Read Online Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) by Carol Goodman - Free Book Online

tired of its dark narrow rooms and was looking about for a grander residence on Fifth Avenue, but what she was really “looking about” for was a husband for Helen who would lift them both out of the encroaching maw of poverty. Poor Helen. She deserved a holiday.
    “We’ll see,” I said, looking doubtfully at the dreadful bathing costume. I would look like a candy cane in it. “You can certainly swim while I show Ruth’s picture around.”
    I showed Nathan and Helen the photograph.
    “Oh, how droll!” Helen cried. “It looks like they’re driving down the Champs-Elysées. Do let’s get our picture taken, too!”
    It was rather sweet to see Helen, who had had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, so enthusiastic about having our day in Coney Island memorialized in a souvenir photograph, but when I looked at Nathan I saw the color had washed out of his face.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “The man,” Nathan said between tight lips. “He looks familiar.”
    “How can you tell?” Helen asked. “His face is all funny.”
    “That’s just it. That’s how I remember him—the man who questioned me that day in the Wing & Clover. Whenever I think of him—or dream of him—his face is a blur just like that.”
    “If it’s the same man,” I said, remembering the day that Helen and I spied Nathan in our local Rhinebeck tavern beside a strange gentleman, “that means the man who took Ruth is Judicus van Drood.”
    A gust of cool salt air hit us as soon as we got off the train in Brooklyn. It felt delicious but didn’t blow away my ominous thoughts. I’d learned last year that Judicus van Drood was Nathan’s real father, but Nathan didn’t know that. And if I had anything to do with it, he never would.
    “What’s the plan?” Nathan asked me as we descended the stairs from the elevated platform to the street.
    I
did
have a plan. We would start at the entrance to Steeplechase Park, where Ruth was going to meet her mysterious stranger, and locate anyone—ticket takers, buskers, security guards—who worked there regularly and show them Ruth’s picture. But I hadn’t figured on the crowds. As we descended from the train platform we were swept up into a stream of people and carried along like bits of flotsam and jetsam onto the Bowery, the wide avenue named after the more disreputable street in Manhattan, which led to the amusement parks and was, itself, an amusement park of sorts.
    “Hang on!” Nathan cried, linking our arms under his as we plunged into the masses. It was impossible to even hear each other over the cacophony of the laughing crowd, the antic calliope music that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and the buskers advertising the many attractions.
    “Look well upon this group of savages, ladies and gentlemen!” one cried. I craned my neck to make out an African tribesman in a fur loincloth, his shaved skull and bare chest covered in tattoos.
    “That man is nearly naked!” Helen whispered into my ear.
    “See the freak show! See the bearded lady and the ape woman of Borneo!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman dressed in a beautiful lace dress, only her face was covered with fur. She stood with an odd regal dignity, her eyes fixed on a point above the heads of the crowd.
    “This way for Delilah of the Seven Veils,” another shouted. “The hottest show on Earth! See her dance the hootchy-kootchy! Anywhere else but in the ocean breezes of Coney Island she would be consumed by her own fire!”
    A woman with a veiled face but an exposed midriff shimmied by us, clinking finger cymbals and twining one of her scarves around Nathan’s neck. An intoxicating scent of jasmine mingled with the aromas of fried clams, salt air, and circus animals. Nathan’s eyes followed the dancer as she wove through the crowd.
    “How very familiar of her!” Helen sniffed.
    The hootchy-kootchy dancer wasn’t the only one who was familiar. Twice I felt a stranger’s hand on my person, but