Again, the girl looked to the older woman, who nodded. “She is… profeta.” The girl seemed to search for the right words. “She… talks to the dead. She says they are coming.”
Mabel frowned. “Who is coming?”
The shriek of police whistles sounded on the edges of the park, along with shouts and cries from the crowd. A tear-gas canister landed in the crowd, and the park was subsumed in a chemical fog that burned the eyes and throat. Mabel could hear her mother pleading for calm over the microphone, and then the microphone was cut off. The crowd pushed and shoved. People ran screaming as the police descended on the workers. Someone bumped Mabel hard and sent her newspapers to the ground, where they were immediately trod into bits. Mabel couldn’t see her parents through the gas and surging crowd. Coughing and disoriented, she pushed her way through the chaotic crowd and took off running, coming face-to-face with a policeman.
“Gotcha!” he said.
Panicked, Mabel darted up Fifteenth Street toward Irving Place, the policeman’s whistle blasting to alert others. There were easily five cops chasing her now. She started toward the iron gates of Gramercy, but strong hands yanked her into a service doorway behind a restaurant. She started to yell, and a hand clapped over her mouth.
“Not that way, Miss. It’s crawling with cops,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, and Mabel quieted. A moment later the police marched past, clubs drawn. She watched from her hiding place as they gave up and headed back to Union Square.
“Thank you,” Mabel said. She looked at her savior for the first time. He was young—not much older than she was.
He shepherded her away. “You’re the Roses’ daughter, aren’t you?”
Even here she couldn’t escape it. “My name is Mabel,” she said, as if daring him to contradict her.
“Mabel. Mabel Rose. I won’t forget it.” He gave her hand a firm shake. “Well, Mabel Rose. Get home safely.”
An explosion came from somewhere nearby. “Go now,” her mysterious savior said and ran swiftly down the alley, vaulting up the fire escape and disappearing over the rooftops.
Back at the Bennington, Mabel took the elevator to the sixth floor. Two of the hallway lamps had burned out ages ago, casting the passage in constant shadows, which always gave Mabel a bit of the heebie-jeebies. Mabel heard whispering at the far end of the darkened corridor and froze. What if the police had followed her after all?
Against her better judgment, she crept forward. Miss Addie stood at the narrow window in her nightgown. Her long gray hair hung in tangles. She cradled a bag of salt, which she was pouring out onto the windowsill in a fat line. Salt seeped from a hole in the bag and pooled on the carpet below.
“Miss Addie? What are you doing?”
“I have to keep them out,” Miss Addie said without looking up.
“Keep who out?”
“There are awful events unfolding. Something unholy is at hand.”
“Do you mean the murders?” Mabel asked.
“It’s begun. I can feel it. In my dreams, I have seen the man in the tall hat with his coat of crows. A terrible choice is at hand.” Miss Addie’s hand fluttered about her face like a wounded bird. She seemed confused, like a woman waking from ether. “Where is my door? I can’t find it.”
“You’re on the sixth floor, Miss Adelaide. You need the tenth. Here, I’ll take you.”
Mabel took the bag of salt from the old woman and helped her into the elevator, securing the troublesome latch on the gate.
“When the cunning folk stood accused of the ’craft as if it were a game, and our gallows bloomed with the dead, the man was there. When the Choctaw were marched to their ruin on the Trail of Tears, the man was there.”
Mabel counted the floors, willing the elevator to go faster.
“They say he appeared to Mr. Lincoln upon an evening before the War Between the States. It was as if a hand had come down and pulled out the heart of the nation, and the very rivers bled, and the land’s wounds would not heal.” Miss Addie suddenly turned and stared right at Mabel. “Terrible what people can do to one another, isn’t it?”
Mabel hurriedly slid back the gate to let Miss Addie out of the elevator. She knew she should help her to her door, but she was too spooked. “It’s just down the hall on the left, Miss Adelaide.”
“Yes, thank you.” Miss Addie took the bag of salt from Mabel and stepped out into the dim hallway. “We’re not safe, you know. Not at all.”
But Mabel had closed the gate and the elevator was already descending.
“Terrible what people can do,” Miss Addie said again.
From the elevator, Mabel watched the old woman’s bare feet hobbling away, a trail of salt and the lace hem of her nightgown left in her wake like sea foam.
OPERATION JERICHO