Erika Swyler - The Book of Speculation

Amos blinked at this revelation. She’d managed to leave him without his knowing. Benno had been watching.

“I will say no more, it would only anger you. Please, get your woman.”

Sleep rumpled and twisting her hair, Evangeline appeared behind Amos. “Hush. I will come.”

They followed the flickering light of Benno’s lamp through the bulrushes and cattails that ran to the water’s edge. Amos held Evangeline’s hand and kept her close, watching her steps as Benno’s light ducked between reeds, vanishing and reappearing, blinking in the wind. How little he knew her. When they reached the riverbank the light stilled.

“I have seen you swim this river,” Benno said. “Do you know anything of this?”

Decay weighted the night, making breathing difficult for the stench of it. Evangeline had swum the river that morning, reveling in its sweetness. The lamp cast a glow over where land met water. The shore shone in a wash of silver and the air buzzed thick with flies. Piled high at the river’s edge were rows upon rows of fish, dead and dying, gills gasping. Their eyes were clouded, sinister opals. She covered her face to block the smell, stumbling from the reek.

“Or this thing. Have you ever seen its like?” Benno crouched to pick something up from the ground. A dark brown stonelike creature with a leathery shell and a tail like a switch. It twisted in his hands, knocking itself from side to side. “Wicked-looking devil, is it not?”

Her stomach lurched. Though larger and more disturbing, it was the same creature she’d found in the salt river in Virginia. “I’ve never seen such a thing before,” she said.

Amos’s arm went around her shoulders and she wondered if he could feel the cold that had rooted in her bones, if he could feel her lie.

“Of course you’ve not.” Benno’s words were heavy and sad. “But they line the banks now. Do you see them? Like demons from the water. You swim here. I have seen you as recent as this very morning,” he said, dropping the strange creature to the sand. Hundreds like it filled the shore, burrowed underneath the dying fish, hidden among the stones.

“The water was clear when I swam,” she said.

Benno’s eyes roamed over Evangeline as if cataloging the parts that made her. His frown snapped into a flashing smile. “Of course. What could you have done? I thought you might have seen something; that is all. I’m sorry to have woken you.” He glanced back at the river. “However, it is certain we must leave this place.”

Amos watched the bodies thrash on the sand. He knew of no reason so many fish would throw themselves to the shore, only that it was a sign. The frantic flapping of gills and the erratic beats of failing hearts ran through him. Bad things awaited in Charlotte, things that could sour a river. They must depart, but if they continued to Charlotte, he could not say they would not be walking toward darkness. It was certain too that something had shifted between Evangeline and Benno, and he needed to shield her from the man who’d been his friend. He thought of the Ten of Swords — the stabbed man.

Benno had called the pointed little creature a devil, and Evangeline understood that she’d brought it to her. She squeezed Amos’s hand, felt the soft skin on his knuckles. It was she who’d fouled the river. She thought of Amos’s hidden cards and her stolen swims, that they might choke under their secrets until they gasped like the fish on the shore. She carried murder within her and it poisoned everything she touched. I am a killer .

“It’s kind of a weird request, but anything you can do would be appreciated.”

I hear her pause, but Liz Reed is the consummate librarian, and dances the line between friend and acquaintance. “I tried to check it myself, but I’m locked out of Grainger’s systems. Janice had my ID removed,” I say.

“Kupferman locked you out?”

“I skipped out on my two weeks and held on to some materials a little longer than I should have.”

Liz does not disappoint. “That’s still rude of her. What do you need?”

“I want to check on something. It’s a riverboat accident, a showboat sort of thing. I’m looking at 1825, New Orleans, when the Mississippi flooded. I’m looking for the name of the boat, shows, survivors — anything you can get.”

“Okay, that’s weirdly specific. Any particular reason?”

“Trying to impress a potential employer,” I say.

“Sanders-Beecher putting you through the paces?”

“Something like that,” I say. She asks if I’ve got a backup plan. “I may travel with my sister for a while. Oh, if you come up with anything call me at the house. My cell is out.”

I’m thanking her when she asks, “Did something happen to Alice McAvoy?”

“No, why?”

“I spoke to her yesterday and she sounded awful. You two are close; has she said what’s going on?”

“Nothing that I know of,” I say. The lie feels square on my tongue. I thank her again, hang up, cross Liz Reed off my list, and move on. Raina at Shoreham and then Elisabeth Booker at Center are next on a list of five — all of whom I’ve helped find books, sat with through conferences, bemoaned budgets with, and commiserated with over the demise of the card catalog. They’re relieved that I’m not still asking for a job. If I’m not looking it preserves the hope that work exists for people like us. An hour later I have a small army searching out Peabodys, and the descendants of Madame Ryzhkova’s granddaughter, Greta Mullins. Tennen, Bonn, Duvel, Trammel, Petrova, Visser — in the end my bizarre family was not so difficult to track. Even in a sea of names a drowning mermaid has a way of standing out.

Soon I’ll have more answers, but right now I know that Alice sounded terrible. And I’m the likely cause.

The lights are on at Frank’s house. They never went off. Eventually the silhouettes moved, Leah first, then Frank much later; part of me hopes she broke whatever’s left of his heart. No one has come in or out, though it’s already midmorning. Alice could be in there with them. There was already a worn sadness to her when her hand touched mine as we leaned against the car.

I try Churchwarry, but there’s heavy static on the line.

The book is open, spine cracked, abused in a way that no one with respect for paper should ever do. It’s not quite a Gutenberg Bible, but something this old is meant to be carefully handled. Held by a bookbinder, sewn and glued. Board, leather, paper pricked to better take ink, scratched by quill, nib, even fingernails. Though it seems impossible to stumble on our past in what amounts to a handwritten journal, it feels right, a satisfying answer to a question I’d always wanted to ask. The book traveled from hand to hand, father to son it seems, until it was lost, surfacing again at Churchwarry’s estate auction.

My family’s drownings passed silently through generations. Was it because we wandered, because our footprints washed away? In the first cold hours spent underwater holding our breath, Enola and I knew we were different. Drowning is in our marrow. Our mother knew she was different. She found Bess Visser’s name and knew that more than just her mother had drowned. In that moment of touching that cursed past, did she feel her own ending, drowning like those before her?

To break a curse you destroy the source. My recourse is to obliterate our history, all evidence that Enola and I are descendants of the extraordinary. The book is the only record of a family I will never know — a mute boy, a mermaid, fortune-tellers — and part of me will be lost with its destruction. Yet it’s an incomplete record. There is no Celine Duvel or Verona Bonn in its pages. My mother’s name belongs there too. Generations of drowning women and disappeared fortune-tellers are absent from its story. This fractured work, this cursed thing, is only part of us, just a beginning.