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“Was there anything else you remember about that farm?” Sister Walker pressed.
Suddenly, Isaiah brightened. “The house had a number. Saw it on the mailbox!”
“What was it?” Sister Walker asked.
“One forty-four.”
“Evie!” Will called. Evie stopped on the steps of the museum and turned to him. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you before.”
“You should have.”
“I know. I made a mistake. That formula absolutely saved James’s life. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been playing god.”
Evie tried to imagine what her life would’ve been like if James had died of pneumonia before she was even born. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. “No. No, I’m glad,” she said on a long sigh. “If you hadn’t saved him… I couldn’t imagine not knowing James.” Then: “I suppose that explains Bob Bateman’s comb, then. Maybe James was just like me and he didn’t come into his powers until he was older.”
Will shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Maybe,” he said at last.
BEFORE THE DEVIL BREAKS YOU
The first time Margaret Andrews Walker saw an actual Diviner at work, she was ten years old and helping her mother nurse the sick at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School in Philadelphia. On Sundays after church, Margaret’s mother had her come and read to the patients. An elderly woman named Lavinia Cooper had been brought in, weak and short of breath. In Mrs. Cooper’s hometown, there had been no colored hospital, and the white hospitals wouldn’t admit her. By the time she’d been brought to Frederick Douglass, her chest cold had progressed to pneumonia.
When Lavinia began to recover, word spread along the ward that she could talk to the spirits and deliver prophecy. Already, she’d saved the life of one of the young doctors. On a rainy night, she warned him not to take his usual route home—“I can see that road washed clean away.” Sure enough, a flash flood swept up four people on the very road that doctor would’ve traveled. A day later, Lavinia had clasped the hands of a young nurse and, with her eyes staring straight up to the ceiling, announced that the nurse was pregnant days before it was confirmed. Whispers circulated: Lavinia Cooper had the sight. She was a spirit talker. One of the cunning folk. What the old-timers called a Diviner.
Margaret was not an impressionable child. As far as she was concerned, doctors and nurses couldn’t afford to believe in that sort of superstitious nonsense. She found the Cooper woman highly suspicious and did her best to avoid her.
“You are not here to serve yourself, Margaret Andrews Walker,” her mother had scolded, swatting her across the bottom even though Margaret was already ten. “You are here to serve the sick and the needy. Now, please make yourself useful and go read to Mrs. Cooper.”
Scowling, Margaret had sat in the chair farthest from the woman’s bed, nursing her wounded dignity as she read aloud from Little Women.
“Come close, child,” Mrs. Cooper bade in a voice made scratchy from coughing.
Margaret dragged her chair nearer to the old woman’s bedside.
“Your grandmother’s here. She wants me to tell you something.”
“My grandmother passed on last spring,” Margaret said matter-of-factly.
“Uh-huh, I know. But she’s here with us now, in this very room.”
“My grandmother is dead, Mrs. Cooper.”
“You don’t believe in spirits? Don’t believe in your ancestors, all your past kin?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” Margaret said.
“Mmmm. Well. They surely do believe in you.” Mrs. Cooper looked up at the ceiling, and Margaret had the distinct impression that the old woman was speaking to someone else. “Yes. Yes, all right, then. Your grandmother and me having a chat. She says she got a special name for you. Now. What might that name be?”
Margaret decided to test Mrs. Cooper. “Lil Bit,” she lied.
“Lil Bit? Lil Bit, is it? All right. Lil Bit.”
Margaret’s anger spread at Lavinia Cooper’s satisfied smile. Grandmother Walker had been young Margaret’s favorite person in the whole world, and her passing had nearly broken Margaret’s heart. How dare this woman, this stranger, trespass on that sacred memory!
The old woman managed a feathery laugh between wheezes. “Your gran says you best quit lying ’fore she has to reach out from the grave and give you a slap like she did that time you put your cousin Dee in the attic for tattling. A bat got in there, and Dee screamed so loud it made a vase fall off the end of your gran’s sideboard. The vase had been a wedding present from your granddaddy Moses, and when your gran come in from putting the canning up in the basement, she let Dee out and gave you a proper whupping. Even made you break off your own switch. Your gran never called you no Lil Bit. She called you Sister on account of how you boss everybody ’round, just like you was in charge.”
That night, Sister Walker had lain awake. Only she and her grandmother knew that story. It had been their secret. That moment with Lavinia Cooper had been the start of Sister Walker’s conversion to belief in the supernatural world. She wanted to ask Mrs. Cooper all sorts of questions: What was this power? Where was her grandmother now? How many other Diviners were out there? But when she’d returned to Frederick Douglass two days later, Little Women in hand, the bed had been stripped. Mrs. Cooper was gone. The pneumonia had weakened her heart, and she’d died peacefully in her sleep.
Margaret “Sister” Walker read everything she could find about Diviners. It was an obsession that saw her through medical training at Howard University. It was noted by a professor who, in turn, recommended her for a job at the newly created U.S. Department of Paranormal, where she would meet the only other person who shared her devotion: Will Fitzgerald. They made a formidable team: Will was scholarly but impulsive, too trusting and given to romantic ideals; Margaret, whose life hadn’t allowed her the privilege of romantic ideals as a birthright, was forthright and wary, organized and patient.
