VI
I HARDLY KNEW YE

And then she reads it again and remembers that Jenny rarely volunteers information. Perhaps it’s meant as an invitation of a most nonchalant kind. Why would it be any of Blanche’s business where Jenny was heading unless Jenny was suggesting Blanche come along?

So here’s Blanche in a rented buggy an hour later making for San Miguel Station, because she can’t think of anything else to do, and her instincts tell her it’s best to stay out of Ernest and Arthur’s way as long as they’re in such a crazy rage. Since setting a pair of Specials on Jenny led to nothing worse than a ten-dollar fine, next time the macs might come with their knives: fix you for good and all. Blanche shudders, feelings Ernest’s thumbprint on her lip. Just talk, that’s all it was, probably, the kind of bluster men resort to in a row. But still. Time to get out of town.

After settling her bill on Commercial Street, Blanche doesn’t have much in the way of cash left, but there’s no point fretting, she tells herself. She could have taken the train but she fancied a ride, for once, hence the buggy. The speed of her motion stirs the parched air, making a sort of breeze. It’s been so long, Blanche has forgotten how good it feels to have wind moving over her, still hot but not half so stale. Why doesn’t everyone flee from the City who can?

She cracks the reins to hurry the old horse on. Just as the stable boy at Marshall’s told her to, she’s following the single train track right across the Mission District. The horse slows as they climb the grade. From up here Blanche can glimpse the sea’s glittering tongue.

Through the Bernal Cut into Glen Canyon, and soon the bleak silhouette of what must be the Industrial School rears up on her right, with its scores of little windows winking through their bars; the stable boy told her to watch out for it, so she’d know she was almost at San Miguel Station. Fellows locked up in that place as old as twenty and as young as three, he mentioned—which disgusted Blanche. “Whips and gags for the troublemakers,” the stable boy added with relish. When Blanche mocked him for crediting every rumor he heard, he insisted that it had all come out before a grand jury.

“Gagged and whipped is what you’ll end up if you tell such lies,” Blanche said to him, but with a smile and a dime to tip him for the directions.

Then even the farms come to an end. Nothing but the County Road and the train line beside it, the last two exhausted runners in a race. A sign that’s off one hinge: VARIETY OF LOTS NOW AVAILABLE FROM THE RAILROAD HOMESTEAD ASSOCIATION. A low wooden depot, silvery lettering faded almost past the point of legibility—SAN MIGUEL STATION—with a scattering of shacks around it. It barely deserves to be called a village. But then again, Jenny knows this part of the Bay, and some little nowhere’s probably the safest spot to hide in till the macs calm down.

The dogs of the settlement yip at the horse as Blanche reins it in. One of the buildings is standing on blocks like wobbling stilts. How did it ever get through the last quake? A sign tacked up unevenly near the roof proclaims, in large, childish lettering, that this is the San Miguel Saloon and Hotel. Is that the official name of what Jenny calls the Eight Mile House?

A whoop of greeting from the shady part of the unrailed porch, where—Blanche squints against the light—Jenny’s lolling in a weather-beaten chair. “Ladies and gentlemen,” cries Jenny, “for your delectation, we have the honor to present that queen of motion, that eminence of equestrian elegance—”

“Did you come by train?” interrupts Blanche.

“Shin power,” Jenny informs her, nodding at the bicycle that leans against the building’s gappy foundations.

The windows are stuffed with rags in places. “High-class locale,” mutters Blanche, getting down from the buggy and looping the reins over a post where a little palomino pony already stands.

“Ah, it’ll grow on you.”

The scrawny mongrel’s hackles rise as Blanche comes up the steps, but Jenny makes the introductions. “Friend! Friend!” She’s done a ragamuffin darning job on Arthur’s green shirt, Blanche notices.

“Mr. John McNamara Jr.,” Jenny says, addressing him, “may I present Miss Blanche Beunon?”

Blanche automatically puts a hip a little to one side, makes her smile dazzle.

The boy’s eyes go big as he nods at her.

“Had a bash at Tom Sawyer yet?” Jenny’s asking him.

He nods fervently. “Reckon it even beats Roughing It.”

Jenny whistles.

Blanche notices that John Jr.’s eyes have strayed to the high-wheeler. “I shudder to think of Jenny bumping out here on that contraption,” she remarks.

“Oh, she knows her way,” he tells Blanche. “Got her educating out hereabouts and all.”

“Really?” She turns to Jenny.

Who’s already springing off the porch to show off her bicycle. “Fancy a go, John Jr.?”

“Me too,” whines a small girl, emerging around the door with another screech of hinges, a tinier boy behind her.

“Yiz’ll stay away from that yoke before it snaps your legs to bits,” orders their mother, stepping out with arms crossed on her flat bust.

“I wouldn’t get up on it if you paid me a dollar,” remarks an older girl, smirking in the doorway.

Jenny introduces Blanche to Mrs. Ellen McNamara and Mary Jane, Kate, and Jeremiah. (Why, Blanche wonders, must Irish families always have a John and a Mary?)

Then Jenny offers to give a demonstration. “Let’s start with the coward’s option—lean it against a wall. See this mounting step?” She taps a piece of metal sticking out just above the little rear wheel.

Jenny just smiles.

The Irishwoman looks disapproving but she’s such a slattern herself, who’s she to frown?

Blanche takes hold of the gigantic handlebars and leads the machine away from the wall. Coward’s option! Its cruelly tapered saddle is so high, she can barely see over it. But skill trumps size.

The McNamaras scatter at her approach. Jenny does a drumroll on her thighs. Does she believe Blanche can do it or is she just enjoying the prospect of seeing her friend make a fool of herself? Blanche runs a little to get the machine moving, puts her right foot on the mounting step, and stands up. But she’s losing momentum already. Hops down, tries it again, sweating like a beast. Ducking, she gives a couple of scoots with her left foot, then—can she make it to the saddle in one jump? No, too high for her. She claws at the passing pedal with her left foot till it’s at the top of its arc, then straightens up on that for an instant and throws herself into the saddle.

Jenny yodels with glee.

Blanche flails, her legs barely long enough to press the pedals with the balls of her feet, her toes stretching fit to rip at the bottom of each orbit. Wild zigzags—but then she begins to get the hang of the steering. Cuts a wide circle across the sandy ground between the Eight Mile House, the store, and the pond (probably deeper than it looks, she warns herself). She risks a turn of the head toward what she can’t help thinking of as the crowd, all six of them.

The McNamaras are open-mouthed. John Jr. claps as if his life depends on it.

“My oh my,” crows Jenny. “Enjoying yourself up there, are you?”

“Vastly,” calls Blanche, breathless.

“Now there’s only the dismount, which is considerably harder than the mount. Want a tip about how to get down in one piece?”

A little later, she’s sponging her sweat and dust off in the guest chamber. Well, that’s the title with which Ellen McNamara dignifies the front left of the shack’s four rooms. The bedstead—imitation black walnut—faces the window, as if there were a view to look at, not just the dusty scrape of the County Road. Instead of a curtain, a square of green baize, nailed at the top, hangs down to block the sun.

A needlework sampler with slightly jagged letters reads:

Blanche thinks she recognizes that from a song. Humble is an understatement. She fingers the sheets uneasily. “I wonder how many of the brats share this bed when the McNamaras don’t have lodgers?”

“Packed sardine-style,” says Jenny, nodding.

Blanche mustn’t think about P’tit, cribbed tight with who knows how many others. She arranges her few possessions on the dilapidated bureau beside the washstand. “The elder boy—you give him books?”

“Pass them on,” Jenny corrects her. “It’s that or use the pages to wipe my ass.”

“Doesn’t he go to school?”

A shrug. “As the fellow says, never let schooling interfere with your education.”

“He likes you.”

“Don’t everybody?” A flash of a grin.

“Except the ones who want to fix you for good and all,” Blanche says in her best manly growl, which makes them both giggle.

“That’s all right. Mammy and Dadda’d put us to sleep in the pond to make a dime.”

Jenny laughs at the image. “One of these days you’ll be grown and gone, Mary Jane.”

A toss of the head. “Gone where?”

“Take a job in the City, maybe. You’ll have a fine time, and your pick of the fellows too.”

“Oh, indeed!” Flushing, the girl disappears into the saloon.

In the evening, McNamara Senior comes back from a laboring job, soaked through with sweat. Blanche and Jenny sit down with the family for some salt cod. (Blanche has already steeled herself, knowing that the Irish can’t cook.) Jenny talks mostly to the little girl, Kate, who’s teaching her some nonsensical song. Jenny repeats after her: “‘You don’t have an arm—’”

“‘Ye haven’t an arm,’” Kate corrects her in her whispery voice, “‘ye haven’t a leg, ahoo—’”

“‘Ye haven’t a leg, ahoo—’” Jenny breaks off. “What’s ahoo?”

The small girl shrugs and sings on.

“What are you saying, child?” Her father breaks his silence. “It’s ‘Ye’ll have to be put with a bowl out to beg.’ He’s lost all his limbs in the wars, and the bowl’s for the money he’s begging.”

“Once you’ve passed on a song, it’s out of your hands,” Jenny tells McNamara. “I favor the kid’s version.”

“Her version, is it? She’s making a dog’s dinner of it.”

“Well, this Johnny sounds like something of a dog’s dinner himself, so—”

P’tit, rolling across the floorboards of the apartment, panting with effort … Blanche shuts her mind like a door, locking him out.

Later on, she and Jenny go over to Phil Jordan’s grogshop, because he’s got a better range of spirits than McNamara. Jenny treats them all to a rendition of something with dozens of verses called “Rye Whiskey,” or maybe “Jack o’ Diamonds,” she can’t quite remember.

After three cocktails, Blanche is distinctly cheerfuller. She trips back to the Eight Mile House and finds that the waning moon lends the ramshackle silhouette of San Miguel Station a certain charm. Her throat is aglow with liquor, even if her lip still hurts where Ernest’s hand crushed it yesterday, on Waverly Place. The hem of her mauve skirt is brown with dust, but what does it matter when no one’s looking? No need to dress up here, or match the City’s arduous rhythms. San Miguel Station’s a two-bit place between real places, an anonymous dirt spot on the map where, for the first time in weeks, Blanche can fall into bed without a thought in her head.

She’s gathering her nerve to step inside when out of the corner of her eye, she sees something move. A house. An actual two-story frame building going by, creaking down the middle of Sacramento Street. Blanche stares. It’s on rollers, hauled by a team of eight gasping horses. Pedestrians dive to one side or another. Someone’s moving without having to change houses, she supposes; what a Californian shortcut! Jenny would be so tickled to see that, Blanche thinks. Abruptly missing her friend so much her stomach cramps.

A pair of bony arms suddenly wraps Blanche up. She recoils from maroon ruffles. The death’s-head, that old ravaged dove Jenny had a soft spot for. “Maria,” says Blanche, as politely as she can.

“Ma pauvre,” sobs the old woman, mopping at her single eye with a scrunched handkerchief. “You really stuck it to those goddamn macs in the paper yesterday!”

Blanche nods uneasily.

“Fleas living off our asses,” Maria pronounces. “Though I did get my own back on my Thomas,” she adds, reminiscent.

“You did?” says Blanche, because it seems expected of her.

“He was just like your Albert—a dog in the manger.”

Arthur, Blanche wants to correct her, absurdly.

“Took half my face off with acid. I could hear my own skin sizzle,” says Maria with ghastly exuberance.

Blanche feels her gorge rise.

“Some splashed on Thomas, I knew, because I could hear him cursing about holes in his pants.” Maria grins. The woman still has all her teeth, Blanche notices, even if they are yellow. “It was the pants that did for him, though. Captain Lees found where Thomas had stashed them under the bar, you see?”

Blanche is oddly impressed by that piece of detective work.

Blanche nods, trying to smile, but her face is contorted with guilt. Thinking, Not if it’s up to me. She’s committed herself to her devilish bargain with Ernest. She’s going to walk in there and testify that he and Arthur could have had nothing to do with Jenny’s mysterious death. Almost ten by the clock over the door of Gray’s. Get inside, Blanche scolds herself, before the detectives come looking for you.

Maria walks beside her. “Not to speak ill and all that, but Jenny was such a hothead. Should have known to stay clear of fancy men,” she laments. “Didn’t the last time nearly finish her off?”

“The last time …” Blanche is confused.

Maria puts her head to one side. “When the girl had to be pumped out with asafetida and warm water, must be five years back—”

Blanche swallows as people push past them into Gray’s. So the police files were right about that much: an overdose. Could it have been accidental? “What had she taken?”

The old woman shrugs. “Laudanum, probably—isn’t that our usual poison? Topping ourselves, it’s an epidemic these days—a teaspoon can do it if you ain’t habituated. Adrien wasn’t the worst, as they go, but not the best neither.”

Who’s this Adrien who drove Jenny to try to kill herself? She never mentioned any Adrien. Ever had your heart broken? Blanche asked, when they were waiting outside 815 Sacramento last week, but Jenny claimed to be a slippery fish. Not so uncatchable, it seems now. Her heart not unbreakable at all.

“He wasn’t the type to ever lay a hand on her,” Maria rattles on as they step into the building, “but he might as well have beaten her, since he gambled away every satané cent she had—”

Maria stares. “Her mac, you mean.”

No.

But yes.

Frail, isn’t that what Cartwright called Jenny in his article? And Blanche thought he was plucking the accusation out of the air. That’s how she earned her crust, folks say, back when she wore skirts, Arthur sneered that night at the faro saloon, and again Blanche assumed he was just throwing any kind of mud that might stick. She’s been deaf to everything that hasn’t matched her own idea of Jenny.

Maria’s one awful eye peers at her. “My dear. Didn’t you know her at all?”

Fury, like a knot of gristle in Blanche’s throat. But what can she say in her own defense? Jenny was easy to enjoy but hard to know.

The lobby’s thick with chattering people. Which part is the deadhouse, where they’ll have laid out what used to be Jenny? Please let them not have prettified her … It must be in the cellars, surely; that’d be coolest. But the crowd is moving up the graciously curved staircase, and Blanche mustn’t be late, so she lets the press of bodies take her that way, carrying her away from Maria.

Her head’s whirling from the old dove’s casual revelation. You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet there, Jenny told Arthur at the faro table, so lightly that Blanche never thought not to take her word for it. But all these weeks, is it Blanche who’s had the wrong Jenny Bonnet?

The upper room’s stifling. Chairs behind several long tables, for the important folks, but little furniture otherwise. The standing audience has sucked up all the air already.

“… of Jeanne Bonnet, supposed to have died by violence,” a man with long white sideburns is announcing with exaggerated articulation.

Supposed? thinks Blanche. What, is there some reason to suspect that Jenny may have burst apart spontaneously? She swallows down a terrible giggle. Jenny would understand. Jenny would have been the first to find the hilarity in all of this.

The man with sideburns seems to be in charge so he must be … Swan, Coroner Swan, she remembers with an effort. He’s addressing a group of awkward-looking men behind the table on the left—this must be the jury. Blanche bobs from side to side, wishing she were taller. She considers what she can see of the jurors’ jackets, their faces, though she has no idea how to decode their expressions. Will they be able to understand the first thing about this case? They never knew Jenny, not even in the partial way Blanche did.

You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet, her friend says lightly, obstinately in Blanche’s head. The Jenny Bonnet who was frail was a girl in skirts, long hair, paint. A girl who took an overdose five years ago and never woke up. That’s not me.

In the crowd, a luminous white head stands out: Cartwright of the Chronicle. Blanche also recognizes Durand’s greasy mustache. His mournful cook stands beside him.

The script is bunkum, but who cares? Blanche doesn’t know what’ll come of this performance, except that neither Arthur nor Ernest will spend a day in jail. That’s all right, she tells herself. What does the truth matter in the middle of all this misery? What goddamn good would justice do Jenny now that she’s dead as a herring? P’tit: he’s all that matters. P’tit, and Blanche’s slim chance of seeing him again. So all she can do is what Ernest told her to. Put one foot after another, stepping blindfolded across the abyss.

So many eyes on her, as if she’s spotlit. Whispers. Blanche realizes she’s the main attraction, the survivor. “The murdered woman’s companion.” How like, but also weirdly unlike, her leg shows at the House of Mirrors.

Her throat locks. Could Ernest be watching in the crowd, making sure she’s going to obey his commands? Surely that would be too risky, because the patrolmen might recognize him as one of the macs Blanche urged Bohen to arrest. No, Ernest won’t show his face anywhere until this afternoon’s papers report that the murdered woman’s companion has changed her story, cleared him and his absent friend of all suspicion.

As Swan drones on about hygienic sprays, slabs, and asphaltum flooring, Blanche shuts him out. She focuses on the man sitting below the coroner, listens to the woodpecker tap of his little black machine. He must be setting down every word everyone says. Jenny would have been intrigued by that, would have gone up afterward to ask him how he could possibly keep up with the speed of human chatter.

A dry little doctor called Crook stands up on a platform now and solemnly swears that he’ll tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God.

Blanche realizes that all witnesses will be obliged to swear on the Bible. It gives her a slight tremble. What Jenny would call pure dumb superstition.

“The deceased was a female of normal physiology,” he recites from his papers, “adequately nourished and developed, with no appearance of disease.” Jargon swims by—nullagravida, rigor mortis, pallor attributable to exsanguination—and Blanche tries not to take in the words. “The brain was medium in size, and firm in substance,” says Crook. “No serum in the ventricles. The lungs crepitant.” Is the language of autopsies meant to be veiled, Blanche wonders, so that folks won’t have to recognize what’s being said about their loved ones? “The stomach greatly distended, containing about two ounces of grumous fluid with a strongly alcoholic odor …”

The delicious cognac they drank on the bed at the McNamaras’, now soured to grumous fluid.

“Eight wounds on the left side.” Crook shows the jury the little box of bullets he dug out of what he calls the cadaver. “Hemorrhage from the wound in the neck, which alone would in my opinion have been fatal, even in the absence of the others …”

Crook anchors his gaze to his notes with one fingertip. “Also swelling and discoloration around both eyes, consistent with a blow of some kind.”

Blanche’s cheeks scorch. Why is he talking about that? What can it matter compared with what killed her?

“This bruising was incurred when?” asks Swan.

“Less than twelve hours antemortem, I would say, Coroner. I also noted considerable scarring on the—”

Swan interrupts. “This scarring, too, of recent date?”

Scarring? Now Blanche is bewildered.

“No, sir.”

“Let’s confine our inquiry to matters relevant to the death, Doctor.”

Flustered, Crook edges his fingers down the page. “I found recent abrasions of the feet and hands, with embedded mud—but would judge them to be irrelevant,” he concedes.

Their tramp on Sweeney Ridge, on Wednesday. Irrelevant, how Jenny spent the day before she died. But not to Blanche. She finds it oddly consoling to think of Jenny always in motion, spinning along on her high-wheeler or striding up a hill or crouching over a pond, all her energies focused on the hunt.

Coroner Swan is thanking Crook now for putting himself in danger to do his job. “Not many years ago,” he informs the court in a sepulchral voice, “an assistant almost lost his life as a consequence of sepsis in a laceration received during a postmortem examination …”

“Calling next witness, John McNamara Sr.”

Blanche has no idea when she’s going to be asked to recite her lies, she realizes. As the only one who was in the bedroom when the bullets flew in the window, shouldn’t she be first after the autopsy report? She’d rather get it over with, frankly—paint herself a fool, a typically irrational female, and get out of this airless chamber.

Coroner Swan keeps his inquiries focused strictly on the events immediately before the death. There’s nothing about Jenny’s history or her character. “Who was in the settlement on Thursday night, to your knowledge?”

“The what?” McNamara’s got the eyes of a stunned steer.

“The hamlet, the village, if you will, of San Miguel Station,” explains the coroner, as if to a child.

“Right, s-sir, right you are.” McNamara’s stammering. “Mrs. Holt the station keeper, now, for one, but I doubt she’d know one end of a gun from—”

“Confine yourself to the facts,” Swan interrupts. “Nobody is expecting you to solve the crime—if indeed a crime has been committed,” he adds, scrupulous.

If? As if someone stalking partridge by moonlight might have accidentally fired at the Eight Mile House!

There’s Ellen in the crowd, tight-lipped with nerves, and Mary Jane. John Jr. must be minding the small ones at home, Blanche deduces.

“Mrs. Holt, Jordan,” says McNamara, counting on his thick fingers, “Mrs. Louis—but her husband’s away to San Jose at the moment—”

McNamara shrugs. “We just know them as Mr. and Mrs. Louis.”

“Carry on.”

“Miss Blanche—Miss Beunon, I should say—she drove herself down in a buggy. Tuesday, it was.”

“And Miss Bonnet?” asks Swan.

No answer from McNamara.

“How did Miss Bonnet arrive?”

Does the Irishman want to avoid mentioning the bicycle? Blanche wonders. She broods again over what she dismissed as a cracked theory yesterday, that the McNamaras planned the murder as an elaborate way of stealing the expensive machine.

“By—by a high-wheeler,” says McNamara, with an odd formality, “is how the person came down.”

“Was it your understanding that these women were in flight from some enemy? Some persons in the City, perhaps?”

Blanche groans inwardly and pulls her straw hat so the veil hangs a little farther over her face. Despite his air of neutrality, of course Coroner Swan has read the papers and talked to the detectives. He must be trying to lead McNamara’s testimony in the direction of the violent macs Blanche spoke of.

“I—my understanding was that the two—the individuals in question were just after a spree.”

“Their intention being to indulge in hard drinking in your saloon?”

Blanche’s mouth tightens. What else is there to do at San Miguel Station?

“In my hotel,” McNamara corrects him pompously. “And in the liquor shop next door.”

“This would be …” Swan consults his papers. “Philip Jordan’s grocery and general store?”

“Returning to your hotel, Mr. McNamara. Would it be incorrect to say that you make the greatest part of your profits from the sale of alcoholic beverages?”

McNamara grimaces. “There wouldn’t be much profit in any of it.”

Blanche can believe that.

“Did the women drink at your bar during the three nights of their stay?”

McNamara is shifting from foot to foot. “Everyone took their fill, anyhow.”

“Everyone, meaning the two women?”

The Irishman’s shaking his head desperately.

“They didn’t drink?”

McNamara takes a great rattling breath. “What you have to understand, Your Honor, is that I’d no notion they were women.”

Every eye in the room locks on him.

“Not that the both of them were, I mean.”

Coroner Swan is squinting down his nose at the Irishman. “You believed the deceased to be male, despite being on record as having furnished her with occasional lodging over the past half dozen years?”

Laughter wafting up now.

“We’re simple people,” McNamara says with a groan. “How were we to know the class of carry-on we were dealing with?”

Hoots of mirth now.

McNamara’s disowning Jenny, Blanche realizes. Irrationally afraid his grubby saloon will be tarred by the association, he’s trying to deny any friendship with the cross-dressing hellion who got herself killed there.

“What was the name you knew this, ah, putative male by?”

McNamara licks his flaking lips. “Bonnet.”

“No Christian name?”

That raises another laugh.

Blanche is stiff with rage. Jenny’s not a harlot now but a heathen?

It’s some slight relief to her that Swan clearly doesn’t believe a word. “You never connected this beardless, light-voiced Bonnet working as a frog-catcher,” he summarizes dryly, “with Jenny Bonnet the frog-catching girl, notorious as a pants-wearer in all the City papers?”

McNamara mumbles something about not reading the papers.

Swan moves on to the events of Wednesday, the thirteenth, the night before the murder.

Blanche remembers riding back from Sweeney Ridge as vividly as if she were there now: the scalding pink of the setting sun. When she and Jenny reached the Eight Mile House, tired out, the two of them had a fancy for cocktails, but McNamara had no bitters, so they settled on a Martinez of sweet red vermouth, gin, and a couple of cherries from a sticky old bottle. Jenny fizzed like soda pop, singing at the top of her voice and drumming on the bar.

Swan is leading McNamara through the sudden arrival of stableman Charles St. Clair to retrieve the buggy Blanche had forgotten to return to Marshall’s.

That quarrel was Blanche’s fault, she’d be the first to admit. She had just about enough left over from what Lamantia paid her, so she could have settled up with the stableman. But how dared St. Clair track them down in San Miguel Station that way, barge in on their jollification and address them as if they were lowlifes? All Blanche did was point out that his boss would make more money the longer Blanche kept the buggy, so why cause her aggravation over it? At that point, in her reckoning, the row became St. Clair’s fault, because he was the one who grabbed Blanche by the sleeve and mentioned the revolver in his pocket …

“Is that the man in question?” asks Swan.

McNamara looks sideways at St. Clair. “I wouldn’t care to say that it is or it isn’t.” He’s clearly so rattled by the male-or-female business that he’s afraid to state anything for a fact.

St. Clair lets out a laugh. “Why, that mick was so top-heavy Wednesday night, I’d be surprised if he could tell me from the side of a house!”

“You’ll get your chance to testify, sir,” says Swan coldly, “unless your interruptions oblige me to bar you from this court of inquest.”

St. Clair, subdued, folds his arms.

“Now.” Coroner Swan reaches into a wooden cube labeled Evidence. “Do you recognize this, Mr. McNamara?”

He peers at it. “It’s her—it’s Bonnet’s Colt, isn’t it?”

Another disturbance: a youngish man with a long double-pointed beard stands up. “As a point of information,” he says in a distinctly Prussian accent, “the revolver is mine.”

“And who are you, may I ask?” Swan sighs.

“Julius Funkenstein, sir, a dealer in real estate and movables.”

“By which you mean a pawnbroker?”

“I have a variety of business dealings throughout the City …”

Won that off a California infantryman, Jenny crows in Blanche’s memory.

“Then you may make application to the City treasurer in due course for the retrieval of your property, if such it is.” Swan puts the gun back in the box.

“Humbly, sir,” says Funkenstein, “she still owed me some nineteen dollars on it …”

That strikes Blanche as the saddest thing, somehow, that Jenny hadn’t even paid off her gun. How many of her grand claims were hogwash?

“Only that they had a bit of a barney, the women—I mean—” McNamara stumbles to correct himself.

“Bonnet and Beunon, yes. What was the nature of the dispute?”

“Bonnet was heading back to the City but Beunon wouldn’t stand for it. Said she—Bonnet—was so stewed she’d ride into the ditch. Then they retired to, ah, our guest chamber. Bonnet went out on the porch for a pipe,” he adds.

And Blanche can see Jenny, as clear as day. Don’t smoke that thing in here, Blanche told her, so Jenny strolled out onto the moonlit porch, glowing like a ghost.

“In your nightshirt, correct?”

“Ah, my best one, that my wife lent her, yes.”

That’s how Jenny operated: Wandered through the world without the things everyone else called necessities. Rustled them up as required.

“They called me in to fix the blind,” McNamara hurries on, “and to give them a drop of cognac.”

“What was wrong with the blind?” asks Coroner Swan.

“It was slipping down, you know, skew-ways.”

Like everything else in the Eight Mile House, thinks Blanche.

“Have you brought a piece, as instructed?”

“I have, sir, a bit that a bullet went right through,” says McNamara, rooting in his trouser pocket until he finds the green scrap and holds it up.

Coroner Swan hands it to the jurymen, who pass it around as if it’s a treasure map and confabulate in mutters.

“In your view, Mr. McNamara, would a person standing outside the window have been able to see through this blind, into the room, given that there was a candle burning?”

“Perhaps we can take it as a given that his sight was good, judging by his subsequent success in shooting a woman dead?” Swan’s getting tired; you can hear it in the occasional flash of sarcasm.

But the killer didn’t need to see through the blind, thinks Blanche, because right after their shiftless bum of a landlord stuck it back up on its nail and left, the nail fell right out of the plaster. The green cloth was left hanging sideways with a gap down the side the width of a sword. Was it Arthur who somehow managed to sneak into San Miguel Station, pacify the dogs, get onto the rickety porch without a sound, and look in at Blanche and Jenny getting ready for bed? Or had he left the country already, having asked his faithful ape to see to Blanche, fix her for good and all? Was it Ernest alone who climbed up for his final trick, shotgun on his shoulder, with Arthur’s orders burning like a brand on his heart?

McNamara’s describing the gunfire now: the havoc, the gore. Blanche refuses to listen.

Next to be called up is not Blanche nor McNamara’s wife, but his daughter, even though she’s only fifteen. Mary Jane’s done her best, ironed her frock (though from where Blanche stands, about five people behind her, she can see a stain near the hem).

She begins by repeating, as if by rote, what her father said about none of them having any idea that Bonnet was female.

Blanche can’t stop herself from letting out a snort, which makes heads turn.

Mary Jane blinks several times.

“On Wednesday, the thirteenth, were you in the saloon when the stableman turned up?”

The girl nods eagerly. “He—Mr. St. Clair—said he’d spill Miss Blanche’s blood if she didn’t pay up right away.”

Blanche doesn’t remember anything as colorful as that.

“Did St. Clair produce a firearm?”

“Well, he had a revolver in his pocket and he kept fooling with it.”

“And Bonnet?”

Care to receive a bullet through your brains, Jenny quipped to St. Clair, or have you got plans for this evening?

“She told my brother to fetch—”

Swan interrupts. “This would be John McNamara Jr.? Is he in court today?”

“Sure he’s only twelve,” calls out Ellen McNamara, histrionic, from the crowd.

“She sent John to go get her Colt,” Mary Jane says, struggling on.

Blanche remembers being irritated by that. All those times Jenny walked around with the thing in her pocket and now, just when it would be handy to brandish, she’d left it under the mattress! St. Clair called Jenny a half-size boaster, Blanche remembers, and Jenny quoted something back at him about it not being the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.

“I believed St. Clair might pull his piece out and gun us all down,” Mary Jane goes on in a rush, “so I stopped him.”

“How did you manage that?”

The girl stands a little straighter, smiles hesitantly.

Making up her next lie, thinks Blanche.

“I caught hold of his arm and asked him to please leave off, for my sake, and he said he would.”

The vain little shammer!

What Blanche is remembering about Wednesday evening now is John Jr. slipping through the saloon with Jenny’s revolver in his hands like some ingenious toy and putting it into her lap. Jenny grinned down at him, and said, That’s a boy!

“Afterward,” asks Swan, “did the visitors make any comment on the incident?”

For the first time, the girl seems flustered.

“Well, Miss McNamara?”

“She boasted she’d made him … take water.”

The phrase puzzles Blanche.

“This is Miss Beunon you’re quoting?”

“Bonnet,” says Mary Jane in a small voice.

“Bonnet said she’d make him—”

“I heard her say to Miss Blanche, ‘Reckon we made that fellow take water.’”

“Take on water, the way a leaking boat might?” Swan wonders.

The girl shrugs unhappily.

And suddenly Blanche gets it: not take but make. Reckon we made him piss his pants, yes, that’s what Jenny said. Blanche almost laughs aloud.

Swan sighs over his papers. Then taps a phrase on one page. “Dr. Crook observed a pair of black eyes on the deceased—an injury of very recent date. Did you see anyone hit Bonnet that night?”

Mary Jane hesitates, and her eyes slide to her parents.

Blanche stiffens. Have they coached her on this point?

“That night or the following day,” Swan prods, “any blow which could have occasioned bruising?”

Blanche’s pulse is hammering with relief. Though she guesses that the McNamaras are leaving out this particular incident to avoid giving the impression that their so-called hotel is the kind of dive where fistfights break out every five minutes.

“The next evening, Thursday, the fourteenth,” Swan says, moving on. “When did you last see the deceased?”

“A few minutes before it—before the shooting. I’d been lying on their bed. It’s my room when we don’t have lodgers,” adds Mary Jane awkwardly, “mine and my little sister’s and brother’s.”

“Are you in the habit of such familiarities with a guest whom you believe to be of the opposite sex, Miss McNamara?”

The coroner’s punishing the family for their lies, Blanche realizes.

The girl flushes to the eyes. “I was only being friendly.”

“Let me put this delicately. Are you friendly with men who visit your father’s saloon?”

“I am not!” A sob escapes her. “I don’t know how you—”

“That’s all at present. You may step down.”

Such power men have, thinks Blanche, when one of them merely hinting that a girl’s on the town sends her racing as if from a rattlesnake.

The funny thing is that nobody on the witness stand has mentioned Jenny’s criminal past. From reading the papers, everybody’s aware of the drunkenness and whoring and scrapes with the law; that knowing judgment lies behind every word they all say.

Blanche needs the lavatory. If she isn’t called up to give her testimony soon, she doesn’t know how she’s going to last …

“Next witness, Charles St. Clair.”

This is ridiculous. Don’t they want to hear from Blanche, the one person who was there, right there in the room?

A knot of newsmen at the back, taking notes. She averts her face.

“Miss Blanche?”

Cartwright; she hurries through the double doors to get out of range. Blanche can’t bear his sympathetic gaze now. Not when she’s about to change her tune and contradict every honest word she told him yesterday. In what terms will he denounce her in the Chronicle tomorrow?

The toilets are rather grand: mahogany seats and marble basins. Blanche realizes why she’s feeling so sick, and it’s not just the lack of breakfast. All morning she’s been expecting Detective Bohen to stand up and lay out the whole situation in his authoritative tone: the sinister Frenchmen who attacked Blanche and Jenny last week, and threatened worse … Then, even if Blanche denies everything, there’ll still be a good chance that the jury will lay the blame where they should, at Arthur and Ernest’s door. But instead, everything that’s been said so far amounts to a dull recounting of Jenny’s last few days. As if she brought the shower of bullets down on herself!

Which means that if Blanche doesn’t point a finger at the macs, nobody will.

What does she mean, if? She won’t point any finger. Blanche made up her mind in the apartment yesterday the moment Ernest mentioned P’tit.

No, she must keep silent about P’tit, hold him in her mind like a candle on the verge of being snuffed out. His life—if he’s alive, Blanche reminds herself, if she read Ernest’s tone right, if this is not some elaborate trick—his life may be in her hands as much as it was when she snatched him out of the weeklies room on Folsom Street less than a month ago.

I admit I bore a grudge against Monsieur Deneve, she practices. I realize now that he could have had no way of knowing that the deceased—that Jenny and I were in San Miguel Station. Unbeknownst to me, he had already gone abroad, besides. I wish to express my deepest regret for having accused him falsely. The formal lines ring hollow. If Blanche is going to do this—betray Jenny for the merest possibility of seeing P’tit—then she should at least deliver a convincing performance.

Ernest ought to have told her exactly what to say when he barked out his orders in the empty apartment yesterday, should have set her lines to learn by heart. It occurs to Blanche now, bending over the sink, that perhaps he’s expecting her to make up some brilliant new theory that’ll send the detectives off in another direction. Should she mention the stolen bicycle and cast aspersions on the McNamaras? Or posit a madman roaming through the City’s hinterlands? Blanche would be more than willing if only she could think of a halfway plausible story.

She needs the toilet again. Runs for it.

It’s flimflam, the notion that she’s entered into some kind of unspoken contract with a murderer! Ernest has more than a few reasons to hate Blanche, and she has no basis for trusting him. What if she goes into that courtroom now, swears on the Good Book and clears Arthur’s name, walks out onto Dupont Street—and never hears from either of the men again? Ernest will leave town tonight, she guesses. Blanche will have betrayed her friend’s cause for nothing. And she’ll never know what’s become of her baby. Blanche was aware of all this already, but she’s been trying not to think about it. Whatever she tells the coroner, whichever way she twists, one thing’s pretty much sure: she’s lost P’tit.

Weak-legged, Blanche emerges from the lavatory. She reels in the sunlight as she walks out of the undertaker’s. City Health Officer Orders Fumigation of Every Building in Chinatown, a headline thunders.

Yeah, yeah, she remembers Jenny kidding, when the next quake comes they’ll probably blame that on the Chinese too.

A busker with a sweat-soaked shirt and the staring eyes of the blind is chirping away merrily, accompanying himself on two pairs of bones:

Jenny would have stopped to listen to him, swapped a verse or two. Jenny would have told Ernest where he could shove his threats. Jenny was sometimes blue, maybe, but never scared.

Blanche presses her hand over her mouth, hard.

What do you reckon, Jenny? Should I march in there and tell the truth, never mind the consequences?

Then her mind changes back again, with a sickening lurch of gears. If there’s the slimmest chance … Whether this works or not, in years to come Blanche has to be able to tell herself that she tried, bet everything, for P’tit’s sake. This is what mothers do for their babies: they bite their tongues and let the world ride them into the ground. So Blanche is going to walk back into that inquest and make a liar of herself for the merest hope in hell that P’tit will be spared—just as she was so strangely spared two nights ago, when the bullets whizzed over her head instead of through it.

“Miss Beunon!”

She spins around.

It’s Cartwright, lifting his blue glasses to wipe his shiny nose. “Didn’t you hear them call your name? Better hustle before Swan finds you in contempt.”

She doesn’t know what that means but it sounds bad. Putain, all this fretting over what to say, and she may miss her chance to say anything!

Cartwright trots along beside her, into the building. “Did you hear Girard was arrested?”

Blanche wheels around, stares at him.

“Last night,” he adds.

This changes everything. If Ernest is in jail being interrogated right this minute, then surely the detectives will crack the truth out of him? They’ll find some fragment of evidence that he went out to San Miguel Station on Thursday and shot Jenny. In which case, this inquest is Blanche’s best—her only—chance to speak up loud and clear, with the world listening, and nail the sons of bitches.

“Miss Beunon, I presume?” asks Swan sourly as she scuttles up the aisle formed by the crowd.

Blanche is too breathless to speak, almost. And suddenly wonders if she’s committing a crime by not using her paper name. (That equestrienne, Adèle Beunon, whose idea of danger was slipping off a horse—how far away she seems to Blanche, how ignorant.)

She steps up on the little platform. From this position she can see the crowd so much better. She slaps her hand on the Bible and says “I do” almost before the clerk has finished the question. Like a wedding, she thinks. Then: Concentrate. No more faltering. Arthur’s left town and Ernest is locked up. The tide of power has turned.

“How long have you known the deceased?”

“A month. Not quite,” Blanche admits. That sounds bad, somehow, shallow.

“At what point did you become aware that she was a female like yourself?”

A female, but not like myself, Blanche corrects him in her head. “I was never under that misapprehension,” she says coldly. “When the occasional fool read her wrong at twenty yards, that wasn’t Jenny’s lookout, was it? If somebody takes me for the queen of England, am I to be had up for impersonation?”

Gales of laughter—and Blanche wasn’t even trying to be entertaining.

“No, but—” The story’s racing too far ahead, and Blanche has to get a grip on it. “I’d left Arthur, you see, and he was eaten up with spite—”

“This would be Arthur Deneve?” Swan fingers his notes. “Your, your mac, I believe your compatriots say?”

“My lover,” she says flatly. But why is she calling Arthur that, Arthur who’s destroyed everything? Lover? Blanche could laugh, she could puke with the absurdity of it all. At the very moment when she stands up to testify against him and Ernest, she’s invoking love?

“When did the connection end?”

She blinks at Swan. “Ah, a week—ten days ago, perhaps—” How to pick one moment and say that’s when love ended, or when it was found to never have been there at all? “He formed a vicious grudge against Jenny.” Against me, really, she wants to say. Because it was Blanche who shamed him by refusing to service the American he brought home, and before that, because she wouldn’t go near him during his smallpox, and before that, because she carried the baby home from Folsom Street, and because, because—there’s always another layer to the onion. But saying any of that will lead to Blanche having to explain her conviction that it was her, not Jenny, the gun was aimed at, and that strikes her as an unnecessary complication for a jury whose members are looking more than a little bewildered already.

“A grudge of what nature?”

“He—” Blanche fumbles for words. How to simplify enough that the jurors get the main point, which is that Arthur’s the murderer? “He was furious with Jenny because—I was going about with her a bit this summer, and he thought it was she who put it into my head to break with him.”

“Was it?”

“Miss Beunon?” Wearily.

“He took my baby!” It comes out of her in a wail.

“There’s no reference here to any baby,” says Swan, flicking through his notes.

“Our little boy, one year old,” Blanche adds. Does she sound sad enough? Her sorrow is real, Christ knows, but it’s hard to display it on demand. “He—Arthur and Ernest, they stole him away from me.”

“This would be …” The coroner scans the pages. “Ernest Girard. Where is this child now?”

“I don’t—” Her voice is shaking too much for her to finish.

Swan asks no more. Makes a note.

Blanche closes her eyes. If P’tit is dead already, then she’s doing the right thing by denouncing the bastards who did it. And if by any chance he isn’t—

She sees herself visiting Ernest in jail tonight and crisply demanding to know her child’s whereabouts. If P’tit’s alive, why wouldn’t Ernest give him back to her at this point? She might even be able to make him fork over some of her stolen money. Anything’s possible, now Ernest’s under lock and key.

So she spills out more and more, eager to make the jury understand before Swan can interrupt her. “The two men stayed in my apartment—the building I owned, the whole building, number eight fifteen Sacramento Street—and then, I learned just yesterday that they sold it out from under me for eighteen hundred dollars. Arthur stole two or three hundred more in cash from me besides that, and took it all away overseas. Left me with only the clothes I have on.” Does all this sound too mercenary? “But my child,” she cries, “all that matters is—”

Blanche hesitates. “Yes.” Ernest did, on Waverly Place, and he must have had Arthur’s approval, because Arthur was the master in that pair. “He and Girard … They tried to have Jenny arrested.” That’s a mistake; why bring up Jenny’s criminal record? Hurry on. “They said they’d fix her, throw vitriol in her face.” Blanche is embellishing, but only a little. “Oh, and another time, I forgot to say, Arthur begged me to return to him, he went down on his knees—” If she’s going to beef this up she might as well make it a good full-blooded scene, and after all, she’s not lying, exactly, just filling in the gaps, the times when she wasn’t there. For all Arthur’s bravado, there must have been moments when the scarred man wept for the loss of Blanche, mustn’t there? “And Ernest cried out, ‘Don’t fret, Arthur, I’ll avenge you, I’ll blow out the brains of these two infernal whores!’”

That last expression raises a satisfied hiss from the crowd.

There. It’s done. Blanche takes a long breath.

Swan’s expression is dubious.

Blanche is barely paying attention as he takes her through the events at San Miguel Station (which sound so petty—rides and meals, as if she and Jenny were on a pleasure jaunt to a seaside resort). But when he asks about the black eyes, she blinks. “Yes, Jenny fell off a horse against a tree.” Plausible? But if you fell off a horse, surely what you’d hit would be the ground. “I mean, she rode smack into a low-hanging branch, and then she fell down,” Blanche adds. Chut, don’t overcomplicate it.

“Was she drunk?” asks Swan.

Blanche doesn’t want the jurymen to think of Jenny as a no-account dipso, because then they won’t care who killed her, but she must make the accident credible. “She … had some taken.”

“I reasoned with her,” Blanche corrects him, “for her own safety.” Safety? Dead an hour later. Guilt turns Blanche’s tongue to stone in her mouth.

“Now, the deceased got into bed before you, yes?”

Blanche nods. “I sat—I was sitting on the edge.”

“What were her last words?”

She won’t cry, not here in front of all these gaping strangers. As if a person’s last words matter so much more than all the others. “She didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing?”

Qu’est-ce, that’s all Blanche remembers hearing after the gunfire, which could have been the start of Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça? or Qu’est-ce qui m’est arrivé? But maybe it was an English word after all, it occurs to her now, that choking guttural, then a final hiss in the dark: kiss, is that what she heard? Could Jenny have been asking for a kiss before all the life spurted out of her? But Jenny had never asked Blanche for any favors—not a shirt, not a dollar, and certainly not a kiss.

“One final point that troubles me, Miss Beunon,” says Coroner Swan. “You told Detective Bohen that you were crouched down, untying a gaiter, just when, outside the window, the murderer was aiming the gun?”

She bristles; crouched down, that sounds deliberate, surreptitious. Could he be implying that she was in on the plot? “I didn’t know, did I?” As if Blanche’s body could have been expected to feel the danger coming. People have no idea of the things that don’t happen to them—the lives they’re not living, the deaths stalking them—and thank Christ for that. Hard enough to get through each day without glimpsing all the hovering possibilities, like insects thickening the air.

“Does it not strike you as more than a little coincidental?”

But Swan’s still brooding. “Let’s consider the statistical probability of your just so happening to bend over at the very moment the assassin pulled the trigger. You dipped out of the line of fire, with the consequence that the eight bullets went right over you, within inches of your body.”

What does he want Blanche to say? That she’s sorry she’s alive?

“It strains credulity,” mutters Swan. “That’s all.”

She waits. Oh, he means she can get down?

“No more witnesses,” declares the clerk as Blanche steps into the crowd.

That’s it? But nobody’s jumped up with the missing pieces of the puzzle, Blanche thinks, bereft.

The waiting’s hard to bear. The audience members shuffle, chat, eat nuts, sip from little flasks.

Then a surge as the jury files back into the airless room. Do these men’s faces bear the righteous expression of Americans who’ve determined to send a pair of Frogs to the gallows? Blanche can’t read them at all.

The foreman is hoarse with nerves but still seems to relish his moment in the limelight. “We find that the deceased came to her death by violence, by gunshot wounds specifically—” He clears his throat.

She wishes he’d get on with it.

“—at the hands of persons unknown to the jury.”

Blanche almost groans. Is that old news all this rigmarole of an inquest has come up with?

Murmurs of excitement in court.

Ah, now, this is more like it, this might do the trick. Principals or accessories: that has a serious ring to it. Is that enough to drag Arthur back from wherever he’s run to? France, even? And Ernest, locked up in a police cell. They’ll hold him now till they’ve squeezed enough evidence out of him. Surely he’ll pay in some measure for those eight bullets?

“Thank you, gentlemen,” says Swan. If he’s disappointed that the jury didn’t reach any more definite conclusion, he clearly believes it would be improper to show it. “Funeral to follow at two p.m. sharp.”

Blanche stumbles out with the crowd.

Her stomach growls, startling her. She hasn’t eaten today. Strange, how the petty needs continue to clamor in the middle of serious ones.

Detective Bohen stands on the sidewalk outside Gray’s, holding forth to newspapermen. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the rate of bloodshed has doubled during this unseasonable heat, although—”

He’s interrupted. “What does it cost to hire a killer in this City, sir?”

“From two hundred up to a thousand dollars, according to our sources,” says Bohen.

“Have you received offers of aid of a clairvoyant nature?”

“Unsolicited offers, yes, as usual, but—”

“Mr. Bohen?” Blanche calls.

He glances at her.

She needs to know. “Principals or accessories: Is that enough?”

He frowns.

The newsmen scribble in their notebooks and smirk at Blanche.

“Is the verdict enough to hang Girard, at least?” she hisses.

“Persons unknown is the pertinent phrase.”

“But the jury—”

“Only a coroner’s jury, and all they have is a hunch. It may be a hunch on which I look with some sympathy, but it’s no more than that.”

“But the evidence says—it points to the two of them, that’s what the foreman said,” says Blanche, hearing herself whine.

“A criminal case requires more than pointing, Miss Beunon,” he snaps. “I’ve heard no proof of either Deneve or Girard traveling to San Miguel Station on Thursday or inducing someone else to do so.”

Her mind is spinning with frustration. “Well, can’t you interrogate Ernest—tell him it’ll be him or Arthur who’ll pay for this, come down on him hard—”

“I can only imagine what kind of methods are used in Parisian police stations,” says Bohen coldly, “and occasionally I do envy your gendarmes the free rein they’re given. It is highly inconvenient that our citizens have the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.”

She grits her teeth. These smug Americans and their rights. “I just mean, shouldn’t a prisoner be made to tell all he knows?”

“This morning, Girard told all he needed to tell, which was that he spent Thursday evening in the lodgings he shares with one Madeleine George. A fact that Miss George promptly confirmed, leaving us with no further justification to hold him.”

Blanche blinks. Madeleine? That salope! “But a woman would always lie for her man.”

“There were other witnesses, acquaintances who visited the pair that evening.”

“So could anyone, Miss Beunon—so could you, for that matter—but there’s no proof.”

She might take offense at that, but something’s stuck in her head, something the man said a minute ago. No further justification to hold him. “You ain’t going to let Ernest go yet?”

“As a matter of fact, he was released some hours ago.”

The cry that comes out of her mouth sounds like it’s made by some small animal seized by a hawk.

The detective’s face creases with annoyance. “These things take time. Slowly but surely, with a rigorous application of logic—”

Blanche stumbles away from him without another word.

“Miss Beunon?” Now it’s Cartwright of the Chronicle at her elbow.

She shakes the reporter off. “You told me half an hour ago that Ernest was in jail, but they’ve already let him out!”

“Is that so?” He grimaces. “Look, miss, I’m doing my best.”

“Doing your best to sell fish wrap.”

“I hope boosting sales of the Chronicle’s not incompatible with striving for justice—”

“You’re all bull,” she cuts in. “Inventing Jenny’s last words! ‘Adieu, I follow my sister …’”

“If I leave anything out, the editor fills it in,” says Cartwright, sheepish. “I’m afraid what we term the news is something of a crazy quilt of fact and fiction.”

But Blanche has turned away, quickly leaving the newsman behind.

There’s that monstrosity of an organ at the corner, the automata still ducking and waving to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Blanche goes the other way to escape its din.

What has she done?

P’tit’s slipped through her fingers one last time.