by Libba Bray
When they turned onto Sixty-eighth Street, they slowed. Police guarded the entrance to the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, where a small flock of reporters shouted rapid-fire questions at them.
“Is today ‘Win a Free Skeleton Day’ at the museum?” Henry joked.
“Hey. There’s Woody,” Evie said, spying her friend and occasional nemesis, T. S. Woodhouse of the New York Daily News, in the scrum. “He’ll know the business.”
Theta grabbed Evie’s sleeve. “Don’t call to—”
“Mr. Woodhouse! Oh, Mr. Woodhouse!” Evie bellowed.
“Him,” Theta finished as every head swiveled their way.
“It’s the Sweetheart Seer!” somebody shouted, alerting the reporters, who now rushed toward Evie and her friends. It had been a while since Evie had enjoyed the bright spotlight of the press’s attention, and for just a moment, it felt so good that she quite forgot why she had come to the museum in the first place.
“Golly, is it Win a Free Skeleton Day at the Creepy Crawly?” she quipped, moving quickly ahead of Henry, who complained, “Hey, that was my line.”
But when she got closer, she saw the broken windows and the word Murderers splashed in red paint across the neat, hand-lettered sign for the museum. Woody was pushing his way toward her, his expression grim. “Evie! Evie!”
“Say, Woody, what’s happened?”
“You don’t know, Sheba? Didn’t anybody telephone you?”
“I was at Theta’s last night,” Evie said feebly. She didn’t like the cold she suddenly felt in her belly. It was the same cold she’d felt when Mr. Smith from the telegram office had come to deliver the telegram about her brother, James, during the war: We regret to inform you…
“You’d better brace yourself for a shock, kid.” Woody reached inside his jacket pocket for his flask. Evie took note of the reporters watching her. She shook her head and he put it back.
“What is it, Woody?”
“Your uncle’s dead. He’s been murdered.”
Will. Murdered. The street swam and Evie stumbled a bit. A cameraman’s flash went off, capturing her in her shock.
“Who would do that? Who would kill Uncle Will?” was all Evie could seem to say.
“Nobody’s said anything yet. Say, uh, you wouldn’t have any ideas, would you, Sheba?” Woody lifted his pencil from over his ear and opened a fresh page on his notepad.
Evie glared. “No, I don’t, Mr. Woodhouse.”
“I’m a reporter, Sheba,” Woody said sheepishly but not apologetically.
Will dead. It seemed impossible. Everything about her uncle suggested life. He was never still. Had never been still. Was still. Now. Another camera flash went off. Evie blinked away spots and put up a hand to block her face. “Please… please don’t.…”
“You wanna put that flash box away before I break it?” Theta shouted at the photographer.
“Why don’t you smile for us instead, beautiful?” a reporter joked.
The others laughed. Theta felt her hands getting warm.
“Ignore them,” Henry whispered.
Evie marched forward with grim determination.
“Evie, where are you going?” Henry asked.
“I want to see for myself,” she said, muscling her way through the reporters.
Woody chased after her. “They won’t let you in, Sheba.”
“They have to let me in. I’m his niece.” Evie pushed past him and charged toward the museum’s steps. “Let me through, please! Let me through! That’s my uncle!”
The museum’s front doors opened, drawing everyone’s attention. Out stepped Detective Terrence Malloy, all one-hundred-eighty-five gruff, Lower East Side–bred pounds of him. His badge shone against his suit lapel and his mouth worked a piece of chewing gum.
“Detective Malloy! Detective—hey, Detective! Over here!” the reporters shouted.
Evie wondered if Detective Malloy liked hearing his name called as much as she had liked hearing hers whenever she stepped out of the radio station. From the look on his face, she decided he did. Reporters clamored for the big man’s attention:
“What do you know, Detective?”
“Do you suspect foul play?”
“Say, was it a ghost?”
This got a laugh. Evie’s cheeks burned. She wanted to slap that reporter. Her uncle was dead and they were making jokes.
“Is it true that anarchists did it?” another asked.
“Is it true that Diviners did it?”
“That’s ridiculous!” Evie blurted out. “My uncle was a friend to Diviners!”
She had everyone’s attention now, including Malloy’s. The New York City homicide detective had been her uncle Will’s friend once upon a time, before the Pentacle Murders and all that followed destroyed that bond. The look Detective Malloy gave Evie was decidedly less than friendly.
“Well, somebody wasn’t a friend to him, Miss O’Neill,” a reporter said, oblivious to the silent showdown. “Did your uncle have any enemies?”
“Yeah—was there anything worth stealing in all that junk?” another reporter asked.
“Any dangerous objects?”
The reporters were shouting at her.
“As next of kin, I demand to see my uncle’s body,” Evie announced over the din.
“That’s the stuff, Evie!”
“You tell ’em!”
She had Malloy against the ropes now, and she didn’t care that she’d had to use the press to her advantage. If he turned her away, he’d look like a heel. She could see from the way he was grinding that chewing gum against his back molars that Malloy didn’t like this one bit.
“All right, Miss O’Neill. I know from experience that saying no to you is a full-time job,” he said, getting one in at her expense. “But remember—this is a crime scene. Don’t touch anything.”
“Say, Detective—couldn’t the Sweetheart Seer help crack the case?” The reporter waved his fingers.
“Detective work is what’ll crack this case, Johnny. You can print that. Follow me, Miss O’Neill. Your pals have to stay behind, though.”
“Evil? You copacetic?” Theta asked, Henry looking on.
“I’m jake. Don’t worry.”
Broken glass littered the beautiful black-and-white marble floor of the museum’s foyer. Evie glanced to her left, at the collections room, with all its rare supernatural and folkloric objects on display. As she followed the detective through the broken museum, Evie could practically hear echoes of a shared past in the walls—there was Jericho taking down a book from a shelf and Sam annoying him by calling him “Freddy.” She thought of Ling sitting on the sofa, her crutches beside her, as she scoffed at some corny joke Henry made. She could picture Theta and Memphis making eyes at each other across a library table when they were supposed to be looking for clues about otherworldly occurrences. She could hear Isaiah’s laughter and Sister Walker gently admonishing him to concentrate. She could see Will as she had the first day she’d arrived, suitcase in hand, from Ohio. He was standing at a lectern teaching a class of college boys about good and evil, about magic and religion, and about a curious man in a tall hat who seemed to be all those things.
They’d reached the library. Steeling herself, Evie followed Detective Malloy inside. The grand room was a mess. Books lay on the floor with their spines bent. Papers had been strewn about everywhere. Like someone had been searching for something, Evie thought.
“Who’s the tomato?” a cop said as Evie walked past.
“Her? She’s the stiff’s niece,” another cop answered.
Evie flinched to hear Will discussed like that.
“You wanna clam up?” Malloy barked and the officers fell silent.
The police photographer’s flash blinded Evie. When it cleared, she saw Will’s body. He was on his back on the floor, looking up toward the ceiling’s painted mural of witches and shamans and vodou priestesses as if he might simply be contemplating America’s supernatural
past. Except that his blue eyes had gone a milky white, the pupils fixed, and a deep purplish ligature mark encircled his neck above his popped collar. Evie had seen more bodies than she’d cared to in the past several months. But none of them had been Will. Get up, she wanted to say. You’re not dead. Get up. Get up.
Detective Malloy came to stand beside her. “Miss O’Neill, you all right? You feel faint?”
“No,” Evie said, and she wasn’t sure which question she was answering.
“Do you know anybody who might’ve wanted to kill your uncle?”
Just me, Evie thought. “No,” she said.
“I know this must be a shock.”
“Yes,” Evie said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“When was the last time the two of youse talked?”
Evie tried not to glance over at Uncle Will and failed. His eyes. “Oh. Um. A few weeks ago, I think.” They’d fought. He’d left her a note to come to him before it was too late. She’d thrown it away. Foolish. Foolish.
“And what about the rest of your Diviner pals? Your set used to come to the museum pretty often, didn’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“Any of them dislike your uncle?”
The full weight of Malloy’s questions caught up to Evie. She straightened her spine. “If you’ve something to say, Detective, I think you’d better come out and say it plainly.”
Malloy cleared his throat. “Very well. Miss O’Neill, do you know the whereabouts of Memphis Campbell, his brother, Isaiah, or Margaret Walker?”
It took Evie a few seconds to understand his meaning, and then she was furious. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said, with radio star crispness. “I know I’m not a famous detective, like you, Mr. Malloy, but did you try going to their homes?” She was baiting the bull, but she didn’t care.
Malloy squinted at her. “Yeah. We did, matter of fact. Funny thing is, the three of them are suddenly missing. Not a trace of ’em anywhere.”
Now Evie didn’t know what to think. Hadn’t Theta said she’d not heard from Memphis and was worried? What if the Shadow Men had gotten to them, too?
“Maybe somebody took them,” Evie said.
“Took them where?” Malloy asked.
“Well, if you want to investigate another disappearance, Sam Lloyd has gone missing.” Evie squared her shoulders. “I have reason to believe he was kidnapped.”
Malloy’s eyebrows shot up. “Sam Lloyd. Kidnapped. Okay.”
Evie couldn’t miss the snickering of the other officers.
“With all due respect, Miss O’Neill, when Sam Lloyd’s around, it’s usually people’s wallets that go missing.”
“But he was kidnapped!”
“How do you know this?”
“I read his hat. Swell, you can all have a laugh, har-de-har-har,” Evie said to the cops chortling in the corner. “But I saw! I know! He was taken by two men in suits.”
Even Malloy seemed amused. “Men in suits, huh? Haberdashers? Tailors?”
Evie wanted to kick every one of these men. Why couldn’t they take her seriously? “Shadow Men,” she said, trying to hide how small they were making her feel. As if her intuition wasn’t reliable and she was some lunatic.
“Shadow what?” Malloy said.
“That’s just what we call them. They wear gray suits—”
“So do lots of fellas.”
“And they have these lapel pins, an eye surrounded by the rays of the sun… you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Detective Malloy’s expression hardened. “Listen, Miss O’Neill, I don’t know anything about Shadow Men or object readings or ghosts. What I know is that your uncle is dead—murdered—and you want me to chase after Sam Lloyd, who probably ran off with some chorus girl and is now grifting his way back to Chicago. That seems a bit odd, you ask me.”
Evie’s eyes welled up. “He didn’t run off. He’s in trouble. I know it.”
Malloy offered his handkerchief. Evie declined it.
“Miss O’Neill,” Malloy said in a softer tone. “Memphis Campbell came to see your uncle last night. Did you know that?”
Evie felt a buzzing in her head. “I… n-no.”
“And Margaret Walker was seen leaving here not too long afterward. The same Margaret Walker who worked with your uncle—and with all of youse. The same Margaret Walker who once did jail time for sedition during the war.”
“Are you saying you suspect Memphis and Miss Walker of murdering Uncle Will? Why? What possible motive would they have?”
“Money, maybe.”
“Will didn’t have any money! He owed the city a fortune in back taxes.”
“Or maybe your uncle had something on ’em both.”
“Like what?”
“That’s the question I’d like to ask ’em.”
The photographer’s flash went off. Evie was reminded of the first murder she and Will had investigated, the body of Ruta Badowski. How could Will be dead? And where were Memphis and Sister Walker?
“Wait a minute. Detective Malloy, you said someone saw Memphis and Sister Walker here last night?”
“Correct.”
“But nobody comes to the museum. It was headed for the auction block. So who was watching it so closely last night? And why did they think to call you?”
“A concerned citizen happened to see.”
“That’s banana oil!”
One of the other cops whistled. “Temper, temper.”
Malloy pointed a finger at the cops. “Pipe down or you’re outta here.”
The cops quieted quickly. The detective looked down his chin at Evie. He pushed his gum to his back molars with his tongue. “You were friends with Mabel Rose, weren’t you, Miss O’Neill?”
“Yes, but I don’t see what—”
“Mabel Rose was a member of the Secret Six. When we searched Miss Rose’s room after the bombing, we found evidence that she’d been talking to someone we believe might be an accomplice, a Diviner named Maria Provenza.”
“Maria wasn’t a Diviner—it was her sister, Anna! And those creepy Shadow Men took Anna, too!”
Malloy narrowed his eyes. “And you know this how?”
She’d walked right into his trap like a Dumb Dora.
“See, I’ve got my own theory about what happened here. I know your uncle from way back. He was… eccentric. But trusting. Innocent. Maybe he knew something about the bombing. About a link between these anarchists and Diviners. Maybe he was gonna spill it and somebody didn’t like that.”
Detective Malloy had concocted his own fairy tale about Will, Evie could see now. To him, Will was an odd but brilliant ghost chaser in a musty museum who probably had trouble finding matching socks. He was not the man who’d gotten his own nephew killed and unwittingly opened a door for a great evil to come into this world. Will and his friends had been idealistic but reckless, and their recklessness had come at great cost.
“You didn’t know my uncle at all.”
Malloy’s eyes were steely. “Maybe not. I sure didn’t know Mabel Rose. Then again, maybe I don’t know you so well, either, Miss O’Neill. I heard you refused to sign a loyalty pledge at WGI, and that’s why they dismissed you. Maybe I shouldn’t just be looking at Memphis Campbell.” There was no mistaking the threat in Detective Malloy’s words.
“Am I free to go?” Evie challenged.
“Sure. But don’t leave town. None of youse.”
Evie stormed out and down the front steps, for once ignoring the reporters waving their notebooks in the air, clamoring for a quote.
Woody sidled up to her. “Sheba, hey, Sheba! You okay? Aw, gee, Evie. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Listen. I know that must’ve been rough.” He lowered his voice. “Can you tell your old friend Woody what you saw in there? Is it true there was a five-pointed star drawn on the floor like in the Pentacle Murders?”
Evie didn’t know whether to admire the reporter’s moxie or
spit in his face. “There was a message left, Mr. Woodhouse,” she said coolly.
Woody poised his pen above the page. “What’d it say, kid?”
“It said, ‘No matter what happens to me, T. S. Woodhouse will always be a rat!’”
“Was that nice?” Woody yelled after her.
And it was all Evie could do not to give him a very not-nice gesture she’d seen some fellas on the Bowery do.
“Evie! Evie!” Henry waved to her from the corner.
Evie ran and linked arms with her friends, practically dragging them back toward the Bennington.
“Hey, don’t pull my arm outta the socket. I got plans for it later,” Theta said.
“On the level: Was Will murdered?” Henry asked.
“Yes,” Evie said. “And Malloy thinks Memphis and Sister Walker did it.”
“Bushwa!” Theta said. Her hands tingled with heat.
“Pos-i-tutely.” Evie felt as if she were floating in her body, until a boy bumped headlong into her. “Ow! What’s the big idea?”
“’Scuse me, miss. Message for you,” he said. He shoved a scrap of paper into Evie’s hand and ran off toward Central Park.
Theta peered over Evie’s shoulder. “Say, that’s a numbers slip. Memphis used to keep those in his socks when he was a runner for Papa Charles.”
Something had been scribbled on the other side: I know who killed him. Meet at Madame Seraphina’s shop tonight. Bring everybody. It was signed MW.
MW.
Margaret Walker.
GHOSTS
Evie stood outside the door to Will’s apartment in the Bennington for some time. No one lives here anymore, she realized, and it sliced through her. Will was dead. Jericho was gone. Sam had been taken. The apartment was now a ghost. She rattled the doorknob. Locked. Evie took the stairwell that led up to the Bennington’s roof. When she climbed out onto the tar expanse, she remembered a night in September, when she’d first arrived in the city, excited and hopeful, before the murders, the ghosts, the Shadow Men, and the terrible revelations about what her uncle Will, Sister Walker, and Jake Marlowe had done during Project Buffalo. Before she’d seen firsthand what the King of Crows could do. That night in October—it seemed ages ago now—she and Jericho had gazed out at the skyline, and then they’d kissed for the first time. The memory brought a flush to her skin. She’d liked being with Jericho. Liked his strong arms wrapped around her. He had been Mabel’s crush, and she’d kissed him.