The Book of Speculation (34 page)

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry he screwed up your family and I’m sorry he screwed up mine.” Her chin starts to wrinkle up, tight little pits appearing.

“Hey,” I start, but it’s too hard to finish. I stare down at my coffee. It’s undrinkable mud warmed over. Doyle has suffered through his entire cup. None of us has the heart not to. “I brought the books I borrowed.” I dig them out and slide them across the small white table, toward her chair. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”

“Oh,” she says quietly. “Never mind that. Kupferman’s an idiot. She’s gone nuts about damaging materials and has Marci reshelving for three weeks because she was drinking a Coke outside the staff room.”

“No.”

“Seriously.” Alice sniffles and rubs the ends of her hair between her fingers. I remember her sucking salt water from the tips of her pigtails. “Why did you take them?”

“My mom read to me from one.” I shrug. “Ever love something so much you start to think it’s yours?”

“It’s good to have things that are yours. Keep them.” She closes her eyes and locks her arms around her knees and I wonder if we’re talking about books at all. She sniffs again, but says nothing. Silence blooms. Enola catches my eye. We should go. I set my cup down.

“I’ll give you my library keys,” Alice says suddenly.

“I’m sorry?”

She rubs her eyes and stands. “You can’t go back to the house for more reasons than the leak. I’ll lend you my keys. Go spend the night at the library.” Then she’s walking down the hall to her bedroom, where there’s the mobile with a horseshoe crab, a creature she doesn’t know why she likes, unless Frank told her that as well.

“She’s drunk,” Enola says.

“Probably,” I say. “She’s allowed.”

Alice returns, leaning against the wall. Yes, tipsy. Good for you, Alice. I wish I’d thought of it myself.

“There’s something I was supposed to tell you. What was it?” She waves the keys in my direction before tossing them to me. “The code is still the same. Kupferman says she’s going to change it but hasn’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Thanks.” We all get up. The storm is still beating down, rain slapping at windows and doors.

“Oh. Oh,” Alice says. She pinches the top of her nose. The words come out in a great rush, “Liz Reed from North Isle called. Said she was trying to get in touch with you but your phone is out.” She stops to take a breath. “That accident thing you were looking into checked out, she sent it to your email. What the heck was that name? It was something weird. Peabody and Sons Maritime Merriments.” She scrunches her face. “Does that sound right?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Wow. Liz Reed. You called in the big guns. She also said that Raina found something for you on that Mullins name.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the last known relative is some guy in the Midwest. Churchwarry.” I hear her, but she sounds like she’s in another room. “Wait. That’s your guy, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I answer.

Churchwarry is a Ryzhkov. A thousand ideas form and fade. Alice may have gotten it wrong; it would be understandable, she’s worn out, buzzed. I need to talk to Raina, double check. I don’t know what happens in the next seconds, when the door opens, why Enola and Doyle are standing by the car in the rain, or how it is that I’m alone with Alice on her step.

Alice leans forward and her hair falls down over her forehead. She shoves it back. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t let you stay. I’m really ugly right now and I’m a little drunk and I need to be alone. I’ll just look at you—”

“And see my mother.”

“It won’t always be this way,” she says. “I need time. I need to be less angry.”

“It’s not you, it’s me. It’s always me.” It’s a thing people say, but it’s true. If it hadn’t been for me, her father never would have told her. “It’s okay. I have a really terrible breakfast face.”

A weak smile. “Don’t. I know every one of your faces. Just put my keys in the book drop when you leave, okay? I’ll get Marci to let me in tomorrow.”

I could just lean in—a little kiss, nothing at all—but it wouldn’t be right. She rubs her face, and I touch her hand. The hug is unexpected, but with her inside and me on the step below, we fit. And I should hold her for a little while. I want to. I could say something, but her cheek is on my shoulder and I can feel her body catching because she’s crying again. Her lips brush my neck, light and awkward, but then she pulls away.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay.”

She watches while I walk to the car, getting pelted by the rain. Even through sheets of water on the windshield, I see her in the doorway. She stays until we drive out of the lot.

“God damn,” Enola whispers. “Alice McAvoy is in love with you.”

I hope.

The car careens around the back roads, swerving around puddles, branches. Everything. “Pull over and let me drive.” Enola’s hand is on my arm.

“No.” Hemlock Lane is flooded and the harbor is on the front lawns of the summer bungalows. A sharp left takes us inland, climbing up the hill toward the monastery where the brothers pray whatever prayers one says during storms. Churchwarry is Ryzhkova’s descendant. He sought me out. “He must have known.”

“Must have known what?” Enola asks.

“Nothing.”

“The book guy?” she persists.

“Yeah,” I say. “His relative, you tore pictures of her cards out of the book.”

“Bullshit,” she says, but there’s no force behind it.

I don’t have the energy to explain it to her. I assumed I’d find Frank at the end of the road, that his family had been passing down Ryzhkova’s portraits, and that maybe my mother giving him her tarot cards had a certain poetic symmetry to it. It’s nothing so easy as that. “Maybe you were right,” I tell her. “Maybe he does want something from me. Damned if I know what it is, though.” The road curves in hairpin turns—a nod to Robert Moses. Doyle’s duffle slides across the seat and thumps into one of the doors.

“He could just want to latch on to you guys,” Doyle says quietly. “You kind of have, like, a way of drawing people to you,” he says.

I peer back at him through the mirror. “What do you mean?”

“I heard about you guys before I hooked up with Rose’s. Didn’t know it was your family for a while, but then Enola said some stuff, I saw you swimming, and things clicked. Your mom kinda sucked in your dad, and Mr. McAvoy.” The way Doyle says Frank’s last name is strangely respectful considering we just burned his belongings. He coughs. “And me. Enola just yanked at my guts, you know? Thom’s half in love with her. You guys sort of have a pull.”

Enola smacks the seat and screeches, “Yanked at your guts?”

“What exactly did you hear and from who?” I ask.

He stretches an arm across the backseat and drums his fingers; each tap spits a tiny nervous spark. “I was with a show that toured the Carolinas for a while. Had a high-dive guy who was real cool. Dave. We’d shoot the shit during downtime. He liked to talk old circus stuff. Told me about this family that called themselves mermaids because they could stay underwater forever, but eventually each one of them drowned.” He shrugs. “He made you sound like the Flying Wallendas or something—long history, tragedy. Intense stuff.”

Enola whips around in her seat. “Why the fuck didn’t you say anything? Don’t you think maybe you should have told me?”

The headlights hit something straddling the road—large, too vague to make out. There’s no shoulder to go around, valley on one side, hill on the other. I slam the brakes. Flashing retinas. Deer. The wheels lock and skid.
Shit
. Water. We slide, the back end slips away, fishtailing. I turn the wheel hard. Enola shrieks. Doyle swears. The seat belt cuts into my stomach and we’re spinning, spinning, watching rain roll over us and the lights from the town scream by. A loud crunch from the backseat. Something goes flying from Enola’s hand. Her cards scatter across the dash, the floor, in the air around us.

Wheels grip, breaks kick in, we screech to a stop.

Gasping. Swearing, breathing. Whispered
Are you all right? Everybody okay? Shit, shit. We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re in one piece.
Let the car gently roll the rest of the way down the hill. There’s no body in the road, no deer. We pull over when there’s a shoulder again. Shards of Doyle’s lightbulbs cover the backseat. He sweeps them into a pile while Enola picks up her cards. Something’s stuck to the inside of the windshield, held fast by a spot of water that got inside. A card. I pick it off with my thumbnail. A dark background, black maybe, hard to tell. Tall building. A lightning bolt. I know it. It’s aged, but it’s an exact image of a sketch in the book. Not a Marseille deck. Not a Waite deck. I trace my finger across the rocks.

“Give me that.” Enola snatches the Tower from me.

26

Charlotte lay cloaked in the biting smoke of burning moss and deadwood. Though purported to be the next burgeoning place of industry, the town was barely more than a village built around two roads, Tryon and Trade. At their intersection was a courthouse, an impressive structure seated atop eight brick pillars that raised it ten feet above the ground. Below, a market buzzed, surrounded by a short stone wall. The people inside were stubborn, with a weedy toughness that had survived the war but not forgotten it.

“Chawbacons,” Peabody called them. Expecting a cosmopolitan city, he was mightily disappointed by the town’s lack in size and presentation. “The heart of industry, he told me. The finest minds in the South, why, they come from Charlotte, he said. And here we are in a veritable backwater. Mark my words, Amos, nothing but ill luck comes from trusting fellows in New Castle taverns. We ought to have pushed on to Charleston. Such time lost.” He muttered and smacked a gloved hand against his wagon.

“We must make the best of it,” he said as he addressed the troupe around the morning fire. “Culture is a balm to the soul. Here, friends,” he said as he smoothed his coat. “Here is a town that is sorely in need of culture, the likes of such as we can provide.” He declared that Amos and Evangeline were to be touted as beacons of learning and sophistication. “The Light of the World, you are, my good children. Be assured, should you have failings, this town will be none the wiser.”

Haunted by the memory of suffocating fish, Amos and Evangeline wished to remain within the wagon rather than in town, but Peabody would hear none of it; M. et Mme. Les Ferez would keep rooms in a tavern run by the improbably named Captain Cook and his wife. They were to dine in costume and conduct themselves in what Peabody considered grand style. The job was well done. Hat shops, tailors, or taverns, wherever they went stares followed. At the end of the day when they retired to their room in Cook’s, Amos and Evangeline closed their door and breathed in relief at the solitude.

Captain and Mrs. Cook were traveling to Charleston and had left the inn in the care of Louisa Tyghe, her son, and a harried kitchen maid. Mrs. Tyghe knocked too often, and her son trailed at Amos’s heels, having never encountered a man who wore his hair in such a fashion.

“You’ll be excellently looked after here, sir,” Mrs. Tyghe said, straightening her starched red apron. “The bed in your room, Washington himself has slept in it. He liked us so well that he gifted us his hair powder. Should you need powder, we offer you the privilege of using some of the great man’s own.”

Amos found the idea of using another man’s hair powder perplexing, but Evangeline had the grace to blush and thank Mrs. Tyghe before shutting the door in the woman’s face. Amos did his best to rub the soreness from Evangeline’s back and she began the ritual of combing and dressing his hair. At last they huddled on the mattress, weary from the town’s claustrophobic politeness—a politeness strangely at odds with the townsfolk themselves. Evangeline fell asleep quickly, but Amos remained awake. In the quiet, he rested his head against her stomach and listened.

On their second night the rains began.

Fine mist settled across the heart of Charlotte. Peabody ordered a stage erected in front of an enormous rail house, but the ground turned to mud and the platform sank under its own weight. Benno’s hands and feet got stuck in the soggy red soil. Pins slipped from Melina’s hands and fire eating was rendered impossible. Sugar Nip and the llama refused to be led from their wagon, forcing Nat to carry the small horse in his arms.

Yet crowds lined up for M. et Mme. Les Ferez. Word of the menagerie had spread, drawing people from across Mecklenberg County, people keen to be parted from their money for a moment of gawking.

Shop owners waited, young women swooned. Children, never had they seen so many children—little girls begging to touch Evangeline’s sleeve, or to pull her hair. Boys were fascinated by her, but also by Amos and the frilled attire that so differed from that of men they knew. Young lovers, spinsters, the old and creaking, all sought a glimpse into the beyond. Mrs. Tyghe visited and was rendered breathless by the interior of their wagon.

“Oh, my,” she whispered. “I daresay you are accustomed to finer things than you’ll find in Charlotte.” Amos hid a smile. Mrs. Tyghe would not have thought so had she seen his Wild Boy cage.

Exhausted at day’s end, they fell to bed without a word.

On the third night in Charlotte the sky broke. The rain brought mud from the hills and soot off the roofs in a ruddy deluge that bathed the town in its offal. Benno and Melina did not leave their wagons. Meixel stayed with the animals. The Catawba began to rise, flooding the Sugar and Briar Creeks and surrounding the town, yet Peabody insisted that Les Ferez work. A wondrous place, he’d been told. Politicians came from here, men of learning—yet the town was barely an outpost. Losses had to be recouped. If people wished to give money to fortune-tellers, then the fortune-tellers must work.

Amos turned cards until his fingertips were raw. Evangeline spoke until her voice became a rasp. When her voice failed, Amos did his best to dance the cards to amuse the clients. He pocketed cards Evangeline should not see—not since the river, not since the rain had started.

On the fourth day Evangeline woke to a sharp pain. Her scream was soundless.