The Diviners (29 page)

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of our radio audience, and welcome to the
Gerard Whittington Hour
, brought to you by Marlowe Industries. Yes, Marlowe Industries—Bringing You Tomorrow, Today. From the very latest innovations in aviation and security to helpful household appliances for the housewife, Marlowe Industries…”

“I still don’t understand,” Evie said over the soft croon of the radio. She lay on the sofa with the illustrated book in her hands. “None of this answers the mystery of the first four offerings. If the Pentacle Killer is truly following the rituals in this Book of the Brethren in order to raise some anti-Christ and bring about Armageddon, why start with the fifth offering? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Detective Malloy reports no similar murders prior to the discovery of Ruta Badowski’s body,” Jericho said. He was seated at the dining room table with his notes.

Will, as usual, was pacing. “It is mysterious. But this much we do know: If the killer is following the offerings in the Book of the
Brethren, and it certainly seems he is, we may be able to prevent the next attempt….”

Evie read the seventh offering aloud.

“What does it mean? Who are the deceitful brethren?” Will mused. He walked from bay window to kitchenette and back again till Evie thought he would wear a path in the Persian rug.

“Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. What if we find the temple he mentions? That way, the police can be there to stop him,” Evie mused. She snapped her fingers. “There’s the Egyptian temple at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

“It could mean a synagogue, especially if this is somehow connected to the Klan,” Jericho suggested.

“What about temples of finance—the stock exchange, or the banks!” Evie shouted. It was as if they were playing a strange parlor game, like charades, but with deadly serious stakes.

“Good, very good,” Will said. They discussed it further, making a list of other possible meanings for the temple mentioned in the seventh offering, with Jericho writing each one down.

“I’ll alert Terrence that our killer may strike at any of those places. Now, Evie, can you see if there is anything in the Hale book about religious iconography?” Will commanded from his momentary post near the bay windows.

The street lamps had come on in Central Park. It was just after eight o’clock. They’d been at the books for some time and had missed dinner entirely. Evie’s stomach grumbled.

“Unc, I’m starved. Can’t we come back to it?” Evie begged.

Will looked up at the clock, then at the dark outside the windows. His expression was one of complete surprise. “Oh. So you must be. Why don’t you and Jericho go down to the dining room? I’ll fix myself a sandwich here.”

“I’ll do the same,” Jericho said.

“Then I’ll be all alone,” Evie said. “Jericho, it will do us both good to get out of here.”

“She’s right, Jericho,” Will said. “Go downstairs for a bit.”

Reluctantly, Jericho closed his books and followed Evie to the elevator. She stopped it on the sixth floor and threw open the gate.

“Why are we stopping here?”

“It just occurred to me that Mabel must be starved! Her parents are at a rally tonight, and the poor dear is all alone.”

“She’s probably already had her supper.”

“Oh, no! I know my Mabel. She’s a night owl. Doesn’t eat until late—like a Parisian. It won’t take a minute-ski.”

Evie knocked her special knock and Mabel threw the door open, wearing her bathrobe and already talking: “I hope you’ve brought me the man of my dreams…. Oh.”

Evie cleared her throat. “Good evening, Mabel. Jericho and I were just going to have dinner downstairs, if you’d care to join us.” Evie cut her eyes at Jericho beside her.

“Oh. Oh!” Mabel said, looking down at her bathrobe in horror. “Let me just get dressed.”

“Hello, Evie,” Mr. Rose called from the kitchen table, where he sat banging out a story on a typewriter. Evie waved back.

Jericho glowered. “I thought you said they were at a rally.”

“Did I? I must have confused my days. Silly me. Mabesie, darling, do hurry!”

A few minutes later the three of them sat in the dining hall at a banquette under a chandelier that blinked every now and then due to some fault in the wiring. Evie filled Mabel in on the details of the murders and what they’d discovered courtesy of Dr. Poblocki. “This fellow seems to be enacting some sort of strange ancient ritual from a vanished cult. It’s pos-i-tute-ly macabre. What a monster he is!”

“That’s what happens when society neglects and abuses children,” Mabel said, fidgeting with her silverware. “They grow up to be monsters.”

“What an
interesting
theory! Mabel, you are so clever!” Evie said. “Isn’t she smart, Jericho?”

Jericho did not look up from his chicken and dumplings. Across the table, Mabel mouthed an urgent
What are you doing?

Operation Jericho
, Evie mouthed back.

“How do you know that’s what happens?” Jericho challenged.

“What do you mean?” Mabel asked.

“How do you know that it’s society that makes monsters?”

“Well, my mother says that when—”

“I didn’t ask what your mother thought,” Jericho interrupted. “Everyone who can read a newspaper knows what your mother thinks. I asked how
you
know that happens.”

Mabel chased the noodles in her cup of soup with a spoon. She’d eaten an hour earlier and wasn’t the slightest bit hungry. “Well, I’ve been to the slums with my mother and father. I’ve seen the horrors wrought by poverty and ignorance.”

“Then how do you account for the poor, abused soul who grows up to achieve greatness?”

“There are always exceptions.”

“What if that isn’t true at all? What if evil exists? What if it has always existed and will continue to exist, an eternal battle between good and evil, always and forever?”

“You mean, like God and the Devil?” Mabel shook her head. “I don’t believe in that. I’m an atheist. Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

“Karl Marx,” Jericho said. “Also not your own opinion. Do you believe that because you actually believe it, or do you believe it because you heard it from them first?”

“I believe it,” Mabel answered. “Evil is a human invention. A choice.”

“Jericho believes we are doomed to repeat our existence,” Evie said, waggling her eyebrows to show just how seriously she took this theory. “Nietzsche.”

“I guess I’m not the only one influenced by other people’s opinions.” Mabel sniffed.

Evie tried to hide her laugh with a cough. She glanced at Mabel and tapped the side of her nose surreptitiously, a signal. “Oh, dear!” Evie said with mock concern. “I seem to have lost my bracelet.”

“No, you haven’t!” Mabel blurted out. She went to kick Evie under the table and got Jericho by mistake.

“Ow,” he said, eyeing her.

“Sorry.” Mabel’s eyes went wide in horror. She looked to Evie with a
Please do something quickly
expression.

“Do you know what I believe? I believe we should have pie,” Evie announced and signaled for the server.

They fell into near silence, the only sounds around the table the chewing and slurping of food. Evie tried to have a conversation with Mabel, but everything felt forced and awkward. Afterward, they rode the elevator together in uncomfortable silence, all of them watching its gold arrow tick the floors off one by one.

Mabel practically leaped from the elevator when the gate opened on her floor. “Good night,” she said without turning around, and Evie knew she’d hear all about it later. The first stage of Operation Jericho had been a certified failure.

When they reached their own floor they found that Uncle Will had tacked a note to the door:
Gone to see Malloy—WF
. It was pure Uncle Will, from the brevity to the initials. Evie crumpled the note and slammed the apartment door behind her. She
glared at Jericho, who had just made himself at home in Will’s chair with his book.

She moved to the couch and glared at him from there. “You didn’t need to be so rude, you know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jericho mumbled.

“To Mabel! You could at least
try
to be polite.”

“I’m not interested in being polite. It’s false. Nietzsche says—”

“Leave Nietzsche out of this. He’s dead, and for all I know he died of rudeness.” Evie fumed. “She’s very smart, you know. As smart as you are.”

Jericho deigned to look up from his book. “She’s under her parents’ thumbs. She thinks what they think. What she said tonight about society making monsters—that was her mother talking.”

“So you
were
listening!”

“She needs her own opinions. She needs to learn to think for herself, not just parrot what other people say.”

“You mean the way you hang on Uncle Will’s and Nietzsche’s every word?” Evie swiped the book away from him.

“I do not,” Jericho said, taking it back. “And why are we having a conversation about Mabel? Why is it so important to you?”

“Because…” Evie trailed off. She couldn’t very well say,
Because Mabel’s goofy over you. Because for the past three years, I’ve gotten letters full of her longing. Because every time you walk into the room, she takes a breath and holds it.
“Because she’s my friend. And nobody is rude to my friends. Got it?”

Jericho let out a sigh of irritation. “From now on I will be the picture of politeness to Mabel.”

“Thank you,” Evie said with a bow. Jericho ignored her.

Memphis tore out the page from his notebook and crumpled it in disgust. He’d tried working on the poem again, the one about his mother and her coat of grief, but it wouldn’t come, and he wondered if he was doomed to be a failed writer as well as healer.

The wind whistled through the fall leaves. It had been April when his mother died, the trees budding into flowers like girls turning shyly into young ladies. Spring, when nothing should be dying. Memphis’s father had roused him from sleep. His eyes were shadowed. “It’s time, son,” he’d said, and he led the sleepy Memphis through the dark house and into his mother’s room, where a lone candle burned. His mother lay shivering under a thin blanket.

“Please, son. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to keep her here.”

His father, leading him to the bed. Memphis’s mother wasn’t much more than bones, her hair thinned to candy floss. Beneath the blanket, her body was still. She stared up at the ceiling, her eyes tracking something beyond Memphis’s vision. He was fourteen years old.

“Go on, now, son,” his father said, his voice breaking. “Please.”

Memphis was afraid. His mother seemed so close to death that he didn’t see how he could stop it. He’d wanted to heal her before, but she wouldn’t let him. “I won’t have my son responsible for that,” she’d said firmly. “What’s meant to be is meant to be, good or bad.” But Memphis didn’t want his mother to die. He put his hands on her. His mother’s eyes widened and she tried to shake her head, to duck his hands, but she was too weak.

“I’m going to help you, Mama.”

His mother parted her cracked lips to speak, but no sound came out. Memphis felt the healing grip take hold, and then he was under, pulled along by currents he couldn’t control and did not understand, the two of them carried out to a larger, unknown sea. In his healing trances, he always felt the presence of the spirits around him. It was a calm, protective presence, and he was never afraid. But it was different this time. The place he found himself was a dark graveyard, heavy with mist. The shades did not feel quite so benevolent as they pressed close to him. A skinny gray man in a tall hat sat upon a rock, his hands made into fists.

“What would you give me for her, healer?” the man asked, and it seemed to Memphis as if the wind itself had whispered the question. The man nodded to his fists. “In one hand is life; in the other, death. Choose. Choose and you might have her back.”

Memphis stepped forward, his finger inching closer. Right or left?

Suddenly he saw his mother, gaunt and weak, in the graveyard. “You can’t bring me back, Memphis. Don’t ever try to bring back what’s gone!”

The man grinned at her with teeth like tiny daggers. “The choice is his!”

His mother looked frightened, but she did not back down. “He’s just a boy.”

“The choice. Is. His.”

Memphis concentrated on the man’s fists once more. He tapped the right one. The man smiled and opened his palm, and a shiny black baby bird squeaked at him.

Memphis’s mother shook her head. “Oh, my son, my son. What have you done?”

Memphis had no memory after that. He’d fallen ill with a fever, Octavia told him, and his father had put him to bed. The next morning, he woke to see Octavia covering the mirrors with sheets. His father sat in his chair, his shirt matted to him with sweat. “She’s gone,” he whispered, and in his eyes, Memphis saw the accusation:
Why couldn’t you save her? All that gift, and you couldn’t save the one person who mattered?

Now Memphis wiped the graveyard dirt from his hands. He smoothed out the page and stuck it back in his notebook. Then he headed toward home. As he passed the old house on the hill, he thought he heard something. Was that… whistling? Couldn’t be. But yes, there it was, just under the roar of the wind. Or was it only the wind itself? Memphis opened the gate and took two steps on the broken path. How many times he had read ghost stories and thought to himself,
Don’t go up those stairs! Stay away from that old house!
Yet here he was, standing in the yard of the oldest, most forbidding house he knew, contemplating going inside. The folly of standing at the boarded-over window of a decrepit house suddenly dawned fully on Memphis, and he backed away. He was immediately reminded of the murders taking place in the city. Why had that thought occurred to him now, here? Again he heard the sound of some faint whistling echoing from the empty chambers of the old house. Memphis ran, leaving the front gate screaming on its rusted hinges.