Page 102 of If Looks Could Kill
He turned his collar up against the cold and hurried back to the main thoroughfare. Not even eighteen years of faithful service could earn a shipping tariff clerk a longer lunch break.
A figure seemed to peel itself away from the wall and block his path. He hadn’t seen her there at all.
“Pardon me.” He moved to go around her.
She sidestepped to block him.
“Did you enjoy your visit today?”
The speaker was a young woman, but her voice sent a shiver up his spine.
“I beg your pardon?” His voice cracked. “My visit where?”
She took a step closer. “We both know where you’ve just been.”
George’s senses prickled. Something wasn’t quite right about this young woman. Then he realized. Of course. She was the local competition.
“If you’re offering your services, I’m afraid I’m not the sort of man to—”
She pulled her shawl back off her head.
Her eyes arrested George first. Deep, dark-rimmed, and accusing. He shuddered.
But her tongue!
Herhair.
He felt himself melt. He was a sack of liquid. An egg, a pool of slime encased in a flimsy shell. Before him stood a column of flame. Fire-hot serpents, with eyes searing through him. A burning woman, but he was boiling. Broiling. Frying inside his own skin.
In her swirling eyes, he saw three girls. The girl he’d been with just now. His own daughter, not much younger. And, to his great surprise, another girl, as she had looked when he first met her. Far more terrifying than this creature of snakes and fangs before him were the trusting, then comprehending, wounded eyes of his once-young wife.
George Frischmann did not return from lunch to work on time. His knees buckled. He fell forward onto the snake demon girl, who broke his fall, if slightly, on his way down.
Tabitha—Purse and Paddy(Monday, December 3, 1888)
I stood in the shade of a nickel lunch counter awning on the Bowery as all over the city noon whistles at factories and workshops began to shrill. Time for workers to find their lunch pails or go in search of a meal, such as one offered by this establishment, whose chalkboard signs announcedBEAN SOUP: 5¢;CLAM CHOWDER: 5¢;HAM AND CHEESE SANDWICH: 5¢; andCORNED BEEF HASH, in case there was any doubt,5¢.
Across the street from me was Steve Brodie’s saloon and, beneath it, the Salvation Army base. My former comrades would soon sit down to a meal of the soup the ladies made, but I knew sometimes Purse Laurier stepped out for a diner meal. I needed to talk to him, though I couldn’t bear the thought of confronting my former fellow soldiers with their thousand questions.
People streamed out of doors. They passed by in their New York rush, heedless of Pearl’s world collapsing all around her, and, for that matter, mine. They took no notice of me, for which I was grateful. I didn’t like being seen on the Bowery. I prayed my ordinary clothes would throw Mother Rosie’s bloodhounds off the scent.
I saw a flash of the dark blue and red of an Army uniform, then Purse’s glossy black curls.
I darted into the wide street and was nearly trampled by a pair of draft horses pulling a wagonload of beer barrels. I ignored the “Watch where you’re going!” and wove my way to the opposite side just in time to catch Purse at a corner.
“Brother Percival,” I called to him. “Wait. Please. I need to talk to you.”
He turned and saw me. His eyes grew wide.
“Miss Tabitha,” he said. “I heard you’d left. And Pearl.”
“Yes,” I said, for lack of anything snappier.
“And I heard something about both of you, and a brothel.”
I tried to behave as though this were perfectly normal. “I see word travels quickly.”
His perfectly shaped eyebrows rose. “So it’s true?”
