“Sure. And you are?”
“I—” He paused, then flicked on the light. In the electric light, we were once again man and woman, nothing more, nothing less, and his excuse was very plainly no more than an excuse. “Damn.”
“I’m sorry, Nate.” I put a hand on the small of his back, then, slowly, slid my other arm around his waist. He sighed and leaned back against me, but there was still a deep line between his brows. “It’s … I’ve got so much to lose, now, and I don’t want you to be part of that.”
“Glad to see you finally realized that.” He turned to face me, running his fingers through his hair. “That you have a lot to lose, I mean.”
“Yeah. And I’m working on it.” I managed a smile, but it turned sour. “I just need to find … I don’t know, someone who knows about old Boston. Smugglers’ tunnels in the North End. That sort of thing.”
“Seriously? Tunnels?”
“Yeah.”
“Must be one hell of a lead. I might be able to find someone to help.”
“Good luck. Oh, and tell your aunt I found that book for her. She’s not going to be happy about it—someone cut it up—but at least I can tell her where to find the remnants.”
“She’ll manage.” He put both arms around me, and I leaned into the hug, then shook my head, coughing. “Hang on,” he said. “Let me get you a drink.”
He filled a glass of water from the tap, but as soon as he brought it near I winced away. “No good,” I said. “Stinks.”
Nate eyed the glass. “It’s just tap. I don’t think we’ve got a filter, but—hold on.” He put down the glass—I dumped it in the sink as soon as I could—and opened the fridge. “I’m sure I saw it in here somewhere … Katie fills bottles all during the summer and leaves them in here, I sometimes find them when I’m cleaning out for Christmas … ah. Here.”
He held out a plastic bottle with a frayed label. I took it, then hesitated. The water inside was strangely cloudy and … familiar? “Is this mine?”
Nate frowned. “It might be. Remember, you brought one back after—”
“I remember.” I’d filled a bottle at the quarry, before I’d quite realized what was in the water. And then I’d forgotten about it. Well, I’d had a couple other things to think about by that point, not least Nate himself. That it had stayed here this long was troubling, not least because of the way the spirit had attached itself to me. “Nate,” I began unsteadily, a sour feeling low in my stomach.
“That’s mine!”
Nate and I both looked up, and I don’t know which of us was redder. Katie, resplendent in My Little Pony pajamas (and oh, she’d be mad that I saw her in something so silly later on), ran forward and grabbed the bottle out of my hand. “Katie!” Nate snapped.
“But I might need it!” The words were practically flung over her shoulder as she ran back to her room, and all I was left with was the slightly greasy feel of the bottle on my hand.
Nate sighed. “She does this sometimes. That’s why she carries that backpack everywhere—she says she might need all sorts of things, and then she changes them out later on … I don’t know. Funny thing is, sometimes she’s right.”
I had a feeling I knew what it was. Katie’s Sight wasn’t all that predictable, but she might get some idea what might be useful later on. So long as she wasn’t turning into some kind of hoarder, she’d probably be okay. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not all that thirsty anyway. But Nate—”
“I know,” he said. He turned back to the window, closed it, and latched it. “I know,” he said again, more quietly. “I can’t keep on like this, Evie. It’s … it’s getting easier for me to make excuses. And if you’re gone, if you go—” He caught himself, one hand tight on the window frame.
I joined him at the window, and then, hesitantly, laid my hands over his. This time he relaxed against me, but not so much that I couldn’t feel the shivers in him. “I’m here now,” I said. “And I won’t go. Not if I can help it.”
He exhaled a long, ragged breath, then turned and, before I could speak or even draw breath, kissed me so hard our teeth clacked together. I started, then leaned into him, drawing my hands up along his forearms till the pulse in his joints thrummed against my palms. He drew back a second, his eyes dark and hooded, then paused. “What happened to your nose?”
I laughed helplessly. “That’s what I need a historian for.”
Ten
Whatever they’d dug up in Dorchester, it seemed to be spreading, because the shower in Nate’s apartment smelled just as bad as the tap water. Eventually—and to keep from using up all his hot water—I found the stinkiest shampoo in his medicine cabinet, dumped it in my hair, and gritted my teeth through the barrage of both acrid freesia and dead-rat smells. At least the latter went away when I dried off; the freesia, though, would be there for a while.
What research I’d done on line the night before (borrowing Nate’s computer) had not filled me with confidence, and another hour’s worth at the Boston Public Library confirmed it: I had absolutely nothing to work with. A black woman named Meda, dressed in Colonial-era clothing—and I wasn’t nearly enough of an expert to say when that had been based on the cut of her dress—and a tunnel under the North End. The most I could find about tunnels were the breathless reports that you got in books like Spooky Tales Of Old Beantown! and other jumped-up pamphlets, and a glance at their bibliographies was enough to tell me that they weren’t based on much. I’d probably have better luck with Katie’s Witches! book. (Though I found a few publications that were entertaining on their own, including the little book that claimed the T was actually an eldritch symbol of the Elder Gods, though since the author didn’t mention the circle under the TD Garden I didn’t take it all that seriously.) And the package store was so old that there weren’t any ownership records.
Finally I gave up and called Nate. He wasn’t answering his phone, but I left a message asking if he’d been serious about finding a historian or someone to help. It wasn’t till I finished that I saw he’d already sent the information in a text message: Talk to V B-P, 17 Gall Ln, Thetford MA. I smiled and closed the phone.
Trouble was, Thetford was one of those little towns just outside the city, small enough that it hadn’t been eaten up by the sprawl past I–95. I thought about biking out there, then discarded it—I’d need more than I had with me, and just now I didn’t want to head home in case Rena was there. (Cowardly, but the sentence of midwinter was starting to weigh on me.) But I did know someone with a car.
Sarah hated having a car; she could never figure out the arcane parking laws that governed the traffic cops, and the insurance payments were a lot more than they were worth. And she didn’t use it all that often; maybe a few official shop errands, but that was it. Most of the time, if I expressed any interest in the damn car she’d try to sell it to me.
Today was no exception, and after I convinced her both to loan it to me and not to sell it to me, Sarah seemed to relax. Her black eye was looking a little better this morning, but not much, and though she’d dipped into her Halloween supplies for a piratical eyepatch, it was pretty obviously there to hide something. “Plus it itches,” she told me, flipping it up to reveal the puffy flesh around her eye. “Everything go okay last night?”
“Not really.” I told her about the stunt Wheelwright and Chatterji had pulled. Instead of laughing it off, though, as she usually did with the crap the undercurrent tended to pull, Sarah chewed her lip thoughtfully and opened up one of her notebooks. “That’s not good. I’d thought they were some of the saner ones.”
“This is the undercurrent we’re talking, Sarah.”
“I know, it’s just …” She sighed and flipped the eyepatch back down. “It’s a little hard to know who to trust just now. Everything seemed to be going so well, the community watch was actually coming together, and then wham. Between the Elect, the Triplets, Tessie, and now these two, I don’t even have time to address the fifteen other complaints that came in.”
“That bad?”
“You have no idea.” She straightened up as the bell rang to announce a customer, and I picked up a Happy Trails Pathfinding Dowser to make it look like I had a reason to be at the counter. “Anything else?” she said, her usual customer demeanor returning.
“Maybe. You remember the, um, the woman you had a discussion with on the docks?” Sarah frowned, then nodded slowly, realization dawning. Yeah, I didn’t want to mention trouble with the cops in front of potential customers either. “She’s probably pissed with me. Nothing big, but if she stops by looking for me, could you, I don’t know, stall a little? This—” I held up Sarah’s car keys, “—is important enough that I don’t want to be distracted.”
Her eyebrows shot up, but she continued nodding. “Sure. If it’s that big. Any chance I’ll hear about it later?”
I hesitated. I hadn’t told Sarah about the use to which I’d put the list she gave me before Halloween, but if it turned out to be nothing … if I could find this for Dina and elude the Hunt, why worry her?
Well, one, because she could help. And two, because she deserved to know. “Yes,” I said. “But once I get back, okay?”
“Don’t bother bringing the car,” she said.
Sarah wasn’t kidding about how rotten the car was; this little hatchback had probably been through more owners than a dorm sofa, and had seen as much action. The seats exhaled a puff of pot-scented dust when I sat down, and the engine hesitated before starting up, like a skinny woman convincing herself to have a piece of cake.
I know driving’s supposed to be second nature to most Americans—the national highway system should be up there with God and apple pie—but it had been years since I’d driven. I rarely needed to leave the city, and where I couldn’t get via bike, I could usually either cadge a ride or take the train, slow as it was. Mom’s car, the one I’d learned on, had been a tiny two-door with steering that stuck when making left turns. It had also been a stick shift; Sarah’s car was automatic, but I kept reaching down for the stick without thinking.
The day was muggy and gross, far too warm for November but certainly damp enough, with a heavy cloud cover that kept the heat in like a stifling coverlet. I managed to get through the maze of Boston streets without causing too many backups and headed out to Thetford.
Out west, past the ring of Route 95 that a lover of mine had once called Taranis’ Wheel … The trees were just at the far edge of leaf season; most had shed their leaves and were left as a fringe of gray at the edge of the highway. This had been farmland, once, not fantastic ground but sufficient, superseded by the great fields of the Midwest. Now it was overgrown, left to trees and developers and office parks. Thetford had been discovered by the latter two, then forgotten and left to the former.
The address Nate had given me was out past the city center of Thetford, what there was of it. The roads out here closed in tight, winding about in ways that seemed to have no relation to either the cardinal directions or the vague contours of the hills. Bare trees bent in on either side of me, and I remembered why it was that so many slasher movies took place out in the woods.
At last the road petered out into dirt and gravel, scrabbling under the tires of Sarah’s car, and I slowed as a tall gray house loomed up at the end of the road. It looked like the structural equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster: a long-preserved central farmhouse with addition after addition tacked on, some starting to sag together.
I shut off the car (it made a coughing, unhappy sound and seemed to slump in place), slung my bag over my shoulder, and got out. The house had a scent of its own, the scent of a building that had been lived in and treated the same way for quite a while, and a plain board over the porch read BROOKS-PARSONS in block capitals that practically announced the name out loud. I tried the doorbell, and, when that produced only a dim coughing noise, knocked.
For a long moment there was nothing, just the faint strain of conversation far within. I knocked a second time, and the voice rose slightly, then dimmed. A door opened and closed, and a light switched on beyond the door, revealing a narrow hallway cluttered with furniture, strange farm implements hanging on the walls, and dozens of pictures tacked up between them. A shadow emerged farther down the hall, and I stepped back, trying to look as if I hadn’t been peering through the blinds.
The woman who opened the door was about Sarah’s height, but with that shrunken look that some old people get, the kind that implied that she’d once been a good deal taller and hadn’t bothered to adjust to the change. Her hair was brilliant white and pulled back in a bun almost as big as my fist, and the glasses she nudged up her nose to get a proper look at me were rimless and thick. She wore a man’s denim shirt over a white turtleneck and a skirt that reached to the tops of her boots, and she smelled of thyme, not dry thyme but wild-growing stuff, and of ground-up slate. She gave me a long, silent look as soon as she’d opened the door, and something about those eyes told me not to speak till I was spoken to.
“Hmph,” she said at last. “You’d be Nathaniel’s friend?”
Nathaniel? “Yes, ma’am. I’m Genevieve Scelan.”
“Hmph. He said you’d be along.” She opened the screen door, but instead of letting me in, she leaned past me and squinted around at the driveway. “You’d best come in, then. I am Venetia Brooks-Parsons. Take off your shoes.”
The statements came one after the other in such declarative tones that for a dizzy moment I assumed that taking off one’s shoes was protocol for dealing with a Brooks-Parsons. It might have been, in some proper old-New-England way. I stepped inside, trying not to loom over her—which was surprisingly easy; height or no, I suspected Venetia didn’t shrink away from anything—and scuffed off my sneakers, one after the other. Once inside, I could identify the other voice: the moderate tones of some public radio announcer, recounting the events of the week. Venetia circled me, giving me another speculative look, and started down the hall. “You can leave your bag at the door. The parlor is this way.”
The parlor smelled of dust and Lemon Pledge, in approximately equal amounts, and more than that, of cramped afternoons. “Actually, there was something I hoped you could help me with. Nate—Nathaniel told me that you were a historian, and—”
“He told you that?” Venetia paused in the door to the parlor and turned to face me, a very thin quirk in the line of her mouth. “Hm.”
Oh, boy. I knew it wasn’t what the Hounds had meant, but “beware of old women” was really taking on a new resonance. “He did. And that you might be able to help me. I’m looking for information on smugglers’ tunnels—”
“Smugglers’ tunnels.”
“In the North End, specifically. The North End of Boston. Um. Around Haymarket.” This wasn’t going well, and now Venetia’s posture in the doorway indicated that I wasn’t even going to make it as far as the parlor. “I’d heard,” I tried again, hoping to make this sound a little less crazy, “that there were tunnels leading from the harbor up into the city, used for travel and commerce—”
“Myths and hyperbole. The stuff of Gothic romances and anticlerical potboilers.” Her lips twisted, and she folded her hands before her in a gesture as forbidding as Rena with badge in hand. “I am a serious historian, not a conspiracy theorist pretending at historical accuracy. If you want sensationalism, I’m sure I can find you a novel or two.”
Great. The kind of historian I needed, and I’d already pissed her off. “Okay, then. Thanks. What about, freedmen and-women in Boston? I mean, how long were there slaves in town?” It was a hell of a leap to make, given that all I had to go on was the color of Meda’s skin, but something about how she’d said “the master” had stayed with me. Or maybe I just didn’t want her to have been a slave.
Venetia’s eyes glinted, but she nodded. “Much more realistic, if unrelated. Officially, slavery ended in 1783, when it ended in Massachusetts, but it was certainly unfashionable for a long time before that. Not that that stopped some families from gettin
g rich off the triangle trade then or for some time to come.” I blinked, confused, and her lips quirked again. “It’s all right, girl. I’m descended from those same rich scoundrels, I’m allowed to say that my ancestors were terrible people.
“No,” she continued, turning back and reaching for a switch on the wall, “slavery wasn’t common in Boston for some time before that. Of course there were exceptions, and sub rosa incidents, or idiots like Grauchy and his curio—”
“Grauchy?” Old Grouchy, the man had said. “What curio?”
Venetia’s lip curled. “That story. Hm. Grauchy was a ship captain who wanted to flaunt his riches. He chose the worst possible way … he had a personal slave whom he tried to promote as a rarity, an ‘intelligent negress.’” She shook her head and turned on the lights in the parlor (which would have been light enough, had she not had the blinds down). “In hindsight, he’s possibly related to your other query, since he did have the Townsend house for a time, before his money ran out. The man wasn’t even a P. T. Barnum; he didn’t have the brains.”
“But she did,” I said slowly. “Her name was Meda, wasn’t it?”
Venetia paused, her hand on the closest chair, then moved back to the light switch and turned it off. “It was,” she said, glancing back at me with a furrowed brow.
I held my breath.
Whatever standards Venetia went by, apparently I’d just passed them. “You’d better come into the back, Genevieve,” she said finally. “I don’t have a kettle, but you’re welcome to coffee.”
My face lit up before I could help it, and that to, seemed to meet with her approval. “Please,” I said.
The kitchen was in the back of the house, a little crowded nook with barely enough room for one person to move, and there were pictures everywhere, crammed in over every shelf and any wall space. Venetia slipped between table and cabinets easily. The coffee was half-caff, brewed up in one of those really old percolators, the kind that splashes the coffee up and around the top of the kettle with a vaguely digestive sound. Venetia set it to brewing again (“to aerate it”) and stalked around the kitchen like a lioness checking the boundaries of her territory. I stayed quiet while she searched through bundled books at the back of one shelf.
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