Page 64 of If Looks Could Kill
“I mean,” I went on, “before you arm yourself for battle against what theymightsay, see what they actually do say.”
She sighed. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? Can’t I just sleep tonight?”
I rose from the bed. “Of course.”
I was almost out of the room when Freyda’s voice stopped me.
“Tabitha,” she said, “do you have snakes for hair too?”
My hand went to my skull. Nothing there but my normal hair, more rumpled than not.
“Not that I know of,” I told her. “Good night, Freyda.”
“Are you going to tell me more about Pearl?” she asked drowsily. “That could be my new feature. ‘Snake Woman Buttons Up Bowery Brothel.’ ‘Medusa Outmaneuvers East End Madam.’ Editors love headlines with alliteration.”
“Goodnight, Freyda.”
Tabitha—A Treat(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
I stood in the upstairs hallway of the silent house and heard a cuckoo clock chime. Just a singlecuck-oo.Half past the hour. Half past nine. Nearly time to find Mike.
Frozen, faithful Mike.
Pearl was asleep. Freyda, heading toward sleep. Cora, still soaking in the tub. There was nothing, I thought, that should prevent me just nipping outside briefly to hand Mike his coat and thank him again for heroically helping us. I owed him at least that much. I wouldn’t invite him in, but a moment or two of conversation on the front steps wouldn’t hurt anyone, provided the street seemed empty.
Miss Stella, I reasoned, had most likely come upstairs to bed. I buttoned up my coat and crept down the stairs as silently as I could. I trod softly on the tile floor of the foyer and felt my way along the wall to the door to the next set of stairs.
“Leaving already, young lady?”
I admit it. I yipped like a pet poodle.
The click of her walking stick was the only sign I had of Miss Stella’spresence. With the candles snuffed out, she was barely more than a darker shadow amid the blackness. I must have been about the same to her.
“You startled me,” I confessed.
I heard the strike and flare of a match as she lit a taper. Soon candlelight danced across her features, and her serpent crown.
“Was there something you needed?” Miss Stella asked. “Something for your room?”
My mind formed a reply about my patient, freezing friend waiting outside, but my gaze fell upon her diamond-white snakes, glistening by candlelight, and other thoughts slipped away.
Unlike Pearl’s hissing snakes, Miss Stella’s seemed more snuggled into one another than risen up to frighten me. These were genteel. Leisured. Like serpents snoozing, sunning on a rock.
I watched them, and for the first time today, there was no abject horror. No shock of the unexpected. No terror of tragedy befalling my companion. No panic of gunshots and fallen pimps in a house of sin. Just a calm, peaceful scene—a fearless woman, standing before me, holding high and erect a head topped with sedate serpents, sliding across and through each other, supple and slow, and shining like stars.
Miss Stella, it seemed, could interpret my silence. She liked the admiration. It emboldened me to speak.
“Can you, er, put them away?” I ventured. “If you want to, I mean.”
“If I want to?”
“I mean,” I said, “that Pearl’s, er, came and went. They’re not there now.”
A small smile appeared on her face. “At my age,” she said wryly, “what’s left of my hair is not much to look at. But these”—here she cupped a gentle hand against her snakes, much as girls sometimes fondly cradle and bounce their ringlets—“theseare as luxurious as ever. White suitsthembetter than it suits an old lady’s thinning hair.”
“Luxurious” was, indeed, the word.
My thoughts returned to Mike and to the coat in my hand.
