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PART I
SPEAKING IN TONGUES

35

“MARINA,” DOT WHISPERED in the dark, “are you still awake?”

Marina was trying to be quiet about her weeping, but she wasn’t succeeding. Dot knew. All this time, she knew and never told her. She’d been trying to protect her to keep that from happening, but she wouldn’t tell her.

“I can’t sleep.”

Dot sat on the edge of her bed, the one she only used a couple of hours a night, stroking Marina’s forehead. “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault.”

Yes, it was. She had not been in full control of herself. But she was stupid, so of course she couldn’t discern anything wrong. It was a mystery she could not have unraveled herself because she didn’t have enough clues. And the biggest was how babies were made.

Marina was horrified by the things Sister Albright told her and refused to believe that it was done in that disgusting, horrible way, and furthermore, that Marina was thought to have done this. With Trey. She had the flu! Why wouldn’t anybody believe her?

Sister Albright had gone to get one of Bishop Albright’s veterinary textbooks and showed her how puppies were made. Marina had scrambled off the bed and into the bathroom to heave into the toilet. She had nothing in her stomach.

“I would never do that!” she wailed. “Not even if I were married.”

“You would if you were drugged.”

“What?”

“There are drugs that make you want to do it very badly and there are drugs that make you forget. I don’t know of any that make you want to do it and forget. Do you remember anything off about the way your soda tasted those times, before you had those strange dreams?”

“No.”

She ran off and came back with a bottle of whisky, which was shocking enough, but she uncorked it and waved it under Marina’s nose.

She promptly ran to the bathroom again, unable to get that rotten-corn smell out of her nose.

When she returned, Sister Albright was waiting for her. “Wasn’t liquor.”

“I thought—” she squeaked. “I thought you didn’t drink?”

“We don’t. We use it to sterilize wounds and mix poultices. You may see chew in our house, too. That is also for wounds, to draw out infection. Bishop doesn’t like to lance if he doesn’t have to.”

Marina wouldn’t want to have a wound lanced, either. “I thought medicinal whisky was an excuse to drink. And it’s illegal.”

“Well!” she said briskly. “Shooting Mormons on sight is state law, but you wouldn’t do it, would you?”

Marina got the point: It was a bad law.

“You’d need a lot of straight whisky to make you forget. Spanish fly isn’t strong enough to make you that horn— Um, willing to have sex.”

Marina winced away from that phrase. It was so awful and ugly. “Spanish flu?”

“Fly. And it doesn’t make you forget. I do not believe what you dreamt were actual dreams, but if you were drugged, they would seem like dreams. And since you didn’t know how it’s done, your mind turned it all into something it could understand.”

“How— How do you know all these things?” Marina whispered, seeing Sister Albright in a whole new way. “About drugs and liquor, and, and, and … ”

“Dot never told you?” she asked, surprised. “Once upon a time, I was a flapper.”

Marina gasped and tried to scoot away, but she was in pain and had no space to move over anyway.

Sister Albright smiled mischievously and her eyes twinkled. “Repentance?” she teased gently. “Forgiveness? Grace? Mercy?”

Marina tried to breathe through her horror. Then she realized that her indecency with Trey was her own sin and she wished to be forgiven. “I— I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t mean to judge.”

“Sometimes grieving feels like judgment, and grief isn’t just for death.”

Marina would figure that out later.

“Anyway. You aren’t the first girl we’ve fostered who had no idea how she got pregnant, and you won’t be the last, but we’ve never had any who forgot doing it. I’ll have to ask Bishop if he’s ever heard of such a thing.”

“You talk to him about such things?” she squeaked. “He’ll know?!” She moaned and almost started crying again.

“He’s a doctor,” Sister Albright said wryly. “And once upon a time, he was a bootlegger. It was how we met. We got married about a week before Dot was born.”

“Dot knows about all these things too?” Her register climbed.

“Of course. How can you avoid sin if you don’t know what it is? That’s how girls get in trouble, not knowing.”

“You … you’re not mad?”

“Not at you.”

“Trey did this to me?”

“He got you pregnant, yes. The rest doesn’t make sense.”

“How?”

She was suddenly uncomfortable. “Ah, well, that is to say, he was courting you for two months. He … had to have a reason.”

Marina bowed her head. “Because why else would he want to court me?” she whispered.

“I didn’t say that,” Sister Albright protested weakly.

“You didn’t have to.”

“Marina,” she huffed, “if he just wanted to have sex with you, he wouldn’t have bothered to wait two months. He’d have drugged you first thing. He could have also raped you, but he didn’t do that, either. You like mysteries. I do too. So think of it this way: There are two mysteries. Why and why wait? We need more information to sort all this out, and that’s up to Bishop to gather. Until then, we need to wait.”

 

36

THE SUMMONS TO the Jackson County Democratic Club came at possibly the most inconvenient time, which was as Trey was beating Solly Weissman half to death for assaulting one of his girls after she’d refused his business.

The first time Solly tried it, Trey had politely explained that just because his girls were whores didn’t mean they were there for the taking. He reminded Solly that his girls were expensive for a reason, and that Trey allowed them to refuse service to anyone for any reason because there were always more where he came from.

Now Solly, being one of Boss Tom’s enforcers, was a very big man, going on three hundred pounds at least, and taller than Trey. But Trey was strong and lean from slinging cases of whisky around every day, so when Solly attempted to throw his weight around, thinking Boss Tom would take his side over Trey’s, he politely reminded Solly that Boss Tom liked the money Trey made, and happy whores made more money.

When Solly decided to try to enforce his right to Trey’s girl, Trey had politely bashed “Cutcherheadoff”’s head into the table so hard it bounced, then dragged him out back to make his point.

Trey had bested Solly in front of Lazia, Carrollo, and a few cogs in the Machine, and here he was, out in the back alley, still pounding the motherfucker’s face in. If Solly didn’t have a raging hatred for Trey before, he would now.

“I’ll finish him,” Brody muttered, hauling Trey back by his scruff. “Boss Tom said now.”

And when Boss Tom said now …

“Did he say what for?”

“Naw.”

Trey bolted down the alley and sprinted three blocks until he was within half a block. He stopped, caught his breath, and proceeded to saunter up the stairs and right on into Boss Tom’s office.

“Yeah, Boss.” Trey barely managed to catch whatever Boss Tom had launched at him. He looked down at a set of keys. “Whats’iss? You called me down here for a lost’n’found?” He didn’t know what to expect when he looked up at Pendergast but his boss’s expression of rage was not it.

“Got word Marina Scarritt is living with the Albrights.”

Trey wasn’t smart enough to put that together immediately.

“Scarritt just couldn’t put the girl on a train, could he?” Boss Tom barked, standing to pace his considerable bulk across the floor. “No!”

“Boss, got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

He jerked his head toward the window. “You won. 1520’s yours.”

Trey’s mouth dropped open. “She’s … It’s … It ain’t even been a month since the last time I was with her.”

“Yeah, well, I know when the first time you were with her was.”

“Then you know I was only with her three times.” Nine if he counted multiples. Given that, there was only one reason she’d be living with the Albrights now. As Trey rubbed his chin, the only thing he could think about was how much he missed the sweet girl he’d spent so much time with. The other one, he could barely remember at all. Hope began to gather in his chest and he began to grin. “Well, hot damn! Now I can marry the girl.”

“You marry her and I’ll torch it.”

Trey’s mouth dropped open. “The condition was I wasn’t to marry her first. You didn’t say nothin’ about marryin’ her after an’ I had no reason to want to then. Now I do an’ it ain’t because she’s pregnant, but never no mind about the fact that the kid’s mine.”

“You got the gin mill. You don’t get the girl too.”

“My. Kid.”

“Find some other way to provide for it, then, but marry her and the whole thing is pointless.”

“Is Scarritt gonna get run out of his situation?”

Boss Tom hesitated. “It’s cooking.”

“Then it wasn’t pointless.”

“It didn’t happen the way I wanted it to!” Boss Tom barked.

“What did he do to you that it was worth 1520?” Trey demanded.

Boss Tom squinted at him. Trey backed off physically, his hands in the air. “No disrespect intended, Boss,” Trey said as penitently as he could muster. He hoped it was enough.

“Hrmph.” Penitent enough then. Good. “Gimme the keys back, you can have the girl and continue on as if the only thing that changed was you got married and you have a wife and kid to go home to after closing time.”

“That ain’t gonna work,” Trey said flatly.

“Why not?

“You’re pissed that I won and you’d be lookin’ for a reason to fire me or keep me busy elsewhere. Lazia wants the speak, so it wouldn’t be long until one of his flunkies gets my job, no matter what he says about keepin’ me on. Even if he did keep me on, it would make me fair game for either Carrollo or Solly or both. Or I could give it up for Marina and my baby. Either way, my people are toast.”

Boss Tom cocked his head and looked at him strangely. “You’d do that? Give it up for her? Even if I gave you my word nothing would change?”

“I don’t believe you.” When Boss Tom’s nostrils flared, Trey said, “That ain’t a knock on you. Just life, things changin’ too fast, ’specially in our business. I got no good options when I made a deal with my people an’ already went back on it ’cuz I couldn’t look myself in the mirror for what I was doin’. Who’d’a predicted that, me growin’ a conscience?”

“What do you mean, you grew a conscience?” Boss Tom growled. Shit. Trey hadn’t gotten around to informing him of his change of heart.

Trey stuck his tongue in his cheek. “Uh … ”

“Are you telling me you didn’t intend to get it done at all?”

Trey held up the keys and jangled them. “But I did. Now I have a better footing to protect my people and they have a better reason to be loyal.”

“This is about the Terranova kid, isn’t it?” Trey hated that he knew who Gio really was. “Atlantic City was buzzing with where he went and why. The gossip was not kind to the family, being unable to control their people. So it’d be very easy for me to get Giuseppe Morello out here to meet your maître d’.”

“I’m small time. Last thing I want’s to attract the attention of the Black Hand.”

“Marina or Matteo Terranova. Choose wisely.”

Trey closed his hand over the keys and drawled, “Nice doin’ business with ya, Boss.”

35-36

If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.

Speakeasy staff.