“Are you Mrs. Mary Judd?” Felipe asked. “Herman Judd’s mother?”
“Unfortunately. You with the police?”
“No, we’re with the Paranormal Society.”
Before Felipe could finish saying the name, she started to shut the door. Wedging his foot in the way, Felipe grimaced as she put her full weight into it.
“I will not have your kind darken my door. We aren’t like you. We are a god-fearing household.”
“Mrs. Judd, Herman is dead,” Felipe snapped.
Her hand stilled, and she hesitantly opened the door. While her dark eyes were still stern and suspicious, she faltered. “How?”
“We aren’t sure. That’s why we’ve come to speak to you. We promise not to take up too much of your time.”
For a long moment, she merely held Felipe’s gaze as if she couldn’t decide if it was worth it. Finally, Mary Judd leaned back into the apartment and yelled, “Alice, take the babies out until I say so.”
“Do I have to?” A sullen young woman with a pregnant belly appeared behind her, dandling a fussy toddler. “It’s five flights.”
“Family business.”
Alice rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath as she grabbed the hand of a slightly older toddler and shoved past them. The oldest child waved at them as her mother jerked her down the steps behind her. A small smile crossed Felipe’s face as he waved back, but it fell away as Mrs. Judd motioned for them to come in. Despite the bright hour of the day, a haze hung over the room. For the first time in many years, Oliver felt too big and clumsy to walk through the makeshift parlor without fearing he would bounce off something. There was too much furniture and too small walls even with only the three of them. He couldn’t imagine how crowded it must be with three babies, two grown women, and whomever else they lived with. While the main room appeared passably clean, it smelled of diapers, stove smoke, and a soap with such an aggressive fragrance that it made Oliver’s eyes itch. When Mrs. Judd led them over to a cluster of mismatched chairs near the table by the window, relief washed over Oliver at the meager, dank breeze that broke through the cramped room. Pulling out his notepad, he settled a little behind Felipe as he took the seat across from Mrs. Judd.
“Mrs. Judd, I’m Inspector—”
“I don’t want to know and don’t care,” she said, her gaze running suspiciously over Oliver and Felipe as if they might bespell her or worse. “Why is it you and not the police?”
“Would you prefer the police do nothing with your son’s case? A dead man from the Bowery would hardly be worth their notice.”
“But it’s your business?”
“Every person with abilities is our business, and every death is worth investigating.”
Oliver looked between them but said nothing. He had never seen Felipe talk to the families of the dead like this before. It was too close to an interrogation for Oliver’s liking, but the old woman didn’t seem to mind. While he had heard Bennett Reynard in the library talk about overcoming anti-magic prejudices with some of the new members, it was easy to forget its prevalence outside the society’s walls.
“How did it happen?”
“That’s what we’re investigating. We aren’t certain yet if it was natural causes or something more, but he was found dead in Green-Wood Cemetery.”
“Robbing the tombs again?” she spat.
“We don’t believe so. We believe he died elsewhere, and his body was placed in a shallow grave in the cemetery. You don’t seem surprised he’s dead.”
Mrs. Judd let out a mirthless laugh. “I’m not. My Herman has been up to no good since the day he was born. It was only a matter of time before he got what was coming to him.”
Felipe’s eyes narrowed. “Can you tell us a little more about what sort of trouble he was into?”
“Stealing, tomb robbery, running with god knows who when he was younger, frequenting fairy clubs,” she said, dropping the last phrase to a whisper. “And those are only the things I know about before he went to Brooklyn and blew his chance to have a decent life. The rest I don’t want to think about, and that’s not even accounting for the unnatural part of him.”
“Was Mr. Judd aware of his powers his whole life?”
The old woman shushed him. “Don’t say that. I don’t need the neighbors hearing. The walls are like paper. We don’t have unnatural things like that in this family, so I didn’t expect him to start playing with dead rats. I put a stop to it. Beat it out of him as best I could, but it didn’t work.”
Oliver wrote down every word and tried not to grind his teeth. How Felipe was able to maintain his composure when people spewed things like that, he didn’t know. His nana had made him promise he would be cautious with his powers, lest what happened to his mother happen to him, but she never beat him. She never even raised her voice. Anything she warned about necromancers was because other people didn’t understand, not because he was inherently evil or wrong. Her love for him was the one thing in life he never doubted. He never would have told her about his powers or his feelings for other young men if he had. Maybe it was because he was the last link to her daughter she had or because she simply understood, but she always made it clear how much she loved him. Despite whatever other people said about necromancers, he had received nineteen years of unconditional acceptance to offset the damage. Oliver didn’t want to imagine what it must have been like to grow up with a mother so full of malice.
“I told him no son of mine was involved with the unnatural, that it was the work of the devil. I would have drowned him in the bath if I had known all the trouble he was going to cause. My other son hasn’t given me a lick of trouble. He’s been good as gold from day one, has a stable job as a sailor, has a wife, even if she is a brat, and healthy babies. Herman could never live up to that, so he left.”
Escaped is more like it, Oliver thought.
