The Shadow Men (Hidden Cities #4)

The Shadow Men (Hidden Cities #4) Page 10

Veronica turned to look directly at him. “Breathe, Mr. Banks,” she said. “I’ll do all I can.”

“Why Copley Square?” Jim asked. “Are Jenny and Holly still there?”

“Nowhere near. But you know that.”

“Then we should be going where they are!”

“You understand, Jim. You’re just trying hard not to.”

“Then fucking make me understand!”

“Jim!” Trix said from the backseat, but fear and anger had Jim now, and such emotions combined brought out the worst in people.

“Learn patience, Jim,” Veronica said, as if she’d known what he was just thinking. “I need to see where they were before they went, even if you do not. I need to … taste the air. It will help me pin down their location.”

Jim scoffed but said nothing. Tears pressed against his eyes and throat, and he did his best to swallow them down. They were as useless as drops in a rainstorm. “But you’ll help me find them?” he said finally.

“I have every intention of setting you on the right path.”

Jim nodded, and a tear streaked down his right cheek. Veronica saw it. He didn’t know how he knew that, but the air in the car seemed to soften. But perhaps that was just him. The trials of driving through a busy Boston possessed him for a while, and each time he looked in the mirror he saw Trix, light splaying across her bright hair, eyes sad, face shadowed with confusion and grief. We’ve both got to hold it together, he thought. And so far, she’s done more than I have to find Holly and Jenny.

“Thank you for helping,” he said softly, glancing across at the old woman. “And I’m sorry about …” He shrugged.

“Oh! A thank-you. Well, that’s an even better start.”

It took another ten minutes to wend their way toward Copley Square. They passed Boston Common, rolling along Beacon Street, then cut left along Clarendon, finding a parking space opposite the First Baptist Church.

“It’s Borders, on the corner,” Veronica said. She was breathing more heavily now, and Jim noticed that her skin had taken on a sickly pallor.

“Are you okay, Miss Braden?” Trix asked, leaning over from the backseat.

“I’m fine,” the old lady said. She took a few breaths, seeming to gather herself, and then offered Jim a small smile. “When there’s a trauma to the city, I suffer a little myself.”

“A trauma to the city?” he asked.

“I’ll explain when we’re there.”

Jim glanced at his watch. Almost ten p.m. “It’ll be closing in a minute.”

“Not tonight,” Veronica said. “Tonight it will remain open until almost ten-fifteen.” She checked the side mirror, then opened the door, standing up with an audible groan.

“Jim,” Trix said as soon as Veronica let the door swing shut, “you’ve got to give her a chance. You must! Believe me, this is the only thing—”

“We’re here now,” he said. “This is where they came. And the things she said about Holly, those fairy books …” He shook his head. “She couldn’t know that.”

“So you’ll give her a chance?”

“It’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?” It came out harsher than he’d intended, but when he and Trix got out of the car he smiled at her, and she nodded. She knew him so well, and even with everything that was happening, she’d know that Jim would struggle to hold on to reason. Though an artist, he was also a pragmatist, an atheist, and a skeptic when it came to the supernatural or anything associated with it.

“She’ll amaze you,” Trix said. “Come on. She’s going.”

They followed Veronica along the street, and Jim was surprised when Trix clasped his hand. He took great comfort from the contact, and as he realized it was because she was afraid, he acknowledged his own fear as well.

Entering the shop, breathing in warmth and the familiar smell of new books, he wondered what they would find.

It was almost as if he had walked this way before. He had, of course, many times in the past. He and Jenny were both big readers, though their tastes differed—she loved thrillers, historical novels, and real-life stories, while he preferred biographies and science fiction. When they came into town they often spent an hour in one bookstore or another, enjoying watching Holly browse the books, buying a couple here and there, maybe progressing to the café for coffee and a shortbread, and sitting to check out their purchases. But this time was different. Veronica had said only a few sentences about Holly and Jenny being here, but the picture conjured in his mind was complete. He was walking in his missing family’s footsteps.

Breathing deeply, Jim moved past the counter and approached the children’s section.

Trix had let go of his hand as they walked through the front doors. Perhaps she’d felt the tension growing in him, or sensed that his mind wasn’t quite in the present as he tried to relive that moment, following Jenny and Holly’s path.

“Here,” Veronica said. She’d gone ahead, and as if following a guide of some kind, Jim and Trix had stayed a few steps behind. Now he saw her swaying slightly, and he reached out hesitantly, not wanting to touch her but worried that she was about to fall. If she drops dead here, now, just what the fuck will that mean? But she didn’t fall, and when she looked back at them he saw a strength in her eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. Something was affecting her, challenging her. But she was fighting back.

“I’m not sure,” Trix said. A strange thing to say.

“Do you feel it, Jim?” Veronica asked.

He frowned and looked around at the book stacks—the splash of colors and textures, words and names jumping out at him, the spines of children’s books hinting at the stories inside, and books faced out tempting with elaborate and enticing covers. “No,” he said, not understanding what she meant, but even as he closed his mouth again he did feel something. He felt …

Someone passed him by, but there was no one there.

The front door closed softly, and he heard the distant jangle of keys, but when he looked back it stood open, warm-air curtain shimmering his view of the rain-slicked sidewalk outside.

It’s all so wrong! he thought, and a nightmare he used to have when he was young struck him for the first time in decades. It used to plague him when he was sick, and he’d never been able to describe it, not even to himself. It was an impression of terrible space, so wide, so endless, that it lessened him where he stood at its heart, smothered him, crushed him down with enormity and possibility. And now it impacted again, because everything he saw and felt around him seemed, for a moment, an infinity away.

He gasped in air that was too far away to breathe. Book titles on the shelving before him blurred, and he closed his eyes to the cold, staggering thought, They mean something else! He stepped back and Trix stopped him, hands on his waist and her chin resting against his shoulder. He heard her breathing hard, felt her heart thudding against his back.

“What is it?” she asked Veronica, voice loud in Jim’s ear.

He opened his eyes again, and the woman was staring at a bookshelf. It was four rows above the floor, a selection of hardback books for children—atlases, natural-history books, histories—and as she slowly lifted her hand and moved closer, Jim knew what she was doing.

“This one,” she said. She touched the spine of a book called People and Places. “It fell, but not here. It only fell there.”

“Where?” Jim asked. Anger flared and faded again just as quickly, because now, through the fear, he only felt a desperate need to know. “Please tell me, where?”

“Where they went,” Veronica said. “They slipped through into another Boston, and this is where it happened. Here.” She tapped the book’s spine and looked around again, ignoring an inquiring look from a shop attendant. “It’s all closed up again now, though. The In-Between has receded; the wound is mended. But there are always scars.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Jim said.

Trix held him tighter. “I think I’m starting to.”

Veronica froze, and it was that sudden stillness that made Jim realize just how alive she seemed. Even while sitting beside him in the car she had been a formidable presence—a person whose gravity was greater than most—and he imagined her being the sort who could command a room upon entry, if she so desired. But for that brief moment she became more immobile than he believed any living person could.

“Closing time,” the shop assistant said.

“Yes,” Veronica said, turning and breezing past Jim and Trix. “Good. It’s gone now. Come with me.”

“Where to?” Jim asked, pleased to leave that place. They were here and then they weren’t, he thought, and there was something cold about that shop, and distant, and he wondered why the assistant didn’t seem to feel it. She smiled indulgently as they exited the store, and he heard the jangle of keys as she closed and locked the door behind them.

“Somewhere special,” Veronica said. “I can tell you more in the car. Hurry.”

As the rain stopped, a siren wailed in the distance. They walked back to the car. It took Jim a couple of seconds to identify the sensation rising inside him.

It was hope.

They slipped through, Trix thought. She was sitting in the backseat again, heart thudding, and as Veronica lowered herself gently into the front passenger seat, Trix said, “They’re somewhere else.”

“Yes, dear,” the woman replied. Jim was walking around the front of the car to the driver’s side, and for an unsettling moment Trix felt complicit in something of which she had no knowledge.

“But you can help us find them?” she whispered.

“I can help you.”

Jim opened the door and climbed in. He slipped the keys into the ignition and placed his hands on the wheel, ten to two. “So will you start telling me now?”

“I will,” Veronica said. “Now that I know for sure, I will.”

“Good. Where to?”

“The North End,” Veronica said. “Home.”

“We’re going to your house?” Trix asked.

“Like I said, dear. Somewhere special.”

Trix stared from the window and watched Boston passing them by, and thought about who they were with and where they were going. For some reason she’d never imagined the Oracle of Boston even having a home. Her grandmother had told her that story when she was barely into her teens, and the Oracle had taken on the hue of someone mystical and mysterious, one of the city’s own shadows, a breath of Boston’s unique air, a ghost. The story had been remarkable and felt very real, and Trix had always believed it was this, more than a thousand childhood dreams and a love of books, that had given her the open mind she had grown up with. She’d toyed with various prescriptive religions before settling into the comfortable embrace of her own beliefs. She’d once heard a ghost, and remembered the way sadness had settled around her for a brief, shattering moment as the wraith walked by. And now here she was in a shiny new Mercedes with the woman who knew Boston, and whom Boston knew.

“A long time ago, there was a man called Thomas McGee,” Veronica said. Her voice had changed somewhat, as if she used different tones and inflections to relay stories, and Trix felt herself settling in to listen. “He was the Oracle at the end of the nineteenth century,” the older woman continued. “The first Irish Oracle, in fact, since the Boston Brahmins had dominated up until then.”

Trix frowned. “Brahmin” was such an outmoded word to describe Boston’s first families and their English Protestant ancestors. She wondered how old Veronica really was, and how long she had been the Oracle.

“By all accounts McGee was a proud man,” Veronica continued, “an older Irishman who’d seen his countrymen struggling toward equality against a background of bigotry and resentment. Since the middle of that century they’d filled most of the unskilled-labor jobs in the city, household domestics and the like, but as the years went on they became the backbone of Boston’s industrial boom. Yet they were still looked down upon. They lived in squalor in the North End and other areas. The all-Irish neighborhoods housed whole families living in single rooms. McGee grew up through that, and after he took on the mantle of Oracle he became more determined than ever to ensure that his people lived better lives in the future.”

“But as Oracle, weren’t all Boston’s people his people?” Trix asked. Maybe she had a rose-tinted view of what being Oracle meant; maybe she’d set Veronica on a pedestal higher than the position justified. Just because it was a little beyond and outside the perception of most normal people, did that mean that being Oracle implied perfection?

“Of course,” Veronica said. “But McGee … well, no one becomes Oracle without maintaining hold of his or her earlier experiences. We are a product of our experiences after all. He was as human as I, and I’m as human as you, dear.”

“So what happened?” Jim asked. He was driving quickly, paying close attention to the road, hands gripping the wheel tightly. He’d moved the rearview mirror back to its original position, and Trix had to lean to the left to catch sight of him now. But he was no longer glancing back to see if she was all right. His focus was elsewhere.

“The longer he remained Oracle, the more he witnessed events in the city around him, the more determined McGee became to ensure that the Oracle of Boston was always Irish.”

“Are you?” Trix asked.

“No,” Veronica said. “My father was English, my mother Italian. I do have some Irish in me, many generations old. But if Thomas McGee were alive today, he’d view me as his …”