The Twelfth Card

inclination to stop the Negro, who has fierce eyes and large muscles and such frightening determination. As for the reward, the shouted offer came froma city constable, which means there’s no coin behind the promise.
    At the Twenty-third Street paintworks, Charles veers west. He slips on the slick cobblestones and falls hard. A mounted policeman rounds the corner and, raising his nightstick, bears down on the fallen man. And then—
    And? the girl thought.
    And?
    What happened to him?
    Sixteen-year-old Geneva Settle twisted the knob on the microfiche reader again but it would move no farther; she’d come to the last page on this carriage. She lifted out the metal rectangle containing the lead article in the July 23, 1868, edition of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. Riffling through the other frames in the dusty box, she worried that the remaining pages of the article were missing and she’d never find out what happened to her ancestor Charles Singleton. She’d learned that historical archives regarding black history were often incomplete, if not forever misplaced.
    Where was the rest of the story?
    Ah . . . Finally she found it and mounted the carriage carefully into the battered gray reader, moving the knob impatiently to locate the continuation of the story of Charles’s flight.
    Geneva’s lush imagination—and years of immersing herself in books—had given her the wherewithal to embellish the bare-bones magazine account of the former slave’s pursuit through the hot, foul streets of nineteenth-century New York. She almost felt she was back there, rather than where she really was at the moment: nearly 140 years later in the deserted fifth-floor library of the Museum of African-American Culture and History on Fifty-fifth Street in Midtown Manhattan.
    As she twisted the dial, the pages streamed past on the grainy screen. Geneva found the rest of the article, which was headlined:
    SHAME
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    THE ACCOUNT OF A FREEDMAN’S CRIME
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    CHARLES SINGLETON, A VETERAN OF THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES, BETRAYS THE CAUSE OF OUR PEOPLE IN A NOTORIOUS INCIDENT
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    A picture accompanying the article showed twenty-eight-year-old Charles Singleton in his Civil War uniform. He was tall, his hands were large and the tight fit of the uniform on his chest and arms suggested powerful muscles. Lips broad, cheekbones high, head round, skin quite dark.
    Staring at the unsmiling face, the calm, piercing eyes, the girl believed there was a resemblance between them—she had the head and face of her ancestor, the roundness of his features, the rich shade of his skin. Not a bit of the Singleton physique, though. Geneva Settle was skinny as a grade-school boy, as the Delano Project girls loved to point out.
    She began to read once more, but a noise intruded.
    A click in the room. A door latch? Then she heard footsteps. They paused. Another step. Finally silence. She glanced behind her, saw nobody.
    She felt a chill, but told herself not to be freaked. It was just bad memories that put her on edge: the Delano girls whaling on her in the school yard behind Langston Hughes High, and that time Tonya Brown and her crew from the St. Nicholas Houses dragged her into an alley then pounded her so bad that shelost a back tooth. Boys groped, boys dissed, boys put you down. But it was the girls who made you bleed.
    Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch . . .
    More footsteps. Another pause.
    Silence.
    The nature of this place didn’t help. Dim, musty, quiet. And there was no one else here, not at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday morning. The museum wasn’t open yet—tourists were still asleep or having their breakfasts—but the library opened at eight. Geneva had been waiting here when they unlocked the doors, she’d been so eager to read the article. She now sat in a cubicle at the end of a large exhibit hall, where faceless mannequins wore nineteenth-century costumes and the walls were filled with paintings of men in bizarre hats, women in bonnets and horses with wack, skinny legs.
    Another footstep. Then another pause.
    Should she leave? Go hang with Dr. Barry, the librarian, until this creepy dude left?
    And then the other visitor laughed.
    Not a weird laugh, a fun laugh.
    And he said, “Okay. I’ll call you later.”
    A snap of a cell phone folding up. That’s why he’d been pausing, just listening to the person on the other end of the line.
    Told you not to worry, girl. People aren’t dangerous when they laugh. They aren’t