Things Half in Shadow - Softcover

Finn, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476761728 ISBN 13: 9781476761725

Verlag: Gallery Books, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Postbellum America makes for a haunting backdrop in this historical and supernatural tale of moonlit cemeteries, masked balls, cunning mediums, and terrifying secrets waiting to be unearthed by an intrepid crime reporter.

Edward Clark is a successful young crime reporter in comfortable circumstances with a lovely, well-connected fiancée. Then an assignment to write a series of exposés on the city’s mediums places all that in jeopardy.

In the Philadelphia of 1869, photographs of Civil War dead adorn dim sitting rooms, and grieving families attempt to contact their lost loved ones. Edward’s investigation of the beautiful young medium Lucy Collins has unintended consequences, however. He uncovers her tricks, but realizes to his dismay that Lucy is more talented at blackmail than she is at a medium’s sleights of hand. And since Edward has a hidden past, he reluctantly agrees that they should collaborate in exposing only her rivals.

The mysterious murder of noted medium Lenora Grimes Pastor as Lucy and Edward attend her séance results in a plum story for Edward—and a great deal more. The pair want to clear themselves from suspicion, but a search spanning the houses of the wealthy to the underside of nineteenth-century Philadelphia unearths a buzzing beehive of past murder, current danger, and supernatural occurrences that cannot be explained…

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Finn is the pen name of an acclaimed author of mysteries and thrillers. He has worked as an editor, journalist, and ghostwriter. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Things Half in Shadow

I

For lack of a better starting point, I shall begin this particular tale on a foggy morning in April of 1869. The mist rose off the water in thick, brownish puffs that reminded me of cannon smoke. It moved in the same skittish manner—an ever-shifting curtain of haze that offered fleeting glimpses of Petty’s Island as the fog approached the dock. I felt a familiar, unwelcome shudder of dread when the fog crashed over us. Tucked in its rolling tendrils was a heady stew of familiar odors. Damp earth. Dirty water. Decay.

With the fog in my eyes and its smell in my nostrils, I couldn’t help but think of Antietam. So much was the same. The early morning chill. The silhouettes of men shimmering within the mist. The stench, getting stronger. As another wall of haze moved in, I cast my eyes to the ground, expecting to see it strewn with the shredded corpses of my fallen brothers.

But I was not at Antietam. I was right here in Philadelphia. On the waterfront of the Delaware River, to be precise, the city sprawling westward behind me. The smell that rode with the fog was merely the remains of yesterday’s catch, sitting a few yards away in a rotting pile of fish guts and lopped heads. The ground, instead of bearing dozens of broken bodies, contained only one. A woman. Fully intact, but dead nonetheless.

Dressed in a gray shift that clung to her body, she looked more girl than woman. Her blond hair, darkened by the water from which she had been pulled, spread across the dock like dredged-up kelp. Sand, pebbles, and streaks of mud stuck to her pale flesh. With her eyes closed and body still, she looked at peace, although I was certain she hadn’t died that way.

It was not, incidentally, the first corpse I had seen that week. I’d seen two the day before—an unlucky pair that had been stabbed in an alleyway on the city’s southern tip. Sailors, caught on the wrong end of a drunkard’s Bowie knife. After witnessing a sight such as that, a dead girl wasn’t so shocking.

Not that I was easily shocked to begin with. In my line of work, death came with the territory. As a reporter for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, I was called on to write about a wide assortment of subjects, but the one I covered the most was crime. Murders, mainly. And for a place nicknamed the City of Brotherly Love, there were an alarming number of them.

But the girl on the ground, it seemed, wasn’t a murder victim. At least that’s what Inspector William Barclay, standing on the other side of her body, thought.

“She drowned,” he told me. “The crew of the Cooper’s Point ferry spotted her floating in the river.”

The ferry was docked at Pier 49, ready to make the morning’s first crossing to Camden. Just beyond it, an impatient crowd grew along the end of Shackamaxon Street, waiting to board, with those in the front trying to peer past the line of policemen blocking their way. The rest of the waterfront rattled with activity, even at that early hour. The lumber mills and steelworks to the south were clanging and buzzing beasts. To the north of us, Kentucky boats filled with coal pushed out onto the river. But on the edge of the pier, it was just me, Barclay, and the dead girl.

“So there’s nothing suspicious about her death?” I asked.

Barclay shook his head. “Not particularly. Of course, that’s ultimately for the coroner to decide.”

“I assume he’ll rule it an accidental drowning,” I said. “But what do you think?”

Barclay, who had seen even more death than myself, tried to avoid looking at the corpse again. Instead, he stared at the pile of fish scraps nearby. A fair number of birds—gulls, mostly, but also a handful of crows—circled it, swooping down at regular intervals to scoop up pieces of the stinking bounty. Barclay watched two gulls battle for a bit of tail before saying, “If she was found in the water, then logic dictates that she also died there. So, to answer your question, yes. I believe that this poor girl drowned in the river.”

He looked to me, hoping his answer was satisfactory. He could tell from my expression that it was not.

“You don’t agree?”

“Not precisely,” I said, pausing to let Barclay issue the sigh that I knew was coming. When you spend lengthy periods of time with someone, as I had with William Barclay, you quickly learn their particular habits. For Barclay, that included shifting his weight to his left leg and putting his hands on his hips when he was impatient or sighing when he was annoyed. Since his hands had already fixed themselves on his hips as soon as I arrived, I knew what was next.

“I know your readers are a bloodthirsty lot,” Barclay said, “but try not to turn what’s simply a tragic accident into sensationalistic fodder for your newspaper.”

I intended to do no such thing, although I couldn’t hold the accusation against Barclay. The Bulletin’s readers were rather ghoulish. No crime was too foul, bloody, or unthinkable for them. There was a reason the motto among the city’s crime reporters was “The morbider, the merrier.”

“I’m not wishing that this girl had been brutally butchered,” I said. “All I’m asking is that you not be so quick to conclude what killed her.”

Because Philadelphia is flanked by two rivers, I had seen a fair number of drowning deaths. The lack of oxygen colors the faces of most victims a pale purple. Their bodies are often bloated. Quite a few of them have pieces of flesh missing from the hungry fish that found them before any human got the chance.

The pitiful creature at my feet possessed none of these telltale signs. Granted, she could have thrown herself into the chilly Delaware only minutes before she had been found, yet it looked to me that something else was at work. If it wasn’t for the soaked clothing and the dirt on her skin, someone waiting for the ferry couldn’t have been blamed for thinking she was still alive and merely napping on the bleached wood of the pier.

“She looks at peace,” I said. “As if she had passed in her sleep.”

Barclay sighed again. “So you’re a trained coroner now, I see.”

“I’m simply saying that she doesn’t look like a drowning victim. Surely, you can see that.”

“All I see,” Barclay said, “is that it was a bad idea to grant you access to the police department that your competitors in the press do without. I’m sure the gentlemen at the Times or the Public Ledger wouldn’t ask me to second-guess myself.”

“They also didn’t save your life on the battlefield,” I replied. “Or have you forgotten about that?”

“How could I when you’re always around to remind me? Now, do you have any more questions or can I proceed without further interruption?”

I had no doubt that Barclay was speaking in jest. He and I had been friends for close to seven years now, having met as members of the Union Army. While it was true that, during a surprise skirmish in a Virginia forest, I threw him to the ground before a minié ball to the skull could do the honors, I think he rather enjoyed having me around. Whenever a ghastly crime occurred, Barclay sent a policeman to my house to whisk me to the scene. That’s exactly what had happened earlier that morning. Much earlier...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Gallery Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476761728
• ISBN 13: 9781476761725
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland