think. They run from 1653 all the way up into the 1980s, but we can narrow down a chunk of pointers fairly quickly. Collection 18159 might help, too. That’s the legal-documents compilation and it starts in 1867, so just a couple of years before your target date.”
“Still feels like we’re looking for needles in a haystack.”
She rapped her knuckles on the computer monitor, suddenly dour as a schoolmarm.
“Then I suggest you begin hunting, young man. Daylight’s burning.”
She left and returned and left again, mobilizing a few of her fellow volunteers to lug file boxes into the room and lay them out along the second table. Each was carefully annotated, its department labeled, lids locked down with twists of twine. She barely let him glance at the paper records. “Believe me,” she told him, “you have no idea how many library rules I’m violating right now. I’ll handle the documents. You focus on that screen.”
He cracked a smile. “Aren’t you worried you’re going to piss off the Muses?”
She didn’t smile back. She gave him a long, silent, almost serene stare, gazing into his eyes.
“No,” she said. “They know our business.”
Then she sat down, turned her back to him, and got to work. He sifted through the digitized archives and endless city records while her expertise narrowed down the search. She made it clear, right away, that she wasn’t going to do all the hunting; she’d help, but the rest was up to him.
Aislin Kendricks. She was the key, the mastermind behind the Sisterhood’s business. That was his angle. He started digging and fell into a familiar rhythm. The databases were alien to him, strange interfaces, strange paths, but running background research was part of his job. He studied up on people every single day at the Brooklyn Standard. Chasing Aislin’s trail through history just took a little more finesse.
Her shadow flitted here and there, mostly in coverage of the Three Keys Finishing School. Big donations from big men, neighborhood politicians puffing themselves up by giving handouts to the needy kids. He caught a pattern, the kind of detail work most people would miss: Aislin’s hand was always in the picture, from the donations she finagled to the deals she cut with local merchants. Her name popped up as an investor in an Atlantic Avenue bakery, and as the co-owner of a tenement with an address Tyler didn’t recognize.
“You ever heard of ‘Smoky Hollow’?” Tyler asked.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Old Brooklyn neighborhood. Atlantic to Amity, north to south, and from Hicks Street to the river. Not a very nice place, if I recall.”
He found a second deed, then a third. Aislin had made herself a landlord, investing and reinvesting until she had bought up a swath of riverfront property. Never the sole owner—a string of men, all different names, took the lead while she loomed in the background.
He’d been jotting notes. Businesswoman. Entrepreneur. Why that neighborhood?
Proximity to the orphanage, maybe, but it still read as strange to him. The grainy scan of an article in the Brooklyn Eagle, dating back to 1873, gave him the lay of the land: …it has been one of the most celebrated localities in the city, and glories in the reputation of having produced more thieves and burglars, of accumulating more filth, and emptying more bottles of bad whisky than almost any other portion of our good and pious village.
“Don’t hold back,” he murmured at the screen. “Tell me what you really think.”
Another article was titled “The Razor, and Its Terrible Use in Smoky Hollow.” The Smoky Hollow gang didn’t confine themselves to terrorizing the land; according to another breathless exposé, they were river pirates, hijacking cargo with swift whaling boats then vanishing to unknown harbors before the police could close in.
It was a tangent, but his instincts told him to keep digging. He found the connection more than half a century later, a stray mention in an unexpected place. It was an article in the July 1947 issue of the Baker Street Journal, a digest for fans of Arthur Conan Doyle.
…of course we know of Doyle’s fascination with spiritualism, and while he was only a young man at the time and living an ocean away, there’s a chance he’d have caught wind of the rumors swirling around New York City. Stories of séances, of graveyard apparitions and fairy lights were thick on the ground, not to mention the whispers of unsavory doings behind closed doors in places like Red Hook and Smoky Hollow.
And if he’d been so