The Shining Girls

Harper ^{4 JANUARY 1932}

‘You hear what happened to the Glow Girl?’ the little piggy nurse says. She has given him her first name this time round, like it’s a gift tied up with a bow. Etta Kappel. It’s amazing what a difference money in your pocket makes. Being whisked past the wards packed tighter than cattle in the stockyards to a private room with linoleum floors and a dresser with a mirror and a view overlooking the courtyard, for example. This is something the rich know: money talks, so you don’t have to. Five dollars a night gets you treated like an emperor in the palace of the sick.

‘Mmmmnghff,’ Harper says, gesturing impatiently at the morphine in its glass vial on the tray beside the bed, which has been inclined forty-five degrees so he can sit up.

‘Murdered in the night,’ she says in a thrilled stage whisper, pushing the rubber tube down his throat between the wires holding his teeth together, screwed right into his jaw so it will be impossible to shave.

‘Nggghkk.’

‘Oh, don’t whine. You’re lucky it’s only dislocated. Still. Not like that dancer didn’t have it coming. Little hussy.’ She taps the vial with her fingernail to dissipate any errant bubbles, then slices off the glass nipple with a scalpel and draws the liquid up into the syringe.

‘You ever go to that kind of show, mister?’ she says, off-hand.

Harper shakes his head. He’s interested in the change in her tone. He knows her type. Up on their moral high horse, so they can get a better view. He sinks back onto the bed as the drug takes its hold.

It took two days of agony to get back here. Hiding out in barns, sucking on icicle shards, greasy with soot from the shipping yards, until he was able to hop a train from Seneca to Chicago among the hobos and drifters who wouldn’t pass comment on his purple bulging face.

The wiring around his teeth will curtail his ability to find the girls. He needs to be able to talk. He will have to lay low. He will have to reassess the way he does things.

He’s not going to get hurt again. He will need to find a way to restrain them.

At least the pain is mostly gone, drowned in a morphine glaze. But the goddamn nurse is still fussing around his bed, unnecessarily as far as he can tell. He can’t figure out why she is hanging around. He wishes she would go away. He gestures tiredly at her. ‘Wht?’

‘Just making sure you’re all settled. You call me if you need anything else, all right? You ask for Etta.’ She squeezes his thigh under the sheet and sweeps briskly out of the room.

Oink, oink, he thinks as the drugs sweep up and swallow him whole.

They keep him in the hospital three days, for observation. Observation of his wallet, he suspects. Lying in bed has made him itchy with impatience, so as soon as he gets back to the House he goes out, jaw wired-up and all. He won’t be caught unawares again.

He goes back to read about her murder, which is widely covered until it becomes clear that it was just homocide and not an act of war. The only paper that publishes an obituary is the Defender, which also prints the details of her funeral. This is not at the cemetery where he killed her, which is for white folk only, but at Burr Oak in Chicago. He cannot resist the urge to attend. He hangs at the back, the lone white man present. When someone asks him, inevitably, why he is there, he mutters around the wiring, ‘Knw hrr,’ and the fools rush to fill in the gaps themselves.

‘Did you work with her? Come to pay your respects? All the way from Seneca?’ They seem amazed.

‘Wish there were more like you, sir,’ a lady in a hat says, and they nudge him to the front so that he is standing looking down at the coffin six feet deep in the hole and laid with lilies.

The children are easy to spot: the three-year-old twins, playing a game between the headstones, not really understanding, until a relative cuffs them and drags them back to the graveside, bawling; a twelve-year-old girl who glares at him like she knows, her little brother holding her hand, too shell-shocked to cry, although he keeps taking deep shuddering breaths.

Harper throws in his handful of earth on top of the coffin. I did this to you, he thinks, and the wires around his teeth make it look like his terrible rictus grin is something he cannot help.

The pleasure of seeing her laid in the ground and no one suspecting keeps him going. Reliving it almost makes up for the pain in his jaw. But eventually he gets restless. He can’t stay inside the House too long. The objects are starting to hum again, driving him out. He has to find another. And the finding, surely, can be done without employing his charm?

He goes past the war, which is tiresome, with the rationing and the fear in people’s faces, to 1950. He tells himself he is only looking around, but he knows one of his girls is here. He always does.

It’s the same tug in his stomach that brought him to the House. That sharp edge of awareness when he walks into someplace he’s meant to be – and recognizes one of the talismans from the Room. It’s a game. To find the girls through different times and places. They’re playing along, ready and waiting for the destiny he’s writing for them.

As she is, sitting at a café in Old Town with a sketchbook, a glass of wine and a cigarette. She’s wearing a tight-fitting sweater with a pattern of rearing horses. She’s half-smiling to herself as she draws, her black hair falling forward, catching fleeting impressions of faces, other patrons or people walking past. Caricatures that take seconds to sketch, but clever, he sees, catching a glimpse over her shoulder.

He takes his opportunity when she frowns and rips the sketch out, squashes it in her fist and drops it. It falls close enough to the sidewalk that he can make as if he notices it in passing. He stoops to pick it up and unfolds the crumpled ball.

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ she says, half-laughing, mortified, like she’s been caught with her skirt tucked into her pantyhose, but she falls into startled silence when she sees the metal around his face.

The drawing is good. It’s funny. She’s caught the vain haughtiness of the pretty woman with the brocade jacket rushing across the street, with a V-dash of a sharp chin and pointy little breasts to match and a little dog as angular as she is. Harper sets the sketch on the table in front of her. There is a smear of ink across her nose where she has rubbed it absently.

‘Yw drppd ths.’

‘Yes. Thank you,’ she says, and then half gets to her feet. ‘Wait, can I draw you? Please?’

Harper shakes his head, already walking away. He has seen the black and silver art deco lighter on her table, and he is not sure he can control himself. Willie Rose.

It is not time yet.