The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Back in the house I try Churchwarry, but there’s no answer. Next to my keyboard is Legends and Poems of the Baltic, the other book I must return. Why did Mom fill my head with stories of kings under the sea and women who danced men into streams? I log on to my computer to find a short email from Anne Landry at Sanders-Beecher Archive. They’re still reviewing applicants, but would like to schedule a call at my convenience. There are questions about my willingness to move since they lack the capital to fund relocation. I tell her I’ll call in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth. There’s also a message from Blue Point. While they thank me for my interest, the previously listed position in reference has been eliminated due to budget restructuring.

In the middle of my inbox, hidden among the spam, is a message from Raina at Shoreham. She’s found Greta Koenig—rather, Greta Ryzhkova. My hunch was right, only she didn’t bear her mother’s name for long. It seems that her mother remarried, and Greta took her stepfather’s name. A Victor Mullins of New Orleans. In 1826. The Mullins name pings back a glut of hits. But why the remarriage? Katerina Ryzhkova was widowed. I flip through the book, running my fingers along the warped pages. Toward the middle, before the switch in handwriting, there is a delicate drawing of a boat—it looks like a rudimentary prototype of the kind of steamers that once crawled up and down rivers throughout the country.

I look up to see the light still on at the McAvoys’, and Frank and Leah’s silhouettes on their living room couch. This is how it’s always been. I’d thought it had been Leah watching us, but it was me on the other side of the glass, wanting in.

Then I begin the hunt. A hunt for a flood between 1824 and 1826, the kind that might swallow a troupe of traveling performers, perhaps a floating circus. The kind that might have killed enough people to imbue any objects left behind with a spirit of loss deep enough to cause a curse. I know in my heart this is poor research. Wild chases go against the fundamentals of good research. But the book found its way to me, which works against all logic as well.

Hours pass before I discover it. In 1825, the Mississippi River floods, inundating New Orleans. Katerina Ryzhkova remarried in New Orleans. It fits geographically and with the timeline.

I catch sight of a small sketch on the page opposite the little steamer boat. I’d seen it before but it hadn’t seemed important, just another absentminded doodle of a man prone to think through sketching. At the corner of a page, just above a quickly jotted note about oppressive heat and fog, is a delicate brown illustration of a horseshoe crab.



I shut the book and leave the house as quickly as my ankle allows. I need to get into the water, to clear my head. My foot and the stairs make for slow going. The bottom two steps have washed out, but someone installed a pool ladder on the bulkhead, so I’m able to tumble down. On the sand, crabs scramble around my feet and over each other. The tide has come up since the afternoon, hiding the thousands more horseshoes that lurk beneath. They seem to part, making way as I shuffle into the water.

Three deep breaths, in, out, in, out, in, out. One last deep sharp breath down, spreading the ribs wide, stretching each muscle and filling it with air, and then I am in the black relief of night swimming. Below is life, tails switching against shells, above is water, then sky—in the in-between there is only me. I swim farther into the dark.

I open my mouth for just a moment, tasting the salt.

There is a cycle at work. My mother knew her mother drowned. My grandmother must have known the same. They must have feared, like every member of the Wallenda family who takes to the wire knowing the specter of death is a breath of wind away, until the wire becomes a curse. A combination of thought and tragedy makes it so. Binding Charms and Defixione, that bulky text Churchwarry sent, puts the source of curses as the written word, intent manifested through language. Below crab tails smack against shells, conjuring the image of Peabody’s drawing. The boat, too, followed so shortly by the water-damaged pages, as though the sketch itself called a flood. My stomach rolls with a cold undercurrent.

Curse tablets bore the names of their targets, sometimes little more. To name a thing is to set it apart—imbuing it with power, or steering it toward destruction. Bess Visser. Amos. Evangeline. Curse tablets were hidden, buried where they wouldn’t be discovered until long after the charm had done its damage. A discovered tablet could be smashed, breaking the charm, just as burning letters can exorcise old lovers. The book hid itself, through flood, finding homes with people interested in books and old things, people who wouldn’t dare destroy such an interesting piece of history. Until it found its way to me.

It’s ready to be undone.

I let my breath out and sink down to the sand bed, dangling my feet until they touch the smooth top of a carapace. It shoots out from under me, slick, and unknowably old. For the first time in days I feel like smiling, and almost gasp in the salt. By the time I emerge from the water, shivering, dawn has crept up.

I know what to do.





22