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past. Except that his blue eyes had gone a milky white, the pupils fixed, and a deep purplish ligature mark encircled his neck above his popped collar. Evie had seen more bodies than she’d cared to in the past several months. But none of them had been Will. Get up, she wanted to say. You’re not dead. Get up. Get up.
Detective Malloy came to stand beside her. “Miss O’Neill, you all right? You feel faint?”
“No,” Evie said, and she wasn’t sure which question she was answering.
“Do you know anybody who might’ve wanted to kill your uncle?”
Just me, Evie thought. “No,” she said.
“I know this must be a shock.”
“Yes,” Evie said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“When was the last time the two of youse talked?”
Evie tried not to glance over at Uncle Will and failed. His eyes. “Oh. Um. A few weeks ago, I think.” They’d fought. He’d left her a note to come to him before it was too late. She’d thrown it away. Foolish. Foolish.
“And what about the rest of your Diviner pals? Your set used to come to the museum pretty often, didn’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“Any of them dislike your uncle?”
The full weight of Malloy’s questions caught up to Evie. She straightened her spine. “If you’ve something to say, Detective, I think you’d better come out and say it plainly.”
Malloy cleared his throat. “Very well. Miss O’Neill, do you know the whereabouts of Memphis Campbell, his brother, Isaiah, or Margaret Walker?”
It took Evie a few seconds to understand his meaning, and then she was furious. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said, with radio star crispness. “I know I’m not a famous detective, like you, Mr. Malloy, but did you try going to their homes?” She was baiting the bull, but she didn’t care.
Malloy squinted at her. “Yeah. We did, matter of fact. Funny thing is, the three of them are suddenly missing. Not a trace of ’em anywhere.”
Now Evie didn’t know what to think. Hadn’t Theta said she’d not heard from Memphis and was worried? What if the Shadow Men had gotten to them, too?
“Maybe somebody took them,” Evie said.
“Took them where?” Malloy asked.
“Well, if you want to investigate another disappearance, Sam Lloyd has gone missing.” Evie squared her shoulders. “I have reason to believe he was kidnapped.”
Malloy’s eyebrows shot up. “Sam Lloyd. Kidnapped. Okay.”
Evie couldn’t miss the snickering of the other officers.
“With all due respect, Miss O’Neill, when Sam Lloyd’s around, it’s usually people’s wallets that go missing.”
“But he was kidnapped!”
“How do you know this?”
“I read his hat. Swell, you can all have a laugh, har-de-har-har,” Evie said to the cops chortling in the corner. “But I saw! I know! He was taken by two men in suits.”
Even Malloy seemed amused. “Men in suits, huh? Haberdashers? Tailors?”
Evie wanted to kick every one of these men. Why couldn’t they take her seriously? “Shadow Men,” she said, trying to hide how small they were making her feel. As if her intuition wasn’t reliable and she was some lunatic.
“Shadow what?” Malloy said.
“That’s just what we call them. They wear gray suits—”
