Cela wished Death would hurry up already. Her brother, Abel, was due home the next evening, and if he found the woman in the house, there’d be hell to pay.
She’d been damned stupid for agreeing to keep the woman, not that she could fathom what had possessed her to accept Harte Darrigan’s request two nights before. Cela liked the magician well enough—he was one of the few at the theater who bothered to looked her in the eye when he talked to her—and she supposed she did owe him for making Esta that gown of stars behind his back. But she certainly didn’t owe him enough to be putting up with his dope fiend of a mother.
But Harte had always been too slick for his own good. He was like the paste stones she fixed to the performers’ costumes: To the audience, her creations sparkled like they were covered in precious gems—but that was all lights and smoke. Her garments may have been well made, her seams straight and her stitching true, but there was nothing real about the sparkle and shine. Up close, you could tell easy enough that the stones were nothing but polished glass.
Harte was a little like that. The problem was, most people couldn’t see past the shine.
Though she probably shouldn’t think so uncharitably of the dead. She’d heard about what happened at the Brooklyn Bridge earlier that day. He’d attempted some fool trick and ended up jumping to his death instead. Which meant he wouldn’t be coming back for his mother, as he’d told her he would.
Still . . . As much as Darrigan might have been all spit and polish on the surface, like the straight, evenly stitched seams in her costumes, there was something beneath that was sturdy and true. Cela had suspected that much all along, but she knew it for the truth when he’d appeared on her doorstep, cradling the filthy woman like she was the most precious of cargo. She supposed she owed it to him now to honor his last wishes by seeing his mother through to the other side.
Two days ago the woman had been so deep in an opium dream that nothing would rouse her. But it wasn’t long before the opium had worn off and the moaning had begun. The laudanum-laced wine Harte had left had lasted less than a day, but the woman’s pain had lasted far longer. At least she seemed to be peaceful now.
With a sigh, Cela knelt next to her, careful not to get her skirts too dirty on the cellar’s floor. The old woman wasn’t sleeping, as Cela had first thought. Her eyes were glassy, staring into the darkness of the ceiling above, and her chest rose and fell unevenly. There was a wet-sounding rattle in her shallow breaths that confirmed Cela’s suspicions. Harte’s mother would be dead by morning.
Maybe she should have felt worse about that, but she’d promised Harte that she’d look after the old woman and make her comfortable, not that she’d save her. After all, Cela was a seamstress, not a miracle worker, and Harte’s mother—Molly O’Doherty, he’d called her—was far past saving. Anyone could see that.
Still, the woman—no matter how low life had laid her or how much she stank—deserved a bit of comfort in her final moments. Cela took the bowl of clean, warm water she’d brought with her to the cellar and gently mopped the woman’s brow and the crusted spittle around her mouth, but the woman didn’t so much as stir.
As Cela finished cleaning the woman up as well as she could without disturbing her, she heard footsteps at the top of the wooden stairs.
“Cela?” It was Abel, her older brother, who shouldn’t have been home yet. He was a Pullman porter on the New York Central line, and he should have been on his way back from Chicago, not standing in their stairwell.
“That you, Abe?” she called, easing herself up from the floor and smoothing her hair back from her face. The dampness of the cellar was surely making it start to curl up around her temples. “I thought your train wasn’t due until tomorrow?”
“Switched with someone for an earlier berth.” She heard him start down the steps. “What’re you doing down there?”
“I’m coming up now.” She grabbed a jar of peaches—an excuse for being down in the cellar—and started up the steps before he could come all the way down. “I was just getting some fruit for tonight’s dinner.”
Above her, Abe was still dressed in his uniform. His eyes were ringed with fatigue—probably from taking a back-to-back shift to get home—but he was smiling at her with their father’s smile.
Abel Johnson Sr. had been a tall, wiry man with the build of someone who used his hands for a living. He’d been killed in the summer of 1900, when the city had erupted in riots after Arthur Harris had been arrested for stabbing some white man who’d turned out to be a plainclothes policeman. Her father didn’t have anything to do with it, but that hadn’t stopped him from being caught up in the hate and the fury that had swept through the city during those hot months.
Some days Cela thought she could hardly remember her father’s voice or the sound of his laugh, as though he was already fading from her memory. But it helped that Abe wore her father’s smile almost every day.
Times like this, it struck her just how much her brother resembled her father. Same tall, wiry build. Same high forehead and square chin. Same lines of worry and exhaustion etched into his too-young face from the long hours of working on the rail lines. But he wasn’t exactly the spitting image of his namesake. The deep-set eyes that were a warm chestnut brown flecked with gold, and the red undertones of his skin—those features were from their mother. Cela’s own skin was a good bit darker, more like the burnished brown of her father’s.
Abel’s expression brightened at her mention of food. “You making me something good?”
She frowned. Because she’d been too wrapped up in caring for the old woman to go to the market, she didn’t have anything but the jar of peaches in her hand. “Considering that I wasn’t planning on you being home until tomorrow night? You’ll have to settle for porridge with peaches, same as what I was planning on making for myself.”
His expression fell, and he looked so forlorn that she had to hold back her laugh. She gathered up her skirts and took a few more steps. “Oh, don’t look so—”
Before she could finish, a soft moaning came from the darkness of the cellar.
Abe went completely still. “You hear that?”
“What?” Cela asked, inwardly cursing herself and the old woman just the same. “I didn’t hear nothing at all.” She took another step up toward where Abel was waiting. But the stupid old woman let out another moan, which had Abel’s expression bunching. Cela pretended that she didn’t hear it. “You know this old building . . . probably just a rat or something.”
Abel started to descend the narrow staircase. “Rats don’t make that kind of noise.”
“Abe,” she called, but he already had the lamp out of her hand and was pushing past her. She closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable outburst, and when it came, she gave herself—and Abel—a moment before trudging back to the cellar.
“What the hell is going on, Cela?” he asked, crouched over the woman in the corner. The material of his navy porter’s uniform was pulled tight across his shoulders, and he had his nose tucked into his shirt. She couldn’t blame him—the woman stank. There was nothing for it.