Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1) by Nick Wisseman (popular books to read .TXT) 📗

her hand out of the bag, causing one of the other passengers to give her a queer look. Suddenly mindful that she shouldn’t be drawing attention to herself—that if everything she’d heard was true, she was the target of a cult dedicated to Jack the Ripper, or worse, the Ripper himself—she smiled at the passenger and looked back out the window. Once the man’s gaze was elsewhere, she peered into the bag again.

The cockroach had the telltale sickle shapes, but it moved feebly: it must have been trapped amongst Augie’s debris since that morning. There was nothing about the insect that suggested the frenzied swarms she’d encountered earlier. No chittering, no compulsion to scramble madly toward her. This was just a bug. Insignificant and near death—a fate she hastened by goring the roach with one of Augie’s pencils.

When she was sure the pest was dead, she used a pamphlet to scoop up the little body and flick it out the window, watching as the disgusting creature fell into the canal that connected the North Inlet to the Central Lagoon. Good riddance.

But killing the cockroach brought her no closer to finding Augie, and she knew her twin was in trouble. She couldn’t quite feel it—they only pretended to have that type of connection—yet why else would he have disappeared like that? And the blood by his bag ... No, he needed her help, and she needed him.

After the train reversed directions again and traveled back around the foreign and domestic buildings, she got off at the 59th Street stop and checked on Dob in the Children’s Building daycare. He was fine, but his mother had yet to claim him.

“She’s bigger than you,” he said when Neva asked for a description. “A lot bigger. With yellow hair.” More specific details would have been nice, but hopefully the likeness to her son would be clear. Neva gave Dob a final hug and began her search of Augie’s favorite haunts.

It was tense work.

In Horticulture, on the other side of one of the inner court’s extensive floral displays, she noticed a bespectacled man studying her with what seemed like unseemly interest. Was he a member of the White Chapel Club? The thought caused her to leave the Fair through the 62nd Street gate. Outside, she surveyed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, set up just beyond the official borders because of the planning committee’s foolish denial of Bill’s application for a site on Exposition grounds. But as Annie Oakley took centerstage in the arena, Neva spied a man in drab colors snooping between the jampacked stands. Was he a plainclothesman tasked by Wiley to find her?

She crossed back into the Fair and hurried through the Fishery Building’s aquarium, barely registering its one hundred forty thousand gallons of Atlantic saltwater filled with every sea creature imaginable. Her trip through the Palace of Fine Arts’ galleries of precious paintings, etchings, and sculptures proved no calmer. Everywhere she went, she saw a man seemingly on the hunt for something, in uniform and out. She even encountered a tourist whose tall hat and long coat evoked sketchings of Jack the Ripper.

The rest of the afternoon played out in similar fashion: brisk walking, frequent glances over her shoulder, and no sign of Augie (or Dob’s mother). Her rashes ached, and when they didn’t ache, they itched.

Exhausted and famished, Neva boarded the Elevated Railroad again and took it to the other end of the Fair. There she ate a hurried dinner in a café affording a view of the South Pond and its full-scale replicas of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. Then she headed to Anthropology, scanning its outdoor exhibits—the Indian Villages, the Yucatan Ruins, and the Cliff Dwellers, with its artificial mountain—in vain. Finally, she entered the Anthropology Building itself.

At the Fair’s Congress on Africa, one of many such conferences held at the Palace of Fine Arts and the downtown Art Institute, Frederick Douglass and other colored speakers had pointed out that the Anthropology Building’s exhibits appeared to be arranged in perceived order of sophistication, with the works of darker races on the outskirts and the output of the palest peoples at the center. Neva shared these misgivings, but she still enjoyed wandering the building’s halls. So did Augie. With any luck, he was sheltering here somewhere, gazing at an Oriental trinket or studying an Egyptian headdress.

But it wasn’t to be. Her systematic circuit through Anthropology did nothing but remind her how distasteful she found the prison display’s visual “history of punishment and torture.”

Neva bypassed the guillotine demonstration—which was executing pumpkins today—by cutting back through the Polynesian exhibit. As on previous trips, a necklace in the rearmost case caught her eye. The piece was of simple construction: a leather cord threaded through a few lightly worked cowry shells, golden in color but completely unassuming when laid beside the jewelry of long-dead kings. There was something about the cowry necklace, though, a quietness that drew Neva in. Before she realized what she was doing, her hands pressed against the case’s glass panel.

She wasn’t the only person so bewitched. Next to her sat a similarly rapt Civil War veteran, dressed in the faded uniform of a Northern colonel and perched on the edge of a wheeled chair, one foot braced against the floor while the opposite pantleg hung empty. His hair was red and bushy, his mustache flecked with white, and his hands ...

His hands were each marred by two purple, adjoined sickle shapes.

Chapter Five

NEVA’S RASHES STARTED to throb again, as if they were excited to find their like on another person. At least her gloves and clothing concealed them. But there was no hiding the bites on her face.

Maybe that was for the best.

“Beautiful piece,” she murmured, pointing at the necklace.

He glanced at her, grunted, and returned to the cowry shells, which he’d drawn with remarkable accuracy—the open page in his sketchbook featured a visual transcription of the necklace’s every detail.

“Clever work,” Neva said, with genuine amazement. “That’s clearer