A TERRIBLE CHOICE

Evie and Jericho were having a late lunch in the Bennington’s dowdy dining room. Jericho was talking, but Evie was lost in her own thoughts. Her chin balanced on one fist, she stared, unseeing, at her coffee, which she had been stirring mindlessly for a good ten minutes.

“So I shot the man in the back,” Jericho said, testing Evie’s attention.

“Interesting,” Evie said without looking up.

“And then I took his head, which I keep under my bed.”

“Of course,” Evie muttered.

“Evie. Evie!”

Evie looked up and smiled weakly. “Yes?”

“You’re not listening.”

“Oh, I pos-i-tute-ly am, Jericho!”

“What did I just say?”

Evie gave him a blank stare. “Well, whatever it was, I’m sure it was very, very smart.”

“I just said I shot a man in the back and took his head.”

“I’m sure he deserved it. Oh, Jericho, I’m sorry. I can’t help thinking there’s a connection between this John Hobbes fellow and our murders.”

“But why?”

Evie couldn’t tell him about the song, and without that, there really wasn’t much to go on. “Don’t you think it’s interesting that there were some unsolved murders fifty years ago that were similar in nature?”

“Interesting but remote. But if you want to know about them, we could go back to the library….”

Evie groaned. “Please don’t make me go back there. I’ll be good.”

Jericho gave her the slightest hint of a smile. “The library is your friend, Evie.”

“The library may be your friend, Jericho, but it pos-i-tute-ly despises me.”

“You just have to know how to use it.” Jericho played with his fork. He cleared his throat. “I could show you how to do that sometime.”

Evie sat fully upright. “Jericho!” she said, grinning.

Jericho smiled back. “It would be no trouble. We could even go—”

“I know someone who could find out about the old murders for us!”

“Who?” Jericho asked. He hoped she couldn’t sense his disappointment.

“Someone who owes me a favor.”

Evie ran to the Bennington’s telephone box and shut the beveled glass door behind her. “Algonquin four, five, seven, two, please,” she said into the receiver and waited for the operator to work her magic.

“T. S. Woodhouse, Daily News.”

“Mr. Woodhouse, it’s Evie O’Neill. I’m calling in that favor you promised.”

“Shoot.”

“Can you dig up some information on an unsolved murder in Manhattan in the summer of 1875?”

She heard the reporter chuckle on the other end. “You got a history test, Sheba?”

“Just tell me what you find out, please. It’s very important. Oh, and Mr. Woodhouse—this is just between you and me and the garden gate. Do you understand?”

“Whatever you say, Sheba.”

Feeling very clever, Evie stepped from the telephone box and headed back toward the dining room. As she passed the elevator, the doors opened and a flustered Miss Lillian stood inside. “Oh, dear. I went down instead of up.” She was struggling with a bag of groceries, and Evie offered to help her carry the heavy bag to her apartment.

“Come in, come in, dear,” Miss Lillian said. “So nice to have a visitor. I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Oh, please don’t go to any trouble,” Evie said, but the old woman was already in the kitchen. Evie could hear the strike of the match, the hiss of the gas as it took. She hadn’t meant to get trapped in a conversation. That was the trouble with offering help to old people. She nearly tripped over a tabby cat, who meowed in surprise and darted away. A second cat, black with yellow eyes, peeked out from under a table. It was hard to see in the dim light. Miss Lillian reentered the room and turned on a lamp.

“What a charming home you have,” Evie managed to say, hoping that her grimace passed for a smile. The place was a dreadful mess, papers and books stacked all about, every surface covered in some sort of bric-a-brac: ornate clocks set to slightly different times, brass candelabras with dark candles burned down to nubs, a bust of Thomas Jefferson, a framed picture of solemn pilgrim ladies on a hill, plants, dead flowers in a glass vase whose water had dried to a film on the sides, and a small painted tintype of what Evie presumed were the young Lillian and Adelaide in their starched pinafores. If there were an award for hideous taste, Evie thought, the Proctor sisters would win, hands down.

“Here’s your tea, dear. Do have a seat,” Miss Lillian said.

Miss Lillian indicated a rocking chair beside an old pump organ.

“Thank you,” Evie said, already thinking up excuses for why she needed to leave: sick uncle, building on fire, a sudden case of gangrene.

“Addie and I have lived in the Bennington since nearly the beginning. We moved in in the spring of 1875. April.” She frowned. “Or perhaps May.”

“Spring of 1875,” Evie said, thinking. “Miss Lillian, do you remember a story about a man named John Hobbes who was hanged for murder in 1876?”

Miss Lillian pursed her lips, thinking. “I can’t say that I do.”

“He was accused of murdering a woman named Ida Knowles.”

“Oh, Ida Knowles! Yes, I remember that. Ran off with a fortune hunter, they said. And then… yes, yes, I remember now! That man—”

“John Hobbes.”

“He was tried for it. Oh, he seemed a bad sort. A grave robber, if I recall correctly. A charlatan.”

“Do you remember any details of the case, or anything about him? Anything at all?” Evie sipped her tea. It had an odd taste.

“No, I’m afraid not, dear. I’m an old woman. Ah, here’s our Addie now.”

Miss Adelaide carried the black cat with the yellow eyes and wore a dress that had probably seen its best days when Teddy Roosevelt was president. “I found Hawthorne trying to eat my begonias, the little devil,” she said, nuzzling the meowing cat.

“Miss O’Neill was just asking about the Ida Knowles case—you remember that, don’t you, dear?—and that terrible man who hung for it. But I couldn’t remember much, I’m afraid. Hawthorne, come here and have some kibble.” She put a bit of chicken salad on a plate at her feet and the cat leaped from Adelaide’s arms and ran for it.

“They hanged him the night of the comet,” Miss Addie said dreamily.

“Solomon’s Comet?” Evie asked carefully.

“Yes, that’s it. He told them to. It was his one request.”

“John Hobbes asked to be hanged the night of Solomon’s Comet?” Evie asked again. She wanted to be sure she had it right. It struck her as important, though she couldn’t say why. “Now why would he do that, I wonder?”

“Comets are powerful portents!” Miss Lillian clucked. “The ancients believed them to be times when the veil between this world and the next was thinnest.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If you wanted to open a door into the great spirit realm, to assure your return, what better time to plan your death?”

“But Miss Proctor, that’s quite impossible,” Evie said as gently as possible.

“It’s an impossible world,” Miss Lillian said, smiling. “Drink your tea, dear.”

Evie swallowed down the rest, spitting up small ends of leaves.

“That is a pretty talisman,” Miss Addie said, gazing at Evie’s pendant.

“Oh, it was a gift from my brother,” Evie replied. She didn’t elaborate further. If she told them James had been killed, they might cluck and sympathize, or else draw out the conversation talking about every relative who’d ever died, and she’d be there all day and night. She needed to make her getaway.

Miss Addie reached out a finger and slid it over the surface of the half-dollar, paling as she did. “Such a terrible choice to have to make.”

“What do you mean?” Evie asked.

“Addie sees into the eternal soul,” Miss Lillian said. “Addie, dear, you’ll let your tea go cold, and we’ve much to do still.” Miss Lillian stood rather hastily. “I’m afraid we must bid you good day, Miss O’Neill. Thank you for visiting.”

“A terrible choice,” Miss Addie said again, looking at Evie with such sympathy that Evie felt quite undone.

Out in the flickering light of the hall—why couldn’t they seem to fix the lamps in the old place?—Evie thought about John Hobbes’s odd last request. Had he thought he could come back after death? That was ridiculous, of course, the thought of an egotistical madman, which he seemed to be. In two weeks, that same comet would make its return to New York’s skies.

As she waited for the wheezing elevator, a shiver passed down her spine, though she couldn’t say why. She wished she could talk it over with Mabel, wished they could share a laugh about the Proctor sisters’ awful décor, but she and Mabel were still on the outs. They’d never gone this long without talking, and Evie wavered between being angry with Mabel and missing her terribly. When the elevator door opened, her finger hovered over the button for Mabel’s floor. At the last possible second, she pressed the button for the lobby instead.

Back in the Proctor sisters’ overstuffed apartment, Hawthorne brushed affectionately against Miss Adelaide’s leg. In the other room, her sister prattled on about the day’s activities. Miss Addie peered into the dregs of Evie’s tea, examining the pattern the leaves had left in the bottom of the cup, and frowned.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 560