“Very good,” Pop said with a smile. “And this young woman wrote about their interpretations of Poe’s writing. Thirty years, twice a year, I taught that course—I still remember her paper.”
“Huh.”
“I try very hard not to do that anymore—make assumptions. Why do you ask?”
I looked down at the plastic coffee cup in my hand. Condensation dripped from its base and onto the dirt. The printed ticket slapped on the side announced my name to be Sebesteen. It looked like I’d gone on a vowel heist with all those extra e’s. “The research I’ve been doing on the spiritoscope has coincided with stories about the Fox sisters—America’s first celebrity mediums. I always thought it was curious, how they’d tricked so many people for so long, although a good part of that was due to them having exploited grieving spectators. But really, it waswhothe sisters were that fooled everyone.” I looked at Pop. “The first time they did a public event, the younger two were sixteen and twelve. Audiences believed, because the alternative was to admit that a twelve-year-old girl in pigtails had pulled the wool over their eyes.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’d said goodbye to Pop around 8:30 a.m. and dragged a wet, panting, and happy Dillon out of the park so I could get to work. I emerged from the shaded canopy as I passed through the gates on Avenue A, and winced as a ray of happy-go-lucky morning sunshine hit me right in the retina. I tucked my chin and shielded the tops of my sunglasses with one hand as I began walking south, oblivious to passersby until one called me out by name. I turned around and backtracked a few steps as a man detached from the cast-iron fencing and came into focus.
“Did you forget that I’m married to a cop?” I snapped.
Joe Sinclair, with his manly beard and manly undercut and another polo shirt that somehow seemed to only further accentuate the rest of his manliness, raised his hands up in self-defense.
“You know this is beyond harassment, right?” I took another step toward him. “You came to my place of business. You followed me to Hell’s Kitchen. You followed me to goddamnInwood. And now you’re waiting for me at the park.”
“For a guy not doing any investigating, you sure do make a lot of curious errands during business hours.”
“How the fuck did you know I was here?”
“And since I’m certain you didn’t see me yesterday,” Sinclair continued, “I have to assume Detective Winter shared details of our conversation with you. I think that might be illegal.”
“Is that the hill you want to die on?” I asked. “I’m going to report you for stalking, but you’re mad Detective Winter gave me a heads-up to be mindful of my surroundings?”
Sinclair had since lowered his hands, tucking them into his pockets and coming off annoyingly at ease. “Which you don’t seem to be, if you don’t mind my pointing out.”
“I have achromatopsia, dickhead. I’m legally blind. So I hope you feel good knowing you’ve been creeping on a guy with a disability.”
That… seemed to shut Sinclair up for a good second or two, as he opened his mouth once or twice, but no words came out.
“I told you I wasn’t interested in being the subject of your story,” I said. “And still, you followed me all over yesterday. Were you going to write it anyway? Just with a voyeuristic approach to the narrative?”
Sinclair’s jaw clenched and he said, “I was considering it, yes.”
“You’re sick. And more than a little obsessed.”
“I’mobsessed? Mr. Snow, I know you’re involved, at least on some level, with the cops on this Sandra Habel case. But even my grandmother would know they didn’t ask you to skulk around the city and ask questions about Marie Yang or Sandra’s spiritpot—”
“Scope,” I corrected.
“What?”
“It’s a spiritoscope. Not a spiritpot, which I’m guessing is what good ol’ Jazz at the Wash & Fold misremembered, since you talked to him too, right? And it wasn’t Sandra’s, by the way. It was just found with her.”
Dillon had been standing beside me the entire time, but he must have sensed my growing agitation, because he tried to intervene the way he often did when Calvin needed to be brought back to the present. The dog took a portion of the leash in his mouth, turned, and gave it a tug in the direction we’d been walking.
I looked down and said, “Hang on, buddy.”
Dillon did not hang on, and tugged the leash again.
“Why’d you run away?” I asked Sinclair. “You followed me all the way to Inwood yesterday. Why didn’t you stay to coerce a story out of me after all the trouble?”
All at once, Sinclair shouted, “Because I thought you’d called the cops on me.” He winced, looked around, then gave an apologetic wave to the woman selling chili mangoes from her pushcart on the corner. “I thought… you must have finally noticed me, waiting across the street for you to come back out. And then I thought, yeah, a cop’s partner, of course they’d send the fucking cavalry to your defense.”
“I was at the rear-facing apartment, not the one facing the street.”
Sinclair swore under his breath.
