Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Read Online Free PDF

covered in black welts, she had lifted a floorboard in the attic to hide her private diary and discovered a pile of blue glass shards in the dusty cavity. A chip of glass drew blood from her fingertip. The cut itched and pulsed. The source of the contagion.
    Case closed; of course others followed. During Ellzy's adolescence, no petty crime went unsolved on the Tarbutton's block.
    Ellzy's father, a parasite who had moved to Baltimore after his late parents’ farm in upstate New York was bought out and razed to make way for an experimental utopia, and her mother, the second-rate jazz singer her father had married after she became pregnant, did not resist when their sickly, pistol-packing, crime-solving daughter left home in her late teens and rented her own apartment.
    During the mid 1930s Ellzy built her reputation as a detective, along with the network of contacts and spies that had come to be known as “Ellzy's Army."
    But she was always easily distracted. After assembling the clues to a case, arriving at a stage where she could swoop in and grab the killer and the glory, she would often turn over all her notes to a police detective. She spoke to her employees of sudden doubts about her profession, about the possibility of knowing anything at all; that it was crazy, Quixotic, to pair cause and effect with any degree of certainty.
    When under such existential spells, Ellzy would retreat to her downtown laboratory and invent new devices to help in fighting crime. Her first invention that proved useful was the “Ellzy plate,” a multi-sensitive floor that bank owners could install in their vaults. The floor automatically recorded, on a rolling drum, data for each person who walked on it, including body heat, gait, presence or absence of a limp, weight, and heel versus toe pressure. After comparing this with data taken by having jailed criminals walk across a test plate at the Baltimore police headquarters (and those whom juries refused to find guilty, across a surreptitious plate sunken in the floor just outside the courtroom), Ellzy could tell with a ninety percent accuracy whether any particular bank robbery had been performed by a known criminal or a newcomer.
    On one occasion, Ellzy was confounded by the information she read off the plate's data roll in the basement of a newly robbed bank. She abandoned the case and ran through the slush toward the hospital where her mother was committed. There Ellzy asked her ailing mother to confirm that she herself did not, in fact, have a twin.
    Ellzy was very wealthy—from her reward money, it was generally assumed—but the banknotes stacked in safes around her office did not make her happy. Each case she solved left her feeling more lost and less aware of what she was searching for in the first place.
    In 1939, Ellzy's fever returned, as it was to do every few months until she vanished from this world. Despite her debilitating palsy, she refused to stay bedridden, and to combat the running temperature that made her feel as though her flesh were melting from her body in ribbons, she took ice baths, which left her blue and shivering but freed her mind to run with a clarity she'd never before known. She came to believe that she was meant to solve the greatest mystery of all, the reason for humanity's existence (and by extension, her own).
    More and more Ellzy relegated the contracted detective work to her lieutenants, who, under her vague if expert guidance, solved all manner of robberies and murders without her direct involvement.
    By 1943, Ellzy saw the world as a jungle of gears, switches, and circuits. She felt webs of connection between herself and each other person who trundled through the streets of Baltimore as if on track lines. The webs formed a massive code, and the scribblings that cluttered her own body during the bouts of fever were, she believed, the key.
    She began to build machines with no discernible purpose. They clicked and whirred in odd corners of her offices,