“Speak plainly? Very well. How does your sister get ahold of a man’s memory who was murdered in an alley in the middle of the night?”
“There are any number of ways. At the hospital, the morgue—”
“What kind of woman does that?” Ian raked his forelock with his fingers as he paced. “Who goes to the hospital or morgue to reap a dead man’s memories? What kind of lust grows inside a woman to be able to do that?”
“Her magic is complicated.”
“Complicated?” Lashing out, Ian reached for the stack of papers, holding up the headlines of murder. “It’s not very complicated to wonder if that gent’s memories aren’t the only ones she’s taken.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I think I’m beginning to ken just fine. This is the second time Mary and violence have held hands. Or do you forget I was hit on the back of the head and left for dead as well? My memories sucked out of me as if by some kind of vampire of the mind.”
Edwina had witnessed her sister being accused before. She’d watched helplessly as their lives got turned upside down and inside out because of people’s rush to judgment. Mortals usually. They called her unnatural, peculiar, abnormal. But this insult was too much. She would not entertain such accusations again.
Edwina set aside her tea. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said and walked out through the broom closet door before she dared show any tears in front of Ian or any other man again.
Chapter Fifteen
A cool draft blew through the parlor at Edwina’s swift departure.
Ian stared at the door. “Blast the day I ever met that woman and her sister.”
“You don’t mean that,” Hob said, placing his hand on the chair where the witch had been sitting.
“Don’t I?”
The hearth elf shook his head. “A fine lady. And she was helping you.”
“Please dinna go getting sentimental on me,” Ian said before giving ground. “Aye, I know. Miss Blackwood has her charms. And under different circumstances, I might give in to them. But her sister, that Mary Bewitched, is a strange one. There’s an unhealthy dose of shadow lurking behind those eyes.”
“You do not know everything.”
“Nae, not everything. But enough. I found the truth once before, and I will again.” Ian tossed the newspapers on the table. “Come, Hob, we’ve got work to do.”
Ian stepped out of the broom closet and passed through the shabby slum house. He consulted his watch. The lane outside was quiet, empty of police and signs of the supernatural, except for the old woman and girl inside who had wished him luck and shut the door behind him. So Edwina was well and truly gone. Fair enough, he thought. By his reckoning, it was only a matter of time and dogged determination before they came full circle and met again, if his current investigation led to the same place he believed his previous one had. He snapped his pocket watch shut and flipped his collar up. “This way, Hob,” he said and marched south toward the one solid lead in his missing person’s case. Hob followed by diving in and out of rain barrels, bottle-washing troughs, and downspouts as he traveled his unseen network of mysterious passages.
After a five-minute walk, dodging costermongers selling jellied eel and fatty pigs’ trotters and one down-on-her-luck witch pushing blister ointment made of fireplace ash and common tallow, he stood in front of the Wilshire Music Hall. Two grand wooden doors painted red loomed ten feet high flanked by ornate carvings meant to give the place a baroque sensibility, but a quick scratch with his fingernail suggested the material was a plaster veneer instead of marble. And, like the walls, the paint was beginning to peel.
He tried the front doors but they proved locked, so he scanned the venue advertisement pasted to the wall outside. As with the building’s facade, the broadside displayed the same flamboyant flair, promising a show that was perhaps many times more respectable than the one that actually took place on the stage. The revue featured the usual parade of jugglers, singers, and comedy sketches. The descriptions made it sound as if entering the theater were on par with visiting the Royal Hall. In reality, most music halls he’d visited skirted indecency laws by a mere hair, which, he admitted, accounted for their wild popularity.
“There’s got to be another way in,” he said to Hob, cocking his head to the right, where a narrow alley cut between buildings. The imp jumped out of one of the wrought-iron urns flanking the front door, still pouting. “She’ll have got home fine,” Ian said, seeing his companion out of sorts.