The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

Where the park opened out, I climbed into the dry wading pool and approached the central ring from which water used to fount. Washington Square Arch, no longer lit at night, loomed as a massive silhouette to the north. I knelt at the pool’s center, dry leaves crackling beneath me, and wound a small music box. When I released the key, a tinkling melody rose into the night.

I set the box on the ring and whispered, “Effie.”

I’d found the music box in an antique shop years before. Curious, I took it to a local diviner. She told me it had belonged to a girl who succumbed to yellow fever in the 1800s and was buried in the city’s pauper grave. Her remains now rested among twenty-thousand others, roughly beneath where I was kneeling. Her spirit, however, was as restless as mine.

“That you, Everson?” an innocent voice asked, clear as a bell.

When I turned, the eight-year-old girl was standing behind me, eyes large and inquisitive. Plain brushed hair fell over the shoulders of the gown she’d probably been buried in, light blue with a broad ribbon fastened belt-like above her waist. Her shoes were simple clogs.

“Hi there, Effie.”

“You brought me music box,” she exclaimed, moving past me to stoop over her former possession.

I smiled sadly. Ghosts weren’t souls. They were best described as living echoes, possessing the appearance and personality of the departed, but little in the way of free will. The more malignant ones could drive a person to insanity, true, but Effie’s ghost represented the sweet end of the spectrum. My heart broke a little as I watched her attempt to pick up the box.

To distract her, I said, “What did you do today, Effie?”

“I tried making friends with a boy, but ’e wouldn’t talk to me.” When she turned, her lips were bent in an indignant frown. She was no doubt referring to a human boy without Sight.

“Probably a loser,” I said. “What about the friends you already have?”

“They’re a’right,” she replied. “But Mary’s gettin’ plumb on me nerves with her tales.”

“Ugh. Mary and her tales.” I shook my head. “Hey, uh, speaking of your friends, I have a question I’d like you to ask them.”

“Whut is it?”

“You know St. Martin’s Cathedral downtown, right?” Fortunately, it was old enough to have been standing during Effie’s time in New York. I watched her nod. “Good. I want you to ask your friends if they’ve seen anything unusual around there in the last month or so.”

“Like whut?” she asked.

I was throwing a blind net. Ghosts were drawn to ley energy, and with the intensity around St. Martin’s, I was hoping one or several in Effie’s circle had made their way down there, maybe picked up on something. A shame I hadn’t befriended any of the ghosts at St. Martin’s, but such things took time.

“Just … anything that might have struck them as odd,” I answered.

Effie appeared to think about that before nodding her head. “A’right,” she said. She turned back to her old music box and, in a soft, haunting voice, added words to the tinkling lullaby.

Sweet babe, a golden cradle holds thee

Soft snow-white fleece enfolds thee

In airy bower I'll watch thy sleeping

Where branchy trees in the breeze are sweeping

Ghosts usually required a full day/night cycle to carry out requests, but I was in no hurry to return to my sheet-tangled bed. Ghouls or not, it was a sleepless night. Too many thoughts knocking around my head: at-large shriekers, no-magic decrees, the cathedral murder, the police sketch, the mystery person watching my apartment, my impending hearing at the college. It made the straightforward existence of the undead seem enviable in contrast.

I wound the box for Effie several more times. Sometime after three, her apparition faded along with her solemn notes.

24

It was half past eight the next morning by the time I made it through the pedestrian checkpoint. My NYPD card had worked its charm a second time, but even so, I was thirty minutes late.

I hurried south from the Wall, aware I was challenging Arnaud by returning to his district. I pictured the vampire at his top-story window but doubted the drizzly morning offered him much of a view. The head of his building had been hidden by a drift of low clouds since early light, meaning he couldn’t see me. When I peeked up again, my face prickled with current.

Damn. Something told me he could.

I dropped my head and cut west to put a few skyscrapers between us. Soon, I was coming up on the steps of St. Martin’s. Beyond the tall bronze doors stood Father Vick, the image of patience.

“Forgive me,” I said, hustling up to the other side of the threshold and shaking the collection of moisture from my coat. “Should have known to add an extra hour to the commute.”

“It’s certainly not what it used to be,” he said with a smile. “Please, Everson, come in.”

The invitation. I peeked past him to make sure no police were inside—or Detective Vega herself—and crossed the threshold. The wave that rippled through me felt thinner than last time. It didn’t induce the same queasiness or deprive me of quite as much power. I wondered whether the shocked and grieving atmosphere of the past two days had something to do with that.

“I’m back here,” he said.

I followed his shifting cassock through several doors and across an inner courtyard. The cathedral around us was stone silent. It wasn’t until we had reached his one-room apartment that he spoke again.

“How have you been, Everson? I was sorry to hear of your grandparents’ passing.”

He left the door open a crack behind me, allowing a slipstream of fresh air into the monastic space.

“I’m well,” I replied. “Busy. Teaching at Midtown College and now consulting for the NYPD.” I intentionally left out that I was doing the second to get six months whacked off my probation—all in the hopes of saving the first. I didn’t need to