Page 138 of If Looks Could Kill
This goes on everywhere, I reminded myself. In countless numbers in this city alone.
I am not special. I am not chosen. I am not alone in this nightmare, or this pain.
Bring them home.
Oh, sweet Jesus, bring me home, I prayed, and I promise, I promise I will devote the rest of my life to this. Because I know you love these other girls too.
And if I can’t go home, dear God, give me strength to endure what’s coming.
Sarah picked up the salmon outfit. “I know this one,” she said. “It’ll look nice on you.”
“Sarah,” I whispered, “wouldn’t you leave if you could?”
Sarah gave me a cold look. “Don’t ask stupid questions,” she said. “Leave me out of it. I’m not getting beat up on account of you.”
I shrank back. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re in for a rough time of it here,” she said. “I was trying to warn you.” She tossed the salmon silk at me. It rolled down my front like water pouring down a glass.
“You’d better get changed,” she told me. “If you don’t, Mack or Zeke’ll beat you and dress you in it themselves. You don’t want that.”
Lower East Side, ManhattanPearl—Out of Tartarus(Early Morning, Tuesday, December 4, 1888)
The figure bends over Pearl. Her face and hair are pale, but her clothing is dark, so she seems to be a floating head. She vanishes so suddenly that Pearl thinks she dreamed her.
Then she hears her at the foot of the stairs, stamping out the fire.
She returns and snarls at Jack, then bends down and slides her arms under Pearl’s shoulders, lifting her carefully to her feet. She murmurs strange words into Pearl’s ear that she can’t understand. She smells singed, like burning firewood.
She all but carries Pearl up the basement stairs and out the back door, into the alleyway. She bears most of Pearl’s weight as they round the corner onto the side street and, from there, onto Tenth Street itself.
The crowd of onlookers has vanished, and the street is desolate. The mysterious girl turns this way and that, unsure of where to go or what to do.
“Oy!”
Pearl turns slowly toward the sound of the voice and of running footsteps. A short, stocky figure emerges from the darkness into the glow of a streetlight, with two taller lads at his heels.
“Itisyou!” he gasps.
“Oscar?”
He turns to his mates. “Fellas, I knows this bundle,” he crows. “She’s a Hallelujah Lass from the neighborhood. The pretty one I toldja about, who’s good at selling papers.”
She looks at the grubby paperboys and wonders if she’s delirious.
“I’m Pearl,” she tells them.
“?’Sright, Pearl,” Oscar says.
The other girl perks up at this. “Pearl,” she repeats in a foreign accent. The girl taps her own breastbone. “Nicolette.” French, perhaps?
Oscar’s companions’ eyes grow wide at the sight of Pearl’s blood-soaked dress. “Geez, lady, you’re bleeding awful,” one of them tells her. “Did Jack the Ripper do that to you?”
In some corner of her fading consciousness, it amuses Pearl to think she’ll be giving these lads the tale of a lifetime. They’d tell their grandchildren someday.
“He did,” she tells them. “He got me. I’m dying.”
Nicolette, her mysterious rescuer, jabbers something at the paperboys that Pearl can’t understand, though she recognizes the phrase that sounds like “toot sweet.”
