There Was an Old Woman Read Free

sister, Ginger, and it was so not what she wanted to see.

Chapter Three
    It’s mom. Call me. xx Ginger
    Why now? Not again. Evie knew she should return the call right away, and as she and Nick entered the Great Hall of Five-Boroughs Historical Society, pushing ahead of them a platform truck with the B-25 Wright Whirlwind engine wrapped up on it like a gigantic pastrami sandwich, that’s what she was intending to do. But her boss’s reaction to their arrival sidetracked her.
    â€œWow. Is that what I think it is?” Connor Kennedy’s familiar voice boomed behind her. A moment later, he was in her space and she could smell his cologne and cigarette breath. He stood absolutely still and silent, staring at the engine. Moving the thing had eaten up a good chunk of Evie’s budget, but judging from Connor’s reaction, it had been worth it.
    â€œSo this is going to be sensational,” he said, doing a 360 and surveying the disarray in the exhibit hall with apprehension. “We are going to make it, aren’t we?”
    â€œOf course we’ll make it. We always do,” Evie said, sounding more confident than she felt.
    The parquet floor of the Great Hall was awash in packing crates. The other two members of Evie’s small staff were assembling bases and plexi mounts for the installation. The museum’s resident electrician was drilling into the wall and wiring one of six massive flat-screen monitors. One of the janitors was sweeping up wood and plaster dust with a wide push broom.
    Outside, beyond a row of narrow two-story arched windows, bright yellow banners for the upcoming exhibit snapped in the breeze. Dramatic red-orange letters on them read: SEARED IN MEMORY. Below that and smaller: June 10–November 17. Just three weeks until it opened.
    Evie could envision the room, silent and cleared of debris. Each of four historic fires would have its own timeline and photographs, audio and video. Artifacts she’d culled from their own collection and borrowed from others would be mounted, lit, and documented. Together, each grouping would tell its own story.
    She walked Connor through the half-finished installations. Greeting visitors and already in place was a magnificent red-and-black steam-powered pumper like the one used to fight the Great Fire of 1776 that destroyed the Stock Exchange and much of lower Manhattan. The next section, commemorating the fire during the ugly 1853 Civil War Draft Riots, would feature blowups of inflammatory broadsides (“We are sold for $300 whilst they pay $1000 for negroes”) that stoked passions so much that anyone with dark skin risked being chased through the streets, beaten, and even killed. One of her favorite pieces in that section was a long speaking trumpet, the kind that would have been used to shout orders to firefighters over those five hellish summer days when the city burned.
    Another section remembered the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, arguably the saddest of all time. In the center was a raised platform where they’d set a battered fireman’s net that couldn’t save the young, mostly immigrant women who’d thrown themselves from the windows of the upper floors of the Asch Building. Foam-core mounted photographs, showing views of the devastated factory interior filled with charred sewing machines and coffins lined up tidily on the floor like fallen soldiers, were already on the wall. Something about the photographs from that one always did her in, filling her head with the gut-wrenching smell of smoke, a smell seared in her own memory.
    The list of the 146 who died in that fire was particularly heartbreaking. Mary Goldstein had been only eleven; Kate Leone, fourteen; most of the rest were in their teens and early twenties. A few of the bodies remained unidentified a hundred years later.
    Journalists back in those days were allowed, encouraged even, to write unabashedly emotional prose, and Evie had