The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

a salary; the furnishings had been done thanks to Evelyn and her friends cleaning out closets and storage spaces. Jenny didn’t mind her small corner of the world. She sat there and closed her eyes, perhaps in listening to what the spirits had to say to her today, perhaps in prayer—Eve didn’t know. She didn’t dare presume to understand the vast internal mysteries of another psychic. It was very important they each respect separate processes and moments of quietude.

      It wasn’t long before a tall grandfather clock in the corner of the room—a gift from the Bishops—began to chime a morning sequence in deep tones. The last reverberating bell faded into silence just as Cora and Antonia walked in, bobbing their heads to Eve and Jenny and the spirits that wafted in from the walls, all keeping their appointed hour.

      When her team was assembled, they turned to Eve expectantly for the day’s orders. Before offering any instruction or command, she took in their faces. Everyone was tired from the séance, but more than that, worried.

      “There has been a departmental complaint, my dears,” Eve declared, setting her jaw, allowing for the group to groan in response. “We’ll be getting a visit.”

      “What kind of complaint?” Cora asked.

      “A complaint of meddling.”

      Antonia sighed irritably. “What are we to do if we can’t be left to do what we’re meant to do?”

      Eve didn’t even look at Vera but the spirit was immediately forthcoming with her own indictment, splaying incorporeal hands.

      “A man in a townhouse had a photograph,” Vera began, wafting to and fro in the ghostly version of pacing. “A single, post mortem photograph of a child. There was something very wrong about it. A mistress’s child. I wouldn’t stand for it and I was sure neither would his wife. So I winged the photograph out into the hallway for her to find. Managed a good shove from his study.”

      “Is this what you were trying to tell me would need written up?”

      Vera nodded.

      “And how were you drawn to the house?” Eve said, picking up a notebook and writing down particulars. “You know we can’t mess in the living’s dirty business, affairs or no, only abuse and crime, so I hope you’ve got something better than that or we are guilty of meddling.”

      “A crying child in a rumpled frock who looked very much alive to me when the poor creature approached me on the street pointed inside a house, saying “I’m lost . . . And there are more . . . Please help . . .” When I turned to look at the house, then back at the child, there was no one; a ghost after all. You know it’s hard for us to tell. We don’t always appear between ourselves as transparent phantasms. We even forget we are incorporeal. I look down and see myself as I always was, find myself reaching for things my hand passes through.”

      “That’s because you’re indomitable and this city can’t bear to let go of you,” Eve said fondly, thinking of Vera’s painting from a year before she died that Eve had seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s schoolrooms, where she had continued her lifelong studies. The painting had been so pulsing with life, it was no wonder she was so often more solid than most spirits Eve had met, and didn’t need the power of a séance to manifest her.

      “So I went into the house,” Vera continued, “to have a look around. Instinct said go to the study. I did. Something—a spirit I couldn’t even see—winged the image out at me from I don’t know even where, in a leather Memento Mori frame, a lock of hair affixed and all. I looked around for the child that had vanished, but I saw the same plaintive face there on that photo, uncomfortable even in death . . .”

      “What did you do next?” Antonia asked.

      “Once I managed to fling the image into the hall, the lady of the house stepped on it before exclaiming. It was not well met. Evidently that child was not hers, nor any relation, and what the photo was doing there was a mystery, but must have aroused or confirmed the wife’s suspicion. I hung back and listened to the excuse of a mousy, evasive man saying he had no idea where it came from. Didn’t believe a word. Felt my essence had been drained in the force of throwing the image so I faded out from the house, finding myself again near my old apartment.”

      “And you’re sure this is the complaint we’ve gotten?” Eve asked. Vera thought a moment.

      “Oh.” She wafted back on spirit heels. “Well, I suppose it could be something else. I just . . . I felt very strongly so I volunteered the information as pre-emptive, in case the man takes any action against the wife or the mistress if that was his child. Since Maggie’s disappearance, I’m just a bit off . . . I feel like she’d have done the same thing I did, would have responded to the same sort of call; it would have been like us, to attend to this matter ourselves. She’d have wanted me to . . .” The spirit’s voice broke.

      “Yes, this does sound like your mission;” Eve agreed, “exposing truths to women to help them look out for themselves. But this young ghost was . . . lost? Not concerned for that lady of the house, it would seem?”

      “Yes,” Vera replied. “In this, I’m not sure if I did more harm than good by exposing the fact. I’m sorry. I should have tried to gather more context before acting. It was unwise, I see now.”

      “It is always so hard to know,” Eve said, her empathy clear. “That’s why we have to take these kinds of acts and cases with such care. The child wants to be acknowledged, that is often the case. What about the child saying there were more?”

      “Oh, yes—that, I’ve no idea,” Vera scratched her head, thinking, bobbing a bit in the air as she did. “More children? That he fathered? More pictures? I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to find my way back . . .” Vera trailed off, her charcoal eyes staring at her blankly. Eve sighed.

      “How many detectives even know about us to be able to lodge such a complaint?” Cora asked.

      “That’s a fair question . . .” Eve murmured, and thought about the gala, the attendees. There were maybe ten people from the department total that were there. Despite the initial call for discretion, perhaps Mr. Roosevelt had boasted of the department beyond the usual channels.

      “I can’t be sure,” Eve replied finally. “Not many, but enough to make any friend to the lieutenant a possible snitch. What they don’t necessarily know about, and shouldn’t, is about our Preventative Protocol measures. I’ll not have our every move subjected to an ethics board.”

      “We have complete, plausible deniability and a solid alibi,” Antonia said. “Cora, Jenny and I were at the theatre while you were at the gala—”

      “Antonia, just let me do the talking,” Eve explained. “Let me be the front of this.”

      Her dark eyes flashed defensively and she opened her mouth as if to retort but closed it again, a pain crossing over her olive complexion. Eve, trying not to tread upon anxiety regarding presentation, clarified gently. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I want no one to feel hidden behind me for any reason. But I must bear the brunt of scrutiny—that’s what being the director means.”

      Antonia’s brow remained furrowed. “You are all my charges and my responsibility,” she added. “I asked for this; to make sense of my life and to retain my sanity. Let me be what I am made for and support me as is needed. I have armor that won’t be pierced; it was forged in childhood when I had to decide if the gifts would kill me or make me their soldier. Let me fight for all of us.”

      Her colleagues each nodded.

      A rough knock on the door. Eve answered it and a barrel-chested man in uniform entered, his actions suiting his frame as he strode into the room. Vera wafted towards the wall, hovering in the same dimensions as a file cabinet and watched.

      “I don’t give any part of a rat’s anatomy what you ladies think you’re doing in this fanciful department,” the short-haired, burly man stated, “but if you send your spooky minions into good people’s fine homes, you’re going to find the full weight of the