“The captain knew the young man’s family from Over-the-Rhine or Mount Adams, Pat?” I asked.

Pat lifted his notebook up to his eye again.

It was all there. He just hadn’t seen it yet.

A loafer to the mob, a wretch to Pat, and a young man to Captain Eichelberger, the criminal had been blessed that night with three Angels in blue. That was the heart of the story, not the mob. The young man might have reminded the captain of a wayward nephew or cousin who had a mother waiting at home, a brood of sisters and brothers too. When the captain showed toward the young man the first sign of mercy—a blue arm extended, the palm of a hand like a shield—the other two police officers followed his lead. Pat had said that violence was a language. Mercy was a language too, I told him.

For the second telling, Pat would read the story to me once it had appeared in the pages of the Enquirer. I teased him that he liked hearing the sound of his own voice. He did, but that wasn’t why he did this. I was his witness. Pat needed to know that he had worked and that he had worked well. So this wasn’t the moment for asking any more questions. Instead, I would say “What a story!” or “Such an odd turn of events!” and that’s how he knew that I’d listened. He would look up from the Enquirer and take a long puff on his pipe.

I didn’t always understand Pat’s stories once they had reached the pages of your newspaper, Miss. As with his lilt, Pat could change his words at will. I preferred the plainer ones that he used when he told his stories to me. The readers of your newspaper preferred the ones bedecked with lace, as Charlotte would say. Maybe the readers wanted the lace because they had to pay money for the stories. I got them for free.

Well, not free. In exchange for being Pat’s cook, maid, and washerwoman.

“You mean for being his wife,” Charlotte had said, when I’d gone to her to air my complaints.

I’d never been anyone’s wife before, and Molly and Aunt Sweetie weren’t anyone’s wives either. We all cooked for other women’s husbands. Cooking for your own husband turned out to be more of a chore. Pat never complained to me about the fare at Mrs. Haslam’s, except for the Cincinnati-coffee. Not that I could have done anything about it, if he had. I wasn’t to take a menu request from a boarder unless it came through Mrs. Haslam first. She called it the Michigan rule.

When I began working at her house, there was a new boarder who wouldn’t eat animal fat or flesh. He was from the state of Michigan and belonged to a faith with a number in its name that I’d never heard of before.

Yes, that was it, Miss. Seventh-day Adventist.