“Ready?” she said. She tried to affect calm. She smiled at Jenkins to set him at ease, and he ceased his foot tapping. Tuttle scowled.
Despite the candlelight, the room was dark, and shadows bounded off the wall in sinister shapes: a scythe, a bone, a revolver. Colonel Bloodworth’s gaze pressed upon her again; she could sense he was the kind of skeptic who badly wanted to believe. He took out his journal and made another note.
She asked the men to join hands.
She closed her eyes. She began to hum, and she instructed the men to hum along with her. When their voices were finally in unison—like a quartet—that’s when she felt it, the presence, descend upon her like an inviting fog.
“Someone’s come through,” she said. She held Jenkins’s hand on one side and the Colonel’s on the other. She tightened her grip. “The old man is exhausted. We take something of our former lives to the Other Side, you know, and he’s in a weakened state. Unwell.”
“We’ve come to ask him a few simple questions,” said Tuttle. His voice was full of air and condescension, like he was talking to a pretty bank teller whom he didn’t trust to count the bills.
More silence. Thirty seconds passed, then thirty more. She felt a headache coming on. She remembered that Ida McKinley took up knitting to distract herself from her condition, darning thousands of socks to give away to charities, but Opal loathed the dull repetition required of needles and yarn.
Without letting go of the men’s hands, she pressed her forehead to the table. The pressure gave her some relief. Once Madame de Fleur thrashed upon the floor in what looked like an epileptic fit so violent, someone called for a doctor.It takes so much out of me, she said later from her cot as Opal pressed cool rags to her forehead. She liked imagining a life where she could care for the woman.
In her parlor, Opal rocked her forehead against the cold relief of the table. She began to moan, and the noise released something in her, not headache pain, but some unexpressed feeling. The Colonel touched her between her shoulder blades. He may have been checking for a pulse or a sign of medical distress, but she let his hand rest there because she longed for touch, even this kind.
After a few moments, she jerked upright and said, “Charles Tuttle, how dare you?”
A German accent. Albert Bremen.
In the candlelight, Tuttle’s mouth looked cavernous, his teeth stalactites. It was Colonel Bloodworth who spoke first. His voice was aglass of water. Cool. Refreshing. “Please forgive the interruption,” he said. “And the hour. Where are you now?”
“What does it matter where he is?” said Tuttle.
“I’m trying to establish a record of fact,” Bloodworth replied.
Opal waited for someone else to speak.
“Personality can extend beyond the body. In theory,” Bloodworth said. The candlelight reflected in his eyes; it amplified the contours of his scar. He was a man who’d known loss, who’d felt it deeply.
“Please, Mr. Bremen,” said Jenkins. “Can you tell us why? Why have you instructed the Earthshine Girls to strike?”
“This is preposterous,” Tuttle said.
“The laws of business,” Bremen’s voice said, “differ from the laws of humanity.”
“And you still consider yourself human,” asked Bloodworth, “on the Other Side?”
“For the love of God, what does it matter if he considers himself human?” said Tuttle. “Tell us something we don’t know—something to prove yourself already. Otherwise we’ll know this is gas!”
Opal pressed her forehead to the table again and grew quiet. Her head throbbed now. Jagr had warned her about the strains of pregnancy. He was a good doctor. She shouldn’t have doubted that.
Jagr and his measly reward. $100. She would not go back to him. Never. She refused to even imagine it.
“My daughter,” said Opal in Bremen’s voice. “Bertie. She’s expecting. A surprise to you both, yes? Congratulations.” Everyone turned toward Tuttle to register the dismay on his face. “An heir at last.”
Silence.
“Is this true?” Jenkins asked.
“Impossible,” said Tuttle.
“So it’s not true?” the Colonel said.
“Lucky guess. Any married woman—”
“Swore you to secrecy. Didn’t want her name in the paper again. Didn’t want to jinx it, did she?” asked Bremen. “Didn’t want to see allthose pitiful looks like when the earlier pregnancies didn’t take. We have papers over here, you know.The Expired Times.News so old it’s news again.”
