Eve groggily awoke on her settee at dawn, a stiff pain in her neck, her mind blank as to where and when she was. She listened for her team and tried to extend her abilities to sense them, but she felt no one and saw no ghosts. The world remained disconcertingly quiet. She assumed Cora must still be downtown, Antonia and Jenny still with Gran. Perhaps they’d stayed with Clara in Tarrytown. No one was there, save one beautiful man stirring across the room.
“Good morning, Eve,” Jacob said from the chair where he’d been sleeping, sitting up as she did and rubbing his eyes. “I’d have moved you to your bed, but I didn’t dare be improper and as Rachel had fallen asleep too—I awoke to see her with her head against that Queen Anne chair there—I just couldn’t bear not helping you to something a bit more comfortable than facedown on the table.”
“Thank you,” Eve said, taking in the sight of him.
He’d set his frock coat on the back of the chair. His cuffs were undone and his white collar, smeared with a bit of Eve’s blood, was open with his similarly spattered white neckwear hanging untied aside black suspenders. His disheveled and unbuttoned look created a sensation in Eve that felt like nothing short of a sudden, drastic fever. She didn’t know whether to be frustrated by how overwhelming her emotions for this man were or impressed by what he evoked.
His somewhat impish smile made Eve realize she was staring—gaping, actually—and she blushed and looked away, still unused to the idea that it was all right to be smitten, overwhelmed, hungry. It was still very new to have admitted they loved one another....
He rose to his feet and walked toward her, pausing at a console table where Eve had placed a silver bowl of small mints as parlor favors, placing one in his mouth. Séances often tired Eve’s throat, and she liked to have little lozenges and candies around as an aid. She hadn’t thought about the practical uses of awaking to a lover and wanting a more pleasant kiss.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said, reading her entirely all too well. “You make me feel the same. You…affect me.” He knelt at her side. “To the point I can’t stand it. I’ve just had to be more practiced at not showing what I feel; it is unseemly.” He lifted up a second small mint. Eve opened her mouth. He placed the mint on her tongue. She again kissed the tip of his finger as she had done in the park, little marks of seduction.
“You can always show me how you feel,” Eve said, lowering her eyes.
He accepted the invitation and kissed her deeply, their hands getting ever bolder with one another, until the phone rang and they broke apart with a little moan.
Rising to pick up the phone, when Eve lifted the bell she heard a less familiar voice in a very familiar cadence.
“Eve, darling, it’s me, Maggie, well, Arielle Prenze, but I’m still here. Can you bring the reverend over to get me out? I think I’ve spent too much time in Arielle. I think we’re a bit stuck. Thank you!”
The click of Maggie hanging up, clumsily, in Arielle’s body, was jarring, her request presumptuous but already expected, and it jolted a laugh out of Eve.
“Well?” Jacob prompted, assembling himself.
“Time for an exorcism at the Prenze mansion.”
* * * *
Once a call had been made to the reverends, Coronado tried to hide his excitement at the prospect of being haunted by Maggie again but Eve could hear it in his voice.
Rachel, who was needed by colleague of hers on a trying haunting a few states away, signed to Eve a goodbye and a promise that she would be here for her as things progressed with Jacob, as an advocate and resource. Eve was aware she and Jacob couldn’t court indefinitely without answering to each of their parents, and she had no idea if anyone would be amenable to an engagement should it go that far. There was much to discuss, but for the moment, she just wanted to enjoy having allowed her heart to open to passionate love.
The detective and Eve set off for the Prenze mansion, leaving a note for any of the team who returned and wondered where they were.
“I made a call about a warrant,” the detective said as they hired a carriage waiting at Washington Square Park. Both of them were moving slowly, worn and bruised, and weren’t up for their usual brisk walks or jostling trolley rides. “But an invitation into this mansion is far better.”
Their aches and pains were eased by shifting into a warm, covetous embrace during the trip uptown.
They were taking their time crossing up the walk to the Prenze front door when it opened.
Alfred Prenze, looking rather green, awaited them at the threshold to show them in. Alfred’s general predisposition toward kindness meant Eve wasn’t jarred by looking into such a similar face as her tormentor. This face was ill, tired, and baffled. It held nothing of the contempt she’d fought against. Eve’s Sensitivities were well aware of Alfred’s differences, his softer energy, and wearied—if not a bit cowardly—heart.
“She’s upstairs. Follow me. Thank you for coming. The reverends are already here. With everything we’ve been through, I confess I never thought an exorcism would be part of it.”
Eve hesitated on the landing of the second floor, turning back to Alfred.
“How are you, Mr. Prenze?” Eve asked gently. “I can imagine this is overwhelming.”
“I…I don’t know. Albert drugged me, and evidently has been doing so for weeks, so my memory is hazy. But I hear he hurt someone, trying to get to the spirits. I told him long ago to give up his animosity. But he never really listened to me. I never knew what he was on about. I saw Mother’s spirit; we all did. But she didn’t bother us like she did him. She must have cracked something open in him, and the more he railed against ghosts, all ghosts, the more he saw them and was haunted by them.”
Eve’s tone was grave. “It was us he hurt. The detective and I. Nearly caused our deaths. I hope you can help us with making sure he hurts no one again.”
“I’m very sorry. I’ll do what I can. Arielle told me she gave you Albert’s diary? I have no idea what is in it, so please ask if you’ve questions. He may have painted me in a bad light too, so be advised he’s never been the most reliable of narrators.”
Jacob, who had stood by Eve’s side, stepped down a step toward the pale, weak Alfred. “While I can’t blame you for wanting to protect yourself, sir, with all due respect, I do wonder about your turning a blind eye to something obviously wrong with the accounts. I have the ledgers and an accounting of the London merger, done just before Albert’s ‘death.’ A high clearance in Scotland Yard and an ambassador here opened some doors for us, and I can’t imagine you’d have built a successful business if you were this open to or unaware of vast sums clearing from the company stores to a predatory artist circle.”
Alfred sighed. “Before he died, Albert told me he’d been supporting a charity he cared for a great deal. After his ‘death,’ I kept the money going, I suppose out of a sense of guilt, out of honoring his memory. I didn’t know what they did.”
Eve bit her tongue so as not to mention Dupont’s transgressions, Mr. Zinne’s blood used for paint, the artist who had gone missing the night Albert died who stood in for his corpse, abandoned as the warehouse burned. All of it would come out; it didn’t have to right now. She motioned to Jacob, and they walked up the stairs as Alfred shuffled away, muttering to himself.
The reverends, each dressed in their black suits with white clerical collars, were already sitting with Arielle in the wide room Eve and Jacob knew from their surveillance position.
Reverend Blessing waited at the back of the room with a slight smirk on his face as Coronado sat at the side of the bed, holding Arielle’s hand and gently praying over her.
“I fear I have a fever, Reverend, tell me, am I warm?” Arielle asked, prompting the reverend to place his hand to her forehead.
“A bit. You’ve been through an ordeal. You’ll be better soon,” Coronado assured her in his light, elegant lilt of an accent born of his youth in Mexico City.
Jacob hung back with the bemused Blessing to ask his thoughts on evidence and mental states of the family. The floorboards creaked as Eve approached the supine woman, and both Coronado and Arielle looked to the foot of the bed.
“Eve!” cried Arielle at Maggie’s prompting.
“Miss Whitby!” Coronado rose and came to clasp Eve’s hand in his. “Are you all right? I heard—”
“Yes, I am recovering, but the more evidence we find in this house, the better I’ll be.”
“Just give me a moment, Eve,” Maggie said through Arielle, her cadence and intent clear. “I’ll be right with you. But I need the good reverend’s help a bit more, please.” Maggie flung Arielle’s hands out, reaching for Coronado.
“Yes, Margaret,” he said, instantly by her side again, taking up Arielle’s hands, but it seemed clear the reverend saw beyond the body to the soul that had taken up within. It was as overdone as a vaudeville melodrama, but Eve couldn’t help but be warmed by the connection.
Early on in Eve’s friendship with Maggie, the ghost becoming Eve’s best and only true friend, the spirit had noted her only regret about life was that she’d never truly had a romance. Not a good, pure one. She’d been taken advantage of but never held dear. What was happening now was dear.
“I just need a little momentum. Perhaps you can pull me. Draw me to you, dear Reverend?” Arielle’s mouth murmured, but it was clear Maggie was the one asking to be drawn to the handsome cleric.
Everyone in the room save for Coronado turned away, as if they were all listening to something deeply private that they shouldn’t be.
“Is she better?” Alfred Prenze asked from the doorway, a ledger tucked under his arm.
“We’re almost there,” Coronado said brightly. He was the most affable, radiant man Eve had ever met; there wasn’t a soul who could look upon his utterly gorgeous face and not see his kindness, lighting him from within.
“Good,” Alfred murmured and shuffled to the detective, handing him the ledger. “When I awoke from my stupor, Arielle showed me Albert’s office, the back room I thought was locked and forgotten. This was in the safe, tucked behind bonds. But I think this ledger will draw the last connections you need, noting accounts and withdrawals. The accounts…life savings, everything those poor artists had in his deluded organization. Drained. He was a vampire, Albert. Once he drained the money, he let those sad, lost souls fade away, using them to advantage. His thrall is a cancer. He was always testing the limits of people, but I never thought it was as drastic as all this. How do we prosecute that quality? How do we stop his mesmeric persuasion?”
“I’ve been told the spirit world saw to the removal of his powers,” Eve replied. “He’s now an average soul who must face justice. And, despite all his efforts, he still sees ghosts.”
Alfred nodded wearily. “I see. Let me know what you need. In the meantime, I’m going to get Prenze tonics back in the business of trying to ease suffering, not creating it.”
He shuffled away, and Eve hoped he had the strength to make good on it.
“All right, then,” Coronado said gently, pulling on Arielle’s hands and murmuring a benediction in several languages, as if for good measure. Arielle’s hands gave way to silvery, luminous hands and Maggie was pulled up and out and floated now before the reverend, her head bent toward him as he looked up.
Arielle lay back and drifted into an immediate, peaceful sleep.
The reverend now stood face-to-face with the spirit that had asked for him.
“Hello,” they both murmured, a reunion of old friends, something stirring in their souls that transcended this moment, time stopping for soul mates. Eve had never witnessed anything quite like it. Maggie and Coronado were far more forward than she had been, being so affected by Jacob, yet they didn’t seem awkward.
All of them, Jacob included, seemed to have a better, more sensible relationship to infatuation than Eve did. She still felt as though she was fumbling and flailing whenever she looked at the man she loved. Glancing at him, she saw him staring at Coronado, who appeared as though he was holding thin air. He was. But the spirit there was just as powerful as touch, in her own right.
Jacob came close to Eve and touched her on the elbow, leading her away from the tender moment. “Let’s search the premises while we still can.” Blessing nodded at them, gesturing they go on. If he was uncomfortable, he masked it by a serene patience.
They found Albert’s room, the torture devices against ghosts, and another device like what had been placed outside Eve’s office: prime evidence that would be added to what Fitton and his associates gathered on the bridge. They then descended to see the prison lined in metal.
“While it proves his cruelty, I know his actions against the dead cannot be prosecuted, nor can anything I witnessed inside his head,” Eve said, reaching out to touch the smooth metal wall. The phantom sensation of electrocution vibrated over her, and she withdrew her hand with a hiss.
“Still,” Jacob said, taking notes in his leather-bound casebook, “this builds a profile we can bring to an Alienist to explain. Courts are warming to Alienist testimony these past few years.”
Eve nodded. “Whether they’ll warm to a Spiritualist is yet to be tried. I’ll need every precedent this century has offered.”
Maggie floated across the threshold of the basement toward Eve, looking rather pleased with herself. “Well wasn’t that an adventure,” she said with a laugh. “What a beautiful soul.” Before Eve could ask Maggie to clarify who she meant, she continued. “Arielle, poor thing, is now sleeping soundly. Having endured quite the reckoning, she’s earned a rest.”
“We all have,” Eve agreed. “Come, let’s go home. I must see Gran and the girls.”
“Oh, I can’t bear another minute of this house,” Maggie said. “This prison was the first place I was transported to. The pain in this room continued to tear me apart. Only my prayers got me out; Sanctuary heard me and drew me to it. Now let’s hear what Gran has done with it.”
As they exited, Maggie was humming a waltz and flouncing about in the air ahead of them.
“You’re chipper,” Eve murmured with a knowing smile.
Maggie glanced between Eve and the detective. “You’ve finally stopped ignoring the obvious, I see. Good. You’re very good together, you two, so don’t disappoint me,” Maggie declared before vanishing into a hedgerow.