Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1)

by Nick Wisseman

  “There’s no easy way to put this either,” Neva said when the crying abated, “but the letter—Derek showed me the final version. It says ...”

  “The truth.” Mrs. DeBell’s eyes narrowed for a second before their edges softened with yet more tears. “I’m sure it tells the truth. But another day. We’ll speak of it another day.”

  “Of course.”

  From there, little of import was discussed until Abiah arrived. And when Jasper came a few minutes later—both children lived nearby, in the Gold Coast—Neva and Derek made their excuses and left Mrs. DeBell with her biological kin.

  Wiley awaited them outside. “I’m so sorry,” he said as Neva stepped through the doorway. “I didn’t know they’d gotten so far with the lead, and I should have guessed that the ‘Derek’ in the note was ... him.”

  She shook her head. “It’s fine. Not your fault.”

  It wasn’t fine, though.

  She’d been sloshing with emotion the last few days, but now she just felt hollow, as if someone had drilled a hole in her heart and let her soul drain out. Augie and Mr. DeBell ... There was no righting this. No way to go back to before. This was her new life, bereft of family.

  Except for Derek.

  His presence next to her as they walked back to the rail station meant everything. Wiley’s sympathy was heartfelt, yet he didn’t know her true relationship to Mr. DeBell, and she had no intention of illuminating him. But Derek... He knew it all. The only person in the world who did. She was more grateful than she could say to be able to lean her head on his shoulder after they took their seats on the train. One passenger muttered about “indecent contact with a colored,” and another wrinkled her nose, but Neva didn’t care.

  “Can you spare another hour?” she asked Derek as the train approached the Fair.

  He didn’t hesitate. “Yes. More if you need it. I’ve little mind to work today.”

  She led him and Wiley, trailing at a respectful distance, to the remnants of the Cold Storage Building, most of it already cleared away (a testament to the efficiency of Director Burnham’s work crews). Ash was still everywhere, however, and it was easy enough to scoop a handful into her jacket pocket—the one not containing the cowry shells. Funny: she hadn’t felt their lure all morning. Was it waning? Or was she just too numb?

  Next, Neva took Derek to the Japanese Ho-o-den on the Wooded Island. The elegant pavilion seemed as good a place as any to hold a service.

  “Would you rather find a church?” asked Derek once he realized what she was about.

  “Not for this.”

  They didn’t go inside the Ho-o-den. Instead, Neva went to the shore behind it, standing just shy of the water lapping against the flowered bank. “Augie,” she said eventually, after several false starts, “you were a scamp and a scoundrel, but you were always there for me. While we lived at the DeBells’, you made me laugh when I felt out of place. While we toured with the circus, you smoothed the way with the other performers and gained their acceptance. While we worked at this fair, you kept me from being overwhelmed.”

  She paused, debating whether to utter the next words, then pushed them out. “And when that white man raped me and would have done worse, you were there to break his damn neck.”

  Derek looked horrified, as well he might. But although the memory was fresh upon her—made raw again by the vivid dreams she’d had since being bitten—the assault had occurred five years ago, at Barnum & Bailey. There was nothing more to be done about it; Augie had made sure of that.

  “You helped me find the strength to get back on stage,” she continued. “You were always there for me, a true brother: the only blood I thought I had in the world. But now you’re gone.

  “Now you’re gone,” she repeated after a moment. “And I must make my own way. I don’t know how ... But I will try to follow the example you set, to remember your joy when I’m low and your courage when I’m afraid. I will remember all of you—I will always remember.

  “Rest in peace, dear brother,” she finished after another aching pause. Taking the ashes from her pocket, she sprinkled a few flakes into the Lagoon, then tossed the rest high, a black-and-white handful that cut a sooty arc through the air before falling to the surface and muddying the blue water.

  Derek bore witness with her as the ash dispersed. Before it was gone altogether, he unfolded Mr. DeBell’s letter—the full letter—stared at it for a second, and crumpled the message into a ball. “Rest in peace, father,” he said, throwing the wad of paper into the Lagoon, amidst the last tendrils of wet ash. “Fret no more.”

  She took Derek’s hand and led him to a nearby bench. They stared at the water for several more minutes before he broke their reverie in a soft, anguished voice. “Three years ago, while you were at the circus, I got a girl with child.”

  Neva looked at him in surprise but didn’t say anything.

  “Or at least, she said it was mine. And I believed her, despite the shame. Although I’m sure Lucretia expected nothing more from her husband’s bastard ... Edward saw us married in a simple ceremony, and Catherine—that was her name—and I moved to Pullman Town; he’d helped secure me a position there as a draftsman. All was well until the baby came.”

  Derek exhaled his next breath heavily; Neva held hers in.

  “It was colored,” he finally said.

  Neva clapped her hand over her mouth. “You didn’t think it was yours.”

  His face contorted so violently she thought it might break. “Why would I?”

  “Oh, Derek, I’m so sorry.”

  He shook his hand in a way that suggested there was more to the story. “What could I do but divorce her?” he choked out. “I had grounds and no reason to think they weren’t just—because Edward didn’t tell me then. He should have told me then.”

  Neva put her hand on Derek’s shoulder, but he shrugged her off.

  “Dissolving the marriage wasn’t difficult. The baby’s skin tone was all the proof I needed. I even gave Catherine my savings, meager as they were, to help her start a new life. But she never stopped swearing that the child was mine, that she’d never been with anyone else, that I was her first and only.” He leaned over to pluck a twig from the ground, sat back up, snapped the thin wood, and discarded it. “I didn’t believe her.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “She wouldn’t leave it alone. Catherine said it wasn’t about the stain on her honor; she just wanted me to accept that the child was mine. But I couldn’t—presumed there was no reason to—and she grew distraught. Miserable. Frantic. And still, she wouldn’t leave me alone. So I changed her.”

  It was Neva’s turn to exhale forcefully. Now she saw where this was going. “Oh, Derek ...”

  “I took her head in my hands,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper but speeding up his cadence. “And for a moment, it made her pathetically happy: she thought I’d finally changed my mind. But I only held her because I needed to feel the flickers in her brain as fully as I could, the charge of her thoughts. I’d never tried to do that before, not to make a lasting adjustment. But I was desperate, and it made me reckless. Which made me arrogant. Which made me careless—she wasn’t the same after.

  “Oh, it worked,” he murmured in answer to Neva’s unasked question. “She never insisted the baby was mine again. She never insisted the baby was anyone’s; she forgot all about it. Wandered Pullman Town in a daze, then disappeared ... She sent her mother a postcard from London that summer, but no one’s heard from her since.”

  Neva wet her lips. “And the child?”

  Derek sighed, and for a moment she feared the worst, but his reply wasn’t as horrific as she’d imagined. Just tragic. “I took her to an orphanage, one that accepted colored children.” He bent to gather the halves of the twig he’d snapped, but instead of doing them further injury, he merely rubbed them slowly against each other. “She’s no longer there—I checked after Edward sent me the letter ... But she’s gone. They lost the adopt
ion records.”

  Neva took her brother’s hand, and this time he didn’t pull back. “What was her name?”

  “Melody.” He didn’t speak the word so much as it was pulled out of him, yanked forth like a knife that had been lodged in his gut—after grunting with the pain of this final admission, he sobbed uncontrollably until Neva pulled his head down to her lap and stroked his hair, calming him the only way she knew how: not with electrical stimuli, but with love.

  ONCE DEREK COLLECTED himself, Neva had half a mind to tell him more of the man who’d violated her after a performance at Barnum & Bailey. She’d been barely seventeen, too young to know how to handle the brute who’d been enflamed by her routine and cornered her in the changing tent. If he’d been slower to use force, she would have been able to bend away from him, contorting in a way he wouldn’t find so attractive. But he’d started by slamming her head against the tent’s central post, and she’d been too woozy to do more than struggle ineffectually.

  Augie had been in full control when he came in and saw what was underway, however.

  He’d pitched his voice into the most fearsome sound imaginable, as if Terror itself had been given a tongue. The brute had flown off her in surprise. Yet Augie was faster: he’d darted forward and smashed the man’s head against the post, just above where he’d knocked her head moments earlier.

  The brute crumpled to the ground without a sound, his head flopping at an impossible angle. After her brother had felt for a pulse and found none, he’d hugged her close, shuddered, and whispered, “I’ll take care of this.” She’d never asked where he took the man’s body, but she imagined the circus’s dancing bear ate well that night.

  And yet, it wasn’t fair to hold this up for Derek to consider. Not when he’d confessed a wrong he’d committed; speaking of her other brother’s finest hour would feel like a rebuke in comparison. So Neva told a more recent tale instead: of her foolishness in following an eerie whistling to its source.

  “It’s time to leave,” Derek said when she’d finished summarizing her run-in with Leather Apron (or his lookalike). “I may not like the man,” her living brother added, gesturing at Wiley, who stood some thirty feet away, gazing in any direction but theirs. “But he’s right. You’d be safer in Pullman Town.”

  “Except now we know someone else—another killer; maybe the killer—is still out there.”

  “Precisely my point. Neva, I won’t lose you too.”

  She looked at Derek for a long moment, at his grief, his exhaustion, his pain ... and felt it all herself. “Or I you,” she said at last. “I’ll come tonight, after I speak to Brin. I owe her a warning.”

  He shook his head. “Send a note. That man nearly killed you.”

  “He could have, but he didn’t. And I’ll be careful.”

  “Then I’m staying with you.”

  “Derek ...”

  “No. I left you last night—against my better judgment—and you nearly died. I’m not letting you walk around alone again.”

  She squeezed his shoulder. “I appreciate that, but you should go. I’ll let Wiley escort me. Don’t lose your job over this.”

  “To hell with my job! You’re my sister!”

  Neva glanced at Wiley—amazingly, he seemed not to have heard Derek’s outburst. “And you’re my brother; I don’t want you risking yourself any more than you already have. Please go to Pullman Town. I’ll meet you there tonight. That’s a promise.”

  He gave her a long, penetrating look. “See that you keep it,” he said at last. Standing abruptly, he rubbed his cheeks dry and took a step southward, in the direction of the Terminal Station. “God’s wounds, Neva, are you sure you’re not the one who can tinker with people’s minds?” He took the bite out of his words by giving her a beartrap of a hug, then told her how to find his house and walked toward the bridge at the other end of the Island.

  Neva watched him until the path turned and he disappeared behind a grove of shingle oaks. It had hurt to tell him to leave—cutting her to her core and out the other side—but it felt right to get him to safety.

  Now for herself.

  “I’m leaving the Fair,” she said to Wiley as she approached him. “Like you wanted.”

  He hid his surprise—and dismay?—almost perfectly; the emotions only played across his face for a moment. “Probably for the best. When will you go?”

  “After the meeting. I’d like to say my goodbyes in person.”

  “Right ... Where will you go?”

  “Pullman Town.”

  Wiley grimaced and shot a look in the direction Derek had gone. “With him?”

  Neva grimaced in turn. She certainly wasn’t going to explain all of that relationship—not when Derek, as an ostensibly white man, had more to lose than she did. “He’s like a brother to me. I’ll stay with him for a few days while I figure out what’s next.”

  “I see. Well, should you need any assistance ...”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  They fell quiet as the Lagoon’s waters lapped against the Island and a gondola slipped past on its way to the Court of Honor.

  “What would you like to do this afternoon?” asked Wiley after an enthusiastic bunch of fairgoers traipsed by.

  “The Palace of Fine Arts,” she decided eventually. If she could speak to Brin now, there’d be no need to stick around until evening; the other anarchists wouldn’t miss her.

  But the Irishwoman was nowhere to be found.

  “Called off sick,” the waiter who’d served them two nights ago explained after Neva found him in the Palace’s restaurant. “First day she’s missed the whole Fair.”

  Once the waiter had moved to another table, Neva turned to Wiley. “Is she all right?”

  He put his menu down. “I haven’t heard different. We can ask her tonight—if she can walk, she’ll be there.”

  It was an ominous form of reassurance. Neva nearly told Wiley not to say such things but held her tongue.

  THE AFTERNOON AND EVENING passed in a haze of nostalgia and anxiety.

  The nostalgia derived from revisiting some of her favorite exhibits, including the seventy-foot “Modern Women” mural at the Women’s Building. She also lingered in the room she’d shared with Augie in the Algerian and Tunisian Village, staying long past the few minutes it took to pack her ludicrously few possessions.

  The anxiety came in waves. Why did the cowry shells keep calling to her? Had the necklace truly been made by a “twisted” Fon clan? Was it wrong to use them? Distracting herself by dreading the coming meeting with the anarchists was almost a relief. But there was little she could do to avoid remembering that somewhere out in the Fair was a man who could bend her to his will simply by pursing his lips.

  Thank God Wiley stayed close.

  He couldn’t protect her, of course. No one could. But he gave her space when she needed it, trailing at enough distance to preserve her privacy. And when the crowds became especially dense, he took her arm and cut a path, like an icebreaker in the Arctic. It wasn’t an altogether bad feeling to have his fingers tight on her—had it really been a few days since she’d last noticed how handsome he was?

  Neva noticed again when Wiley finally brought her to the Machinery Hall and Brin let them inside the storage room.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, his finely wrought features adorably stern. “Need to check in at the Administration Building. Stay here, please.”

  “And where else would I go?” She smiled to distinguish her teasing from sarcasm.

  “I’m afraid to speculate.” He smiled back, no doubt happy to see her mood lightening.

  But it was only a mask, one she let fall as soon as Wiley shut the door behind him. “I saw the killer,” she said to Brin. “Or at least, someone who’s been primed to kill.” Neva quickly related her encounter with the Leather Apron lookalike, hurrying to get the tale out before the other anarchists arrived.

  “Was he controlling the insects?”

  “
Not in a way I could see, but they came when he was close and followed when he went.”

  Brin leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. She appeared to have recovered from whatever had ailed her earlier (the fever?). “Think we could trap him?”

  “You weren’t listening. I was all but helpless against his whistling. I told you this as a warning, not a challenge.”

  “But if there were two of us, and one of us stayed out of sight with muffs on her ears ...”

  “Dynamiting the Ferris Wheel isn’t enough excitement for you?”

  “Ah, but that’s not happening until Monday. I’d like something to tide me over through tomorrow’s tedium.”

  Someone rapped the night’s code on the other side of the door, and Brin stood to let them in—Roland, Pieter, and Quill. So much for speaking privately.

  “You’re feeling better, I trust?” asked Pieter as he entered. He looked first at Neva, who nodded, and then at Brin. “I heard you called off sick today. They gave you leave for that?”

  She nodded too. “Just this once. It felt like the mother of all hangovers, but I didn’t have a drop yesterday. I’m able enough now.”

  Neva frowned and ran her right forefinger over her left glove, lightly pressuring the rash beneath.

  Brin shrugged—she didn’t think it was the fever, then, but she hadn’t ruled it out.

  “She here to speechify some more?” asked Roland, gesturing at Neva.

  “She is,” Neva answered, pointing back at him. “If he’s here to listen.”

  “He ain’t, so he might as well leave.”

  “Sit down,” Quill called out.

  “And stop being a bran-faced bastard,” Pieter added.

  Roland turned and snorted. “Just ‘cause Wiley thinks he’s found another Zulu jampot don’t mean we can trust her. She may not have been a plant for the Pinkertons before, but what’s stoppin’ her from going to them now?”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Brin said.

  Roland’s meaty fingers started twitching as if they wanted to ball into fists. “You willing to take the chance?”