The Diviners (16 page)

Sam was at a loss to explain it. He remembered something strange his mother had said to him once. They were in the bathroom, and she was cleaning the scrapes he’d gotten after the school bullies chased him home and pushed him down on the street. “Don’t worry,
lyubimiy
. You have gifts they do not.” “What do you
mean?” he’d asked, wincing as she pressed a damp cloth to his scraped chin. “In time, you will see.” In time, he did see, but he wondered if that was what she had meant after all and, if so, how she could have known.

Trying to keep warm in the slight chill, Sam had watched the sailor carefully and thought of his jacket. It wasn’t the wool peacoat itself but the postcard hidden inside his pocket that mattered. It wouldn’t seem like much to anyone else—just a worn drawing of majestic, snow-capped mountains and tall trees. No helpful postmark accompanied it. On the back were three words scrawled in Russian. That postcard was the only thing Sam had brought with him from his father’s house in Chicago when he ran away, taking refuge in a traveling circus heading east. In the six months since he’d arrived in New York, he’d barely been able to survive. But fortunes could change quickly. The papers were full of stories of self-made men, like Henry Ford and Jake Marlowe. Sam, too, would make his fortune, and then he’d find the place in the postcard. He’d find
her
.

Evie, her uncle, and the Teutonic giant had obviously left for good, so Sam flicked open his Swiss Army knife and easily picked the lock on the museum’s door. For an egghead, that professor was pretty dumb about safeguarding his treasures. Street light pressed against the museum’s stained-glass windows. It gave the gloom inside a warm amber glow. Sam waited for his eyes to adjust, then slipped through the quiet old mansion looking for his jacket. This whole affair could’ve been avoided if he’d used his skill on Evie O’Neill back at Penn Station. But for some reason, he’d wanted her to see him. He’d wanted to talk to her. And when the time came, he’d wanted to kiss her as much as he’d wanted her money. That had been his undoing. Now here he was in the Museum of the Creepy Crawlies, searching in the dim light for his jacket.

It had been so much simpler with the sailor. The man had
idled on the corner, confused about whether to go forward or turn right or left, and in that moment, Sam had read the poor chump perfectly. When the sailor had finally crossed the street, Sam had come from the other direction.
Don’t see me
, he’d thought, and even when someone looked in his direction, it was with a hazy, unfocused glance. Sam moved seamlessly through the crowd and lifted the sailor’s wallet from his pants pocket with ease, then walked away without being noticed.

Where was his jacket? Sam chanced turning on a desk lamp. The light fell onto a stack of newspaper clippings a good two inches thick. He riffled through the stories, dismissing them with a smirk. Ghost stories. Spooky tales invented by folks who were afraid of living. Or who wanted attention. He knew the type. Then Sam’s smirk faded as his eyes fell on a small article from a Kansas paper that told of a fifteen-year-old girl who fell ill with the sleeping sickness. Just before she died, she repeated a phrase that baffled her family. It was only the same two words, over and over:
Project Buffalo
.

Sam returned the article to the stack with suddenly shaking hands. If this Professor Fitzgerald knew something about it, then he needed to find a way to stick close to him, maybe by staying cozy with his niece, which sounded like a pretty swell proposition. Unless she killed him in a fit of pique. She certainly seemed like the sort of doll who could do it. Sam smiled at the thought; he liked a challenge. And that one was definitely a challenge. All he needed was a way in.

He spied it hanging on the wall in the collections room:
CEREMONIAL MASONIC KNIGHTS TEMPLAR DAGGER AND SCABBARD OWNED BY CORNELIUS T. RATHBONE, D. 1855
.
That ought to do it
, Sam thought, tucking it into his shirt. He left the museum as he’d found it. By this time tomorrow, he’d have his jacket, and maybe a little reward money, too.

Evie went straight to Mabel’s apartment and the girls scooted past the cigarette smoke–filled parlor, where Mabel’s parents were hosting a political meeting. As they shut the door to Mabel’s bedroom, they could hear the adults arguing about workers’ rights over cups of coffee.

“What’s the matter? You look terrible,” Mabel said.

“It’s been a real lulu of a day, old girl.” Evie told Mabel about Ruta Badowski’s grisly murder, leaving out the part about the shoe buckle. She knew Mabel—she was as much of a crusader as her parents. She’d probably march Evie down to the police station and make her confess. But Evie didn’t want to relive a minute of the terrible things she’d seen.

“How awful! Do you think your uncle Will can help them find the killer?”

“If anyone can, it’s Unc. He’s a genius.”

“Are you going to help?”

Evie shuddered. “Not on your life-ski.”

In the other room, the arguments escalated into shouting.
Someone pounded the table and yelled, “We must do more!” while Mrs. Rose shushed and soothed.

“Mabel, could I sleep here tonight?”

Mabel’s eyes widened. “You want to sleep through
that
?”

Evie nodded. She needed the noise. It might be enough to drown out the nightmares.

Mabel shrugged. “Suit yourself. Here, have a nightgown.”

Evie held up the chaste, high-necked gown, examining it with a scowl. “If I should die in the night, please remove this.”

“Could you please remind me why we’re friends?”

“Because you need me.”

“I think you have that reversed, Evie O’Neill.”

“Probably.” Evie kissed Mabel’s cheek. “You are an absolute doll of a pal, Mabesie, my girl.”

“Don’t you forget it.”

They crawled into Mabel’s bed and watched the light make patterns on the ceiling in the dark. They talked of Operation Jericho and poor dead Rudolph Valentino, and they talked, too, of their futures, as if they could shape the glittering course of their destinies with secret confessions offered like prayers to the room’s benevolent hush. They talked until their words grew sparse with their drowsiness.

“Have you ever known something that you were afraid to tell?” Evie asked. She was more tired than she ever remembered being.

“Whaddaya mean?” Mabel slurred.

“I’m not sure,” Evie murmured. She wanted to say more, but wasn’t sure how to begin, and Mabel was already fast asleep.

Under a crumbling eave in the old house, a spider waited and watched as a hapless fly ventured into its web. When it became
clear that the fly was hopelessly trapped, the spider scuttled forward, entombing the creature in a shroud of silk.

Like the spider, the house was also watching. Waiting. It had waited for many years, through the deaths of presidents and the fighting of wars. It had waited as the first motorcar roared down dirt roads and the aeroplane defied gravity. Now the wait was over.

Deep in the bowels of the old cellar, the furnace flame coughed to life. Behind the furnace lay a secret passageway to a hidden room whose walls glimmered faintly with symbols painted long ago in preparation. The stranger turned a crank and, high above, a metal grate, rusty with neglect, screeched open to reveal a night sky untouched by the phosphorescence of city lights. It was the perfect place to watch listless clouds drift by. To gaze at the stars. Or to catch the full glory of a prophecied comet as it burned past. The stranger stood naked beneath that sky. His shimmering skin was also a tapestry of symbols. He placed the eyes upon the altar and bowed his head, waiting, like the spider, like the house.

Whispers filled the room, soft at first, then louder, like the sound of a thousand devils loosed upon a desert. The gloom moved. The shadows surged, pressing against the stranger and the offering while the cold distant stars looked away.

The morning’s
Daily News
sold the story of Ruta Badowski’s death with a three-inch headline—
MURDER IN MANHATTAN!
—atop a grainy photograph of her grieving parents. Evie read the accounts in every newspaper while she waited for Will to come back from the police precinct. The stories mentioned that it was a ritual murder and that the killer had left a note with a Bible quotation and occult symbols, but didn’t divulge what the symbols were. Detective Malloy had obviously held back details. Evie wished she didn’t know the details. She’d woken with that terrible whistling melody in her head.

None of the newspaper accounts mentioned that Will had been consulted, and Evie wished that they had. It was terrible, she knew, but there was no such thing as bad publicity, and a mention of Uncle Will in connection to a murder investigation might bring people to the museum. It was nearly one o’clock. They’d been open since half past ten, and the only visitor they’d had was a man from Texas who’d really wanted to sell them cemetery plots. Evie had seen the bills piling up on Uncle Will’s desk, along with the letter from the tax office and another from a realty company. If they
didn’t start getting a steady flow of visitors, they’d all be out on the streets. And Evie would be back in Ohio.

“It is always like this?” Evie asked Jericho, who was absorbed in some religious text that smelled of dust.

Jericho looked up, puzzled. “Always like what?”

“Dead.”

“It’s a little slow,” Jericho allowed.

Evie couldn’t do much about the museum just then, but she could do something about Operation Jericho. She scooted her chair closer to him and put on her best pensive face.

“Do you know who would be pos-i-tute-ly wonderful at this sort of thing? Mabel.”

“Mabel?” Jericho’s eyes had the faraway look of a man trying to place something.

“Mabel Rose! Lives downstairs in the Bennington?” Evie prompted. Jericho still looked lost. “Often comes to visit and speaks aloud in whole sentences. You’ve heard her voice. Try to remember.”

“Oh, that Mabel.”

“Right. Now that we’ve sorted out our Mabels, what do you think of her?
I
think she’s a swell girl. And so bright! Did you know that she can read Latin? She can conjugate while she cogitates!” Evie laughed.

“Who?” Jericho said, turning a page.

“Mabel!” Evie said with irritation. “And she has an adorable figure. Granted, it’s hidden beneath the most tragic dresses, but that figure is there, I tell you.”

“Do you mean Mabel from sixteen-E?”

“Yes, I do!”

Jericho shrugged. “She seems a nice enough sort of girl.”

Evie brightened. “Yes, she does, doesn’t she? Very, very nice. Why don’t the three of us have dinner together some evening?”

“Fine,” Jericho said absently.

Evie smiled. At least Operation Jericho was off to a rousing start. She’d figure out a plan for the museum later.

“What you gonna do, writer man?”

Gabe stood between Memphis and the net, arms spread, fingers ready for the steal. Their shoes squeaked on the wooden floors of the church’s gymnasium. Overhead, ceiling fans whirred, but they couldn’t keep up with the boys’ sweat. Memphis wiped a forearm across his eyes, planning his move.

“Gonna stay there all day?” Gabe taunted.

Memphis faked to his left. Gabe took the bait and lunged, allowing Memphis to surge past him on the right. Fast and sweet, he moved down the court and sank the ball with ease.