There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Two


The freight elevator of the Empire State Building descended slowly, bouncing a little as it landed. A maintenance worker pulled open the scissor gate and Evie Ferrante, her colleague Nick Barlow, and the team of four movers they’d brought with them emerged from the car—like clowns, Evie thought, spewing out of one of those tiny circus cars—along with a rolling platform loaded with tools and packing equipment. An officer from building security had escorted them down, presumably to make sure they took only the old jet engine that the Five-Boroughs Historical Society had been authorized to remove.

In this cavernous sub-subbasement, the ceilings were low and the lighting meager. Here none of the art deco architectural detailing of the building was present, just the structural bones. Evie had to watch out to keep from tripping over coal cart rails embedded in the floor or banging her head on the yellow pipes that snaked along overhead. A roach the size of a silver dollar skittered past her feet and into the shadows.

They followed the security officer into the core of the building, past massive support columns of bare concrete with veins where moisture had hardened into lime deposits. If she closed her eyes, the cool dampness and the smell could have convinced her that she was walking through ancient catacombs.

Evie’s heart quickened. There, sitting on the floor among some cardboard boxes, was a battered Wright Whirlwind engine, or what was left of the one from the B-25 bomber that had lost its way on a foggy Saturday morning in 1945 and slammed into the north side of the building. The wings and propeller had sheared off on impact. The plane itself had turned into a fireball, feeding on its own fuel and taking out offices on four floors.

Evie crouched beside the engine, savoring the moment. She was about to bring to light an artifact that no one had thought to look for. She hadn’t made history—that wasn’t her job—but she was about to preserve an important piece of it.

“Holy shit,” said Evie’s onetime mentor, Nick. “That’s it, isn’t it?” The expression on his face was of unabashed delight. “You did it. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” Nick had been so incredibly generous to her. He’d been stoic if not supportive when she’d gotten promoted over him to senior curator, her academic degree trumping his many years of experience. “That means a lot to me, coming from you.”

The engine was round, about five hundred pounds of metal, five feet in diameter and caked with dust. With its center crank and rusting cylinders that radiated out, the thing resembled a miniature space station that had been through an intergalactic war. Upon impact with the building, the engine had been pulled right out of its cowling, and it had shot partway across the seventy-ninth floor before plunging to the bottom of an elevator shaft. It was miraculously still intact, not twenty feet away from where workers had hauled it from the elevator pit days after the accident.

It surprised Evie that so few people knew about the spectacular crash. Maybe it was because a few days later the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

“This is so cool,” Nick said. He crouched beside her. “They’re just going to let us take it?”

Evie waved the release and letter of agreement she’d worked so hard to get. Finding the engine had been a reward for persistence. She’d been looking for artifacts to feature in the upcoming Seared in Memory exhibit, the first she’d curated solo, and it had occurred to her to wonder what had happened to the plane engines after the fire. From Alice Chen, a friend from college and now director of community relations for the Empire State Building, Evie had learned that not only did one of the engines still exist, it hadn’t been moved. Getting the building owners to agree to let the Historical Society feature the engine in the exhibit had taken months of diplomacy. It helped that one of the Historical Society board members was the wife of a senior partner in the property management company that ran the building.

While the movers got started assembling the polyurethane-sheathed cage that Evie had designed to protect the engine during transport, Nick set up lights and Evie started to take pictures. Of the engine. Of Nick standing over the engine, his arms spread to give a sense of scale. Of the closed door just beyond with white stenciled letters that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Of that door open, shooting down into the pit where the engine had landed. It must have sounded like a bomb exploding, a quarter of a ton of burning metal plummeting from more than a thousand feet overhead.



It took the rest of the morning to get the engine wrapped and hoisted onto a platform. By the time they were ready to leave, Evie’s arms and legs were coated with dirt and rust—and those were just the parts of her that she could see. She was glad she’d worn jeans and steel-toed work boots.

As they were bringing the engine up in the service elevator at the Historical Society, her cell phone vibrated. Maybe it was Seth. He’d promised her dinner at her favorite soup dumpling restaurant in Chinatown for a change. Handsome in a Colin Farrell kind of way, without the mustache, he and Evie had met at an auction. He’d outbid her for a gold-and-pearl tie tack that had belonged to Stephanus Van Cortlandt, New York’s first American-born mayor. It was a refreshing change to date someone who’d actually heard of Stephanus Van Cortlandt or knew that the pattern tooled on those gold cuff links was acanthus leaf. It wasn’t the worst reason she’d had to go to bed with a man.

The doors opened on the second floor, where the main exhibit hall was located. A minute later there was a chime. A text message. Evie fished out the phone.

The message was short and sweet. It was not from Seth; it was from her sister, Ginger, and it was so not what she wanted to see.