Never Sleep (eBook)

Two women were in the dark basement, their faces covered in grime and sweat. One had a shovel. The other had a gun.

“Did you hear that?” the one with the gun whispered.

The other, knee-deep in the hole she was digging, froze with the spade suspended over the earth. “Hear what?”

Mrs. Flora Mahoney pointed her pistol at the ceiling. It was a .42 caliber LeMat revolver that had been her husband’s. Her thumb rested on the rotating striker atop its hammer, which toggled between the pistol’s two barrels: the wider smoothbore underbarrel fired a shotgun load; the one on top fired regular cartridges. “My sister hearing us over her husband’s drunken snoring ain’t likely, but still. Try and keep it down, will you?”

“I’m digging as quietly as I can, Flora, I swear.”

Flora bent down and took Bess’s cheeks in both hands. Her friend was not unattractive, but she could not touch Flora’s own striking beauty. Flora wielded this difference like a cudgel. It had not taken long after their first meeting for Flora to beat Bess into the shape most useful to her.

“You better,” Flora hissed.

“Are you sure we can’t go to California?” Bess said after excavating a few more shovelfuls of earth. “I hear there’s still gold there.”

“No more talk of California, now. I don’t want to spend all that time in wagons and horseshit before I start living. Train west from Philadelphia to St. Louis, then steamboat down to New Orleans. I worked in a fine French house on Rampart Street after my first husband”—she spit into the earth—“left me. I still have friends there where you need them. They can get us out, I’m thinking to Havana. As far as we can get from men and their idiocy before we die of old age.”

“Not California, though?” It was hard to hear Bess’s soft voice over the scrape of the spade.

“California can fall into the sea and sink all the way to hell for all I care. In Cuba we can get a young girl or an old man to wait on us, for a reasonable price. We can’t do that in California. As rich as we’re going to be, we’re supposed to live like animals?”

A thin sliver of moonlight through a narrow window was the only illumination in the cellar, but it was enough for Flora to see the glint on the oilskin-wrapped bundle when Bess uncovered it in the hole. Ignoring her own warning to Bess to be quiet, Flora leaped beside her friend with a cry and elbowed her aside to snatch up the packet. She set the pistol on the ground so she could unwrap the still-crisp stack of bills from the Planters’ and Mechanics’ Bank of Charleston inside. She counted the bills twice with both hands. She got fifty thousand both times. She wrapped the money back in the oilskin and then put the package into an open carpetbag nearby.

After they helped each other out of the hole, Flora threw her arms around Bess.

“I would never have had the courage to do this without you,” Flora whispered. “Your friendship means everything to me.”

Bess blinked back tears. “And yours, mine. Finding you, us finding each other—it has saved my life. I mean that truly.”

“Our lives begin right now, at this very second. Let’s go live them.”

Flora practically pulled Bess up through the cellar doors and out into the winter night. They walked quickly, their footsteps too loud on the small stones of the road no matter how cautiously they trod. They said nothing. They didn’t need to.

That night at supper, they had plotted to meet Bess’s brother, Forrest, at his cart in front of the pleasure garden at the edge of the village. Mrs. Flora Mahoney had met Mrs. Bess Ingram and Forrest sitting on a path-side bench there months before when there was still color in the trees. Flora had just moved in with her sister’s family after her husband’s incarceration. Captain Mahoney had been accused by his employers, the Andrews Express Company, of pocketing fifty thousand dollars in banknotes he was supposed to transfer on to South Carolina. It was not long before Bess was reluctantly confessing to Flora that she too had been widowed by the law: her husband had been imprisoned for forgery in nearby Philadelphia.

Never a trusting soul, Flora had written a letter to the Quaker wardens of Eastern State Penitentiary, who confirmed this story as fact. She and Bess had become fast friends after that. Flora poured her heart out to Bess about the Andrews Express Company and their paranoia and greed, epitomized by their unjust accusations against poor, innocent Captain Mahoney, who had been their Montgomery station agent for years and had never been accused of so much as taking the wrong man’s hat after church. The people of the town had thrown their support behind Captain Mahoney, making the hung jury at her husband’s trial something of a foregone conclusion. Afterward, the Mahoneys had thought it best to retreat to Flora’s sister’s home in Pennsylvania to let the company’s blood cool, but the captain was arrested as he and Flora stepped off their steamboat in Manhattan on the weight of mysterious and as of yet unrevealed new evidence. Flora had finished the journey to Jenkintown alone.

Only when Flora received a letter from her husband in his cell at the Tombs—a letter that told her to hand over the money she was hiding for him to the ruffian crowd he used to ride with in Kansas, men who were strangers to her—did she confide the truth in Bess and begin plotting her flight. At first, her friend had resisted, insisting that Flora was being rash—not to mention disloyal—by taking the money for herself and leaving the country at the first threat of having to share it with someone else. But that was just Bess being Bess, which was to say, bubbleheaded. Flora didn’t keep her around for her opinions. In the end, not only was Bess completely convinced of the rightness of Flora’s plan, but she also persuaded her handsome and equally dull brother Forrest to drive them to the train station in King of Prussia in the dead of night.

When the edges of Forrest’s cart coalesced out of the gloom in front of the pleasure garden, a sudden panic stabbed through Flora: she had forgotten something. But what? “Wait . . .” She stopped walking altogether.

“What is it?” Bess said.

Flora patted her skirts, more and more frantically. The LeMat wasn’t there.

“My pistol,” Flora said. “Damn it. I must have left it behind in the cellar—we’ve got to go back for it.”

“No need,” Bess said. “It’s here.”

Flora’s pistol was in Bess’s hand. Her thumb was on its striker.

“Well, why didn’t you say so, you little fool? Give it here.”

“I am not inclined to,” Bess said, gesturing forward with the LeMat. “Don’t stop now.”

Flora didn’t budge. She couldn’t make her legs move. The woman standing in front of her looked like her friend, was dressed like her friend, albeit smeared with mud from head to toe, but her expression had completely changed. Where were the milk-saucer eyes, the head-bowed deference? Bess’s spine was straight, her arm steady—she held the gun like she knew what to do with it.

For some reason, the only thing Flora could think to do was smile.

“Your name isn’t Bess Ingram, is it?”

“You don’t need to know my name,” said this stranger. The squashed church mouse was gone, and a Valkyrie now stood in her place.

“What a cute little dumpling you are, girl,” Flora said, revelation dawning. “A dumpling full of spiders.”

Kate Warn knew from experience that this was the most dangerous juncture of any operation: when the prey was treed but not yet in hand. Flora had almost handed the stolen money to her and Forrest, her partner, and let them ride away with it to Philadelphia, where the rest of the National Police Agency was waiting. If only Flora hadn’t noticed her pistol was missing. Oh, well. One of Kate’s many skills was improvising. In this business, it had to be.

She marched Flora toward the wagon at gunpoint. Forrest sat on the driver’s bench holding the reins to a pair of bored horses.

Kate’s prey barked out another laugh of revelation. “Oh, your brother, he’s an Andrews Company cop too, isn’t he? Oh, how scrumptious. My useless husband could learn so much from you pack of wolves.”

“Feel free to stop talking at any time,” Kate said.

“Company detective.” Flora spat at the ground. “Camp whore. Rich man’s piece. The rest of us scrape and save and drown in debt. We try to take just a little, just table scraps for ourselves, but, no, any tiny crumb is too much, too much for your pimps and overseers to bear—”

“I can finish this speech for you, if you’d like,” Kate said. “I’ve heard every version before, backwards and forwards, in German and French, and once in Gaelic. I have yet to meet a thief who isn’t preoccupied with fair play.”

Much to Kate’s relief, that shut Flora up. If Flora made any real effort to raise a ruckus, she could bring the whole damn town running. Fortunately, the homes surrounding the garden were dark and still. The stars over their heads had more life to them.

“Get in.” Kate poked her captive between the shoulder blades with the LeMat. Flora clambered up into the flatbed unaided. Kate took the carpetbag, heavy with larceny, into...