Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online Page A

streaks—poppy, turquoise, parrot green. They were young like her, but their dresses dipped low, showing shiny flesh, and their eyes were fringed with dark lashes and their cheeks were like berries bursting, crinkly hair marcelled, and it was all very, very wrong that she should be here, and one man, a stout patrician type with a bulging pocket-watched vest, he had his hands clambering down a girl’s lightly clad, shimmery gold back nearly toward her behind and then, definitely, there. The music hammered at her and the floors felt sodden with champagne and maybe it wasn’t so different from Louise and Ginny’s and yet it was. It was. It was because that was their party and this was not. This was not. It was something else and it felt a little bit like these girls had, stiff-faced and cold-eyed, punched a clock.
    Then, from the corner of her eye, something: a swath of dress the color of crème de menthe and it was a dress she knew, as Mrs. Loomis had worn it on New Year’s Eve, and it fit so snug across her swelling chest that the trim kept tearing. But it didn’t look like Mrs. Loomis, not the way the dress was hanging, swinging.
    Her eye followed the dress, followed its peacock spread, trailed it as it spanned and tucked and then settled behind the large gray shoulder of a man she recognized as one of the doctors at the clinic, Dr. Jellbye, Dr. Jellieck, Dr. Jellineck…and then he turned and behind him Marion could see that bristle of deep red hair and then Louise’s kohl-rimmed eyes, jittery with pleasure.
    “It’s my prairie canary,” came a voice slipping rough in her ear, startling Marion, making her flinch. But it was only Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, and he took Marion’s arm in his sausage fingers and plucked her from the crush and as he did said, “Joe Irish is looking for you, bunny rabbit.” And she felt overwrought and angry and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. And you may tell him I have gone.”
    But Marion’s voice seemed to get swallowed up by Mr. Gergen and his big double-breasted suit jacket and then, like a game of Pass the Parcel, she was fast in the arms of Gent Joe himself, tuxedo black as India ink, and she looked up at his eyes, his eyes smiling, his face doing smiling things as if there were never any such thing as shame in this world, and she caught his eyes and she said, in a voice that surprised her, “Mr. Lanigan, you will remove me from this place,” a strong, spiky voice like Louise telling a noisy patient, “I suppose you know you’re disturbing the entire ward, Mr. Milksop.”
    He did as she said. He removed her with great speed.
    Then they were in front of the hotel and the cold pinpricking her and he putting his tuxedo jacket around her.
    “These are not the kinds of places I can…”
    He pulled his jacket tighter around her and said, mournfully like those Irish can do, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. But I saw no other way. You had closed the door on me. But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. I should have realized this was no place for you. That’s a lie, Mrs. Seeley. I knew this was no place for you. And yet.”
    He said he’d take her home in his motorcar and she didn’t like it but could think of no other way. The trolleys ran an hour apart this time of night.
    In his car, she sat far against the door, feeling suddenly like he’d seen her without her clothing. She felt like, in coming, she’dshown him everything. She knew she had. And now she must retreat.
    The sedan was filled with him, he was so large a presence, so tall and with that hair thick like a layer cake, and the way he talked, which was big, like the best salesman, filled with tricks of tone and turns of phrase—there was this way he had of always reminding you how important and marvelous what was happening to you just then was.
    “And that El Royale Hotel, I’ve invested a substantial amount in it, it will be colossal. Did you know, they put circulating ice water in every