Intersections Read online

  I stayed up with Persephone, reading her what I could of Dr. Doolittle and hoping she heard me. It was almost lunch time before she woke.

  "Connie," she said and I burst into tears.

  She grabbed me and held me close, rocking and shushing me as though I'd been the one who was attacked.

  When I'd finished, she cradled my face and grinned. The purplish-green knot closing her left eye was the size of a golf ball.

  "I forget sometimes that you're just a boy," she said. "I'm sorry for that."

  Not sure what she meant, I just nodded.

  "Go fetch me some water, now. My mouth is so dry Bedouins are driving camels across it."

  Once the doctor had examined her, he went to fetch the Sheriff. I sat with her and held her hand as she sipped the water.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Oh, the usual." She smiled.

  "It's not funny, Seph. You look like you went twelve rounds with Jack Dempsey."

  "At least I still have all my teeth."

  It took me awhile to get the whole story from her. I only heard the highlights that day and, even when the Sheriff came, she shooed me off. I really didn't know everything until a couple of years later, after Houdini's funeral, when she'd had a few too many and finally filled in the remaining gaps. I think maybe that's what she meant that day commenting on my age. I think she worried she was stealing my childhood in some way by exposing me to the darker side of the world. Growing up on the streets, I was tougher than most kids and, in many ways, had to grow up too fast. But she wanted to protect me, that had been obvious since the moment she'd snatched me away from those goons I was playing ghost for and put a proper roof over my head.

  I hope she knew how much I appreciated everything she did for me.

  Anyway, I'm sure I'm still missing a few details, but here's what happened the night before as I've pieced it together.

  18

  She finished her project in the work shed, or at least as much as she'd been able to do without the vacuum tubes. Something had been tugging at her, her mind piecing together a string of clues, and she thought she might have worked the whole thing out. Flooded with nervous energy, she needed to do something but didn't know what.

  What she did know was that the old library seemed to be a place no one had checked out yet. Reasoning she might at least be able to find some alcohol there if nothing else, she grabbed her flashlight and walked the four blocks to the old building.

  It was dark inside, the only noise the November wind rustling the trees. She walked around to the back door. Locked, of course. She found a rock and proceeded to smash the lock open.

  Flicking the flashlight on, she stepped through the door.

  Boxes and crates cluttered the place alongside empty shelves and stacks of chairs. The dry scents of dust and old paper filled the large room. On one wall, a locked door labeled "STAFF ONLY" drew her attention. She used the rock again, this time gaining entrance to what had once been the library offices. This must have been the "gentleman's club." A few sofas had been arranged around a coffee table covered in ashtrays, the stale scent of cigars and old booze still heavy in the air. Decks of cards and a tray of poker chips sat on the floor. Old lamps were scattered about the room, most still half filled with oil. The place even had a Victrola, a small stack of Red Seal records beside it. Someone had left an Enrico Caruso on the machine and she considered playing it, but thought better of it.

  "There is a God," she said when her flashlight lit up a dozen bottles of liquor on a table in the corner.

  Unable to find a glass, she sipped directly from a bottle of rum. She'd never been a fan of straight rum. It tried too hard for her taste. But the fire when it hit her belly was good and clear and helped her think.

  Two other rooms attached to this one, each with a locked door as well. She continued her tactic with the rock, amused at feeling like a hoodlum. The first room was a supply closest where cases of liquor had been stashed. The second a proper office. She slipped into that one.

  A large desk dominated the room. Off to the side, a massive sofa sat against the wall. A sheet had been draped over it and a couple of pillows laid out. Wrinkled and mashed, it had obviously seen recent use. Leaning over it, she caught the faint whiff of perfume and stale sex. This was where the tryst happened. Or a tryst, she supposed, though she never believed in coincidences. Caitlin had been here.

  Stacks of paper covered the desk and she lowered herself into a leather chair behind it. A glass sat amidst the paper, a splash of clear liquid inside of it. Next to that, another ashtray held a half smoked cigar. She touched the tip with her finger and was relieved to find it cold.

  Scanning the papers on the desk, they read like drafts of some kind of legislation.

  The desk also housed a locked drawer. Running her hand along the underside of it, hoping she could find a way to pop it open, her fingers instead ran into something thick and chalky. It flaked at her touch and, when she shined the flashlight on it, she knew it was blood.

  Sliding back, she shined the light further down the desk. Blood had caked on the corner. It smeared the wall to the right, streaks and hand prints suggesting someone reached out frantically, trying to grab hold of something, anything. More blood stained the floor.

  This was where Caitlin had been killed.

  Of course it was. Quiet, secluded, one could do anything here and keep it a secret. The walls of the library were concrete and this office buried deep inside. A crowd could be pressed against the outside of the building and never have any inkling that a teenage girl was being taken advantage of in here.

  No one would have heard her screams.

  The room felt suddenly tomb-like and Persephone shuddered. She felt hollow. Numb. She should leave, go tell the Sheriff what she found here and then put as many miles between her and Gallow's Grove as she could.

  She moved to do just that yet, when she reached the back door, she thought of something that had been said to her earlier and rushed back to the office. Fumbling around until she found a letter opener, she jimmied the lock open on the drawer.

  A stack of letters sat inside.

  Removing them, the faint scent of perfume rose from the pages. She'd done that same thing when she was younger. Those had been such ridiculous days and she wondered how close she might have come at times to sharing Caitlin's fate.

  The handwriting neat and precise, her words almost poetic, Caitlin wrote about how much she loved him, how she knew it would be a scandal if it was ever revealed they were together but she almost didn't care. Yet all she wanted was to leave town and it seemed he’d been slipping her money every time they met to help her do so. She said over and over in the letters that she wished there was a world where she could wake up every morning staring into his blue eyes, but she knew that could never be and she accepted it. Every letter seemed to contain some variation on that same theme as though she felt, if she said it enough, she'd eventually believe it.

  At least, that was, until the final letter. She had told him at some point before she'd written it that she was pregnant. She'd been waiting for him to decide what to do about it. He had demanded, it seemed, that she see a doctor he knew in Albany who could take care of situations like this, but she refused. Would he stand up and do the right thing, she asked? Would he leave his wife and marry her?

  "Poor, naive thing," Persephone said.

  "She didn't seem that way at first."

  Persephone looked up to see him in the doorway.

  "It was mutually beneficial, in the beginning. I suppose I was also naive in thinking it could stay that way."

  She gripped the letter opener hard and held it beneath the table.

  "I may have even loved her. I'm not sure."

  Running through a hundred calculations, she knew she had nowhere to go but through him.

  "I came here now," he said, "to clean things up. The blood, the letters, all of it. I should have done it that night, but I couldn't bring myself to. I never w