Death Casts a Spell, Chapter 6
Kitty and Mr. Gallo have found the missing teenager, Jeannette Jacoby. But they've also found more than they bargained for.
We stared at the two identical girls, momentarily at a loss for words. We had come looking for the missing Jeannette Jacoby, and we had found her. But we hadn’t found her alone.
I elbowed Mr. Gallo gently in the ribs. “You should have guessed,” I said. “Same principle as the shoelace. Two of a kind.”
“Excuse me?” said the Jeannette who was seated. “Are you looking for someone?”
“You,” I said. “We’re looking for you. Er, one of you.” I examined them both in turn. They were identical, down to the tilt of their eyes and the shape of their lips. No mere lookalikes could possibly resemble one another so closely. Nor even sisters. “We didn’t know you were—” I shrugged and spoke the obvious word. “Twins.”
Nor did I have any idea how such a thing was possible. How had a girl from one of Chicago’s wealthiest families come to be twins with a performer at a seedy theater? What had happened to separate them? And what sort of trouble might they be in?
Mr. Gallo and I crowded into the room, which was barely large enough for the four of us. The vanity the girls sat at took up most of the space, and the rest was occupied by a blue velvet chair that was piled high with costumes. I tried to make space by shoving the mound of fabric out of the way, and pricked my fingers on a pair of shears that had been carelessly tossed into the pile of sequins and lace. I sucked my finger and decided to perch on the chair’s arm, rather than risk trying again and finding a hatpin or pincushion. I dropped the shears into the basket of mending tools beside the chair.
As for Mr. Gallo, there was virtually nowhere he could stand without hulking over the girls, which wasn’t going to do any favors to our quest for information. He looked from one corner of the room to the other, and eventually had to settle for crowding into the corner next to the door.
The girl who was standing watched with displeasure as we took up residence inside her dressing room. She stopped fiddling with her sister’s hair and crossed her arms. “I presume my parents sent you? Well, you can tell them I am not coming back.” She stuck out her chin and narrowed her eyes at Mr. Gallo, as though expecting him to try to sweep her over his shoulder and carry her off by force. “I’m with my real family now.”
“Your parents didn’t send us,” Mr. Gallo told her. “Your sister did.”
“Eleanor?” Jeannette’s hard-nosed manner faltered slightly. “She sent a—” she looked Mr. Gallo over. “A detective? And—” She turned to me and frowned uncertainly.
Secretary didn’t seem like it would command a great deal of respect in this situation, so I left the question unanswered. “She’s worried about you,” I said.
A grimace of uncertainty twisted Jeannette’s mouth. The other girl saw it and got to her feet, placing herself between Jeannette and us. “Well, you can tell her Jeannie’s fine. She don’t need no help. We’re just fine together.”
“It would be better,” I told Jeannette, speaking past her twin, “if you told her yourself.”
Jeannette chewed her lip. Her twin turned to her and caught her hands. She dropped her voice, but I could make out the words. “Don’t leave me now, Jeannie. He’ll kill me if you leave.”
Jeannette returned her twin’s grip fiercely. She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m not coming back,” she said. “At least not right now. Eleanor will just have to understand.”
I chanced a glance at Mr. Gallo, to see whether he’d heard the twin’s whisper. The grim set of his mouth told me he had. “Perhaps we could reassure her,” he said, “if we knew more about your situation.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Jeannette’s twin shot to her feet. “Nothing doing,” she said. “You just take yourselves right out of here. Jeannie and me are fine.”
I thought the chances of getting Mr. Gallo to follow this suggestion were something less than nil. He, like I, wanted to understand what was going on here—and how we could help.
But I didn’t think we could afford to press for that information directly, at least not right now. Instead I played for time. “Perhaps you could just write her a letter,” I said. “So we could show her you’re all right.”
Jeannette hesitated.
Her twin shook her head at her. “If anyone finds out where you are, they’ll come and take you away from me,” she said. “Then where will I be?”
Jeannette sank her teeth into her lip again, clearly torn. I pressed her. “Eleanor’s very scared, Jeannette. She’s desperate to know you’re all right.”
Jeannette looked from me to her twin, but she was crumbling. “I’ll keep it short,” she said. “I’ll just let her know I’m okay.”
The other girl threw up her hands in exasperation. Jeannette grabbed a piece of paper from the wastebasket next to the vanity. It was another of the Great Vetrovsky flyers that had led us to the Majestic in the first place. I remembered the threat I’d read on the first flyer, and something clicked in my head. “Freddie?” I asked, raising my eyebrow at Jeannette’s twin. “Frederica?”
“Winifred.” The girl smiled warily. “That’s me.”
So there had been no boyfriend—instead, there was a sister. I briefly considered what I might ask Freddie without setting her alarm bells ringing again. I had so many burning questions: how long had the girls known each other? How had they chanced to grow up separately—for it was plain from Freddie’s speech that she hadn’t been raised in a stylish home like the Jacoby mansion.
But I didn’t want her clamming up, so I settled for a smaller question. “You’re amazing on stage,” I said. “How long have you been doing this?”
Freddie bit into her lower lip, just as her sister had done. “Six months,” she said. “But the show got a lot better after—” She glanced at her sister.
After Jeannette joined, I filled in silently. That implied the girls had known each other only a short time, perhaps only a month or two. Without Jeannette, Freddie would have been able to do most of Vetrovsky’s tricks—and I was sure it was she we had seen on stage, strutting through the act with practiced flair.
The bullet catch, though, was different. It could only have been managed with a double, someone who could appear at the back of the theater within seconds, far faster than Freddie could have traversed the required distance. I wondered how recently Vetrovsky had acquired his reputation as a master magician, and how much of it he owed to the twins.
Jeannette’s pencil hesitated over her note. She wrote a line—then frowned and struck it out. Meanwhile, I saw that Freddie was becoming increasingly nervous. Our presence had already put her on edge, but there was something else worrying her. She kept darting glances toward the door, as though she was expecting someone—and wasn’t looking forward to their arrival.
Jeannette at last finished her note and handed it over to me. I folded it into quarters so I could jam it into my little beaded purse. “Make sure you tell her I’m just fine,” Jeannette said. “There’s no reason she ought to worry.”
I locked eyes with her “Is that true?” I asked quietly.
This was too much for Freddie, whose anxiety had reached a fever pitch. “We said we’re fine!” she said, glaring at me. “Just go on and leave us alone now!”
“We could,” said Mr. Gallo. For all his bulk, he could speak gently when he wanted to. “But we’d rather help you. It’s plain to see you’re in trouble.”
Jeannette seemed torn between loyalty to her twin and a desire for help. She couldn’t have dealt with many truly dangerous circumstances as a child of the Jacoby household. Now she was out in the real world, but there was a good chance she wasn’t really ready for it.
Jeannette cast a guilty look at Freddie and opened her mouth.
But before she spoke, the door behind us burst open, and a man stormed in. It was the Great Vetrovsky, without his cape, but still wearing his jeweled and feathered headdress. He opened the door with such force that Mr. Gallo, standing behind it, was pushed hard into the corner.
“What did you think you were doing out there?” Vetrovsky snapped at Freddie. He fumbled for something in his jacket pocket, and both girls shrank back in alarm. “You’re not supposed to blow him kisses like a Jezebel! You’re supposed to be his—”
He never finished the sentence. Mr. Gallo, standing behind the door, slammed it closed. The reverberation rattled the strands of costume pearls on the vanity table.
We all stared at Mr. Gallo. He had widened his stance, his eyes were narrowed, and I rather thought Vetrovsky must be rethinking his words. My presence hadn’t been enough to deter him from his rant—but if he had realized someone of Mr. Gallo’s size was here, he might have been a bit more polite.
My estimation of his prudence was, as it turned out, exaggerated. He glared at Mr. Gallo. “Excuse me? Who are you?”
Mr. Gallo took a step toward Vetrovsky. In the small room, this put their chests about a foot from each other. Vetrovsky was tall, but not as tall as Mr. Gallo, and considerably less broad. He looked up at my boss with a sneer that I thought heralded trouble. Quietly, I hopped to my feet and sidled closer to the vanity where the girls still sat.
“This room is not a public space,” Vetrovsky said. “I suggest you leave.”
He put a hand on Mr. Gallo’s shoulder, as though to escort him from the room. It was exactly the wrong move. The second the hand touched his sleeve, my boss grabbed Vetrovsky’s wrist and twisted it, hard. Vetrovsky yelped and tried a left-handed punch to the face. Mr. Gallo neatly dodged it, and countered with what must have been a ringing back-handed slap against the other man’s ear.
I threw out both arms, trapping the girls behind me. Jeannette gasped as I crowded her into the vanity, but I didn’t want either of them within an arm’s reach of Vetrovsky.
I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride as I watched my boss control the situation. He was using only a moderate amount of force, keeping his responses measured. He wasn’t looking to pummel Vetrovsky into a pulp, merely to keep him from turning his aggression in the direction of me or the girls. It was especially impressive to me, since I knew what Mr. Gallo was capable of if he really wanted to hurt someone. I hadn’t forgotten the way he had saved my life when a certain violent bootlegger had been trying to strangle me. The experience had been horrifying, but as I recalled Mr. Gallo’s heroism, I felt my cheeks getting warm—and not from embarrassment.
Vetrovsky darted in under Mr. Gallo’s guard and tried a vicious jab at his gut. Mr. Gallo took a neat step back, minimizing the power of the punch. Then he landed a heavy downward blow on the other man’s shoulder, sending him staggering across the small room and into the chair full of costumes. He collapsed in the heap of glittery fabrics. He squealed, and tried to leap up. I deduced that there had, indeed, been another sharp object in the pile.
Mr. Gallo took two quick steps across the room and stood over Vetrovsky, holding him in the chair with one heavy hand on his shoulder. He looked down at the entertainer with an expression of quiet satisfaction. I came to his side and regarded the man slumped in the chair.
Vetrovsky’s face was long and thin, just like the drawing on his flyers—but they had failed to capture the sallow color of his cheeks, or the way his mouth came to a cruel pinch at the corners. His eyes were closed in pain right now, but as I stood over him, they fluttered open.
I gently removed Mr. Gallo’s hand from his shoulder. “Now that,” I said, “was a hell of an entrance.”