Marsh’s bemused look turned to a scowl as Mira read the final two sentences. “What’s in there?”
She drew out a photograph and offered it to Marsh. He snatched the picture from her hand. The image showed a hand loosely clutching a bright metallic object, roughly cylindrical and maybe eight or ten inches long. It appeared to have several gearlike dials on its exterior, as well as a short type of funnel extending from the top.
“The alembic—Grey has it!”
Marsh looked up and stared at Mira. From inside the box, she had picked up a small black velvet bag with gold drawstrings pulled tight. She cradled it in her hands as she stared back at him, her eyes wide in anticipation.
“It’s heavy,” she whispered.
“Here!” he hissed at her. His outstretched fingers wriggled uncontrollably, motioning her to hand it over. “Careful.”
Marsh set it down as gently as if he thought the bag itself were about to disintegrate. His fingers pulled at the strings until they came loose, and he slid his hand inside the bag and drew the golden object out into the light. Rapturous delight crumbled into utter despair in the second or two that it took his mind to grasp what he was seeing.
His gaze shot to the photograph and then back to the distorted lump of gold upon the desk before him. The funnel was still there, and he could make out the shape of one of the prominent dials on the alembic’s side. But the thing itself had been melted down, collapsing and rehardening into a shapeless mass. All traces of its alchemical markings, the secrets to its proper use, obliterated.
“No! He couldn’t have!” Marsh grabbed the golden mass off the desktop. He turned around, unable to bear the looks on the faces of Mira and Jerome, watching him suffer this ultimate failure. He was rewarded by his own incomprehensible likeness, glaring back from a mirror on the wall.
“This is not possible!” His arm whipped around in a furious blur, and then the melted alembic hurtled from his hand. It struck the center of the mirror and dropped to the floor. A few shards fell, but most of the mirror hung in place, a spiderweb of cracked glass that now held the seething, fractured reflection of Jotham Marsh. “Dead. With my own hands—I will see him dead!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FIRST AND FOREMOST, I’d like to thank my wife, Cathy, not only for being my first reader but for all the help and support she provides every step of the way.
I’m very grateful for my editor, Sean Desmond, whose insight and good judgment helped shape this book and bring it to a satisfying conclusion. I’d also like to thank my publisher, Molly Stern, as well as all the people at Crown whose efforts have contributed to this series including: Julie Cepler, Ellen Folan, Meagan Stacey, Annie Chagnot, Christopher Brand, Lauren Dong, Stephanie Knapp, and the sharp-eyed Maureen Sugden.
At William Morris Endeavor, many thanks to Erin Malone and Suzanne Gluck for their never-ending faith and support, as well as Cathryn Summerhayes and Tracy Fisher.
A book of this type requires a significant amount of historical research, and I’d be hard pressed to recount every source. However, I often turned to Edward H. Elwell’s 1876 Portland and Vicinity along with various documents and photographs on the Maine Memory Network at www.mainememory.net. The character of Chief Jefferson was inspired in part from material found in The Life of John W. Johnson on the very informative www.nedoba.org website.
This story features a fictitious final manuscript by Professor Eben Norton Horsford referencing Norse runes at Portland, Maine. With regard to the professor’s actual theories on Viking explorations in New England, I’m indebted to his other existing works, as well as Rasmus B. Anderson’s The Norsemen in America, and Gloria Polizotti Greis’s wonderful article, “Vikings on the Charles or, the Strange Sage of Dighton Rock, Norumbega, and Rumford Double-Acting Baking Powder.”
To the extent that my descriptions of the Boston Athenaeum are at all accurate, I credit that institution’s publication: The Athenaeum Centenary. Any and all errors in portraying the building’s layout are entirely my own.
The 1775 bombardment of Portland by Capt. Mowat is described by William Willis in his The History of Portland from 1632 to 1864. However, I have made alterations to that work to suit my needs, including fictional references to Thomas Webster. Similarly, I made certain abridgments and omissions to Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal 1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” as necessary for the flow of the story.
Like Mowat’s attack, the collapse of the Munjoy Hill Reservoir was another real tragedy suffered by the city of Portland. Four people died as the result of a flaw in the reservoir, and I meant no disrespect to their memories by reconstructing the events of the collapse in a much more dramatic fashion. Details of the collapse were gleaned from various newspaper accounts as well as John R. Freeman’s “The Bursting of the Distributing-Reservoir at Portland, Maine, August 6, 1893” in: Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies, Volume 13, 1894.
In addition to my personal experiences on Katahdin, I used a variety of sources to re-create what a trip up the mountain may have been like in the late nineteenth century, including Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s 1849 newspaper account of her journey, as well as the later words of Percival Proctor Baxter. To the latter, I am, like all Mainers, deeply grateful for the continuing gift of Baxter State Park and Katahdin.
Start reading Kieran Shields’s debut novel,
The Truth of All Things
Available from Broadway Books wherever books are sold.
1
At the sound of footsteps in the alley, Maggie Keene dimmed the gas lamp and sidled up to the room’s only window. She eased the curtains aside, her fingers barely touching the paper-thin material for fear it might tear and crumble. The gap between two neighboring tenement houses allowed a slice of moonlight to pierce the narrow passageway below. A man in a brown derby hurried past, stepping over the remains of a smashed crate. The splintered boards lay scattered on the ground like animal bones bleached a ghastly white by long exposure.
Maggie cupped a hand against the glass and peered in the other direction. There was still no sign of John. Her eyes drifted past the lights of the Grand Trunk Railway Station, down toward the waterfront of Portland, Maine. The harbor was a dark canvas, interrupted only by a scattering of ships’ lamps bobbing on the tide. She smiled at a faint memory: fireflies hovering over a field on a summer night. She clung to the image for a few seconds until the distant lights began to blur. The laudanum mixture made her feel remote and empty. It threatened to lull her to sleep until a familiar pain twisted in her gut. A vague, unformed prayer sped through her mind, begging God to let her be all right.
She reached for the small brown medicine bottle on the nightstand. Against the light of the gas jet, Maggie saw that it was almost empty, even though John had given it to her only yesterday. It helped the cramps, but she worried that she’d be doubled over again when she woke, the same as most mornings that week. She sat on the edge of the bed and gazed around the room, searching for a distraction from the pain. The place bordered on spare, but it was clean, with a sitting area, a fireplace, and even a private water closet. The only thing she missed was a clock.
John had promised to be back no later than midnight. Maggie knew he’d return, since he paid for the room. He’d even left behind his precious notebook, the one he was always patting his coat for, making sure it was safe in his pocket. The desire to peek inside it washed over her, but she let that thought tumble back into the deep. Even if she could undo the book’s locked clasp, she had never been to school and struggled with even simple passages from a child’s primer. Another cramp snaked its way through her gut. She drained the last of the little brown bottle, then poured a glass of water to rinse the taste from her mouth.
Maggie wished John would hurry up and get back. Then he could finally show her what he’d been hiding. He would reveal to her the truth of all things; that was how he’d phrased it. Then they would toast his shattering success. Just Joh
n puffing himself up, of course, but the thought still made her smile. It would be nice to celebrate something more than turning out a drunk stiff’s pockets and finding loose change. She reached for the black hat she’d bought that day and looked at her reflection in the window. It was impossible to tell from the faint image staring back, but she knew she was paler than usual.
The sound of a step on the outside stairs stirred her back to the moment. There was the quick ascent of boots, and she met him at the door as the knob twisted.
“I was starting to wonder,” she said. “Everything all right?”
“Everything is”—he struggled for several seconds to produce the right word—“perfect.”
He had these moments of silent effort, and Maggie had already learned to act as if she didn’t notice the awkward pauses. John brought her forward onto the landing. He slipped into the room and extinguished the light. Maggie heard him fumbling in the dark before he reappeared and led her down the stairs
“So where are we going anyways?”
“Patience, my dear. You’ll see … soon enough.”
“Always such a mystery with you.”
He smiled. “Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep … but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye … at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead … shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
“What are you on about? Better not start preaching at me.”
He gave a chuckle. “Just a bit to start you on the way.”
Maggie’s mind was drifting into the haze of the laudanum; she didn’t take any notice of how thin and raspy his laugh sounded. It held no warmth or humor and was instantly swallowed up by the night air. She stumbled on the uneven ground and then felt John’s grip on her arm as he guided her into the darkness.
Deputy Marshal Archie Lean stood in the Portland Company’s cavernous machine shop. He wasn’t quite as trim as when he’d first joined the police a decade ago, but he still retained the sturdy build developed in his youthful days as a boxer and rugby football player. He doffed his hat and tugged on a handful of sandy hair, as if he could somehow forcibly extract an explanation from his spinning mind. Lean pulled out his notebook and glanced at his earlier jottings under the heading of 6-14-92. Halfway down the page, he caught sight of two lines of poetry that he didn’t recall writing: “She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years.” He crossed out the lines. Lean needed to focus his thoughts, so he lit a cigarette, his fourth in the hour since he’d first seen the body. Maybe he could make it the rest of the day without another. His wife hated the smell on him, but he knew that Emma wouldn’t mind once she heard what he’d seen tonight.
Dr. Steig had stepped out a few minutes earlier, and Lean was now alone with the woman’s body for the first time. The wooden floor planks had been pried up and removed, exposing a roughly circular patch of dark earth about eight feet in diameter upon which the body now lay. A pitchfork stood before him, plunged into the dirt. Two of the prongs ran straight through the young woman’s neck, pinning her to the ground. She was on her back, arms out to the sides, her legs spread apart. A burned-out lump of candle tallow sat just below her right foot. She still wore her long black skirt, dark hose just visible at the ankles, and black leather shoes. Her white blouse, black coat, and several other garments had been removed and stacked neatly several yards away. Although she was naked from the waist up, that had not been immediately apparent at a distance. Two long cuts crisscrossed her chest. Blood, drying darkly, covered nearly all her torso, though her arms were a ghostly white. Her right arm was severed at the wrist, a pool of blood where the missing hand should be.
The deputy was no stranger to bodies that had met a violent end. They were mostly men, older ones who had lived out a decent portion of their allotted years. At least it seemed that way, since they typically led hard, unforgiving lives that aged them prematurely and sped them on to their ends. Doubtless, Maggie Keene was on a similar road that would have robbed her of any final traces of hope and innocence in a short time, but earlier that night she had been young and alive.
Lean noted a fifteen-ton Cleveland crane overhead. The machine was suspended above, resting on rails on either side of the room so it could move heavy steel pieces and equipment the length of the building. The crane’s great hook held a chain from which a massive circular gear dangled at eye level. The large iron cog would soon help drive some powerful engine across great distances, but now it hung motionless and silent.
Facing him, scrawled along the side of the gear, was a series of chalk letters: KIA K’TABALDAMWOGAN PAIOMWIJI. It was too long to be any sort of worker’s note for some special component for the rail car they were building. He supposed it was either foreign or perhaps some sort of code. The letters were printed in his notebook already. He took a deep drag and let the cigarette smoke linger in his lungs a few seconds more as he prepared for another inspection of the body, hoping to notice something new and telling. Soon Mayor Ingraham would arrive, and Lean would be called upon to explain what steps had been taken, what he made of the scene, and the plan for apprehending the murderer. He could answer the first question.
As one of Portland’s three deputy marshals, Lean was in a small minority of citizens with a telephone in his home. After receiving the call, he had hurried down to meet the first patrolman who’d answered the watchman’s frantic whistle. Other officers had since swept through the building, but Lean had kept them away from the body. He’d ordered the first patrolman to stand guard over the watchman inside the latter’s shack, quarantining the only two known witnesses to the horrific details of the body. The dozen or so other buildings that made up the Portland Company’s rail-car manufacturing grounds had been searched as well. He’d used the telephone in the company office to speak with the marshal and then sent word to the station to call in every available patrolman. Almost every one of Portland’s three dozen police officers was now out on foot, searching for signs of the killer.
He looked down at the body once more. The passage of time since Lean had first viewed the corpse did nothing to alleviate the unexpected despair he’d felt when he first stood over the young woman’s body and her face had still been warm to the touch. Even that last hint of life had since been stolen away. Now the woman’s soul was one more hour removed from this world. The wide, unknowing look on her face remained, and the senseless horror of it all weighed on Lean. He fought down the urge to yank away the pitchfork still planted in her neck.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KIERAN SHIELDS is the author of Grey and Lean’s first adventure together, The Truth of All Things. He lives along the Maine coast with his wife and two children.
A Study in Revenge Page 40
