Her Borrowed Name

*Do as I say and I'll land you higher than you've ever been.*

Nell stopped counting the slats. Her finger stayed where it was, on the fourth one.

Higher than what. At seven o'clock she had been inside a slop cart. At ten she was sitting on the floor of a hotel storeroom with her back against the wall, and in between she had not been higher than the second-floor landing.

She looked up. The storeroom had one window, high and narrow, and the moon came through it in a bar that fell across the shelves and showed the dust turning in the air.

China in crates. Candles in a box, wrapped in paper. A chair with the cane gone out of the seat. Her, on the boards, in her dancing clothes, with a gray smudge on the back of her hand that she had rubbed at twice and that had not come off.

She looked at the ceiling, and then at the corner the voice had come out of, because there was nowhere else left to look.

"Who's there," she said.

*Nobody hears me but you. Nobody sees me. Nobody else is going to get you out of this building.*

The voice was low and it was a man's and it was not in a hurry. It did not come from the corridor or from the window. It came from inside her own head, and it was not one of her thoughts.

Nell got up. It took her two tries. On the second try she made it to the door and put her ear on it, and heard the patrolman out in the corridor, shifting his weight, chewing something.

"Are you a ghost," she said.

Nothing.

"You're a ghost," she said. "All right. Sir. I don't mean any disrespect." She wiped her palms down her skirt and got her breath. "If you're a ghost, you'll want something. They always want something. What is it."

*Sit down.*

She sat.

*You're not the one who fired.*

Nell's mouth opened and stayed open a moment.

"How do you know that," she said.

The dust turned in the bar of moonlight. The patrolman chewed.

"How do you know that," she said again.

*The veil. Why the veil.*

"It's for the dance," she said. "You can't do the knife dance with your face showing. The woman who taught it wore a veil, and she wouldn't teach me till I had one."

*And the knife.*

"They took it off me." She touched her calf, where the strap had been, and where the strap was not. "It was strapped under. The patrolman found it and he made a noise about it. It cost me seventy-five cents."

*It's sharpened.*

"Knives come sharpened."

*A dance knife doesn't.*

"They sell a dull one for the stage," she said. "Three dollars. Three dollars for a knife that couldn't cut a rope, when the hardware store down the street has the same steel in it, sharp, for seventy-five cents. I'd have to be simple."

She put her chin up.

*I didn't ask what it cost. I asked why it's sharp.*

"Because I'm not made of money," said Nell.

The voice said nothing to that. Out in the corridor the patrolman got up, went a few steps, came back, and sat down again, and the chair took him with a crack.

*You're not on the list.*

"No."

*How did you get in.*

Nell looked at her hands.

"It's not a nice story."

*I don't need a nice one.*

"There was a boy on the kitchen door," she said. "Six dollars. It's the going rate; I asked two other boys first and they wanted eight. He put me in the slop cart and rolled me past the man on the gate, and I got out of it by the coal bins, and I washed at the pump, and I put my veil on." She raised her head. "The Wexford had every big man in Calderport under one roof tonight. One dance, one good dance, and somebody in that room asks who I am. That's how it's done."

*The slop cart.*

"It's a living," she said.

*That isn't a living.*

"Nine dollars," she said. "That's what it cost me, all told, to be in this room. Six for the boy, two and a quarter for the dance, seventy-five cents for the knife. Nine dollars and here I sit."

The voice was quiet a while. Nell pulled her knees up and put her chin on them and listened to the building. Somewhere off down the corridor a door stood open and men's voices went back and forth through it, not agreeing.

*Nine dollars,* the voice said at last. *And the man who did the shooting spent nothing at all.*

"Who got shot?" said Nell.

*You don't know.*

"How would I know? I was under a table with a hundred other people, and then a hand had me by the collar. Is he dead?"

The voice did not answer that either.

"They'll hang me," said Nell. "Won't they. For shooting a man at the Wexford. I've never had a gun in my hand in my life. I wouldn't know which end to hold. They'll hang me anyway, and they'll put my name in the paper, and it'll be back in Harlan's Mill on the morning train, and every woman on that street will say she always knew it."

*They won't hang you.*

"You don't know that."

*I know a great many things.*

"Then tell me one," she said. "Tell me how I get out of this room."

*When the men come out of that room down the hall, you'll speak to them as a cousin of the Van Alsts. A cousin from upstate. That's all.*

Nell laughed. It came out of her before she could put a hand over it, and she put the hand over it, and the patrolman in the corridor said, "Quiet in there."

She waited until his chair creaked and settled, and then she leaned forward and said, very low, "Sir. That dinner tonight was the Van Alsts' dinner. If I knew a Van Alst, do you think I'd have come in on a slop cart? Do you think there's a girl in this city who wouldn't sell her own teeth to be a Van Alst's cousin? I could say it. I could say it fine. Nobody's going to believe it for one minute."

*You can lie, can't you.*

"I can lie," said Nell. "I can't read. Lying isn't the problem. The problem is that half this city's been trying to get next to that family since before I was born, and every one of them had a better dress than mine."

*Try it anyway.*

"And when they ask me something?"

*Then you'll have something to answer with.*

"From you."

*From me.*

Nell sat back against the wall and looked at the crates.

"You want something," she said. "Ghosts want something. What is it."

*Out of this room.*

"That's not a thing a ghost wants."

*It's a thing I want.*

"Then I'll pay you," she said. "When I'm out. I'll have a window put up in a church, stained glass, the whole—"

*I don't want a window.*

"Plain glass, then. A window's a window."

*No.*

"A candle," said Nell. "A good one. Beeswax."

Silence.

"There's cheap ones," she said. "Four cents, five. They burn perfectly well."

*I want you to do as you're told.*

"Because that's free," said Nell.

The voice said nothing, and she had the strong and unpleasant feeling that it was agreeing with her.

She got her feet under her. Somewhere down the corridor a chair went over backward and a man said something cheerful and the whole hall moved at once, forty people coming out of a room together, skirts and boots and the man from the cloakroom saying, "Gentlemen, if you'd send your checks around in the morning—"

The patrolman's key went into the lock of her door.

*Say you're a cousin,* the voice said. *Say it before they ask.*

The door opened. Light came in flat and yellow across the boards and the crates and across her skirt, and past the patrolman's shoulder the first of them was already coming down the corridor.