THE MUSEUM OF THE CREEPY CRAWLIES

Evie disembarked from the train with a wave to the porters and conductors with whom she had played poker from Pittsburgh to Pennsylvania Station. She was now in possession of twenty dollars, three new addresses in her brown leather journal, and a porter’s hat, which she wore upon her golden head at a rakish angle.

“So long, fellas! It’s been swell.”

The conductor, a young man of twenty-two, leaned out from the train’s stairwell. “You’ll be sure to write me, won’t ya, sweetheart?”

“And how. Just as soon as I practice my penmanship,” Evie lied. “My aunt will be waiting. She’s legally blind, so I’d better fly to her side. Poor dear Aunt Martha.”

“I thought her name was Gertrude.”

“Gertrude and Martha. They’re twins, and both blind, the poor, poor dears. Farewell!” Her heart thumping, Evie rushed up the stairs from the platform. New York City—at last!

Uncle Will’s telegram had been quite specific: She was to hail a taxi outside Pennsylvania Station on Eighth Avenue and tell the driver to take her to the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult on Sixty-eighth Street, off Central Park West. She had been sure it would be no trouble at all. Now, in the hubbub of Pennsylvania Station, she felt more than a little lost. She went the wrong way twice and finally found herself in the enormous main room, with its floor-to-ceiling arched windows and the giant, center-placed clock whose filigreed arms reminded passengers that time was fleeting—as were trains.

Nearby, a very glamorous woman wearing a full-length Russian sable despite the heat was drawing an ever-thickening crowd of followers and shutterbugs. “Who is that?” Evie whispered urgently to one of the admirers.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. But her press agent paid me a dollar to stand around and gape like she was Gloria Swanson. Easiest buck I ever made.”

Evie scurried to keep up with the hustle and bustle of the crowd and nearly wiped out a newsboy hawking the Daily News. “Valentino poisoned? Read all about it! Anarchists’ bomb plot goes bust! Teacher goes ape for evolution! All the news right here, right here! Only two cents! Paper, Miss?”

“No, thank you.”

“Nice topper.” He winked and Evie remembered the porter’s hat.

A mirror hung in the window of a druggist’s shop, and Evie stopped to fix her hair and replace the porter’s hat with her own brimless gray cloche, turning her head left and right to make sure she was at her best. She took the twenty-dollar bill she’d won playing poker and, after a moment of deliberation, stuffed it into the pocket of her red, summer-weight traveling coat.

“I can’t say I blame you for taking in the view. I’ve been looking for a while.”

The voice was male, and a little gravelly. Evie caught his reflection in the mirror. Thick, dark hair with a longer piece in front that refused to stay swept back. Amber eyes and dark brows. His smile could only be described as wolfish.

Evie turned slowly. “Do I know you?”

“Not yet. But I hope to remedy that.” He stuck out a hand. “Sam Lloyd.”

Evie curtsied. “Miss Evangeline O’Neill of the Zenith O’Neills.”

“The Zenith O’Neills? Now I feel underdressed. Let me just get my dinner jacket.” He grinned again, and Evie felt a little off balance. He was of medium height and compact build. His shirtsleeves had been rolled to his elbows; his trousers were worn at the knees. Faint black smudges stained the tips of his fingers, as if he’d been shining shoes. A pair of aviator’s goggles hung around his neck. Her first New York admirer was a bit rough around the edges.

“Well, it was nice to meet you, Mr. Lloyd, but I’d better—”

“Sam.” He picked up her case so quickly she didn’t even see his hand move. “Let me carry that for you.”

“Really. I can—” She made a swipe for her case but he held it up.

“I insist. My mother would skin me for being so unchivalrous.”

“Well”—Evie looked around nervously—“just as far as the door, then.”

“Where ya headed?”

“My, you ask a lot of questions.”

“Let me guess: You’re a Ziegfeld girl?”

Evie shook her head.

“Model? Actress? Princess? You’re too pretty to be just anybody.”

“Are you on the level?”

“Me? I’m so on the level I can’t get off it.”

He was flattering her, but she was enjoying it. She loved attention. It was like a glass of the best champagne—bubbly and intoxicating—and as with champagne, she always wanted more of it. Still, she didn’t want to seem like an easy mark.

“If you must know, I’ve come to join a convent,” Evie said, testing him.

Sam Lloyd looked her over and shook his head. “Seems a waste to me. Pretty girl like you.”

“Serving our lord is never a waste.”

“Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we’ve got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead.”

“He’s not dead; just very tired.”

The corners of his mouth twitched in amusement, and Evie felt the warmth bubble up again. He thought her clever, this Sam Lloyd with his knowing grin.

“Well, it’s a big job,” he shot back. “All that smiting and begetting. Say, which convent you heading to?”

“The one with all the ladies in black and white.”

“What’s the name? Maybe I know it.” Sam bowed his head. “I’m very devout.”

Evie held back a small ha! “It’s… St. Mary’s.”

“Of course. Which St. Mary’s?”

“The absolute most St. Mary’s you can think of.”

“Listen, before you commit your life to Christ, maybe you’d let me show you around the city? I know all the hot spots. I’m a swell tour guide.” He took her hand in his, and Evie felt both excited and unnerved. She hadn’t been in the city for even five minutes, and already some young man—some admittedly quite attractive young man—was trying to get her to go off alone with him. It was thrilling. And a little terrifying.

“Listen, I have to tell you a secret”—he looked around—“I am a scout for some of the biggest names in this town. Ziegfeld. The Shuberts. Mr. White. I know ’em all. They would string me up if I didn’t introduce a talent like you.”

“You think I’m talented?”

“I know you are. I can tell. I have a sense about these things.”

Evie raised one eyebrow. “I can’t sing. I can’t dance. I can’t act.”

“See? A real triple threat.” He grinned. “Well, there goes the St. Mary’s talent show.”

Evie laughed in spite of herself. “All right, then. You with your keen observations—what, exactly, do you find special about me?” she asked coyly, glancing up at him through her lashes the way she’d seen Colleen Moore do in We Moderns.

“There’s just something about you,” he said without really saying anything at all, which disappointed her. Sam rested his hand on the wall above her head, leaning closer. Evie’s stomach fluttered. It wasn’t that she didn’t know her way around the fellas, but this was a New York City fella. She didn’t want to make a scene and come off as a complete rube. She was a girl who could take care of herself. Besides, if her parents heard about this, they’d yank her straight back to Ohio.

Instead, Evie looped under the handsome Sam Lloyd’s arm and snatched her valise back. “I’m afraid I have to go now. I believe I see the, um, top nun going into the ladies’ lounge.”

“Top nun? Do you mean the Mother Superior?”

“And how! Sister… Sister, um…”

“Sister Benito Mussolini Fascisti?”

“Exactly!”

Sam Lloyd smirked. “Benito Mussolini is prime minister of Italy. And a fascist.”

“I knew that,” Evie said, her cheeks flushing.

“Of course you did.”

“Well…” Evie stood uncertainly for a few seconds. She stuck out her hand for a shake. With a smirk, Sam Lloyd drew her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. She heard the shoe-shine men chuckling as she pulled away, red-faced and disoriented. Should she slap him? He deserved a slap. But was that what sophisticated Manhattan moderns did? Or did they shrug it off like an old joke they were too tired to laugh at?

“You can’t blame a fella for kissing the prettiest girl in New York, can you, sister?” Sam’s grin was anything but apologetic.

Evie brought up her knee quickly and decisively, and he dropped to the floor like a grain sack. “You can’t blame a girl for her quick reflexes now, can you, pal?”

She turned and hurried toward the exit. In a pained voice, Sam Lloyd called after her: “Best of luck to the nuns. The good sisters of St. Mary’s don’t know what they’re in for!”

Evie wiped the kiss from her mouth with the back of her hand and pushed her way out onto Eighth Avenue, but when she saw the majesty of the city, all thoughts of Sam Lloyd were forgotten. A trolley jostled down the center of the avenue on steel tracks. Motorcars swerved around the throngs of people and one another with the furious grace of a corps de ballet. She craned her neck to take in the full view. Far above the busy streets, men balanced daringly on beams of steel, erecting new buildings like the ones whose tops already pierced the clouds, as if even the sky couldn’t hold back the ambition of their spires. A sleek dirigible sailed past, a smear of silver in the blue. It was like a dreamscape that could change in the blink of an eye. A taxi careened to the corner and Evie got inside.

“Where to, Miss?” the cabbie asked, flipping his meter on.

“The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, please.”

“Oh. The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies.” The cabbie chuckled. “Good thing you’re goin’ to see it while you can.”

“What do you mean?”

“They say the place is in arrears on its taxes. The city’s had its sights set on that spot for years. They want to put some apartment buildings there.”

“Oh, dear.” Evie examined the photograph her mother had given her. It was a picture of Uncle Will—tall, lanky, fair-haired—standing in front of the museum, a grand Victorian mansion complete with turrets and stained-glass windows and bordered by a wrought-iron fence.

“Can’t happen soon enough, if you ask me. That place makes people uncomfortable—all those crazy objects s’posed to be fulla hocus-pocus.”

Objects. Magic. Evie drummed her fingers against the door.

“You know about the fella that runs the place, don’t ya?”

Evie stopped drumming. “What do you mean?”

“Odd fella. He was a conscie.”

“A what?”

“Conscientious objector,” the cabbie said, spitting the words out like poison. “During the war. Refused to fight.” He shook his head. “I hear he might be one of them Bolsheviks, too.”

“Well, if so, he never mentioned it to me,” Evie said, pulling the wrinkles from her glove.

The cabbie caught her eye in the mirror. “You know him? What’s a nice girl like you doing with a fella like that?”

“He’s my uncle.”

At that, the cabbie fell blessedly quiet.

At last the taxi turned onto a side street near Central Park and pulled up to the museum. Tucked away among the grit and steel of Manhattan, the museum itself seemed a relic, a building out of time and place, its limestone facade long since grimed by age, soot, and vines. Evie glanced from the sad, dingy shadow before her to the beautiful house in her photograph. “You sure this is the joint?”

“This is the place. Museum of the Creepy Crawlies. That’ll be one dollar and ten cents.”

Evie reached into her pocket and pulled out nothing but the lining. With mounting alarm, she searched all her pockets.

“Whatsa matter?” The cabbie eyed her suspiciously.

“My money! It’s gone! I had twenty dollars right in this pocket and… and it’s gone!”

He shook his head. “Mighta known. Probably a Bolshevik, like your uncle. Well, little lady, I’ve had three fare jumpers in the past week. Not this time. You owe me one dollar and ten cents, or you can tell your story to a cop.” The cabbie signaled to a policeman on horseback down the block.

Evie closed her eyes and retraced her steps: The tracks. The druggist’s window. Sam Lloyd. Sam… Lloyd. Evie’s eyes snapped open as she recalled his sudden passionate kiss. There’s just something about you…. There sure was—twenty dollars. Not an hour in the city and already she’d been taken for a ride.

“That son of a…” Evie swore hard and fast, stunning the cabbie into silence. Furious, she pulled her emergency ten-dollar bill from her cloche, waited for the change, and then slammed the taxi door behind her.

“Hey,” the cabbie yelled. “How’s about a tip?”

“You bet-ski,” Evie said, heading toward the old Victorian mansion, her long silk scarf trailing behind her. “Don’t kiss strange men in Penn Station.”

Evie rapped the brass eagle’s-head door knocker and waited. A plaque beside the museum’s massive oak doors read HERE BE THE HOPES AND DREAMS OF A NATION, BUILT UPON THE BACKS OF MEN AND LIFTED BY THE WINGS OF ANGELS. But neither men nor angels answered her knock, so she let herself in. The entry was ornate: black-and-white marble floors, wood-paneled walls dimly lit by gilded sconces. High above, the pale blue ceiling boasted a mural of angels watching over a field of Revolutionary soldiers. The building smelled of dust and age. Evie’s heels echoed on the marble as she made her way down the long hall. “Hello?” she called. “Uncle Will?”

A wide, elaborately carved staircase wound up to a second-floor landing lit by a large stained-glass window, and then curved out of sight. To Evie’s left was a gloomy sitting room with its drapes drawn. To her right, pocket doors opened onto a musty dining hall whose long wooden table and thirteen damask-covered chairs looked as if they hadn’t been used in years.

“Holy smokes. Who died?” Evie muttered. She wandered till she came to a long room that housed a collection of objects displayed behind glass.

“ ‘The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies,’ I presume.”

Evie passed from display to display, reading the typewritten cards placed beneath:

GRIS GRIS BAG AND VOUDON DOLL,

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

BONE FRAGMENT FROM CHINESE RAILROAD

WORKER AND REPUTED CONJURER,

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, GOLD RUSH PERIOD

CRYSTAL BALL USED IN SÉANCES OF

MRS. BERNICE FOXWORTHY DURING

AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM PERIOD, C. 1848,

TROY, NEW YORK

OJIBWAY TALISMAN OF PROTECTION,

GREAT LAKES REGION

ROOT WORKER’S CUTTINGS,

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA

FREEMASON’S TOOLS AND BOOKS, C. 1776,

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

There was a series of spirit photographs populated with faint figures, gauzy as lace curtains in a wind. Poppet dolls. A ventriloquist’s dummy. A leather-bound grimoire. Books on alchemy, astrology, numerology, root workers, voudon, spirit mediums, and healers, and several volumes of accounts of ghostly sightings in the Americas starting in the 1600s.

The Diary of a Mercy Prowd lay open on a table. Evie turned her head sideways, trying to make sense of the seventeenth-century handwriting. “I see spirits of the dead. For this they hath branded me a witch….”

“They hanged her. She was only seventeen.”

Evie turned, startled. The speaker stepped from the shadows. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had ash-blond hair. For a moment, with the light from the old chandelier shining down on him, he seemed like some severe angel from a Renaissance painting, come to life.

“What crime did she commit?” Evie said, finding her voice again. “Did she turn the gin to water?”

“She was different. That was her sin.” He offered his hand for a quick shake. “I’m Jericho Jones. I work for your uncle. He asked me if I could keep you company while he teaches his class.”

So this was the famous Jericho with whom Mabel was so besotted. “Why, I’ve heard so much about you!” Evie blurted out. Mabel would kill her for being so indiscreet. “That is, I hear Uncle Will would be lost without… whatever it is that you do.”

Jericho looked away. “I highly doubt that. Would you like to see the museum?”

“That’d be swell,” Evie lied.

Jericho led her up and down staircases and into preserved, musty rooms holding more collections of dull, dusty relics, while Evie fought to keep a polite smile.

“Last but not least, here is the place where we spend most of our time: the library.” Jericho opened a set of mahogany pocket doors, and Evie let out a whistle. She’d never seen such a room. It was as if it had been transported here from some spooky fairy-tale castle. An enormous limestone fireplace took up the whole of the far wall. The furnishings weren’t much—brown leather club chairs worn to stuffing in places, a dotting of old wooden tables, bankers’ lamps dimmed to a faint green glow at each. A second-floor gallery crammed with bookcases circled the entire room. Evie craned her head to take in the full view. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high, and what a ceiling it was! Spread across its expanse was a panorama of American history: Black-hatted Puritans condemning a cluster of women. An Indian shaman staring into a fire. A healer grasping snakes in one hand while placing the other on the forehead of a sick man. Gray-wigged founding fathers signing the Declaration of Independence. A slave woman holding a mandrake root aloft. Painted angels and demons hovered above the historical scene, watching. Waiting.

“What do you think?” Jericho asked.

“I think he should have fired his decorator.” Evie plopped into one of the chairs and adjusted a seam on her stockings. She was itching to get out and see Mabel and explore the city. “Will Unc be long?”

Jericho shrugged. He sat at the long table and retrieved a book from a tall stack. “This is an excellent history of eighteenth-century mysticism in the colonies if you’d care to pass the time with a book.”

“No, thanks,” Evie said, suppressing the urge to roll her eyes. She didn’t know what Mabel saw in this fella. He was going to take work; that was for sure. “Say”—Evie lowered her voice—“I don’t suppose you have any giggle water on you?”

“Giggle water?” Jericho repeated.

“You know, coffin varnish? Panther sweat? Hooch?” Evie tried. “Gin?”

“No.”

“I’m not particular. Bourbon’ll do just as well.”

“I don’t drink.”

“You must get awfully thirsty then.” Evie laughed. Jericho did not.

“Well, I should get back to the museum,” he said, walking quickly toward the doors. “Make yourself comfortable. Your uncle should be with you shortly.”

Evie turned to the stuffed grizzly looming beside the fireplace. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any hooch? No? Maybe later.”

Other than Jericho, she hadn’t seen a single soul in the museum. She was hungry and thirsty and a little put out that she’d been left all on her own without so much as a hello from her uncle. If she was going to live in New York, she’d have to start fending for herself.

Evie patted the bear’s matted fur. “Sorry, old sport, you’re on your own,” she said, and left the library in search of food. She heard male voices and followed the sound to a large room in the back of the museum where Uncle Will, in gray trousers, waistcoat, and blue tie, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, stood lecturing. His hair had darkened to a dirty blond over the years, and he sported a trim mustache.

“The presence of evil is a conundrum that has taxed the minds of philosophers and theologians alike….” he was saying.

Evie peeked around the corner to take in the whole of the room. A class of college boys sat taking notes on Will’s lecture.

“Now we’re cookin’,” Evie whispered. “Sorry I’m late!” she called as she breezed into the room. The college boys’ heads swiveled in Evie’s direction as she scraped a chair across the floor to join them. Uncle Will regarded her over the tops of his round tortoiseshell glasses.

“Go on, Uncle Will. Don’t mind me.” Evie perched on the edge of the chair beside one of the College Joes and did her best to look interested.

“Yes…” For a moment, Uncle Will’s bewildered expression threatened to become permanent. But then he found his stride again and began pacing the room with his hands behind his back. “As I said, how does one explain the presence of evil?”

The boys all looked to one another to see who would answer.

“Man makes evil through his choices,” someone said.

“It’s God and the Devil, fighting it out. That’s what the Bible says, at least,” another boy argued.

“How can there be a Devil if there is a God?” a boy in golf knickers asked. “I’ve always wondered that.”

Uncle Will waved a finger, making a point. “Ah. Theodicy.”

“Is that a cross between theology and idiocy?”

Will allowed a small smile. “Not exactly. Theodicy is a branch of theology concerned with the defense of God in the face of the existence of evil. It brings about a conundrum: If God is an all-knowing, all-powerful deity, how can he allow evil to exist? Either he is not the omnipotent god we’ve been told, or he is all-powerful and all-knowing, and also cruel, because he allows evil to exist and does nothing to stop it.”

“Well, that certainly explains Prohibition,” Evie quipped.

The college boys laughed appreciatively. Again Uncle Will looked at Evie as if she were a subject he had yet to classify.

“Any good world would allow for us to have free will, yes?” he continued. “Can we agree to this point? But once human beings have free will, they also have the ability to make choices—and commit evil. Thus, this very good thing, free will, allows the possibility of evil into our fine world.” The room was silent. “One to ponder. But, if I may continue with our earlier discussion…”

The boys sat up straight, ready to take notes as Will paced and talked. “America has a rich history of beliefs, a tapestry woven together by threads from different cultures. Our history is rife with the supernatural, the unexplained, the mystical. The earliest settlers came here for religious freedom. The immigrants who followed introduced their hopes and haunts, from the vampire legend of Eastern Europe to the ‘hungry ghosts’ of China. The original Americans believed in shamans and spirits. The slaves of West Africa and the Caribbean, stripped of all they had, still carried with them their customs and beliefs. We are not only a melting pot of cultures, but also of spirits and superstitions. Yes?”

A boy in a navy blazer raised his hand. “Do you believe in the supernatural, Dr. Fitzgerald?”

“Ah. It would seem illogical, wouldn’t it? After all, we live in the modern age. It’s difficult enough to get people even to believe in Methodism.” Will smiled as the boys chuckled. “And yet, there are mysteries. How does one explain the stories of people who exhibit unusual powers?”

Evie felt a tingle down her spine.

“Powers?” a boy repeated in a skeptical tone bordering on contempt.

“People who claim to be able to speak to the dead, such as psychics or spiritual mediums. People who say they have been healed by the laying on of hands. Who can see glimpses of the future or know a card before it is played. The early records of the Americas talk of Indian spirit walkers. The Puritans knew of cunning folk. And during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin wrote of prophetic dreams that influenced the course of the war and shaped the nation. What do you say to that?”

“Those people need the services of a psychiatrist—though I’ll make an exception for Mr. Franklin.”

Another round of chuckles followed, and Evie joined in, though she was still discomfited. Uncle Will waited for the laughing to subside.

“This very museum, as you may know, was constructed by Cornelius Rathbone, who amassed his fortune building railroads. How did he know that the age of steel was coming?” Will paused at the lectern and waited. When no one answered, he continued pacing, his hands behind his back. “He claimed he knew because of the prophetic visions of his sister, Liberty Anne. When Cornelius and Liberty were young, they spent hours in the woods playing at all sorts of games. One day, Liberty went into the forest and was lost for two full days. The men of the town searched but could find no trace of her. When she emerged at last, her hair had gone completely white. She was only eleven. Liberty Anne claimed she had met a man there, ‘a strange, tall man, skinny as a scarecrow, in a stovepipe hat and whose coat opened to show the wonders and frights of the world.’ She fell ill with a fever. The doctor was sent for, but there was nothing he could do. For the next month, she lay in a dream trance, spouting prophecy, which her worried brother transcribed in his diary. These prophecies were astonishing in their accuracy. She claimed to see ‘the great man from Illinois taken from us while visiting our American cousin’—a reference to the assassination of President Lincoln in the balcony of Ford’s Theatre while he watched a production of the play Our American Cousin. She spoke of ‘a great steel dragon criss-crossing the land, belching black smoke,’ which most interpret to mean the Transcontinental Railroad. She predicted the Emancipation Proclamation, the Great War, the Bolshevik revolution, and the invention of the motorcar and the aeroplane. She even spoke of the fall of our banks and the subsequent collapse of our economy.”

“Clearly, she couldn’t see everything,” the boy in the golf trousers said. “That will never happen.”

Will rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Knock wood, as they say.” Will grinned and the College Joes laughed at his superstitious joke. He fidgeted with a silver lighter, turning it end over end, occasionally flicking his thumb across the flint wheel so that it sparked. “Liberty Anne died a month to the day after she emerged from the woods. Toward the end, her prophecies became quite dark. She talked of ‘a coming storm,’ a treacherous time when the Diviners would be needed.”

“Diviners?” Evie repeated.

“That was her name for people with powers like her own.”

“And what would these Diviners do?” the boy in the golf pants asked.

Will shrugged. “If she knew, she didn’t say. She died shortly after making the prophecy, leaving her brother, Cornelius, bereft. He became obsessed with good and evil, and with the idea that this was a country haunted by ghosts. That there was something beyond what we see. He spent his life—and his fortune—trying to prove it.”

The boys fell into heated discussion until one of them shouted over the others. “Yes, but Professor, do you yourself actually believe that there is another world beyond this one, and that the entities from that world can act to help or hurt us? Do you believe that our actions here—good or bad—can create an external evil? Do you believe there are ghosts and demons and Diviners among us?”

Uncle Will took a cloth from his pocket and wiped the lenses of his spectacles. “ ‘There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Will said, hooking the spectacles over his ears again. “That quote is from William Shakespeare, who seemed to know a thing or two about both humanity and the supernatural. But for your examinations, you will need to know the following concrete information….”

The boys groaned as Will fired off a dizzying plethora of information and their pencils struggled to keep up.

Evie slipped out and went to wait for Will in his office. The steady click of the mantel clock kept her company as she took a look around. His desktop was awash in newspaper clippings and perilous-looking stacks of books. Bored, Evie leafed through the newspaper clippings. They were reports from towns across the country of ghost sightings, hauntings, and such strange goings-on as dead relatives appearing for seconds in a favorite chair and red-eyed “demon” dogs who frightened the caretaker of a junkyard in upstate New York. Some of the clippings were two or three years old, but most were recent—from the past year. Evie started reading an article about a girl who claimed to be able to speak to the dead and who had been warned by “kind spirits” of trouble to come. She’d just gotten to the part about the girl’s sudden disappearance when Uncle Will announced his presence with a soft clearing of his throat.

Evie shuffled the clippings to one side. “Hello, Unc.”

“That’s my desk.”

“So it is,” Evie said brightly. “And a tidy one it is, too.”

“Yes. Well. I suppose it’s fine this time,” Uncle Will murmured. He took a cigarette from a small silver case in his breast pocket. “You’re looking well.” Will lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Did Jericho show you the museum?”

“Yes, he did. It’s very… interesting.”

“Was your trip comfortable?”

“Swell, although I was pickpocketed at Penn Station,” Evie said, and then wished she hadn’t. What if Will decided she couldn’t look after herself and sent her back to Ohio?

Uncle Will raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“A hideous young man named Sam Lloyd. Well, that was the name he gave me before he kissed me and stole my twenty dollars.”

Will squinted. “He what?”

“But don’t worry. I can take care of myself. If I ever see that fella again, he’ll wish he’d never tangled with me,” Evie said.

Will blew out a plume of smoke. It hung thickly in the air. “Your mother has told me that you were in a spot of trouble back home. A prank of some sort.”

“A prank,” Evie muttered.

“And you’re to stay until October?”

“December, if possible. Until the coast is clear back home.”

“Hmm.” Will’s expression darkened. “Your mother has petitioned for you to attend the Sarah Snidewell School for Girls. They are overburdened at present, so your schooling, it would appear, falls to me. I’ll provide you with books, and, of course, you are free to attend my lectures. I suggest you make use of our many fine museums and lectures through the Society for Ethical Culture and whatnot.”

It dawned on Evie that she was free from the tedium of school. The day just kept getting better.

Uncle Will thumbed absently through a book. “You’re seventeen, is it?”

“According to my last birthday.”

“Well. Seventeen’s certainly old enough to do mostly as you please. I won’t keep you on a leash as long as you keep out of trouble. Do we have a deal?”

“Deal,” Evie said, astonished. “Are you sure you’re related to my mother? There wasn’t a mix-up in the nursery?”

Will’s smile flickered for a second and disappeared. “Your mother has never quite recovered from your brother’s death.”

“She’s not the only one who misses James.”

“It’s different for her.”

“So they say.” Evie swallowed down her anger. “That bit you were talking about back there—people who could see the future or…” She took a breath. “Read objects. Diviners. Do you know anyone like that?”

“Not personally, no. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason,” Evie said quickly. “I suppose if there were Diviners, they’d be all over the papers and radio, wouldn’t they?”

“Or, if history is any indication, they’d be burned at the stake.” Will gestured to the many bookcases surrounding them. “We’ve an entire library devoted to such stories if you’d like to read more about America’s supernatural beliefs.” He stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. “I’m afraid I’m running a bit behind, and I’m sure you’d like to unpack and freshen up. The Bennington isn’t far from here—ten blocks. Shall I have Jericho walk you over?”

“No,” Evie said. Even a ten-block walk with stoic Jericho would probably be painfully dull. “I’ll be jake on my own.”

“Pardon?”

“Jake. Swell. Um, fine. I’ll be fine. I’ll go find Mabel. You remember Mabel Rose? My pen pal?”

“Mmm,” Will said, distracted by another book. “Very well. Here is your key. There’s a dining room just off the Bennington’s lobby. Help yourself to something to eat, and ask them to put it on my bill. Jericho and I should be home by half past six at the latest.”

Evie slipped the key into her handbag. She hadn’t had a key back in Zenith; her every move had been monitored by her parents. Things would be different here. Things would be perfect. She went to hug Uncle Will, who stuck out his hand for a shake.

“Welcome to New York, Evie.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1197