Pin let her breath out and slipped the knife back into her pocket.

“Remember the place near where we met by Hell Gate?” she said. “Where you left the note? Meet me there tonight, at eight o’clock. Don’t tell anyone. Not even Willhie.”

“Willhie’s the night watchman.”

“You already told me that.” She unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway. “And bring your knife.”

Chapter 89

Chapter 89

IT WAS TWILIGHT when she returned to Riverview. Max might already be gone. But Pin didn’t believe he was, not yet. He wouldn’t rush off. It was so easy for him to change his appearance—fake mustaches and different color hair, different hats. A man who could turn two faces to an audience, and they would believe each to be his real one.

No, he was still here. He needed something. Money from the rubes. Another girl. Her fingers brushed the shiv for the thousandth time. She’d never used it, not seriously. Now it felt like a sixth finger.

Inside her shack, she pulled the filthy curtains and pushed the room’s sole chair against the door, still hanging on its hinges. A useless precaution: a few good kicks and the entire shack would fall down around her in pieces. It still made her feel safer.

She set down the paper sack and sank onto the mattress, staring at the pictures of Lord Clyde and Harriet Quimby. She removed them from the wall, searched her pockets for the photograph of the doll dressed in Maria Walewski’s clothes, the holy card that Sister Dymphna had given her, and last of all Henry’s card. She set them in a row on the floor beside the mattress, leaning against the wall, then went to the trunk in the corner.

When she and Abriana were young, the trunk had been big enough for them to hide in, something their mother repeatedly warned them not to do. “Children die from being trapped inside trunks,” she’d said, adding to her list of things that children died from. Lice, consumption, broken glass, chewing tobacco, falling off roofs, freezing to death, eating toadstools. Not hurdy-gurdy men, not dark rides, not watching a movie with a stranger.

Pin dug her fingers under the latch and prized it open, releasing the smell of camphor. Inside were her mother’s few items of winter clothing. Ugly clothes, all moth-eaten. A boiled-wool jacket, much repaired. Worsted stockings, a long wool skirt. Also, the linen handkerchief that Abriana had painstakingly embroidered with wobbly red Xs as a Christmas present for their mother, and a crushed straw hat that had been her sister’s.

Pin kept digging, until she came to her own things. A tiny pair of white leather shoes. A chewed-up flannel nightgown that stank of mice. Her own winter jacket, scratchy red wool and far too short. A plain white cotton shimmy and some heavy black wool stockings.