Mabel thought again about Anna’s vision and the warning from the Diviner at the camp. They’d both said that danger was coming. That Mabel should be careful. Arthur would say she shouldn’t believe in Diviner warnings. Evie would put all her faith in them. And there was Mabel, caught in the middle. Mabel’s whole existence was about belief in causes and change. But for once, she didn’t know what to believe.
The coffee shop’s windows blazed into the night. Arthur sat inside at a table. Mabel stopped to check her breath and fix her hair. In the glass, she thought she saw the reflection of the burly man. She whirled around, searching the shadows across the street, but it was just an ordinary man on his way to wherever he was going, and so she went inside.
Evie knocked at Henry and Theta’s door.
“To what do I owe this great honor?” Sam asked, arms folded.
“Oh, clam up, will you? I’m worried about Mabel.”
Sam welcomed Evie inside, and she plopped herself down on Theta and Henry’s one decent chair.
“Mabel? Mabel’s probably the one person you don’t need to worry about,” Sam said, bringing over two Hires root beers and taking a seat in the smaller, rickety chair. “She’s got her head on straight. Why, I’ll bet she’s downstairs right now making up a box for the poor.”
“No, she’s not, either. She’s out with a boy.”
“Well, bully for her!”
“I’m not so sure. This boy might be trouble.”
Sam smirked. “You want me to go steal his wallet, tell him he can’t have it back until he promises to be a prince to Mabel?”
Evie managed a brief smile. “No. At least, not yet.”
“Aww, listen, Sheba. Mabel’s a good egg. She wouldn’t go for any funny business.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Sam took a swig of his root beer. “But speaking of funny—something funny happened to me today.”
Evie scrounged in her purse for her compact and checked her complexion in its small round mirror. “Funny haha or funny strange?”
“I had the feeling I was being followed.”
“By whom? Adoring packs of schoolgirls?” When Sam didn’t answer, she asked, “Was it adoring packs of schoolgirls?”
“You finished?”
“Since I didn’t get a laugh, I suppose I am,” Evie said, and powdered her nose.
Sam took another swig of his root beer and wiped his hand across his mouth. “I didn’t see anybody when I turned around. I just had this… hunch. That weird feeling in my gut.”
“Who would want to follow you?”
Sam quirked an eyebrow. “You want me to make a list?”
Evie closed her compact with a snap. “No, thanks. I hate to see you have to work so hard. I know what a toll thinking takes on you.”
Sam shot her an annoyed look. “Okay. Then how about this: Maybe the people who have my mother. Maybe those creepy Shadow Men.”
Now Evie was worried about both Mabel and Sam. “Funny you should mention our elusive friends the Shadow Men,” Evie said, and she told Sam about the encounter she and Mabel had just had with Maria Provenza’s bigoted landlord.
Sam listened with a grave expression. “Something sure stinks, all right.”
“Sam, I don’t think you should go anywhere by yourself.”
His grin was wolfish. “Yeah? You offering to be my bodyguard, Lamb Chop? Gee, that’ll be kinda awkward on my dates, won’t it?”
Evie rolled her eyes. “Fine. Get pinched by those creepy Shadow Men. See if I care.”
“Don’t worry about me, Baby Vamp. I’m a street rat. Been looking after myself for a long time,” Sam said, finishing his root beer. “Still—it’s all the more reason to know what’s on those cards, see if we can find other Diviners who might hold more pieces of the puzzle. Have you heard anything from the giant up in Valhalla, yet?”
“Frequently. And once he called me long-distance!” Evie said breezily. Two can play at this game, Sam. “But so far, he still hasn’t found your card reader.”
“Well, maybe you can give him a noodge?”
“A what?”
“A noodge. A little prodding,” Sam explained. “I’m getting antsy here.”
“Fine. I’ll send him an urgent letter.” At the door, she wrinkled her nose. “Noodge? Is that a real word?”
“It’s Yiddish. Like…Ikh hob dikh lib.”
Evie narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What does that mean?”
Sam smiled. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you.”
When Evie got back to the Winthrop, she took Arthur’s card from her pocket and placed it on the table, debating. She knew she shouldn’t read it, but Mabel had been so secretive that it had piqued her curiosity.
“I really shouldn’t,” Evie said aloud. And then she was frantically pulling off her gloves and pressing Arthur’s card between her palms.
A memory of Arthur and Mabel’s first meeting flared. He’d rescued her from the police at a rally in Union Square. Their chance meeting was sweet. She saw Mabel’s face as Arthur had then, all curly copper hair and big eyes. Evie could feel the kernel of attraction between them. She should stop, she knew. She would stop. As soon as she knew if her best friend was okay. But then the card took a turn. Evie felt fear and danger and deception. She saw Arthur in a cell. A man in a brown hat sat across from him. Evie caught the flash of a badge. Police? No. Bigger than that. “It’s your choice, Mr. Brown.”
Arthur scoffed. “Choice. Ha.”
“Just do what we say. We’ll take it from there,” the brown-hat man said.
Evie had no idea what that meant. She pressed further, but the card wasn’t giving her anything else, and now she was sorry she’d read it. Objects had a voice, and this one was screaming at her. Should she confess to Mabel what she’d done? Mabel would probably never speak to her again. Should she say something to Mabel’s parents? Only a snitch would do that, and Evie was no snitch. Besides, Mabel’s mother hated Evie.
Evie did know one thing for certain: Arthur Brown was in some sort of trouble. Bad trouble.
“Oh, Mabesie. What have you gotten yourself into?” she whispered.
That night, the Diviners atomized a family at an abandoned house in Queens.
The neighbors had called it in—disturbances, rattling, pets gone missing. The old house’s dining room still had paper on the walls, a delicate lily-of-the-valley pattern that must have been pretty once, before the dirt and decay set in. The ghostly family—a husband, his wife, and pinafored twin girls who couldn’t have been more than seven—sat at the table as if they were merely waiting for their supper. Sam and Memphis had barraged them with questions, but the man and his wife only seemed confused and a little afraid.
“We don’t know,” the woman said, her voice sounding as if it were coming through a tin can. “We don’t know why we’re here. It was a carriage accident, you see. A carriage accident.”
Memphis could see the line across the husband’s abdomen where he’d been crushed. Here and then gone.
“They’re lying,” Evie said to the others. “They have to know something! It’s a trick.”
“What if they’re not lying?” Ling asked. “Henry?”
“Gee. I don’t know,” Henry said, glancing from face to face.
“It was a carriage accident,” the ghost wife insisted. “I saw the horses sliding sideways. Then we tumbled down the hillside. Gone, all gone in the blink of an eye.”
“We should do it quick, before they turn,” Sam said.