Читать книгу The Spectral City - Leanna Renee Hieber - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Eve began taking her leave from the club, begging forgiveness; saying that she’d received an important lead on a brand new missing person case. She didn’t say it was one of her own. She managed a few words of appreciation to Roosevelt and to those who had facilitated her offices; the men who had been particularly unobtrusive and taken the information she gave without snide commentary. They deserved particular thanks. She pressed the Bishops’ hands in hers, quietly thanking them for being gifted Sensitives who had paved the way for her. They quietly smiled, and Eve could sense how much more Clara wished to say, but didn’t. Those who kept rolling their eyes in her direction she pointedly ignored.

A glance back at Horowitz proved to Eve that he’d been staring at her as she gathered her things; a drawstring bag and a light wool evening cloak. Catching his eye, she could see him attempting to discern the cause of her departure. His look seemed to ask if she was all right. With a shrug, she turned away, a wresting sensation in her stomach telling her the obvious: that he was one of the rare young men who had the ability to affect her. Most, she didn’t even notice.

Eve enjoyed the art of flirting, she enjoyed the challenge of charming and captivating people, all people, who might be helpful to her. What to do with that once the game was afoot was hardly her strong suit. She frankly didn’t have time for callers. The detective would, of course, remain a colleague, but the game could remain, silently, in play, ensuring an ally in him and a source of secret pleasure if she could keep him on a bit of a hook.

Grandmother Evelyn, having watched Eve’s face from the moment Zofia burst to her side, rose quietly from her perch at the side of the room as if on cue. When Eve glanced at her gran—her mentor, her inspiration, and her very best friend—she knew she’d been heard; that the ripple of the spirit world Zofia sent across Spiritualist waters had been felt there too. Her grandmother turned to Lord and Lady Denbury and smiled that gracious, warm smile that eased the sting of whatever she might say next.

“Something has happened,” Evelyn said gently. “Information has just arrived with some urgency and demands Eve’s attention. Let me go, I’ll see after her.”

Eve’s mother, sitting bolt upright and yet distant-eyed, as if trying to somehow be both alert and far away at the same time, nodded to her elder, knowing better than to fight the inevitable and acquiescing that she couldn’t come between two such kindred spirits who remained so driven by their gifts, talents that precluded all else.

“Mother, Father,” Eve swept over to them and kissed their cheeks in turn, feeling the draft the spirits left in her wake wash over them in a subtle breeze. Her mother physically recoiled from the chill while keeping a strained smile on her face.

She gazed between the two of them, speaking with a mournful earnestness. “I know you hardly know what to say to me anymore. I am so sorry all of this pains you. I love you very much.”

Her raven-haired and unearthly blue-eyed father, Jonathon, described by ladies of the city as breathtakingly handsome, managed a reply. “Congratulations, my dear, on this accolade from the Governor. Whatever you do that solves the unsolved, eases pain, and makes this city safer, we love and support you.”

Her mother fought for words, the white lace collar that swept up from the taffeta of her fine purple gown quavering a moment. The cameo at her throat and the small auburn pin curls that framed her lovely face shook before she finally murmured, “Grandmother Helen’s loving ghost would be very proud.”

At this, Eve’s grandfather, Gareth, squeezed his daughter’s hand and reached out to pat Eve on the head as she bent over them, shifting the careful braid she’d put her dark hair into to manage her thick locks. “Yes. Be good. Be safe, child,” he said, maintaining his nearly fixed, pleasant smile.

They meant their words, but all of this was a kind of torture and Eve didn’t want to subject them to it any further, and she urged the whole family to go home and rest.

Her parents and grandfather went on ahead, Evelyn insisting she and Eve would hail a hansom cab and all would be well after a breath of fresh air.

‘A breath of fresh air’ was their code for a full leave to talk with spirits.

Eve needed that air, and she needed her girls, without constraint. She could gain no reliable intelligence if she herself was surrounded by the uninitiated, the uncomfortable or anyone who might worry about appearances. Her communication with the dead was unorthodox even by the varying standards of mediums and clairvoyants. Roughly interrogating thin air would only lose her ground in front of skeptics.

Bursting down the Player’s Club stairs and onto the path around Gramercy Park, it was only a moment before Zofia reappeared at her side in a freezing gust. While Evelyn hailed the hansom cab, she alerted the driver as to what might ensue.

“I warn you, sir, my granddaughter here is an actress in grave need of learning lines. If you hear her shouting from the compartment, let it be. Take us around Washington Square Park a few rounds if you please.”

The man shrugged. “So long as you pay me, scream to the heavens if you like.”

“Thank you, Gran, as always,” Eve murmured, hopping into the cab.

“Of course, now get on with it. I’ve hardly the connection with your girls you have, but I could tell in that room something was wrong. And not just the officers’ general opinions, though I could have given a whole battalion of them a piece of my mind,” the elder woman scoffed. “There have been police matrons in the force now for nearly two decades, for heavens’ sake, what century are they in?”

With a chilly blast, the compartment was illuminated in an eerie grey light as Zofia floated across from Eve. “Go on, Zofia,” Eve prompted, “now we all can speak freely. Tell me more. Everything.”

The ghost, her dark eyes mesmerizing and entirely unsettling if Eve looked into them for long, shifted as if uncomfortable, staring at Evelyn, biting her lip before whispering to her medium.

“Will your grandmother want to hear about this, Eve?” the girl began, shifting closer, so that Eve saw her own breath cloud before her. “Considering . . .”

“Considering what?” Eve pressed.

“Margaret. Maggie was her niece and you are family. You met her long after she died. You taught me to be sensitive to how the living still grieve, Eve,” Zofia insisted.

Eve sighed. “Yes, so I did. Of course.” She turned to her grandmother. “Can you hear Zofia, Gran?” Eve asked carefully.

“A few words.” She swallowed hard. “I heard Margaret. I know what . . . who . . . you’re being careful about.” There was a flash of distinct pain across Gran’s lovely face—her stoic, distinct face lined by a fully-lived life, the picture of elegance who held the weight of a room with spirited grace, all the more vibrant a presence for her sixty-eight years. She shifted her shoulders, a rustle of luminous satin, as if she were readjusting some great weight to a more manageable position.

“Don’t worry for me,” she continued quietly and patted Eve’s knee absently with a long-fingered hand creased with veins and accented by a large garnet ring and one of polished lapis lazuli; both powerful stones with distinct powers of lending clarity to divination. “My poor Maggie has visited me and our souls are at peace; we are more loving now than we were in life. Go on, dear, you must get to the bottom of this if she’s missing from her usual haunts.”

Eve squeezed that hand that had wrought so much out of this world and the next, a hand that had guided and saved her mind when so much was screaming around and within it. Maggie too, had helped, inordinately. It was Eve’s job now to help her in whatever void she’d been lost to.

“When did you know Margaret was gone, Zofia?” Eve began.

“Today. She wasn’t at our appointed rounds,” Zofia insisted. “She never misses our Friday Frights.”

“Friday Frights?” Eve narrowed her eyes.

“You know she and I like to terrorize any old codger giving a working girl a hard time in the business district. Every Friday. Eyes seem to wander more, lips are looser and hands lose their way the day before a weekend. We like to appear before the face of any man who won’t leave a girl well enough alone, in hopes he’ll wet himself or scream like a baby . . .” Zofia’s luminous grey face lit with a smile “. . . or both.”

Eve couldn’t hold back a laugh. Her darling girls. When they weren’t helping solve crimes or alerting her to possible threats they were making their own kind of righteous trouble.

“Something is wrong indeed,” Eve replied, “if Margaret Hathorn missed her chance to knock a bowler off a lecher’s head.”

“Exactly!” Zofia exclaimed. “She’s the ringleader. When she didn’t appear downtown—on Fridays we meet at the Bowling Green—I wafted about to any of her known haunts. Nothing. I told the rest of the girls when I could find them. We came back to the Precinct office, but you weren’t there. That’s when we remembered about the ceremony tonight.”

The carriage came to a halt along the street. “Here,” the driver called down.

“No,” Eve shook her head emphatically. “Gran, I can’t leave now—whenever I go home, I always lose their focus. They become fixated on the property and forget their details.”

Evelyn opened her door and called back to the driver. “A few more turns around the Square, if you please, sir, we’ll account for them all.”

“Suit yourself. Anything for art, I suppose,” the driver retorted as Evelyn shut the door, gesturing for Eve to continue.

As the clop of the horses sounded again and the jolt of the carriage rocked them, Zofia wavered.

“Go on, Zofia dear,” Eve stated. “Please. What words do you remember as the last you heard from Maggie before this disappearance?”

They circled Washington Square Park, the old parade ground renamed in honor of the first president’s inauguration downtown. There along the northern side, facing Fifth Avenue, the newly erected Washington Arch glowed eerie in the moonlight, a grand homage to the Arc de Triomphe that appeared like a ghost in its own right, a mystical beacon rising from the dark shadows of the gas-lit park. The spirit was instantly distracted.

“Did you know,” Zofia began mournfully, “that there are ten-thousand-some human remains underground there, in the park? Just below the earth. Taken by yellow fever, choleras, one disease or another, the city didn’t have the room . . . A pit of ten thousand bones . . . Disregarded. Tromped and paraded over . . .”

“Yes, Zofia, of course we know that,” Eve said, gritting her teeth. “But their deaths were long ago. We need to talk about what’s happening now.”

This was the point when patience never won her. Extracting useful, prescient details was the most difficult part. A ghost who came right to the point was a spirit Eve longed to cultivate.

“When you realized she was gone, you said you went to find the other girls. Did you come to the office together?”

“Yes,” Zofia nodded, wisps of hair floating in the air as if she were in water. “Just like you taught us, we floated around the table and called out for her, we held our own séance to get her to come out, but nothing. We tried lighting her candle, but we couldn’t. We looked into the scrying glass. We even tried moving that silly spirit board. We tried everything we could think of.”

The ghost was getting agitated, as the temperature was dropping further and further, and her form was wavering as if she were an image interrupted from a projected screen. “The more we did, the more worried all of us got. We made a promise we’d let each other know if we were going to cross over for good, go onto the sweet Summerland. She promised she wouldn’t go without telling us . . .” Zofia’s voice hitched.

“There now, Zofia love, don’t you cry,” Eve said softly. She felt as though she were an elder sister to some of the ghosts. “We’ll find her. Can you remember the last thing she said to you?”

The ghost thought a moment before answering. “You know how you and Gran have said that there are times when we might hear a knocking sound?”

Eve nodded. “From the Corridors of life and death itself,” she replied. “Fate, destiny, eternal rest, all may come knocking at any time from that space between the living and the dead.”

“She said she was hearing lots of sounds,” the ghost continued, cocking her head as if she too were straining to listen, “and she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. She said they were loudest outside some of the largest mansions in the city. Knocking, singing. Calling. Murmuring. Bidding her come in . . .”

“Was this the last that she spoke to you?” Eve pressed. “About these sounds?”

“Yes. It was Sunday, two days past. What if . . .” Zofia whispered, the mesmeric irises of her grey, luminous eyes widening. “What if something came from the corridor of death and Maggie answered the door . . .?”

Eve’s blood went from cold to a distinct ice; the chill of the spirit and the fog of her breath was nothing compared to the shiver that went from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, and along that shuddering course was a ghostly whisper that seemed to be echoed by the whole of the spirit world itself:

Don’t invite anything in . . .