Page 33 of If Looks Could Kill
“We don’t need Freyda,” I told Pearl. “Let’s go look for the girl again tomorrow.”
I paused under the glow of glaring saloon lights to peruse the front page of my paper.
“Those poor miners,” I said, scanning the article. “Only two survivors. One hundred and sixty-two of them, killed in one explosion.”
“Their poor families,” Pearl said quietly. After what looked like an innerstruggle, she added, “Er, what does it say about the murder in London?”
Oho.Not even Pearl the Prim could resist a story as tantalizing as the Ripper case.
I turned to the first column and forgot my wicked amusement. “A younger woman,” I whispered, “was found mutilated in a rented room.”
We stared at each other for a moment. Mutilated. I blinked away the image.
I could tell Pearl was shaken too. “How utterly wicked.”
I wanted to wrap a protective armor around my own body, alive and intact and with all its parts and organs safe and working.
“Why would anyone do that?” Pearl said. “When will it ever stop?”
“That’s the question,” I agreed. “Each new murder makes it more shocking.”
“What possible reason could anyone have for such gruesomeness? Such brutality?”
“Sadism?” I said. “Some perverse kind of”—I could barely say the words, as the thought was so grotesque—“sexual thrill from it?”
Pearl closed her eyes. I regretted voicing the thought aloud.
A long silence prevailed before Pearl spoke again.
“We’re told God loves all his children,” she said, “but some people are just so… so…” She searched for a fitting word.
“Unnecessary?”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
Here it came. The religious scolding. I wasn’t in the mood. “Hmm?”
“You said ‘unnecessary.’?”
I would neither confirm nor deny it.
“It’s not the word I would’ve used,” she said slowly, “and I’m not sure it’s what the Lord would want us to think.”
Leave it to Pearl to let no opportunity for a spiritual rebuke get away from her.
“But sometimes,” she said, “you do have a knack for words.”
East LondonJack’s Second Arrest(Wednesday, November 14, 1888)
They arrest him again, on a charge of indecency. Some complaint from a landlady—not the laundress, but another one; he had so many—with objections to his nightly activities, his comings and goings, his private amusements. That was the nuisance about his ambulatory ways, his dependence upon landlords. Someone else’s fussy, snoopy moralizing always hung over him.
But so be it. He can afford the legal counsel he’ll need to put this matter behind him.
In the meantime, though, a cold and unpleasant night behind bars. And worse, the nagging suspicion that they don’t really care about the indecency matter. That’s a ruse, a sleight of hand. They’re still hunting down the eccentric American doctor believed to be capable of the Whitechapel horrors.
Plenty of “experts” wrote letters to the editors of the newspapers insisting that only a doctor had enough anatomical knowledge to perform the extractions the Ripper had, and in the dark, no less, with such speed and stealth. Which just proved what he’d always said: his own self-teaching wasfar superior to the quackery at their so-called schools of medicine. Trained surgeons were little better than butchers, and with far less artistry. They should’ve trusted him, during the war, to act as a surgeon in army hospitals. If he can do what he’s doing now, in silent haste and the dark of night, think how many lives he could have saved! But the world isn’t ready for him. His luster threatens lesser men, so they push away his light, to their own detriment. It’s always been this way.
There will be a hearing soon, some appearance before a judge or magistrate, and he will post his bail and go. Go home. He won’t wait for a trial. The water here in Mother England is getting a bit too hot to swim. His talents need a wider scope, and New York alone has plenty of slums of its own where females go to disappear, where one body, more or less, may make a splash in the papers, but is hardly missed and soon forgotten. Police may not care to notice, and if they do, Lower East Side cops are easily bought in cases such as these.
