***
Joshua couldn’t sit still. He walked back and forth on one of the flowered runners in Mrs. Yancy’s parlor.
The old woman said, “When Katherine gave birth to twins, she realized that the elaborate lie about Mary Gunther would no longer hold up. The people in St. Helena had been prepared for one child. No matter how she explained the second baby, she’d plant suspicion. The idea that everyone she knew would find out what she’d been doing with her own father…. Well, I guess it was too much for her on top of everything else that had happened in her life. She just snapped. For three days, she carried on like someone in a fever delirium, gabbling like a madwoman. The doctor gave her sedatives, but they didn’t always work. She ranted and raved and babbled. I thought I’d have to call the cops and let them put her away in a little padded room. But I didn’t want to do that. I sure as hell didn’t.”
“But she needed psychiatric help,” Hilary said. “Just letting her scream and carry on for three days–that wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.”
“Maybe not,” Mrs. Yancy said. “But I couldn’t do anything else. I mean, when you’re running a fancy bordello, you don’t want to see the cops except when you pass out their payoff money. They usually don’t bother a classy operation like the one I had going. After all, some of my clients were influential politicians and wealthy businessmen, and the cops didn’t want to embarrass any big shots in a raid. But if I sent Katherine off to a hospital, I knew damned well the newspapers would pick up on the story, and then the cops would have to shut me down. They couldn’t just let me go on doing business after I’d gotten all that publicity. No way. Absolutely impossible. I’d have lost everything. And my doctor was worried that his career would be ruined if his regular patients found out he was secretly treating prostitutes. These days it wouldn’t damage a doctor’s practice even if everyone knew he gave vasectomies to alligators with the same instruments he used in his office. But in 1940, people were more … squeamish. So you see, I had to think about myself, and I had to protect my doctor, my girls…”
Joshua walked up to the old woman’s chair. He looked down at her, taking in the plain dress and the apron and the dark brown support stockings and the stodgy black shoes and the silky white cat, trying to see through the grandmotherly image to the real woman underneath. “When you accepted Katherine’s three thousand dollars, didn’t you also take on certain responsibilities for her?”
“I didn’t ask her to come to my place to have her baby,” Mrs. Yancy said. “My business was worth a whole lot more than three thousand dollars. I wasn’t going to throw it all away just for principle. Is that what you think I should have done?” She shook her gray head in disbelief. “If that’s what you really think I should have done, then you’re living in a dream world, my dear sir.”
Joshua stared down at the woman, unable to speak for fear he would scream at her. He didn’t want to be thrown out of her house until he was certain she had told him absolutely everything she knew about Katherine Anne Frye’s pregnancy and about the twins. Twins!
Tony said, “Look, Mrs. Yancy, shortly after you took Katherine in, when you discovered that she had wrapped herself up in girdles, you knew she was likely to lose the baby. You admit the doctor told you that might happen.”
“Yes.”
“He told you Katherine might die, too.”
“So?”
“A child’s death or the death of a pregnant woman in labor–something like that would have closed up your place every bit as fast as having to call in the cops to deal with a woman who was suffering a nervous breakdown. Yet you didn’t turn Katherine away when there was still time to do that. Even after you knew it was a risky proposition, you kept her three thousand dollars, and you allowed her to stay. Now surely you realized that if someone died, you’d have to report it to the police and risk getting shut down.”