Things Half in Shadow (43 page)

“Sophie,” I said. “Sophie Kruger.”

Dutton looked perplexed. “How did you know that?”

“Because her talent brought her to the attention of several people,” I answered. “Including someone who killed her in the same fashion that caused Mrs. Pastor's death.”

The embarrassed flush in Mr. Dutton's cheeks, which had flared even brighter during his crying spell, vanished in an instant. His face quickly took on the same color of the sky just before a snowfall—gray and burdened with an unknowable weight.

“That can't be,” he said. “Tell me, Mr. Clark, that you are simply being cruel.”

“I'm afraid not. She was found dead the day before Mrs. Pastor's murder.”

Mr. Dutton rocked sideways in his chair, swooning first left, then right. When it became apparent that he was going to topple right out of it, I ran to his side and propped him up.

“This was my fault!” he moaned. “All my fault! I located them and now they're dead.”

For the second time that week, I longed for the smelling salts still lodged in my old desk at the
Evening Bulletin
offices. Luckily, Lucy had some stored in that surprising bag of tricks she called a dress. Waving them beneath Mr. Dutton's nose, she said, “Breathe deeply.”

The smelling salts did their job. Eldridge Dutton righted himself again and said, “This is terrible. I never thought that is what they wanted.”

“They?” I said. “I thought it was just Corinthian Black who hired you.”

“He did,” said Mr. Dutton. “But he made it clear it was on the behalf of an organization.”

“I don't suppose he mentioned doing mediums harm?”

Mr. Dutton shook his head. “Of course not. If he had, I would never have agreed to the job. He said he represented men of science researching Spiritualism.”

“Did he give the name of this organization?” I asked.

“Yes. Only once, in passing. But I remembered it, because it, too, was a strange name.”

“What was it?”

“Something Latin,” Mr. Dutton said. “Praediti, I think it was.”

Hearing the word left me stunned. I couldn't have been more surprised had the earth decided to stop turning. In fact, for a moment it felt like it had. Everything ceased to exist. No more Lucy Collins or Eldridge Dutton. No more quiet office and ticking clock. No more Philadelphia, with its bustle and smells and teeming streets. For a brief time, it was just nothing but that word, so loud in my skull that I felt it reverberate throughout my entire body.

Only instead of Mr. Dutton's voice, I heard it spoken by my mother, just as she had done right before Mrs. Pastor died.

Praediti.

In truth, the word had become half forgotten in the days following Mrs. Pastor's death. I had been too busy trying to clear my name to really ponder its meaning or why it had been so important for my mother to say it.

Now, however, it was all I could think about, even as the rest of the world came into focus once more. I again heard carriages in the street outside the office and the ticking of the clock inside. I saw Lucy and Mr. Dutton both eye me with concern.

“Edward?” Lucy said. “What's wrong? You look as if you've seen a ghost.”

Seen? No. But heard? Most definitely.

The ghost in question was my mother, and I was suddenly haunted by the instructions she had given me during Mrs. Pastor's final séance. Instructions I now felt compelled to follow.

“I must leave,” I said. “There's somewhere I need to be.”

Lucy widened her eyes in confusion. “Right now?”

“Yes. You must excuse me.”

With that, I left the office, stumbling through it as though the floor was slanted. Things didn't right themselves once I stepped onto Walnut Street. The buildings there appeared tilted, as did the street itself and everything on it. Horses looked to be pulling carriages up ridiculously steep inclines, while passersby seemed to defy gravity.

I set off into this new, lurching world, no doubt looking like a drunkard as I made my way northwest. As I walked—or, more accurately, stumbled—the word Praediti echoed through my head, still in my mother's voice.

She had known its meaning. She had understood its importance. And even though she had never spoken it to me in life, she had found a way to pass it along to me in death.

That, improbable as it might have been, was easy to understand. What left me utterly baffled was
why
she had felt the need to say it to me. My best guess was that, through ways that defied logic, she had somehow predicted my current troubles, and uttering that word was her way of trying to help me.

So I continued my dizzying trek across the city, the echo of my mother's voice guiding me all the way to Eastern State Penitentiary. Standing outside the prison, my head still spinning and my heart pounding, it was clear that I was meant to be there. My mother had wanted it this way.

It was never my intention to obey her instructions. Yet now I had no choice in the matter. If the Praediti
were involved in Mrs. Pastor's death, then I needed to know who they were and what they wanted.

My mother had, in essence, provided the key to understanding all the strange things that were happening to me.

It was now up to me to use it.

Only that required speaking to the person on this earth I hated the most. It meant that, for the first time in fifteen years, I needed to see my father.

E
astern State Penitentiary stood, fortresslike, on Fairmount Avenue, its eleven acres bordered by a stone wall thirty feet tall. The entrance gate, embellished with turrets and towers, rose even higher. From the outside, the prison resembled a foreboding castle, plunked down in a northeastern patch of the city.

Because of its size and initial expense, the prison was very likely the most famous in the country. Everyone from presidents to Charles Dickens had walked its cell blocks. Tourists, for reasons that eluded me, flocked there. I had been asked many times over the years if I wanted to see this architectural marvel, declining on every occasion. I had no desire to set foot inside the place.

Now, however, I had no choice. If I wanted to understand who the Praediti were and what they were up to, I needed to speak with Magellan Holmes.

Despite that fact, I wasn't quick about it. I don't know how long I stood outside the prison. Long enough for the sky to darken from the onset of evening and an approaching late-spring storm. When I at last moved, it was only because I spotted a guard shooing a well-dressed couple through the front gate. The last of the day's tourists, no doubt.

“Wait!” I yelled as the guard began to close the wrought-iron barricade. “I need to speak with one of your prisoners.”

The guard—a man as thick and impenetrable as the prison's walls—continued his task. “Personal visitation is only on Sundays.”

“This is an urgent matter.”

“Whatever it is, it can wait till Sunday.”

“I'm a man of the press,” I said, pleading. “I write for the
Evening Bulletin
.”

Yes, it was a lie. But a small one, which I saw as forgivable. Plus, it finally caught the interest of the guard, who halted the gate before it closed completely.

“Who do you need to see?”

“Magellan Holmes.”

The guard cocked an eyebrow. “The wife killer? What do you need to see him for?”

“An article I'm writing,” I said, lying again.

“You ain't tryin' to get him freed, are ya?”

Although it was a good-natured joke, I was able to answer that question honestly. “Not at all. I have no desire to see that man free.”

The guard contemplated me through the gate's bars, sizing me up and determining my trustworthiness. Standing stock still before him, I wondered just how much I really looked like my father. It was enough for P. T. Barnum to notice a resemblance, and as I underwent the guard's inspection, I became convinced that he had spotted it, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, when he nodded and told me to enter. Yet I felt a great deal of disappointment as well. Slipping through the gate, I realized I actually wanted to be turned away just as much as I wanted to be let in.

Those emotions continued to tug at me as I followed the guard deeper onto the prison grounds and down the middle of a triangular-shaped courtyard. Two sides of the triangle were made up of long, low-slung cell blocks that reached to the wall behind us. Another entrance gate was positioned at the triangle's tip. Rising over it, outlined against the darkening sky, was a rotunda.

“This is as far as I go,” the guard said as we reached the second gate. “Callahan will help you from here on out.”

This Callahan on the other side of the gate was as thin as the other guard was wide. The two men had a brief, whispered
exchange before the first guard left and Callahan took over. Opening the second gate, he said, “Welcome to Eastern State, Mr.—”

“Clark,” I said, stepping inside. “Edward Clark.”

“We get a lot of newspapermen here,” Callahan said. “We're very popular with the press.”

I was inside the prison proper now, standing directly beneath the rotunda. Cell blocks stretched in every direction, like the spokes on a wheel. Another guard stood in the center, slowly rotating so he could keep an eye on every long block. Callahan greeted him with a nod before veering into one of the blocks.

“Mr. Holmes is in Cell Block seven,” Callahan said.

It would be incorrect to call the long hallway I found myself facing a block. To my eyes, it looked more like a tunnel, with a rounded ceiling that stretched as far as the eye could see. Damp-walled and dim, there was definitely something subterranean about the place. Not even a few windows in the ceiling, letting in the last breaths of daylight, could help brighten the place.

“You ever visited us before, Mr. Clark?” Callahan asked.

“No,” I said.

“We're a model prison. Solitary confinement, that's what it's all about here. One man per cell. Little fraternization. We want them to reflect on their misdeeds.”

I pictured my father alone in a cell with nothing to do but think about how he had killed my mother. I wondered if, while staring at the cold, stone walls, he ever regretted it. I wondered if thinking about it tortured him. I hoped to God it did.

“Mr. Holmes is in the last cell on the right,” Callahan said. “I'll guide you there and leave you alone for a few minutes to talk.”

We began the long journey down the cell block, my trepidation growing with each step. I was still torn by the desire to either move faster or run in the opposite direction, each emotion compounded by the sights along the way. Evenly spaced cells sat on both sides of the hall, each one equipped with a narrow window in the roof that
let in a slit of fading light. Instead of bars or wood, these doors consisted of flattened strips of iron, welded together in a gridlike pattern. In the center of the door, at eye level, was a rectangle big enough to pass through a plate of food.

The design of the cell doors did little to hide the men inside. Passing cell after cell, I caught sight of shadowy figures lying on cots, sitting on commodes, standing up while simply watching the wall. Some approached their doors and reached out to us. Hands both white and black emerged from the rectangular slats, fingers curling and uncurling. A man inside one cell we passed, standing with his trousers around his ankles, shoved his manhood through the iron slats of the door and flapped it at us, grinning. I looked away, toward the cell across the hall. Inside that one was an inmate lying on the floor, loudly weeping.

Accompanying all of these sights was a chorus of voices, some whispering, some shouting. They taunted us, pleaded with us, asked for money, lawyers, food, tobacco. Floating above them, like a lullaby on a breeze, was the sound of a hymn being sung with regretful sincerity. Someone who had adequately reflected on his misdeeds, I presumed.

Callahan ignored all of this, walking with his narrow chin thrust forward. He was accustomed to such things. He saw—and heard—these men every day. I, however, did not, and the sights and sounds reduced my already-conflicted resolve.

I didn't belong in that place, not even as a visitor, and every forward step we took further tilted my emotional balance toward fleeing. I would have, too, if my legs had allowed it. But they were too weakened by nervousness to do any running. By the time we neared the end of the cell block, I thought they would buckle and collapse beneath me.

“Holmes is just up ahead,” Callahan announced.

We were at the second-to-last cell, where an inmate lay snoring on his cot. Then it was on to the last cell.

My father's cell.

I stopped before I could reach the door, my heart pounding loudly in my ears. Sweat had broken out on my brow and my legs wobbled. I was certain I was going to faint. I hoped for it, in fact. I wanted to tumble to the floor, unconscious, and not wake up until I had been dragged all the way back to the street outside.

But then I again thought about my mother. I thought of her voice during Mrs. Pastor's final séance, gently instructing me to see my father. And, of course, I thought of her final word to me, the one I needed to ask my father about.

Praediti.

I needed to know what it meant. So I wiped my brow, took a deep breath of rancid prison air, and stepped in front of the cell.

Just like his neighbor, my father also lay on a cot, only he was awake. He was reading a book, taking advantage of the last few minutes of light coming from above. The book—a Victor Hugo novel—covered his face, leaving me with only a glimpse of thin legs in gray wool trousers and a pair of hands I no longer recognized.

Once upon a time, those had been among the most famous hands in the world. People truly believed that magic sprang from those fingertips, that a whole other world was contained in those delicately creased palms. Now they were veined and spotted. The hands of an old man. If any magic had truly existed in them, it was long gone.