“Not me.”
“Radcliff.” Calvin stood in the threshold of the multiuse, holding the door open with one hand. “Were you planning to work this case?”
Looking toward me a final time, Radcliff said, “I hope you change your mind.”
“Hang on to that pipe dream.” I watched him go, say something to Calvin, which went unanswered, and disappear inside the building.
Calvin hadn’t moved. It was difficult to tell, but I was certain he was staring at me.
And if he was waiting,expectingme to come over and apologize, well… then he was as mad as Dean Radcliff was to think I was interested in seeing what a preppy, all-American boy looked like in his birthday suit. So I took a cue from Alice’s request to getsomewhereand the Cheshire Cat’s promise that she was sure to, if only she walked long enough, and headed back to the train.
By the time I’d returned from the tippy-top of Manhattan to the East Village, segued to the Emporium to grab my copy ofExperimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestationsby Robert Hare, picked up Dillon from Pop’s—where he’d initially succeeded in getting me to stay with the promise of cake, only to disclose afterward that it was carrot, so I hastily declined on the grounds that I had some time-sensitive work to tend to but would swing by tomorrow for coffee—it was already past five in the evening when I got home. I fed the dog, took a lukewarm shower, and changed into Levi’s and a T-shirt. I collected the leftover gyoza and a beer from the fridge, plucked a few books from shelves near the staircase, and plopped myself down on the couch with the AC blasting.
I flipped open Hare’s book to the schematics of his various spiritoscopes, then set it beside me on the couch and out of the way of the sweating beer bottle. I knew I’d been right in telling (yelling at) Calvin that the scale I’d glimpsed in Marie’s hand had been a spiritoscope. Because there it was—Plate III. The scale was only part of the contraption, of course. The rest consisted of a seesaw-like table setup with a vase of water that the medium kept their hands near but couldn’t touch, and supposedly after invoking the spirits, the scale on the opposite end would dip with weight beyond what was already established by the water, proof of said spirits’ strength.
It was one of the weirder designs, in my opinion. And I think Hare had been particularly salty at the time of writing up the description of how it worked, because one bullet point included the analogy that trying to explain at the Association for the Advancement of Science why this experiment was proof of the afterlife was akin to the Dutch ambassador trying to convince the King of Ava that water was known to freeze and so could be walked upon.Calm down, Hare. Your bucket of water only proves the medium lied to you and simply placed force on the seesaw apparatus. The water was irrelevant.
I ate one of the cold gyoza and took a swig of beer while I stared at the drawing a moment longer. Marie’s murder scene mimicked Sandra’s. A lot. A spiritoscope and another seemingly unrelated object that held a sophisticated message translatable to those familiar with the history of the Fox sisters and Spiritualism. The knucklebones in Sandra’s hand had represented how the sisters would crack their fingers and ankles so as to create disembodied sounds to thrill and terrify séance-goers. So what did the apple in Marie’s hand signify? That one was actually a lot easier and more literal.
Before the sisters had become famous, when they still lived upstate in Hydesville, they’d concocted a whole story about a spirit haunting the family home, a man named Charles Rosna, who’d been murdered and buried in the cellar. Kate and Maggie got some kind of sick thrill out of terrifying their mother, and as their story grew, so did their act. They’d tie apples to strings, and at bedtime, throw them across the bedroom and drag them along the floor so they’d bounce and make noise that would alert the parents, only for them to enter the room and see their darling girls in bed. The apple left with Marie represented just another way the sisters had fooled an entire country.
I ate another gyoza and considered: these two murders were absolutely, without question, connected and executed by the same individual. If the presence of the spiritoscope wasn’t enough of a dead ringer, both Sandra and Marie were even killed in similar ways—a stabbing to the head. Of course, without knowing the details of Sandra’s knife, I couldn’t make any definitive deductions…. But considering the hone sticking out of Marie’s eye, which was used for realigning a kitchen blade to keep the edge sharp, was quite possibly sterling silver, and given the penchant for antiques showing up at these crime scenes, I felt it was reasonable to assume I was looking at nineteenth-century flatware as the weapon of choice both times.
A subject of which I had a book on.
A few, actually.
I leaned over the coffee table, studied the table of contents of one title with my magnifying glass, then flipped to the midpoint. The photographs showed an eclectic array of serving utensils and their various patterns in both sterling and silver plate throughout the decades, all of which could be considered art unto themselves. Sugar shells, grapefruit spoons, cake servers, slotted spoons, ladles, ice cream servers, fruit servers, asparagus tongs—everything you’d need at an upper-class dinner table that wasn’t specifically the fork or knife going into your mouth. I kept turning pages, searching through companies like 1847 Rogers Bros., Gorham Manufacturing, even Tiffany and Co. before coming to a handful of examples of roast-carving sets. Most of the photographs only included the knife and fork, but a few did offer the hone as part of the package, although for the most part, they appeared to be additional purchases outside of a standard flatware set. So here was where my historical research would, in fact, prove useful to the police. Should I be allowed access to the knife that killed Sandra, I might very easily prove that it and the hone could have originated from the same set.
Which would make sense. Ease of convenience for the killer.
I wished I’d gotten a better look at the hone handle and taken note of the motif, in order to narrow down the pattern likelihood. The 1800s presented such a huge boon in silver-making, specifically in the realm of flatware, where artistry could be employed for both the ultrarich with the use of sterling silver, to the more affordable silver plate for the average citizen. There was a literal endless supply of designs and manufacturers to peruse, even for something as specific as a hone.
Okay. Let’s come at this from a different angle.I flipped open a notebook to a blank page and scrawled across the header:Suspects.
I tapped the pen in the margins, leaving blots of ink in random tattoo.
After a moment, I wroteMarie Yang.
I crossed her name out and underneath added: murdered.
She’d originally had enough means that I’d found it disconcerting—intimately acquainted with Sandra’s work schedule, had keys to the shop and apartment, if not an interest in, at least an understanding of the occult, simply due to proximity. Except she turned up dead—stabbed through the eye in her own apartment on Thursday.
That was two days after her employer was found murdered and the same day as the article published withThe City, where Marie was named and quoted. That was a correlation, right? Granted, Marie wasn’t a medium or actively involved in the community, at least from an outsider’s point of view, but that hadn’t stopped someone from feeling she had to be removed from the conversation.
I knew, courtesy of freaky Walker, that Marie left every morning but Sunday at 6:45 a.m., which would make Readings by Madam Sandra her first stop of the day, since Jazz at the Wash & Fold said that she’d arrive by eight and that all aligned with the commute time from Inwood to Hell’s Kitchen, giving her a few minutes’ grace for train delays or maybe grabbing breakfast before work. Walker hadn’t said anything about Marie not leaving at 6:45 yesterday either, despite Sandra being dead. Because a girl’s gotta work, right? She could have easily moved another client to her suddenly available morning slot, but that’d be something Calvin could confirm—
I grunted, balled that thought up, and tossed it into my mental wastebasket.
If today was the first day that Marie didn’t leave her apartment at the usual time, that meant she was dead before 6:45 a.m. In fact, she’d still been in her pajamas. So someone had woken her up, surprised her in the early hours because… she knew something? Because of the newspaper quote? I begrudgingly admitted to myself that the notion aligned with Calvin’s organized-killer concept. Marie was, perhaps, viewed as a loose end to tie up.
I jotted down the stream of consciousness notes under her name, including a question to myself: when doesThe Citygo on sale? It’d have to be pretty damn early if the killer read it and decided Marie might know potential clients, friends, or enemies of Sandra’s, which they might feel Marie would then share with police, therefore concluding Marie needed to sleep with the fishes.
Speaking of enemies,Rosewas the next line item. She was still suspicious as hell to me. She openly disliked Sandra, actively attacked her reputation, and was unwilling to disclose where she’d been Monday and Tuesday. And yes, okay, I wasn’t the police. She’d had no reason to talk to me, and worse, I’d sort of… aggravated her during my “reading.” But it didn’t sit right with me. If you had nothing to hide, why hidethat?
A throwaway comment from Jazz bubbled to the top of my awareness just then.
Maybe a man. Maybe a tall woman.
