Calvin reached up to massage his temple. “It was my day off.”
“Look at this.” I tapped the Kinetoscope. “This is an Edison Kinetoscope.”
“Are we talking Thomas Edison?” Calvin crossed his arms, and his biceps flexed and bulged and…distracted.
“Uh—huh. Yeah. That’s the guy.” I looked at the cabinet. “But there was no contact information from the owner inside the crate. No documentation, letter—not even a postcard.”
“I’ve yet to see the correlation between a piece of furniture and murder.”
“It’s a movie viewer,” I corrected. “And—you’re absolutely certain it’s not for you?”
He gave me a critical look.
“Maybe someone sent you a really morbid birthday present?” I suggested. Not that I sincerely thought it was a gift, but Calvindidwork homicide and hewasgoing to be forty-three this Friday. And it had been established how susceptible the Emporium seemed to be to death and mayhem since the two of us met.
“No one would send me an Edison Kinetoscope. What is this about?”
I let out a heavy breath. “It came with a reel of film. It still works, Max and I watched it. It’s the final round of the Leonard-Cushing fight of 1894. It’s not supposed to exist, by all accounts.”
“And did Leonard kill Cushing?” Calvin asked dryly.
“No.” I paused for a beat. “Someone else died, though.”
“It’s a movie.”
“Not—no, the murder isn’t part of the film, Cal. Someone spliced two scenes together. It’s not staged or fake. A man actuallydiedand someone recorded it.” I turned the Kinetoscope on and tugged Calvin close. “Watch it.”
With a sigh, he relaxed his arms and leaned over the peephole to watch the scene.
I waited, anxiously studying Calvin’s body posture as the seconds ticked by. Louis Armstrong projected from the shop speakers, Max was chatting up customers, and Dillon wove around this and that across the showroom. When enough time had passed that Calvin would surely have reached the outdoor scene, I noticed his jaw tense. Andthatwas the only reaction I needed to authenticate what I too had seen.
“So?” I asked, for the sake of nicety.
Calvin straightened and looked at me.
“It’s real, isn’t it?”
“Seb—”
“Itoldyou.”
“Don’t get carried away,” Calvin chastised. “We don’t know anything—when or where or—”
“Mid-1890s. It was filmed relatively close to the same period as the boxing match.”
“How can you tell?”
“The frame rates match, they were both shot with a Kinetograph camera, the film itself was precut—”
“All right,” Calvin interrupted, holding up a hand. “We still don’t even know where this occurred. It could be any city in America that had a camera in the 1800s.”
I looked at the Kinetoscope briefly. “It’s New York—the Flatiron site.”
Calvin narrowed his eyes.
“Before the Flatiron Building actually existed.”
He was quiet, scrubbing his face with one hand. “Sweetheart… how thehelldo you know that?” Calvin asked in such a calm, polite tone, it was nearly comical.
