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“What? Ah, horsefeathers!”
Woody handed his latest column to the secretary and grabbed his hat. “Sue? Could you be a dear and bring that to the copy boys for the late edition? Thanks.”
“Sure, Woody. Where ya headed so fast?”
“Confession.”
It had taken all of Woody’s gambling pot to get in to see Sister Walker. He’d had to bribe one of the cops he knew was on the take. And he’d had to borrow his cousin Michael’s priestly raiment with a promise he’d come back later to confess his sins and say his Hail Marys.
Now, with the clerical collar pinching his neck, Woody sat across a table from Margaret Walker. He was allowed only fifteen minutes. He had to make it good.
“I know about Project Buffalo,” Woody whispered. “I saw the file. A little bird told me. That’s usually a figure of speech, but in this case, it’s not.”
“I know,” Sister Walker said.
“Why aren’t you telling them the truth, Miss Walker?”
She looked at Woody with a mixture of contempt and irritation. “Who listens to women?”
“I believe Memphis Campbell has been sending me stories. I’ve been printing them in the paper.”
Sister Walker allowed a small smile at this. It was short-lived. “We have to stop Jake Marlowe from using the Eye.”
“The Eye?” Woody said, jotting it down in the notebook he’d stashed inside his priestly frock. “Is that the machine Jake Marlowe was building during the war? The one that could supposedly break into another dimension?”
“He did build it,” Sister Walker said. She leaned forward and lowered her voice to almost a whisper, telling Woody quickly about the Eye, what it had done, what it was still doing.
Woody’s hands shook as he took his notes.
“I need you to get the proof, Mr. Woodhouse. Before it’s too late. The Shadow Men—”
“Shadow Men?”
“Rogue government agents. They work outside the law. Wherever there’s a coup to protect American interests, you can be sure the Shadow Men were part of it. And they are very invested in this machine of Marlowe’s. In eugenics and in Diviners and in the King of Crows.”
Woody felt dizzy trying to keep up.
“They ransacked my apartment. They stole my files. I’m sure they’ve destroyed them by now. I saw the ghost of Will Fitzgerald. He warned me not to go in. I should have listened.”
“His… ghost?” Woody felt a chill, remembering his own encounter with Will’s ghost.
“Never mind that. We have to keep Evie and Memphis and the rest of the Diviners safe. This witch hunt is a ruse. They need the Diviners for malevolent purposes.” She leaned close. “For Jake Marlowe.”
“Marlowe? But he hates Diviners,” Woody said, playing devil’s advocate one more time. No reporter could afford to look too gullible.
“He helped make Diviners. We all did.”
“Jake Marlowe? Surely not.”
Sister Walker scoffed. “Like I said, who listens to women?”
“I believe you, Miss Walker,” Woody said. Jake Marlowe was the most famous anti-Diviner in the nation. If it turned out that he’d not only made his own stock of Diviners but had been killing them off, well, that was front-page news. Hell, that was career-making news. “What can I do?”
“Investigate Project Buffalo and the tie to Jake Marlowe and the Founders Club. You’ve got to expose the truth before Marlowe can find our Diviners. Before he can use their power to open the portal between worlds permanently. Before there’s no hope left.”
Again, Woody felt dizzy. He didn’t understand half of what Miss Walker was saying to him. Woody’s hero, the reporter H. L. Mencken, had made his name in Dayton, Tennessee, reporting on the Scopes Trial—the Trial of the Century. America, with its stated separation of church and state, had been torn asunder over the teaching of evolution and the larger questions it asked: Was humankind descended from apes? Was God a collective delusion? And what was happening to America? The Trial of the Century, though, was really about the soul of the country. The divide between young and old, traditional and modern, past and future. For a nation that believed itself ordained by God, this was a reckoning. For what else might they have to question about themselves, then? What might they have to question about false inheritances? What Margaret Walker was whispering to him now made that story seem nearly insignificant.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Their time was nearly up.
