The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

or scream like a baby . . .” Zofia’s luminous grey face lit with a smile “. . . or both.”

      Eve couldn’t hold back a laugh. Her darling girls. When they weren’t helping solve crimes or alerting her to possible threats they were making their own kind of righteous trouble.

      “Something is wrong indeed,” Eve replied, “if Margaret Hathorn missed her chance to knock a bowler off a lecher’s head.”

      “Exactly!” Zofia exclaimed. “She’s the ringleader. When she didn’t appear downtown—on Fridays we meet at the Bowling Green—I wafted about to any of her known haunts. Nothing. I told the rest of the girls when I could find them. We came back to the Precinct office, but you weren’t there. That’s when we remembered about the ceremony tonight.”

      The carriage came to a halt along the street. “Here,” the driver called down.

      “No,” Eve shook her head emphatically. “Gran, I can’t leave now—whenever I go home, I always lose their focus. They become fixated on the property and forget their details.”

      Evelyn opened her door and called back to the driver. “A few more turns around the Square, if you please, sir, we’ll account for them all.”

      “Suit yourself. Anything for art, I suppose,” the driver retorted as Evelyn shut the door, gesturing for Eve to continue.

      As the clop of the horses sounded again and the jolt of the carriage rocked them, Zofia wavered.

      “Go on, Zofia dear,” Eve stated. “Please. What words do you remember as the last you heard from Maggie before this disappearance?”

      They circled Washington Square Park, the old parade ground renamed in honor of the first president’s inauguration downtown. There along the northern side, facing Fifth Avenue, the newly erected Washington Arch glowed eerie in the moonlight, a grand homage to the Arc de Triomphe that appeared like a ghost in its own right, a mystical beacon rising from the dark shadows of the gas-lit park. The spirit was instantly distracted.

      “Did you know,” Zofia began mournfully, “that there are ten-thousand-some human remains underground there, in the park? Just below the earth. Taken by yellow fever, choleras, one disease or another, the city didn’t have the room . . . A pit of ten thousand bones . . . Disregarded. Tromped and paraded over . . .”

      “Yes, Zofia, of course we know that,” Eve said, gritting her teeth. “But their deaths were long ago. We need to talk about what’s happening now.”

      This was the point when patience never won her. Extracting useful, prescient details was the most difficult part. A ghost who came right to the point was a spirit Eve longed to cultivate.

      “When you realized she was gone, you said you went to find the other girls. Did you come to the office together?”

      “Yes,” Zofia nodded, wisps of hair floating in the air as if she were in water. “Just like you taught us, we floated around the table and called out for her, we held our own séance to get her to come out, but nothing. We tried lighting her candle, but we couldn’t. We looked into the scrying glass. We even tried moving that silly spirit board. We tried everything we could think of.”

      The ghost was getting agitated, as the temperature was dropping further and further, and her form was wavering as if she were an image interrupted from a projected screen. “The more we did, the more worried all of us got. We made a promise we’d let each other know if we were going to cross over for good, go onto the sweet Summerland. She promised she wouldn’t go without telling us . . .” Zofia’s voice hitched.

      “There now, Zofia love, don’t you cry,” Eve said softly. She felt as though she were an elder sister to some of the ghosts. “We’ll find her. Can you remember the last thing she said to you?”

      The ghost thought a moment before answering. “You know how you and Gran have said that there are times when we might hear a knocking sound?”

      Eve nodded. “From the Corridors of life and death itself,” she replied. “Fate, destiny, eternal rest, all may come knocking at any time from that space between the living and the dead.”

      “She said she was hearing lots of sounds,” the ghost continued, cocking her head as if she too were straining to listen, “and she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. She said they were loudest outside some of the largest mansions in the city. Knocking, singing. Calling. Murmuring. Bidding her come in . . .”

      “Was this the last that she spoke to you?” Eve pressed. “About these sounds?”

      “Yes. It was Sunday, two days past. What if . . .” Zofia whispered, the mesmeric irises of her grey, luminous eyes widening. “What if something came from the corridor of death and Maggie answered the door . . .?”

      Eve’s blood went from cold to a distinct ice; the chill of the spirit and the fog of her breath was nothing compared to the shiver that went from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, and along that shuddering course was a ghostly whisper that seemed to be echoed by the whole of the spirit world itself:

      Don’t invite anything in . . .

      Chapter Three

      This thought of the finality of death, a concept a ghost was always at odds with, was enough to frighten Zofia’s spectral form into disappearing, snuffing her from the cab, leaving only a misty, luminous wisp, then nothing. The carriage came around the north side of the park and halted.

      “Well then . . .” Eve muttered.

      “How many more times round, ladies?” the driver asked, calling down to them in a wary tone.

      “Let’s go home,” Gran said, opening the door and calling up. “We’ll alight at the corner of the park and Waverly, if you please, sir, thank you.”

      “As you wish,” he replied as they jostled forward again.

      She turned to Eve. “You know there’s only so much you can get out of them at once. This will take time. Maggie has all the time in the world; surely this is but a pause on her eternal journey,” she continued, though Eve could tell she was trying to rally herself as much as anything. It was Maggie’s interest in dark things, in the paranormal, that had led to her death, a fact Gran would never fully accept or forgive herself for not intercepting.

      Upon arriving, Evelyn finally relieved the driver of his rounds and went in to check on the rest of her family while Eve approached the adjacent townhouse she shared. While Evelyn and her grandfather Gareth had their own home further uptown, along the part of Fifth Avenue that constituted old New York money, they spent a great deal of time here; these two addresses were far more the center of their world since Eve had taken up residence with her team.

      The privilege of a fairly comfortable life that Eve was wise enough not to take for granted only came by fortuitous marriage at a ghostly cost.

      The families entwined out of deep love, respect, and the particular, inimitable bonds created by spiritual battle at the precipice of life and death. Evelyn was a natural stepmother to Natalie, and Gareth was an understanding husband. Regardless of class, neither Eve’s father, a British Lord, nor Gran, who had inherited more money than any of them, ever made the family feel that they were anything lesser. While Evelyn Northe-Stewart was not Eve’s grandmother by blood, she most certainly was by soul and spirit.

      Gran and Grandpa weren’t going back uptown tonight, Eve was certain. They had their own floor, below her parents, in ‘Fort Denbury’ as Eve was fond of calling the attached townhouses her father had procured on Waverly Place, west of the park, before she was born; fine brick and brownstone buildings with the sort of exquisite detail one would expect of an era that called itself gilded.

      Eve walked up the grand stoop, let herself in the glass-paneled door covered in wrought-iron tracery, and with a turn of an ornate key, the gas lamps that glowed in round orb sconces all about the property flamed to life. Gliding past the open pocket doors of the first-floor parlor, she