Crooked Ways

Chapter One

December 23rd

My skirts rustled with each step, multiple layers of black broadcloth over cascading wire hoops, my matching silk veil as stifling as a blanket. Every piece of the ensemble was a replica, of course. No conservator in their right mind would have let my sweaty twenty-first-century body into a genuine Victorian mourning dress.

The bodice strained—obviously having been made for a less buxom female with a shorter torso—but the petticoats were voluminous enough to hide a marching band. Which was a good thing because I was barefoot, and I planned on staying that way. Atlanta was destined for a crisp chilly Christmas, but until the predicted cold front rode through, the afternoon was practically balmy.

I hiked my crinolines, grabbed my water bottle, and shuffled for the hallway.

Emily looked up from her camera. “Tai! Where are you going?”

“I need water. This thing is hot as Hades.”

“Five minutes. We have to keep on schedule.”

She scurried past me into the makeshift darkroom, two developing plates in her gloved hands. I’d seen the finished photographs from the previous sessions. They looked exactly like the antique images my clients often brought in to be appraised—starkly detailed black and white with a mirror-like surface, a fragile sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver.

Except they had me in them. No one could tell it was me—the veil hung to mid-chest, and underneath that, my entire face except for my closed eyes was hidden by a white linen handkerchief, my hair shellacked into dirty blond sausage curls under a black funeral bonnet. Even my freckles had been lost beneath a thick slathering of pale foundation.

As I refilled my water bottle, I spotted the soon-to-be deceased getting pancaked in the hallway. I swished my way over. His eyes remained closed as the make-up tech powdered his face into a flat white pallor.

“I had no idea you’d passed,” I said. “My condolences to your family.”

Reynolds opened his eyes and grinned. Rotund and good-humored, he had the steel gray hair of an elder statesman and the mustache of a swashbuckler. Being active with local reenactment units meant he had closets full of Confederate and Union uniforms, enlisted men and officers both, but today he wore the morning coat and cravat of an 1860’s businessman.

“The family is grateful for your sympathy,” he said. “Five thousand dollars grateful.”

“Wow! A big donor. Who have they asked you to be?”

“My impression today is of a post-war robber baron who never actually lived in the South, but whose great-great-granddaughter bought a house in Morningside. She says I bear a striking resemblance. This is not true, but she’s only a little older than you, so everybody over sixty looks the same to her. I didn’t argue because we really need that archivist at the Center.”

He was referring to the Atlanta History Center where his late sister’s ephemera collection, the most extensive grouping of Civil War-era papers and documents in the Southeast, was being processed for display. He’d been doling out the family fortune toward that cause and sponsoring fundraisers throughout the fall and winter.

“How did you come up with this?” I said.

“It was all Miss Emily’s idea. She’s been making tintypes for a museum in Brooklyn and pitched the idea of customized funeral portraits. I had the casket and funeral accoutrements. She had the equipment and expertise. All we needed were some professional mourners, and we were set.”

Set indeed. His foundation had auctioned off twelve sessions, and bidding had been fierce. Apparently lots of rich Atlantans wanted to be photographed in a casket while strangers in black pretended to cry their eyes out.

I screwed the cap back on my water bottle. “Thanks for getting me the gig. I really appreciate the extra bucks.”

“There’s no one I’d rather having weeping at my coffin, m’dear.”

He knew I was struggling financially. That was nothing new, but closing down the gun shop meant my balance sheet was especially unbalanced. Being an apprentice PI was part-time work, and it wasn’t highly compensated.

I patted his back. “I will mourn you magnificently.”

“I have no doubt.” Reynolds peered over my shoulder. “Miss Emily is waving at us in a frantic manner. We should get in there.”

He held out his elbow, and I let him lead me back to the ballroom, which had been set up in grand funerary style. The casket was made of well-oiled oak with gold leaf fleur-de-lis, a reproduction that Reynolds planned to eventually be buried in. Dozens of ivory calla lilies stood at attention, their blooms stately and mournful, symbolic of love and grief, death and resurrection. Black crepe draped the mirrors, and the pendulum of the grandfather clock had been stopped as if memorializing the time of death.

Underneath the fragrance of the lilies was the acrid tang of ether and alcohol, the chemicals of wet plate processing. Daguerreotypes and ambrotypes had to be developed within ten minutes of the shutter snapping. Which meant Emily had us hustling.

She handed me a handkerchief. “This client wants your face entirely covered.”

“Even the eyes?”

“Only your hair and hand should be visible.”

I suppressed a feminist shudder and moved into place. In the nineteenth century, women were the ornaments of mourning, channeling it like a lightning rod. Disappearing into it. I remembered the stone angels in Bonaventure Cemetery, those colossal marble creatures with wings drooping, collapsed in sorrow, frozen in bereavement.

That was me today, grief personified—immobile, silent, without agency. But only for a little while, only for pretend.

The make-up tech finished powdering Reynolds into corpse-hood. Then she and I each took an arm and helped him inside the casket. The wood creaked and grumbled, and we held our collective breath as he settled in. Please let the scaffold hold, please let it hold. I did not want to call 911 and explain why a man with the complexion of flour wasn’t having a heart attack but had instead fallen out of a casket.

Emily bent behind the camera. “Places!”

I stood at Reynold’s head and brought the handkerchief to my face with both hands. One of the scurrying assistants draped the veil over my face, then tilted my elbow a few degrees as if I were a department store mannequin.

Emily’s voice sparked with annoyance. “Tai, I can still see your eyebrows.”

I buried my face even deeper in the handkerchief. “How’s this?”

“Good. Slump a little more, like you’re sobbing.”

I dropped forward in a grief-stricken way.

“That’s a hunch, not a slump. Loosen your shoulders.”

I cursed softly under my breath and let my neck droop. Twenty bucks an hour, I repeated in my head. Twenty bucks an hour.

“Perfect. Now, on my count, forty-five seconds. Three, two, one…go!”

I froze. After fifteen seconds, my eyelids started twitching. My nose itched. My calf cramped and demanded attention.

Twenty seconds down, twenty-five to go.

I focused on not breathing, not moving.

Ten seconds to go.

Five.

Suddenly, a sneeze erupted from the anteroom. Emily threw a look in that direction. “What the hell?”

Trey stood outside the threshold looking sheepish. The mourner beside me whispered to the mourner beside her—something along the lines of “hot damn, who is that?”—and I stifled the urge to elbow her. Even from twenty feet away, his blue eyes were distractingly gorgeous, but his presence was puzzling. I’d left him at the shop running end-of-year paperwork, and that was where he’d said he planned to stay.

I examined him more closely. He was still wearing his casual clothes, so he hadn’t been called into the office. His black hair was neatly combed, so he hadn’t been running.

He pulled his own handkerchief from his pocket. “My apologies.”

Emily glared at him. “Who are you?”

“Trey Seaver,” he said, as if that explained anything.

“And you’re interrupting my shoot because…?”

“Because I need to speak to Tai.”

Emily switched the glare my way, as if it were my fault that my boyfriend was allergic to lilies and was also standing there interrupting. Which was, I had to admit, unusual. Trey had a thing for paperwork and politeness. For him to abandon both meant something was wrong.

“Tai’s busy,” Emily said.

“I can see that. But this is…” He dropped his face into his handkerchief and sneezed again. “Important.”

Emily’s voice was clipped. “We’re on a tight schedule. So perhaps form a queue, and Tai can get to you after that.”

Trey didn’t budge. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

Emily opened her mouth to argue with him some more. But then Reynolds sneezed too, making the casket creak. It was a fake sneeze, practically a cartoon sneeze, and I had to work very hard to keep my expression neutral.

He smiled in pretend embarrassment. “Apparently I too need a break, Miss Emily.”

She smiled back, tightly. “Of course, Mr. Harrington. Whatever you say.”

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