The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Mrs. Tyghe lifted her head to survey the wreckage once more, and to search for her son. It was then that she spied, resting against the remains of a mounting block, the twisted filigree of the weather vane that had once sat proudly on the roof of the doctor’s home. Any small hope she had was consumed by fury.

“You’ve killed him,” she said. “You killed him sure as you stand here. Never have I met such cursed people. You brought this.” She nodded at Evangeline. “You come here, saying you tell the future, things only the Lord would know, then lie up in my bed and bring the flood. You took my son,” she shouted and turned to Amos. “You Devil, take you and your child. Leave here or I’ll find who still lives and let them set their guns on you. Get.”

Evangeline clutched Bess.

On the outskirts of what had been Charlotte, the menagerie’s wagons were waterlogged yet functional, the llama and pig had been lost, but the horses remained dry, safe atop the hill past Sugar Creek. They packed in haste. Peabody insisted that distance and time would remedy their misfortunes, though he found the words difficult to believe. Before the sun hit its peak they rolled onward.

“North,” Peabody told them. “I find I am done with the South. Philadelphia,” he said. “Philadelphia will welcome us.”

Evangeline knew his words were empty. Looking over the destruction and at the strange peacefulness of her child’s quiet face, she agreed with Mrs. Tyghe. Never had there been two such cursed beings.





27

JULY 23RD–JULY 24TH


We flee the rain, clinging to the library’s walls. Blue security lights fix us flat like a photograph, burning everything away: Doyle, ink and skin; Enola, bones and a ravenous stare. She hasn’t spoken to him since the car. Alice’s key trips into the lock and turns with a satisfying crunch. The alarm squeals the moment the door opens. I find the keypad, punching in the numbers my hand has memorized the same way it knows to hold a pen or turn a page. The air is musky with paper, dust, and Grainger’s unique redolence of disrepair. I move for the lights.

“No worries, man. I got it,” says Doyle. He trots over to circulation and puts his hand to a desk lamp. One at a time, the fluorescents stutter on with percussive hisses, bathing books in cold green light. It’s an uncanny thing to watch, but Doyle merely shakes out his hands when he’s finished, as though this is as mundane as tying his shoes. Enola walks ahead, a visible shiver working its way up her spine.

“Little Bird,” Doyle calls. She flips him the middle finger and disappears upstairs, heading toward the whaling archive. He starts to go after her but I stop him with a hand on his elbow.

“Don’t. Let her go.” Enola can sulk effortlessly for days. She once refused to speak to me when I brought Lisa Tamsen home after a shift at the Pump House. She shouted that Lisa smelled like old fry oil. I got seven days of silent treatment before she admitted that Lisa’s sister had filled her locker with dissected grasshoppers from the biology lab. She’d glared at me as if I should have known what I’d done. I know what Doyle’s done. “What do you know about us? I mean everything.”

“Pretty much what I said.” He shrugs and searches for somewhere to sit. He props his feet on one of the lounge chairs in periodicals and they land with a squish. “My friend collected circus stories so he’d have shit to talk about. He was big on accidents. Like, I bet you didn’t know that they lynched an elephant in Tennessee, right?”

No. I did not. The wind has started clawing at the windows. Lights flicker.

“Yeah, this circus elephant snapped and killed somebody—trampled or strangled, I don’t remember—so the town decides to put it down, but they can’t figure how. They wind up using a crane to hang it. Anyway. He used to talk about train wrecks, fires, people breaking their necks on the high wire, trapeze stuff. Sometimes I think he was just waiting to see if I’d electrocute myself. I told him it doesn’t work that way.” He doesn’t elaborate on how exactly it does work. “So, we’re down somewhere around Atlanta and it’s so unbelievably hot, and we’d just spent all day putting up tents. I guess I said something about wishing we had a dunk tank, and that starts him on a jag about mermaids. He says there are these women that pop up on the circuit every once in a while, they can hold their breath for an insanely long time and swim like they’re half fish. They’ve been around forever. It’s one family and they all look the same—black hair, and so skinny you could break them. Everybody takes them on, no matter what show, since a woman like that brings in cash like crazy, because you’re watching the impossible, the actual impossible.” He looks at me. Impossible meeting impossible. “The whole time I’m listening for the catch. His stories always had catches.”

“They die.”

“Yeah,” he says. “They drown. Hardly any of them ever make it past thirty.”

“Did you ask him how he knew about the women?”

“No. Dave had this way of picking up stories. I figure most of them were bullshit. I mean, drowning mermaids?”