Stranger Things meets the Golden Age of Detective fiction in a rollicking supernatural detective thriller that introduces Artie Quick, a sales assistant at Filene’s in Boston, who moonlights as a amateur detective.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Jeremy P. Bushnell’s Relentless Melt, which is out June 6th.
The year is 1909, and Artie Quick—an ambitious, unorthodox and inquisitive young Bostonian—wants to learn about crime. By day she holds down a job as a salesgirl in women’s accessories at Filene’s; by night she disguises herself as a man to pursue studies in Criminal Investigation at the YMCA’s Evening Institute for Younger Men.
Eager to put theory into practice, Artie sets out in search of something to investigate. She’s joined by her pal Theodore, an upper-crust young bachelor whose interest in Boston’s occult counterculture has drawn him into the study of magic. Together, their journey into mystery begins on Boston Common—where the tramps and the groundskeepers swap rumors about unearthly screams and other unsettling anomalies—but soon Artie and Theodore uncover a series of violent abductions that take them on an adventure from the highest corridors of power to the depths of an abandoned mass transit tunnel, its excavation suspiciously never completed.
Will Theodore ever manage to pull off a successful spell? Is Artie really wearing that men’s suit just for disguise or is there something more to it? And what chance do two mixed-up young people stand up against the greatest horror Boston has ever known, an ancient, deranged evil that feeds on society’s most vulnerable?
“The year is 1909. Artie Quick is learning the art of criminal investigation under the guidance of Professor Silas Winchell. Theodore Reed, an eccentric friend of Artie’s, has been gathering reports of local anomalies, and he’s heard an interesting one from a groundskeeper at Boston Common about a “sustained scream of distress” that happened on the grounds of the park. Artie, seeking some investigative experience in the field, agrees to accompany Theodore into the park the very next night, to see what will turn up if she puts the techniques she’s learned from Professor Winchell into practice…”
They walk the paths of the Common, senses heightened. She tries to perceive things with clear and objective eyes, the way Winchell would want her to. But after a minute or two she begins to feel foolish: she starts to suspect that there’s maybe not that much to see. What kind of evidence gets left behind by a scream? In practice, it feels like they’re bumbling around in the dark, looking at nothing. Maybe she should have brought her notebook to record her observations—but what would she note, anyway? Is it important to note the broken branch overhead? What about this page from a newspaper, trampled into the mud? Should she observe details of the footprint?
It occurs to her then that maybe the problem is not that there are too few things to observe, but rather too many, that anything could be a clue. She feels frustrated by her own inability to evaluate the details meaningfully, to say with authority that this one is more important than that one; but then the frustration gives way to a sense that the whole thing is just plain dumb.
She shakes her head to clear it. Start again. What would Winchell want her to do? The details that are probably the most important for her to gather, right now, are details about the scream itself. They’ve been looking around the Common—that’s in line with the chapter in the book she read last night, “Inspection of Localities”—but she remembers Winchell telling her about a future section in the book, “Examination of Witnesses.” She hasn’t gotten to that section yet, but from the title she can guess what she’d need to do.
Theodore couldn’t provide much in the way of useful details about the scream because he didn’t hear it himself: he wasn’t a witness. But someone was.
“Hey,” she says, reaching out to touch Theodore’s sleeve. “This guy Flann. The gardener. Let’s go talk to him.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Theodore says. “I’d love to introduce the two of you; I think you’d find him fascinating; absolutely fascinating. He wouldn’t be on the grounds at this hour, however.”
“Oh,” Artie says.
“Perhaps we could speak with him tomorrow,” Theodore says. “Sure,” Artie says, but she’s a bit dejected to have to postpone pursuing what feels like a lead. She kicks a rock up the path; she falls deep into thought.
“Well, wait a second,” she says finally. “If he’s not here late at night, how did he hear the scream?”
“I don’t believe he did,” Theodore says.
“Well, OK,” Artie says, “but who did then? I mean, are we sure there even was a scream, or are we just chasing phantoms?”
“Ah!” Theodore says. “Flann—he’s a bit of an eccentric, you understand—he always tries to maintains close contact with the transients who reside here in the park. The tramps? The hoboes? They help him to keep up his sense of what transpires on the grounds.”
Together they look up toward the northern corner of the park, the triangle near the golden dome of the State House and the tall, white steeple of the Park Street Church. Vagrants congregate there at night, sleeping on the benches. So far her perambulations around the park with Theodore have kept away from that corner, perhaps out of a shared, unspoken sense that that area would be dangerous.
“I believe,” Theodore continues, “that he pays them a small sum for any useful tidbits of information they provide to him. So one of them must have been the source.”
“Or several of them,” Artie says.
“Plausibly,” Theodore says.
She’s nervous, but she also knows that churchwomen have worked with vagrants, part of their charitable mission. If they can do it, so can she.
So, together, they make their way up the incline that leads to the wrought-iron gates at the front of the State House, until they reach a group of four men sitting on a stone bench in front of a bronze relief depicting Civil War soldiers on a march. Artie and Theodore hang back, right at the edge of the group, exchanging glances. They don’t really have a plan.
It’s Theodore who makes the first move. He takes a big step toward the men and throws his arms wide. “Gentlemen!” he says. “Good evening!” The men bristle, look up at him balefully.
Artie catches Theodore by the coat, tugs him backward. She might not know how to interrogate witnesses, but in the moment she finds it hard to believe that it could go worse than the approach that Theodore is trying here would.
“Listen,” she says, to the man closest to her. In an attempt to draw upon some inner reserve of charitable fellow feeling, she crouches down near him, so that they can better see eye to eye. He has a grizzled gray beard, and part of his nose seems to have eroded, a result of either accident or disease, Artie isn’t sure. She wills herself to hold her position, to carry on, even though she finds it a little difficult to maintain a sense of fellow feeling with someone who’s missing part of his nose. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she continues. “Just—my friend here and I are looking into something that happened here last night. A possible crime. We heard that someone might have been screaming—in distress?” The man stares back, seemingly uncomprehending. “Sustained distress?” Artie tries.
“What is she saying?” bellows the second man on the bench.
“Shut up,” the first man bellows back.
The second man: “But what is she saying.”
“I was saying—” begins Artie.
“She was saying that someone was screaming last night.” “Screaming?”
“Screaming.”
“Last night?”
“Here, last night; she wants to know if we know anything about it.”
“Well, I wasn’t here last night; I was at Old North.”
“I was with you, you damn idiot.”
“Well, tell her that.”
“I will.”
“I see,” Artie says. “I’m sorry to have bothered you—”
“Were either of you here last night?” the second man hollers down to the other two men on the bench. The third man sits there inert, his chin to his chest; even from a few feet away Artie can smell the odor of alcohol wafting off of him. He hasn’t stirred during the entire conversation and he doesn’t respond now. But the fourth man, wearing ragged overalls and a broad-brimmed fisherman’s hat, who up until this point had been similarly inert, suddenly leaps to his feet and takes a lurching step toward her.
Artie, startled, rises from her crouching position and tries to back away, but the man reaches out and grabs the cuff of her jacket.
Artie looks down and, through her panic, notes the tattoo on the back of the man’s hand: a crude anchor, just above the knuckle. A former sailor?
“Hey, now,” Theodore says, stepping in: he interposes a long arm protectively between her and the man, although the man doesn’t release his grip.
“Theodore, wait,” Artie says. She doesn’t want this to tumble into violence if it doesn’t have to, and she isn’t sure Theodore’s presence is helping. She keeps her eyes on the old man’s face, inspects the crinkled network of lines around his eyes, and he looks back at her, and then he begins to say something. Artie can’t understand him, though: to her ears, it sounds like gibberish.
“What is he saying?” Artie says, to the two loud men still sitting on the bench, who have, for the moment, ceased bellowing in favor of watching this unfolding drama.
“He’s Portuguese,” says the first man. “Do you speak it?” “No,” Artie says.
“I don’t speak it either,” says Theodore.
“We’re all outta luck then,” says the first man.
Artie tries anyway. “Were you here last night?” she says, returning her attention to the man in the fisherman’s hat in front of her. “Did you hear the scream? Did you see the crime?”
The Portuguese man releases his grip on her sleeve, says something else, pauses, as though trying to figure out how to say something in English. Theodore, detecting that he maybe doesn’t mean Artie any harm, draws his arm away, although Artie can tell that he’s still energized, ready to get into a scuffle if the circumstances warrant it, perhaps a bit too ready. The Portuguese man seems to give up on whatever he was trying to say, and instead he turns his attention to fishing something out of the pocket of his overalls with his free hand.
He pulls something out, presses it firmly into Artie’s palm, and then releases her sleeve.
She looks down at it.
It’s a human tooth.
She recoils a bit, but doesn’t drop it.
“Is this—where did you get this?”
The Portuguese man reaches up into his overgrown mustache and hooks his mouth with his forefinger. He pulls it way open so that she can see the gap, all the way at the back of his row of teeth.
“This is yours?”
The man, listening, lets go of his mouth, nods.
“Did someone strike you?” Artie tries. She makes fists with her hands, mimes a punch to her own jaw.
The man shakes his head no. “Did it just—fall out?” she says.
The man listens. Artie isn’t sure he understands. He nods yes.
Artie holds the tooth up, mimes it falling from her head. The man nods yes.
“Did you hear someone scream?” she asks.
The man stares at her. She puts her hand on her throat, opens her mouth, does her best imitation of someone in distress. The man nods yes.
“Was it you? Were you the one screaming?” The man nods no.
“Did you see who it was?”
The man nods no.
This is the closest thing to a witness as she’s going to find, she suspects. But she’s not sure what to ask next, especially given that she’s not even really sure he’s understanding her questions. She makes a mental note to read that chapter in the book, so that next time she’ll better know what to do.
She offers the tooth back to the old man, but he wraps his hand around hers, closes it back inside her grasp. His hand is wrinkled and knobby, very much an old man’s hand, but it is warm and dry.
“Thank you for your time,” she says, and then she leaves, Theodore behind her, the man’s tooth still in her hand.
