Henry tossed a nickel at the newsie. “Hey, give me a little punch to the gut, will you?”
The newsie blinked. “You tryin’ a get outta work or somethin’, Mister?”
“Just land one, will you?”
The newsie buried his fist in Henry’s gut and Henry reeled, coughing. “Yep. Definitely awake. Thanks, kid. I owe you.”
The newsie shook his head. “If you say so.”
By the time Henry made it to the Tea House, he was trembling.
“What happened to you?” Ling said, pouring him tea.
“Bad dreams,” Henry said, warming his hands on the hot cup. “I found out about our mystery woman, though.”
Henry told Ling about his revelatory afternoon with the Proctor sisters.
“Anthony, Orange, and Cross were streets,” Ling said in wonder. “George led me to that intersection, too.”
“Very well. I’m all ears. What does it mean, Mademoiselle Chan?”
Ling tapped her spoon absently against the side of her cup. “Wai-Mae’s ship docks in San Francisco tomorrow. I think George has been trying to warn me that she’s in danger of suffering the same fate. That she needs my help to avoid it.”
“What should we do?”
“I have to tell Wai-Mae. Tonight. She needs to know.”
“I don’t envy you that task,” Henry said, slipping back into his coat.
“She’ll be heartbroken,” Ling said.
“Somehow, I think she’s not the only one,” Henry said gently, and Ling felt near tears. She had grown very close to Wai-Mae and hadn’t realized how much she’d been looking forward to having her as a friend in New York. Now it was all in jeopardy.
At the door, Henry stopped. “I still don’t understand what the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company has to do with all of this, though. An old train station? Doesn’t make sense.”
Ling shook her head. “I can’t know everything.”
Henry grinned. “That’s a relief.”
“Henry…” Ling started. She had a terrible feeling of misfortune that she couldn’t place.
“Yes, darlin’?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Same time tonight?”
“Pos-i-tute-ly,” Henry said, enjoying Ling’s pursed-lip annoyance.
In the dream that finally found her, Adelaide was a girl of seventeen, with hair gilded by summer sun. There was the big house and the well and the wagon Papa would use to drive them into town on Sundays. It was all just as she remembered it, when she allowed herself the luxury of remembering. Nostalgia, like morphine, was best in small doses. Drifting through the dream was the sweetest girlish singing she’d ever heard, something exotic to her ears. It was exquisite pain, this song, as if the string of notes had crawled inside her like a long vine, twining itself to her longing. Addie’s heart was full of want. She could burst from it.
“Elijah,” Addie said, naming the desire.
And then, like magic, he was there, shadowed on the edge of the cornfield with the old church steeple rising in the distance.
“Free me, Addie,” he whispered.
There was a reason Addie couldn’t do this before, but she couldn’t think of it now, not with her lover so close and her need so strong.
“Will you do that for me, Addie? Will you?”
“Yes,” Addie whispered. Her face was wet in the moonlight. “Anything. Anything.”
In her sleep, Adelaide Proctor rose from her bed and walked to her dressing table. She opened the cabinet and took out her music box. She wound the key at the back and smiled as the tiny French dancing girl twirled round and round to the sweetly tinkling bells of a song that had been popular before the Civil War. Addie remembered her last dance with Elijah, when he took her hand and promenaded her down the center. Oh, how handsome he was, smiling across the aisle at her as they waited for the other couples to take their turn at the reel. How impatiently she waited for the excuse to hold his hand once more.