by Libba Bray
Passing through the ballroom, she caught snippets of conversation:
“… I hear Miss Snow received two thousand fan letters last week.…”
“… Two thousand? Why, I heard it was five.…”
Envy burned up Evie’s throat. Her pasted-on smile drooped.
“… I like Marlowe. He speaks his mind.…”
“… He oughta run for president. After all, I hear the Democrats are putting up Al Smith again, and he’s a Catholic… don’t wanna answer to the pope.…”
“… Like this Mussolini fella. Now he’s really taken Italy by the reins and instilled genuine national pride. Seems like we need a little of that over here.…”
“Hear, hear! America first.”
Someone tapped Evie on the shoulder. She turned and found herself face-to-face with T. S. Woodhouse.
“I need to talk to you, Sheba,” he said.
“Can’t it wait? I—”
Woody opened his tuxedo jacket, showing her his flask.
“Lead the way, Mr. Woodhouse,” Evie said.
In the hustle and bustle of the hotel kitchen, Evie knocked back several belts of strong whiskey, coughing heartily. Her lungs were on fire. “Whoo!”
“My bootlegger is a good man,” Woody said.
“What did you want to talk about?” Evie asked when she found her voice again.
“Remember that matter you asked me to look into?”
“Jumping into the river in concrete overshoes?” Evie teased.
Woody smirked in appreciation. “That was good whiskey. Don’t make me sorry I shared it. I meant Project Buffalo. Take a look at this.”
He slid over the day’s newspaper. Evie unfolded it and glanced at the page.
“You wanted me to know that there’s a sale at Gimbels?”
Woody tapped the article above the ad. Evie’s brow creased as she read. It was a small police blotter paragraph about a man who’d been found dead in the East River. Evie gasped when she came to the dead man’s name. “Bob Bateman!”
“Strangled with a wire.”
“Just like Sam’s informant, Ben Arnold.”
Woody nodded grimly. “I found an interesting connection between your Bob Bateman and Sam’s Ben Arnold. You ever hear of these Better Baby contests?”
“There’s no such thing as a better baby. They’re all monsters in pinafores who scream and spit up on your best dress.”
“You’re gonna make a fine mother someday.”
Evie took another swig of whiskey. “You were saying?”
“They were contests offered by Fitter Families for Future Firesides.”
“Those tents they have at state fairs? Jericho and I saw one of them upstate in Brethren. They’re eugenics programs, aren’t they?” Evie said, holding back on what she knew. She wasn’t ready to let Woody in on that yet. “Some nonsense about breeding superior people, as if we were sheep.”
“Some people are sheep,” Woody said. “Anyway, they were supposed to help women have some idea how to make their babies healthier. Guidelines. But they were also an anti-immigration campaign. Some folks don’t like the idea of America being a melting pot. The slogan was ‘a better baby means a better country.’ Turns out Bob Bateman and Ben Arnold worked for Fitter Families. Now, here’s where it gets interesting.”
Woody paused for effect.
“Woody, if you turn this into an Agatha Christie novel, I’ll…” Evie grabbed a saltshaker from the counter. “I’ll bludgeon you with this.”
Woody cast a dubious glance at the tiny silver shaker. Evie put it down with a flounce. “Well, I’d have to hit you a lot. But I’m up to the task, I assure you.”
“The same folks helping to fund Fitter Families also gave money to the U.S. Department of Paranormal. An outfit comprised of the most powerful men in America—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman. It’s called—”
“The Founders Club!”
Woody frowned. “You stole my big finish.”
“I know about them. They were at Marlowe’s estate when we were there. A secret club meeting.”
Woody jotted down a note. “I’ve been sniffing around these Fitter Family tents here and there. They’re not just giving folks tests to see if they’ve got a bogus goodly heritage so those same folks can go home with a medal to show off. They’re asking people if they’ve got any special psychic talents and whatnot.”
Evie’s brows furrowed as she remembered the pamphlet she’d seen at the asylum. “Why are they looking for Diviners?”
“Dunno. But I heard a rumor that when they do find one of those special types, sometimes those people go missing later.” Woody shook his head. “Something’s rotten about this whole story, kid.”
“I suppose you think we’re making it all up,” Evie said, steeling for a fight.
“On the contrary. I think we’re onto something big.”
The kitchen doors swung open, and with them came the sound of Sarah Snow singing a hymn with her band, the Christian Crusaders. Woody frowned. “Sarah Snow’s getting mighty popular.”
“Sarah Snow, Sarah Snow,” Evie griped, and took another drink. “Honestly, if I never hear that name again…”
“She’s got a pulpit on the radio.”
“I’m on the radio, too, you know!”
“I’m just saying: Reading Aunt Polly’s brooch to find a lost key to a safe-deposit box isn’t the same as somebody telling folks that God doesn’t like Diviners and thinks they’re dangerous. I’ve seen how that tide can turn. Watch your back, Sheba.”
Evie knocked back more booze. “I can handle myself just fine.”
Woody’s brows creased into a V. “Don’t you have to give an interview tonight, Sheba?”
“I can handle my hooch just fine, too.”
The whiskey had softened the edges of Evie’s nerves, which was a good thing because Sarah was already onstage by the microphones, and the sound boys were gesturing wildly to Evie. Sarah might’ve gone for white, but Evie had gone for gold, like a star, and her mouth was painted a perfect Cupid’s bow red. She smiled as she flounced toward the stage, then remembered she was supposed to be “good” and straightened her spine like a politician’s wife. See? Look how very lovable and demure I am! Don’t you like me now? Some of the Blue Noses still looked at her with disapproval. As much as Evie wanted to pretend that their judgments didn’t matter, they crawled under her skin and made her nervous.
“Stand here, sweetheart,” the engineer said, leading Evie to her spot. He sniffed, smelling the whiskey on her breath, and Evie wished she’d gobbled a peppermint candy. Everybody was here. And Mr. Phillips was watching. Beside Evie, Sarah was the picture of serenity. Evie sought out Theta at the back of the room. Theta nodded, and that calmed Evie some.
“Why, look who’s here! It’s none other than two of WGI’s greatest ladies of the airwaves, Miss Sarah Snow and Miss Evie O’Neill, the Divine—and the Diviner!”
The audience laughed good-naturedly. The reporters started in easily enough with lots of softball questions about how excited Evie and Sarah were to attend the exhibition (“Oh, very!”), their favorite nightclubs (Evie: “The Hotsy Totsy and the Twenty-one Club.” Sarah: “My nightclub is the church, and Jesus never charges a cover.”), and what they liked best about being on the radio (Evie: “My wonderful fans!” Sarah: “My faithful listeners.”).
The familiar killing gleam showed in Woody’s eyes. “Miss Snow, you’re a real supporter of Prohibition. What’ve you got against a good time?”
Evie suppressed a giggle. She could kiss Woody.
Sarah chuckled. “I believe you don’t need spirits if you’ve got the Holy Spirit, Mr. Woodhouse,” Sarah said in her comforting midwestern accent, her vowels as flat and familiar as prairie grass. No one had made her take elocution lessons, Evie noted.
“Didn’t Jesus turn water into wine?” Evie said. “Why, he was the original bootlegger!”
Some of the reporters chuckled, but at many of the tables, there
were pinched faces. Evie’s mouth went dry.
“What do you make of all these supposed ghost sightings in our city?” Harriet Henderson. The old snake.
The slightest crease appeared in Sarah’s normally serene brow. “I can’t help but wonder if these terrifying apparitions are signs from the Lord that we should return to old-fashioned values. And turn away from Diviners.”
Sarah pointedly ignored Evie and looked toward those tables of overly powdered rich women and the reporters furiously jotting down her words. “It’s all very entertaining to read secrets in a handkerchief or ring, I suppose. But dancing in nightclubs won’t fill the bowls of the hungry. Telling fortunes above a tea shop won’t help the man who’s out of work or worried about losing the family farm. There’s only one power I believe in, only one true Diviner, and that is Jesus Christ Almighty.”
“Sounds like you’re taking a page from Jake Marlowe, Miss Snow. He’s not including Diviners in his Future of America Exhibition. He says they’re un-American.” Harriet cast a furtive glance Evie’s way.
I’ve been set up, Evie realized.
“I’m afraid I must agree with Mr. Marlowe,” Sarah said with a gentle shake of her head. “These are frightening times. Americans are frightened of threats from without and within. I can’t help but wonder: What if any of these so-called Diviners were anarchists? What if their loyalties were not to America first? Why, with their special powers, they could be very dangerous, indeed.”
“Say, I hadn’t thought about that,” one reporter muttered, taking down notes.
Evie knew this jaded lot; most of them had a secret flask and a betting form in each pocket. They weren’t usually the sort to fall for this, but not one of the reporters pushed back.
Sarah beamed. “But here’s our Mr. Marlowe now! I’m sure you’d much rather hear his thoughts than mine. Jake, join us, won’t you?”
Sarah beckoned Marlowe, and the crowd erupted with cries of “Speech! Speech!” Evie could feel the night slipping away from her. The crowd sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” until an abashed Jake Marlowe took the stage. Sarah laid her hand on his arm and gazed up at him with adoration again, and Evie wondered if she practiced that expression in her mirror each night as she slathered on her cold cream.
“I didn’t know you went in for that old-time religion, Mr. Marlowe,” a reporter said.
“Well, I didn’t realize just how pretty some of God’s missionaries were,” Jake said, and Sarah pretended to be embarrassed, but Evie knew she loved it. The audience loved it, too.
“When’s the wedding?” someone shouted to much laughter. Sarah and Jake were giving them quite a show.
“Like Miss Snow, I care very much about this country,” Jake said, turning serious again.
“I care about our country, too!” Evie said feebly. She put extra polish on the silver-tongued vowels she’d been practicing an hour each day, but the whiskey was catching up to her. Her words weren’t as crisp as she’d like. “Diviners help all sorts of people. Why, just last week, a little girl came to me with the collar of her dog. Poor little thing was all brokenhearted. I got a read off the collar, and within the hour, she’d found little Fifi.”
“Our lady of lost pets,” a reporter joked just loud enough to be picked up by the microphone. This got a roar of laughter from everyone, and Evie’s cheeks burned. She also wished her head weren’t quite so fuzzy. Woody’s booze had been much stronger than her usual. She shouldn’t have drunk it so quickly on an empty stomach. It had hit her hard and fast.
“My brother died serving this country,” Evie blurted out, and immediately regretted it.
There was a glint in Marlowe’s eye.
“Say, weren’t you and Miss O’Neill’s uncle once best friends?” a reporter asked.
It was the first time that Jake Marlowe’s smile faltered. “Once,” Jake said meaningfully. “But we’re very different fellas. He has an obsession with our history, with our ghosts.” Jake Marlowe shook his head. “We’re a country of the future. We’re not haunted by anything.”
“But, Mr. Marlowe, they say that those who don’t heed the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.”
“Not if they’re Americans!” Marlowe said, the microphone echoing his words into the crowd in split-second waves that met with thunderous applause. “But these Diviners, well, what if they could know secrets about us they shouldn’t? I think that’s a real threat. I’m afraid I find the entire idea of Diviners unseemly. And Un-American.”
Evie couldn’t hold herself in any longer. “I hear the Ku Klux Klan feels the same way. So you’re in fine company, Mr. Marlowe!”
There were gasps in the crowd.
“Uh-oh. Trolley’s off the tracks,” Theta whispered to Woody at the back of the room.
Onstage, Marlowe’s eyes glittered with something hard. Seeing his expression was like hearing a shot half a second before seeing the gun. “Is that so? From what I hear, your brother wasn’t a war hero but a deserter.”
“That’s a lie and you know it!” Evie slurred.
“What did she say?”
“She called Jake Marlowe a liar!”
“The nerve!”
“Terrible girl.”
Terrible girl. Evie might as well have been back in Ohio, listening to the small-minded gossips. That nasty smallness was everywhere, it seemed. The whiskey had been a mistake. It had made her dizzy. It had also made her bold.
“You know what happened to my brother,” Evie said through clenched teeth. “It was you. You and the Founders Club and those terrible Shadow Men and—and Project Buffalo!”
“Dammit,” Woody muttered under his breath.
Jake smirked. “My, even the United States Army was in on this supposed conspiracy? It seems I’m in excellent company.”
The room roared with laughter. At her.
What could Evie say? That they had a telegram proving James’s death? That was a lie. She was telling the truth, even if she had absolutely no proof of it. It was her word against his, and he would win.
“James was no deserter,” was all she could say. Her face was hot.
“I would have liked to have spared your poor parents the truth, but very well, Miss O’Neill. You’ve pushed me to this: Your brother, James O’Neill, was a deserter. He was shot and killed trying to desert his post by a real war hero, Luther Clayton. And now Luther Clayton is dead. Why, if I were as conspiracy-minded as you are, Miss O’Neill, I might suspect that a Diviner with a radio show paid a poor, shell-shocked veteran to stage a shooting just to keep her in the public eye. And then I might wonder why that poor soldier died after that same Diviner visited him.”
Evie was reeling. “That isn’t true and you know it!” She grabbed for the microphone and stumbled, nearly tumbling off the stage, until Sarah righted her. She sniffed, frowning at Evie.
“Why, Miss O’Neill,” Sarah said in a whisper she had to know would be picked up by the live microphone. “Have you been drinking?”
The audience was booing Evie openly now. “Get her off the stage!”
Mr. Phillips was motioning for Sarah to sing. “Ladies and gentlemen, at this celebration of our great nation, won’t you join me in a favorite hymn?”
As Evie left the stage, some of the men at the expensive tables still booed her while their wives looked at her with contempt. And Evie realized that Sam had been right—no matter how much she tried to make herself fit, eventually, the real, smart-mouthed Evie would come bursting out of the confining party cake with all of her opinions and wounds on display.
Onstage, the Crusaders played Sarah’s signature hymn while she sang along in her sweet soprano: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before…”
One by one, the people at the tables took up the song. They sang as one voice. Inside, Evie was crumbling. Tears coursed down her cheeks. Theta wasn’t singing. And neither was Woody. He offered Evie his handkerchief. “Tide’s turning, Sheba,” he
said soberly.
As the song drew to its close, a man burst into the room, his eyes wild. His shouts couldn’t be heard above the din in the room, though.
“What? What’s he saying?” the guests repeated to one another until the man’s desperate cries could at last be heard.
“Ghosts!” he screeched. “Ghosts in the streets!”
WE WILL BE HEARD
An ominous fog bank spread across the far end of Wall Street, rolling slowly forward. From inside it came the steady thrum of marching feet and the clanging of chains—a phantom army on the move.
“What is that?” Woody asked from the steps below, his notebook open and his hand shaking.
“That thing people told us not to worry about,” Evie replied.
“Ghosts!” The murmur passed through the crowd, not yet hysteria.
“Stay here. I’m going to call in the troops,” Theta said, squeezing through the crush of curious swells and back into the hotel.
The dark, billowing cloud advanced another block, then stopped. For several long minutes, the ghosts, shrouded in gloom, kept their distance. An electric stillness filled the air, a storm held under a bell jar, just waiting to be unleashed. The crowd burbled with nervous excitement and growing dread: “What are they doing?” “I don’t know.” “Will they hurt us?” “Where are the police?”
Theta raced back to Evie’s side, breathless. “I called Henry and Sam. They’re grabbing everybody and coming down here.”
“How long?”
Theta gave a New Yorker’s shrug.
Sirens rang out, followed by the shriek of whistles as the police arrived. They pushed back the people and set up barricades, as if that could stop what waited in the fog.
“Ling! Over here!” Theta called, spying Alma helping Ling navigate through the gawkers lined up ten deep on the sidewalks. News had spread fast.
