Lair of Dreams
Page 172

“Elijah,” Addie said, naming the desire.
And then, like magic, he was there, shadowed on the edge of the cornfield with the old church steeple rising in the distance.
“Free me, Addie,” he whispered.
There was a reason Addie couldn’t do this before, but she couldn’t think of it now, not with her lover so close and her need so strong.
“Will you do that for me, Addie? Will you?”
“Yes,” Addie whispered. Her face was wet in the moonlight. “Anything. Anything.”
In her sleep, Adelaide Proctor rose from her bed and walked to her dressing table. She opened the cabinet and took out her music box. She wound the key at the back and smiled as the tiny French dancing girl twirled round and round to the sweetly tinkling bells of a song that had been popular before the Civil War. Addie remembered her last dance with Elijah, when he took her hand and promenaded her down the center. Oh, how handsome he was, smiling across the aisle at her as they waited for the other couples to take their turn at the reel. How impatiently she waited for the excuse to hold his hand once more.
Addie passed into the night-shadowed parlor. The man in the stovepipe hat sat in the Morris chair. His broken, dirt-caked fingernails clicked against the chair’s wooden arms, one, two, three, one, two, three. He nodded at Adelaide.
In her head, she heard Elijah: “Free me, my love.”
A sleepwalking Adelaide Proctor left her apartment carrying the box in her arms. The hall lights flickered as she passed. At the end of the hall was a garbage chute, which led down into the incinerator. She tugged down the handle. Its metal maw gaped open, hungry. Adelaide removed the iron box’s lid. One by one, she tossed in the contents—first the finger bone, then the tooth and the lock of hair. She rubbed her thumb across the tintype of Elijah, reluctant to part with it even in sleep. Finally, she threw it in, listening as it clattered down the chute.
Humming the music-box tune, Adelaide slipped back into her moon-drenched apartment, stumbling past the mewling cats circling her ankles anxiously and into her bed, where she could embrace that perfect world she’d been promised on the other side of sleep. And then she was dreaming of soldiers and of light streaming through the trees like electric rain, and the man in the stovepipe hat was laughing as they screamed, and everywhere, everywhere was death.
New York is a city short on patience, cleanliness, clement weather, and citizens who hold faint opinions. It is not a city short of people trying to make a career of being famous, no matter what the opportunity. The ribbon-cutting ceremony exists for just this sort of thing. Mr. Ziegfeld had recruited New York City’s most famous Diviner and her beau to cut the ribbon on his dazzling new Ziegfeld Theatre, trumpeting the Follies’ new revue, Diviners Fever. Mayor Jimmy Walker was on hand, as well as some of the Follies’ biggest stars. So was a smug-looking T. S. Woodhouse.
“Hiya, Sam,” he said, sauntering up. He licked the tip of his pencil. “Beautiful day for a ribbon cutting. Why the long face? Say, you and your fianceé aren’t on the outs, are you?”
“Why would we be?” Sam said. He didn’t trust T. S. Woodhouse a bit.
“Oh, I don’t know. Young love is restless love.” Woodhouse smiled. It was not a warm smile. “Say, how’d a fella like you end up with a dame like Evie O’Neill?”
“Whaddaya mean by that?” Sam said. He matched Woody’s smile, but his eyes were hard.
“I figured her for riding in cars with pretty boys from Harvard or oil barons from Texas with a lotta money and only a little sense.”
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets and glared. “Guess Lamb Chop doesn’t go for that after all.”
Woodhouse held Sam’s gaze. “I suppose you’re right. Say, there’s a pretty interesting rumor going around about you and your Lamb Chop,” he said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“That the whole romance was cooked up by WGI’s publicity hounds.”
Sam had had enough. “Get lost, Woody. If you were anybody worth knowing, you’d be higher up on the masthead and wouldn’t have to make chump change writing gossip about Sheiks and Shebas for the Daily. Radio’s gonna put you news boys ten feet under soon enough, anyway. You might wanna hustle yourself a new job.”
Woodhouse’s self-congratulatory smile turned cold. “That so? What do you think I should be writing about instead? Bootleggers and bookies? Or maybe secret government programs, like Project Buffalo?”
Sam felt squeezed of air. “Whaddaya know about Project Buffalo?”