It was then the wolf came from behind her, the one who’d been on the porch when he’d seen to the prying old hermit who’d been on the hill the day he dumped the girl’s body. It seemed the wolf had died and returned as a ghost as well, and yet he was real enough that he had to be restrained with a chain, so intent was he on lunging at the man he recognized as his master’s killer.

“Hold on to him,” Herbert shouted. “He’ll be after me!”

“Because you killed the old man?”

“I did him a service putting him out of the misery he lived in. Now go away, the both of you! Vanish from here! There’s real business of the living to be going on in this place, and we don’t need the likes of you.”

Herbert did not hear the men from the Workmen’s Circle as they circled him, then leapt upon him. They were indeed the living, who beat him down and shackled him with a length of rope, then slipped on iron cuffs. Isaac Rosenfeld got a black eye in the process, of which he was quite proud. There had been six witnesses to Herbert’s confession; most Eddie had known as boys in the factories. Eddie took a photograph of the men who gathered around Frank Herbert, a memento they could show their mothers and girlfriends. Eddie had promised Juliet he would not pursue her brother, but that didn’t mean others wouldn’t take up the cause and do their best to connect him to the events that had led to Hannah’s death.

Rosenfeld took the buttons as further proof against Herbert. Ella, who had so bravely consented to play the part of her sister’s ghost, was asked if she would accompany them to the Tenth Precinct and make her statement as well.

“I need to go with them,” Ella said when Eddie wanted to walk her home safely. “My father will understand. And it’s you he’ll want to hear from. You’re the one he’s trusted.”

Mr. Weiss was waiting on the concrete steps outside his building, wearing a winter coat, though it would be summer in a matter of days. Eddie sat beside him, the wolf at their feet. When Eddie confirmed that the murderer had been caught, Weiss nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d find him.”

“Yet I feel I’ve failed.” Hannah was still dead. Harry Block was still in the mansion on Sixty-second Street.

“Every good man feels that he’s failed.”

Eddie grimaced. He shook his head. “That’s not me. Good would never be a proper term.”

“Your father told me that you were. That was why I came to you.” Weiss seemed extremely sure of himself. “You know why I believed him?”

Eddie shrugged. “Because you pray with him each morning and a man you pray with is one you believe?”

“God is the only one I pray with,” Weiss corrected him.

“So maybe you trust my father because you grew up in the same town and you worked together.”

“Those things are true, but they have nothing to do with my faith in your father. In the town where we grew up, one boy slit his brother’s throat and another stole from his own grandmother so that he could flee to Paris. Coming from the same town means nothing. I’ve worked with many men I wouldn’t even speak to if I passed them on the street. Mules work together, so do men, it means nothing as well. I have faith in your father because he’s a good man, and like every good man, he, too, has failed. But I can tell you this, he knows what it means to be a human being.”

“To be a failure?”

Weiss sputtered out a laugh. His beard had turned white in a matter of months. He clapped Eddie on the back. “To forgive,” he said. “As he’s forgiven you.”

NINE

THE GIRL WHO COULD FLY

**********

MY FATHER locked me in my room. When he discovered that the coffin had been stolen he informed me that he had never been as disappointed in his life, or as betrayed. He found me in the yard and confronted me, but I blamed the liveryman, as I was meant to do. Perhaps I wasn’t convincing, for my father seemed to know I was no longer under his command. He may have noticed my expression of longing as I watched Eddie disappear with the liveryman. He tricked me into admitting I had gone to Manhattan without his permission by saying he’d had me followed. He was a liar, but he knew how to get the truth out of people. When I stumbled over my words, stating I had indeed traveled to Manhattan because I thought I needed to return the camera the photographer had left behind, my father shouted that I was a woman of deceit. He changed in a moment, before my eyes, his face filling with rage. Was this my thanks to him, for raising and caring for me? I promised him that nothing had happened, but he shook his head. Why should he believe me now? How could he know whether or not I’d been ruined by this man in Manhattan, and if I’d given myself freely to a worthless individual?