Читать книгу The Spectral City - Leanna Renee Hieber - Страница 12

Chapter Five

When Eve awoke, it was with a wave of pain that crashed over her body as she gained consciousness. She was no stranger to pain—it was a state she often found herself in, one way or another, to varying levels, depending on her circumstances. She avoided too-bright light, she tried not to be overtired, she made sure to drink water and always travel with aspirin. Her clairvoyance and clairaudience came with pressures and pain associated with her eyes and head, and the only thing that eased the feeling like the tightening of a vise grip around her skull was letting the spirit world in, letting it pass through her field of vision and murmur in her ear as it pleased, in and out like an exhaled breath.

Eve had long ago learned to live with the spirit world as a second luminous, transparent layer of movement and form as well as an additional murmuring layer of sound superimposed upon the living layer of reality. Having made a certain peace with aches and pains, today felt sharper than most.

There was a time, three years prior, when she had applied and was accepted to Barnard Women’s college. Gran’s idea of putting the ghosts to work in a department was all well and good, she’d thought, but she wanted to be a fully educated woman. She’d excitedly begun her first semester studying history, having taken up residence in a small, simple dormitory just off Broadway, where she could see the edges of the Columbia green, its grand new concourses taking over the Morningside area.

Of course, Eve saw and heard the spirits all through the halls and floating across the lawns, but she had assumed they’d leave her well enough alone to study. Instead, the migraines got worse. Ghosts who had ignored her before became insistent that she listen.

“We are your course of study,” Vera had said, when Eve looked up from a book to find her dormitory room had become overrun with ghosts. She asked why they couldn’t leave her be to study for a night, and they all told her that they were her sole discipline, her sole purpose.

In what became a workable truce, Eve left school and with the help of her mentors in the many months that followed, took steps to open the Ghost Precinct, provided the spirits let her alone enough to read books and study what interested her at her own pace. The migraines dimmed to the dullest of roars before fading entirely most days.

But after last night’s session of automatic writing, she was sore in an entirely different way, as if she’d run miles and fallen on her face rather than just collapsing from strain on the writing desk. Her arm was numb and before her lay Maggie’s fountain pen with a drop of ink splattered onto the paper below it as if it had been a thumb-prick of black blood. She almost didn’t want to read what she had written.

Whispers and cold, whispers and cold.

All there is.

Drawn in, something was wrong, I was found, now am lost.

Am I between again?

Whispers and cold.

Don’t let anything in. Don’t open doors, I don’t know what’s around me.

If I go somewhere, will I ever return? Did I live or did I die? Again. Did I die to live?

There are thoughts in the void.

Is everything overturned? Do I still exist?

Someone is very wrong. The children know. Inversed.

Don’t let anything in, not the monstrous hum.

A phrase written there chilled Eve’s blood in the instant. She remembered that recurring phrase about not letting anything in, but the rest was done in a subconscious state, where memory was far away. The last line struck her most.

Don’t play God lest you play the Devil instead.

The automatic writing was personal, intimate. Was she actually able to access Maggie’s state of mind in some strange, transient place? It was baffling, but it seemed like she had listened in on a frightened internal monologue.

From the earliest inclination of self, Eve wanted to help. She wanted to heal, soothe, and make things better for all around her. It was why the ghosts were so drawn to her. They wanted the same peace she wanted for them, and they came to her desperate, unwitting vampires draining her energy and life force. In order to survive, Eve had to toughen herself a bit, put up psychic shields, harden her heart and soul only so much as to not die of a broken heart like old romantic poets, exhausted and drained of all capability before she ever had the chance to fall in love herself. She couldn’t care about every little thing; she had to constantly prioritize.

But Maggie. She cared about Maggie. Eve closed her eyes and pressed back tears of worry.

“Beloved friend,” she murmured into the places of her mind and bidding the spirit that traveled back and forth across the veil with such impunity to hear her, “do not be afraid. You were the first of the spirits to ever bind your soul to mine, and I will never desert you even if you’ve lost your way in the labyrinth of eternity’s corridors. I love you . . .”

She folded up the paper of this entranced writing session and carefully tucked the results into a small envelope. In a hissing gust and a suddenly plummeting temperature, the air around her taking on a preternatural glow, Eve turned to see that Vera had burst in on her and floated about two feet away, about a foot in the air, her arms folded in her floral shawl, glowering.

“There’s something you’re going to need to write up,” the ghost said, agitated. “In Preventative Protocol.”

“Well let’s get going to the offices then, you can tell me when I’m at my typewriter,” Eve said, stretching and sliding open the pocket doors. Vera nodded and vanished again as abruptly as she’d entered.

“I pray Antonia did us all the extreme favor of making coffee . . .” Eve said to herself as she stepped into the entrance hall.

Antonia, who was just tidying up, whirled to Eve, looking her up and down and pursing her lips in disapproval. “Why, of course I did, but heavens, did you not go to bed last night? Last I saw you, you went to the study. I didn’t think to check on you.”

Eve chuckled. “I fell asleep face down on the writing desk.”

“I’m sorry, you poor dear! I should have come down to see how you were faring.”

“I’m not your responsibility,” Eve said, following her into the dining room where a warm carafe was still sitting on the hutch.

“Of course you are—we all are each other’s beautiful burden,” Antonia countered with a cluck of her tongue, pouring a cup and handing it to her. “If I’d known you were going to sleep in there I’d have at least moved you to the settee.”

Eve took a sip of coffee and groaned in palpable relief. “Well, thank you for the sentiment,” Eve conceded. “No irreparable physical harm done, but no answers gained either in the writing. But I must be off. Vera needs a report made up.”

* * * *

Eve walked the several blocks east to her Precinct office on Mercer Street, north of the 15th Ward Station House. The Ghost Precinct had been shoe-horned into an unmarked Metropolitan Police records building whose second floor was all theirs to make reports, hold meetings and do the work of séances and divination. This plain red brick building was where hundreds of unsolved cases sat languishing in file cabinets, most of them dating from a time of unparalleled corruption before Theodore Roosevelt had overturned every rock and cleaned up the force. Paperwork and records were irregular and varied ward to ward, with many in the offices incomplete. The idea was that if Eve and her mediums were ever at a loss for something to do, any number of cases gone cold were readily available to their psychic meddling.

As exciting as their work might seem to anyone interested in spectral phenomena and the occult, there really was a great deal of mundane paperwork, resulting from an effort towards raising inter-departmental standards of procedure. But it was the paperwork that made any of it legitimate. Without thorough, documented process, so much would be left up to ghostly whispers and the vague pull of instinct, those first clues that, when finally leading to evidence, created a full picture. It was Eve’s plan that after several years at the Precinct, she’d collect her findings and publish a book about all of it.

It was Preventative Protocol that required the most care—a slippery moral slope that would prove the most dangerous and questionable aspect of the group’s aims. There were two reports from last week Eve hadn’t written up yet. They were seen by one of Roosevelt’s most trusted lieutenants, Mr. Bonhoff, and Roosevelt himself.

When Eve’s offerings to a now retired sergeant got her noticed by Mr. Bonhoff in the first place, he had engaged Roosevelt directly. It was a discussion the three of them, under Gran’s supervision, had from the start.

“The rights of our citizens are sacred,” Roosevelt had explained. “In the cases you worked, where you couldn’t have known the circumstances, where you brought clues right to the department’s door, those were at a stage where a murder would have gone unsolved. One already committed and where we were entirely at a loss.”

“Preventative crime is a trickier wicket,” Roosevelt had continued. “Innocent until proven guilty.”

“I’ve given this a great deal of thought, sir,” Eve replied. “I agree with you entirely. I would never want a clairvoyant, a ghost, or any activity in the spectral realm, to supersede human free will and independence. Where I believe the ghosts loyal to me can be of most direct use is to perhaps expose the elements of a possible crime and leave it to the living to sort it out amongst themselves. With the dynamics of power in consideration.”

Roosevelt raised a bushy brow. “In some cases, the helpless just need help,” Eve explained. “I can’t police what ghosts try to affect; they have minds—and missions—of their own. What they will ask me to help with are things they cannot influence all on their own. Sometimes we may need to give things a little push.”

“Can you give us an example?” Mr. Bonhoff said. He was a quiet, level-headed, steady-handed man interested only in the city’s greater good.

“I have often held a séance not to draw out information from the dead but to magnify their abilities. Many of them aren’t just here on earth for their own unfinished business, but that of our own mortal failures.”

“Go on . . .” Bonhoff urged.

“Why, just last week I was contacted by a ghost begging for intervention on behalf of a child apprenticed to a brute, a child who would not survive another beating. Henry Bergh’s creation of the ASPCA passed animal cruelty laws decades prior. This is, of course, a huge boon, where cases of animal cruelty and domestic abuse can be linked and animals and children might be removed from deadly situations if their plight is known.

“As my Gran and her circle of philanthropists and clergy have many associates, a contact from the ASPCA was able to go see for himself, and they found both horse and child with open, bleeding sores. The horse was collected and turned over to care, and thanks to an Episcopalian organization the child was able to choose a different apprenticeship. The child chose to work with the church itself, saying that God had saved him so he wished to work to help others in turn. But it was the ghosts that saved him. God didn’t swoop down, the ghosts did, reaching out for a listening ear. I was glad I was there to hear the spirit of the boy’s elder sibling, who came asking if someone could look in on his battered brother. Whatever entity serves as God, I can’t be sure of, but I believe the dead are used to great purpose. Angels among us, even. It would only be fair to stop fearing ghosts and start appreciating what they can do if we but only listen, and act before it’s too late.”

The gentlemen were very moved by this account, and thusly the protocols for preventative services were quietly instated.

If an alarm was sounded, a network of various charitable contacts curated by Gran and her dear friend Reverend Blessing, a dynamic man and sometimes exorcist, might be deployed in an instant to check in on a precarious situation where an innocent creature might be in danger.

The origin of this protocol was particularly on Eve’s mind today as just a few days before Maggie disappeared nearly an identical case to the one she’d used as an example crossed Cora’s spiritual threshold. The same strategy had been deployed to resituate the powerless into a safer environment of their own choosing, rather than merely being a victim of fate.

The Preventative Protocol was new and the cases thus far were few, as the grounds for stepping in had to be an iron-clad case. Eve required more than one spirit to relate their insights on the person and place. She’d had no second thoughts about what had been done so far, but she wanted to be sure there was continued oversight.

The latest issue with a farrier and his hired hand needed to be written up, and it had to be documented which ghosts would be checking in on the subject after his transfer to a better condition. Zofia had volunteered, saying that if she could never grow up to have a life of her own, at least she could watch over these young squires mired in pain and try to bring them a life of hope instead.

Eve wanted to capture the most human and moving details her department oversaw. This was what she wanted the world to know about the dead; just how beautiful they were. She’d convince the world, report by report.

* * * *

Only Jenny was in ahead of Eve, paid an hour extra per day to tidy the place up and prepare coffee and tea. It was something Jenny had asked to do, indicating that her parents never wanted their daughter to go without, encouraging her to take as much as she could from a job willing to pay her well.

The matron who had been assigned to sit watch by the exterior door, Mrs. McDonnell, wasn’t due in for another fifteen minutes or so. She was generally unpleasant to the girls, so Eve liked to avoid her.

Whenever Jenny was in the office alone, the spirits of her parents often joined her, singing Irish ballads of a faraway home. Mary and Connor Friel’s spirits looked after orphans as an ongoing mission, and Jenny willingly shared them, provided they returned to her when they could. Eve paused outside the door for a long while. The Friels’ ethereal voices hit a keening note and rendered Eve breathless. The music of spirits could stop time. It was perhaps the most civilizing thing, music, the way to bring the whole world together, living and dead, offering some comfort and peace, no matter where or when.

Eve didn’t want to interrupt—she knew that these moments of privacy were very important for Jenny, the only way she could still feel like she had her own family. Living communally with co-workers, time alone was vital and she tried to be a respectful manager in that regard.

But the telephone rang from within and that forced Eve into entering, placing her warm hand on the cool glass doorknob, the frosted glass panel of the wooden door reading “Ghost Precinct: E. Whitby, managing official” in gilt letters. Every time Eve looked at her name on that door, her heart raced, daunted and thrilled in equal measure by the weight of responsibility.

What a jarring, unnatural sound the telephone was, a vibrating, clattering noise that was far louder than the size of its two small brass bells would have indicated. Eve wondered if she was already becoming her Grandmother, hating modern, clanging sounds that jarred a contemplative mind. The alarming notification had shattered the timeless spell of the Friel family song.

The first NYPD telephone had gone into the Center Street station in 1880. Nineteen years later stations often communicated by wire or courier instead. The force hadn’t wanted to pay for what was still a relative luxury when the women working there weren’t switchboard operators or secretaries, so Gran paid for the installation on the wall as a matter of convenience, expediency and safety for Eve’s precinct, even though she herself hated using one.

Eve was designated as the Precinct contact, so it had to be her that answered the phone. This also made sure that if there was a problem or a disciplinary action it would fall on Eve and not her colleagues. When she created the Precinct, she insisted this be so. She wouldn’t subject a fellow Sensitive to reprimand or censure, if she could help it.

As Eve entered, the startled sadness on Jenny’s face had Eve blushing with an apology, knowing she was interrupting something beyond precious. The Friels wafted to the back of the room as if concerned they might be too intrusive otherwise. Eve gestured to the ghosts that they were welcome to stay, and then gestured at the phone that she’d have to answer, bowing her head in respect and care before changing her focus.

Their office was dim. Jenny hadn’t turned on the one large electric lamp that hung too low and buzzed too loud. Their group often relied on what meager sunlight came through the thin, tall lancet windows that peppered the back of the records building.

Eve went to the wall where the telephone box was mounted, picked up the handle of the receiver and leaned in, speaking close and loud into the voice box. “Whitby here. How can I help you?” she said, in a loud, strong tone. She didn’t announce herself as a woman, even if her voice might belie it, as she wanted to be spoken to on merit, not on impressions of her sex and their aptitude in such a work environment as this.

There was only a hiss on the other line.

Breathing—shallow, soft, and far away.

“Hello?” Eve repeated. There was an intake of breath, as if whoever was on the other side of the line wanted very much to say something but couldn’t.

The hissing of the line continued for a moment, a static buzzing overtaking any sound of breathing. As if it were coming out from the telephone itself, a chill emanated, and the tiny hairs across Eve’s face froze. She shuddered. The static hiss grew loud, unbearable.

But no one was on the line.

Eve shook herself free from the chill and hung up, placing the black cylinder with a fluted end on its designated hook.

Turning around, she noticed Jenny was gesturing to her parents, who were reaching out to her, placing incorporeal hands upon her small shoulders. Eve turned back away, not wanting to interrupt the family.

The most interesting feature of the room was its narrow, glowing windows; it sported nothing but file cabinets, a rickety shelf, and a few small tables with drawers that were more suited for school children’s desks than for professionals facing the wall, each set with a wooden sorting tray full of various papers and guides. At the back of the room, dressed with a black tablecloth and set with notebooks, a small bell and a candle, was a small circular séance table with five seats, one for each medium and one for Gran whenever she felt like joining them, their mascot and patron saint.

“Where is my coffee?” Eve muttered to herself.

Vera lifted her transparent hands in the air. “Incorporeal. Don’t look to me.”

At her elbow, Eve’s favorite cup appeared, presented by Jenny, who looked up at her with narrow, angry eyes. Eve took a step back at the small and inexplicably furious girl. Jenny gestured between the cup and a spirit board planchette, signing that setting the cup down upon it was quite disrespectful. She folded her arms, fuming.

Eve frowned a moment before offering a counter argument.

“But you don’t use a spirit board or a planchette, Jenny.”

The girl turned away, her thin braid swinging out from her small head. In the next moment she whirled back, the braid again airborne before it thumped down on her shoulder as she emphatically began signing that even if Eve didn’t use a board with letters and numbers and a small disc spirits guided to point to them, perhaps some of their company might want to use one.

“If you’d like to use a board, Jenny, then say so. And then I won’t think of it as décor.”

Jenny slammed a drawer closed on her desk that had been open. She looked into the air and shook her fist at Vera, gesturing between her desk and the ghost that things had been moved. She signed, emphatically, not to move her things.

Eve came close and put both hands on the girl’s shaking shoulders. “What’s really going on, my dear?”

The girl burst into tears.

Mrs. Friel wafted over to Eve. A ghost’s voice came as a distant but clear whisper, carrying with it an intense atmospheric quality as well as words, almost as if a spirit’s words were underscored with a sorrowful note of music, evoking a Sensitive’s empathy. “I’m sorry, Miss Whitby. It is the anniversary of my death in the waters of the East River. It has only been a year.”

“Oh, my goodness!” Eve exclaimed, putting a hand to her mouth. “I had no idea!”

The ghost continued. “She lost everyone that day. Nearly our whole parish, the last of any family. She’s been overwhelmed with emotion of late.”

“Of course,” Eve murmured. Mr. Friel just stared at his daughter, having hardly gotten to know her in life, illness striking him down back in Dublin when she’d been a baby. Eve caught the glimmer of tears in his vaguely transparent form, sparkling in small luminous silvery stars, there in his welling eyes.

Eve knelt, holding her arms out for Jenny. The girl didn’t wish to be held; she shook her head.

“I’m here for you as you need,” Eve murmured. “Please let me know.”

Jenny nodded, wiped her eyes and went to one set of the lancet windows at the back of the room that let in light in distinct shafts at this hour of the day, if the sun was bright. She climbed a step-stool and began cleaning the thick panes studiously, a creature of constant movement.

Much like the house chores, Eve wanted everything to be fair, but Jenny had asked for extra hours. It seemed like working was a drive, a constant urge for Jenny, a way to stay afloat from her grief. She was such a restless spirit and Eve, wishing she could take the girl’s grief away, empathized with the complications of missing a body when there still was a spirit there to see. Her parents weren’t gone. They just couldn’t hold her anymore. The loss of touch was the most unbearable of all changes between the parallel worlds of life and death.

Eve took to her desk and examined what had been left upon it. There was an envelope that read Miss W in small script.

That was slid under the door, Jenny signed to Eve after she’d placed her washcloth in a tin bucket, strode over, and stopped across Eve’s supervisor desk. The young girl’s expression indicated the missive was both important and likely unwelcome. Eve shared a worried look with her colleague and opened the envelope. Her heart immediately sank.

The memorandum was on a slip of paper with red ink.

Complaint, 11am.

She glanced at Jenny who pursed her lips and rolled her eyes, signing somewhat of a rhetorical question, wondering if anyone would ever be satisfied by what they do.

“Satisfaction doesn’t seem to be in human nature, but still, we strive,” Eve replied with a sigh.

The rallying sentiment of striving seemed to brighten Jenny’s sadness and she nodded, squaring her shoulders, moving to her own desk: a small, simple surface with one drawer like one might have had in a one room school-house. What ‘budget’ they had went to giving them a salary; the furnishings had been done thanks to Evelyn and her friends cleaning out closets and storage spaces. Jenny didn’t mind her small corner of the world. She sat there and closed her eyes, perhaps in listening to what the spirits had to say to her today, perhaps in prayer—Eve didn’t know. She didn’t dare presume to understand the vast internal mysteries of another psychic. It was very important they each respect separate processes and moments of quietude.

It wasn’t long before a tall grandfather clock in the corner of the room—a gift from the Bishops—began to chime a morning sequence in deep tones. The last reverberating bell faded into silence just as Cora and Antonia walked in, bobbing their heads to Eve and Jenny and the spirits that wafted in from the walls, all keeping their appointed hour.

When her team was assembled, they turned to Eve expectantly for the day’s orders. Before offering any instruction or command, she took in their faces. Everyone was tired from the séance, but more than that, worried.

“There has been a departmental complaint, my dears,” Eve declared, setting her jaw, allowing for the group to groan in response. “We’ll be getting a visit.”

“What kind of complaint?” Cora asked.

“A complaint of meddling.”

Antonia sighed irritably. “What are we to do if we can’t be left to do what we’re meant to do?”

Eve didn’t even look at Vera but the spirit was immediately forthcoming with her own indictment, splaying incorporeal hands.

“A man in a townhouse had a photograph,” Vera began, wafting to and fro in the ghostly version of pacing. “A single, post mortem photograph of a child. There was something very wrong about it. A mistress’s child. I wouldn’t stand for it and I was sure neither would his wife. So I winged the photograph out into the hallway for her to find. Managed a good shove from his study.”

“Is this what you were trying to tell me would need written up?”

Vera nodded.

“And how were you drawn to the house?” Eve said, picking up a notebook and writing down particulars. “You know we can’t mess in the living’s dirty business, affairs or no, only abuse and crime, so I hope you’ve got something better than that or we are guilty of meddling.”

“A crying child in a rumpled frock who looked very much alive to me when the poor creature approached me on the street pointed inside a house, saying “I’m lost . . . And there are more . . . Please help . . .” When I turned to look at the house, then back at the child, there was no one; a ghost after all. You know it’s hard for us to tell. We don’t always appear between ourselves as transparent phantasms. We even forget we are incorporeal. I look down and see myself as I always was, find myself reaching for things my hand passes through.”

“That’s because you’re indomitable and this city can’t bear to let go of you,” Eve said fondly, thinking of Vera’s painting from a year before she died that Eve had seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s schoolrooms, where she had continued her lifelong studies. The painting had been so pulsing with life, it was no wonder she was so often more solid than most spirits Eve had met, and didn’t need the power of a séance to manifest her.

“So I went into the house,” Vera continued, “to have a look around. Instinct said go to the study. I did. Something—a spirit I couldn’t even see—winged the image out at me from I don’t know even where, in a leather Memento Mori frame, a lock of hair affixed and all. I looked around for the child that had vanished, but I saw the same plaintive face there on that photo, uncomfortable even in death . . .”

“What did you do next?” Antonia asked.

“Once I managed to fling the image into the hall, the lady of the house stepped on it before exclaiming. It was not well met. Evidently that child was not hers, nor any relation, and what the photo was doing there was a mystery, but must have aroused or confirmed the wife’s suspicion. I hung back and listened to the excuse of a mousy, evasive man saying he had no idea where it came from. Didn’t believe a word. Felt my essence had been drained in the force of throwing the image so I faded out from the house, finding myself again near my old apartment.”

“And you’re sure this is the complaint we’ve gotten?” Eve asked. Vera thought a moment.

“Oh.” She wafted back on spirit heels. “Well, I suppose it could be something else. I just . . . I felt very strongly so I volunteered the information as pre-emptive, in case the man takes any action against the wife or the mistress if that was his child. Since Maggie’s disappearance, I’m just a bit off . . . I feel like she’d have done the same thing I did, would have responded to the same sort of call; it would have been like us, to attend to this matter ourselves. She’d have wanted me to . . .” The spirit’s voice broke.

“Yes, this does sound like your mission;” Eve agreed, “exposing truths to women to help them look out for themselves. But this young ghost was . . . lost? Not concerned for that lady of the house, it would seem?”

“Yes,” Vera replied. “In this, I’m not sure if I did more harm than good by exposing the fact. I’m sorry. I should have tried to gather more context before acting. It was unwise, I see now.”

“It is always so hard to know,” Eve said, her empathy clear. “That’s why we have to take these kinds of acts and cases with such care. The child wants to be acknowledged, that is often the case. What about the child saying there were more?”

“Oh, yes—that, I’ve no idea,” Vera scratched her head, thinking, bobbing a bit in the air as she did. “More children? That he fathered? More pictures? I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to find my way back . . .” Vera trailed off, her charcoal eyes staring at her blankly. Eve sighed.

“How many detectives even know about us to be able to lodge such a complaint?” Cora asked.

“That’s a fair question . . .” Eve murmured, and thought about the gala, the attendees. There were maybe ten people from the department total that were there. Despite the initial call for discretion, perhaps Mr. Roosevelt had boasted of the department beyond the usual channels.

“I can’t be sure,” Eve replied finally. “Not many, but enough to make any friend to the lieutenant a possible snitch. What they don’t necessarily know about, and shouldn’t, is about our Preventative Protocol measures. I’ll not have our every move subjected to an ethics board.”

“We have complete, plausible deniability and a solid alibi,” Antonia said. “Cora, Jenny and I were at the theatre while you were at the gala—”

“Antonia, just let me do the talking,” Eve explained. “Let me be the front of this.”

Her dark eyes flashed defensively and she opened her mouth as if to retort but closed it again, a pain crossing over her olive complexion. Eve, trying not to tread upon anxiety regarding presentation, clarified gently. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I want no one to feel hidden behind me for any reason. But I must bear the brunt of scrutiny—that’s what being the director means.”

Antonia’s brow remained furrowed. “You are all my charges and my responsibility,” she added. “I asked for this; to make sense of my life and to retain my sanity. Let me be what I am made for and support me as is needed. I have armor that won’t be pierced; it was forged in childhood when I had to decide if the gifts would kill me or make me their soldier. Let me fight for all of us.”

Her colleagues each nodded.

A rough knock on the door. Eve answered it and a barrel-chested man in uniform entered, his actions suiting his frame as he strode into the room. Vera wafted towards the wall, hovering in the same dimensions as a file cabinet and watched.

“I don’t give any part of a rat’s anatomy what you ladies think you’re doing in this fanciful department,” the short-haired, burly man stated, “but if you send your spooky minions into good people’s fine homes, you’re going to find the full weight of the NYPD against you—certainly not behind you as our former chief would like to have you believe.”

“And you are?” Eve prompted.

The man pointed to his badge.

“Sergeant Mahoney. Yes, I can read,” Eve replied. “I just assumed you’d do us the courtesy, as your colleagues, of introducing yourself like a gentleman.”

“You want manners?” the gruff man frowned. “Why’d you join a bunch of officers? Go have a séance in a lady’s parlor and be done with wasting our time.”

“Who complained to you to warrant this?” Cora asked, her nostrils flaring. Her light brown face was flushed with frustration. Eve held out a hand.

“We don’t know anything about the nature of your complaint,” Eve clarified, trying to keep an edge from her tone.

“That’s not germane to the discussion.”

“Of course it is,” Eve countered, stepping forward. “How can we avoid something if we know nothing about it?”

“Of course you know about it, you sent a ghost in to go snooping.”

Eve cocked her head to the side. “To be fair, Sergeant, only a fraction of the city’s ghostly goings on have anything to do with us. It is a very big city. A very haunted big city. We work with some seven to at most ten of the thousands that float about the boroughs.”

“The Prenze family is off-limits,” Mahoney declared. “They are boons to the Police and we owe them our thanks. Consider this a warning with no second chances.”

“Barging in, demanding, accusing and threatening, all with no proof nor details, and all in one breath,” Eve said, in awe of the confidence it took to be so rude.

“Like I said, you don’t like it—”

“Leave the force, yes, I heard you the first time. I’ll have you know I’ve not authorized anything related to the name Prenze. We’ll be sure not to trouble such a helpful family with any of our direct actions should they come to our attention. However, if their house is just simply haunted, don’t rush to accuse us. Take that up with an Exorcist. I know two, I can make a referral if you like—”

He harrumphed and exited.

“Good day, Mister Mahoney,” she called after him.

All the girls’ fists were clenched. Vera cursed after him in Spanish with a wide, emphatic gesture, wafting forward to Eve’s side and making the papers on her desk float away with the breeze of her gesticulation. It was clear Vera hadn’t been noticed by Mahoney, but per Eve’s orders, as none of them knew how much the spirit world affected everyday folk, when their office had company the ghosts were to keep their profiles low.

“So how do we surreptitiously spy on this Prenze family? No one is that threatening who’s doing the right thing,” Antonia stated.