Things Half in Shadow

by Alan Finn

  “You spoke to Bettina?”

  “We have,” Lucy said. “So who really gave you the watch?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Mr. Dutton snapped.

  “I think it was Lenora Grimes Pastor,” I said. “Judging from the heartfelt inscription, I take it the two of you were engaged in, say, more than séances?”

  The eyes of Eldridge Dutton widened ever so slightly as he said, “Are you implying, sir, that I had an improper relationship with Mrs. Pastor?”

  It was exactly what I was implying, although I couldn’t picture it myself. While both were roughly the same age, physically Eldridge Dutton and Lenora Grimes Pastor were complete opposites. And even though the old adage claims that opposites attract, I wondered what these two could have seen in each other.

  “He’s referring to your Saturday séances,” Lucy said.

  “I know what he’s referring to,” Mr. Dutton snapped. “And he couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “So your watch wasn’t a gift from Mrs. Pastor?” I asked.

  “It was a gift, yes. But not from her.”

  “Then who was it from?”

  “It was a gift from my late wife.” Mr. Dutton shifted from one foot to the other, the watch still held to his heart. Color rushed into his cheeks—the unmistakable pink blush of shame. “Her name was Laura. She gave it to me three weeks ago.”

  VII

  Eldridge Dutton elaborated a few minutes later when Lucy and I sat in his law office. Thomas was sent to wait with the coach and all of Mr. Dutton’s partners and clerks had left for the day, leaving the building largely silent. The only sounds I heard were the gentle ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner and, of course, Mr. Dutton’s voice.

  His tale was a lengthy one, which trickled out in fits and starts. Sometimes he repeated himself or, suddenly recalling another detail, went backward in his story and started again. There were plenty of pauses—long, nervous ones that allowed many ticks of that corner clock to pass uninterrupted.

  To spare you, dear reader, I have chosen to simply narrate the story. It is an interesting one, to be sure, with many similarities to my own tale. But it is better doled out in one large piece instead of the halting manner in which I had received it. Still, I must begin with a direct quote from Mr. Dutton, which sets everything up nicely.

  “We do a bit of investigative work at this firm,” he said. “Tracking down heirs, for instance, or finding witnesses if one of our clientele has been accused of a crime. Because I have proven myself adept at such investigations in the past, a strange request came my way.”

  That request, made by one of the firm’s new clients, was for Mr. Dutton to go on a series of visits to mediums throughout Philadelphia. Because he was seen as a sensible man, the client wanted him to find out if there were any legitimate mediums in the city, ones who didn’t rely on illusions or trickery.

  In short, the client requested of Mr. Dutton what my editor Hamilton Gray had requested of me. In his case, however, he was offered a tidy sum for his task, and his job was not to unmask false mediums but to discover real ones.

  He agreed and enlisted the help of his second wife, who had a vague interest in Spiritualism. In the beginning, they were amused by the ways in which the city’s charlatans tried to fool them. They were even more astonished by the many people they met who believed such trickery.

  “They say a fool and his money are soon parted,” Mr. Dutton said. “I saw plenty of fools parted from their money by common thieves.”

  Upon hearing this, I made sure to keep an eye on Lucy. While she never said a word in her defense, I saw her flinch several times. It made me wonder if, like with Mrs. Mueller, she and the Duttons had crossed paths before.

  Mr. Dutton was preparing to tell his client that every medium in Philadelphia was a fake when he and Leslie attended their first séance at the home of Lenora Grimes Pastor. They realized that night that Mrs. Pastor was the real thing—a true communicator with the dead. It was during that séance that Leslie Dutton first spoke with her long-dead sister, Henrietta. Mr. Dutton also heard the voice of a person from his past.

  “It was Laura,” he told us. “My first wife.”

  So surprised was he by her presence that he couldn’t respond. Hearing her voice again after several years left him frozen, unable to speak or even think.

  It was, I imagine, similar to the feelings I had experienced upon hearing my mother. Shock, sadness, and regret had rendered me numb. So it was with Eldridge Dutton. While I had managed to break through the shock and respond to my mother, Dutton could do no such thing with his wife.

  Laura’s voice soon vanished, replaced by someone else’s. Yet when the séance was over, he vowed to return and speak to her again, should she reappear. Leslie, who had been equally thrilled by the brief conversation with her sister, also wanted to return. So began their weekly Saturday night engagements at the Pastor home.

  Weeks went by. While Leslie Dutton heard from Henrietta often, Eldridge heard not another word from his late wife. It occurred to him that it was possible the presence of the second Mrs. Dutton prevented hearing from the first. The two women had known each other, after all, having been patient and nurse. Mr. Dutton’s theory was that Laura’s spirit detected the presence of Leslie, and therefore remained silent. If he wanted to hear from her again, he realized he needed to do so without the new Mrs. Dutton around.

  So he took the liberty of calling on Lenora Grimes Pastor one Saturday morning, requesting a séance in which it was just the two of them present. Mrs. Pastor was reluctant at first, agreeing only after Mr. Dutton offered a generous contribution to her Quaker school. They immediately retired to the séance room, where Mrs. Pastor fell into her trance. In mere minutes, the voice of Laura Dutton emerged.

  “It filled my heart with joy to hear her again,” Mr. Dutton said. “To talk to her. To tell her how much I had missed her. And to apologize.”

  It was here that I interrupted his tale. “What did you have to apologize for?”

  Eldridge Dutton cast his eyes downward and said, “It’s shameful to admit, but my relationship with Leslie began while my Laura was still alive.”

  According to Mr. Dutton, his first wife’s illness had left her in so much pain that morphine was her only relief. She spent her final weeks glassy-eyed and numb, unable to speak to her husband or daughter. (“It was as if she was already dead,” he told us.) Lonely and grieving, he was comforted by the pretty young nurse who shared their home.

  “She was so kind,” he said of Leslie. “So warm and understanding. She was the only thing that made life bearable for me.”

  “What about your daughter?” I said, thinking of Bettina and her anger at both her father and stepmother. Not only did I now understand it, but thought it wholly justified.

  “She did comfort me,” Dutton said. “But a daughter can do only so much. A man needs other comforts as well.”

  “Men!” Lucy said, huffing with disdain. “I declare, that’s all you think about.”

  Mr. Dutton’s face reddened again. “I make no excuse for my conduct, Mrs. Collins. It was wrong of me. Yet I found myself in love with Leslie, even while poor Laura suffered.”

  Her suffering didn’t last much longer. A few weeks after his affair with the nurse began, Laura Dutton died quietly in the middle of the night. Leslie stayed with the family, mostly because Dutton said he couldn’t bear to let her go. They eventually made their love known to all and married. Yet the guilt stayed with him.

  Once his first solo séance with Mrs. Pastor had ended, he immediately scheduled another for the following Saturday morning. When that one proved to be equally as successful, he decided to make a standing engagement with Mrs. Pastor. On Saturday mornings he would arrive alone to laugh and reminisce with the spirit of his first wife, returning later that night with his second wife. He never told Leslie about his communications with Laura. Nor did he mention it to Bettina, even though Laura Dutton had begged him to bring her
to one of the Saturday morning séances. And if another form of guilt began to nip at the edges of Mr. Dutton’s conscience, he managed to brush it aside.

  Then, one recent Saturday morning, Laura asked him what he thought of the gold watch she had given him. She had ordered it the day before her illness overtook her, as a token of her love. Dutton told her he had received no such watch and suggested that perhaps she was mistaken. Laura insisted it existed, even providing the name of the shop in which it had been purchased.

  Dutton went to the shop that afternoon and inquired about the order. It turned out that although the watch had been paid for, no one had come by to retrieve it. And so it had stayed in the shop, collecting dust in the hope that someone would eventually come to claim it.

  “But now it is in my possession,” Dutton said, patting the jacket pocket in which it rested. “And I shall cherish it always.”

  The watch, precious though it was, complicated his situation. The time he spent with the spirit of Laura now had a physical representation, reminding him of how much he missed her and how he longed to have her back. He held the watch as much as he could—polishing the case, winding the hands, watching the rubies on the face glint in the light. And he began to live only for those Saturday mornings, counting down the days, hours, and minutes until he could speak with her again.

  “Outside, you implied that I was being unfaithful to Leslie,” he said. “Although wrong about the object of my affection, you were quite correct about my unfaithfulness. It was through Mrs. Pastor that I rekindled a love affair with Laura. But now they are both gone. And unless I somehow find another true medium, I shall never hear from Laura again.”

  His tale finished at last, Eldridge Dutton began to weep. It was a sorry sight, watching him cry so extravagantly, holding a hand over his face in a failed effort to shield our eyes from his tears. Lucy and I comforted him as best we could, knowing it would make little difference. The man had lost his first wife twice now—once upon her death and again upon Mrs. Pastor’s.

  “Please forgive me,” he said amid the sobs. “This has been very hard.”

  “I’m sure it has,” I replied. “Being present for Mrs. Pastor’s death must have distressed you greatly.”

  Dutton dried his eyes and nodded. “It did. Only I couldn’t express it. Not in front of Leslie.”

  “Do you think she knew about your”—I struggled with the right wording to describe what, exactly, Mr. Dutton had been engaged in—“affair from the Great Beyond?”

  “Not at all,” was his reply. “I told her I came to this office on Saturday mornings. She noticed the watch, though, and demanded to know where it came from. I had no choice but to admit it was a gift from Laura that had only recently been delivered. That was at least some version of the truth.”

  And Lucy and I now knew everything. No, Mr. Dutton hadn’t been stealing from Elizabeth Mueller, nor had he even talked to the spirit of her husband. He and Mrs. Pastor hadn’t been engaged in a torrid affair and there was no motive I could think of for wanting her dead. In fact, other than Robert Pastor, Mr. Dutton had the biggest reason to keep her alive. Yet doubt nagged at me. Not about Mr. Dutton, mind you, but about the person who had hired him.

  “I’d like to know more about your client,” I said. “This man who hired you to seek out true mediums.”

  “Mr. Black?”

  “Is that his name?” Lucy inquired.

  “Yes. Corinthian Black.”

  “Odd name,” I said.

  “Quite,” said Mr. Dutton. “But appropriate considering he is an odd man. Ghastly looking.”

  “How so?”

  I doubt many of you will be surprised to learn he described a pale man with a ghastly face that was missing a nose. I can’t say I was, either.

  In fact, it was my suspicion that the man who hired him was the same one who had threatened Lenora Grimes Pastor and attempted to run down Lucy and me.

  The revelation, while not a shock, did prompt a flurry of questions from us. “Did you discover any other true mediums in the city?” she asked. At the same time, I said, “Did he say why he sought them out?”

  Faced with two questions at once, Mr. Dutton tackled the first. “I came upon one other medium in the city who seemed to be legitimate. Instead of voices emanating from her, as was the case with Mrs. Pastor, she conversed with spirits as if they were sitting right there in the room with us. Amazing to witness, especially in one so young. Her name was—”

  “Sophie,” I said. “Sophie Kruger.”

  Dutton looked perplexed. “How did you know that?”

  “Because her talent brought her to the attention of several people,” I answered. “Including someone who killed her in the same fashion that caused Mrs. Pastor’s death.”

  The embarrassed flush in Mr. Dutton’s cheeks, which had flared even brighter during his crying spell, vanished in an instant. His face quickly took on the same color of the sky just before a snowfall—gray and burdened with an unknowable weight.

  “That can’t be,” he said. “Tell me, Mr. Clark, that you are simply being cruel.”

  “I’m afraid not. She was found dead the day before Mrs. Pastor’s murder.”

  Mr. Dutton rocked sideways in his chair, swooning first left, then right. When it became apparent that he was going to topple right out of it, I ran to his side and propped him up.

  “This was my fault!” he moaned. “All my fault! I located them and now they’re dead.”

  For the second time that week, I longed for the smelling salts still lodged in my old desk at the Evening Bulletin offices. Luckily, Lucy had some stored in that surprising bag of tricks she called a dress. Waving them beneath Mr. Dutton’s nose, she said, “Breathe deeply.”

  The smelling salts did their job. Eldridge Dutton righted himself again and said, “This is terrible. I never thought that is what they wanted.”

  “They?” I said. “I thought it was just Corinthian Black who hired you.”

  “He did,” said Mr. Dutton. “But he made it clear it was on the behalf of an organization.”

  “I don’t suppose he mentioned doing mediums harm?”

  Mr. Dutton shook his head. “Of course not. If he had, I would never have agreed to the job. He said he represented men of science researching Spiritualism.”

  “Did he give the name of this organization?” I asked.

  “Yes. Only once, in passing. But I remembered it, because it, too, was a strange name.”

  “What was it?”

  “Something Latin,” Mr. Dutton said. “Praediti, I think it was.”

  Hearing the word left me stunned. I couldn’t have been more surprised had the earth decided to stop turning. In fact, for a moment it felt like it had. Everything ceased to exist. No more Lucy Collins or Eldridge Dutton. No more quiet office and ticking clock. No more Philadelphia, with its bustle and smells and teeming streets. For a brief time, it was just nothing but that word, so loud in my skull that I felt it reverberate throughout my entire body.

  Only instead of Mr. Dutton’s voice, I heard it spoken by my mother, just as she had done right before Mrs. Pastor died.

  Praediti.

  In truth, the word had become half forgotten in the days following Mrs. Pastor’s death. I had been too busy trying to clear my name to really ponder its meaning or why it had been so important for my mother to say it.

  Now, however, it was all I could think about, even as the rest of the world came into focus once more. I again heard carriages in the street outside the office and the ticking of the clock inside. I saw Lucy and Mr. Dutton both eye me with concern.

  “Edward?” Lucy said. “What’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Seen? No. But heard? Most definitely.

  The ghost in question was my mother, and I was suddenly haunted by the instructions she had given me during Mrs. Pastor’s final séance. Instructions I now felt compelled to follow.

  “I must leave,” I said. “There’s somewhere
I need to be.”

  Lucy widened her eyes in confusion. “Right now?”

  “Yes. You must excuse me.”

  With that, I left the office, stumbling through it as though the floor was slanted. Things didn’t right themselves once I stepped onto Walnut Street. The buildings there appeared tilted, as did the street itself and everything on it. Horses looked to be pulling carriages up ridiculously steep inclines, while passersby seemed to defy gravity.

  I set off into this new, lurching world, no doubt looking like a drunkard as I made my way northwest. As I walked—or, more accurately, stumbled—the word Praediti echoed through my head, still in my mother’s voice.

  She had known its meaning. She had understood its importance. And even though she had never spoken it to me in life, she had found a way to pass it along to me in death.

  That, improbable as it might have been, was easy to understand. What left me utterly baffled was why she had felt the need to say it to me. My best guess was that, through ways that defied logic, she had somehow predicted my current troubles, and uttering that word was her way of trying to help me.

  So I continued my dizzying trek across the city, the echo of my mother’s voice guiding me all the way to Eastern State Penitentiary. Standing outside the prison, my head still spinning and my heart pounding, it was clear that I was meant to be there. My mother had wanted it this way.

  It was never my intention to obey her instructions. Yet now I had no choice in the matter. If the Praediti were involved in Mrs. Pastor’s death, then I needed to know who they were and what they wanted.

  My mother had, in essence, provided the key to understanding all the strange things that were happening to me.

  It was now up to me to use it.

  Only that required speaking to the person on this earth I hated the most. It meant that, for the first time in fifteen years, I needed to see my father.

  VIII

  Eastern State Penitentiary stood, fortresslike, on Fairmount Avenue, its eleven acres bordered by a stone wall thirty feet tall. The entrance gate, embellished with turrets and towers, rose even higher. From the outside, the prison resembled a foreboding castle, plunked down in a northeastern patch of the city.