“Ready?” Sam asked.
The others nodded. Sam pushed, and the door opened with a creak. Inside the narrow shell of a room hovered the ghost of a woman with disheveled hair and a dress that might’ve been in fashion forty years earlier. The dress bowed out around the middle, revealing her to be with child. A noose had been cinched at her neck, the ligature burns still bright along her broken skin. The rope hung down her side like a braid. At her feet was the winking image of a turned-over chair. She regarded the Diviners with a detached curiosity. Her eyes were dark. She had not turned. Yet.
“Have you come to help me rest?” she asked in a scratchy voice like a last dying gasp.
“Yes,” Evie managed, swallowing down her fear. “We have. But we must ask you some questions first.”
The ghost did not object. She clasped her hands. “I want to rest, but I am hungry, so hungry all the time, like a sickness, and I cannot find rest. It is the Eye. It won’t let me rest. I feel it burning in the dark of me.”
At the mention of the Eye, a tremor passed through the ghostly woman. Veins of rot climbed up one cheek. She shuddered as if with an acute pain.
“We gotta work fast,” Sam said.
“Where is the Eye?” Memphis asked.
The woman regained her composure. She smiled, ecstatic. “Resting in… in a field of… of gold. It shines like… like a promise. It is open! Oh, I would have its promises, for I am hungry!”
“Look,” Ling whispered to the others. The woman wavered between states: One minute, she was a lost soul, a shimmering, faded photograph of the human she must’ve been once. But the next, she had blurred into one of the terrifying dead, sniffing the air with blind hunger, teeth gnashing, eyes going icy.
Already, the Diviners were coming together, ready to tear her atoms apart. “Whatever you’re gonna ask, ask it now,” Memphis said, positioning himself slightly ahead of Isaiah to protect his brother. “I got a feeling we only have seconds left.”
“Where is Conor Flynn?” Evie demanded.
The woman was disintegrating before their eyes. “Would you not even know my name?”
“Where is Conor Flynn?” Evie repeated.
“He is among the dead. Safe for now in the wings of the caged one.”
“She’s answering in riddles,” Isaiah said.
An insect-like whine had arisen. A fly landed on the woman’s nose. Another crawled across her lips. “Hungry…”
“Wait! What keeps the Eye open?” Ling said. She squeezed Henry’s hand, ready.
But the woman was losing her battle. She bared her newly sharp teeth and answered with the plural voice of the hungry ones: “You do.”
With a bloodcurdling screech, she lunged forward, but the Diviners were ready for her. The room appeared to warp and bend inward. The tension created raised the hair on their arms and pulled hard at their back teeth, but then there was a release, followed by a sudden swoop of euphoria, and in the next second, the ghost was nothing but a few remaining sparkles of light.
It didn’t take long for reports to spring up of other Diviners joining the ghost-hunting fray. One of them, a psychic in Murray Hill, posed in her fern-laden parlor beside a crystal ball while holding up the supposed ectoplasm of a ghost she claimed to have caught “rummaging through my cupboards like a common criminal!”
“Ectoplasm my foot!” Sam groused. “That’s cheesecloth and some wet noodles. Big phony!”
“They’re trying to horn in on our act,” Henry said, folding up the newspaper. “There are ghost-hunting parties taking place. Well, they’re usually too blotto to do much, but it’s the principle.”
It seemed as if overnight, the Diviner business in town had shifted from “Sees all! Knows all!” to “Protects all!”
Racketeering, the mayor cried, and vowed to put any “Diviners, ghost hunters, or other disreputable types taking advantage of gullible New Yorkers” out of business. To make matters worse, Evie hadn’t been able to get Woody to accompany them on a mission ever since the night he’d staked out a supposedly haunted warehouse with them and it turned out to be raccoons in the walls.
“You know how long it took me to live that down in the newsroom, Sheba? Don’t answer—I still haven’t lived it down. Every day, some joker leaves me a little drawing of a ghost raccoon on my desk. My editor put the kibosh on the whole ghost angle. And anyway, I’m busy trying to hunt down leads on this Project Buffalo story whenever I can,” Woody said, lowering his voice.
“You mean when you aren’t gambling,” Evie complained.
Woody’s voice was a shrug. “I can do both.”
A few days later, Evie returned to the Winthrop spattered with mud after they’d chased down three ghosts in a moonlit field behind a filling station in Astoria. The expedition had left Evie exhausted and filthy, but also strangely giddy. There was something about the energy boost from exterminating the ghosts that felt good. Powerful. It made her want more.
As Evie approached the front desk, the night manager gave her a once-over before pasting on a smile. “Good evening, Miss O’Neill.”
“Good evening, Mr. Williams. I’ve been meaning to ask: Is it true that the Winthrop does not rent rooms to Negroes?”
Mr. Williams looked surprised. “Why, yes. That is our policy.”
“It’s a terrible policy. I’d like you to change it.”
“Why, Miss O’Neill, the Winthrop’s policy is only for the comfort of its patrons.”
“Well, gee, I’m a patron, and I’m uncomfortable with your policy,” Evie said.
The night manager was very polite. “I’ll alert Mr. Stevens to your concern, Miss O’Neill.”
“Yes. See that you do.” Evie sniffed and twirled her mud-splattered beaded handbag.
“There are two messages for you, Miss O’Neill.”
Evie smiled as she read through the first one, a letter from Jericho:
Dear Evie,
I hope this letter finds you well. There’s nothing much to report from my letter dated two days ago, except to say that I miss you two days more than I did then.
You really should see the rose garden here. It’s beautiful, like you.
Fondly,
Jericho
Evie smiled and tucked the letter into her brassiere until she could add it to the pile of Jericho letters in her underwear drawer. The second note was addressed Attention: Evangeline O’Neill. There was only one person who called her Evangeline, and Evie was already angry before she read Will’s message.
Please don’t make the same mistakes I did, Evangeline. I waited too long with Cornelius.
Come to me before it’s too late. Will.
Come to me. Like a command. Same old imperious Will. Evie tore up the note and tossed the pieces in the wastebasket.
When Evie arrived for her radio show the next evening, Mr. Phillips took her aside. “Evie. I’m not happy about this ghost business.”