Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (21 page)

Clipboard in hand, the mission nurse made her nightly rounds. When she came to Chauncey Miller’s bed, she drew closer. His sweat-drenched face wore the oddest expression, something between pain and ecstasy, and his eyes moved frantically beneath his closed lids. It made her uneasy to look at him.

“Mr. Miller? Mr. Miller!”

She couldn’t wake him. That was when she saw the angry red patches bubbling up on his skin like radiation burns. In the bed beside Chauncey’s, an old wino named Joe Wilson moaned. His forehead was slick with sweat and his eyelids twitched with fevered dreaming.

“Mr. Wilson?”

“Dream… with… me…” he gasped.

“Mr. Wilson!” The nurse nudged him, then tugged on his arms, to no avail.

The room filled with whispers uttered in sleep, “Dream with me… dream with me… dream…”

The frantic nurse moved quickly from bedside to bedside. Of the twenty men on the ward, twelve of them would not wake. Her clipboard clattered to the floor as she ran to inform the doctor that they’d better call the health inspector straightaway.

The sleeping sickness had come to the mission.

Damp wind gusted against Mabel as she hurried along Central Park West ahead of the rain. She kept one hand on her hat and the other on her nervous stomach as she practiced what she’d say when she knocked at the museum.

“Good afternoon, Jericho! I was just passing by.”

“Oh, Jericho, are you hungry? There’s a swell diner down on Broadway.”

“Jericho! Fancy meeting you here. At the museum. Where you work. Every. Day.”

Mabel growled. She was lousy at this sort of coy game-playing. If only she could say what she really wanted to say, flat out.

“Kiss me, you fool!” Mabel exclaimed, lifting her arms skyward. A passing postman tipped his hat and gave her a hopeful smile, and a horrified Mabel shoved her hands deep into her coat and marched up the sidewalk, muttering to herself the whole way.

As Mabel approached the museum, she slowed, noticing the two men in the brown sedan. A life on the front lines of the labor movement had trained Mabel to keep alert for oddities, and something about these men seemed off. They were just sitting, watching the museum. Well, they weren’t the only ones who knew how to watch. Mabel stopped beside the driver’s-side window and tapped gently on the glass.

The driver rolled down the window, scowling just slightly before correcting his expression with a smile. “Yes, Miss?”

Mabel smiled. “I beg your pardon. Could you tell me the time, please?” She made sure to get a good look at the two of them, as her parents had taught her: Gray suits. Dark hats. Curious matching lapel pins—an eye with a lightning bolt.

“It’s just past one, Miss.”

“Thank you very much,” Mabel said and crossed the street, letting herself into the museum. “Steady, Mabel,” she whispered before pasting on a smile and blowing into the museum’s grand library with a cheery, “Hello! Anybody home? Jericho?” She dropped her coat and hat on the outstretched paw of the giant stuffed bear.

Jericho’s blond head poked up from behind the stacks of dusty boxes cluttering the top of the long library table. “Mabel. What brings you here?”

Mabel’s throat felt tight. On the front lines, she had faced hostile union-breakers, men with guns. Why was talking to this one boy so terrifying? “I was just hungry and passing by. Oh! Not that I thought you’d have food here,” she said, wincing at her bungle. Quickly, she gestured to the table. “Gee, it’s like something vomited paper in here.”

Jericho raised an eyebrow. “That’s certainly descriptive.”

Strike two.
“Sorry,” Mabel said. “What is all of this?”

“Will’s notes from his paranormal-researcher days. We found them in the cellar. I’ve been going through them for the past hour. Did you know there’s mention of Diviners since the dawn of this country?”

Jericho paused, and Mabel wanted to respond with something clever. But being this close to Jericho made her antsy. “Huh-uh.”

“John Smith writes about a Powhatan brave—a healer and mystic—who visited Jamestown. A Diviner servant in George Washington’s household had a vision that helped Washington narrowly avoid capture by the British. And there’s evidence that a few of the witches at Salem were actually Diviners. But this is when it gets really interesting.”

Jericho jumped up from the table. From behind a bookcase, he
rolled out a large chalkboard. Mabel could just make out the faint remaining chalk lines of Evie’s notes from the Pentacle Murders investigation. Quickly, Jericho swiped the eraser across the surface, eradicating the last traces of her presence from the museum. He wrote the date
September 1901
on the chalkboard.

“All right. I’ll bite,” Mabel prompted. “What happens in September 1901?”

“The assassination of President McKinley?” Jericho chalked
McKinley
beside
1901
.

Mabel blushed. “Oh. Oh, of course.”

“It seems that in August 1901, a Diviner, a former slave named Moses Freedman, tried to warn the president about a possible attempt on his life. But no one believed him. In fact, he was taken into custody under suspicion of being an anarchist agitator, and was questioned for months following McKinley’s assassination. They held him for nearly a year without charging him.”

“But that’s illegal!” Mabel protested. “What about habeas corpus?”

“Suspended, under the constitutional provision stating that a person can be held without charge if the public safety might require it.”

“That’s a slippery slope toward fascism,” Mabel grumbled.

“I’m sure Moses Freedman would have agreed with you.”

“What happened to him?”

“In early July 1902,” Jericho said, adding that date to the board, “he has a vision about a possible mine explosion in Johnstown, Pennsylvania—another warning that goes unheeded—”

“The Rolling Mill Mine Disaster. It was one of the worst mining disasters in American history. It killed more than one hundred men,” Mabel blurted.

Jericho raised an eyebrow. “Impressive.”

Mabel shrugged away the compliment. “If your parents were union organizers, you’d know these things, too. Some girls are raised on fairy tales; I was raised on mining disasters.”

“You had a very interesting childhood.” Jericho gave a little half smile, and Mabel felt it deep down.

“So,” she said, clearing her throat. “Rolling Mill?”

“Right. Rolling Mill. After that, President Roosevelt sits down with Moses Freedman and determines that he’s telling the truth. And that gives him an idea. In 1904”—again, Jericho scribbled with his chalk—“the president creates the U.S. Department of Paranormal to explore the fantastical world. He wants to find and use Diviners to work in the interest of national security. After all, if you’ve got someone whose supernatural abilities can help them see disaster or danger coming, why not use them?”

“So where does Dr. Fitzgerald fit into all of this?”

Jericho wiped his hands against his trousers, leaving chalk-dust finger streaks. “He was recruited for the U.S. Department of Paranormal. He traveled the country seeking out Diviners, testing them, hearing their stories, and registering them for the government.”

Mabel whistled. “You’re right. That really would perk up the Diviners exhibit. But won’t Dr. Fitzgerald be angry that we’re using his private letters and research from that time?”

“Then he shouldn’t have left it to us to save his museum,” Jericho said bitterly. “We’ll only use the letters about Diviners.”

“How long did you say you have to put this exhibit together?”

“Ten days.”

Mabel shook her head. “That won’t be easy.” It seemed impossible, in fact. Unless… “Would you like some help?”

Jericho’s eyes widened. “Are you volunteering?”

“Reporting for duty.”

He gave her another half smile. “That would be swell. Thanks.”

“Well, then,” Mabel said, feeling on solid ground for the first time. “Let’s get to work.”

Mabel riffled through one of the files, pulling out a photograph of five people posed in front of an overgrown crepe myrtle. “Is that… Dr. Fitzgerald?”

Jericho nodded.

“He looks so young. Oh, not that he’s old now! He just looks… not quite so worried as he usually does.”

A handsome, dark-haired man with a bold smile stood beside Will, one arm thrown across Will’s shoulder as if they were brothers.

Mabel gasped. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Jake Marlowe. He and Will were friends. Once,” Jericho said.

Mabel felt it would be impolite to press Jericho on that point, so she left it alone. Jericho hoisted a strange, dusty contraption from a crate. It was a small wooden box, roughly the size of a cracker tin. A hand crank stuck out from its right side, and in its center was a long glass tube with a pencil-thin, two-pronged filament inside. Just below the filament was a numbered meter that counted in tens from zero to eighty.

Jericho dropped the odd device onto the table. He and Mabel cocked their heads in unison. Mabel tried the rusty crank. It squeaked its displeasure. “I give up. What on earth is that?”

“Not sure yet. I’m hoping one of these letters will give us some clue. Here. You take this crate and I’ll take that one. Put aside anything that has to do with Diviners.”

For the better part of an hour, Jericho and Mabel sorted through and made stacks of what seemed promising. Plenty of it was just junk—books gone to pulp, water-damaged photographs, a shopping list or postcard with a banal inscription:
The flowers are in bloom. Lovely.
Jericho turned his attention toward a small cache of letters nestled deep inside his crate. Every single one was addressed to Cornelius from Will. There were none from Cornelius back to Will. Jericho pulled the first letter from its envelope.

At the bottom of the page, Will had drawn a sketch of an eye-and-lightning-bolt symbol.

“Hey! I think I may have found the name of our mysterious machine!” Mabel said, waving a piece of aged paper. “It’s called the Metaphysickometer.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Jericho said, coming to stand beside Mabel and read over her shoulder.

“Yes. Um. It is. Uh… anyway. Will refers to it in this letter,” Mabel said.

Mabel patted the strange box of wires and gears and needles. “Well, hello there, Metaphysickometer! Pleased to meet you. Gee, an early Jake Marlowe invention! Might be valuable. I wonder why he never touts this one like he does everything else?”

“He doesn’t like to talk about his failures,” Jericho said, stepping over to examine the machine.

Mabel’s brows came together in a V. “You don’t like him much, do you?”

“I admire what he’s accomplished. I respect his achievements. But he’s not a man who thinks about the cost of those achievements.” Jericho paused. “Or so I’ve heard.”

“Sure would be great if we could include a demonstration of this beauty in the exhibit. I wonder how you make it work.”

“Will’s letter said it measures some sort of ghostly electromagnetic radiation. So I suppose if there are no Diviners and no ghosts, you get a quiet machine.”

“Suppose. Of course, it’s been living in the cellar all these years. It might not work at all,” Mabel said, thumping the glass. The needle didn’t budge. “Oh! I found some photographs, too. Here. This one is of Mama Thibault. Let’s put her picture with her letter. Perhaps we can find other pictures and pair them all up. Did you find anything useful?”

“Um… here. This one was promising,” Jericho said, grabbing a letter from a stack he’d put aside.

“Ha!” Mabel said. “The professor has a sense of humor. Or he did once. Sorry. Go on.”