She nodded, her fist pressed tight to her pinched mouth. More tears spilled, the validation of haunting reveries.
“It’s why you wanted to know if your uncle Zeke had any more specific message for you, isn’t it? You were hoping—”
“He might give me a clue. If I should tell you about the dreams or if they really have everything to do with you.” She brushed at another tear.
“He kind of has. Between Zeke and Brody, the timing of this trip home . . . what happened with my parents. It’s taken the convergence of all of it to get me to here. But mostly, it’s taken you.”
“And I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“Why? Tell me, about the dreams. Like this room we’re in, you’ve seen it before?”
“Glimpses.” She ran a hand through her thick hair. “A lot of the dreams occur outside, on a beach, in a giant, old-fashioned amusement park. When I was in high school, we covered a section on twentieth-century Americana. There were pictures of a place called—”
“Luna Park.”
“Yes. Luna Park. Would you believe back in high school, when I saw the photos, I actually passed out. Hit my head right on the edge of Mrs. McKneely’s desk.”
Pete’s eyes widened at the detail.
“Truthfully, it’s the biggest reason I came to New York. I wanted an up-close look at the girl’s dreams. Of course, Luna Park, the original one . . . it’s been gone for decades.” She shrugged. “I can only get so close to everything. To her.”
“And whose dreams do you believe you’ve been taking care of, Em? Who do they belong to?”
“Esme,” she said, as if making her own murderous confession. “I’ve known for certain since you showed me the photos of Esmerelda Moon.”
“And have you ever—”
“Dreamed about what you relive? What happened in this room? No. But I wasn’t entirely surprised when you showed me the photos of her bruised face. In some of the more disturbing dreams, I see flickers of it. It’s so violent. There’s so much anger. Those are the worst dreams.”
“And whoever does this to her—”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell me this before now?”
“For a few reasons.” In the stuffy room, filled with memories and dreams that so deeply affected them both, Em took a step back. “One, I wasn’t sure if you’d believe me. Not because my claim was so grand, but because it’s too small compared to yours.”
“And the other reason?”
“Unlike those men I interviewed in prison, you admit to murder. You punish yourself for having killed Esmerelda Moon. I also can’t say for certain it’s only one man who hurts Esme. I’ve never seen a face.” She looked at Pete’s bruised hand. “Just his fist—her fear.”
“So bring it full circle, Em. Say what it is you’re thinking. You might not be able to pick Esmerelda Moon’s killer out of a lineup, but there’s still every chance it could be me.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Em’s schedule kept them from further tag-teaming history. At least that’s what Pete told himself. But perhaps it was more about what she couldn’t put together, and Em was right to be cautious. The two of them stood in the middle of a murder scene. Em now had a whole name for the girl in her dreams. She’d seen photos, proving this was not déjà vu. Everything she knew had been validated. So when present-day reality gave Em a way out, Pete didn’t stand in her way.
“I have to go,” she said, glancing at her phone. “I have a three-hour shift at the Y on the West Side.”
“What do you do there?”
“Lifeguard. The under-twelve free swim.”
“You’re a lifeguard.”
“Why do you say it like that, like you’re surprised?”
“I’m not. In fact, I’m often impressed with a lifeguard’s ability to save a life.”
She left after giving him her cell phone number and the address of her late-afternoon audition.
Pete wasn’t done absorbing a place so surreal and familiar. Compared to the memories racing through his mind, the space was disturbingly vacant. The contrast was frustrating. Yet he stayed, even as sweat puddled down his back and the stale air bordered on suffocating. Eventually, Pete wrestled with the narrow window until it stuttered open. Its wood was so rotted the swell of humidity kept it raised. He sat on the sill and city noises flooded in. Aside from the dead rat in the alley below and a sliver of clearing sky above, the building across the way was the only view. A solid breeze billowed, so cool and at odds with the day, he thought July had given way to October. Pete breathed in fresh air but halted on his inhale. His hair wasn’t blowing back, but forward. The rush of cool air came from inside the room. Startled and perched on the narrow edge, Pete lost his balance and grabbed on to the window frame. The decayed molding cracked and gave way. In a frantic second, he nearly plunged backward, out the open hole. A force hauled him forward. Pete tripped over his own feet, stumbling into the middle of the room. He blinked, keenly aware of the specter assist.
He looked to the barren corners. There was a presence and it felt demure. The specter was also vague, as if it’d expended its energy to rescue him from the fall. He couldn’t imagine it was Esme. Hell, why wouldn’t she have shoved him out the window and been done with it? “Talk about motive and opportunity,” he said aloud.
Pete considered his uncle Brody, even Zeke Dublin. No. This specter was female, and he was forced to reconsider Esme. “So,” he said, steadying a breath and his immediate fate. “You still don’t want to talk. Fair enough. I get it, with everything that happened here, between us.” He pointed to the window. “Sorry if I’m confused, but if you wanted an eye-for-an-eye, it seems like you passed on a golden opportunity.” Then he muttered softly, “Of course, if you knock off the human, and your goal is torment . . . game over.”
On those words, his camera bag moved. It slid inches across the hardwood, as if the antiquated building had tilted twenty degrees. Pete understood the energy required for a specter to move an object, even when drawing muscle off his extrasensory abilities. Physical demonstrations were rare. It also read as a sign. Whoever the specter, its aim was to bring a strong message. “Okay, so my camera bag has your attention. Photos?” he said, more to himself than the elusive ghost.
It’d always been his plan to photograph the room, and he retrieved the Canon 5D, changing out the lens like he was in a foxhole during a Fallujah bombing—steady but guarded. The 50 mm prime lens was better in tight spots or when semiautomatic gunfire rained down. This felt similar, just slightly scarier, and he concentrated on the business of being a photographer. In a fast rotation, Pete fired off a dozen shots, capturing the room in the round. Hurriedly, he reviewed the images. “Well, I suppose any other outcome would have been a letdown.” In all the pictures, orbs were visible. They were faint in some shots—different hues, varying strength, but present in every frame. So obvious, in fact, if he were to turn photos like this in to Flagler, he’d tell Pete, “Don’t give me crap like this—photoshop your shitty lighting errors before submitting, St John.”
Looking between the last shot and the empty room, he realized the entity was gone. Pete didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. He felt alone. His memories had far greater meaning than a room where time had continued on for a hundred years. It felt like the Rabbit Lane bungalow—a structure filled with physical tally marks but no real answers.
Pete squatted next to the bag and changed the lens, putting the camera away. The postcard caught his eye. “You’ve got to be . . .” This morning, when he looked at the card, he recalled it facing picture-side out. The addressed side was now visible through the clear plastic pocket. Pete snatched it from the case, and his knees met with the floor. First, a message had mysteriously appeared on the front—old news now. Then yesterday, a return address had shown up on the back. It had delivered them to Hupp’s Supper Club. And now the ghost gift appeared complete, bearing
a recipient: “Phin Seaborn, 114th Division, American Expeditionary Forces, Aisne, France.”
It took Pete only a second to know what he needed to do next. Executing the thought took longer: fifteen minutes of googling and a half-hour cab ride across town, plus his press credentials, to access the best print archives of World War I available. An elderly woman led him to a temperature-controlled basement room at the New York Times. “We archive to whatever standard is available. But anything that old . . .” She pointed to narrow metal shelving, rows and rows. “Precomputer, premicrofilm, it’s preserved in its original format here. Library of Congress has microfilm, along with Recordak, but you seem kind of in a hurry. Like you’d rather not take a trip to DC.”
“Uh, no. Not if I can help it.” Pete gulped at the endless metal trays that looked like mini coroner slabs—stored and bygone. “I may be a while.”
“You did note a specific time frame.” She pointed to an isolated section. “We also adopted all the archived copies of the New York Tribune from that era. Seemed like the conscientious, custodial thing to do, print media being such an endangered species.”
“The Tribune?”
“Yes. The paper actually trumped the Times back in the day. Let’s see . . .” She squinted upward through round, black frames that contrasted with her white hair. “That would be 1866 to around the mid-1920s. Then it merged with the Herald.”
“Thanks,” Pete said, staving off the sense of being swamped by the past.
“Well, good luck. We close at six. Just let me know when you leave.” She headed for the door. “The Tribune . . . ,” she said. Pete looked at her from across the deep room. “You said World War I, right?” He nodded; she touched her fingertips to her head. “Took me a minute. We did have an editor years ago, photo-slash-history buff. He’d spend his lunch hours down here, fascinated with Tribune coverage of World War I. Photos in particular. Apparently, whatever photog they had embedded was way ahead of his time.”
“Really? A photographer ahead of his time?” The camera bag on Pete’s shoulder slid to the floor.
“Like I said, good luck.” Her gaze trailed around the massive archives before she closed the door, keeping elements like humidity and modern-day technology at bay.
For whatever the Hupp hotel room did not deliver, the archived Tribune pages did. Within an hour, Pete unearthed a long-ago past. His first inkling of Phineas Seaborn was not related to war but random society photos from a July 1917 edition of the Tribune. He recognized the rich paneling, the stage Samsara’s manager had described. The people pictured meant nothing, set off no inner alarm—just a bunch of well-dressed patrons toasting champagne glasses, posing at tables filled with china dishes, cigars, and the air of money.
He continued to scour editions, trying not to go too fast or miss anything that might be a clue. A photograph from a March 1918 edition jumped out at Pete. It showed off a young man dressed in a tux, dimples so deep they struck him as dastardly as opposed to genuine. The photo credit didn’t belong to Phineas Seaborn but to a Charles Carlisle. The caption read: Benjamin Hupp, socialite and future heir, poses bravely, ready to embark on his duty to country. Hupp is to be stationed at a standby post in Washington, DC, awaiting further orders.
For the longest time, Pete stared at the photo. He felt as if Benjamin Hupp glowered back, as if they’d stared at one another before. Pete’s eyelids fluttered as he tried to summon where or when. It frustrated him so, to know specific moments from another life but never recall more than the parts he’d visited. From beneath his hand, the photo emanated heat—one small clue that there was a missing memory. It wasn’t the blistering effect from the photograph of Esme, but hot enough. Pete shook his head at the winsome image of Hupp. He reeked of entitlement, looking like someone Pete probably wouldn’t much like in this century or the last.
A story his mother once told him muscled its way into his thoughts. It was the grisly tale of how and why she’d ended up with the pockmarks and bites on her arm, the scar on her chin. It’d been a warning she’d reluctantly shared with her son. Evil. Her scars were left by the presence of evil. Looking at the deep-dimpled, fashionably savvy heir, a tingle crawled up Pete’s back.
The woman who granted Pete access to the archives had said photo taking was prohibited. He assumed it was professional courtesy when they allowed Pete to hang on to his camera. Admittedly, the executive assistant knew of Pete’s work, was familiar with photos the Times had run. Pete couldn’t break the rules, at least not blatantly with the Canon 5D. Fortunately, that camera wasn’t his only resource. While the room was surely monitored, Pete casually pulled out his iPhone, snapping photos under the guise of sending a text message. He was a lot of things, some shaky and unknown, perhaps traits as appalling as the ones Emerald Montague saw in her dreams. But he was also a heralded war correspondent, and Peter St John wasn’t so easily deterred.
Neither was Phineas Seaborn, as the Tribune pages revealed. As Pete delved deeper into the archives, into the heart of the Great War, the photos and illustrations began to tell a macabre story. Pete’s breath caught—again, he recognized his work. He found twenty, maybe thirty photos and sketches. All were of battlefields in France—bloody, gruesome, accurate, and defining of war. “Phineas Seaborn’s war.” Pete had been sitting on a metal stool. He stood and sat, repeating the motion. The antsy feeling was the same, the way he felt after a past life experience, the desire to climb out of his own skin. He forced himself to sit once more. His eyes darted between photos and illustrations.
He smelled blood and dirt, the rotting limbs of dying men, the stench of trench foot, the sight of tetanus—lockjawed faces, twisting muscle spasms, fever. Blood spouting from mouths and eyes. Even in his present-day war travels, he’d never seen anything like it, the volume of dead men gut-wrenching. The black-and-white images ran in color through his head because, really, these were his memories.
Pete closed his eyes. The English saddle and the black horse. The huge draft horse lay on its side, the left leg cannon bone protruding. In the animal’s own blood, he’d marked its head with an X, between its right eye and ear. Then he held a pistol to it. He’d squeezed that trigger too. Pete’s eyes teared—then and now—hearing the discharge of the weapon into the horse’s massive skull, killing it instantly.
He blinked dry his damp eyes and snapped photos of his photos, the detailed illustrations. Beyond the similarity of artistic interpretation, he saw what Phin Seaborn had done. It was the same thing as Pete—he’d documented war, hoping to send a message of peace. “And so then what did you do?” he said to himself, posing the question to Phineas Seaborn. Pete did a quick Google search, but nothing about a Phineas Seaborn turned up.
Months after the Battle of Belleau Wood, the photos and illustrations stopped. The famed battle took place in June 1918, a fact Pete had known for years. The Seaborn photos and drawings last appeared in a December 1918 edition. That much made sense. Media from the era traveled by ship back to the States. Publication came weeks, if not months, after the fact. Yet this felt like something more than a war that had ended.
If it was not for Esme’s murder, Pete might have thought Phineas Seaborn went down in the flames of glory on a battlefield. That he’d not only served his country but also recorded the devastation of war for the world to see. But Pete knew that wasn’t Phin’s fate. He knew it because his handwriting was on a strip of photos, showing off Esmerelda Moon’s battered face. Photos taken in January of 1919. It was difficult to reconcile—the hard evidence of a war hero in front of him and the man who would shoot Esmerelda Moon. But Pete also understood how PTSD could ravage a mind, the hair trigger it could produce.
“Maybe it’s exactly what happened. Maybe it all came to a head and he . . . I snapped in an Upper East Side hotel room.”
Pete continued on, processing newspaper pages as fast as his mind’s eye would allow. He panicked slightly, wondering if this hunt would end like the Rabbit Lane bungalow and hotel room and his other life
—a dead end. He moved through years. Hope turned, like the delicate yellowed pages he touched, into a fragile thing.
With the last archived issue of the Tribune, May 30, 1925, an article and a photo caught Pete’s eye. He studied the photo first: a solemn-faced bride, dark haired, so different looking from Esme in complexion, figure, and presence. The article next to it was titled: American War Hero Lives Life in Europe. Pete read, with bated interest, the long-awaited conclusion of the life he once lived:
Phineas Seaborn, Great War hero, who fought in and recorded battles that amassed more than three hundred thousand American casualties, now lives a near-recluse life in a hut without electricity or running water on the banks of Walberswick, England. In addition to his eminent contributions as a fighter, photographer, and illustrative artist, Seaborn also made headlines for rejecting President Wilson’s 1919 invitation to the White House to celebrate his Great War victories. Instead, after a brief stateside adjournment, civilian Seaborn returned to a post-war Europe in the spring of 1919.
Over the years, Seaborn has refused requests for interviews or photos. It’s believed that his abandonment of the United States is a protest of the events he witnessed. In a related 1921 interview, conducted from the Choctaw reservation in Oklahoma, Native American spy Hassan Lightfoot referenced a friendship with the elusive Seaborn. However, Lightfoot’s claims could not be corroborated, and it is reputed that the Indian spy, despite any purported war aid, embellished what was likely a brief encounter with the revered hero.
This article notes a recent surfacing of Seaborn. In the midst of a torrential downpour, a marriage ceremony took place between Mr. Seaborn and Miss Maree Gagne, of Aisne, France, this past week in Paris. The two met during Seaborn’s term abroad, when Miss Gagne ferried messages between Allied forces. When approached by reporters, Seaborn was asked if he chose the French capital because of his wartime connections. Perhaps a testament to his personal ravages, with his new bride beside him, Seaborn replied, “I was once told Paris is France. I don’t give a damn about the rest of the World anymore.”
Echo Moon (A Ghost Gifts Novel Book 3) Page 32