The New York Public Library, that grand beaux arts queen of books, presides over Fifth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second streets with a majesty few buildings can match. At exactly eleven o’clock in the morning, Evie arrived at the bottom of the grand marble steps, confident that she would find just what she needed to break open the case of the Pentacle Killer, and that she would find it in roughly a half hour, give or take. She’d pestered Detective Malloy for what he knew about John Hobbes, which wasn’t much, but he did tell her that the man was hanged, he believed, sometime in the summer of 1876.
“Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun? Ba-da-bum-bum, la-la-la-la. Ain’t we got fun?” she sang as she passed one of the pair of sculpted stone lions guarding the entrance. She gave its right paw a pat. “Nice kitty,” she said, and went inside. She was directed up three flights of winding stairs into a large, wood-paneled room crammed with bookcases. A librarian whose brass nameplate identified him as a Mr. J. Martin looked up from a copy of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. “May I help you?”
“Pos-i-tute-ly!” Evie beamed. “I have to get the goods on a murderer for my uncle, Dr. William Fitzgerald of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”
Evie waited while Mr. Martin furrowed his brow, thinking. “I can’t say that I have.”
“Oh,” Evie said, deflated. “Well, then. What can you tell me about a man named John Hobbes who went to trial for murder in 1876? Oh, and could you be a doll and make it fast? There’s a swell sale over at B. Altman, and I want to get there before the crowd.”
“I’m a librarian, not an oracle,” Mr. Martin said. He offered her a scrap of paper and a pencil. “Could you write down the name, please?”
Evie scribbled John Hobbes, murderer, and 1876 on the paper and slid it back. Mr. Martin disappeared for a bit, then returned with two stacks of newspapers bound on a wooden rod, which he placed on the desk in front of Evie. There had to be a week’s worth of work for her in those two volumes. She wouldn’t be shopping that day. Or possibly ever.
“All of this?” Evie said.
“Oh, no,” Mr. Martin said.
“Thank heavens.”
“I’ll be back with the others in a moment.”
“Others?”
“Yes. All fourteen.”
At half past six Evie staggered back into the museum. She clomped into the library, past the table where Will, Jericho, and Sam sat working, tossed her scarf to the floor, and, with a heavy sigh, collapsed onto the velvet settee, her cloche still on her head. “I’m exhausted.”
“I thought you went to the library,” Uncle Will said.
Evie cut her eyes at Will, who didn’t look up from his book. “Why do you think I’m so exhausted? If you’d like to know anything at all about this city in 1876, please raise your hand. No show of hands? Pos-i-tute-ly shocking.” Evie bunched a pillow into a corner of the settee and rested her face against it. “There is a hideous invention called the Dewey Decimal System. And you have to look up your topic in books and newspapers. Pages upon pages upon pages…”
Uncle Will frowned. “Didn’t they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?”
“No. But I can recite ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while making martinis.”
“I weep for the future.”
“There’s where the martinis come in.” Evie yawned and stretched. “I thought research would be more glamorous, somehow. I’d give the librarian a secret code word and he’d give me the one book I needed and whisper the necessary page numbers. Like a speakeasy. With books.”
“I don’t see any books,” Uncle Will said warily.
“Got it all right here,” Evie touched her head. “And here,” she said, patting her pocketbook.
“You stole books from the New York Public Library?” Will’s voice rose in alarm.
“O ye of little faith, Unc. I took notes.” Evie drew a stenographer’s notebook from her cluttered bag.
Uncle Will held out a hand. “May I see them?”
Evie clutched them to her chest. “Nothing doing. I’ve lost hours of my precious youth I’ll never get back, and I never made it to B. Altman. I’m playing radio announcer, here.” Evie lay on the settee with her feet propped on the back and flipped pages till she found the one she needed. “Naughty John, born John Hobbes, raised in Brooklyn, New York, at the Mother Nova Orphanage, where he was left at the age of nine. A troubled youth, he ran away twice, finally succeeding when he was fifteen. He shows up in police records again at age twenty-nine, when a lady accused him of doping her up and trying to have his way with her—what a bad, bad boy!” Evie waggled her eyebrows, and Sam laughed. “However, the lady in question was a prostitute, and the case was dismissed. Poor bunny.” Evie riffled through to another page. “He worked in a foundry, where he was told to beat it when they caught him using company iron to make his own goods. He showed up again in 1865 for peddling dope to returning Union soldiers. In 1871, he worked for an embalmer—that’s a real undertaker, not a bootlegger. He set up a profitable side business selling cadavers to medical schools. At some point, he reinvented himself as a Spiritualist, running séances at Knowles’ End, a ritzy mansion uptown on the Hudson. Ida Knowles—who owned the joint—ran out of dough and had to sell it to a lady”—Evie traced her finger to the spot she needed—“named Mary White. Naughty John’s companion, who was a wealthy widow and medium who got pretty chummy with Ida after Ida’s mother and father died. That Ida was a real tomato who was not hitting on all sixes….”
“Beg your pardon?” Will said.
“She was pretty gullible,” Sam explained.
“Because she started spending all her clams on séances with Mary and John. Anyway, the chin music was—”
“The what?” Will asked.
“Gossip,” Sam said.
“That John Hobbes kept a lot of dope around, and these Spiritualist meetings should’ve been called ‘spirits meetings’ because everybody was pretty half seas over on some kind of drugged plonk, and what they got up to would’ve made every Blue Nose and Mrs. Grundy from here to Topeka reach for her smelling salts.”
Will held out his hand. “May I, please?”
“Suit yourself.” Evie handed over her notes, as well as several newspaper articles, which Will regarded with an expression of alarm.
“How did you get these out of the library?”
Evie shrugged. “I’ll take them back tomorrow and tell them I’m awfully sorry for thinking they were my Daily News.”
“Does your mother know you’ve a burgeoning criminal mind?”
“That’s why she sent me to you.”
Sam grinned. “Nice work, Sheba.”
“Ishkabibble.” Evie reclined against the pillows, closing her eyes. “I might be too tired to go to the pictures tomorrow.”
Will paced as he read. “… Mrs. Mary White, a rather colorful widow whose companion was Mr. John Hobbes. Ida continued to live there in the eastern wing, and she and Mary grew very close. Ida was not, however, particularly fond of Mr. Hobbes. In letters to her cousin, she wrote, ‘Mary and Mr. Hobbes hosted another of their spiritual meetings in the parlor last night, which went on well past a decent hour. I attended for a spell. Mr. Hobbes offered a sweet wine, which made me feel very odd. I saw and heard such strange visitations that I could not be certain of what was real and what was not. I excused myself and retired to bed, where I was troubled by peculiar dreams.
“ ‘The old book, which he does not allow me to read, he keeps locked in the curio cabinet. “It is the book of my brethren, given to me by my dear departed father before I was sent to the orphanage,” he told me with a smile….’ ”