The Diviners (62 page)

“Will! Jericho!” she called.

“Here!” Jericho shouted back, and she saw his shirt off to the right.

They ran together as a pack, Evie still clutching the pendant in her fist. The wind picked up, driving into them, the noise of it like a hundred angry voices. She leaned into it, pushing back. The crack of a rifle sounded on the ridge above them. A warning.

“Where’s… the… car?” Evie huffed out.

“This way!” Jericho dragged her after him. She glimpsed the Ford in the trees and ran to it as if it were a lifeboat.

Will ripped open the driver’s-side door and slid behind the wheel, fingers seeking out the clutch. “Why won’t it start?” he growled.

“The motor’s too cold. You’ll need the hand crank,” Evie said.

“Jericho… crank,” Will gasped out.

“I’m buying you a new car; I swear I am,” Evie vowed.

Jericho raced around to the front of the car and placed one
hand on the hood for balance. With the other, he reached for the crank. Another shot rang out.

“Jericho! Keep your thumb beside your fingers in case the crank snaps back!” Evie called. “You don’t want to break your arm!”

Jericho nodded. He pushed the crank forward,
once, twice
. The motor belched and coughed and then went silent again. Torches winked in the shadowy trees just above them. The fires on the crest of the hill paused, held their flicker to one space momentarily as if lost, unsure whether they should destroy or illuminate in those woods. Jericho gave one more push. As Evie had warned, the metal bar snapped back quickly, and Jericho barely had time to jump back and avoid injury. The engine shuddered to life—
ta-thacketa, thacketa, thacketa
.

Shouts came from up the hill. The torches, indecisive no longer, zigzagged down the slope, leaving angry tails of flame and smoke. The engine spasmed and threatened to die again.

“No!” Evie shouted, as if her reprimand could get the Tin Lizzie running.

With grim determination, Will worked the clutch, and this time the motor caught, humming into readiness. The torches were close. Evie could make out the full shape of the mob as Jericho came around the side of the old Ford.

The rifle cracked. Jericho recoiled, bumping back into the car in an awful dance.

“Jericho!” Evie shrieked.

Jericho moaned and fell to his knees.

“Will, I think he’s been hit!”

“Keep the motor running!” Will said. He ran to Jericho and Evie slid behind the wheel. Her heart thudded in time with the Ford’s engine and she cried reflexively, as if she could exorcise her fear through tears and shallow breath. The mob was on the move again.

Will dragged Jericho into the backseat as Evie pumped the accelerator, careful not to flood the engine.

“What are you doing?” Will said.

“I’m driving!” The car lurched forward, the tires spewing up pebbles and leaves as the Ford rattled onto the dirt road. Gunshots followed, but Evie was too fast for the faithful. By the time they reached the road, she had put several car lengths between them.

Jericho moaned as his head lolled against the backseat. Evie’s foot pressed down on the accelerator and she took the curve at a dizzying pace, her back wheels sliding out. Uncle Will stared down the cliff at the lights of the valley below. “Dear god,” he gasped.

“My father owns a dealership,” she shouted. “I’ve driven everything you can imagine!”

“Just get us there in one piece!”

She hugged the turns, swerving once as she narrowly avoided a car on its way up the hill. The Ford wobbled on two wheels before slamming down onto all four again. In the backseat, Will cursed. At last the lights of the village were visible ahead.

“Where’s the hospital in this backwater?” Evie yelled as they rattled onto Main Street.

“Take us back to the inn,” Will directed.

“Sweet Mary, he’s been shot, Will! He needs a doctor!”

“We can’t take him to a hospital.”

“Why not?” She turned around.

Will’s face was grave. “I’ll tell you later. Just trust me for now. We’ll tend to him at the inn. Watch the road!”

Evie wanted to scream. She wanted to yell at Will—for the case, for Brethren, for Jericho. It was insanity, and she’d had enough.

“You’d better be right, Unc.” She jerked the car away from the center of town and headed back to the inn.

“Whatever I do, follow along,” Will said when they arrived, dressing Jericho in his overcoat and buttoning it closed. He disappeared inside and came out with two men, who helped hoist Jericho and haul him into the inn’s parlor. The innkeeper’s scowling wife looked on with tight-lipped disapproval from behind the desk at this filthy trio dragging a barely conscious young man into her inn.

“I’ve told you about the wages of sin,” Uncle Will said loudly enough for the innkeeper’s wife to hear.

“My brother,” Evie added, doing her best to look contrite and concerned. She still shook from the ordeal. “Father tries so hard.”

“These young people today,” the lady clucked.

Once they were inside the room, Uncle Will placed the woozy Jericho on the bed and thanked the men with a tip. Evie shut and locked the door while Will washed the graveyard dirt from his hands and removed Jericho’s overcoat. She couldn’t see exactly where Jericho had taken the hit. There was no blood to be seen, though his shirt, which was covered in dirt and grass stains, was sopping wet.

“Evie, I need you,” Will said. “Open my bag and take out the small zippered leather pouch inside.”

Evie found the pouch and handed it to Will. Inside were four small vials filled with a thick blue liquid and a strange syringe. “What is that?”

“No time to explain. Quickly, before his body shuts down. Place the vial in the chamber of the syringe.”

Evie did as she was told. There was a sharp sound as Uncle Will ripped open Jericho’s shirt. Evie struggled to comprehend what she saw. For a moment, the world slowed as she tried to make sense of it and couldn’t. The bullet had left a large hole just below Jericho’s heart. Beneath the wound was some sort of machinery, an intricate system of brass tubing and wires.

“Evie!” Will’s voice snapped her attention back to the task at hand. Will grabbed the syringe from her, tapping the glass of the vial to clear the bubbles from the blue liquid.

“There’s no time to secure him. He’s going to become agitated at first. You have to be ready.”

“I don’t understand….” Evie started, staring in horror as Will plunged the syringe into Jericho’s chest and released the lever.

“Another!”

Evie loaded the syringe with a second vial, which Will administered. Jericho didn’t move.

“Again!”

“No! We need a doctor!”

“I said, again!”

“Dammit, Will,” Evie muttered and loaded a third ampoule.

Will aimed the syringe just as Jericho came off the bed in a fit of thrashing, like a man possessed. His eyes were wild, searching, as if he didn’t know where he was or who they were. His left arm swung out, sending the bedside lamp crashing to the floor. His right arm caught Will in the jaw, and he crumpled to the floor, dazed.

“Evie! Push it in. Now!”

Evie dove for the discarded syringe and plunged it into Jericho’s leg, scuttling backward into a corner as he whirled around violently.

“Jericho…” Evie whispered.

He staggered toward her, wobbled for two seconds, then fell onto the bed and was out.

Evie was still crouched in the corner. “Is he…?”

Will touched his swollen jaw, wincing, and sank onto the other bed, exhausted. “He’ll be fine now. Let him sleep.”

A loud knock startled them both. Will covered Jericho with a blanket and Evie ran to the door, opening it a crack. The
innkeeper’s wife tried to see around her but Evie kept the opening narrow. “What the dickens is going on in there?”

“My brother fell and broke a lamp,” Evie said, breathless. “My father will pay for the damage, of course.”

“This is an establishment for decent folks. I’ll have no riffraff here.” The woman strained to look over Evie’s head.

“Yes. Of course.”

Evie shut the door and sat on Will’s bed watching as he expertly sutured the ragged skin on Jericho’s chest. She watched Jericho sleep. He seemed an angel now.

“What was in that fluid?”

“It’s a special serum. I can’t tell you much more than that.”

Evie’s mind reeled out to the breaking point. Her mouth struggled to form words. “What is Jericho?”

“An experiment,” Will said with finality, the teacher dismissing the class. He clipped off the thin suture wire and stowed the tools in the kit containing the syringe and vials. “Where is the pendant?”

In the chaos, Evie had forgotten. She went to her coat and retrieved the filthy object, which she handed to her uncle. “What do we do with it?”

“When we get to the museum, we’ll form a protective circle. Using what you’ve gleaned from the missing page, we’ll bind his spirit back into the pendant and destroy it.”

“Do you think it will work?”

“I have to believe it will,” he said.

“I want you to tell me about Jericho,” Evie commanded.

Will took out a cigarette. He patted his breast pocket. “Where the devil has my lighter gone to now?”

“You’re always losing it.” Evie passed him a book of matches. “Jericho?”

Will lit the cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke. “I think it best to let Jericho tell you. It’s his story to tell, not mine.” He paused. “Evie, that was well done tonight,” he said, offering his hand for a shake, which Evie ignored. It if bothered him, he didn’t let on. “I think in light of our visitors this evening we should leave early, before dawn,” Will said. “You should get some rest.”

Evie shook her head. “I’m going to keep watch over Jericho.”

“There’s no need. He’ll be fine.”

“I’m going to keep watch.”

“There’s no need—”

“Will! Someone has to keep watch!” Evie’s tone was both angry and pleading, the whole terrible night spilling over into this refusal to be moved from Jericho’s side.

Will nodded. “Very well. I’ll sleep in your room tonight.”

A moment later she could hear him moving about on the other side of the thin wall, probably pacing and smoking. Evie soaked a towel and gently wiped the dirt and serum from Jericho’s wound. Then she crawled into Will’s empty bed and lay on her side, watching Jericho’s chest rise and fall. She kept watch for as long as she could. But she couldn’t fight her own exhaustion, and she drifted into restless dreams.

Steady rain battered the shuttered stands and stilled rides of Coney Island’s boardwalk as Mary White Blodgett woke from her morphine fog with her heart racing and a feeling that the world was spinning too fast on its axis. She started to call for her daughter, then remembered that Eleanor had gone to the casino.

Pain traveled up Mary’s arm. Oh, how she wished she could have more morphine. If she was to get through the hours until her ungrateful wretch of a daughter returned, she’d need to occupy her mind. She closed her eyes and remembered her days as a great woman.

Oh, she’d been the belle of the ball before she’d married, with suitors aplenty for a girl of such modest means. But it was Ethan White who’d caught her eye. He was older than she, an imperious, fussy sort, not at all romantic, but with a knack for business that would keep her comfortable, and their wedding had been written up in the Poughkeepsie papers for everyone to see. He’d made money in oil speculation. Some dusty town in Texas had vomited black gold, and the money flowed into the Whites’ bank account.
There had been caviar and a house north of the city and box seats at the opera, which Mary didn’t really like but which she attended so that everyone could see her there in her fur and jewels, the great lady, Mrs. Ethan White.

She’d known about the girl in Lubbock. It would have been fine if Ethan had chosen to keep her and be discreet. But she was in the family way, and Ethan had suddenly developed romantic notions of chivalry. He meant to leave Mary for the girl. Mary would be scandalized. No more could she sit in the lordly tier at the opera house, peering down at all the little people looking back up at her, envying her life. They’d regard her with pity. Pity, Mary White could not abide. She’d fought with Ethan, pleaded with him even—Mary never pleaded, and even now, in her bed wet with the morphine sweats, she tightened her lips against the distasteful memory—but he was resolute. He would go to the lawyers first thing and draw up the papers. She would be well cared for as long as she kept her mouth shut and didn’t make a fuss.

Mary had no intention of becoming the object of gossip.

Ethan always took a glass of sherry in the evening to calm his nerves. Mary had the maid bring the sherry, as always. To this, Mary added the arsenic they kept on hand for the field mice who tried to make a home in the root cellar. In the dark of the bedroom, she’d sat in her rocking chair with a volume of John Donne’s poetry while her husband writhed and shook on the bed, one clawed hand reaching toward her as she calmly flipped the pages. At twenty-four, Mary White became a very wealthy widow. She packed her mourning veil along with everything of value and moved to the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.