The morning dawned with the sun shining in fiercely through my window at six o’clock and the day promising to be a scorcher. Not ideal weather to be running around on a case. If I were married, I told myself, I’d go to stay with Daniel’s mother out in Westchester during this kind of weather. I’d sit on a shady porch, sip lemonade, and play croquet. Maybe one day my husband would be able to afford to build me a house on Long Island, or on the Hudson, where I could escape from the heat in the summer while he toiled on in the city. The idea of being a wife was beginning to show some benefits after all!

I got up, washed, and dressed. There was no way I could wear Oona Sheehan’s theatrical two-piece on a day like this. I’d expire with heat. The Houdinis would just have to put up with me in my usual muslin, however untheatrical it looked. There was no point in my going to visit them too early: theatrical folk are notoriously late risers. So now I was all ready, champing at the bit, with nowhere to go.

Ryan had offered to take me to his dressmaker, of course, but not before ten o’clock. And I wasn’t going to order a costume at this stage, not until I knew a lot more about what had happened and what would be involved. I decided I could always pay a call on Daniel at his rooms, just in case he had not gone into work early. I’d bring supplies and promise to come by later to cook him dinner. If that wasn’t extending the olive branch, then I don’t know what was. I went across to the market and bought lettuce and cucumber for a salad. I even threw caution to the winds and purchased a tomato. Then I went to the delicatessen and came away with some lovely slices of cold boneless leg of pork, stuffed with sage and onion. Some small potatoes and we were ready for a delicious summer meal.

I took the Sixth Avenue El up to Twenty-third Street and walked toward Daniel’s apartment on the corner of Ninth Avenue with great anticipation. Our time spent together recently had been tense and uneasy. I suppose it’s always that way before a marriage. I realized I was possibly being the difficult one, unwilling to let go to one ounce of independence. If I hadn’t known people like Sid and Gus and Nellie Bly, that newspaper reporter whose risky exploits are legend, I suppose I should just have succumbed to the notion that wives were supposed to be submissive. But I had never been submissive to anybody, even when I lived in a cottage in Ireland and we were as poor as church mice.

Ten