The Briar Club: A Novel: A Thrilling and Powerful Story of Female Friendships and Secrets

Dear Kitty,

Does the name “Briarwood House” sound auspicious? We shall see!

I wish you were here.

—Grace

June sunshine poured over the street, the sounds of a jazz saxophone drifted over from next door, somewhere on Capitol Hill Senator McCarthy was waving lists of card-carrying American Commies, and a new guest had come to the Briarwood boardinghouse. Her shadow fell across Pete where he knelt on the front stoop banging a nail into the flapping screen door, and he looked up to register a tall woman with a red beret over a tumble of golden-brown hair.

“Hello there,” she said in a soft midwestern drawl, nodding at the sign in the window. “I see you have rooms to rent?”

Pete scrambled upright, dropping his hammer. He’d thought he was being so alert: watching the street over his toolbox, eagle-eyed for any signs of a rumpus. Not that the square ever had much in the way of rumpus, but you never knew. What if some dirty no-good louse from the Warring gang shot up the Amber Club just off the square, making off with a bag of the long green? If that went down and the feds came sniffing, the word on the street would point to the shadowy figure across the way. You want the long and short, you talk to the shamus at Briarwood House. Nothing gets past Pistol Pete. And then Pete would rise, flicking his cigarette and straightening his battered trilby . . .

But instead a woman had walked right up to him while he was tacking down a screen, and he’d nearly dropped his hammer on her ribbon-laced espadrille.

“Mickey Spillane,” she said, nodding at the paperback copy of I, the Jury he’d set aside on the front stoop after his mother swooped in with a reminder about the screen door. “Your favorite?”

“I, uh. Yes, ma’am. I’m Pete,” he added hastily. “Pete Nilsson.”

Her wide mouth quirked, and she stooped to pick up his hammer. “Then maybe you could tell me how a lady can get a room here, Hammerin’ Pete.”

Just like that, Pete fell in love. He been falling in love an awful lot since turning thirteen—sometimes with the girls in his class at Gompers Junior High, mostly with Nora Walsh up in 4A with her soft Irish vowels, occasionally with Arlene Hupp and her bouncy ponytail in 3C—but this dame in the red beret was something special. She was maybe thirty-five or something (old enough to have an interesting past), with a worn suitcase swinging from one hand and a camel coat belted around the kind of figure Detective Mike Hammer (Pete’s hero) would have described as a mile of Pennsylvania highway.

And she’d called him Hammerin’ Pete. He junked Pistol Pete on the spot, wishing he could cock his trilby back on his head and drawl Let me show you the joint, ma’am but unfortunately he wasn’t wearing a trilby, just an old Senators cap, and from inside the house his mother’s voice snapped “Pete, who are you gabbing to? Have you finished with that door?”

“Someone’s come about the room, Mom. Mrs.—” He looked back, realizing he hadn’t asked the woman’s name.

“March.” Another of those slow, amused smiles. “Mrs. Grace March.”

Pete’s mother popped out, face pink and irritated over her quilted housecoat, and she gave the newcomer a once-over even as she introduced herself. “Mrs., you said?” Clearly trying to appraise if there was a wedding ring under Mrs. March’s white glove. “I run my boardinghouse for ladies only, if you and your husband—”

“I was widowed last year.” Mrs. March sounded remarkably composed about that fact, Pete thought.

“Children? Because it’s a small room, no space for more than—”

“No, only me.” Mrs. March stood swinging her suitcase, and Pete could tell his mother didn’t much like being half a head shorter than this prospective tenant.

“Well, I suppose you can leave your luggage in the kitchen and come up to see the room.” There was a tone in his mother’s voice that Pete heard quite a lot, halfway between grudging and avid—grudging because she didn’t trust new people, avid because new boarders meant money—and he knew he shouldn’t have uncharitable thoughts about his mother, but he wished she would sound a little more . . . well, welcoming when she asked someone into their home. Don’t you want the boarders to like you, Mom? he’d asked once, hearing her harangue the renter in 3B for leaving water spots in the sink, and his mother had tutted, Only patsies worry about being liked, Pete. The only thing that matters is whether they pay their rent on time. He hadn’t really had an answer to that—or rather, he knew better than to voice one. If he did, Mom would just let fly with a tight-lipped Well, don’t you sound just like your father when you take that tone. Hammerin’ Pete was a match for any hard case in the District, but one just-like-your-father from Mom and he shriveled like he’d been slapped in the puss. “Would you like a cup of coffee, ma’am?” he asked, opening the door for Mrs. March, and his mother shot him an irritable look.

“How kind”—another smile from the new arrival—“but I believe I’ll just see the room.”

It’s not much of a room, he wanted to tell her as she followed his mother up the stairs. A storage closet up at the top of the old brownstone, off the fourth-floor landing: Pete’s mother decided this year that she could cram a boarder in there, and Pete had spent his last break emptying out the junk, nailing down loose floorboards, and lugging up the tiny icebox so she could advertise there was a kitchenette. But he couldn’t honestly believe anybody would want to live in such a shoebox.

“She’ll take it,” his mother said ten minutes later, sailing down the stairs flushed and jubilant. “Six months paid up front, too, and she looks like a lady. Not that you can tell, these days. Here, before you take that up . . .” Popping the clasps on Grace March’s suitcase.

“Mom!” Pete hissed, feeling his ears burn. “I hate it when you do this—”

“Don’t be squeamish. You want a dope fiend or a floozy in the attic? Or a Communist. Better to snoop now before she digs herself in.” Mrs. Nilsson flipped through the tidily folded blouses and skirts with rapid, expert fingers, poked at a big glass mason jar apparently stuffed with nylons, examined the toiletries. Pete stood gnawing his lip, remembering how the English teacher at Gompers Junior High had said that the Latin root of the word mortification was “to die” and Pete could see why, because he was so mortified right now he wanted to drop dead here on the worn linoleum of his mother’s kitchen. Please don’t find anything, he prayed, watching her sift through the new boarder’s underwear (silky pink and peach stuff, he couldn’t help but notice with a burn of shame). The fourth-floor room had already nearly been rented out to a pleasant-looking spinster with a Jersey accent, but when Mom rummaged through her suitcase she found a package of what she called Those Things (the kind of rubber things the boys at Gompers boasted about stealing from their older brothers) and there had been an ugly scene before the woman from Jersey was kicked out, all before she even moved in, and without getting her just-paid deposit back, either.

Pete was already hoping Mrs. Grace March would be sticking around for a while.

“Well, take it on up.” Mrs. Nilsson closed the suitcase, looking vaguely disappointed there hadn’t been anything more sinister than a pink needle case. “Hurry back down, now. I need you to weed the tomato patch after you take your sister to the library.”

“Yes, Mom.” Pete sighed.

“You’re a good boy,” she said, giving his ear a pinch as he hauled the suitcase toward the first of three flights of stairs.

The door off the right side of the tiny fourth-floor landing stood ajar, but Pete knocked anyway. “Mrs. March?”

“Oh heavens, drop that Mrs. March business,” her voice floated out. “I keep looking around for my mother-in-law, and not having a mother-in-law anymore is one of the few advantages of being widowed.”

“Yes, Mrs. M— Um, Mrs. Grace.” He hauled her suitcase inside, embarrassed all over again by just how tiny the room was. A narrow twin bed against one wall, a rickety little bureau that doubled as a coffee table, one shabby armchair . . . and his mother might call it a kitchenette, but it was really just an icebox the size of a packing crate, with a hot plate balanced on top. Worst of all were the walls: chipped, tilting inward under the slanted roof, painted a faded but still bilious green. You agreed to live here? he thought—but Mrs. Grace was ignoring all that. She’d hung up the camel coat and unlaced the espadrilles, padding about in an old floral-printed skirt and what looked like a man’s shirt tied up at the waist, and she was heaving up the sash on the window at the end of the room so she could look out at the square below.

“Did my suitcase pass inspection?” she said without turning around, and Pete wanted to die all over again, but she aimed a mischievous smile over one shoulder. “There’s a glass mason jar in among my unmentionables. If I haul it out, can you tell me where to fill it up?” She was glancing around the room, which conspicuously lacked a sink.

“The bathroom’s on the landing. Sink and, um, toilet, anyway.” He felt his ears go red again, saying toilet to a lady. “If you want a bath, you’ll have to go to the third floor.” Where three women already competed for the tub and mirror between seven and eight in the morning. “A word of advice,” he found himself saying. “You do not want to get between Claire from 3B and Arlene from 3C when they start going at it over whose turn it is for the bathroom.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Mrs. Grace, having unlatched the suitcase, shook the mason jar free from a jumble of nylons and blouses. “Would you mind filling that up for me? Hot water, please.”

When he came back lugging the sloshing jar, she had unearthed a handful of tea bags, which promptly went into the water, along with the contents of a dozen little sugar packets clearly scavenged from a diner. “Sun tea,” she explained, seeing Pete’s puzzled expression as she carried the jar to the window and pushed it carefully through to sit on the sunny stone ledge. “Let it steep on a hot porch or warm windowsill for three hours, and you’ll never taste anything better. Old Iowa farm recipe.”

“Is that where you’re from? Iowa?”

“Originally.” She stood back, admiring the sun tea sparkling in its jar, but didn’t volunteer anything else. “Who’s the musician?” she asked, tilting her head as a mellow sax riff on “Sentimental You” waltzed through the window on the warm breeze.

“That’s Joe Reiss, next door. He plays at the Amber Club down the street—he’s always practicing.”

“How many boarders live here altogether?”

“Eight, if Mom’s got a full house.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, trying a tentative smile. “You’ll meet the rest at breakfast. That’s between seven and seven thirty every morning,” he recited. “Breakfast comes with your rent. Though a lot of our boarders prefer to get breakfast at the Crispy Biscuit on the other side of the square,” he felt compelled to add, in all honesty. His mother tried her best, of course she did, but her leathery scrambled eggs and undercooked bacon (slapped down on the dining room table at seven on the dot and removed at seven twenty-nine and fifty-eight seconds) weren’t exactly . . . well, the pancakes at the diner on Briar just couldn’t be beat, that was all.

“You’re quite the man of information, aren’t you?” Mrs. Grace took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and shook one out.

“My mother doesn’t allow smoking,” Pete couldn’t help saying.

“I know.” Calmly, Mrs. Grace struck a match, lit up, took a long inhale of smoke, and blew it out the open window. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“My mother knows everything,” Pete said feelingly. You could never hear her coming; in those house slippers she could pop out of the shadows like a jack-in-the-box. Always when you’ve left your coat on the floor, or are just thinking about putting your feet on the sofa, Pete had heard one of the boarders say. Nora Walsh from 4A, the pretty one with light-brown hair that gleamed in the sun. And Nora wasn’t wrong: a coat on the floor or a shoe print on a sofa was the kind of thing Pete’s mother couldn’t stand—ate her nerve ends raw, Mickey Spillane would have put it. “My mother’s had a difficult life,” he said loyally. “She just gets a little tense about rules. You know, times being hard and all.” Times were hard: the war only just receding into the past and the atom bomb waiting to blow the world to kingdom come and now Commies running all over making trouble. At least Senator McCarthy said so.

“It’ll be our secret.” Mrs. Grace tapped ash out the window, smiling. Even her eyes got in on the smile—golden-brown eyes, like her hair, and they had a way of staying half-lidded, as if she were looking at everything with sleepy amusement. “So, why is this place called Briarwood House?”

“Because we’re on the corner of Briar Avenue and Wood Street.” It sounds more refined, his mother had said when she hand-lettered the sign: BRIARWOOD HOUSE: BOARDING FOR LADIES. We’ll get a better class of boarder that way. But the house was just a house, Pete thought—a tall narrow brownstone on the nicer edge of Foggy Bottom, not some country manor out of a book like those Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries he’d read last summer.

“How long have you had boarders here, then?”

Pete looked at his shoes. “Since my dad left.” He waited for her to pounce on that. Adults always did. But Mrs. Grace just took another long drag off her Lucky Strike, looking around her new home: the lime-green paint, the slanted ceilings, the postage-stamp-size window seat. “It’s not much,” Pete felt compelled to apologize, but she shook her head.

“All of this”—she gestured with her cigarette, encompassing the sunny windowsill, the skeins of jazz, the clatter of feet on the stairs—“it has potential.”

“It does?” Pete felt like he heard that word a lot, generally when adults were telling you why you couldn’t do something now, maybe later. Look at your peach-fuzz chin in the mirror, and imagine the potential that one day you might need a shave; look at the cars cruising past and imagine the potential of someday driving one. To Pete, the word potential really just seemed to mean a long way off. Maybe never.

“This whole house has potential,” Mrs. Grace said, sounding very definite. “And so do you, Hammerin’ Pete.” She gave another smile, stubbing out her cigarette on the stone window ledge beside the mason jar. “Now scoot. Come back in about three hours—I’ll be unpacked, and you’ll get a glass of sun tea that’ll make you swear you were in heaven.”

But Pete was pretty sure he was already there. He swung out of 4B whistling, and he didn’t stop even when he looked through the half-open door of the landing bathroom and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the sink. Hammerin’ Pete . . . maybe when he was the toughest gumshoe in town, he’d carry a hammer through his belt: the hammer that took a smash to the Warring gang, brought down the biggest crime family in the District. By then he’d be thirty, not thirteen; he’d have a dashingly blued growth of stubble instead of pimples; he’d have a battered trilby slashing across a cruel cliff of a brow, not a Washington Senators baseball cap.

Yes, he could almost see it. Because he had potential. The new boarder said so.