Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

He turned onto a nearly deserted road, the sun beating down on his black hat and coat. As he continued, he paid attention to his surroundings, as Hochman had taught him to do. Listen, and you’ll hear a story being told, one you may need to know. Upon hearing a rustle behind him, Eddie stopped, as if to adjust the wrappings on his hand, taking the opportunity to peer behind him. He spied the young man who had lingered at the funeral, who now ducked behind a stable. He wondered if this was the man Beck had noticed in the muck near the river, and if he had found himself a murderer. Instead of continuing on, Eddie walked back toward the stable, going around the far side. He picked up a branch from a chestnut tree and approached his stalker, surprising him from behind, pushing him up against the shingled wall, the branch across his throat.

“Get off !” the younger man cried, choking out the words. He was only twenty-one or twenty-two, clearly unused to a fight. Eddie had no trouble keeping him in check, the branch pressed harder against his neck. “I’ve done nothing to you!” the young man managed to croak.

This man was a stranger to Eddie. “Why are you following me?”

“For Hannah. I think I know what happened to her.”

Eddie dropped the branch away. The young man bent over, coughing, his hand clutching his neck.

“How would you know anything?” Eddie asked when the other man had begun to recover.

“We were in love. We planned to marry. She wasn’t ready to tell her father, so we kept it to ourselves.”

This was the fellow R had mentioned when Eddie interviewed her, the man Hannah had loved. His name was Aaron Samuels, and he’d been a tailor, but no more.

“I can’t go back to my life. Not with what I know and what I let her do. We thought we could do what the unions couldn’t. She was meeting with someone that morning, a representative for the owners. She had proof they were locking workers into the sewing rooms. I’d helped her, God forgive me. I removed one of the locked doorknobs from the tenth floor—it was on the door that led to the fire escape—and she had it with her. If they refused to change the conditions, she would do her best to go to the city representative for the Lower East Side, Alfred E. Smith, and beg for his help.” Samuels broke down. He chided himself for his own idiocy and neglect. “I should have gone, but she thought she’d have a better chance of getting the boss’s people to show up. They’d consider her less of a threat. Because she was young and pretty and a girl, I believed they’d think she was harmless.”

“You know nothing about the person responsible?”

Samuels became agitated, and his dark eyes flashed. “If I did, don’t you think I would have found him?”

They began to walk together toward the El train, both deep in thought. There were factories along the route, and some vacant areas in which crickets had begun to call.

“Her sister said she ran off to get something to eat before work,” Eddie recalled.

“She was meeting him then. Before work. She didn’t want Ella to know.”

“So it was somewhere close by.”

“The alley behind Greene Street.”

Eddie’s brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

“I didn’t think it mattered,” Aaron Samuels said. “It was only an alley.”

“Anything more?”

“She told me not to worry. She always carried a spool of blue thread with her for luck.”

Eddie had returned the gold locket to Mr. Weiss but had asked to keep Hannah’s other possessions. Hochman always said what a person carried revealed more about his soul than his affiliations with any philosophy or religion. When Eddie came home from the funeral, he arranged Hannah’s belongings on his worktable. First the blue coat, then the hairpins and comb, and last the black buttons. He studied them, but he saw nothing unusual. Certainly, there was something beyond his vision and his understanding. He took out his camera, and though he struggled to work with his splint, he managed by tying his hand, splint and all, directly to the camera with a length of rope.

Each object looked ordinary enough through his lens. Once the plates had been developed and the prints readied, he tacked them to the wall to study them while they were still wet. The blue coat was in surprisingly good condition, girlish and hopeful, with its round collar and four gold buttons. The comb and pins made him recall that Ella had told him her sister combed her hair a hundred strokes each night. He turned his attention to the close-up photograph of the extra buttons, for they seemed an anomaly, too large and mannish for a young woman’s clothing. Each had a star in the middle with holes at the points in which there were bits of frayed black thread. He looked more closely at these bits of uneven thread. Then, quite suddenly, he understood that Hannah had torn them from her attacker’s coat.

He felt the swell of excitement he’d experienced as a runner for Hochman when he began to puzzle out the whereabouts of a missing husband or fiancé. He searched the cluttered tabletop for his magnifying glass, then set to work examining his photographs from the day of the fire. When the room became dim, he lit a lantern and several candles. He sifted through photographs he’d taken until he came upon a carriage pulled by two fine black horses. He brought the candle closer, though it dripped wax upon the print. He hadn’t looked carefully enough when he first developed the image. He’d had so many from that day, and his eyes had burned with cinders. Now he recognized the dark-haired man gazing out from behind the velvet curtains of the carriage as Harry Block. He was the attorney for several owners of garment factories near Washington Square, so it was not out of the question for him to be in the area on the day of the fire. Upon closer inspection, Eddie saw that the man holding on to the rear of the carriage was carrying a thick bully stick, meant to do grave damage if anyone in the despairing mob rushed those making their escape.

The man holding the club was the one who’d chased Eddie from the scene on that day. The same man who had tried to rob him outside McSorley’s. A man who might have used this same bully stick to pull himself out of the mud after he’d rid himself of a young girl’s body, who might have been convinced an old hermit knew of his terrible deeds.

Eddie took his watch from his jacket and placed it on the table, running a thumb down the crack in the glass. He thought of the look on Block’s face when he’d revealed the watch that had once belonged to him.

Eddie went to gather the prints from the library gala once more. A chill went through him when he came to the last photograph of the night. He studied the man who had attempted to rob him, the same individual who rode upon the carriage on the day of the fire, the one who was posted in the shadows of the front hall of the Blocks’ town house, avoiding the gold-toned light the Tiffany chandelier threw onto the richly decorated walls. When Eddie leaned closer, he saw what he hadn’t noticed before. Two black buttons were missing from his coat.

He should have gone back to Brooklyn, to address the matters of his own life and interests, returning for Coralie. Instead he took up his old post on the corner of Sixty-second Street. Something had taken hold of him, the urge to make things right. He barely knew himself or his desires. He had no obligations, and yet he was weighted down with a sense of responsibility. He felt naked without his camera, but he had come to this address for one reason alone. If he waited long enough, he was certain the fellow in the photographs who worked for Block would appear. It was morning, and the streets were busy, therefore Eddie didn’t notice when a young woman came up behind him, having been out walking with her dogs, two large black poodles. The dogs alerted Eddie to the woman’s presence, for they ambled up to him with a sort of haughty familiarity. The larger of the two nudged him.