Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [53]
Francie ran back upstairs to the room Josh shared with Sammy and tapped on the door. There was no reply. She knocked again, waiting worriedly, wondering if Josh was sleeping, or if maybe he was ill. She was sure he wouldn’t just go away without telling her. Not now. The door was unlocked and she pushed it open and peered in. The two beds were made up, and Sammy’s brown wool muffler lay across a chair. Francie shivered. The empty room felt chilly and impersonal; it didn’t feel like Josh at all. She walked slowly back to her own room. She had no idea where Josh was or even if he would be coming back.
The hours ticked slowly by, evening changed to night, but still he did not return. She heard the drunken shouts of revelers on the streets and the strains of music from the dance hall and remembered how happy and alive it had made her feel only that morning. The moon shone brilliant as a spotlight through her window and she could see the clock said three A.M.
The endless night was worse than any she had spent alone in her old room on Nob Hill because then she had not been in love. In the moonlight the pretty daffodils Josh had given her looked like stage props in a play that had taken place years ago, instead of just that morning. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still; her life was suspended until Josh came back, and if he didn’t come back, she knew she would just die.
The moon faded, the sun took its place, and the street was suddenly filled with noise and life again. And still Josh did not come.
Francie lay still as death on her bed, so drained of emotion she couldn’t even cry. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and outside the call newsboys were shouting, “Extra, Extra.” She heard another noise, a faint rustling outside her door. She leapt up and flung it open, but no one was there. Just a copy of the Extra the newsboys were crying in the street. The huge black banner headline shouted the news: WOMAN MURDERED—STABBED TO DEATH IN BARBARY COAST ALLEY.
Francie closed her eyes, afraid to read anymore. She dropped the newspaper and sank down onto the bed, but her eyes were drawn back to the terrible headlines. And across the top of the paper she saw scrawled in pencil: Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The words danced before her eyes as she read about the girl … “only twenty-one … brutally stabbed, her throat slashed …”
Her hand stole to her own throat and she groaned out loud as she remembered Josh’s gentle smiling face as he had waved good-bye to her only yesterday. But Josh had not been home last night. And it had all happened exactly as Sammy had said it would.
CHAPTER 11
1906
A thin, dank fog rolled in from the bay, shrouding the wharfside tenements, and fingering the windows of the grand houses on Nob Hill. Its chilly tendrils touched the soft cheeks of the women hurrying home along lonely nighttime streets, making them shudder and glance nervously over their shoulders, as if they already felt the murderer’s touch.
But Francie slept the sleep of the exhausted. She did not hear the door open, did not even know Josh was there until she felt his hand on hers and his breath against her cheek.
“So cold,” he murmured, “you are so cold, little lass.”
Too frightened to move, she watched him cross the room and turn up the gas lamp. He walked to the window and stared out at the fog, his brow furrowed, and then he turned to look at her. He picked up the newspaper and read the bold, black, terrible headlines.
“Sammy told me about you,” she sobbed. “I said he was just jealous, that it was all a lie, I wouldn’t believe him. But it happened, just the way he said it would.”
He sat next to her on the bed and put his hand under her chin. “Do you believe him, Francie?”
She looked at the face of the man she loved, the man who had saved her life, not threatened it. Goodness radiated from him, even the nuns had said so. Yet Sammy