Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (52 page)

All morning, Ling had been able to think of nothing but last night’s unsettling dream walk and what she and Henry had discovered inside the tunnel. The burn still hurt. As soon as she had a moment at the restaurant, she’d telephoned Henry, catching him on his way out the door.

“I’m just on my way to Grand Central to meet Louis’s train now,” he said. “I promise to bring him straight to the Tea House. We can talk about it then,” he promised and hung up.

At lunch, Charlie Lee stopped by the Tea House to let Ling know that his grandfather had returned from Boston, and as soon as she’d finished cleaning the tables, Ling took advantage of the afternoon lull to visit Chang Lee at the Golden Pearl, bringing him an offering of oranges for the coming New Year. Chang Lee was nearly eighty, but his mind was as sharp as ever, and Ling held out hope that he might know something helpful to put her own mind at ease about Wai-Mae.

“I understand from my grandson that you had a question about the neighborhood—some matchmakers, was it?”

“Yes, Uncle. A firm called O’Bannion and Lee,” Ling said eagerly. “Do you know it?”

“Yes,” Mr. Lee answered and said nothing more. But she could read the judgment in his silence, and her earlier hope that they might turn out to be reputable matchmakers after all waned. “They had an office here once,” Mr. Lee said at last. “It was in the Bend.”

“The Bend?”

“Mulberry Bend.”

Mulberry Bend. Wai-Mae had been correct about that after all.

“O’Bannion and Lee,” Mr. Lee continued. “Not matchmakers.
Procurers.
They promise girls passage to America from China to marry wealthy husbands. And once the girls are here in America…” Mr. Lee shook his head sorrowfully. “The girls are sold. Prostitutes forced to work to pay back the debt of their passage here. The girls are poor, alone in a new country, with no laws to protect them. What can they do? They are trapped.”

“Why hasn’t anyone stopped them?”

“Someone did,” Mr. Lee said. “They were murdered. Right down the street.”

“I-I never heard about a murder.”

“I imagine not. O’Bannion and Lee were murdered in
1875
.”

“In 1875?” Ling repeated.

“Yes. Murdered by one of the poor girls they’d ruined. She plunged her dagger into each man’s heart.” He shook his head. “They were bad men. I remember seeing her sometimes. An opium addict. She played a little music box.”

A buzzing began in Ling’s belly. “Did she wear a veil?”

“Yes. She did. How did you know that?”

The buzzing raced up Ling’s neck to her scalp. She felt dizzy. “Where is Mulberry Bend, Uncle? I’d like to see it.”

“You see it every day.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“It’s called Columbus Park.” Mr. Lee spread his hands wide. “Mulberry Bend was razed in 1897, and the park was built in its place. Mulberry Bend has been gone for decades. And so have your O’Bannion and Lee.” He blew on his fingers, as if scattering dandelion fluff to the wind. “Ghosts.”

Henry paced the platform of track ten on the lower level of Grand Central, watching down the tracks as if it were his future arriving in billowing clouds of steam. A fresh red carnation poked up from his lapel. At last, a mournful whistle-moan announced the approach of the train. Henry’s pulse beat in rhythm to the wheels,
chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga
. The metal beast slid past. Henry craned his neck to check each window, but the faces at the glass were blurs. The train stopped in a long, sighing hiss. A uniformed man shouted, “Now arriving—the three-ten New York and New Or-leeeans Limited!”

Doors opened. Happy passengers trundled off and into the arms of waiting family and friends. Henry trotted up and down the platform, his heart leaping each time a handsome dark-haired young man came down the steps, but none was Louis. Porters loaded suitcases and trunks onto trolleys and wheeled them away. The teeming platform emptied of people until only Henry and the porters remained. Had he somehow missed Louis in the crowd?

“Excuse me,” Henry called up to a porter stepping back onto the train. “I’m looking for a friend who was on the three-ten. Are there still passengers on board?”

The porter shook his head. “No, sir. Nobody left on the train. They’re all off now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir. Not a soul left.”

He must’ve missed him. Louis was probably upstairs now in the wide lobby, suitcase in hand, his head tilted back, his mouth hanging open as he took in the grandeur of the big-city station. Henry raced up the stairs and into the main waiting room, walking briskly between the long wooden pews, where people sat reading newspapers or fussing with children. He thought he saw Louis walking toward a telephone booth, so he hurried after him, calling Louis’s name.

“Can I help you?” the man said, turning around. He was easily ten years older than Louis.

“Beg your pardon. I thought you were someone else,” Henry said and went back to walking the length and breadth of Grand Central. Henry’s excitement had now turned to fear. He remembered how hurt Louis had been when he asked him about the bribe. For all his good nature, Louis could be thin-skinned about a slight. What if he was so hurt by Henry’s careless remark that he’d decided not to come after all?

Then again, what if Louis had simply missed the train?

Hope restored, Henry hurried to the ticket window. “Pardon me, when is the next train in from New Orleans?”

“Half past six this evening,” the clerk answered.

Henry sat on a bench and waited. He was still waiting at half past six. And still at eight o’clock, when all the other passengers had gone off with their families. By nine o’clock, as the janitors pushed brooms across the wide marble sea of Grand Central’s main waiting room, and the tracks had gone mostly quiet, it was clear that Louis wasn’t coming at all.

Henry pushed out into a bright-lights city that had lost its luster and made his way down to a club he knew on Barrow Street in the Village. He’d wanted to show Louis everything, but now he just wanted to get drunk or punch somebody. Maybe both.

“Whiskey,” Henry said to the bartender. He slapped down the money he’d earmarked for his night out with Louis. It didn’t matter
now. Henry gulped it down, enjoying the burn, then threw down twenty dollars and opened his flask, offering it to the bartender.

“Would you like to make a contribution to the Feeling Sorry for Myself Fund? It’s a very worthy charity, I assure you,” Henry said.

With a shrug, the bartender filled the flask to the top.

Henry was well on his way to being drunk when he stumbled to the speakeasy’s telephone booth and dialed his number at the Bennington. He rested his head against the folding glass door and listened to the tinny ringing coming through the receiver while he drank from his flask.

On the fifth ring, Theta picked up. “Nobody’s home,” she said, her usual greeting, and Henry wished he were sitting next to her at their messy kitchen table.

“Is this Czarina Thetakovich of the Orpheum Circuit?” Henry slurred. “Collect call from that cad, Henry DuBois the Fourth.”

There was a slight pause.

“Please don’t hang up,” Henry whispered.

“Hen? Where are you? Whatsa matter?”

Henry stared at the phone booth’s wooden ceiling. Tears streamed down his face.
You can stop your sniffling, Hal. Men don’t cry.
That was what his father had always said. Well, Henry was a man, and he had a lot to cry about.

“Louis never showed up. I spent the piano-fund money and made you mad, and all for nothin’, Theta. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, Hen,” Theta sighed. “Just come home.”

Henry wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You still my best girl?”

“You can’t get rid of me that easy. We’re family. Come home.”

“Okay. I will,” Henry said and hung up.

But first, there was something he needed to do.

Henry barreled down the streets of Lower Manhattan, past quarantine plasters and dark, closed businesses with signs in their windows
reading
THIS ESTABLISHMENT CLOSED BY ORDER OF NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
.
He was still drunk when he reached the quiet borders of Chinatown. The streets were nearly deserted, and eerie in their quiet. The Tea House was mostly empty, but Henry could see Ling inside. He waved to her and gestured to the alley, and a moment later, she joined him there.

“Imaginary science club member Henry DuBois the Fourth reporting for duty,” he slurred. He tried to salute, lost his balance, and banged into a garbage can. “Shhh,” Henry said, settling the top on it.

“Are you drunk?” Ling whispered.

“As usual, your powers of observation are acute, ma’moiselle.”

“What’s happened? Where’s Louis? I thought you were meeting his train.”

“Ah. Now we come to the heart of the matter. Or the lack of heart. One of us, it seems, lacks heart. He never showed. Ling, I need you to go in with me. I need answers.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Really? I think it’s a spiffing idea.”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re observant. Say! Have you considered becoming a scientist?”

“And you’re a bad drunk. Henry, listen to me: The dream world isn’t safe.”

“I know. Ghosts. Monsters. Things in tunnels.” Henry slumped against the wall. “And that’s precisely my point: What if something happened to Louis last night? What? You’re making a funny face.”

Ling took a shaky breath. “I found out about O’Bannion and Lee. They died in 1875. They were
murdered
, Henry. By one of the girls they tricked. A girl who wore a veil and listened to a music box. I don’t think we should go back in, Henry. Not tonight.”

“One hour in the dream world. That’s all I’m asking. I can’t get to the bayou without you. It takes both of us. You know that.”

“You need sleep. Real sleep, Henry. We both do. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

Henry looked up at the cold, dead stars.

“I don’t believe in tomorrow much anymore,” he said.

When Henry returned to the Bennington, he found that Theta had left a note:
“Meeting Memphis. Back soon. Welcome home, Piano Man.”
A crisp five-dollar bill peeked up from the top of the piano-fund jar. A piece of masking tape had been affixed to the front.
PIANO FUND—DO NOT TOUCH,
it read.

Henry fumbled with the metronome. Vaguely, he was aware that he was drunk and angry and hurt, and that was a bad way to go into a dream walk. But he didn’t care. He needed to see Louis. He needed answers. And if Ling refused to go with him, he’d go it alone, see if he could get there on his own steam. The metronome’s steady tick worked its magic, and Henry was out in seconds, the heaviness of the alcohol pulling him more deeply under.

When he woke inside the dream world, he wasn’t on the streets of old New York. Instead, he stood on the platform of the train station, which glowed with an extra polish tonight. Everything appeared washed in a golden haze. Henry smiled. He’d done it. He didn’t even question how he’d done it.

“
I’ve tumbled into Slumberlaaaand
,” he sang as he stumbled toward the dark tunnel, impatient for the train.

Henry thought about the night before and all they’d seen there. He wavered at the tunnel’s threshold for another few seconds. But then all he could think about was Louis.

“Awww, to hell with it,” Henry said and stepped inside.