Moonshine: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed them. Self-consciously, I pulled my cloche hat further down, so that it shaded my eyes. A construction site like this was not, as Mama would say, a place where any respectable young lady should find herself. I didn't fear for my safety, and certainly not for my mother's Victorian sense of propriety, but the silence and the stares made me wish I hadn't come down here on such a whim. Couldn't I have waited until night, when he would have been at home? The men didn't even catcall, which made me feel annoyed and grateful all at once. Tall and skinny and breasts like bumps on a board--it might be the fashion at F. Scott Fitzgerald's legendarily glamorous Long Island parties, but here I felt like a gawky teenager.
    I grit my teeth and reminded myself of how little time I had for this errand.
    "Is Giuseppe here today?" I asked the worker closest to my right--a swarthy man with day-old stubble and a bowler hat tilted on his head.
    "What's a girl like you want with a sucker?" he asked. His accent was broad and faintly southern. "You're such a skinny little chit, he'll barely get a snack."
    This joke seemed to strike him and his companions as hugely witty, because they practically laughed themselves off their seats. I was about to give up and ask someone else when he finally recovered himself.
    "Hey, Giuseppe!" he yelled in the general direction of the scaffolded mouth of the tunnel. "Got a bleeder here to see ya."
    Squinting into the shadows, I could just barely see a tall figure materialize in the entrance. I thanked the man and started to walk down the sharply sloping bank.
    One of the men behind me said something that involved "dessert" and slang I didn't recognize. I felt his friends' laughter like a splash of ice water on my back as I hurried toward Giuseppe.
    As soon as I walked beneath the ice-encrusted wooden scaffolds, I realized what a mistake I had made. Giuseppe hung back in the shadows so I could hardly see his face, but I could tell from the frightened and furious look in his inhumanly bright eyes that I wasn't precisely a welcome guest. He was wary, probably because he couldn't imagine why I would have sought him here. And when he found out? Oh, bloody stakes. I am such an idiot.
    "Miss Hollis? Has something happened? If it's the money . . ." He looked around and lowered his voice. His right hand was worrying at something in his pocket, his left was pulling at the brim of his cap. I could feel his nervousness, and I'm as much an empath as my bicycle. "I will pay you back, I swear, but--"
    I shook my head quickly, and forced myself not to back up. I would have felt so much safer in the light. "No, no, it's not about that. I told you yesterday, you only need to pay me back when you can. It's . . ." I hesitated, and then rushed on. "You see, I'd just wanted to ask you a few questions about Rinaldo."
    The words, in their unadorned gall, made him freeze. I winced. My plans might have seemed sane in bed or the cocooning safety of a morning soup kitchen, but in the presence of one of the countless victims of Rinaldo's brutality I felt like a little girl, ignorantly courting death. I almost apologized and left, but Giuseppe roughly grabbed my elbow and forced me deeper into the tunnel. My eyes adjusted to the dim light provided by a few intermittently hung electric bulbs and more gas lamps. I grew aware of the hard, curious stares of the other workers. But I could only hear water, dripping somewhere behind me, and the low-pitched buzz of the electrical lights. Even my footsteps were muffled by the packed dirt and none of the men here put much store in breathing. Their eyes seemed to blaze out of the gloom--predatory, inhuman, watchful. The air smelled like damp earth and something barely recognizable--the curious antiseptic tang of a pack of vampires. I felt like a lamb lured into the lion's den. Immunity, as Aileen so often warned me, didn't mean "the buggers won't bleed you to death."
    "Zephyr, you know you shouldn't be