Murder on St. Mark's Place Read Free

need to have a good time. They should stay at home and help their mothers until they find a respectable man and get married. It’s not natural for a girl to get work and go out alone with no chaperon to protect her. And this is what comes when she does. She ends up dead in an alley!”
    Sarah glanced at the door into Agnes’s bedroom, which she’d left open because of the heat. Fortunately, Agnes still seemed to be sleeping soundly, oblivious to the judgments of her neighbor. Still, she pushed the door closed, not wanting to cause Agnes any more pain than she’d already suffered.
    “Young women have to work nowadays,” Sarah reminded her. “Agnes and her husband couldn’t afford to keep Gerda if she didn’t pay her share of the expenses.”
    “Ach, she didn’t have to run wild, though, did she? Going out every night, wearing those fancy clothes that she couldn’t afford on her wages, not after she gave most of them to Mr. Otto for her board. And those shoes! I heard the policeman ask Agnes if her sister owned a pair of red shoes. That’s how they knew it was her. Everybody in the neighborhood knew about those red shoes. And everybody knows what kind of a girl wears red shoes!”
    “Yes, a girl who is now dead,” Sarah reminded her grimly.
    Mrs. Shultz huffed, plainly annoyed that Sarah wouldn’t join her in condemning Gerda. “I must get back. My own husband will be home soon.” Sarah wasn’t sorry to see her go.
    Sarah looked in on her patient again and found Agnes awake, her eyes brimming with tears. She’d overheard at least part of the conversation.
    “That is what they will say about my Gerda now,” Agnes moaned. “They will say she was a bad girl. They will say she deserved to be murdered, and no one will care that a poor German girl who worked in a shirt factory died in an alley. No one will bother to catch the man who did it, and no one will ever be punished.”
    Sarah knew this was true, so she had few words of comfort to offer. “At least Gerda has you to mourn her,” she offered.
    “She was not a bad girl,” Agnes insisted, trying to make Sarah understand. “She only wanted to be free. That is what she says, all the time. She wants to be free, with no one telling her what to do. That is why she left Germany. She did not want our father telling her what to do and what man to marry. She wanted to make a new life for herself here in America where she could decide for herself what she did.”
    The same way Sarah had left her own father’s house and married the man of her own choice instead of her father’s. When Tom had died, again Sarah had decided to make her own way instead of moving back to her father’s house. She’d wanted to be free, just like Gerda. She’d found a way to make her own living and her own life, just the way Gerda had tried to do. She’d simply been more successful at it than the dead girl had, because Gerda had met a man who had stolen her choices from her. There but for the grace of God go I, Sarah couldn’t help thinking.
    “The police, they will not care who killed my Gerda, will they?” Agnes asked.
    Sarah could have lied to escape an awkward moment, to make Agnes feel better even though she knew the lie would do more harm than good. But because she did know, she told the truth. “The police might investigate if you could offer them a reward for finding Gerda’s killer.”
    Agnes shook her head, tears running down her face. “We have no money for a reward.”
    Of course they didn’t. And justice in New York City was only for the rich. Unless ...
    “I have a friend,” Sarah heard herself saying. A small lie. She and Frank Malloy weren’t exactly friends. “He’s a police detective. I could ask him to help. He might be able to do something.”
    Agnes clasped Sarah’s hand in both of hers. “Please!” she begged. “It is all we can do for Gerda now.”
     
    S OMEONE in THE building was cooking cabbage for supper. Or maybe everyone was. With