Annie and the Wolves Read online

  Hell, maybe it was all three, too much adrenaline filtered through an injured brain slowly remolding itself—a process that could take years, all the doctors said. She recorded every incident and setback on her kitchen calendar. Full-on, visually detailed attacks, plus the lesser surges of anxiety. Ripples emanating from a distant splash.

  “You okay?” the boy asked. “You look dizzy.”

  Without thinking, she took a step toward him to see if he smelled familiar; he did. But it was only stale cigarette smoke and a hint of deodorant spray. Most teenage boys smelled like that.

  She was tempted to say, Don’t smoke, but that was none of her business. What she actually wanted to say was, I thought you’d quit. That made even less sense.

  “No, I’m fine. You should get going. Thanks for telling Mrs. Holloway for me. I’m heading home and will come right back, but the class will be halfway over by then. Can you give her this, so she can have the slideshow up and ready?”

  Reece took the thumb drive, nodded and started down the hallway until he was side by side with Scott. Then he swung around and walked backwards. “So, should I come fix your laptop later, then?”

  Scott looked back over his shoulder, also awaiting her response.

  It wasn’t so much that she wanted to please the man she’d almost married and then lost. She just wanted to reassure him and, more important, herself, that she was okay now. Not afraid or obsessed or stuck, not imagining things, not falling apart. All that was over.

  “That would be fine,” she said. “Anytime.”

  3

  Annie

  1904

  Annie would never forget the first headline: August 12, 1903, from Kansas, the Salina Daily Union: annie oakley’s downfall—cocaine brings the famous rifle shot to the depths. Another, two days later, from Delaware: annie oakley stole to buy herself cocaine. The third headline was from North Carolina: annie oakley in prison.

  “How could they, Mr. Fraley?” she asked the first of two lawyers she and Frank had hired when they’d decided to sue all fifty-five newspapers. “They’re such bald-faced lies. I don’t see how they’ll defend themselves.”

  “They’ll say they got it off the wires. A woman using your name, or something close to it, was arrested. That part of the story is arguably accurate. How could reporters be sure it wasn’t you?”

  “But that’s ludicrous. Anyone could have seen that poor wretch wasn’t me.”

  “They’ll say they had good cause to believe it, with you being in the entertainment business.”

  “Not that entertainment business.”

  “Most juries don’t know the difference between burlesque and sport shooting in a traveling show or exhibition,” Mr. Fraley said. “Anyway, they’ll say they couldn’t stop the presses. They’ll say it wasn’t malicious and caused no damage. And when that doesn’t work, they’ll go back to the beginning and make the jury think maybe those stories had an ounce of truth, or that even if the stories were completely wrong, they could have been true.”

  “You’re saying they’ll attack my character.”

  Frank reached over and touched the back of Annie’s hand. “They’ll find nothing to attack.”

  Frank’s comment should have calmed her, but it had the opposite effect, because even Frank didn’t know everything. When they’d become acquainted—she, a tender fifteen-year-old who could have passed for twelve—he’d thought she was the most unsullied, untouched, innocent woman he’d ever met. If he knew everything, he would think less of her. He would study their relationship anew, seeing reasons for the disappointments they never discussed. At the very least, he would pity her.

  “I understand your point of view,” Mr. Fraley said to Frank, “but it doesn’t matter. They’ll make her wish she’d just accepted an apology and never bothered to sue. It’s a lawyer’s job to wear people down.”

  That was eight months ago. She hadn’t liked the lawyers, Misters Fraley and Paul, in the beginning. But she respected them now. They’d been right about everything. The defense lawyers and the newsmen, who didn’t appreciate her counterattack against the yellow press, had done all they could to stifle her determination. Already she was more tired than she’d ever been in her life, and this was less than a year into the lawsuits, a process her lawyers predicted could last four to five years, even longer.

  “You’ll get through this,” Frank said. “Look at all you’ve overcome in this decade alone.”

  He didn’t understand that the wear was cumulative. Of course, it shouldn’t have been. One was meant to get stronger, to learn from every crisis, to build an ever thicker shell. That was indeed how the first half of her life had felt: an accretion of layers, a stoicism, a set of tricks for dealing with stage-door Johnnies and everyday boors, another set of tricks for holding off the competition and demanding one’s right to remain in the limelight. But since . . . when? . . . perhaps early in her forties, something had changed. Frank would always blame the train crash. It was an easy event to point to. Everyone could see the pain caused by broken ribs, a twisted back. No one could doubt the physical toll.

  But Annie knew it was an entire series of blows, none of which could be entirely separated: first, the accident and the tricks it had played on her mind; next and unrelated, but equally injurious, the malicious headlines; and finally, the trials themselves. Each by itself might have been mere nuisance, a bee sting. The sum total was something else: a swarming attack. This was what it meant not only to age, but to fall from grace. To have your face pushed down in the mud, or worse.

  At her very first trial, in Scranton, the defense lawyer had taunted her. “You’re the woman who used to shoot out here and run along and turn head over heels, allowing your skirts to fall.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Annie replied without emotion. “I didn’t allow my skirts to fall.”

  At that moment, she’d allowed herself to look out at the jury, expecting sympathy, moderation and intelligence. But the first among them who caught her eye had none of those traits. He was a pale, narrow-faced man with poorly cut hair, a slack jaw and black eyes, staring right at her. He seemed to be looking for signs that she was part of the underworld, a drug fiend, a performer in a “leg show” or something equally ridiculous. Annie stared back at the man as long as she dared, expecting him to blink and look away. But he wouldn’t. Instead, he noticed her looking and leered—a fleshy-lipped halfway smile. She leaned back in her chair, heart pounding. He looked familiar, but so many of them did. Maybe it was the mouth. Maybe the beady gleam of his eyes. She could imagine his hands on her wrists. She could imagine—remember—his smell. The man she’d never forget. The man who wasn’t a man at all, but an animal.

  The defense lawyer asked her again, “Didn’t you turn handsprings?”

  “I am the lady who shot, but I didn’t turn handsprings.”

  Later, her lawyer would say that she looked unflappable. But she hadn’t felt it. She’d barely managed to find the words. Her heart had trilled so fast, it felt as if she’d had a pigeon caged inside her ribs.

  The first trial had been in November. Now it was April. But even after those months, as she found her way to the farthest edge of the dark train platform, that juror’s face remained with her. Thirty-three years had gone by since the chapter of her childhood about which she seldom spoke. The juror shouldn’t matter, but he did. There were dozens more trials still to come. People whispering. Men staring, assuming.

  She tilted her hat low over her eyes in the hopes that no one would recognize her as she waited for the train doors to open. She had an all-day trip home to New Jersey ahead. But she didn’t want to go home, even with Frank waiting there for her, already knowing the first argument they’d have. She had an idea that would upset him: Europe, a quick trip to get away from it all. The trials were unevenly spaced—sometimes only weeks apart, more often months. The steamer would take a week or lon
ger, she might spend ten days in England or the continent, and finally another week back. With Frank if he truly understood. Alone if he didn’t.

  Perhaps she would find a spa, some place with hot springs and minerals that would leach away whatever was ailing her. Perhaps she’d find a doctor. In America, she didn’t dare buy cough syrup or a tin of herbal tea, lest the reporters would twist it into more evidence that she was a drug addict. In Europe, she could see someone confidentially. But would that help?

  She checked the train station clock. Why must everything run late? But it wasn’t yet. She was simply getting anxious.

  She pulled up the edges of her collar and tugged the lapels of her heavy wool coat, trying to create a barrier against the cold that no one else on the platform seemed to feel. They were all dressed for spring. She was shivering, but perhaps that was because of the meals she kept skipping. On many of these trial days, she fasted, too upset to eat.

  A European doctor. Perhaps he could give her something for her ailments.

  She had occasional headaches. But that wasn’t enough reason to consult a medical expert. Really, what bothered her most were the images that flashed through her mind. They’d started three years ago at the time of the train crash, the full terror and strangeness of which she’d confided to no one. But after several months of unhealthy rumination, she’d gotten control of them. Her life seemed to be on track. She’d appeared as herself in an East Coast stage drama that, while hackneyed in terms of plot, was successful enough to run for several months. At one performance, she’d fallen from her horse. The press enjoyed that—any chance to see her fail. She’d avoided injury, but she had to admit that her mind had been wandering. She’d been thinking about the crash, or more specifically, the minutes after. And with even more intensity, the minutes before, working her way backward through increasingly vivid reencounters with every sensation before the collision, looking for the limit to her strange immersions in those prolonged and exceedingly lifelike moments—a limit she hadn’t yet found.

  And then came the ridiculous Hearst lies, completely unrelated to anything that had happened before. Just another bit of extremely bad luck. The recovery she’d made over three years was now without purpose, for this had stalled her career yet again. She had gone forward a step and back two—more than two, because sources of unresolved bitterness had been dredged back up, a black scum painting the lining of her defective soul. The images began to return, fed by anger, frustration, the parallels between the worst moments in her life and this one: having no control over a man who would ruin her. She felt pursued by inappropriate thoughts, a muddled temptation to indulge the memories, to deepen the pain, as if pressing on a bruise or reopening a barely healed cut.

  On the train platform bench closest to her, someone had left a folded newspaper. The Saint Louis Chronicle. She didn’t want to read the paper. Hearst owned most of them—Washington Evening Star, Detroit Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Examiner, New York Daily News. They’d all printed filthy stories about her. Career-destroying lies, and that was no exaggeration. Annie never wanted to read a newspaper again.

  A man approached, studied her from head to foot, gestured toward the bench and accepted her tight head-shake. She would not sit. When he did finally lower himself with a grunt onto the bench, she became aware that he was in an even better position to ogle her from behind.

  The train doors weren’t opening. She needed to be away from the foul-breathing man. She didn’t want to be here. But she didn’t want to be in New Jersey, either. She didn’t want to be anywhere, except perhaps in a city where no one would recognize her, in a city where someone might be able to help her deal with her nerves—and her rage.

  She could hear the man behind her, rustling the paper and then merely breathing, too heavily. She would not turn around. She would not move away. She was waiting to get on the train, that was all. She had managed to perform on stages and under bright lights and in open fields and in the center of enormous race tracks for audiences of thousands without feeling vulnerable, but now every set of eyes burned into her.

  She had to be stronger, but how could she be? First the train crash, then Hearst, and now this: daily humiliations on top of pain, both physical and mental.

  The predator can spot weakness.

  The world was full of wolves.

  Three weeks later, she was standing at the rail of the steamship, still more than twelve hours from Liverpool. Ridiculous to look this early for signs of land this far out. But it had been a long crossing, especially because Frank had not accompanied her. Equally distressing had been Annie’s need to keep her identity hidden in order to avoid any attention from the American press. Whenever presented to anyone aboard the ship, she referred to herself as Mrs. Butler. Phoebe—her birthname—Butler. None of it a lie. She didn’t like telling lies.

  And yet today at breakfast, her identity almost had been revealed. The captain, speaking to their entire table, had asked if she might demonstrate her shooting skills, from the deck.

  “I brought no arms,” she said without smiling.

  “I’m sure we can find something. We have a number of sport shooters aboard . . .”

  She leveled her gaze at him. “It’s Sunday.”

  “Well, that’s the best day for leisure.”

  She shot him a dark look.

  “Pardon me,” he said, and changed the subject. Well, at least he got the hint, and yes, they could believe she was pious if that meant they left her alone.

  As she stood to leave, he apologized and mentioned that there would be a small church service to attend after breakfast, if that appealed. It didn’t. She begged off, claiming a headache, and went first to her cabin for a warmer coat and then to the deck.

  She avoided a cluster of lounge chairs where a trio of women were gathered and chatting, and instead picked the last seat in the row, one chair down from a woman who was peering through binoculars in the direction of distant seabirds.

  “I see you’ve decided against the captain’s offer as well,” the woman said when she lowered her field glasses. Now Annie recognized her. She’d been at breakfast and had some sort of European accent, maybe German. She was in her twenties and rather somber: black coat, black hat, voluminous checked scarf that hid the bottom half of her small pretty face.

  “I prefer to be alone,” Annie said. Not meaning to be sour, she added, “I don’t mean without the company of another woman, like yourself. I just . . .”

  “It’s all right. I understand.”

  “And you? No interest in the prayer service today?”

  “I’m not Christian.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “You?”

  “I was raised Quaker,” Annie said. “Mother taught us we didn’t need a church building or any particular set of prayers to feel the presence of God.”

  “Then we have a different heritage but are of a like mind,” the woman said. “I’ll leave you to your own peaceful thoughts.” She picked up a thick book with a blue cover, the title too small to make out. Annie didn’t read much herself, and never without effort. A lifelong failing.

  Noticing Annie staring, the woman said, “It’s about trafficking.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. And I don’t know what that means, actually.”

  “Of humans.”

  “White slavery, then.”

  “That’s another term for it.”

  “I hope it’s on the decline?”

  “Not with the increasing flow of people into cities and from one country to another. I’d say it’s only bound to get worse.” The woman smiled and reached across the empty chair between them to shake hands. “My name’s Giselle.”

  “Phoebe. Phoebe Ann.” This was ridiculous. She was no good at false identities—even partially false ones. “It doesn’t sound like light reading.”

  “It isn’t. I�
��m preparing for a conference.”

  “In Liverpool?”

  “Berlin. After that, I’ll return home to Hamburg. Last month I was in Delaware. Do you know they lowered the age of consent in Delaware from ten to seven? How could a seven-year-old girl provide consent for anything of an intimate nature?”

  Annie was speechless.

  Giselle said, “I’m a social worker, but I have the good fortune to travel for these sorts of women’s events.” She leaned forward in her deck chair. “Should I know who you are?”

  Annie thought, When Thomas Edison made a film of me shooting, you were probably no more than five years old. “I’d rather you didn’t, to tell you the truth.”

  “It’s just . . . the captain seemed to imply you’re famous. Are you sure you haven’t done something exceptional?”

  Annie didn’t like people who overvalued themselves or wore their achievements on their sleeves. For professional photographs, she had to gussy up, but how many medals did anyone need? She’d recently had a trunk of them melted down, the proceeds sent to charities.

  Taking the question seriously, Annie said, “I’ve earned an honest living since I was a child. I’ve always put food on the table. I don’t think that’s exceptional. But it’s always mattered to me.”

  “I take it you’re not married.”

  “I am married, actually. But that’s never changed my desire to be independent, financially or otherwise.”

  Giselle sat back, satisfied. “Well that’s refreshing. He must be an unusual man, your husband.”

  “He is,” Annie said, feeling an unexpected lump in her throat.

  That should have been enough of their mutual prying, but Annie didn’t have any of the props that Giselle had—binoculars, a book—behind which she might look occupied. All week, she’d stayed in her cabin whenever possible, passing the time by embroidering two new skirts. She didn’t mind embroidery, but enough was enough. She needed to ride a horse, walk with a dog into the woods, or even this: simply converse with a person, but only the kind of person who wouldn’t talk about trivial things.