Читать книгу Darling Jack - Mary McBride - Страница 8

Anna Matlin was invisible.

As a child in the grim coal-mining hills of southern Illinois, she had learned her lessons well. In a family of thirteen, the squeaking wheel got backhanded and burdened with extra chores. In any forest, it was the tallest tree that suffered the lightning.

So Anna, early on, had decided to be a shrub.

She had blossomed once—and briefly—at the age of sixteen, when she eloped to Chicago with Billy Matlin. But Billy had soon looked beyond her, to Colorado and the promise of gold.

“I’ll send for you,” he’d said. But Billy never had. He’d died instead, leaving his young widow pale and even more invisible.

Under bleak winter skies, in her somber wools and black galoshes, Anna Matlin was barely distinguishable from the soot-laden banks of snow along Washington Street as she made her way to number 89, the offices of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, where she had been employed for six years, filing papers and transcribing notes and more or less blending into the wainscoting.

In summer, in her drab poplins and sensible shoes, she seemed to disappear against brick walls and dull paving stones.

Whatever the season or setting, Anna Matlin was—by her own volition—invisible.

But every once in a while, particularly in summer, when the sun managed to slice through the smokedense Chicago sky, it would cast a rare and peculiar glint from Anna’s spectacles, a flash that for an instant made her seem exceptional and altogether visible.

As it did on the morning of May 3,1869…