The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

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      Chapter Three

      This thought of the finality of death, a concept a ghost was always at odds with, was enough to frighten Zofia’s spectral form into disappearing, snuffing her from the cab, leaving only a misty, luminous wisp, then nothing. The carriage came around the north side of the park and halted.

      “Well then . . .” Eve muttered.

      “How many more times round, ladies?” the driver asked, calling down to them in a wary tone.

      “Let’s go home,” Gran said, opening the door and calling up. “We’ll alight at the corner of the park and Waverly, if you please, sir, thank you.”

      “As you wish,” he replied as they jostled forward again.

      She turned to Eve. “You know there’s only so much you can get out of them at once. This will take time. Maggie has all the time in the world; surely this is but a pause on her eternal journey,” she continued, though Eve could tell she was trying to rally herself as much as anything. It was Maggie’s interest in dark things, in the paranormal, that had led to her death, a fact Gran would never fully accept or forgive herself for not intercepting.

      Upon arriving, Evelyn finally relieved the driver of his rounds and went in to check on the rest of her family while Eve approached the adjacent townhouse she shared. While Evelyn and her grandfather Gareth had their own home further uptown, along the part of Fifth Avenue that constituted old New York money, they spent a great deal of time here; these two addresses were far more the center of their world since Eve had taken up residence with her team.

      The privilege of a fairly comfortable life that Eve was wise enough not to take for granted only came by fortuitous marriage at a ghostly cost.

      The families entwined out of deep love, respect, and the particular, inimitable bonds created by spiritual battle at the precipice of life and death. Evelyn was a natural stepmother to Natalie, and Gareth was an understanding husband. Regardless of class, neither Eve’s father, a British Lord, nor Gran, who had inherited more money than any of them, ever made the family feel that they were anything lesser. While Evelyn Northe-Stewart was not Eve’s grandmother by blood, she most certainly was by soul and spirit.

      Gran and Grandpa weren’t going back uptown tonight, Eve was certain. They had their own floor, below her parents, in ‘Fort Denbury’ as Eve was fond of calling the attached townhouses her father had procured on Waverly Place, west of the park, before she was born; fine brick and brownstone buildings with the sort of exquisite detail one would expect of an era that called itself gilded.

      Eve walked up the grand stoop, let herself in the glass-paneled door covered in wrought-iron tracery, and with a turn of an ornate key, the gas lamps that glowed in round orb sconces all about the property flamed to life. Gliding past the open pocket doors of the first-floor parlor, she turned a few more gas lamps bright, banishing the night’s shadows but keeping shutters closed from prying eyes. There in her parlor, filled neither with finery nor useless knick-knacks but a wide circular table and many places to sit, she would conduct the necessary séance to continue the search for Maggie.

      At sixteen years old, the ghosts had been at their zenith, pressing upon Eve all the time, in constant agitation. It had nearly torn the whole family apart, not to mention wrecked a good number of fine furnishings and objects. It wasn’t because the ghosts plaguing Eve were poltergeists, but often ghosts would startle any number of family members, and teacups in the hand, fine bone china, and any nearby objects easily unsettled were none the safer for a cavalcade of spiritual interruption.

      It was Grandmother Evelyn who’d suggested that since the Denburys had bought the adjoining townhouse as an investment on Jonathon’s instinct, the instinct had actually been preservation of family rather than a real-estate venture. Eve moved into the empty home next door, and the ghosts followed. Within the month, both buildings were more peaceful for the separation and Eve grew accustomed to living alone while never being left alone.

      Ghosts loved Eve. There was something about her soul, her energy, her presence, that drew them to her. While she could always talk to Gran about it, thankfully being a Sensitive and a part-time medium herself, even Gran was baffled by how many spirits kept Eve company. It was Gran’s questions about the spirits that had set the course of her life and made something meaningful out of what could have felt like a curse.

      “What on earth do they all want to talk about?” Gran asked once, just after her sixteenth birthday, when a horde of spirits had swooped in and blown out the candles on her cake.

      Eve shrugged. “Gossip! I told them to go find some high-society medium instead.”

      “Well, your father is a titled Lord—”

      “I mean a high-society girl who cares. I couldn’t care less about the petty goings on of others. What point is there? Heaven forbid I haunt the earth to gossip. They go on and on. About particulars. Details. Clothing, comings and goings. Shouldn’t they be trying to sort out their greatest mortal failure and make peace? If I were a detective, I’d write down all these details, as someone might find them useful at some point.”

      Gran just stared at her, thunderstruck. “Maybe you should.”

      Eve had blinked at her. “What?”

      “Become a . . . sort of detective.” Gran’s compelling gaze twinkled—a sure sign she was in possession of a particularly good idea. “If the restless dead won’t leave you alone, then why not give the busybodies something to do?”

      At this, Eve had snorted. But the idea stuck.

      Within the next years she was asking relevant people in the Spiritualist movement important questions, questions that, thanks to Ambassador Bishop, even caught the ear of the newly elected Governor Roosevelt, and her precinct was born. With stipulations, of course, as her operatives were ‘just young women’ and her department a collection of spirits. For some people in the world, Eve had learned with frustration, there were always qualifiers. Sometimes СКАЧАТЬ