Murder in a mill town Page 3

  “Bridie, she worked on them machines over there, with Ruth and Evie.” The girl pointed to two young women struggling together to adjust the leather belt connecting a loom to the line shaft overhead. One was tall, sturdily buxom, and brown-haired; the other plain and petite, with sallow skin and thin cornsilk hair scraped back into a knot at her nape. Like the other mill girls, they wore aprons over their threadbare dresses, the skirts of which were hemmed short, displaying their shoeless feet and ankles.

  “The tall one’s Ruth,” the girl yelled. “Ruth Watson. Little blonde is Evie Corbet.”

  “Do you think they’d talk to me?” Nell asked loudly.

  “About Bridie?” The girl offered a doubtful little shrug. “If they do, they won’t have nothin’ nice to say, I’ll tell you that. They never did take to her, and since she got herself sacked, them two been doin’ the work of three.”

  “Sacked?” Nell asked. “Bridie was fired?”

  “Sure, why do you think she ain’t here no more?”

  Nell wondered if Bridie’s mother knew she’d lost her job, and decided she did. Mrs. Fallon hadn’t wanted to tell Nell about Bridie’s being married, probably because it would mark her as an adulteress. Most likely she’d wanted to withhold all unflattering information about her daughter, at least until Viola had agreed to help her.

  “You might want to wait till Ruth and Evie ain’t workin’ to talk to ‘em,” the girl advised. “Foreman’ll get mad. Maybe during the noon dinner break. It’s comin’ up presently.”

  Nell thanked the girl, pressed a half-dime into her hand, and went outside to wait.

  * * *

  Hewitt Mills and Dye Works was housed in a complex of buildings laid out at drearily precise right angles, ruining an otherwise bucolic setting. Anchoring the arrangement was the woolen factory, a colossal stone box surmounted by a disproportionately puny cupola. It was like a village unto itself, this compound, with its own store, its own church, and rows of brick boarding houses in which the mill girls lived.

  Trees had been planted in soldier-straight lines punctuated by the occasional stone bench. Seating herself on the bench least likely to be seen from Harry Hewitt’s office window beneath the cupola, Nell peeled off her black crocheted gloves, withdrew her little leatherbound sketchbook and mechanical pencil out of the chatelaine hanging from her belt and executed a swift drawing of the woolen factory.

  At precisely twelve noon, a bell within the cupola started clanging. Within seconds, mill employees were streaming through the front door into the welcoming sunshine. Most of the females headed for the company boarding houses, where their dinner presumably awaited them. A few lingered in the courtyard to chat with each other or flirt with the men.

  Nell caught sight of Bridie’s former co-workers, Ruth and Evie, talking to two other mill girls and a strapping young black-haired fellow. He whispered something to the tall brown-haired girl, Ruth, who looked around, then motioned for the others to follow her. Her little blond friend hesitated a moment before giving in to their cajoling, and the furtive little group disappeared between two buildings.

  Nell followed them through a patch of woods to a secluded stretch of riverbank, where the girls were lounging on the grass by the water, watching the young man roll a cigarette. He was coatless, his collarless shirt open, sleeves pushed up. All of the girls, except for Evie, had their skirts rucked up almost to their knees, an indiscretion that would have ruined them utterly and forever had they been Boston society daughters.

  “You plannin’ on sharin’ that, Otis?” asked a pretty, plump young woman as she unbuttoned her snug collar.

  Otis smiled at her as he ran his tongue along the cigarette paper and rubbed it down. “Sure, Mary, I’ll give you a taste if you like.” Leaning over, he slid the cigarette between her lips, withdrew a box of matches and lit it. “I get a kiss for every puff, though.”

  That met with a flurry of giggles that tapered off as the girls noticed Nell walking toward them. They hastily tucked their legs beneath their skirts; Mary hid the cigarette behind her back. Nell had seen women smoking only twice before—an actress and a prostitute. It still struck her as bizarre.

  “Good afternoon,” Nell said as she joined them.

  They exchanged looks. “Afternoon,” Otis muttered.

  “Is that cigarette smoke I smell?” Nell asked.

  Mary was clearly trying to maintain a neutral expression, but her eyes betrayed her dread. Sanctimonious August Hewitt had established strict rules of conduct for the young women employed in his mill; smoking was no doubt cause for censure, if not outright dismissal.

  “I was smoking,” said the young man as he reached behind Mary to take the cigarette back. “She was just holding it for me while I took my boots off.” Never mind that those boots—he was the only one wearing them—were still on his feet.

  “I was only asking,” Nell said, “because I came back here to have a smoke myself, but I seem to have left my cigarettes at home. I don’t suppose you could spare one?”

  They scrutinized her openly, from her smart little hat to the toes of her black satin boots, no doubt wondering what a lady of her supposed station was doing sneaking cigarettes.

  “I’m not trying to get you in trouble, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Nell said. “I don’t work for Mr. Harry, or anything like that.”

  Ruth said, “What’re you doin’ here, then?”

  Nell withdrew her sketchbook and opened it to the drawing of the factory. They passed it around with considerable interest, peering over one another’s shoulders for a better view.

  “You an artist?” Otis asked.

  “Course she is.” Ruth pointed to the drawing. “You think just anybody could do this? Looks just like a photograph.”

  Not quite, but close enough; Nell was a fanatic for detail. Viola, an accomplished painter who’d studied in Paris when she was young, was always encouraging her to be looser, less strictly representational, but deliberate sloppiness went very much against her grain when she was capable of such exactitude.

  Flipping through the sketchbook, Otis said, “You draw people good, too. Real good.”

  Nell thanked him. “Say, have you ever had your portrait done?”

  “Me?” He snorted as he handed back the little book. “Naw.”

  “How about I give you a sketch of yourself, and in return you give me a cigarette?” she asked.

  “Really? You want to draw me?”

  The girls chortled suggestively as Nell lowered herself onto the grass, praying her dress didn’t stain. She opened her sketchbook to a blank page and rummaged through her chatelaine for her pencil.

  “That Otis,” Ruth said. “He’s a regular ladykiller.”

  “It ain’t like that,” Otis protested. “She’s an artist.”

  The girls teased him good-naturedly as he settled into the pose suggested by Nell—reclining with an easy-to-draw three-quarter profile, his face dappled by sunlight filtering through the trees overhead. A warm breeze flickered the leaves, which still wore their deep, late summer green; the nearby stream burbled soothingly.

  “Are all of you from around here?” Nell asked as she sketched.

  “Otis is,” Mary said through a ripple of smoke as she passed the cigarette to Ruth. “And Evie there.” She nodded to the blond girl. “I’m from New Hampshire. My folks are dairy farmers.”

  Ruth, it turned out, hailed from Vermont; the other girl, Cora, from northwestern Massachusetts. All had been brought up on farms. Most were sending the money they earned, or most of it, back home to their folks. Mary was working so that one brother could go to college and the other could start a lumber business. Only Cora was keeping her earnings for herself; to Nell’s surprise, she was saving to send herself to Mount Holyoke Seminary.

  Otis rolled Nell a cigarette when she tore out the finished sketch and gave it to him. She tucked it into her chatelaine “for later.” All the girls except for quiet little Evie were begging to be drawn. Mindfu
l of the brevity of their dinner hour—or rather, half-hour—Nell posed them together for a group portrait.

  “Do your folks ever worry about you?” she asked as she blocked out the composition with light pencil strokes. “I mean, you’re all fairly young, and most of you are far from home.”

  “Nah, they keep a tight rein on us here,” Ruth said.

  “Too damned tight,” Cora grumbled, the coarse language prompting giggles from everyone but Evie, who let out a scandalized little gasp. “Just ‘cause we work for them, they think they own us. They tell us when to go to bed and when to get up in the morning, who we can talk to, and about what.”

  “If we step off company property after work,” Mary said, “we get chewed out but good, and a black mark goes on our record.”

  Ruth said, “The house mothers, they follow your every move and report the bad stuff to Mr. Harry so’s he can decide what to do about you.”

  Cora rolled her eyes. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “The gall,” Mary said, “a hound like that, with his ways, passin’ judgment on us.”

  “Try not to move, Mary,” Nell said as she swiftly sketched in the girls’ features. “Have you ever known him to actually fire anyone for disobeying the rules?”

  Ruth said, “Well, there was this one girl, Bridie Sullivan...”

  Nell managed not to smile.

  “Her and Evie and me, we all worked together on the same bank of looms—just since June, which was when Bridie started working here. She got herself sacked a few days ago, but there ain’t no question she had it comin’.”

  “Evie?” Everyone turned to find another young man—huge and hulking, with overgrown white-blond hair—emerging from the woods that separated the river from the mill. “Evie, what you doin’ here? You’re s’posed to be at dinner.”

  Evie sighed. Speaking for the first time, she said, “It was too nice out.”

  “I went to your house, lookin’ for you,” he said, his pout very much at odds with his bulk and that thick-chested voice. “Mrs. Hathaway, she’s writin’ you up for skippin’ dinner. You din’t ought to skip dinner.”

  “Sorry, Luther. Here.” Evie patted the ground next to her. “You sit right here with me till it’s time to go back.”

  The others greeted Luther familiarly as he lumbered over to Evie and sat cross-legged. Evie finger-combed his hair as he gazed, open-mouthed, at Nell. “What you doin’?”

  “Don’t stare, Luther,” Evie said. “She’s drawin’ a pitcher. Of Mary and Ruthie and Cora.”

  “Can I see?”

  “It’s not done yet, but here.” Nell turned the sketchbook to show him.

  He grinned in childish delight at the unfinished sketch. “Looks just like ‘em!”

  “Evie and Luther are brother and sister,” Otis told Nell. “Been workin’ here since they was little.”

  “What kind of work do children do?” Nell asked as she returned to her drawing. “Those machines are all so big and complicated.”

  “I was a doffer,” she said. “I took the full bobbins off the spinning frames and put the empty ones on—just fifteen minutes out of every hour. The rest of the time, I got to play. Luther ran errands for the men in the spinning room.”

  “He still does, don’t you, fella?” Leaning over, Otis gave Luther a playful sock on the arm. “Don’t know what us mule spinners would do without ol’ Luther.”

  Rubbing his arm, Luther told Nell, “I’m strong as an ox. Ain’t nobody can carry as much as me, nobody.”

  “He’s a hard worker, our Luther,” Otis said. “We give him sweets when he does good.”

  “I don’t do it for the sweets,” Luther said, seeming genuinely insulted. “I get money, just like you.”

  “What is it they pay you again?” Otis asked with a conspiratorial wink at Nell. “Two dollars a week? Ain’t that what you were makin’ when you were nine?”

  “Don’t ride him, Otis,” Evie said. “You know how he gets when people laugh at him.”

  “I get two dollars and fifty cent.” Luther glowered at Otis. “You don’t know everything.”

  Wanting to defuse the atmosphere and refocus the conversation on her reason for being here, Nell said, “What did you mean before, Ruth—that this Bridie Sullivan had it coming to her when she got fired?”

  “Bridie’s gone,” Luther said.

  His sister said, “Hush, Luther. Everybody knows that.”

  “She was a bad girl.”

  “Luther, just be—”

  “Why do you say that?” Nell asked with feigned nonchalance as she continued to draw, glancing back and forth between her three subjects and her sketchbook.

  Evie answered for him. “He’s just saying that ‘cause it’s what everyone else says.”

  “We knew what she was from the get-go,” Ruth said. “Very first day she come to the mill, I says to Evie, ‘this one’s trouble.’ All laced up tight, with that mountain of red hair. Thought she was better than us, bein’ as she’d lived in Boston and all.”

  “When all she really was,” Mary interjected, “was cheap Irish trash.”

  Nell continued sketching, her expression carefully neutral. It was only those from the old country who recognized her Irishness without hearing her name. There followed a flurry of complaints about no-account foreigners taking over their jobs at the mill, but soon their attention returned to Bridie Sullivan. Nell heard all about Bridie’s face paint and flirty ways, her suspiciously fine clothing and hair combs and boots—the latter being a particular sore point. Evie, she noticed, had fallen silent again.

  “Never did go to church with us,” Mary said, “and she’d raise holy hell about havin’ the tithes taken out of her pay.”

  “On account of she’s a cat-lick,” Ruth added.

  “The church is Protestant,” Cora explained. “Congregationalist. And she didn’t even live here—she lived with her folks. If you ask me, she had a point.”

  “Evie and Luther are cat-licks,” Ruth said. “They go to their own church on Sundays, but they don’t get all het up about the tithes.”

  “They should.” Cora said.

  Evie shrugged and plucked at a blade of grass. Her brother just looked confused.

  Ruth said, “You’re a spooler, Cora. You never did have to work with that Bridie Sullivan, otherwise you wouldn’t be makin’ excuses for her.”

  Redirecting the conversation yet again, Nell asked them how Bridie had come by all her fine trappings.

  “Men give ‘em to her,” Ruth said. “For, you know, makin’ free with herself. That’s the kind she was.”

  “She had this sweetheart, Virgil,” Cora said. “Good looking fella.”

  “‘Cept for them stars,” Ruth said with a shudder.

  “I liked them stars,” Mary said. “Made you wonder about him.”

  Ruth laughed. “I’ll say they did.”

  “If he’d been ugly to start with, I might have felt different about the stars,” Cora said, “but he was so well-built, you know, with shoulders out to there. Dark hair but real fair skin, and the biggest blue eyes you ever saw. The other girls used to try and catch his eye sometimes, till they found out he’d just got out of the calaboose.”

  “What was he in for?” Nell asked.

  “Nobody was on good enough terms with Bridie to ask,” Cora replied.

  “He wasn’t the only one she was dallyin’ with,” Ruth said. “Everything in trousers came sniffin’ around sooner or later, and they didn’t usually leave disappointed, if you know what I mean—so long as they made it worth her while.”

  Mary said, “The really fancy stuff—the bonnets and ear bobs, and most of them dresses—it was Mr. Harry give her them.”

  “Harry Hewitt?” Nell asked, looking up. “Were he and Bridie...did they...?”

  “Every chance they got,” Ruth said. “He’d have that little lickfinger Carlisle come pull her off her shift and bring her up to his office. She’d come back with her ha
ir done different, and this look on her face.”

  “He pulled her off her shift?” Cora asked. “Evie, is that true?”

  Evie, sitting next to her brother with her arms around her updrawn legs, her gaze on the patch of grass at her feet, answered with a shrug.

  Ruth nudged Cora with her shoulder and said in a low voice, “Don’t be askin’ her about Bridie and Mr. Harry.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot.”

  Nell must have looked confused, because Otis grinned and said, “Evie’s sweet on Mr. Harry, has been ever since she was this high. Ain’t that right, Evie?”

  “Leave her be,” Ruth said, while Evie tightened her arms around her legs and looked away.

  “Yeah, you leave her be,” Luther echoed, his neck reddening.

  “Aw, come on, Evie knows the score,” Otis said as he set about rolling another cigarette. “Mr. Harry, he don’t want nothin’ to do with her. All’s he wants is a Bridie Sullivan, or one of them others, to lift her skirts for him up in that fancy office of his.”

  “Others?” Nell asked.

  “Bridie ain’t hardly the only one,” Otis said. “There’s always at least half a dozen of the girls at his beck and call. ‘Harry’s Harem,’ we call ‘em. He’s got a window on his office door with some of those what do you call ‘em...Venetian blinds on it. Whenever the blinds are drawn, you can bet everybody knows just what’s goin’ on in there.”

  “Bridie’s the main one, though,” Mary said. “Or was. You shoulda seen him when she was around. Couldn’t take his eyes off her. It’s like she’d put a spell on him.”

  Ruth said, “Evie, don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.”

  Otis made a sound of disgust. “You ain’t doin’ Evie no favor, tellin’ her that. For cryin’ out loud. Harry Hewitt ain’t lookin’ for no mill girl to fall in love with and take home to Mama, ‘specially some mousy little hayseed like—”

  “You shut your mouth,” Luther demanded. “Just shut your mouth.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ nothing Evie don’t already know,” Otis said. “Why don’t you tell your sister not to get all moony over a rich pretty boy that ain’t never gonna look twice at the likes of her? Here she is, all wrung out over Mr. Harry and eaten up with jealousy over Bridie Sullivan, when—”