Chapter Three
“You knew him?” I gasped as the dark drawing room faded away and Jackaby’s office reappeared, the midday sun streaming in through the windows. I stood up abruptly from the leather armchair and immediately regretted my decision. My vision reeled and I sat back down.
Jenny—my Jenny—hung pale and translucent in the air ahead of me. She had been beaming, but the smile was rapidly melting away. “Knew whom?”
I breathed, holding on to the armrests to keep from falling out of the chair. Slowly the world stopped spinning and the feeling returned to my skin. “How did I get—Jenny, did you possess me all the way into the armchair?”
She nodded, but the pride had left her face. “I knew whom, Abigail?”
“That man. The one in the photograph.”
Rising more gradually this time, I stepped over to Jenny’s open file. My temples were throbbing and the room felt as though it were slowly spinning to a stop. Jenny stood beside me as I tried to pull my mind together. When the world was finally stable again, I looked up to find that she had already fixated on a picture. Her translucent hand brushed the image of her body, sprawled across her bedroom floor.
“Jenny . . .”
“Howard gave me that locket,” she said. “It’s not in the house any longer. I’ve looked and looked. It had a note inside. ‘From Howard with love.’ It’s just a little pewter thing, but it’s the little things you miss.”
“Jenny, stay with me,” I said cautiously. “Please? This is important.”
She pulled her eyes away from the picture. “I’m with you, Abigail.”
I plucked the photograph of the pale man off the top of the pile and held it up for her to see. It was grainy with a sepia tint, but the face was unmistakable. I had seen him watching my window from the street corner, and then again, lurking outside the train station. Now I had seen him up close through Jenny’s memories, and not a hair on his head had changed in those ten years.
The pale man stood in the foreground of the picture, a smug smile on his face. He was not alone. In the background of the picture, five men stood around a worktable in what appeared to be an industrial factory. Bright lamplight illuminated their faces and left hard shadows on the wall behind them. The men wore dark work aprons, thick gloves, and tinted goggles pushed up on their heads. The one in the center was Howard Carson.
There were no other pictures of Howard in the house—none hanging in Jenny’s room nor propped up on her nightstand. She spoke of him fondly but rarely, and always with trepidation, as if feeling gingerly around a bruise.
Along the bottom of the picture had been inscribed five words in tight cursive: For posterity. From humble beginnings . . .
“He worked with my fiancé.” Jenny’s voice was quiet.
I tensed, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling up. “Jenny? Are you still with me?”
She pursed her lips, nodding. “I remember now.” I held my tongue, not daring to tip the balance. When she spoke her voice was scarcely more than a breath. “He was called Pavel.”
The photograph had been in her case file for years, but Jenny had never been able to identify the pale man before, nor anyone in the file save Howard Carson. There had been something about the image she responded to—an uneasy remnant of a feeling—but like Jenny herself, the memory remained frustratingly intangible. Looking at any of the photographs in her file for too long put her in a fragile state, but still she tried. When I had recognized the pale man as the same wretch whose trail of havoc we had followed across the valley, she had tried even harder, wrestling with the demons in her mind for anything—a detail—a name—but the effort had only triggered her to echo every time. Until now.
“Is he . . . ?” I whispered. “Is he the one who . . . ?” Jenny’s eyes narrowed in concentration, and a cold breeze crept under my collar. My trip into her thoughts might have brought a flickering light to Jenny’s memories, but those corridors were still shrouded in something darker than shadow. “Perhaps we should take a rest,” I said.
“He was here. Why was he here?” Jenny’s silver hair whipped in a sudden breeze, though the windows were latched tight. “I don’t like him. I don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I, Jenny. I think we ought to stop.”
“He came to the house. He’s at the door. He knows that Howard is here.”
“Jenny, stop.”
“I don’t like him.” She blinked, her eyes drifting in and out of focus, and then her stare turned icy. “I know who you are. You work with my fiancé.”
I stuffed all of the photographs and the loose clippings and notes back into the file and slammed it shut as a bitingly cold gust of wind pressed into my back. When I looked around Jenny was already gone.
“Jenny?” I called to the silence. The silence deepened.
“Give her time.”
I jumped at the sound of a man’s voice. “Mr. Jackaby!” I gasped, clutching my heart. “I didn’t hear you come in. How long have you . . . ?”
“I just got back. I won’t be staying long. I wasn’t expecting to find myself stepping into an icebox.” He dropped his satchel with a thump and picked up Jenny’s file as he walked around the desk. “Be careful, Miss Rook. Our undeparted friend has a thorn buried deep in her metaphorical paw, and we find ourselves in the lion’s den.” He tucked the file into his desk and shut the drawer with a click. “I assure you, we will do everything in our power to remove the injury—but I have no intention of making it worse and getting torn to ribbons for our efforts. Patience and diligence are paramount.”
“With all due respect, sir, ten years stretches the definition of patient. She is already a decade into her afterlife.”
He stared at the old papers and receipts spread across his office floor. “Still, we must consider the possibility that the thorn and the lion are one.”
“Sir?”
He met my gaze and sighed. “Ghosts are beings of discontent, Miss Rook. The undead remain bound to this earth by their unfinished business. Either we will not succeed because we cannot succeed—because her soul will never be content—”
“Or we will succeed,” I said, realizing his implication. “And her business will be finished.”
“And she will depart from us at long last.” Jackaby nodded. “That is her decision, though. She says she’s ready. We will provide her with what few answers and what little peace we can, but there’s no benefit in rushing the job.” He slid into the chair and leaned heavily on his desk, his gray eyes gloomy.
“Sir?”
“I dislike the idea of being without Miss Cavanaugh.”
“Have you told her that?”
“She has her own concerns to attend to right now.”
“She really can handle more than you think, sir. She’s making considerable progress.”
“The state of my office says otherwise. I noticed the glass in the wastebasket, by the way. I take it this is not her first echo today. How long was she incorporeal for the last one?”
I hesitated. “Only an hour. Maybe two. It was just a little one.” His gaze drifted to my cheek, and I could feel his eyes catching on the slender scar on my cheekbone. The mark was a trivial thing—already it had faded to a soft pink line—but it was a souvenir of a nearly catastrophic brush I’d had with a Stymphalian bird, another supernatural force I had woefully underestimated. Getting Jackaby to stop treating me like a fragile thing was difficult enough without having reminders of past close calls etched on my face. It didn’t help that the injury in question had been inflicted by nothing more than the creature’s feather. I redirected the conversation. “She had a revelation.”
“A revelation.” Jackaby nodded with a deep breath. “Splendid. Because nothing bad ever happens in Revelation.”
“The pale man. His name is Pavel. She remembered him.”
Jackaby’s eyes darted up, but he quickly hid his interest. “Pavel? A given name only. Likely an alias.”
“She can do more.”
“But she should not. It’s too dangerous, Miss Rook. In light of recent developments, I think it best we suspend Miss Cavanaugh’s direct involvement altogether.”
“What? That’s absurd! This is her case!”
“Precisely my point! She is far too emotionally invested to handle the minutia of this investigation. With each new twist and turn we risk pushing her over the edge, and we cannot foresee what might lie beyond the next curve. Walking this path was hard enough on her when the trail was cold.”
“She’s stronger than ever!” In my frustration, I nearly told him about our secret practices, about our remarkable success with possession—but I bit my tongue. The secret was not mine alone to tell, and Jackaby was being especially bullheaded right now. A cog clicked in my mind. Something had happened. “Wait a moment. What recent developments?” I asked.
“See for yourself.” Jackaby flipped open his satchel and passed a handful of papers across the desk to me. They were torn at the top, as though ripped out of a booklet. “Lieutenant Dupin of the New Fiddleham Police Department very kindly lent me his notes on the matter.”
“Does Lieutenant Dupin know that he very kindly lent you his notes?”
Jackaby shrugged. “I’m confident he’ll piece it together sooner or later. Marlowe keeps him around for something.”
I shook my head, but turned my attention to the notes.
The body of Mrs. Alice McCaffery was found early this morning by one Rosa Gaines, age 32, a maid in the McCaffery household. Mrs. McCaffery had been at my desk in the station house only the day before to file a missing persons report for her husband, Julian McCaffery. En route to investigate now.
I arrived at the McCaffery home just prior to 8 o’clock in the A.M. The scene within is as Ms. Gaines described it. Alice McCaffery lies on the floor of her chamber. Her dress is torn at the neck and signs of a struggle are evident. Cause of death is a single deep laceration to the chest. Blood has dried in a wide pool around the body. My word, but there is a lot of blood.
I stared numbly. I could see why Jackaby was hesitant to share the news. The missing person, the bedroom struggle, the body, the blood. I might as well have just read the police report in the file sitting beside me. It was Jenny’s murder to the last detail.
“What do you make of it?” Jackaby asked.
“Eerily familiar, sir.”
“More than you know,” said Jackaby. “Julian McCaffery was a research scientist, not unlike Jenny’s fiancé, Howard Carson. Carson and McCaffery both studied under Professor Lawrence Hoole at Glanville University, although years apart.”
I swallowed. “That’s an awful lot of coincidences. Hoole went missing, too, didn’t he? Yes, I remember. It was in the Chronicle weeks ago.”
Jackaby nodded. “He makes an appearance in the lieutenant’s next entry, as well.” He gestured to the papers in my hands. I flipped to the next page and read aloud:
It is not yet midday and I have been presented with my second corpse of the day. The discovery was made by Daniel & Benjamin Mudlark. The brothers, ages 7 and 9, disclosed the information in exchange for compensation. They agreed to 5¢ payment and escorted me to the scene.
The body appears to have washed up with sewage runoff on the northern bank of the Inky. Based on physical description and documents found on the body, the deceased is Lawrence Hoole, age 56, a professor at Glanville University. The corpse is waterlogged, but given the minimal state of decay, I estimate he is not more than two days deceased. The only visible injury is a puncture wound at the base of his neck, surrounded by a circular bruise.
The professor is survived by his wife, Cordelia. Glanville Police Department has responded to my inquiries, but inform me that the widow Hoole is . . .
I turned the page over, but that was the last of it. “The widow Hoole is what?”
“Bereaved?” suggested Jackaby. “Disconsolate? Something mournful, I imagine. Probably ‘sad.’ Lieutenant Dupin is nothing if not frugal with his adjectives.”
“Those poor people,” I said. “A single puncture wound and a rounded bruise—that’s Pavel’s dirty work and no mistake. There can be no question that this whole mess is connected, then.”
“What about Cordelia Hoole?” Jenny’s soft voice caught both of us by surprise. I spun to find that she had rematerialized by the window, the sunlight slipping in sparkling beams through her translucent figure.
“Jenny,” I said. “How long have you—”
“I’m sorry, Miss Cavanaugh,” Jackaby cut in. “We really ought to follow up on these leads more thoroughly before we trouble you with the details. I don’t wish to—”
“Jackaby, ten years ago my fiancé vanished and I was murdered. Yesterday that McCaffery man vanished and Alice McCaffery was murdered. Their mentor, Hoole, vanished, and now we know he was murdered as well, and you’re—what? Waiting for the pattern to complete itself? You’re ten years too late to save me, detective. You’re a day too late for Alice McCaffery. The question is, what about Cordelia Hoole?”