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Everybody laughs. The Devil’s their kinda fella. Idealism is for suckers.
“Ain’t we got fun?”
Out back, Oscar is rooted to the spot as he sees the three ghosts moving across the shadowed lawn of Central Park. One wears a filthy hoop skirt. She has cheeks blistered with smallpox. Another, a gray-haired suffragette, gnaws at the still-wriggling body of a squirrel. The third is a young woman, maybe only weeks dead. They are from different eras, different graves, but they have found one another, along with a common enemy—the living. The freshest one trails off into the parking lot, drawn by the lights. She slips into the backseat of a long, sleek Chrysler. “Hungry,” she says and waits. The remaining ghosts take notice of Oscar. They smile, as ladies do, and the bright Casino glow catches the razor-sharp edges of their teeth.
“At the Devil’s Ball! At the Devil’s Ball!”
The bandleader sings. Horns wail. Feet pound the floors with dancing.
No one hears Oscar.
The Diviners climbed through a back window, letting themselves into the shuttered Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. The beams from their flashlights traveled across what had once been home but now seemed unfamiliar. The glare gave the library’s spiral staircase an otherworldly haze and reflected off the stuffed grizzly bear’s lifeless glass eyes. My uncle was murdered in this room, Evie thought, a shudder passing through her.
“You okay?” Jericho asked.
Evie nodded and stroked the bear’s furry paw. “It’s just… seeing the museum like this, it’s like a body without a soul.”
Will had been the museum’s soul, and now he was gone, and she was learning more and more that life could turn on a dime like that. People you loved could be gone in a breath. So why didn’t knowing that make it any easier to be vulnerable? To tell people that you loved them, that you were hurting, that you were afraid, or that, sometimes, at five in the morning, you were so alone in your skin that you watched the weak light play across the ceiling, willing it toward dawn?
Or perhaps no one else felt that way, and Evie truly was alone.
“See if you can find anything that will help us,” Evie whispered. She didn’t know why she was whispering. There was no one around to hear them. Not anymore. “And if there’s something you want, you should take that, too. It’s all marked for the bulldozer anyhow.”
They spread out, moving through the museum for the last time. Evie kept an eye on Jericho as he gently picked up each object, saying good-bye to the museum and Will in his silent fashion.
“He really cared about you, you know,” Evie said as they made their way across the leaf-and-paper-strewn floor, avoiding the spot by the fireplace where Will’s body had been found. Whoever had murdered Will had gone to great lengths to make it look as if someone had been searching for valuables inside the museum.
“Thank you,” Jericho said, smoothing the crinkled pages of a damaged book and laying it properly on the table. He spied something shiny underneath one of the long library tables and stooped to retrieve it. Will’s silver lighter. How many times had Jericho watched Will flicking the wheel, a nervous tic, as he paced a thinning path into the Persian carpets? Jericho rubbed a thumb across Will’s engraved initials.
“You should take it,” Evie said softly. “He’d want you to have it.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You could start.”
Jericho grinned. He flicked the wheel, which sparked but did not catch. “Did I ever tell you about the first day I saw this place?”
Evie shook her head.
“After Marlowe… did what he did,” Jericho said. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about the machinery inside his broken body just now. “Will brought me here first, before the Bennington. Can you imagine being a kid and walking into this place? It was even more of a mess. There were crates stacked up in the butler’s pantry, and sawdust and packing hay on the floors. But I loved it from the very first minute I saw it. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in history.”
Evie gave a small, fond hmm of a laugh that threatened to become emotional. “You, um… You really do sound like him.”
Jericho inhaled. He wanted the smell of the place in his memories forever. He remembered sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows. How thrilled he was when Will would give him an absentminded order while he was hunched over some ancient text: Jericho, up in the stacks, find me J. M. Reginald’s Taxonomy of Spiritual Sensation, please. And off Jericho would run, pounding around the spiral stairs, racing from bookcase to bookcase until he found it. The excitement when he and Will would pry open a crate containing some new piece of supernatural ephemera: A weather vane that was said to spin whenever spirits were near. A slate that had been used by a Diviner for automatic writing. A silver spoon for the dispensing of herbs to protect against evil. A velvety seventeenth-century broadsheet proclaiming “wonders and portents”—animals born disfigured and comets streaking across skies. Jericho also remembered the sadness that would shade Will’s face toward the end of some afternoons. The witching hour, Jericho had come to call it. How Will would say he needed to be alone to think, and he would go into his study, close the door, and not emerge for hours.
That was why Will paced so much, Jericho had come to realize. Will had thought he could outrun his own grief over both what he had done and what he had allowed to happen during the war. Regrets were like hauntings, Jericho knew, visitations people tried to dispel with busyness or the bottle, with blame heaped on others, or with a relentless urge to reframe and retell their own histories, to make up stories that haunted them less than the truth.
Will had died with all his ghosts intact. And though Jericho did not believe in God, he had seen evidence that there was an afterlife of a sort, a transmutation of energy. He wondered where the newly deceased Will Fitzgerald would fit into a Taxonomy of Spiritual Sensation.
The witching hour. He’d seen that same melancholy descend over Evie at times. It was part of what drew him to her as much as her liveliness—that ragged hem of sadness showing. He fantasi
zed about being the balm for her sadness the way Memphis could heal a wound. As if it were a quest and once Jericho had fixed her pain, he would in turn fix his own. He would finally be strong and useful and worthy of love. He wished that he could talk to Will one last time to ask if he had ever felt that way about Rotke.
Jericho remembered something that now, with Will dead, took on great importance. Seized by emotion, he raced into Will’s study.
“Jericho? Jericho! Why are we off to the races?” Evie called.
Theta poked her head out of the collections room. “What is it?”
