Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (53 page)

While the Sweetheart Singers warbled her theme song and Mr. Forman purred the show’s introduction into his microphone, Evie dabbed at her face with a handkerchief and looked out at the audience, where people waited hungrily with their objects. Her mind was on Sam. Theirs was supposed to be a pretend romance, nothing more. But then Sam had saved her life, and she’d kissed him. She’d wanted to kiss him—that much was clear. His kisses had been passionate and tender and dizzying; Evie hadn’t wanted to stop. When the party broke up at last, and Evie headed home, she glanced through the taxi’s rear window to see him standing there in the middle of the busy street watching her leave, his hands shoved into his pockets, a sweet grin on his face as the cars and taxicabs zoomed around him, horns honking angrily. The deal with Sam was supposed to make Evie’s life easier. Instead, she was more confused than ever.

“And don’t forget that the Sweetheart Seer will be the special guest of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult at tonight’s grand Diviners exhibit opening, beginning at the
spooooky stroke
of deepest midnight! That sounds rather
crrreepy-crrrrawly
, Miss O’Neill,” Mr. Forman prompted.

“Yes. Rah-ther,” Evie said tightly. Through the glass of the engineer’s room, she could see Mr. Phillips, who did not look pleased to have his radio used in such an unscripted fashion. “Shall we bring up our first guest, Mr. Forman?”

Mr. Forman took the hint. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the Pears Soap Hour stage—Mr. Bob Bateman!”

To polite applause, a handsome man came forward. He seemed sweetly nervous. “How do you do, Miss O’Neill?”

“I’m doing much better now that you’re here,” Evie shot back, enjoying the audience’s laughter. “How can I be of help to you today, Mr. Bateman?”

“It’s awfully nice to meet you. You’re such a swell girl and all.”

“Gee, Mr. Bateman, that’s awfully sweet of you to say,” Evie said. “Oh, you brought me a comb. Golly, I hope this doesn’t mean that my bob looks a fright!”

More laughter. It was a great audience, a great show—one of her best. She hoped Mr. Phillips was paying attention.

“Oh, no, Miss O’Neill. You look beautiful,” he said, and Evie actually blushed.

“Careful there. This young lady’s engaged to a Diviner,” Mr. Forman interjected, to the crowd’s delight.

“He’s a lucky fella,” Mr. Bateman said, and Evie’s smile wobbled just a bit. She no longer knew what game she and Sam were playing.

“This comb belonged to my best pal, Ralphie,” Mr. Bateman said, and Evie snapped back to the moment.

“Oh. Uh-huh,” she said.

“He died during the war.”

There were clucks of sympathy from the audience.

“Gee, I’m sorry,” Evie said. “My brother was a war hero, you know.”

“Yes. I’ve heard that. I figured you might be sympathetic to an old Army man like me. The thing of it is, when he was over there, Ralphie married a French girl on the quick, but I don’t know her name and, well, the family has been trying to find her all these years. I’m sure you understand. I thought maybe you could get a name for us?”

“Of course,” Evie said quietly. She put her hand on Mr. Bateman’s. “I’ll do whatever I can.”

Mr. Bateman put the comb in her hands. It was just an old tortoise comb, something you could get at any drugstore. Nothing special.
Evie closed her eyes. She rubbed her thumb over the tips of the teeth. Then, when she was ready, she held it between her palms, pressing gently, and waited for information.

But the comb didn’t seem to want to yield its treasures to her. To get at its memories, she’d need to go deeper. That was unpredictable on the radio. But Bob Bateman was a war hero, and everyone was waiting. Evie would not send him away with nothing. Gritting her teeth, she dove further under, concentrating so hard that she could feel sweat prickling along her upper lip and trickling down her spine. Evie forgot caution. She cared only about getting a read, no matter what it took.

Her head jerked back as the vision flared. The sensation was a dizzying one. She was running. No. Something was moving. The scenery. Trees. Rocks. More Trees. Seen through a window. Ah! She was on a train. Evie breathed through, searching for her footing in the memory, and was rewarded with a steadier picture. Yes, she was in a train compartment crowded with soldiers. A card game was in play on the small tray table. A skinny, dark-haired boy sprawled across his seat, writing in his diary. There was no girl in sight. Perhaps she was elsewhere on the train. Evie would find her.

“Anybody know where we’re headed?” the diary writer asked. He seemed nervous. His eyes. There was something familiar about his eyes. Brown. Sad.

“They never tell us nothin’,” the card dealer answered around the cigarette in his teeth.

“Just seems funny they didn’t tell us.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” the dealer said. “Who’s in?”

The longer Evie stayed under, the more she felt that there was something strangely recognizable about all the men, something she couldn’t quite place. Stay light. Don’t go too deep. That was the name of the game on the radio. But Evie was in deep already. She needed to know.

Outside the windows, the land rolled on. Trees. Hills. Light snow fell.

The dealer flattened a card against his forehead, facedown. “What am I holding, huh? What is it? Who can call it? Joe? Cal?”

“It’s the Ace of Spades,” came a new voice, so shocking in its familiarity that Evie could scarcely breathe.

With a grin and a head shake, the dealer threw the card on the table, faceup. Ace of Spades.

“Son of a bitch,” a freckle-faced soldier said. “Right again.”

“That’s our Jim,” the diary writer said. Evie went cold inside. She’d placed his face. The soldier with the gun. The one who’d tried to shoot her on Forty-second Street. Her arms shook and her legs trembled. Nausea crept up into her throat. It was too much. She needed to quit, but she couldn’t—not yet. She had to see the soldier’s face. The one who’d guessed the card. She had to know who…

And then he was there. Right there. Smiling and bright-eyed and so young. Just the way she remembered him.

“All right,” her brother said, grinning. “Which one of you wise guys took my comb?”

In the next moment, Evie slipped to the stage floor. She was vaguely aware of a commotion around her, voices that sounded as if they came from underwater.

“Miss O’Neill? Miss O’Neill!” cried Bob Bateman.

“Please, stay calm!” said Mr. Forman.

Excited murmurs from the audience. Anxious voices: “Make her stop!” “How?” “Do something!”

And then someone pried the comb from her stiff fingers, severing the connection. Evie came to with a great, heaving inhalation, as if her lungs had stopped working for a moment and were now desperate for air. Her head lolled from side to side. The bright white lights hurt her eyes. Evie’s knees buckled as she tried to stand. The studio audience gasped. One of the Sweetheart Singers rushed over to prop her up. The back of Evie’s tongue tasted of blood. The inside of her cheek was raw where she must’ve bitten it. Mr. Forman provided a glass of water, and Evie gulped it down greedily, not caring that she spilled it
down the front of her dress. Pushing off from the Sweetheart Singer’s embrace, she lunged toward Bateman on unsteady legs.

“Where… where did you get this?” Evie choked out when she could speak again. The studio lights were daggers. Her eyes watered and her nose ran. She was afraid she might vomit.

“I told you, it was my buddy Ralphie’s.…”

“That’s not true!” Evie half yelled, half cried.

The audience was uncomfortable with this unseemly display. They’d come for a good time and answers about lost pets or family treasures whose secret histories might connect them to royalty or millionaires. Mr. Forman tried to intervene, but Evie’s voice rose over his. “Where did you get my brother’s comb?”

“Say, now—I came on for a little help,” Bateman snapped, but he seemed more unsettled than angry. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to this.”

In the booth, the engineer gestured wildly to Mr. Forman, who practically shoved the Sweetheart Singers up to the microphone, where they launched into an upbeat tune to drown out the drama unfolding in front of them. Bob Bateman grabbed the comb from Mr. Forman and started down the middle aisle toward the doors in the back even though the
ON AIR
sign glowed red. Evie stumbled after him, eliciting further murmurs of disapproval and shock from the audience, but she didn’t stop, careening like a rolled marble down the hallway of the radio station after Bob Bateman.

“Mr. Bateman! Mr. Bateman!”

The man hurried his steps. She burst through the doors and out into the madness of the street. Cold rain fell in fat drops that stuck to her eyelashes. Bob Bateman was halfway down the street. Evie chased after him and grabbed hold of his arm.

“Where did you get that comb?” she demanded through clenched teeth.

“Look, I already told you—”

“You’re lying. You’re lying, you’re lying!” She was crying now. Big hiccuping gulps. Making a scene right there on Broadway, with
everyone looking on. But she was beyond caring. She only wanted the truth. “How did you know my brother?”

“What?”

“My brother, James! He was on that train. The vision—I saw him!”

Bob Bateman’s face showed panic. He gave the street a quick glance and leaned in close to Evie, lowering his voice. “Listen, sweetheart, it’s not even my comb.”

“What?”

“It’s not mine, okay?”

“B-but you s-said—”

“They paid me to say that. It’s not even my comb,” he said again.

“Who? Who paid you?”

“I don’t know. Some fellas in dark suits… Adams! His partner called him Mr. Adams.”

“Why would they do that?”

“How should I know?”

“Take me to them.”

“You’re crazy,” the man said. Evie latched on to his arm with both hands. “Let go!”

“Not until you take me to them.” Evie dug her nails into the man’s arm to keep him there.

“Ow! I said let go!” The man stepped down on Evie’s instep. She howled more in shock and anger than in real pain, and he yanked his arm free. A crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle.

“Crazy,” Bob Bateman groused to everyone watching. “She’s crazy! Those Diviners are all crazy!” he yelled and ran off.

By the time the wet, bedraggled Evie returned to the radio station, the Pears Soap Hour had ended. She hid behind the thick, fanned leaves of a potted plant, watching a group of men smoking in the lobby, and listened to Mr. Forman’s voice piped through the loudspeakers as he explained to the audience sitting by their radios that “Miss O’Neill has taken ill, overcome by the spirits from beyond.”

“Overcome by spirits, all right,” one of the smoking men quipped.

Mr. Forman reminded listeners that Sarah Snow’s Mission Hour
was coming up next. The Wireless Wonders Orchestra played the Sweetheart Singers on, and they sang an inoffensive tune to make housewives happy.

Evie waited in the ladies’ lounge until her audience had cleared out and a new one came in. Sarah Snow’s soothing voice reverberated in the Art Deco fortress of WGI.

“Evie, there you are.” It was Helen, Mr. Phillips’s secretary. She looked a bit stricken, like someone delivering a bad telegram. “Honey, Mr. Phillips wants to see you.”

“Oh. Pos-i-tute-ly,” Evie said without fizz. “Let me just freshen up.”

Helen patted her arm. “I’ll let him know.”

In the mirror, Evie dabbed at her face and hair with a towel. She wiped away the spidery mascara beneath her eyes and put on a fresh coat of red lipstick. She trudged down the forever hallway, her heels clacking across the gleaming marble floors. She reached Mr. Phillips’s office and kept walking, all the way to the back door. Then she broke into a run.

The radio played in the parlors of the Foursquares in Minneapolis and in the kitchens on the South Side of Chicago. The sermon reached the ears of senators and congressmen, of preachers tending congregations and reformers attending meetings on Prohibition. It crackled along wires strung through the ether and was reborn in the office of the boss overseeing the migrant workers, the farmer worrying about a crop in the frost, and the factory foreman preparing his production quotas for the next morning’s shift.

The hymn’s marchlike strains played in the small home in Lake George, New York, where Will spoke with a little girl who’d seen from her attic window one cold night a dozen flickering wraiths coming across the winter-frozen lake as the sky churned and flashed above them. Will sat perfectly still as the little girl told him how these ragged spirits seemed to be heading somewhere, drawn by some invisible thread, but that when they came upon a fawn, they surrounded it and fell upon it, feasting with such a frightening ferocity that the poor animal scarcely had time to cry out, and the girl sank down to her
floor away from the window, well out of sight, afraid they’d come next for her.

In the studio, the hymn ended.

Sarah Snow pronounced her balm of a benediction, soothing the weary hearts of a skittish nation on the verge of change.

It was followed by a cheery appeal for Arrow shirts, the shirt that makes the man.