Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit Read online

  “It’s already dark out,” I said to Sheriff Heath that evening. “Couldn’t we go tomorrow?”

  “It has to be tonight. One of the fellows upstairs was committed this morning, and Judge Stevens ordered him taken away before nightfall. He heard Mrs. Kayser’s case right after that. In his wisdom, he ordered them transported together so as to save the taxpayers the cost of running the automobile twice.”

  “Well, that couldn’t be more inconvenient. We’ll have to go all the way south to Rutherford, then turn around and drive right past Hackensack on our way up to Morris Plains. All of this with your poor fellow riding along as if he’s on some sort of sightseeing tour. What do we know about Mrs. Kayser?”

  “Not a thing,” the sheriff said. “She’s a housewife. I suppose it’s the usual trouble. Nervous prostration or the like.”

  Deputy Morris came around the corner just then, looking a bit ragged. He’d been ill for a week and still had watery eyes and a cough. It was unseasonably cold out, and with the wind came the threat of a storm. His nose was red from having been out in it.

  “Ready, Sheriff,” he said.

  “Go on, then, both of you,” Sheriff Heath said. “Morris has the particulars on the woman down in Rutherford. Our fellow won’t give you any trouble. He’s a lunatic, but he’s good company.”

  “Drive him yourself, then,” Deputy Morris said from behind his handkerchief, but the sheriff only waved us away good-naturedly. In the time I’d known him, Sheriff Heath had been shot through the shoulder chasing a robber through the woods, had an elderly inmate die in his arms, and had seen his wife and children threatened by a deranged inmate. A drive to the asylum with a cheerful lunatic and a housewife in custody was, in his opinion, light duty. I could hardly disagree.

  Outside, the wind had picked up and a few raindrops splattered down. A guard was waiting alongside the sheriff’s wagon. Our cheerful lunatic sat in the back, looking around with the bright expectation of a child about to go on an excursion.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll have you ride in back with him, miss,” Deputy Morris said.

  He never could get used to calling me Deputy. Morris was the most senior of Sheriff Heath’s men, and my closest friend at the jail. When my family was under attack two years earlier, it was Deputy Morris who most often volunteered to spend the night in our barn waiting for the thugs to return. He’d become a good friend of the family since then. He and his wife even served as surrogate grandparents for Fleurette, as they lived near the music academy where she had, until recently, been a student. Sheriff Heath sent the two of us out whenever he could, and as a result we worked more than our share of cases together.

  “I think that’s best,” I said. “Who is he?”

  The deputy bent down and peered at him through the window. “Tony Hajnacka. Nice fellow, but he tried to slash his neck with a broken spoon. That earns him a trip to Morris Plains.”

  I bent down to get a look at him and saw the bandage around his neck. “Do you mean to say he did that in our custody?”

  “Afraid so. I’ve never seen an inmate do a thing like that with a spoon. He might be a lunatic, but he’s no imbecile. He’s coming off the drink, too. Look how he twitches.”

  “I can manage a little twitching.” I slid into the back seat alongside Tony.

  He jumped and stared at me in surprise. “Are you the queen of this castle?”

  Sheriff Heath was right: he’d make for lively company.

  “I’m a deputy sheriff just like Morris here, but you can call me whatever you like.”

  “What I’d like,” he mused, “is a nice quiet place in the country and five acres.”

  “That’s just about what you’re getting,” Morris said.

  I didn’t like to make light of the lunatic asylum, but Morris had been at this job for a few decades. He knew when to indulge an inmate in his delusions.

  It was clear right away that Morris was right: the effects of his craving for drink had not yet left Tony. He had a habit of scratching at his face whenever the idea of liquor came back to him, which it did often. His hands trembled, but he didn’t like to see them shaking, so he tended to wring them together or to punch a fist into his palm, which rattled the handcuffs and bothered Deputy Morris.

  “Don’t let me hear the sound of your fist.” Deputy Morris turned around to look at us. “Keep still back there,” he told Tony.

  “I’ve done nothing but keep still since I took up with you fellows,” Tony said. “I’m a man who likes to roam about. I took a coal train all the way to Denver once.”

  “Why didn’t you stay out there?” I asked.

  “They didn’t take to me,” he said, with a note of wonder in his voice that such a thing might be possible.

  I thought it best to keep him happy and distracted, so we carried on in that fashion for some time. It was dark by then, and slow-going into Rutherford on account of the deep ruts in the macadam roads and the intermittent rain. Deputy Morris groaned and muttered to himself as he drove. From time to time a gust of wind hit us broadside, and the wagon’s top lifted like a sail. I could tell Morris was having to fight it.

  When we rolled into Rutherford and found the street where the woman lived, Deputy Morris brought the automobile to a stop and nodded for me to step out with him.

  “I’m going to stay here with Tony,” he said when we were standing in the street. He kept a gloved hand over his mouth to fight his cough. “I don’t like to think about what he’d get up to if I left him by himself. Mr. Kayser is supposed to be at home, and he can help you if there’s any trouble.”

  I bent down to look at Tony, who was staring at his new surroundings with evident interest.

  “That’s fine. I’ve never had trouble arresting a woman. She’ll probably go more easily if I’m alone anyway. But are you sure we have the right place?”

  Anna Kayser’s house was a snug and perfectly groomed cottage, with a neatly trimmed boxwood under the window and freshly painted shutters. Women bound for the lunatic asylum didn’t usually live in cheerful, inviting homes.

  Deputy Morris looked at the paper Sheriff Heath had given him. “This is the place. Says Kayser right here on the mailbox. They don’t all live in shacks.”

  “I suppose not. Does she know where she’s going?”

  “She was committed this morning. We should’ve just kept her at the jail today, but there was some mix-up at the courthouse and her husband must’ve taken her home. It’s always harder when we have to go get them like this.”

  “And you don’t know what might be the matter with her?”

  He shrugged. “Only what the sheriff said. Housewife with a case of nerves.”

  I wished very much that I’d been told more about this case, but it was too late by then. There was nothing for me to do but to walk up to the porch and rap at the door. It opened right away and I faced a pleasant-looking older man whom I took to be her husband.

  “Are you Mr. Kayser? I’m Deputy Kopp, from the sheriff’s—”

  He put a finger to his lips to silence me, then waved me inside. I didn’t like the idea of sneaking up on the woman, but I followed him in.

  He led me into a parlor furnished in the most ordinary manner imaginable. There was a green divan and two side chairs to match, a bookcase with a little writing desk built in, and a fire blazing cheerfully in a potbellied stove in the corner. The evening paper was folded neatly on a tray table alongside an ash-tray, and three magazines were arranged in a perfect fan shape on a round table. Atop the mantle was a lamp of pale blue glass painted with leaves and bunches of grapes, alongside photographs in frames that were dusted more often than anything in my house had ever been. From the kitchen came the odor of a steak in a pan, and the familiar sound of a potato peeler in an experienced hand.

  How could anyone who kept a house like that belong at Morris Plains? I couldn’t help but try to concoct a scenario that might explain it. Perhaps the wife was bedridden, and it was a housekeeper I hea
rd in the kitchen.

  But I could tell from the way the man closed a door that led down the hall to the kitchen—silently, stealthily—that my idea was wrong. The lunatic that I was to take away to the asylum was at that moment cooking her husband’s dinner.

  In a low voice he said, “I’m Charles Kayser. It’s my wife you’re here to see.” He was a perfectly ordinary-looking man, with sandy hair that thinned above his forehead but didn’t disappear entirely, and an industrious air about him that suggested that he was in charge of something all day: an office or a shop.

  “Is that her in the kitchen?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent about it.

  He nodded and pulled a pipe from his pocket.

  “She must be remarkably calm about going, if she’s cooking dinner first.”

  He kept his eyes on the pipe, nonchalant. “She doesn’t know she’s going.”

  “But I thought she was committed this morning!”

  “She didn’t see the judge. It was just me and the doctor. She was . . . too unwell to travel.” He said it with considerable care, the way one speaks of an invalid.

  “She’s well enough to run a kitchen.”

  He just shrugged. I saw no point in arguing with him. “If she doesn’t know she’s to be sent away, have you made any provision for her going?” I asked. “Has she a suitcase packed?”

  “She won’t need any of that. The doctor said to let her keep her routine until you folks came for her. Don’t give her any time to get worked into a state.”

  There might’ve been some logic to that, depending on the circumstances, which at that moment had me entirely mystified. Was I to simply barge into Mrs. Kayser’s kitchen and wrestle her away from her potato peeler?

  The answer came to me, as it were, in the form of the lunatic herself, swinging the door open, no doubt to tell her husband something about dinner.

  There she was: thin, pinched Anna Kayser, with strands of graying hair plastered to her cheeks from the steam, a checkered apron hung round her neck, and a look of horror rising from her pale lips to her colorless eyes.

  She took in my uniform, which, apart from the skirt, was nearly identical to that worn by every police officer and deputy in New Jersey. Her eyes stopped on my badge.

  I’ve never seen such terror come over a woman. She put her hands out in front of her as if she couldn’t see the way, and turned to run down the hall, back to her kitchen, but her husband was too fast for her. In an instant he had her round the waist, the pipe still upright between his teeth. I could only watch them in astonishment, the backs of them, the form of her dress collapsing under his grasp as if she weren’t inside it at all. His legs were anchored around her like fence posts.

  “I’m not going! You can’t do this!” Her voice rose to a high and nervous pitch.

  “Now, Anna.” He muttered something in her ear that made her jab him in the gut with an elbow. He must have been expecting that, because he held fast.

  He kept whispering. Whatever he said had the effect of draining all the defiance out of her. “Don’t send me back there. Don’t do it, Charlie. They can’t do a thing for me. They never could.” She was choking on her words, heaving them out of her throat between sobs.

  He said something into the hair at the back of her neck, but it only wound her up again.

  “Then what’s the matter with me this time? Tell me, tell me to my face, Charlie. Let me hear you say it.”

  She wrenched herself around to face him, and took another look at me over his shoulder. “Did you think I’d go quietly if you sent a lady to take me? Did you think it would make one damn bit of difference?” Her eyes stayed fixed on me but she jabbed him in the chest.

  Mr. Kayser sounded like a father trying to coax a child into taking medicine. “Now, listen to me, dear. Dr. Lipsky agrees. Don’t you think he knows what’s best for you?”

  She wasn’t having any of it. “Dr. Lipsky works for you! He says whatever you pay him to say. I won’t go.”

  “Of course you’ll go. The sheriff’s come for you.”

  “You carry me out, Charlie. Carry me out into the street, in front of everyone, and show them what kind of a man you are. Go ahead!” She slumped over after that speech, still crying a little, so that her husband was obliged to hold her up.

  He turned around to look at me. I like to think I’ve earned my reputation as a woman of action, but I confess that I was frozen to my spot in the doorway and hadn’t any inkling what I ought to do. Mr. Kayser, of course, had a very clear idea about that.

  “I won’t have to carry you out, Anna,” he said. “That’s why Miss Kopp is here.”

  But I wasn’t ready to do any such thing. I stood there, perfectly still and hardly breathing, for far longer than I should have. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kayser watched me the way one watches a wild bird or a deer, in absolute silence, waiting to see what it does next.

  Our tableau was interrupted when Deputy Morris banged the front door open and came through the sitting room into the little hall. There was a look of weary impatience about him. He brushed right past me and said, with a sort of booming authority that he summoned up in moments like this, “Mrs. Kayser, Deputy Kopp and I are here to bring you to Morris Plains, for the treatment your doctor ordered.”

  He obviously thought that I should’ve been able to utter such words myself, but he hadn’t witnessed the scene that just took place. Something was plainly wrong. I just hadn’t yet worked out what it was.

  I thought that if only I could get Deputy Morris outside, I could tell him what I’d seen. But I couldn’t leave the Kaysers alone. Instead, I did my duty and took Anna Kayser firmly by the elbow. Finding herself outnumbered, she went along with me, through the sitting room and to the front door.

  Deputy Morris glanced at me over the top of Mrs. Kayser’s head. “Haven’t you any handcuffs?” He was clearly astonished that I’d failed to drag her out of the house myself. Hadn’t I just nabbed a thief that very morning under far more difficult circumstances?

  I hated to drag her out in chains in full view of the neighbors. To make it less noticeable, I locked her wrists together in front rather than behind. Mrs. Kayser wore a knobby green sweater that frayed at the wrists. It gave me no pleasure to put metal shackles on her. She looked up at me, sniffing, but I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  There was a coat rack by the door. I took the sturdiest coat I saw and draped it over her shoulders. From a hat stand I selected a gray narrow-brimmed wool hat better suited to going to church than to a lunatic asylum, and set it on her head.

  Mr. Kayser had been hanging back, watching all of this, his pipe between two fingers, just a man waiting for some sort of ordinary business to be concluded before he got on with his evening. When Deputy Morris opened the door, Mr. Kayser turned and went back to the kitchen without saying a word. The sound of plates rattling suggested that he was, in fact, going to sit down to his dinner, before we had even left.

  Anna and I exchanged a look of shock and understanding. What man could eat at a time like this?

  “You don’t have to do this,” Anna whispered.

  Deputy Morris heard her and said, “Of course she does, ma’am. She’s a sworn deputy and she carries out the law. You wouldn’t want deputies changing their minds about the law on a whim.”

  He didn’t phrase it like a question, and he didn’t wait for an answer. It was a mess outside, with the wind picking up strength and the rain pelting down. There was nothing for us to do but to run out into it. The full and terrible truth of her situation must have come over Mrs. Kayser, because she sobbed as we ran. When she slipped on the brick walkway, she didn’t try to get up (nor could she have, with the handcuffs) and I had to yank her to her feet.

  I hadn’t thought to look at her shoes. She wore a pair of felt slippers with a little wooden heel, suited for working in the kitchen but not for a storm like this one.

  “She needs another pair of shoes,” I called out to Deputy Morris, who had run ahead to pull Tony Haj
nacka out of the back seat so that Anna and I could sit by ourselves.

  “It won’t matter at the asylum,” he said as he hauled a jumpy and confused Tony around and put him in the front seat. He squatted down, groaning over his creaky knees, and wrestled with Tony’s handcuffs to get them locked around the front door handle.

  I settled Anna into the back seat, but stayed outside to speak to Deputy Morris.

  “Something’s not right here. She’s no lunatic.”

  He put up a hand to shield the water running off his hat. “Are you telling me she didn’t want to go?”

  “Why, yes, and she also said—”

  He opened the back door and gestured for me to get in. “None of them want to go. This isn’t for us to decide.”

  It was impossible to stay out in the rain any longer. I looked back toward the house and saw Charles Kayser watching us from the wide front window, just the silhouette of him with the yellow lamplight behind him. He held a coffee cup in his hand and seemed entirely at ease.

  5

  inside the auto, Anna and I were shivering in our wet coats. Morris turned around and said, “Get her under the rug and she’ll be warm enough.” He sounded a little softer now, but I could see that he was overly tired and anxious about the storm.

  I dropped a rug over Anna’s lap. She kept her face turned to the window. It was just as well: there was nothing I could say to her with Tony Hajnacka listening. I wasn’t about to suggest that an inmate didn’t belong at Morris Plains, or that it was within my power to do anything about it. Tony would only insist that he didn’t belong there either, and we’d be mired in an argument about it all the way to the asylum.

  Instead I sat and brooded over what I’d done. I felt ashamed that I’d dithered so long that Deputy Morris had to come and take charge. I should’ve seized Mrs. Kayser at once and removed her to some private room to hear her side of things if I felt an explanation was warranted. But Deputy Morris was right: it wasn’t our place to question the judge’s orders.

  Still, I knew perfectly well that lunatics didn’t keep clean and comfortable homes and cook regular meals. Sometimes an otherwise sane woman went away for nervous exhaustion, but Mrs. Kayser didn’t seem any more nervous or exhausted than any other housewife—only furious over being committed to the asylum again.