The Whitaker Girl

Clara had been sitting with her elbow on the table and her hand holding up her head long enough for the ice in her glass to go down to water. Her face gave up nothing. The only sign was the line between her brows.

Frankie leaned in. "Clara. What are you going to do?"

Clara put her hand down and sat back. "I'll take it as it comes. I'm not making a plan."

"Then get one." Frankie's voice went down the stairwell. Below them, somebody on the second floor laughed at something else entirely. "You got engaged to him. You went abroad with him for four years. Now his mother changes her mind and that's the end of it?"

"She's allowed to change her mind."

"She's not."

Clara turned her glass a quarter turn on the cloth and left it there.

Wes Mercer had taken the second floor of Delaney's for the night, one long table and the chairs pushed back, half of Water Street and their wives still at it. Frankie was his sister. She had been up and down between the floors all evening, and Clara had come up with her, and the third floor was three small rooms off a landing, windows shut, nobody in it now but the two of them and a waiter who had stopped coming up.

"Four years," Frankie said. "You didn't do one thing wrong in four years."

"My father cleared out the accounts in the spring and left with a woman from the club. The whole town knows it."

Frankie's hand came up off the table and went back down. "That's separate."

"Eli doesn't think so."

"Is that what he says?"

"He says I'm making a fuss about nothing. He says his mother was joking."

Frankie waited.

"He's tired," Clara said. "He has a lot on him."

"He's ducking it."

"Yes."

Frankie sat back hard in her chair. "She's already picked somebody, you know. My mother had it from Mrs. Voss's own cousin."

"Roz Voss."

"Rosalind Voss." Frankie's mouth turned. "Her father holds the haulage contracts on half this lake and sits on the board of the bank that holds the paper on the other half. That girl has never stood in a line in her life."

"She speaks three languages."

"You speak four."

Clara looked at her hands. "But I'm poor."

A woman in this town was worth what her father's name was worth, and hers had come apart in the spring. Whether she was excellent had nothing to do with it. The ruin and the laughing about it wiped out everything else she had.

"Twenty years from now somebody at a party will say, that's the Whitaker girl the Kesslers handed back," Frankie said. "And they came to you. Your grandfather was alive and they came to the house."

"I know what they did."

"Then fight."

"With what?"

Frankie's face went red. Clara was already sorry, and before she could take it back there was a scream from the floor below.

It was a young man's voice. It broke in the middle and went up, and then there were chairs, and a hard flat order, and a gunshot, and another one on top of it.

Frankie was up. Clara got a hand on her wrist. "Wait—"

"That's my brother's room." Frankie pulled loose and went for the stairs.

Clara went after her, a step behind, and that was why she came down onto the second floor behind Frankie and saw the room before anyone in it looked up.

Nine of Wes's men were down. Every one of them was on his knees with both hands clamped on a leg, and the blood was coming through their fingers onto the boards. Four men she had never seen were standing, and none of them was in a hurry. One of them had a gun against Frankie's head.

She still had her glass in her hand. She set it on the step behind her.

The long table was still standing. Somebody's wife had left her coat over the back of a chair.

The man in the middle of the room was tall and wide through the shoulders, and his hair was longer than a man's who worked in an office. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. Blood had gone onto the front of his white shirt and was spreading through the cotton in a slow stain that kept getting bigger while nothing else in the room moved. His eyes were black and entirely awake. He looked at Frankie, and then at Clara, and the gun stayed where it was, pointed at the floor.

Clara stopped at the bottom of the stairs, stood still, and breathed out.

"Mr. Ray."

Raymond turned his head. "Do I know you?"

"Clara Whitaker. I'm engaged to Elias Kessler." Her voice came out level. "My grandfather was Edmund Whitaker."

"Whitaker." He looked at her a moment. "And you call my brother Mr. August."

"Everybody in the house does."

"Whatever Wes did, Mr. August can settle it at the house." She nodded once at Frankie, at the barrel against her head. "Not here. Not with his sister under a gun."

Raymond turned the gun over in his hand and put it in his waistband.

"I'm not going to kill him," he said. "You can breathe."

A hand went into Wes's hair and brought his head up off the wall. His mouth was full of blood and his lips had begun to swell, and he could not get a word out of it.

"Tell my nephew," Raymond said. "If he comes at me again, I'll cut his balls off. You tell him in those words."

The open hand came across Wes's face, and the sound of it went around the room.

"And you. You want to be his gun. You want to stand in for him. Then think about whether you get to live through it."

"I'm taking interest tonight," he said. "Three of yours. Any objection?"

In the corner a gun went off. A man went down without a sound. It happened twice more. The smell in the room got heavier.

Frankie was shaking all the way down to her hands.

Wes stared up at him, his mouth working at words that would not come, and nothing in his face was fear.

"Keep looking at me," Raymond said, "and I'll take your eyes out."

Wes shut his eyes.

Raymond straightened up and fixed his shirt. The top button, done with both hands, unhurried, the way a man does it in front of a mirror. Then the sleeves rolled down over his forearms and the cuffs buttoned.

The blood smell was still in his nose. Under it, on her, soap — cheap soap, the kind that comes in a block and goes in with the wash.

He stopped in front of her.

Too thin. The collarbones too clear, and her mouth red with nothing on it.

He could not remember whether he had had her. That kind of thing he remembered. Which meant he had not.

He said nothing, and went down the stairs.

His men went down behind him. The front door opened onto Water Street and shut again.

Clara stood where she was.

Then she went to the nearest of Wes's men, the one with his chin down on his chest, and got down on the floor beside him and took the cloth off the table and folded it and laid it flat above his knee and put both palms on it and her weight down through them.

Blood came up through the cloth onto her fingers and into the green wool at her knee.

"Get me towels," she said.

Nobody moved.

"Frankie. Towels. Now."