The Diviners (37 page)

“Three minutes,” Will said.

Evie gritted her teeth. She didn’t understand how or why her object reading worked, only that it did—in its own way, and in its own time.

“Two and a half minutes remaining…”

Images unspooled slowly for Evie now. “These were in a bin at Woolworth’s, marked down to seventy-eight cents. It was cold that day and you’d lost one glove of the last pair. You’ve lost the right glove of this one, too. You keep taking it off and forgetting it.”

Evie opened her eyes. Will was still looking at his watch. “That could be a lucky guess. Or cleverness. Gloves at Woolworth’s
at that price aren’t uncommon. You often observe me misplacing my right one. Not proof. One minute remaining.”

Evie was tired and desperate and more than a little angry. She closed her eyes again. This time, the scene was strong. She saw a laughing woman with dark hair and eyes, her hands encased in a fur muff. “ ‘That’s you all over, William. Always a glove short,’ ” Evie repeated after the woman.

“Stop,” Will said coldly, but Evie was truly there now. She could almost sense the wind. A much younger Will wobbled on ice skates while the pretty woman laughed. Evie smiled unconsciously.

“I can see her. She’s standing by an ice rink… in a dark green coat… in the snow….”

“Stop, Evie.”

“She’s very pretty and… and she’s happy… so very happy… it might be the happiest day of her li—”

Will yanked the glove from Evie’s hands hard, startling her. He loomed over her, red-cheeked and angry. “I said stop!” he thundered.

Evie turned and ran from the museum, ignoring Sam as he called out after her.

Evie walked the streets of the city until she was too tired to continue. In Central Park, she found a bench by the pond and sat to watch a rowboat with two couples in it. They laughed easily, enjoying the day’s sun. They seemed carefree and unbothered, and Evie hated them for it. She’d hoped Uncle Will of all people would understand. Evie wiped her tears with the back of her hand. Ordinarily, she’d go to Mabel for comfort. But that was out of the question, and Evie felt lost and alone.

She wandered back to the Bennington and climbed the stairs to the roof, where she sat with the pigeons. She had that coiled tightness ballooning in her chest, like her skin was on too tight. Like she’d come around a blind corner, and every demon she kept at bay had been there waiting. Will lectured about belief in the supernatural, but the only ghosts that frightened Evie were the very real ghosts inside her. Some mornings, she’d wake and vow,
Today, I will get it right. I won’t be such an awful mess of a girl. I won’t lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won’t go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I’ll be good and kind and
sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves.
But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She’d say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She’d take a dare she shouldn’t, just to be noticed. Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish. But what was the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all? “Oh, Evie, you’re too much,” people said, and it wasn’t complimentary. Yes, she was too much. She felt like too much inside all the time.

So why wasn’t she ever enough?

Evie stared at the long columns of windows cut into the building across the street. So many windows. Who lived behind them? Were they happy? Or did they sometimes sit on a rooftop haunted by a deep loneliness for which there seemed to be no cure?

The door creaked open on its hinges and Jericho angled his broad shoulders through the opening. “Thought I might find you here. What happened with your uncle Will?”

Evie turned her face away and wiped her eyes. “I stirred the tea counterclockwise.”

Jericho slid down the wall, keeping a respectable distance between them. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Evie said nothing. To the south, the sun glinted off the steel tip of a building. Smoke belched from rooftop chimneys in fat, sooty puffs. A billboard advertised Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum in giant iron letters. On the roof’s edge, the pigeons arched their necks, hunting for food.

“You asked me about how I came to live with your uncle Will. I didn’t answer you right away,” Jericho started. He pulled a heel of bread from his pocket and unwrapped it.

“No, you didn’t,” Evie said. Once, she’d been very curious about that. She couldn’t see that it mattered now, with her expulsion imminent. But she was grateful to Jericho for coming after
her, for trying to comfort her in his way. She just wanted him to keep talking. “Will you tell me now?”

He squinted in the sun. “I was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania. Cows and pastures. Rolling farmland. Mornings seem newly born there. It’s about as far from here as you can get.”

“Sounds swell,” Evie said, hoping her words didn’t sound as hollow as they felt.

Jericho waited for a spell, as if gathering words. “There was an epidemic. Infantile paralysis. It took my sister first. And then I woke up with a fever. By the time they got me to the hospital in Philadelphia, I couldn’t feel my legs and arms, and I was having trouble breathing. I was nine.”

As he spoke, Jericho tore the bread into tiny pieces, which he tossed onto the flat tar roof for the birds, who swarmed the food.

“They put me in a machine, a prototype of something they were working on called an iron lung. It breathes for you. Of course, you’re trapped inside it—like a metal coffin. I spent whole days staring up at the ceiling, watching the light from the windows behind me shift like a sundial. My mother would come up from Lancaster by horse and wagon every Sunday and pray for me. But there’s a lot to do on a farm, and there were two other children back home and another on the way. Soon it was every other Sunday. Then she just stopped coming.” Jericho broke up more of the bread and tossed it into the scrum of squawking birds. “I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.”

Evie wasn’t sure what she should say, so she kept quiet and watched the birds clustering around the food, fighting for it.

“Then I heard a bird chirping on the windowsill, signaling
spring. I knew that if the bird could get there, so could she. I knew the minute I heard that bird outside my window that she wasn’t coming back. Even before the doctors told me my parents had signed the papers that made me a ward of the state, I knew.”

Jericho wiped his hands on his handkerchief.

“How could your parents just leave you?” Evie asked after a while.

“Invalids don’t grow up to work plows or threshing machines. I was beyond their care. And they had other mouths to feed.”

“How can you forgive them so easily?”

“What would not forgiving them do for me?”

“But you’re strong and healthy now. How…?”

Jericho tossed a small rock from the roof with a baseball player’s power. “They tried something new. I was lucky; it worked. And after some time, I recovered.”

“Why, that’s a miracle!”

“There are no miracles,” he said. His face was unreadable. “Will agreed to be my guardian. He needed an assistant, and I needed a home. He’s a good man. Better than most.”

“He only cares about his work and that damned museum,” Evie said, not caring that she swore.

“That isn’t true. I don’t know what happened today, but he was awfully worried. Talk to him, Evie.”

Evie wanted to tell Jericho what had happened, but she couldn’t seem to open herself to scrutiny again.

“He’s already made up his mind to send me back to Ohio,” Evie said. “Perhaps if I were a ghost he’d listen.”

“There are no such things as ghosts, either. But don’t tell your uncle that,” Jericho said. It made Evie smile for a moment.

She knew she should start packing, but she wanted to forestall
the inevitable just a little longer, to etch the skyline of the city forever in her mind. It had been a wonderful few weeks. It was a shame it was over.

Jericho took out his dog-eared book, and Evie nodded to it. “May I?”

Jericho handed it over, and Evie read from the bookmarked page: “ ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?’ ” Evie narrowed her eyes at him. “You sure know how to have a good time, don’t you?” She handed it back to him. “Will you read to me?”

“You want me to read Nietzsche to you?”

“The way I’m feeling, it couldn’t hurt.”

Jericho cleared his throat and found his place. “ ‘What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves…’ ”

Jericho’s voice lulled Evie. She watched the sun glint off the side of a water tower on the roof of a building to the west. Nearby, the pigeons hopped about in their constant quest for food.

“ ‘What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?’ ”

“Jericho, have they tried your miracle cure on anyone else?”

“I told you,” Jericho said. “There are no miracles.”

Will returned home around suppertime and summoned Evie to his office. He sat stiffly in his chair, fidgeting with an unlit cigarette. The radio played softly.

“Evangeline, I shouldn’t have lost my temper earlier. I apologize.”

Evie shrugged. “Everybody gets sore sometimes.”

“It took me rather by surprise, I’m afraid.” Will lit the Chesterfield in his hand. He dragged on it, then blew out a thin stream of smoke. “Tell me more about this talent of yours.”

“It started two years ago, when the dreams about James began.”

“Your brother, James?”

“No. James the doorman,” Evie snapped, and instantly regretted it. The last thing she needed to do was to aggravate Will.

“There was no antecedent. I’m a curator and scholar. I must have sourcing,” Will said matter-of-factly. “How did you come to discover it?”

“The first time, it was a brooch of Mother’s. I wanted to wear it, but she wouldn’t let me. She’d left it on her dressing table, and I
picked it up, but I couldn’t seem to work up the nerve to pin it to my dress. I kept turning it over in my hands, and I got the funniest feeling. The brooch felt warm. My hands warmed, too, and my palms tingled.” Evie paused. She’d wanted to talk about it, but now she felt exposed.

“Go on. What did you see? Were you privy to only an hour of the object’s history, or could you see back farther? Did it come on you as more of a feeling, a suggestion, or did you feel as if you were with the person, living that moment?”

“So… you believe me?”

Will nodded. “I believe you.”

Evie sat forward, hopeful. “It was just like sitting at the picture show, but a picture show where the projector light isn’t terribly strong. It was only a moment. I could see Mother sitting at her dressing table, and I could feel what she had been feeling when she’d worn the brooch.”

“What was that?”

Evie looked him in the eyes. “She wished I’d been the one to die instead of James.”

Will broke the gaze. “Mothers love all their children equally.”

“No, they don’t. That’s just what we all agree to say.”

“And that was the first time?”

“Yes. I tested it. Whenever I concentrated on an object, I could sense some of its history. It isn’t always in order. Sometimes the pictures I see are faint; other times, they’re stronger. I think when the emotion is strong, I feel and see more.”

“Has it gotten stronger, would you say? Or weaker?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t practiced it like the castanets,” Evie said. “Can you practice it like the castanets?”

“Have you met anyone else who can do what you do?” Will asked, ignoring her question.

“
Are
there others like me?”

“If so, they haven’t announced themselves. Have you told your parents about this?”

“It was hard enough telling you after what happened in Ohio. They think it was one of my little pranks.”

“Good, good,” Will said.

“Why are you asking all these questions?”

“I’m trying to understand,” Will said.

No one had ever said anything like that to Evie. Her parents always wanted to advise or instruct or command. They were good people, but they needed the world to bend to them, to fit into their order of things. Evie had never really quite fit, and when she tried, she’d just pop back out, like a doll squeezed into a too-small box.

“So no one knows,” Will murmured.

“Well, I did show off a bit at that party Theta took me to,” Evie said uncertainly.

“You did this at a party?” Will sounded alarmed.

“It was nothing important! Just telling people what they’d had for dinner or the names of their dogs when they were kids. Most of the people there were fried.” Evie was careful not to mention her own drinking. “It was only in fun. Why shouldn’t I?”