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

by Nick Wisseman

  A body clothed in a stained tweed jacket.

  A body whose hands and feet were bound, and mouth gagged.

  A body that twitched when Neva touched her fingers to its right wrist, nodded, and removed the cowry shell necklace from around its neck.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  EVEN THOUGH NEVA HAD seen the Transportation Building’s model of Pullman Town several times during the Fair—and despite the fact that she hated whistling now—a windy note escaped her lips when she exited the Illinois Central station and got her first look at the real thing. She hadn’t been treated to a view this impressive in months.

  To the east, beyond the manmade Lake Vista, rose the Pullman factories, artful buildings that managed to suggest both efficiency and beauty—a far cry from the grubby chaos of the Union Stockyards. To the north were the spacious, freestanding houses of executives and managers. And while the tenements and rooming houses to the south were smaller, their construction evoked the same elegance, and trees lined their streets as they did everywhere else. The level of intent that had gone into the community’s design was plain.

  Yet this was not a model town: no one worked. The factories were silent.

  Neva fingered the white ribbon she’d pinned to her jacket. The strip of pale fabric was a gift from Brin and signified solidarity with the striking workers. The Irishwoman had also provided train fare to and from Pullman Town, a welcome charity.

  Brin led the way off the platform and headed south. A few blocks of walking took them into the tenement-housing neighborhood, which, despite the recent strife, was remarkably clean—Pullman must be maintaining the town for appearance’s sake.

  “Are there soldiers here?” asked Neva.

  “A few. But most are at the rail stations, trying to get the trains moving.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Eugene’s hoping the soldiers will help us by ‘ensuring order and allowing us to continue boycotting peacefully.’”

  Neva nodded. Eugene Debs was the leader of the American Railway Union and a bit of an optimist. “You don’t agree?”

  “I think it’s fanciful. But he brought us this far.”

  Neva was tempted to add Without blowing anything up. But the impulse made her think of Wiley, which made her fall silent.

  “Lady Brin!” a man sang as they turned the corner onto what a sign proclaimed to be 114th Street. He was remarkably tall, towering over a wagon filled with sacks labeled “Rice” and “Grain.” A long line of women and children had queued up nearby in front of a makeshift table—two boards on two crates—off to one side.

  Neva suppressed the urge to join them.

  Brin just rolled her eyes. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

  “Be that as it may,” the man said, “any girl who doubles the Cook County Board’s donation of free food is a lady to me.”

  One woman close enough to hear curtsied to Brin. Another made a prayer sign with her hands and murmured, “God bless you.”

  Neva eyed her obviously discomfited companion. Now that she looked close, the Irishwoman’s clothing was finer than she remembered—subtly so, but the threads were tighter, and the fabric higher quality. “Did you come into an inheritance?”

  “Of sorts.” Brin gestured toward the other end of the street. “Are they still meeting in the repair shop?”

  “Probably,” the tall man answered. “They were due to finish ten minutes ago, but I doubt everyone’s said their piece.”

  “Thank you, Michael.”

  “Milady,” he said with a grin, doffing his hat.

  She wrinkled her nose and strode off.

  Neva studied the line a bit longer before following. The children were better dressed than their tattered counterparts at the fairgrounds, but many were just as thin. “How bad is it here?”

  “The winter was hard,” Brin said without turning around. “And while the boycott’s necessary, it’s made things harder still.”

  “Bad enough that you’re buying grain for those that can’t afford it?”

  Brin clucked her tongue and pointed to a large building on the corner. “They’ve been using the town repair shop for meetings. Derek should be there.”

  He was—front and center.

  “This is it,” he said as Neva and Brin came in through the back. He was standing on a workbench, gazing out over his audience of grim-faced white men and a few similarly dour white women. “Soldiers have entered Chicago, and even Pullman Town itself. This is the tipping point—the moment our boycott triumphs or fails.”

  “He’s with the strikers?” whispered Neva.

  “Since the beginning,” the Irishwoman whispered back.

  Neva gave Derek a closer look. He seemed a touch careworn, but otherwise the same. And yet he’d turned against Pullman—the situation must be dire indeed to have affected such a shift in her brother.

  “Everything we’ve worked for,” he continued, “everything we have is at stake now. So I ask you again: why are we not doing everything we can to increase our chances of success?”

  “Not this again,” a man grumbled to Neva’s left.

  Derek ignored the comment. “Why haven’t we brought the colored waiters at the Florence Hotel into the fold or pressed the American Railway Union to allow Negro porters into its membership? We need every workingman on our side. Their interests are the same as ours in this matter.”

  “Then why are the Negroes serving as goddamned scabs?” a woman asked loudly.

  “Because we shut them out! Why wouldn’t they take our jobs when we exclude them from the struggle, and by doing so indicate they’re on their own? But if we extend a hand now, we can bridge the divide and swell our ranks before it’s too late.”

  “It’s too late for nonsense,” the original grumbler cut in. “And don’t think inviting pretty colored girls to the meeting will sway us.” He jerked his thumb at Neva. “She’s got no place here. Neither do you, if you keep ranting like a fool.”

  Derek didn’t reply immediately: he was too busy staring at Neva, whom he’d only just noticed.

  Unsure how to respond with so many eyes on her, she gave him a small nod.

  He ripped his gaze away from her. “I’m not asking you to refight the Great War,” he said to the rest of the room. “Just to think practically about what’s best for your families. Winning means being able to feed them. Losing means continuing to rely on charity. Think on it—that’s all I ask.”

  “Thought and forgot,” the grumbler quipped, to general amusement.

  Face dark, Derek climbed down from the workbench and headed for the back door. Brin stayed put, but Neva met him outside.

  “Excellent timing,” he said before she could manage a hello. “Not that I had much chance of winning that argument, but now they probably think I’m only making it because I have a colored mistress. The predilection runs in the family, you know.”

  She was shocked at how bitter he sounded. “Derek, I’m—”

  “Why are you only showing up now? It’s been nine months. Lucretia said you stopped by the house in February, so I knew you were alive—then at least. But you couldn’t have come here before? Or after? Or at least sent word you were all right?”

  “Derek, please ...”

  “I spent days looking for you, Neva; weeks, once I got laid off. I even asked at Barnum & Bailey Circus when they came through in the spring—”

  She stopped him with a hug.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered once he returned the embrace, haltingly at first and then wholeheartedly. “I’ve been an idiot.”

  He had the grace not to say anything to this.

  Releasing him and standing back, Neva sized him up again. He looked—and felt—skinny. He must be missing meals like everyone else in Pullman Town. Or rather, everyone who lived on its south side. “You were laid off?”

  “Just before winter. Work was slow; I said a few things I shouldn’t have ...”

  “You said a few things? W
hat sorts of things?”

  He winced—that was the same, at least. “Nothing repeatable. Told a manager off for flaunting his earnings when all his workers had just suffered another pay cut. Didn’t go over well.”

  “I guess not ... You’re well, though?”

  “Well enough.” He appraised her the same way she had him. “What about you?”

  “I’m managing.” She grew conscious of how exposed they were in the street, and how she’d hugged him after he’d pointed out that being perceived as a Negro-lover would damage his arguments for integrating the strike. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

  “We should.” He motioned to the north. “There’s not much to see right now with the boycott underway, but I can show you the Corliss.”

  Neva hid a grin—this was the Derek she knew. “Is that a train car?”

  “A generator. Come on.”

  He led her to a building on the east side of the factory district, then into a room that must have been six stories tall and at least as wide. Neva didn’t say much as they walked and said even less when she saw what stood at the center of the room: an enormous engine shaped vaguely like a capital A, with twin cylinders thicker than her waist and a gear wheel many times her height.

  Derek smiled at her reaction. “Its drive shaft runs six hundred feet through tunnels beneath the shops. Powers the entire works ... when they’re going.” He cocked his head back the way they’d come. “The town’s architects created Lake Vista to provide water for the steam and act as a cooling mechanism.”

  “I feel like we’re back at the Fair.”

  “We are in a way: the Corliss ran the machinery at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in ‘76. Then Pullman purchased it in ’83 and brought it here—took 35 railcars to carry all the parts. Real monster when it’s moving. It can generate up to 2,400 horsepower.”

  Neva made suitably appreciative noises. “It’s fitting, actually—I came to ask you to return to the Fair with me. Our Fair.”

  Derek crossed his arms. “Why?”

  “To explain why I’ve been ... absent these last months. I need to show you something.”

  “Today?”

  “Please. I know there’s a lot going on, but it can’t wait.”

  Curiosity crackled across his face, warring with hurt and indignation. His voice was perfectly reserved, though: “And I suppose you won’t tell me about it unless I go?”

  She shook her head. “You need to see.”

  He stared at the Corliss for some moments, then started to frown.

  But someone else preempted his refusal: “Well, isn’t this a pretty picture.”

  The voice was instantly familiar—it belonged to the woman from the repair shop, the striker who’d complained about colored scabs. She didn’t look older than thirty, but her hair was gray, and her eyes painted in the colors of fatigue: red streaks and black shadows. A similarly haggard man accompanied her into the engine room.

  “Charming couple,” he observed of Derek and Neva.

  “Never thought black and white would go so well together,” the tired woman agreed. “It’s like a photograph.”

  Derek couldn’t help wincing. “Lecta, Whitby, this is Neva, a friend of mine from childhood.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said, matching the formal cordiality of Derek’s tone.

  Lecta didn’t bother. “Bring her here to ‘swell your ranks,’ did you?”

  Whitby glanced at the woman, his eyebrows crinkling. “What does that mean?” he asked in what seemed to be an attempt at a whisper, but—possibly due to drink; he looked a bit sodden—was almost a shout.

  “It means,” Lecta said indignantly, “that our Derek here, he of the weekly ‘let in the coloreds’ rants, is thinking with a head other than the scruffy thing atop his neck.”

  Whitby gave her another glance. “You mean his peter?”

  She glared at him. Neva stifled a laugh.

  Derek sighed. “You’re wrong in more ways than you know. But unless you have something of substance to discuss, we’ll leave you to whatever you came in here to do—without your spouses.”

  The tired woman stiffened at this, but Whitby grinned. He seemed more than just a bit drunk now.

  “Enjoy the day,” Derek said, tipping his hat as he strode past the pair.

  Neva pantomimed a curtsy before following. “Well, that was pleasant,” she said once they were outside.

  “Hardship brings out the worst in us all. Come on—let’s go visit the White City again.”

  THEY MADE A DETOUR first.

  Brin had insisted on staying in Pullman Town, but she’d offered to cover Derek’s rail fare (he’d said “lend”; she’d said “Just have it,” and given him extra). Then he and Neva had overshot the Fair at her direction, traveling up to 25th and State. The neighborhood was home primarily to Negro residents.

  “This won’t take long,” Neva explained as she led Derek to one of the smallest houses on the block and knocked on the door. “But you need to see it first.”

  Hatty answered a moment later, wearing a faded yellow dress that had been mended too many times to count. “Neva—and Derek! Come in, come in.” She embraced Neva, and after Derek tried to shake hands, embraced him too.

  Inside, Hatty indicated they should sit on the two available surfaces: a rickety-looking chair and an even ricketier-looking bed. Yet despite the room’s closeness, everything was well-kept. The bed was trimly made, and there wasn’t a speck of dust to be seen. Neva would have been shocked to find Hatty’s house in any other condition.

  “Please,” Derek said, gesturing for the old woman to take the chair.

  She refused at first, but eventually compromised by sitting on the bed next to Neva while he took the chair. “So what brings you here, children?”

  “To see you,” Neva said. “And to ask you about this again.” She withdrew the cowry shell necklace from her pocket.

  Derek sat up straighter. “You still have it.”

  “I do. And Hatty’s seen one like it.”

  “Before the War,” she agreed. “A woman in the fields used to wear one. I don’t know anything more about it now, though, child.”

  “That’s fine. I was hoping you could tell Derek what you told me. You’ll say it better than I can.”

  Hatty shrugged. “If you’d like.” She leaned in to get a better look at the necklace. “Yes,” she said, as if speaking to herself for a moment. “It’s the same kind the woman wore. She was a saltwater girl. Couldn’t speak much English at first, so instead of talking, she just fiddled with her shells.”

  Derek cocked his head. “Saltwater girl?”

  “It means she was brought over the Atlantic after importing slaves was supposed to be illegal,” Neva supplied. “After Congress outlawed it in 1808.”

  “Ah.”

  “Other slaves looked down on her for it,” Hatty added. “Those of us whose families had been here longer. It wasn’t right—didn’t make any sense—but that’s the way it was. Mostly she turned the other cheek. But I heard her snap once, after Tobias, a nasty brute of a man, knocked her down. She said ...”

  Neva put her hand on Hatty’s arm. “What did she say?”

  “Something that sounded like a curse. Said it calmly. Held up her shells and pressed them together, two on either side, and told Tobias—and these are my words, you understand; I don’t recollect quite how she put it, and she was quite eloquent by then—she told him the shells were fashioned after a charm so powerful the family that made it killed each other trying to possess it. And that even her sad little imitation could cause a man to lose his teeth, his hair, his sight ... and his balls.” Hatty chuckled. “Nonsense, of course. But Tobias never bothered her again.”

  “Where was she from?” asked Derek. “Before, I mean—in Africa.”

  “Dahomey, I think.”

  “And my mother?” asked Neva. “You said she was Fon too?”

  “Her family was. That I know for sure. Nat’s was fro
m Togo.”

  Neva let this last bit go—now wasn’t the time to bring up the subject of her true father. “Thank you.” She turned to Derek, raising one eyebrow significantly.

  “I see,” he said eventually.

  She nodded. Hatty’s anecdote was as close to a confirmation as they were likely to get: that the cowry shells had a connection to Dahomey and “magic”—and maybe to their family. “I wish we could stay longer. But we need to be going.”

  Hatty’s face fell. “So soon?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll come by again when I can. Maybe next week?”

  “Any time, child, any time. I’ve lots of it these days.”

  Derek winced. “You’re not at the DeBell’s?”

  “No, child,” the old woman said sorrowfully as she stood to distribute another round of hugs. “Been laid off these past three months.”

  DEREK INSISTED ON GIVING Hatty everything he could spare from the money Brin had insisted on giving him—he held back only enough to pay for rail fare to the Fair and then Pullman Town. Neva didn’t try to dissuade him. She remembered how kind Hatty had been to him when they were children, while all the DeBells (except their father) treated him like a mangy dog.

  But that wasn’t the family history Neva wanted to discuss on the way back to the rail station. Her focus remained on the cowries.

  “I’m still not sure what to think about that Fon woman’s claims at the Fair,” she said as they turned onto the station’s street. “About the shells forming the sign of a ‘bad vodun.’ I think they’re more aloof than that. But they’re certainly more than just a necklace. They make me more. More flexible, more able to use my talent. And they seem to do it for anyone who puts them on, anyone with—”

  “Neva.” Derek reinforced the warning in his tone by thrusting his arm in front of her. “Look.”

  The station was on fire.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  NEVA GRIPPED DEREK’S arm, squeezing hard to suppress memories of blazes at the Fair: the Casino... the Peristyle... the Cold Storage Building. The rail station wasn’t fully alight yet, but smoke puffed out its windows in telltale ways, a precursor she’d seen too many times in the last year.