Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Read Online Free PDF Page B

peering out of shadows with reflective fish-eye lenses at members of the Army as they dropped off money, or took money to buy the increasingly strange supplies Ellzy required. Her minions claimed to be able to hear Ellzy talking, either to herself, or to her machines, late every night until the sun rose.
    Accusations and dirty rumors filled the streets, with H. L. Mencken himself writing a column exposing the supposed perils of trusting women with police work. People said that Ellzy was the greatest robber of all, that she crept about at night, strength augmented by pipes and pistons latched to her limbs—dark illegal inventions that let her rip the doors from bank vaults like they were made of crepe paper.
    The police raided Ellzy's offices early one morning in 1945. The evidence was indisputable: serial numbers on the bills in her safes matched those stolen in heists all over Baltimore, crimes she'd been unable to solve. But her offices were empty of life, filled to the rafters with dense tangles of machinery, dials that ticked and whirled, meters and spinning readouts.
    The police detective leading the raid, a man named Edward Barksdale, ordered the building torched. When later asked to explain his actions, he claimed that nobody else should look at Ellzy's machine. The police captain asked why not—had Ellzy Tarbutton found what she was looking for? What was the purpose of the machine? And where had she gone? Barksdale insisted that Ellzy's machine was of a highly personal nature, being built from instructions “engraved on her own flesh” (incidentally raising some question as to how he was so familiar with Ellzy's flesh), and that she had indeed vanished in search of answers, but that in so doing, she had sacrificed everything.
    Apparently whatever mystery Ellzy had solved was not one whose solution others, who had not paid her price, deserved to know.
    * * * *
    2. Roger Townsend Rogers, born 1898 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, refused to follow any path that he himself did not hew. From a young age it was clear that he had a rare imagination. His father, a moody and foul-tempered man plagued with chronic tinnitus after attending a disasterous concert in Vermont some years before the young Rogers's birth, was generally uninterested in his son's wild stories, usually characterizing them as “lies” and rewarding them with his belt. Perhaps Rogers might have become an author, were it not for his dyslexia, which made reading and writing a frustrating chore; sadly, he also lacked all natural artistic ability when it came to manipulating the artist's pencil and brush or the sculptor's pick. It was not until 1920, after being forced from home and moving to Maryland, and with the discovery that would make him famous, if only to the tiniest sliver of avant-garde Baltimore, that he was able to translate the glorious pictures that crowded his mind into reality.
    Rogers found in his pantry one August morning a loaf of bread, speckled with green-gray mold. Two circular colonies of mold were spaced as evenly as eyes, with a third and fourth looking like nose and mouth, creating on the loaf a crude upward-smiling face. Rogers, who was still queasy from the previous night's carousing, was struck by the similarity between the loaf's face and his father's; the one thing missing from the portrait was a bit of color. The nose, preferably, would be larger and a good deal redder. The cheeks, too, could be improved by the suggestion of a spreading network of flushed, broken-veined skin, and the eyes, as well, should be reddened to indicate the model's traditional bloodshot condition.
    In a fit of inspiration he called on his good friend Francis Bardelon, a lifelong bachelor, who could always be counted upon to have five or six moldy foodstuffs in various places around his lodgings.
    Bardelon joined the hunt for excitingly colored mold. Although it was Rogers who found a plate of angel-hair beneath Bardelon's bed, covered in dollops of crimson