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Will blew out a thick cloud of smoke. “Could’ve been a lucky guess. Or he could’ve seen the card beforehand and not told.”
“I suppose so. Except…”
“Except?”
“When he guessed it, one of the other soldiers said, ‘Right again.’ That suggests James had done it before. Doesn’t it?”
“Evie, where are you leading with this?”
Evie sat forward. “Do you think it’s possible that James had special powers, too? I was so young when he died, I can’t remember him doing anything, well, Diviners-like. Do you?”
“Mostly, I remember that he loved baseball, especially the Chicago White Sox. I don’t think that makes him exceptional. I think that made him an American kid,” Will said, tapping ash into an overflowing brass tray.
Evie liked hearing stories about her brother. Why had they never talked about James before? “What else?”
Will pulled on his cigarette again, smiling at some private memory. “He once stole a pie your neighbor had baked from off her kitchen windowsill, where she’d set it to cool. He took it into the woods and ate the entire thing with his hands.”
“His hands?”
“Indeed. And then he vomited all night. Your mother told him it served him right.”
“She would.” Evie laughed. “I can’t believe he didn’t share any with me.”
“You were only two or three, if memory serves.”
The record spun out. It wasn’t jazz, but it was pretty. She wondered what James would think of the Hotsy Totsy, how fun it would be to take him there. How she wished he could’ve seen the girl she’d grown up to be. Would he be proud of her? Disappointed?
“I dream about him all the time,” Evie said, her smile fading.
“I understand.”
Almost automatically, it seemed to Evie, Will looked over at the framed photograph of his dead fiancée that he kept on his desk. Evie had caught glimpses of Rotke when reading over Sam’s mother’s mementos, so she’d picked up bits here and there—Rotke seemed warm and happy. “What was she like?”
“She was clever,” Will said after a long pause. “So very smart. And a Diviner.”
“She was?”
“Her powers weren’t as strong as all of yours. But she could read people. She could read me. And I suppose I needed reading. I didn’t even understand myself. Not as well as Rotke did.”
“You never really said. How did she die?”
Will drew slowly on his cigarette, letting his answer out with the smoke. “It was an accident. In the lab. There was nothing that could be done.”
Evie wanted to know more, but she also didn’t want to pry into her uncle’s private pain. “About Bob Bateman’s comb,” she said, bringing the conversation around again. “I’ve been thinking: What if James is trying to send me a message from beyond?”
“Oh, Evie…” Will started.
“But what if he is? I dream of soldiers all the time—”
“That doesn’t mean anything—”
“The same dream. Over and over—”
“Evangeline. Don’t do this to yourself—”
“They’re in a forest. And James is trying to tell me something important. He’s trying to warn me and—”
“James is dead, Evangeline!” Will thundered, bringing his fist down on the desk, rattling his papers. “He is dead! And the dead. Must. Rest. Let him go and move on.”
