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Henry looked chagrined. “Playing Chopin waltzes in their lobby.”
Evie made a face. “That stodgy place? It’s full of dew-droppers and four-flushers looking for some egg to keep ’em in the good life.”
Henry sighed. “I know. But I’m very sentimental about the money.”
Memphis cleared his throat. “We’re all here and accounted for, Sister.”
“Almost,” Evie said quietly.
Sister Walker crumpled into a chair. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, but she seemed suddenly smaller and more fragile.
“Is it true?” Evie asked. “Did those Shadow Men murder Uncle Will?”
Sister Walker nodded, fighting tears. She coughed several times, the cough boiling up from her like tea in a heating pot. She searched in her pocketbook and found a lozenge to soothe her throat. When her emotions and the cough were under control, she spoke slowly, with great effort. “I was upstairs in the stacks when they came in. Will warned me to stay out of sight. All I could do was listen.”
Evie pictured her uncle struggling against the two Shadow Men as they strangled him to death. “Why didn’t you do something?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you scream or… or… he was your friend. Why didn’t you stop them?”
“So they could kill me, too?” Sister Walker held Evie’s gaze until Evie looked away. “Will made it quite clear that I should stay hidden. He wanted me to survive, to bear witness. So I could bring this.”
From her pocketbook, she removed Will’s dusty library edition of The Federalist Papers and dropped it on the coffee table.
“The professor wanted us to have a history lesson?” Henry said.
“In a manner of speaking. This is what’s left of our files on Project Buffalo,” Sister Walker explained. “These files are proof. Proof of our experiments on a vulnerable population of women. Proof of the powerful men who stood to gain from it: The Founders Club. The United States government. Senators and tycoons and generals. Jake Marlowe.”
“You,” Evie said pointedly.
“If you think they would’ve let a woman like me benefit from this research, you don’t know much. I resisted once and went to prison for it, if you’ll recall,” Sister Walker answered with cool anger.
Ling opened the book. Official-looking papers had been folded and shoved between the pages. Everything was there—names, dates, progress. There were signatures from two different American presidents, as well as a secretary of war. There was mention of the man in the stovepipe hat in dreams and visions and warnings, all of it ignored. Over Ling’s shoulder, Evie read quickly down the page and found what she was looking for: James Xavier O’Neill. Of the U.S. Army. Unit 144. It galled her that she would have to go to Marlowe tomorrow night and try to make peace for the sake of putting an end to the Eye and her brother’s misery. To save the world she’d have to compromise with the enemy. “How do we know that’s what really happened? How do we know you didn’t call those Shadow Men yourself?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it,” Sister Walker said. Her cough returned.
“Let me pour you some tea,” Seraphina said.
Sister Walker put up a hand, then relented. “Thank you.”
Ling held up the pages. There were about a dozen of them. “We need to get these documents to the newspapers.”
Seraphina snorted. “You think your institutions will save you? They’re part of this.”
“She’s right. I don’t think a Big Cheese like Mr. Hearst will publish them. He’s pals with the same people who paid for Project Buffalo. Rich, powerful people protect other rich, powerful people. I should know,” Henry said bitterly.
Memphis nodded at Evie. “Your friend T. S. Woodhouse might print it.”
“That rat at the Daily News?” Theta said, an unlit cigarette bobbing against her lower lip. “Why, he’d publish his grandmother’s diary if he thought he could get enough column inches for it. At the museum, he was offering Evie a shoulder to cry on and trying to get a quote all at the same time.”
“Woody is pos-i-tutely the worst,” Evie agreed. “He’s unscrupulous and murderously ambitious and, if what I read from his wallet once is true, he has some rather unorthodox habits of a sexual nature—”
Henry raised an eyebrow. “How unorthodox?”
“—which I would prefer not to discuss. Until later. With cocktails. But he’s the only one who’s believed us about everything so far. He wants the truth as much as we do. And he never quits.”
“Then I say we take it to the rat,” Memphis said.
“And then what?” Theta said.
“Then they arrest the Shadow Men for Uncle Will’s murder,” Evie said.
