Читать книгу A Summoning of Souls - Leanna Renee Hieber - Страница 12
ОглавлениеChapter Four
“Why are you still drawn to haunt this place?” Eve asked the parade, troubled by this lack of resolution. “I’m so confused.”
Eve had sincerely hoped they’d put to rest the spirits haunted by what had happened in and around Dupont’s work, but then again, the spirits so affected by the theft of body parts and tokens of their death were all children. The assembly remained of several adults and elderly souls. What else had the spirit world so unsettled about this place?
They ascended the stoop, reading the letters painted on the front bay window indicating funerary services and the viewing parlor.
The detective plucked a set of keys from his pocket and began trying each one in the lock.
“You managed to get a key with this warrant?” Eve asked, incredulous.
“Bills was so unnerved by Dupont’s work he has proved helpful. He handed me Dupont’s keys when we were at the theatre to separate the body parts from the stage set, thorough about the evidence of remaining parts. His cooperation with me, directly, insisting on me alone and not my superior, has me additionally suspect in the captain’s eyes. But the people who know the case must remain the ones working it. So many things get lost in a hierarchy of ego and superiority.”
Horowitz emitted a small laugh of victory as one long brass key turned in the lock with a resonant clang and the glass door swung open.
“Agreed. You’re good about creating rapport, and the results follow. It’s one of your best qualities,” she said with a smile that he shared.
They entered the empty white entrance hall and the open, plain doorway that led into the long white-walled viewing parlor, empty save for the dais where a coffin would have been laid out for those who had become interested in separating death from their own home.
“I was inside briefly with the girls so this part is familiar to me,” Eve said. “Jenny broke in through a back window, and we looked around quickly before anyone could report us as intruders. We didn’t have a warrant. In our haste I realize we didn’t check the rear exit, and I didn’t know yet to look for a box near the electric, keeping the ghosts out like in other venues.”
“Then let’s see,” Horowitz said, and charged in, through the parlor and around to the back half of the building. Eve followed quickly.
Beyond a small preparatory kitchen left over from when the parlor had first been a home, they found a rear door with a dark shade over its window. The detective went out, Eve following to the small patch of struggling green surrounded by the backs of other buildings. Horowitz noted the fuse box on the exterior brick of the parlor and gestured to an additional small metal box beside it.
Eve reached forward and flipped open the lid to reveal the tines of metal and a sparking current snapping between them.
“Antonia broke the current of one of these boxes before.” Eve peered closer. “If we can get something nonconductive, and break the wires there, it should disconnect it.”
Horowitz picked up a broken plant pot and knocked the edge on the side of the wires, and with a click and scrape they fell to the side.
With a rush of cool air, spirits swept into the space. Eve followed the lead of the dead and the detective followed her. These older spirits were not dogging Eve like the children had been before their parts and tokens were found in Dupont’s “reliquaries” and “art projects.” In the wake of the spirits’ chill came drops of rain falling from a darkening sky.
Reentering the parlor’s hall, Eve watched the spirits swoop around, some five to seven of them, darting through walls and windows, experiencing the freedom of movement they’d not had when kept outside; but there was a focus to them—they were looking for something. A host of them went down a narrow stairs to the side of the kitchen, stairs Eve hadn’t noticed before.
At the top of the winding stairs floated a distinct spirit that struck Eve with a sequence of memories. He was dressed in a dark robe and cap and had a long black-and-silvered beard; his skin was a dusky grey, which in life must have been a rich bronze. She’d noticed him before, floating outside of sacred sites but, not wishing to disturb his peaceful mien, Eve had never spoken with him, nor he to her.
He turned and floated down the stairs. Eve followed, Jacob on her heels, only to vanish at the bottom stair to leave them alone in a whitewashed room.
Downstairs, two narrow rectangular windows at the top of the cellar-level wall lit the room; coarse wooden floorboards were laid over a dirt floor. Set about the plain space were several wooden cabinets, most that looked like the base of a phonograph stand, two with wheels on tapered legs, one stocky and squat against a wall, and a few large wooden spools set against the far wall.
“These cabinets look like…” Horowitz trailed off as he looked into one of the wooden cabinets and examined the top tray. It was empty.
“The bases of the device attached to Gran during her abduction,” Eve finished, opening another of the rolling cabinet bases. Nothing. “Devices then attached to me and Cora.” She opened the door of the cabinet against the wall. Nothing.
“But only after we all were overcome by noxious gas.” The detective finished recalling the events of that troubling night bitterly. Who had abducted them was unclear, but all roads pointed to Dupont and Albert Prenze as Montmartre. The detective moved to lift the large wooden spool shapes, but there was nothing in or on them.
“These spools look like they’d have held rope or, considering the devices, wire.”
“Yes, wire,” Eve confirmed.
The spirit in robes that had gone down ahead of them reappeared. When he saw Eve catch his eyes, he wafted closer to her. “I know you,” Eve said. “I’ve seen you outside various sacred sites, since I was a child. What brings you here?”
“Dupont and Prenze have become notorious of the dead. They threaten spirits and living allies. We are united in the pursuit of justice,” the man said in a thick accent, likely Armenian, Eve noted, from the Gregorian style cross he wore below his beard. She only knew this because Gran had insisted when she was a child that she learn as many icons and sacred symbols as she could, saying she’d encounter them all in the city’s confluence and each had importance and power. As of late, New York’s Armenian population was growing rapidly in hopes of escaping persecution abroad.
“I’ve seen you too,” the man continued, adding warmly, “child of spirit. Any haunt remaining in service to life, to God, and to the city should learn the most gifted mediums of their age and take note.”
“Thank you,” Eve replied, moved by this outreach. “As I’m sure you know, prosecuting Dupont is under way, but Prenze…”
“We need proof, please,” Horowitz added, taking Eve’s lead, looking in the direction she was looking even if he couldn’t see what she saw or heard what spirits said. “Tactile proof of wrongdoing. Anything you could point us to would help, spirit, thank you.”
The ghost turned toward him with another benevolent smile. “Yes, child of Moses. I understand.” He then pointed a long, robed arm at the wall nearest them, where the one cabinet not on wheels sat flush against the wall.
“The old priest is gesturing to this one,” Eve explained, opening the door again to show the spirit that the cabinet was empty. The spirit gestured again, insistent, the arm of his robe like a shadowy wing.
“Then let’s move it from the wall,” the detective suggested, and they each took a corner of the heavy wooden piece that had been left behind likely out of expediency.
As soon as they moved it from the wall, a thin folder of papers fell to the floor and the detective rushed to pick them up. Eve looked over his shoulder as he examined the papers.
On top was a typed half page with handwritten names, indicating that Arte Uber Alles had a permit to exhibit an “unnamed art project” on the Brooklyn Bridge, with the year, 1899, but no date set. Another paper marked a transfer of property from the Zinne family to A. Montmartre: a warehouse of funerary clothes downtown near the water.
“That’s the location Gran was abducted to, where we all were put unconscious!” Eve exclaimed.
“Now this is important proof,” Horowitz said. “Thank you, spirits!” he said to the air.
Eve turned to the ghost, but he had vanished. Even if spirits weren’t manifest, gratefulness carried to their world and Eve heard a soft chorus of “You’re welcome” on the air and relayed the sentiment.
Another permit was for laying an additional telegraph line in Tarrytown jurisdiction, perhaps what Eve saw today. Did Prenze have property near Sanctuary?
Another paper was a receipt for wire from the Roebling Wire Company, many spools, and the next was for a bank account via the Chemical National Bank with its headquarters on Broadway, indicating that Arte Uber Alles had a new account as of 1896, the year Prenze supposedly died.
“Permit, receipt, property transfer, and account contract....” Horowitz listed off, peering at the addresses on each. “Places to inquire once we’ve continued sweeping this place.”
“Neither Dupont nor Prenze as Montmartre could’ve known this was left behind, and I’d like to think that was through the help of the spirits,” Eve said. “Though I confess, part of me is beginning to be paranoid enough to wonder if everything is a trap and we’re just wandering where our enemy bids.”
“If so and it leads to evidence, we use it to fight back,” the detective replied matter-of-factly.
Eve kept sweeping the room, recalling Antonia had plucked a thin braid of hair from a baseboard upstairs and had left it on the grave of the child it belonged to, per the spirit’s request. The recollection reminded Eve to look in every crevice and she did so.
Going back upstairs, Eve’s eye caught on a small dark triangle on the baseboard a few steps from the ground floor. Using a fingernail, she separated the triangle from the wall, and with her fingertip slid a small, thin piece of metal up into view.
A tintype image. Likely from forty or so years ago, when the prephotographic medium was in its prime. The portrait was of a distinct, severe-looking woman in a black dress with a cameo at her throat.
“Good eye, Eve!” Horowitz exclaimed, looking at the image over her shoulder on the stairs.
Looking at the picture, Eve had a visceral reaction. She could feel a rush of information wanting to hit her all at once. At the center of her forehead, a burning sensation indicated there were too many spirits that this image summoned and that reactions were clogged at her third eye. She wavered on the step. Jacob gently steadied her.
“She hated him, and he her…” Eve murmured. “I feel it. The spirit world knows it too.”
“Do you remember, the painting in the ballroom of the Prenze mansion?” Horowitz asked. “I think this is the same woman.”
“Yes, it must be,” Eve agreed. “The mother Albert had such contention with.” Eve’s ears perked up at a specific sound: a rustling, an assent. “She is at the core of his motivations.” She tucked the tintype into the pocket of her skirt. She’d been sure all her skirts, for work or for everyday wear, had at least one. She didn’t like the object being near to her, just a few layers of fabric from her skin, but the image was important. “Perhaps that volatility of emotion can serve us.”
Returning to the parlor level, a woman in a plain dress, like the uniform of a schoolmarm, floated above the dais.
“Do you have anything to say to us?” Eve asked. “Anything would be helpful.”
“All in black, everything in black, but never in light,” the solemn woman said, and while her dress was simple and neatly kept, her silver hair was wild as if swept by a storm.
“Well, this place was a funeral parlor,” Eve replied. “There’s nothing unusual in that.”
“But that’s how we see him!” The spirit shuddered, her transparent form shaking. “The spirits, he hates us, and he stares at us, all in black, a void.” The ghost’s eyes widened. “He’s planning something terrible, with all those things and wires and devices and we don’t know how to stop it.”
“The shadow man? Is that who you’re talking about?” Eve asked. A child spirit had described Prenze in such a way. The woman nodded. Something that rattled a spirit was of greater concern to the living.
“The shadow man wants to end us. Whispers and cries from places we can’t access, spirits in great distress, imprisoned by his hatred.” The woman swooped at Eve suddenly, her arms flailing. Eve tried not to flinch, but the rush of cold air made her blink back tears. “Help! Before he kills us all!”
“We want to help,” Eve reassured the nervous old woman. “What else can you tell me?”
The spirit turned to look out the window toward a couple walking arm in arm under an umbrella. She reached toward them as if transfixed and didn’t say another word, just floated with transparent arms outstretched, longing for some old suitor.
Eve sighed, seeing the woman’s attention was lost to her. Horowitz was looking at Eve, patiently waiting for an explanation of what, if any, clues were shared.
“Taking lessons from the dead is admittedly a life of unreliable narration,” Eve began. “But she said Prenze is planning something terrible. They want us to stop harm coming to ghosts. Like he harmed Maggie.”
The fact that Eve hadn’t seen Maggie all day troubled her, even if Zofia had mentioned she was off, preoccupied. Usually her best friend passed through, checking in, a consistent companion. Maggie was Eve’s familiar, her spirit tether, guiding her through life. Losing her to Prenze’s interference once made Eve nervous about any further absence.
“I wonder if those spools of wire, since dispensed, relates to the danger to ghosts, as Maggie seemed to think it was Prenze turning up the lights to a blinding level that…blinked her out, severing her spirit’s tether to our world.”
“I think you must be a connective piece, then. You and Gran,” Horowitz said. “Cora too, those with psychic capacity. To do what he wants to do, he must need information from you; why else study you or hook you to the device?”
“I don’t know. Whatever he did opened something; it was after that that he began the astral projection.”
“Let’s see if next door can be any more reliable than any of your ghostly narrators,” the detective suggested.
Exiting the Irving Place address, Horowitz took a moment to lock the door after him before they turned toward Gramercy Park. Following the promise of trees ahead, they walked a block north and stood at the southeastern corner of the rectangular enclave of townhouses facing a gated green with a wrought iron fence to keep out anyone who didn’t belong to the little district of old money that hid itself from the city’s biggest industrial changes in the widening streets and avenues beyond.
The spirits that usually coursed around the neat and tidy green were still today, all floating in place, all staring straight at Eve. For them to be stock still was unnatural—stifling, even, to a Sensitive so accustomed to seeing them as reflective of the city’s constant movement and restless nature.
Eve stopped in her tracks, the detective beside her, his hand brushing hers. After a moment he caught her hand and kept it, squeezing her palm as he tilted his head toward her.
“What is it?” her ever-attentive companion asked.
“All the ghosts are staring at me.” Eve fought a nauseous wave of unease. “Their stillness is unsettling. Ghosts are creatures of movement and floating. Entities of eternal breezes. For the whole of the spirit world to be acting unnatural makes me wonder what Prenze is doing or perhaps what other changes are happening to affect them.”
“Perhaps his electrical work, the monitors, the blockades—and more—are affecting their general freedom?”
“Perhaps…” Eve squinted at the spirits, which stared blankly back. She shook her head and turned toward the closest row of townhouses, Dupont’s home around the corner from his parlor.
A breeze blew back the loose hair around Eve’s face and Vera appeared again before her, white hair up in a bun with strands floating as if underwater. Her floral shawl that Eve had once seen in beautiful reds and blues in the fullness of Sanctuary was greyscale here, held taut over bony, folded arms. Born and raised in Mexico City, a talented artist, she’d spent her adult life in Manhattan. Her intense love of art and this city kept her soul as vibrant as her paintings.
“I was torn from here,” she said, her accent light and lilting. “I tried to go in again, just as you stand, and from here I was ripped apart. Sanctuary put me back together, as it did Maggie. The same thing happened to her at the Prenze mansion. Break these devices of torture, Eve!”
“We’ll do whatever we can,” Eve promised, explaining to Jacob what the spirit said. “It’s this house,” she said, indicating the white sandstone façade with carved stone lions on either side of the stoop. They ascended. Vera hung back, hesitant.
Horowitz looked at the ring of six keys with a fob of a sacred heart stamped in metal, a sad reminder to Eve of all the little reliquaries Dupont had made from the parts of children. Jacob chose the most elaborate key, brass with a filigree pattern, and turned the lock that matched its pattern. Their reflection shifted in the etched-glass panel of the door as they entered.
Dupont’s townhouse appeared just as empty as the viewing parlor, and as they stood in the house’s parlor, similarly white walled and open, Eve noticed some of the same spirits that had been floating around the viewing parlor had come with them, looking in the front bay window.
“Let’s disarm the blockade.” Eve gestured to the windows. “They’re here, looking in.”
“Does it ever startle you, seeing them? I know you look upon the dead as your duty, but—”
“Always,” Eve interrupted. All the spirits kept staring at her unnervingly through the window. “Just because one accepts a calling doesn’t mean it can’t scare you.”
Jacob stared at her a moment. “Brave and honest,” he said in admiration.
Eve shrugged. “If I wasn’t at least a little frightened of the power of spirits, I wouldn’t have built up my reserves, my shields, learned my limits. If I’d have just let it all in, without discernment, we’d never have met. I’d have been committed to some private asylum upstate.” She turned and found her way to the back of the home.
Past a rear kitchen, the two exited onto an exterior landing. Eve gestured toward the electric box affixed to the brick outside where a similar blocking mechanism was mounted beside, and Horowitz did the same as was done at the parlor to remove it.
Spirits poured in; a floodgate lifted. Quiet at first, they took stock of the place, moving meticulously through walls, phantoms floating a foot from the floor.
“Greetings, spirits,” Eve called. “Please direct us to anything of note.”
At this bidding, Vera reappeared, her wrinkled face determined.
“No, Vera,” Eve assured gently. “I would never ask you to revisit a site of trauma.”
“No, no,”—she shook her transparent head, white wisps of hair flowing—“this place is an enemy and I want to vanquish it. This house.” She clucked her tongue. “Dios mio.” The spirit sighed, floating toward the library, off the main entrance hall, gesturing with a bent hand that Eve follow her. “This room was the start of everything for me, with this case.”
The library must also have served as Dupont’s study. Umber-painted walls were broken up by tall maple bookshelves that seemed to have mostly been left alone. Books were stacked along the bookshelves, with gaps where perhaps Mrs. Dupont had taken some tomes of note or worth. A large leather chair and desk remained near a tall lancet window with stained-glass squares. Mrs. Dupont must not have felt the need to move what was obviously his, the man’s actions and obsessions having estranged him.
“This was where little Ingrid Schwerin appeared to me,” Vera explained, gesturing as she spoke, “just outside the house and then leading me into this hall. Just as the spirits of children begged for Maggie’s intervention at the Prenze mansion, so did Ingrid want me to know her story here.” The spirit shook her head. “I don’t know how I was able to get in, past that blocking device to begin with. Perhaps Ingrid’s tie to this place carved out a door for our souls. I launched her postmortem photograph from this desk into the hall, and that began the unraveling.”
It was true; little Ingrid’s spirit had led the charge toward what Eve prayed would prove ongoing justice. Their search continued.
Upstairs, the main bedrooms and boudoir, in earth-toned brocade wallpapers and wood paneling, were empty, a few small side tables and one bed left behind, and the spirits that had gathered seemed unconcerned for this floor. It was the uppermost floor they wanted Eve to see.
A silvery mass flew above, calling for Eve to follow as they passed through the ceiling.
Eve led the detective up a narrow flight of curving stairs to an arched top-floor hall with two small doors open into empty, cobwebbed rooms and one large door at the end of the hall, painted a bright red, an entirely unsettling and odd juxtaposition to the rest of the understated townhouse.
Three young spirits flew ahead, pointing to the arched, crimson portal. Vera hung back against the hallway wall, gesturing to the spirits as if what was to follow was for them to say, not her.
Eve recognized the souls, hovering at the threshold. They were three of the children that Eve had interacted with during Dupont’s fetish. Eve recognized the boy of around ten or eleven at the fore; he had appeared in her office during a séance to glean information about Dupont’s activities and the thefts of tokens from corpses.
“Hello young man,” Eve said in a welcoming tone. “Giacomo, isn’t it?” At this, the little boy brightened, nodded, beaming that he’d been remembered, and he and the dark-haired little girl beside him in a pale pinafore shared a smile. “I remember you were trying to get justice for your sister during the remainder of your too-short life and then, even after death. And is that you?” She turned to the girl.
“Yes, thank you, ma’am,” the boy said. “This is Magdalena.”
One of the reasons the dead so often cooperated with Eve and wanted her to listen was that she tried to make them feel important and recollected in a world that had often discarded them.
“I hope you two were able to find some peace, knowing Mr. Dupont had been arraigned.”
“Yes, ma’am, but if you’re here, then you know not everything’s done with. And now that I’m here, I remember,” the boy said ominously. “Not like this house would let me forget…” Eve took a moment to explain what she was seeing and hearing to the detective. The spirit pointed to the red door.
Horowitz approached, looked at Eve, and withdrew the six keys again, peering at the ornate double lock. He tried one of the remaining keys that didn’t go to the front doors; eventually the slenderest key unlocked the base of the hefty iron lock and a second key above undid another latch, and the wooden door swung open on soundless, well-oiled hinges.
The room was triangular, one large window with a thick red curtain drawn aside, the view looking out over the shingles of the next rooftop, edges of the trees along the street coming into view beyond a small window ledge.
Inside were what looked like stage sets, which would explain the hefty red window drape as a stage curtain. Folded to the side were painted screens with various landscapes of field, sea, or forest. A mixture of props peppered one wall, a mixture of fantastical and liturgical things, a castle footing, a spear, a taxidermized peacock. An open trunk with a bunch of costumes spilling out. A small bookshelf held children’s books with gilded spines.
A Bavarian scene was set at the fore, a crook, prop sheep, and large metal bell set to the side.
Vera pointed to it. “That’s how Maggie described what her children looked like who asked for her help, little Grimm’s fairy-tale children.”
“Where is Maggie?” Eve asked Vera, who could only shrug, a sunbeam cutting through her silvery form, a contrast of luminosity, the sun highlighting dust motes floating amid the edges of the spirit’s skirts. “I wish she were here to help make sense of this.”
“This must be where Dupont did his private, postmortem photography,” Horowitz mused. “Posing the bodies that had been left in his care?”
“This is likely all the staging for the collection that ended up in the Prenze mansion.” Eve turned to the little boy and his sister. “Were you photographed as well as stolen from?”
The girl nodded, and gestured to her hair, indicating a lock taken at some point during the funerary process.
A third spirit that had hung back in the hall now wafted close to Eve, a wide-eyed child in a long robe with wispy hair. “This is how we were posed, so many of us,” the child murmured. “Before we were laid out. Freshly dropped off. Barely dead a day in some cases. Before the stink could really set in.”
“Art above everything,” Giacomo muttered bitterly.
“Arte Uber Alles?” Eve asked. The children nodded. “Dupont spoke about a ‘great experiment.’ Were you a part of that?”
The three spirits nodded in unison. “There was testing,” the waifish, robed child said, ominously pointing toward the wall.
Along both sides of the wall hung a sequence of long copper wires. Some were attached to discs like what had been placed on Gran’s temples.
“Monitoring, or testing dead bodies? I don’t understand.”
Giacomo looked at his sister; she shook her head. The little brother spoke for her. “The process started here and then was perfected at the other parlor.”
“What process?” Eve asked.
The boy sighed, as if trying to figure out how to explain it. “To try to block any of us ghosts. Some of us lingered on to see what he was doing with our bodies. He didn’t want to be bothered; neither of them did.”
“Who?” Eve pressed.
“Dupont and the partner. The shadow man. He helped with the devices. There’s something behind the wall. Do you hear the hum? It goes up to the roof, to a wind device that powers the drum.”
“There is a low note in the air, now that the spirits mention it,” Eve said, bidding Horowitz listen.
“A low drone.” He peered closely at the thin slats of stained wood along the narrow side of the room. Walking over to a seam in the wall, he fished out a curved metal hook from between the wood panels, and a panel slid out to reveal metal plates on the wall behind. The ghosts came close, peering too.
“It’s all been about getting us to go away.” Magdalena’s voice was tiny and sad.
“Dupont’s been mucking about with photographs for a long time,” Giacomo offered, “but the experiments, all this wire and the metal and such, that’s been about three years. Since the shadow man. We’ve been asking any spirit we see these questions. We know you need answers. We’re trying to help you piece it together.”
“Thank you, dear children,” Eve said earnestly, looking at each spirit. “You’re so helpful. You’re right, we need answers, and proof. Each moment we’re getting closer.”
Vera’s generally kind, warm expression was fixed in consternation. “These men.” She shook her head. “If you don’t want to be haunted, why act in a way that angers the dead?” Vera, floating in the doorway, asked the absent tenants, echoing the rhetorical question of this case.
“I’ll let Bills know about this development,” Horowitz said. “Those postmortem photos can be evidence, if we can ever recover them from Prenze’s clutches.”
They descended again to the main floor, and Eve peered at the only thing that had been left in the hall: a grandfather clock against the wall of the entrance hall that faced toward the open parlor arch.
“I can see why Mrs. Dupont didn’t want to take this with her,” Eve said, grimacing. The face of the grandfather clock was an eerie, smiling half-moon that looked more like a sneering caricature of a clown than a celestial body. She peered closer at it, seeing that there were smaller clocks in each corner that were set to other cities around the globe. Each of those small hands were spinning in an unnatural manner.
A cold dread crept over Eve at this sight, and it seemed the tall, carved wood sides of the large fixture trembled. The face of the clock suddenly careened close to hers, and strong arms seized her and swung her by the waist away from the clock and toward the other end of the hall, papers from the file scattering everywhere.
Jacob had moved, deft and nimble to swing her out of harm’s way, covering her in a protective embrace as the clock crashed behind them against the balustrade and then to the floor in a terrible noise of clattering chimes and springing clockwork.
Looking up at the rear door window at a flurry of movement, Eve glimpsed a man in a black hat and a long black cloak leering for a moment before vanishing.
Prenze again and his blasted projection. The most unwelcome haunt, and now, able to manifest objects with force.
Jacob righted Eve, and she embraced him. “Thank you!”
The rear door swung open of its own accord, and they broke apart, both balling their hands into fists, ready to fight. But this time, there was a more welcome sight at the threshold. The spirit children reappeared.
“We’ll help protect you,” Giacomo, again at the forefront of the trio, said. “We’ll try. If he can manifest force, maybe so can we.”
“Thank you, Giacomo,” Eve said, lowering her fists. “I don’t want you to deny eternal rest on our account.”
“We’ll rest once all this is settled,” the young spirit, hardened by a life and death of disrespect, declared. “These men disturbed us directly, but they’ve offended the whole spirit world now.”
This echoed what Eve had heard from within Sanctuary.
“This isn’t over until he’s stopped his quest,” Magdalena whispered, taking her brother’s hand. Her breathlessness made her words all the more chilling. “He wants us all gone. And he must think you are one of the reasons keeping us here.”
At this, Eve shuddered. It was true. It wasn’t just that she was part of the inquiry into Albert Prenze, his family, his practice; it was that she tethered what he hated most.
The detective stepped around broken clock parts to pick up all the receipts and papers from their discovery to replace them in the file.
“I doubt after all this we’ll be able to make headway at either of our offices,” Eve said. “We should go on ahead to my house so we don’t keep the Bishops waiting. We need them. Now that Prenze while manifesting can throw things at us like a damned poltergeist… We need shields.”
“Lead on, then, Whitby.” Tucking the file under his arm, the detective gestured toward the door. “Let us be schooled in the steeling of minds.”
He rubbed his hands together, his tone firm as he continued. “But I’m going to request clearance on the Prenze mansion. The whole family needs to be watched. Tomorrow morning I’ll scout locations. If I recall correctly, there are a few new hotels climbing up north of Longacre Square. We’ll find one with a view of his property, procure a telescope and binoculars, and engage in some good old-fashioned surveillance.”
He said it with such surety it actually gave Eve a surge of hope. Herein was a workable solution that avoided confrontation, something they couldn’t do yet.
“Thank you,” she said. “Sometimes the spirits make me unable to see the forest for the trees. I don’t mean to not think like a detective, but sometimes my problem solving is all fantastical and forgets to offer up solutions in the practical.”
“I had hoped we could pounce on something.” Horowitz exited with Eve, locking the door behind him. “But we need a lynchpin. All the rest of this”—he indicated the papers under his arm—“will fall in around it. From what I know about casework, the more personal we get, the closer to the truth. We have to know what’s going on in the family manse.”
“Yes,” Eve mused, withdrawing the tintype from her pocket, staring at a cruel face. “Mother dearest made a monster. But I doubt it was solely her fault. I hope we can see something to prove Albert’s duplicity over Alfred, find some way to extricate him before Albert finally does him in. I wouldn’t put it past him, to just take over.”
“We’ll need to know what’s happening,” the detective declared. “He can’t be the one doing all the watching. Let’s turn the tables.”
