AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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-valle
y 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.
