Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Mary, we’re not interested in magic or bloody flying carpets.” Alastair held a handkerchief over his nose. “We’ve come to ask you questions.” The odor exuding off the woman was preternaturally powerful. Something akin to a fetid over-ripe melon. If there was such a thing, Bloody Mary seemed a walking candidate for spontaneous human combustion.

“Finally, somebody wants me for something,” she pathetically replied.

Behan stalwartly held his own against the assault on his senses from this homeless wretch. The judge had been right. Even cleaned up, her skin appeared dusky and covered with a gray patina. She appeared Spanish or Black or a mix of both, but it was impossible to say with any certainty. Her accent sounded Mexican.

“Let’s make a deal.” A mantra for her. “Let’s make a deal. Anything you want,” she toothlessly muttered and spread her legs as far as her ankle chains allowed. “Let’s deal. I’ll take care-a-all three of yous!”

Obviously, she’d fallen back on her usual method of relating to men. “Look at her teeth,” said Ransom.

“God save us,” muttered Behan.

Logan joked, “You want some time alone with her, Ken?”

“Let’s make a deal,” she repeated.

“Mary…we do not want a magic carpet ride,” Ransom assured her.

“What teeth are you talking about, Rance?” asked Behan, talking over him. “She’s got none.”

“That’s just the point. If she did barter with this Leather Apron devil in these vanishings, what did he pay her? She have any cash on her?”

“Not a nickel.”

“And boys, I tell ya, she wasn’t tearing at human flesh, not with her gums, so what motive has she?”

Twenty minutes and they learned nothing from Mary. She kept wanting to talk about an amusement park and a ride she had once taken, presumably as a child, deep in the bowels of a haunted castle. Then she slipped back into barter mode, her eyes lighting up with a cackling laugh. All her words came out of her toothless, cryptlike mouth along with spittle and froth that both sickened and amazed the three Chicago inspectors.

Finally, unable to take her voice-like a nail through the head, or her stench-like a spike of sewage through each nostril, or her frothy mouth-like a rabid dog-Behan pleaded that Alastair take over.

“There’s nothing but mayhem inside your head, right, Mary? You don’t know why you’re here, do you, Mary?” asked Alastair, replacing Behan at the “front.” “If she knows anything at all,” he said to Logan and Behan, “about the Vanishings, she’s likely forgotten it. Or it’s locked away in her sponge.” Alastair indicated his head.

But Mary exploded at the word Vanishings. “It’s the work of the Anti-Christ himself! Nothing I had a hand in; nothing I could do anything about.”

“Where do I find this Anti-Christ, Mary? Where?”

“Under the water…under the lake, under the fair.”

“Under the fire?”

“Fair…I said fair! Under the bleedin’ fair!”

“Now we know for sure she’s batty,” said Logan.

“I already knew that before you two nabbed her.” Alastair turned his attention back to Mary. “Is there anything else you wish to tell us, Mary?”

“No.”

“Nothing you wish to say in your defense?”

“No.”

“What’s your real name, Mary?”

She stared at him but said nothing.

“Your secret name?”

“I’ll not tell.”

“Is it full of Grace, as in Hail Mary, full of Grace?”

“I am full of Grace. My name…my real name is Grace. Grace Sheffield, originally from Shrewsbury, England.”

Ransom jotted this down. He’d recalled it from arrests ten years prior.

“Whatya doing with that?” she asked, fixated on the moving pen over the notepad.

“Just going to check to see if it’s true.”

“Ohhh…’tis true enough.”

Alastair stood and slipped from the room, the other two inspectors doing likewise. Outside, they began a group coughing-sneezing-hacking-snorting jag, filling their white handkerchiefs with the result of their combined interrogation.

Alastair said, “I believe she’s a dead end, and that we’re railroading a mindless old crone.”

Behan shrugged, his mustache bobbing with his tie. “We’re just following orders.”

Frustrated, Logan blurted out, “We oughta take a g’damn club to the old witch and beat it outta her.”

“That kinda talk in the face of what you just saw in there? Now, I can just imagine where the orders came from, but fellas, this old girl…she’s got nothing but loose marbles and bird fodder for brains.”

From where they stood out in the hallway, they heard Mary being Bloody Mary, shouting lunacies at some invisible demons in her head and inside Room 148. “My goddamn real name is Grace! You know ’cause I have a friend who digs earthworms in the cemetery! She ties ’em tail to head, head to tail and makes jewelry outta worms-living worms! Living jewelry! Says it’s eatable jewels and the idea will sell in the thousands! Won’t make her any less mad, but it will make her rich and mad! But she damn well ate ’em all! Now that’s sick! Her name is Grace, but she’s got none! Same as me. I had an accident with her, an accident with Grace…just like she had an accident with me. Her accident with Grace was with me!”

“The woman is battling the DTs,” declared Ransom. “She’s sick in too many ways to count-not unlike the charge brought against her.”

Even as he said this, Alastair thought, How fitting that she, like the Mother of God-according to the street children-had fallen so far from “Grace” …Perhaps there was some small truth in the street beliefs after all. But it all seemed so tenuous.

Behan and Logan reluctantly followed Alastair back into 148, returning to the scolding Bloody Mary in her chains. Alastair asked, “When you were Grace, Mary, did you ever have a child?”

“Yes…yes, several.”

“Whatever happened to your children?”

“Dead, all dead.”

“All dead?”

“Cruel world.”

“Not one survived?”

“Well…all that I knew of.”

“Meaning?”

She began crying. “’Cept one I left with the sisters.”

“The sisters? What sisters?”

“The Sisters of the Holy Cross Convent.”

“On South Michigan Avenue?”

“Yes, but Grace was just a child then.”

“And how old would your son be today if alive?”

“I dunno. How should I know? Can’t keep my head round numbers.”

“Take a wild guess then.”

“’B-bout your age, I suspect.”

“ Ahhh …and have you seen him, Mary Grace, recently?”

She thought long and hard on this. “No…not ’im…that could not be him . Not that evil thing!”

“The street children say that you’re the mother of Zoroaster’s child. Any truth to it, Mary Grace?”

She smiled wide at this. “If I spawned a demon from me womb…I’m penitent sorry.” A smirk on her face said otherwise. “And I’ve asked God’s blessin’ and forgiveness at the church’s back door, ’cause the likes of you won’t have me come through the front ! And as I’ve God’s forgiveness, I don’t need none from murderers like you !”

“Well now, Mary, now we know where you stand,” Logan said and chuckled.

“Don’t hold back,” added Behan.

But Alastair was intrigued by this and the image of her at the back door of a church, perhaps the same as Samuel had said where holy water was being sold; he imagined the same fellow could sell forgiveness to a fallen angel such as Mary Grace for the right price as well. He’d filed this away for a time when he could visit St. Alexis. Have a chat with the priests there. But for now, he wondered what connection Bloody Mary had with this man the children called Zoroaster-or the son of Zoroaster-and whether he was her son or not, and then she’d have motive… if she believed Leather Apron was indeed her son.