggy.

  “Ames?” He said uncertainly. “Avis?”

  By unspoken accord we began to walk back toward Percy Street, where I’d left my car and Old Ben would be only a short distance from a trolley stop. I wondered if either name he’d come up with was close enough to get me anywhere if I made more inquiries.

  The soothing rhythm I’d come to enjoy stopped suddenly.

  “Amos,” he said. “Their name was Amos.”

  ***

  Back at the office I reacquainted myself with the cot. In a couple of days I’d return it before I got too attached.

  After a late lunch I returned to the street with the gray house. I started there first. At least my face was looking considerably better. Remnants of bruises that hadn’t quite faded, a couple of scabs on my cheek and ends of stitches sticking up like barbed wire. Other than that and the fact I couldn’t wear lipstick, I was a regular glamour girl.

  “Hi,” I said when a woman in her mid-thirties opened the door. “I’m looking for the Amos family who used to live in this house. Are you a relative by any chance?”

  She was about the right age to be one of the girls.

  “Amos?” she repeated blankly. “No. I’m sorry, I don’t even recognize the name. We bought the house from people named Tisdale, and that was—”

  She broke off, speaking to someone inside with strained patience. “Dorothy, wash the polish off before you start buffing!

  “I’m sorry, what was I telling you? Oh, yes. We bought the house from people named Tisdale, and that was before our oldest was born, so at least ten years ago.”

  Her eyebrows raised, inquiring silently if she might return to household duties. I thanked her and left.

  I tried the houses in one direction from where the Amos family had lived. Then I tried the other direction. The results were much the same as those at the first house. Only one woman had grown up on the street, and she’d been a baby at the time of the flood. Her parents were both dead, and she didn’t recall ever hearing the name Amos. Most of the people I talked to had moved there in the last twenty years.

  The most unpleasant woman I encountered turned out to be the most helpful, but only after a fashion.

  “I have no idea where those people went. Snooty as they came, that Mrs. Amos. Snubbed me every time we met.”

  She slammed the door in my face.

  At least I was confident now that Old Ben had remembered the name correctly. Running low on optimism as well as energy, I decided to have one final stab before I gave up. I’d try the four houses across from where the Amoses had lived. If that didn’t turn up anything, maybe I’d come back tomorrow to try the remaining houses on that side, and maybe I wouldn’t.

  When I reached the second house, as I was making my way up the sidewalk, a woman with nicely cut gray hair appeared from the side of the house. She wore a canvas butcher’s apron over her dress and carried a trowel in one hand.

  “May I help you?” Her tone was cool. “I’ve noticed you knocking on all the doors. Are you selling something?”

  I attempted a smile.

  “Actually, I’m hunting some information. I promised my aunt I’d try to find the woman who used to live in that gray house. Mrs. Amos.”

  “Lorraine?” She started to thaw. “Goodness. I haven’t thought about her in years.”

  “They were chums,” I said. “Their girls played together, I think. They lost touch after the flood, and my aunt’s been down in the dumps since my uncle died....”

  The woman filled in the blanks. Her tongue clicked in sympathy.

  “Dear me. Just let me think. They moved, of course. All the houses along here had so much damage. First floors completely under water, and inches deep on the second.”

  And this street was just on the edge of the flood, where waters were lower, I thought. The woman with the trowel was telling me how she and her family and some of the others had simply lived in their attics during the long months of cleaning and making repairs.

  “But I know Lorraine and the girls stopped by one day, after things had begun to settle down. She told me where they were living, too.” She pursed her lips. “If only I....”

  Her face cleared suddenly.

  “You know, I do believe she wrote it down. Yes, I’m sure she did. I remember now. She asked would I send any mail along if it turned up, and tell anyone who might come looking for them. I think I might still have that slip of paper, too. Why don’t you come in while I have a look?”

  Depositing her trowel in a basket on the porch, she wiped her shoes like crazy on the doormat before going in. I did too. While she disappeared upstairs, I sat down in a front parlor furnished in heavy oak pieces. The loud tick-tock of a mantle clock filled the space around me.

  Sooner than I expected, my hostess returned. Her smile was triumphant. In her hand was a leather-bound address book, its corners worn.

  “I thought I might have tucked it in the back of this, and I was right.”

  She held out a scrap torn from nice stationery. The ink had faded with time but the information on it was clear:

  Lorraine and Simon Amos.

  Followed by the name of a street and a number.

  Thirty-seven

  Heebs had sold nearly all of his morning edition when I approached his corner for the second time in an hour on Tuesday.

  “Thought I already sold you one of these,” he grinned. “You back to flirt?”

  “Back to see if you might be interested in making some money. Do you think you can go into maybe a dozen bars and ask a few questions without getting tossed out? They’re pretty rough places.”

  He crossed his arms.

  “Do I look wet behind the ears? My ma sent me into plenty of dives hunting my old man before he took off.”

  His mother had taken off too, when Heebs was, what, nine or ten? How he’d managed not to get picked up and tossed into an orphans home was anyone’s guess. Maybe because hard times had left so many like him out on their own that the orphanages were full. I waited as a customer approached and handed him three cents for a paper.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I’ll pay you two bucks.”

  His eyes widened.

  “Two bucks and a date with you, Sis? I must be dreaming.”

  ***

  Once I’d arranged a time and place to pick up Heebs, I returned to a trail that was growing more visible. The phone book didn’t list anyone named Amos at the address left with their former neighbor, and it didn’t list Simon Amos at all. I looked under Lorraine, although most women, even if widowed, kept the listing under their husband’s name. No luck there, either.

  The thought of repeating yesterday’s round of knocking on doors didn’t thrill me, but I’d known tedium went with this job when I hung out my shingle. I got gas for the DeSoto and drove to the address I was hunting. The street reminded me of the one I’d been on yesterday, except it was farther from downtown and some of the houses looked newer. I rang the bell on a door with an oval of frosted glass centered in polished wood. Through it I could see a woman and little girl come downstairs to answer.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I’m trying to locate the Amos family who used to live in this house. It’s about an inheritance.”

  For some reason people are more apt to help when they think money’s at stake, even though they’re not the ones who stand to profit.

  “Amos,” the woman mused. She had a hairbrush in her hand. One side of the little girl’s hair was neatly braided; the other a mass of tangles. “I don’t
think I’ve ever heard of them. We’ve only been in the neighborhood a few years.”

  I tried a second house, where a woman was vacuuming to beat the band, then a third where a tired looking young woman greeted me two kids whining behind her, and another so close to arriving she needed a basket.

  “You might try Mrs. Little, in that brick house over there.” She pointed. “She’s lived there a long time.”

  With a sigh of overdue hope I thanked her and crossed the street.

  The woman who answered the door wore a hat and a suit like she was about to go out, and violet-pink lipstick which didn’t make her look any younger.

  “Oh, my yes. Of course I knew the Amoses. Lovely people. Lorraine and I used the same dressmaker, so we’d chat up a storm when we met there. Her older daughter, Jane, was in the same class as my girl. The younger one was an odd little thing — not feeble minded or anything, just sort of moony. She certainly married well, though, so there you go.”

  Foreknowledge was climbing my spine.

  “Would you happen to know how to locate any of them?” I asked, although I had a feeling I already did.

  “Lorraine passed away. I think someone told me her husband was poorly and living with Jane. Oh, if only I could remember what Jane’s married name is.” Her violet-pink lips pursed. “Well, no matter. You’ll have no trouble finding Tessa. She married a man named Cyrus Warren. They say he’s going to run for the Statehouse.”

  She started to close the door.

  “I couldn’t help noticing how perfectly that suit of yours fits,” I said quickly. “I don’t suppose you’d give me the name of that dressmaker you were mentioning. I’ve been looking for one.”

  Sometimes flattery buys as much information as money. It halted the closing door.

  “Wanda Meecham, but she’s not taking new trade.” She preened at her privileged status and started to close the door again.

  “Oh, gee. I’ll bet she has an assistant, though. Maybe she’d take customers. Is that the Mrs. Meecham with a shop on Main?”

  ***