She didn’t reply, though she’d stopped flailing. Gingerly, like she might be made of ribbon candy, he let go. Esmerelda turned. At least she’d altered the look on his face: smug to wary.
She looked down—the bottom of the gown was covered in mud. Oscar would not be pleased. Esmerelda looked back at her more immediate problem. “I’m with Oscar Bodette’s Traveling Extravaganza. We had a show earlier, over the bridge in Brooklyn. The gown . . . it goes with a different act. I, um . . . it’s more theatrical than singing.”
“What’s more theatrical than singing on a stage?”
“It’s different. Certain venues and crowds lend themselves to more creative acts.”
“You mean like juggling . . . doing a jig, acrobatics?” He smiled. It caught her eye. He had pretty teeth and a full set. “I can’t see doing none of it dressed like that.”
In an attempt to convince him, she blurted out the truth. “It’s a soothsayer act.”
“Soothsayer?” He tugged the cap from his head and ruffled his fingers through his dark hair. “Like a mind reader?”
She felt a blush rise over the rouge on her cheeks. “Yes. I speak to the dead, or I have on Tuesdays and Saturdays at Albee’s in Brooklyn. New Faces in Queens before that.” His expression remained muddled. “It’s one of a dozen acts we do. Like you said, dancing a jig, dramatic readings, and such.” She rolled her eyes. “For a person photographing a fancy club, you’re more naïve than Cora.”
“Who’s—” He stopped, his stare still examining. “Never mind her name. Tell me yours again.”
“Esmerelda . . . Moon.” She pointed to the one overhead.
“Esme.”
“What?”
“Less of a mouthful. Suits you.”
“Suits me? You don’t even know me.” Esmerelda brushed at the gown. It felt like an effort to straighten her dignity—currently covered in gold, rouge, and mud. Herself having been taken for a common trollop.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But at least I’m making an effort, and not with much help from you. So you truly don’t speak to the dead? And you’re not a . . . well, a woman whose living might be assumed from her wardrobe?”
Esmerelda folded her arms, the wide sleeves drooping, beads dangling. “Aren’t you as quick as Wall Street ticker tape.” She raised an arm in the direction Oscar had gone. “People will jump at any chance to visit with their departed loved ones.” She glanced at the ground. “Or so I’ve learned.”
“If only that could be.” He squinted at her. “But you don’t like doing it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because everything about you changed when you said it—like if you had a choice, you’d rather not be a soothsayer.”
She thought it a queer statement, like anyone sat around mulling over the option of being a soothsayer. “I’m not . . .” She looked at the mud. Then her head bobbed back up. “It might not be the most honorable job, but I prefer it to being a common . . .” Esmerelda was unsure how she’d become the focus of the discussion. “What’s wrong with your friends, anyway? If you want to speak of dishonorable behavior.”
“Ah, they’re just Hell’s Kitchen riffraff. More like a gang than mates. They’d been asking to tag along to this part of town. And they did think you were . . .”
Esmerelda’s jaw slacked.
“I’m not defending them.” He hoisted an arm in the direction they’d gone. “But all the boys are a little drunk and dizzy, yet tight in the mind these days.”
“Why’s that?”
“Everyone’s got the call. Ralph’s going next week. We’re all going eventually.”
“Going where?” Esmerelda stepped back, thinking he meant the influenza that had taken so many, Sally’s sister, Tilly; and Esmerelda’s own mother. “You’re not sick, are you?”
“No. Nothing you might live from.”
She blinked, never having heard it put that way before.
“The war, Esme. We’re all being called sooner or later. They’re making an army out of us boys—even Mr. Benjamin Hupp. Surely you see a newspaper now and again, hear talk in your travels.”
Esmerelda shook her head, far preferring a book when she could get her hands on one.
“You don’t know about the Lusitania? German subs are sinking ships every day, coming closer to this side of the ocean.”
Of course she knew about the luxury liner sinking, but she didn’t know about other boats.
“Krauts have already taken Belgium, they’re working on France. Mr. Wilson has no choice. We’re already in a war over there.”
“‘Over There.’” The song clicked. Esmerelda’s fingers caught around the hair ribbon, which came undone. She felt stupid and at a loss. “I didn’t know.”
“I guess lots of women don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” He paused, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Most women don’t like to talk of war or know about it. It’s men who’ll do all the fightin’.”
“It’s men who have all the power and rule. Seems you’ll be doing nothing but lying in the bed you’ve made for yourselves.” She looked in the direction the drunk idiots had gone.
“I see your point.”
She looked back with surprise.
“Anyway, none of it is an excuse, but add some whiskey to the fact and rash behavior won’t be far behind. You . . . you’re all right, then?”
She nodded and hoisted the loose shoulder of the gown into place. Other than having the wits scared out of her, she was fine.
“So you’re really singing on Hupp’s stage tonight?”
She’d nearly forgotten. “Not if I don’t get inside.” But Esmerelda didn’t move. In the spotlight of a gas lamp, he bedazzled her—no regalia needed. Wavy dark hair and eyes like an incoming storm. But it was more than what Oscar would call “stage presence.” An itch of familiarity invaded her—like Esmerelda had known him all her short life. “You . . . you’ve never been to New England, have you?”
“New England?”
“Massachusetts.”
He shook his head.
“Well, um . . . thank you, Mr. . . . ?”
“Seaborn. Phineas Seaborn. But Phin to my friends.”
“Thank you for your assistance . . . Phin,” she said carefully. “If it weren’t for you, I might have ended up like Desdemona.”
“Desdemona?”
“She was murdered.”
“Was she?” He stared as if Esmerelda had been an eyewitness.
“Onstage. I might not know newspapers, but I know a little Shakespeare. It’s a popular dramatic scene. Jimmie and I have played it a few times.” Esmerelda shrugged softly. “Desdemona is murdered by her jealous lover.”
“Then it’s even better I turned up when I did. We wouldn’t have wanted it to come to that.”
Esmerelda’s shoes had sunk into mud, but it was their twined gazes that held her still. “It is indeed.”
The two were bound to silence, maybe time. The moment felt wavy, like the rings from a rock skipped over a pond. The buzz inside Hupp’s club echoed, not steps away, but from an entire world away. Even odder, the young man replied in kind.
“This is a curious thing for a fellow to say, a stranger to think—standing in an alley, talking to a girl I didn’t know this morning.” He came closer, and Esmerelda only felt . . . safe. “Know that if I could prevent it, I’d never let harm come to you, Esme. Not in a hundred years. I promise you that.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
Surrey, Massachusetts
Present Day
Aubrey sat on the bed, a journal open on a lap desk. Word by word, voices rose from the living room. The ones she wrote slowed. Eavesdropping wasn’t intentional, but as Grace’s soft tone hardened, then Pete’s boomed, it couldn’t be helped. Aubrey tapped the pen against the bound notebook. She bit down on her lip and cringed. The people who could comprehend Pete’s circumstances were a short list, and G
race Hathaway happened to be on it. Aubrey’s earlier text was meant as a nudge toward a friendly reunion, nothing more. She continued to listen, her gaze weaving over the other items on the bed: a fabric-covered cardboard box and a laptop, some papers she’d printed out earlier.
The front door slammed, and Pete came up the stairs and into his parents’ bedroom. “You shouldn’t have invited her here, Mom.”
“I just thought—”
“You thought what? Grace would pop in after everything that’s happened, and we’d say, ‘Gosh, aren’t we two crazy idiots? Guess Mom knew best. Marry me, darling.’”
She tossed the journal aside and offered Pete a deadpan look. “No. I thought you’d at least take her to lunch before declaring your undying love.”
“This isn’t one of your 1940s, cue-the-romantic-music classics. I don’t get the girl or the happy-ever-after ending.”
“Not with that doomed attitude, you won’t.”
“My attitude is a reasonable reaction to ‘Here, Pete! Say hi to the alive-and-well girl whose heart you broke, in addition to a full-on visit with one you loved and—’”
“Don’t say it.”
“Why? Is there an alternative interpretation?” He turned for the hall.
Having witnessed twenty-plus years of unyielding visits to his past, Aubrey didn’t doubt what Pete experienced—that he’d killed a beautiful girl named Esme. Of course, what she heard now spilled over into more of an in-the-moment rant.
“Pete, I’m sorry.” Her plea was loud and placating enough for him to turn back. “I didn’t think . . . or I thought too fast. I wasn’t going for the ‘big picture,’” she said, air quoting her words. “I only thought it wouldn’t be the worst thing if you and Grace reconnected on some level. I get that you were better friends than anything else.”
Pete heaved a sigh, tapping his knuckles on the door molding. “Look, the only way happily ever after works out is if Esme’s ghost turns up, forgives me, and we end up in a remake, The Ghost and Mr. Muir.”
“Esme’s ghost?” He’d never broached the subject—ghosts and Esme were two different talking points. “Why would you say that?”
“Say what?”
“Esme’s ghost. Your other life has nothing to do with spectral encounters. It’s two divided worlds, and your father and I have always viewed it as a huge part of your frustration. Has something changed?”
And now he looked ambivalent. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Aubrey scrambled off the bed, faster than she’d moved in months. But when your child—even an adult one—stood near fire, reaction was instinct. “Esme. You encountered her spirit?”
Pete held up the gauze-covered hand. “I wasn’t that unsteady in the bathroom. I was shocked, frustration expounded tenfold.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’m not sure what it was—a woman’s voice, a presence. It’s never happened before, nothing like that, nothing so connected to her.”
“And you what, decided that not telling your father or me was the way to go?”
“I was trying to figure it out. As you know, the threshold for ‘never happened before’ is damn high in this house.”
He wasn’t wrong. Pete’s knowledge of Esme was the vision he relived. Years ago, he’d concluded the reason he never encountered her spirit was anger. Who’d visit the person responsible for their death? Unless, perhaps, it was to haunt them. “Was her presence surrounded by anger? Is that how you cut your hand?”
“No. Not hardly.” He stared at his bandaged palm. “I’m just foggy about what I’m dealing with in terms of a specter.”
“But you’re positive it was an apparition?” The look Pete offered, it was as if Aubrey asked if the sky was blue. “Sorry. Dumb question. But what makes you say the ghost was Esme?”
“A feeling.” He was quicker with this reply, which, while vague, told Aubrey something. Only a specter connected directly to you could elicit emotion, intense personal feelings of love or loss. She knew this from encountering thousands of specters that belonged to other people, and one that belonged to her—Zeke Dublin.
“She, uh . . . she spoke to me.”
“Did she?”
“Yes. After all these years, it was very enlightening. She said, ‘If Paris is France . . .’”
“‘If Paris is France’?”
“Yeah. In the bathroom. Then when we were at breakfast.”
“You heard her a second time?”
“Yes. Outside, on the deck. Esme said, ‘If Paris is France, then Coney Island, between June and September, is the World.’ Then she vanished.”
Aubrey sat on the edge of the bed and Pete plopped down next to her.
“For years I’ve imagined all the hellish things Esme might say if I encountered her—on this side of life or the next.” He sighed, and Aubrey listened. “Last year, I was pinned in a bunker in Mosel, a hundred yards away from a bomb blast that took out three blocks and dozens of people. I was positive I wasn’t getting out of that day alive.”
“Pete! You never said a word to us.”
“The point is I did what any person does in a situation like that. I thought of the people I loved. I thought of you and Pa.”
Aubrey smiled small. “You thought of Esme.”
“I did. Insane as that would sound to anyone beyond these walls.” Pete’s gaze moved around the bedroom. “But in that bloody ditch, I’d never been more ready, more prepared to face her.”
His words made Aubrey’s heart ache, that her son was so bold about death in the present, fearing his other life more. “I can’t imagine how terrifying it was, from every perspective.”
“In the bunker, with body parts landing on me, explosions coming closer, I envisioned Esme’s wrath. But even then, all I could think of was how much I loved her. When I walked away from the bunker unscathed, I paused in the middle of what was still dangerous real estate. Then I hustled the hell out of there. If only for a split second, I dreaded this life more than that one.” Pete rubbed the thumb of one hand over the bloodied gauze on the other. “All that, and yet I remain too terrified to seek any real answers. How’s that hitting on your crazy meter?”
“You could have called. We could have talked it through.”
“To what end?”
It was Aubrey’s turn to sigh; she was well aware of how long they’d wandered the maze of Pete’s mind.
“Then after all these years,” he said, “today, in my own bathroom, in my own house, Esme does more than turn up dead in my other life. She’s present in this one. And what do I get from her? Not confrontational words or a specter on the attack. Nothing that might make sense.” He laughed, which sent a chill up Aubrey’s spine. “I get a riddle about Paris and Coney Island.” Pete stood, slapping his hands against his sides. “Teaser text. It’s about the only thing I’ve never considered.”
“It might have sounded cryptic in a twenty-first-century moment, but maybe you’re miss—” Aubrey cocked her head; the phrase was familiar. “‘If Paris is France’ . . . wait. Esme didn’t say that.”
“Oh, she did. Believe me. Along with putting a bullet in her, those words are also now burned in my memory. Maybe we should start a second scrapbook.”
“Just hang on a second.” Aubrey pulled her laptop toward her, typing furiously. “There!” She pointed to the screen. “‘If Paris is France, then Coney Island, between June and September, is the World.’”
“What are you . . . ?” He leaned in, staring at the results.
“Esme didn’t say it. Well, not originally. George Tilyou did.” Aubrey quickly read through one Google result. “Tilyou was the entrepreneur who built Steeplechase Park, and eventually Coney Island. He coined the phrase.”
“Around World War I?”
“Late nineteenth century. But it stuck, enough to index more than a million Google entries.”
“Huh. I never heard it before this morning.” He glanced at his mother. “Why would she say that to me?”
“A better question is wha
t does it mean between the two of you? After all this time, all these years, if Esme is making herself known, there must be a reason.”
“And what are the chances of that being good news versus bad?”
Aubrey started to reply. She wanted to reassure her son. She ran her hand over her pockmarked arm. That and the scar on her chin were compliments of evil specters. Aubrey couldn’t promise Pete what had happened that morning was a positive thing. But she did as any good mother would and offered the most supportive answer possible. “Why don’t we keep an open mind? Not make assumptions.”
Pete looked at his watch. “Well, in a few hours, it won’t matter. I’ll be on a flight to Iceland.”
“You can’t be serious. After this?” Aubrey pointed to the laptop screen as if it contained a computer-generated image of the mysterious Esme.
“Whatever it was, whatever it might be . . . I’m still in the ‘I’d prefer not to know’ camp. Let it go.”
She closed out the Google search. “So no Esme, and no Grace.”
“Mom, you know how difficult it is to fit normal inside my life—or lives. I’ve accepted the fact that what you have with Pa is not in the plan for me.”
“Don’t say that, Pete. You don’t know.”
“Yeah. I do. I know what I felt for Grace was special. I also know it’s not anything close to what I feel . . . felt for . . .” And the thought hung there like it had for years—impossible to fit into the context of rational thinking.
“Her.” Aubrey provided this as if Esme were the girl Pete had loved and lost last year, instead of in another life.
“Did it ever occur to you that my existence in this life is punishment for the last one? Maybe this morning was a reminder. In case I thought I was beating the odds by living on the edge of death.”
Aubrey was too short on energy to offer a meaningful reply. Pete’s take on life was difficult to argue. She had so few facts and none that could be used in his defense—a World War I medal bearing his initials. Blood tests from years ago that showed traces of coal, part of an absurd trial tetanus vaccine, as well as antibodies to a strain of influenza eradicated a century before. His role in the Great War was common knowledge by the time Pete was twelve. All of it came before Esme, his horrific and methodical reliving of having killed her. Pete’s telling was so vivid it often felt like a weighty secret Aubrey harbored about her son.
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