Undertow

by Jordan L. Hawk

  I sat in the parlor, my hands clasped between my knees. A quick search of the house had turned up no sign of Irene, and Mrs. Yagoda reluctantly agreed to summon the police. They’d glanced in Irene’s room, tramped around the garden, and, with the exception of Tilton, departed.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head vehemently. “That is, she had acquaintances, but no one special.”

  “Mmhm.” Tilton didn’t seem convinced. He tucked his notepad back into his pocket without bothering to write anything in it. “Chances are she had a sweetheart you didn’t know about and decided to run off with him, before her parents could find out. I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually.”

  I gaped at him. “She wouldn’t have left without her pocketbook! It still has all her money in it.”

  “She probably just forgot it,” Tilton replied, rising to his feet.

  “But—but she’s gone,” I protested, following him out of the parlor to the front door.

  “She left,” he corrected me. “There was no sign of forced entry. No indication of an intruder. You already said she woke you up with a nightmare. If someone had abducted her from her own bed, don’t you think you would have heard the commotion?”

  “Perhaps they used chloroform,” I suggested weakly.

  “They would still have to enter the house in the first place. And lugging an unconscious woman about isn’t as easy as the dime novels make it sound.” We reached the front door, and Tilton offered me a smile he probably thought was reassuring. “We see this sort of thing all the time, Miss Parkhurst. Trust me. There’s no need to put worry lines on that pretty face.”

  I stood helplessly in the doorway and watched him walk away, humming a jaunty tune to himself.

  ~ * ~

  “You seem troubled, Miss Parkhurst,” Mr. Quinn said.

  I gasped and spun, putting my back to Dr. Whyborne’s desk. I’d arrived late to work, but as Dr. Whyborne had left town on some business he hadn’t fully explained to me, no one noticed my absence. As he’d only arranged to be gone for a short time, I hadn’t been given a different assignment, and my work at the moment consisted mainly of sorting his mail.

  Mr. Quinn stood near the door, peering about the office with his strange, pale eyes. As I watched, he extended one long-fingered hand and caressed the books on Dr. Whyborne’s shelf.

  “Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Quinn?” I asked. “Did Dr. Whyborne forget to return a volume to the library? I can help you find it.”

  Dr. Whyborne was not, to put it plainly, organized, and his office reflected it. Since becoming his personal secretary, I’d tried to help straighten it, and succeeded only to the extent that he no longer kept things stacked haphazardly on the floor. Every other surface sported small mountains of books and papers, although at least he’d cleared off the visitor’s chair at some point. Or, more likely, Dr. Putnam-Barnett or Mr. Flaherty had.

  “No.” Mr. Quinn crossed to the desk and stared at Dr. Whyborne’s chair. “Sometimes I like to come in here, when no one else is around, and…contemplate.”

  I made a mental note to suggest Dr. Whyborne have the lock to his office changed. “I…see.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I imagine you do. Not like that disagreeable fellow at the theater last night.” He sniffed delicately.

  “Mr. Young?” I asked.

  “Yes, quite. I don’t imagine he’ll stay long. He has neither the blood nor the temperament.” Mr. Quinn glanced at me, as though he hadn’t said anything particularly strange. “Is that what troubles you?”

  “No.” I hesitated. Surely Mr. Quinn wasn’t really interested in my problems. But he’d asked, and I felt the need to unburden myself. “Irene Vale—the woman who was with us at the theater last night—is missing.” My shoulders drooped. “The police say she must have run away with a beau, but she wouldn’t have left her pocketbook and all her things behind if that were true. There’s no evidence anyone took her, though. It’s…strange.”

  I glanced up to see Mr. Quinn watching me with unblinking eyes. “How fascinating,” he said. “I take it there was no sign of spontaneous combustion?”

  “Dear heavens, no!”

  “Pity. Do go on.”

  “There’s nothing to go on with,” I confessed. “She had strange nightmares, and then she was gone.”

  “Nightmares, you say.” Mr. Quinn tapped his chin with a spidery finger. “I do love a good nightmare, but I find most lack appreciation for them.”

  “Er, yes.” I hadn’t any idea how else to respond, so I forged ahead. “I would ask Mr. Flaherty to look into Irene’s disappearance, but he’s left for Kansas with Dr. Whyborne.”

  I wasn’t at all clear why Dr. Whyborne seemed to require a private detective to accompany him on all of his expeditions, but the two seemed to travel everywhere together. Ordinarily I would have expected a landlord and boarder to want some time apart, but they were utterly inseparable. Mr. Flaherty even attended the museum galas. And I couldn’t count how many times he’d turned up to share lunch, or else walk with Dr. Whyborne to dinner.

  It must be nice to have such a close friend.

  “Time is usually of the essence when it comes to disappearances,” Mr. Quinn said thoughtfully. “Do you think this might be a matter for Widdershins?”

  I shifted my weight uneasily. “I’m…not sure what you mean.”

  “Widdershins.” He made an impatient gesture. “The maelstrom; the vortex; whatever you wish to call it. Dr. Whyborne is the most easily accessible to those of the land, but there is another.”

  I’d always heard that the unusual architecture of the library drove the librarians mad, but I’d never actually believed it until now. “Those of the land?”

  “One for the land, and one for the sea.”

  “Oh!” Finally, I thought I understood. “That was the line of poetry—”

  “Prophecy.”

  I gritted my teeth, but tamped down my annoyance. “Of course. When you say there is another, you mean Dr. Whyborne’s sister.”

  “The one given to the sea, yes.” Mr. Quinn nodded gravely. “They are both Widdershins.”

  I still didn’t know what he meant by the rest of it, but he seemed unlikely to give me a coherent answer. “You think I should go to Persephone and ask her for help?”

  It would be an excuse to see her. I thrust the thought away sternly.

  “It is much more difficult to contact her, for those of us of the land,” he mused. “But if I sacrifice one of the junior librarians on the night of the new moon, near the reef…”

  “No, no, that won’t be necessary!” I exclaimed. “I have a summoning stone.”

  Mr. Quinn’s pale eyes bulged from his head. “Widdershins entrusted you with a summoning stone?”

  “Yes?” I said tentatively.

  His hands clenched…then relaxed, as if a deliberate effort on his part. “Well. It is for us to serve, not to question. Widdershins knows its own.”

  “I’ll…think about it,” I said, backing toward the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get back to work. And I should probably lock up, so…”

  “Of course.” Mr. Quinn took out his handkerchief, ran it over Dr. Whyborne’s chair, where his hair would rest, and tucked it back in his pocket. “We all have our duties to attend to.”

  ~ * ~

  I was still undecided when I returned to the boarding house that evening. Mr. Quinn no doubt meant well with his suggestion, but how could Persephone possibly help when it came to Irene’s disappearance? She lived in the ocean, after all. She might be the chieftess of the ketoi, but that didn’t make her a detective. It only meant her time was far too valuable to waste on my problems.

  Oliver awaited me in the parlor; when he heard what had happened, he was full of concern. Perhaps sensing I wasn’t in the mood for company, he kept his visit short, though he did ask me to dinner the next day.

  Mrs. Yagoda served dinner soon after he left. Once we’d all helped ourselves from
the sideboard, Mrs. Yagoda said grace. As we tucked in, she cleared her throat.

  “The mystery of Miss Vale’s so-called disappearance has been solved,” she said in a tone of decided disapproval.

  I paused with my fork halfway to my mouth. “You’ve heard from the police?”

  “Yes.” Her mouth pressed into a harsh line amidst a network of wrinkles. “It seems Miss Vale had a…friend. One Mr. Burton.”

  My pulse quickened. “Yes—she spoke to him at the theater last night.”

  “Apparently, they were laying plans to elope together. Mr. Burton has vanished as well.”

  My hand tightened on the fork. “He’s gone? Are the police looking for him?”

  “Why would they?”

  “Because Irene wouldn’t elope dressed only in her nightgown!” I exclaimed.

  Mrs. Yagoda’s eyes widened in affront. “Miss Parkhurst, control yourself.”

  My hand shook. I wanted to shout at her, to make her see it was all nonsense. Instead, I lowered my gaze to my plate. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “As you should be.” She settled back in her chair. “Older, wiser, minds than yours have considered the matter. You must accept our judgment.”

  “Of course,” I said to the plate.

  “I am as shocked as anyone to think a woman of such morals could have lived beneath my roof,” she went on, apparently mollified by my surrender. “I will discard her things tomorrow and find a more suitable boarder.”

  I glanced up in time to see the other ladies cast speculative looks amongst themselves. We were all surviving on the salaries of female clerks and secretaries; I suspected few of Irene’s possessions would remain for Mrs. Yagoda to cast out tomorrow.

  Which meant I had to get to her room first.

  With a muffled sob, I clutched my napkin to my eyes. “I’m…I’m sorry,” I burbled from behind the linen. “It’s just such a…such a shock! To think I believed Irene a friend…”

  I let out an inconsolable wail and fled the table. “Let her go, the poor thing,” Mrs. Yagoda said, her words nearly drowned out by the clatter of my shoes on the stairs.

  Once I was safely on the third floor, I lowered the napkin. My stomach complained of its emptiness, and I silently cursed Irene for costing me dinner. But if I’d waited, the other boarders would strip the room, and any chance at finding a clue to her disappearance would be lost.

  Mrs. Yagoda had locked the door, no doubt in hopes of preventing us from stealing anything. Fortunately, Mr. Flaherty had once shown me how to pick the lock to Dr. Whyborne’s office with a hair pin, after Dr. Whyborne had wandered off to some distant storeroom with the key in his pocket and left me no way to retrieve his correspondence to mail. A quick application of his lesson, and I was inside.

  I paused a moment, wondering where to start. The bed had been tidied, no doubt by the maid on Mrs. Yagoda’s orders, but otherwise nothing seemed to have been disturbed. The desk seemed a likely place, so I began with it.

  Nothing, save for letters from Irene’s family. Only dust gathered beneath the bed. It seemed doubtful she’d hide anything under the mattress, since the maid would find it the next time she aired the bed. Irene’s pocketbook sat atop the dresser, but a quick look through it revealed only the things I’d expect any woman to have. I took it anyway; if Irene was found safe, I could return it to her. And if not, I still needed a replacement for the one ruined by the dead squid.

  The only place remaining to look was the dresser. I began opening its drawers, running my hands underneath the frocks and underthings. My search disarranged them from their neat folds, but hopefully anyone else would assume the police had gone through the drawers.

  My fingers encountered something hard at the very back of one drawer, buried beneath Irene’s stockings. I pulled it out, and discovered it to be an object just large enough to fit comfortably into the palm of my hand, wrapped in silk.

  It couldn’t be.

  There came the sound of footsteps on the stairs. I hastily shoved it into my pocket and shut the drawer. Moving as quickly as I could, I relocked her door behind me and let myself into my room.

  As soft voices sounded from the room across the hall, speculating how to get past the locked door, I put the silk-wrapped object on my desk. Hands trembling, I pulled back the cloth, revealing the carved stone inside.

  A summoning stone. Just like the one Persephone had given me.

  Bile coated the back of my throat. The summoning stone had made me feel special. Set apart. It meant Persephone and I were friends. That she wanted to see me, even if she was a chieftess and I was just a secretary.

  But it seemed I wasn’t so special after all.

  So much for my stupid dreams of being kissed. No one was going to kiss me.

  Persephone had never mentioned Irene to me. And Irene had never said anything about knowing the ketoi. Of course, I hadn’t either—if our positions were reversed, no doubt she would have been equally shocked to find a summoning stone in my possession.

  It didn’t matter Persephone hadn’t mentioned Irene to me, or me to Irene. What mattered was that if Persephone knew Irene was missing, she’d want to help find her.

  Mr. Quinn had been right. I had to ask the sea for help.

  Chapter 4

  I sat on the stairs until I was certain everyone else was abed. Of course, Mrs. Yagoda chose that night to gossip with one of the neighbors, and it was nearly midnight by the time I heard her close and lock the door. She rattled around the kitchen for a time, then finally retreated to her own room. I waited for another half hour, giving her enough time to fall asleep, before creeping down the stairs.

  I went as quietly as I could. If Mrs. Yagoda caught me coming downstairs fully dressed at this hour, she’d know I meant to sneak out. She had very stringent ideas about the behavior of young ladies, and instituted a strict curfew. If she caught me breaking it, I’d be turned out for certain.

  Her restrictions had never really bothered me before. Other boarders had come and gone, as they met beaus and got married. A few young men had asked me to dinner or the theater, but never the one I wanted, so I’d declined all invitations.

  I wished I might take Persephone to dinner. Then again, given her mania for waffles, perhaps breakfast would be better. I tried to imagine her at a café, sipping coffee and eating waffles with her rows of shark’s teeth.

  I had the knife from beneath my pillow and removed a lantern from the sitting room. The door creaked when I eased it open. I froze, listening intently, but no sounds came from the direction of Mrs. Yagoda’s bedroom. Breathing a sigh of relief, I slipped out and shut it behind me.

  I pulled my coat more tightly around me and kept my hand on the knife in my pocket. Though I meant to steer far clear of the more unsavory parts of town, I was still a woman alone at night on the street. Dr. Putnam-Barnett’s advice came back to me: “Aim for the eye or the groin. Putting a blade in either of those is guaranteed to dissuade even the most determined man.”

  After an hour’s walk, I finally reached a stretch of beach on the outskirts of Widdershins. The waves rolled and heaved beneath the waning moon. Little flashes of bluish light sparked in them, as though stars had fallen into the sea and become trapped there.

  Papa’s bones lay beneath similar waves, somewhere in the cold waters of the Bering Sea. And those of Oliver’s father, and the rest of the crew. Only wood and sail, along with a few sealed trunks had been recovered from the wreck of the Bedlam. The logbook hadn’t been among them, but Oliver received First Mate Young’s diary and a few belongings washed up inside one of the trunks.

  I hated to think how their last moments must have been filled with pain and fear, the power of the storm overwhelming the ship despite all their efforts to keep her afloat.

  I shook my head and slipped my hand into my pocket. I’d brought my summoning stone as well as Irene’s. I should use mine…but perhaps Irene’s would get Persephone’s attention faster.

  The black stone lay
heavy in my hand. It was magic—it had to be. But other than the strange symbols carved into the surface, it seemed like just an ordinary rock to my senses.

  I threw the stone with all my strength. It vanished into the night, even the splash of its landing concealed by the growl of the waves.

  I shuffled from foot to foot. How long would it take Persephone to respond?

  The breeze off the sea sapped the heat from my bones. I went to sit on a low rock, my arms folded around me for warmth. The sea ballad Papa had so loved came back to me, and I began to first hum, then sing softly.

  “Then three times ‘round went our gallant ship,

  And three times ‘round went she,

  And the third time that she went ‘round

  She sank to the bottom of the sea.”

  Another voice joined mine unexpectedly, far stronger and surer than my questionable singing. Looking up, I saw Persephone striding through the surf toward me, grinning as she sang:

  “Oh the ocean waves may roll,

  And the stormy winds may blow,

  While we poor sailors go skipping aloft

  And the land lubbers lay down below, below, below

  And the land lubbers lay down below.”

  The water shimmered on her orca skin, and her golden jewelry glittered in the moonlight. My mouth went dry at the sight. I rose to my feet, my heart quickened, and I hastily patted my hair into place.

  “Is that what you are, Maggie?” she asked, laughing. She caught me around the waist and spun me; I let out a yelp of shock. “A land lubber?”

  I grabbed my hat to keep it from flying off. I wanted to stay angry with her, for not telling me about Irene. But now that we were face-to-face again, it was hard to hold onto indignation. “First I’m a cuttlefish, now a land lubber?”

  “Cuttlefish are better,” she said, and set me back on my feet. “Such cute little tentacles. I’m glad you used the stone.”

  So the stones didn’t differ in some way from each other. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse.