Discretion was still my priority here. The girl was small in size compared to me, but there was a lot of power in her eyes. Years of acting training were to thank for that, no doubt. Still, I wasn’t about to pull my bat on someone nonparanormal. I resisted the urge to back off and held my ground. “How about you tell me what you know?” I asked.
“How about you leave?” Elyse said with a sweet smile over her bitter words.
“Or what?” I said. “You’ll stage-combat me to death? I’m not worried. After all, don’t they train you actors how to miss?”
“Funny,” Elyse said.
“Just tell me what you know,” I said again.
Elyse crossed her arms in defiance. “Or?”
“Just tell me,” I said.
Movement caught my eye from around the room. Darryl and Heavy Mike were walking over. Mike had his video camera out as he came, but it was Darryl I was worried about. He towered over me and stood protectively just over Elyse’s shoulder.
“Everything okay here, Elyse?” Darryl asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Simon was just leaving.”
Darryl looked at me, a bit of menace in his eyes as he stared me down. “Good,” he said.
“I was?” I asked, starting to get angry.
“Yes,” she said. “You were. I don’t know who you are, but you were no friend of the professor. That’s for sure.”
“Aw, come on . . . fight for the camera,” Mike said from behind his video camera. “This would make excellent footage. A nice scuffle . . . I bet it would even look good in court.”
Trent and George moved to stand with their friends, a unified front of five against one single Simon.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go, but consider this. Someone killed the good professor and nobody seems to be as interested in that as much as I am.”
“Wait,” Elyse said, grabbing me by the arm. “How do you know he was killed? Who are you?”
“I can be secretive, too,” I said. I pushed open the door, hoping to get out while the getting was good. To my relief, no one moved to stop me, and I was glad to get away from them. I had what I needed from them—a lead. The Hell Gate Bridge. Mason Redfield’s decades-long obsession. Perhaps it would hold some answers to his death, especially with the dark, rich histories of death that bridges seemed to have.
I let the door slam shut behind me and walked away, which was probably best. If I left now, I could at least keep with my general rule about not using my bat on normal people. Not that film and theater people really counted for normal, as I was slowly learning.
17
Connor had spent his day catching up on paperwork, still nursing a hangover from last night at Eccentric Circles, and I put in a couple of hours killing some of my own paperwork after I told him about the documentary. By the time either of us had a second free and could get our asses up to the Hell Gate Bridge, it was already dark out. The best approach seemed to be coming at it from Queens through Astoria Park, but once we got there, there was still the daunting task of working our way up to the crossing. As we started up the understructure of it, I was impressed by the sheer size of it.
The Hell Gate Bridge stood against the night sky, traversing the East River where it spanned over to Wards Island. In the dark, its two stone towers rose up at either end of it and the red steel of the bridge itself stretched in a low arch across the expanse, two sets of train tracks running down the center of it. By the time we climbed all the way up to it and stood on the tracks, the September wind was whipping at Connor and me, putting a chill in my bones that was already creeping me out.
Professor Redfield had found it fascinating enough to spend great expanses of time obsessing over it. I needed to know why, and if the answers were out there, I had to find out. I stepped out onto the main section of the bridge.
Connor hesitated. I stopped and looked at him. “Coming?”
He dug his hands down into the pockets of his coat. “Probably a bad time to bring this up, but I don’t really care for bridges, kid.”
“No?” I asked. “Afraid of heights or something?”
“Not quite,” he said. “You remember why we don’t go down to Ground Zero, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “No one from the D.E.A. dares to step foot where World Trade Center once stood. Too much sorrow. Too many ghosts.”
“Pain sticks, kid. Before 9/11, bridges were the number-one source for sorrow around here. Despondent people love to fling themselves to their unhappy demise. A gruesome but romantically poetic way to go, if you ask me. You show me a Manhattan bridge and I’ll show you at least a handful of ghosts moping around on each of them for eternity. So, like I said—not a fan of them. Just look for yourself.”
I turned to look out onto the bridge, adjusting my eyes to really look.
I knew that most New Yorkers turned a blind eye to the stranger things they came across in Manhattan. The fragility of the human mind helped protect itself. My own mind was no exception, and even when I could focus on the hidden world around us, I was not nearly as trained as Connor at seeing the dead. I willed myself to focus on the empty spaces my conscious mind must be avoiding.
“Whoa,” I said when my mind keyed in to the entire scene before me. The bridge was covered with dozens, maybe hundreds of ghostly figures. Spirits drifted directionless across the span. I turned to Connor. “Are you seeing this?”
Connor gave me a dark smile. “What do you think, kid?”
“We’re not going out there, are we?” I asked. “Think about my hair.”
“Way to focus on what’s really important,” Connor said.
I stepped closer to Connor, dropping to a whisper with the horde of apparitions so close. “I think I have a point,” I said. “A very vain but accurate point.”
“Jesus,” Connor said, agitated. “I’m sorry you’re too damn pretty to do your job.” He looked out over the bridge. “You do realize that we’re supposed to exhibit some sort of heroism, right? It is in our job description, kid.”
“Right,” I said, feeling somewhat dressed down. “Sorry.”
“Just stay close to me,” he said.
“Fine by me,” I said
Connor walked off onto the bridge. The wind picked up, joined by the sound of rushing water below that I could see through the struts as we went, giving me a bit of vertigo from all the movement. The chilling bite of the wind blew at our clothes and hair. The shapes around us were like a living fog, drifting in the wind up and down the bridge. They were slow enough that we were able to move among the spirits without running the risk of passing through any of them.
“Is this something ghosts do regularly?” I asked. “I mean, get together like this? Maybe they’re going to go bungee jumping off the bridge.”
Connor shot me a don’t-be-stupid look and continued out onto the bridge where the greater concentration of spirits were. I followed him, the ghosts drifting out of our path as we went.
Connor stopped when we were about halfway across the expanse right in the heart of the ghostly gathering. There were hundreds of them. He turned in circles, looking them over. “Interesting,” he said.
Meandering spirits swirled all around me. “Popular place,” I said. “I guess if you’re looking to off yourself, Hell Gate is the place to go.”
Connor shook his head. “I don’t think these are all suicides, kid.”
“Why not?”
Connor waved his hand out toward the crowd. “Look at the way they’re all dressed,” he said.
I studied the crowd closely, taking note of the clothes. All of them looked to be from the same era. Tall, stiff collars on some on the men in fine tailored suits, ankle-length skirts and matching jackets on many of the women. Other, more casual women had on shirtwaist dresses and sailor hats. The rest either wore broad-brimmed hats or sported the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl hairstyle, but the wind was already playing havoc with them.