Something Strange and Deadly (Something Strange and Deadly #1)(24)

Once Mama left my room I rubbed at my eyes, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and set to work. I needed to find every important phrase or word in Elijah’s letters. I needed something to offer Joseph Boyer. Something to force him to take me seriously.

But I’d barely read two sentences when I was interrupted.

“Miss Fitt?” Mary called from downstairs. “I need help with dinner?”

I sighed and hauled myself off the bed. Life still needed living even if there was something strange and deadly going on in Philadelphia.

I met Mary at the bottom of the stairs, and we walked through the hall to the kitchen.

Our kitchen was the one room Mama had not splurged on to redecorate since, of course, no one but our family would ever see it. The floor was worn down into familiar paths. The white paint had lately turned to a gray brown, and the iron stove in the back of the room often smoked up the house. Our icebox was really of no use in the summer—it had a hole from which the sawdust had been slowly leaking for years—and that was why we needed almost daily market trips during the warmer months.

Mary pointed at an assortment of vegetables laid out on a long, wooden table. “You said to make a stew, but there ain’t any meat.”

“I know, but we have to make do.” The party had eaten up our budgeted food allowance, and I’d had to lighten our diets for the rest of the month to compensate.

I took a wide knife and moved to the table. “I’ll take the vegetables. You get the water boiling.”

I set to chopping cabbage. The clack, clack of the knife was soothing, and soon my thoughts drifted.

Clarence—why had he lied about Elijah? And why did he insist upon my secrecy but then constantly divulge more? It was as if he played at some game of intrigue but had yet to learn the rules or get the knack.

The thought tickled my brain—I had heard that phrase spoken before, but by whom? And when?

I stared sightlessly at the cabbage, and a vague memory emerged in my mind.

An argument. Between Father and... and a dark-haired man.

I’d been only a child, but I could distinctly remember the man’s shouts— “We will live like kings!”—and the slamming doors that sent shudders through the house.

“I promise you, Clay,” Father had screamed, “no good shall come of this!”

A dark-haired visitor named Clay and a game of intrigue...

I sliced the last of the cabbage and turned to ask Mary, who peeled potatoes beside the stove.

But no. She wouldn’t remember; she was only a year older than me, and she’d only just started working as our scullery maid before Father’s death.

It was back when my family had a whole houseful of servants. But one by one, all of them had left except for old Jeremy and young Mary. I had always assumed the other servants had found better jobs with more popular families, but perhaps it was merely better jobs with less crazy employers.

When Father’s business and city council campaign fell, his sanity fell too. Father claimed it was sabotage, that his enemies sought to destroy him; but I never knew if his paranoid ravings were true. Either way, a few months after Father was forced to withdraw from the election, he died.

But things would look up again. Soon. Somehow I’d make it right again—I just had to.

I huffed out a heavy breath and moved to the celery. When I finished dicing it and the stew pot had water bubbling, I gave Mary directions for the rest of the meal and then I dashed upstairs to my room.

It was late afternoon, and I had to use what remained of the day’s sunlight to read Elijah’s letters.

I settled onto my bed and started with the first letter. For the beginning of Elijah’s travels in 1873, he’d been in London. He had scoured ancient texts before traveling to a bookseller’s in Paris, and so his letters had focused mostly on these old books. Next, he’d explored sunny Egypt (sending few letters), and then in July of 1875, he’d traveled to New York City.

In each of his letters I underlined his scratchy words to note the parts I thought strange. Such as, the old man in the pyramid or Honorius. Who were they? Authors of the ancient texts, I supposed, but still no one familiar.

In France, Elijah kept referring to some soldier, but who he meant, I couldn’t even begin to guess. And in one of his letters from Egypt, Elijah had mentioned “missing pages,” but he never named the text or why it mattered.

And what the blazes was the Gas Ring? In a letter he’d sent from New York, he mentioned, “The Gas Ring will see its errors, and Father will be most proud.”

Except Father was dead—would be proud was what he’d meant. Elijah never really got used to referring to Father in the past tense.

I mopped my brow with a handkerchief and set the letter in the growing stack of marked pages. The moist summer heat was suffocating in the room. And reading these letters one after the other made all the strange references more obvious than when I’d read them with months in between.

I skimmed the next letter in my hand; it had been sent several months ago from New York.

... The missing pages from Cairo are in a museum here, but the curators are not cooperative. These are such exciting times, my dear sister! I have begun experiments which I believe will impress you. Unfortunately, they have impressed others as well, and they are not the sort of people I want around....

People. He’d attracted negative attention from people—plural. Necromancer... or necromancers.