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Bywater Books - Ann Aptaker

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139 pages

English

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National Advertising, including Facebook & Twitter
Select Author Appearances (The Mysterious Bookshop, Drunken Careening Writers, Noir at the Bar)
National Print and Online Media Campaign (Crimespree, Curve, Autostraddle, Lambda Literary)
Online Outreach to Mystery & Historical Mystery Book Bloggers
Social Networking Campaign: Official Author Website: www.annaptaker.com | Official Author Twitter: @annaptaker

UNIQUE NEW CRIME SERIES: Ann Aptaker has carved out a clever and unique crime-solving duo—butch/femme • rich/poor • street-smart/highly educated.
AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR: Ann Aptaker is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author who is only getting better and more daring.
FRESH NEW PERSPECTIVE OF THE QUEER GILDED AGE: With its colorful setting and elements of high suspense and historical intrigue, A Crime of Secrets examines how two lesbians from different backgrounds combine forces to root out evil in a society that prefers not to acknowledge that such things can and do happen.

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Fiction

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Publié par	Bywater Books
Date de parution	04 juillet 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781612942704
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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This book is dedicated to all who dare to love, dare to question, and dare to seek no matter the danger.
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Prologue
April 1899
A brilliant afternoon in New York’s Madison Square Park, a brilliant, sparkling spring afternoon. Water dances on the tiers of the fountain, droplets glitter in the sunlight. Colorful parasols gripped gracefully in the gloved hands of strolling women are suffused with sunshine, the colored light dappling the women’s cheeks. The sun catches, too, the innocent glint in young girls’ eyes, and the not-so-innocent glint in the eyes of roguish men who linger along the paths.
Children’s giggles float like bubbles in the air, rising above the murmurs of promenading lovers and the hushed discussions of men of business.
Baby carriages shimmering with silk ruffles and silver fancywork delicate as their sleeping babies’ dreams are tended by mothers whose flowered hats bob in rhythm with the women’s maternal cooing.
The serenity of the park is but a grace note in the clang and boom of the powerful city that surrounds it, a city growing ever taller ever faster! All around, new buildings rise higher. Horse-drawn carriages are thrust aside by the latest mechanical contraption, the automobile, and by hulking cable cars, their steel wheels grinding noisily along their tracks, thrilling the cars’ passengers but terrifying the remaining equine beasts who still pull hansom cabs and tradesmen’s wagons and the broughams of the leisurely rich. The city is shaking off its old century while it makes a mad grab for the new. The populace is lured by all that’s coming and all that’s promised of new inventions and wild ideas. Indeed, what was scorned as scandal just a few years ago is enjoyed on this radiant afternoon as a blaze of artistic glory: the golden, naked Diana the Huntress perched atop the tall campanile of Mr. Stanford White’s vast Madison Square Garden entertainment emporium overlooking the northeast corner of the park. How the righteous howled when White and his sculptor, the renowned Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens, placed the voluptuous Diana atop the tower! And how now, on this bright day, the patrons of the park bask happily in the aura of Diana’s glowing body, her archer’s bow pulled taut, her arrow aimed across the restless metropolis. Oh yes, Mr. Stanford White, New York’s boldest, busiest architect, has his way with the city, muscling its towers and its dubious morality into the future.
A breeze blows through Madison Square now, tossing the hems of the women’s dresses above the tops of their high-button shoes, exposing a bit of skin, provoking feigned embarrassment in the women and enthusiastic delight in the men.
Ah, the allure of a woman’s leg, the hint of the pleasures of the flesh. These windblown titillations add bits of drama to an otherwise pleasant afternoon in Madison Square Park, where strolling lovers, playful children, cooing mothers, and local workmen who have come by for a bit of air and sunshine have seen nothing of the vile murder nearby that moments ago took the life of a young girl whose pale blue eyes saw her own blood spew through the air in an arc of death, whose skin felt her warm blood soak her lacy blue dress. She never saw the face or hands of the monster who killed her.

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Chapter One
Later that day
Fin Donner, née Finola, well-tailored androgyne of rough and iniquitous history but who now resides in contentment, was nostalgic for gaslight. True, the recently installed electric wall sconce she switched on in the parlor to counter the fading afternoon sunlight was silent and odorless, unlike gaslight which hissed and gave off an eggy aroma. Still, despite the warm tone of the amber lampshade, Fin missed the seductive flicker of the old golden light. This modern electric illumination didn’t shimmer as softly along Fin’s brocade waistcoat or the sleeves of her bright white shirt. It didn’t slide as sinuously along the room’s polished mahogany furnishings, or down the carvings on the marble fireplace, a dark red which the old flicker imbued with whimsically devilish life. It didn’t enrich the deep green moiré silk-covered walls with quite the same sinewy sheen. But the electric bulb gave a steadier light, which made reading easier on the eyes. And Fin had to admit that the amber shade with its silken fringe had its own charm, its own serene radiance, creating a light companionably falling on the sticklike contours of that other newfangled object recently installed on the little table beside one of the room’s pair of overstuffed leather armchairs: a home telephone. Next to the telephone was its companion, the printed directory.

• • •

She sat down again in the comfort of the armchair, where she’d been reading the latest issue of the Police Gazette while she waited for her beloved Devorah to return from her afternoon at the Astor Library. With a sigh of yearning for her lover to hurry home, Fin took up the newspaper once again and continued reading the rollicking account of a bloody brawl at the Thumb In The Eye Saloon, a head-cracking brouhaha that spilled into the streets of the dockside neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Fin knew well the saloon and its neighborhood. Indeed, she was born in its crowded tenements, strutted its brutal sidewalks. Hell’s Kitchen was even now a rough and heartless part of town where human life was chopped up as savagely as the overworked dray horses who dropped dead on the cobblestones and were carted off to the neighborhood’s slaughterhouses, their body parts sold off by the piece to tanneries and glue factories. It was on Hell’s Kitchen’s streets, in its alleys, and along its docks where Fin learned to survive. As a child, she learned to be more cunning than the sneering so-called do-gooders who snatched the city’s street urchins and put them into hellish workhouses. Eventually she, too, fell prey to the child snatchers, hauled off to an institution of cruelty where a day’s punishment resulted in a broken arm or a bloodied face, but Fin refused to let it break her spirit. Later, as a young, strutting soldier of the streets, she survived by her fists and her courage. She needed both to fend off the thugs who didn’t like the idea that Fin preferred men’s clothes to women’s and women’s love to men’s.
Finishing the story of the Thumb In The Eye brawl, Fin began an article recounting the latest activities of one Mr. Alistair P. Flugg, an annoying but politically well-connected prig who went around the city with a band of followers, accompanied by a detail of police, raiding brothels, smashing saloons, and terrorizing those who plied their outlaw trades in the streets and alleys. His work, he insisted, was done in the name of God and the purity of American womanhood, by which he meant white Protestant womanhood.
Fin barely skimmed the article. Her distaste for Flugg and his ilk cancelled any interest in the man’s doings.
Her attention was further distracted by her eagerness for the arrival of her treasured Devorah. Fin’s beautiful and cherished companion had lately been spending time reading the latest studies on patterns of crime. This pursuit of Dev’s amused Fin—in Fin’s hard experience, any pattern of crime was quite simple: someone possessed something; someone stronger, or needier, or greedier wanted it; hence, crime—but she would never belittle any of Devorah’s endeavors. She loved Devorah from the depths of her soul and the heat of her flesh, and considered these past six years together an earthly paradise.
Frankly, it still amazed Fin that society belle Devorah Longstreet, daughter of the Fifth Avenue Longstreets, a woman of refined manners and elegant speech, would even look at rough trade like Fin Donner. Though Fin took pride in her grooming—she kept her wavy black hair oiled and combed neat; her trousers, jackets and waistcoats custom tailored to her female physique and of the finest quality—she was nevertheless thickly built, sturdy as a brickbat, and spoke with the remains of a dockside accent through a craggy, broken voice, the result of a teenage street brawl that bloodied her face and smashed her throat.
But Devorah had indeed looked at Fin with a curiosity that soon roused passion and deepened into love, an outlaw love that exacted a terrible price. It cost Dev her family’s affection and protection. She was snubbed and disinherited, never allowed through the door of the Longstreets’ Fifth Avenue mansion again.
That blow, especially the loss of her mother’s affection, was as painful to Devorah as a physical attack, as if she had been knifed in the heart, draining her spirit. But Fin’s patience and ardent attentions helped heal Dev’s injured soul. Dev’s natural vigor eventually revived, and she assured Fin that she did not regret her choice to follow her heart and pursue with her lover a life of crime; or rather the pursuit of criminals. Their Donner & Longstreet Inquiries enterprise gave outlet to Dev’s lifelong curiosity—her family had considered it unacceptable nosiness—about people and their habits, and it netted Fin and Devorah sufficient income to maintain these cozy rooms on Irving Place near Gramercy Park. Their successful detective business further provided the funds which enabled them to attend the operas, ballets, and other theatricals that Dev so enjoyed, and for Fin’s occasional nights at the prize fights and other sporting houses she still patronized, though she’d sworn off many of the vices which had filled her life before she met Devorah, lest the sordidness of her old ways soil the ecstasy she’d found with her beloved.
Around five o’clock, unable to maintain interest in the newspaper, and yawning from a slight boredom with the quietness of the approaching evening, Fin rose from the chair to pour a glass of brandy from the cabinet opposite the fireplace. As she poured the liquor, its woody fragrance floated up to her nostrils, affording her the pleasure of anticipating that first,