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“Aw, faith and begorrah, Seamus,” the reporter said, mocking him. “You’re all wet, Woody. Go see your bookie and leave the reporting to the real boys, why don’tcha?”
“Go to hell,” Woody said back. He needed to talk to Margaret Walker and find out what was happening across the country. There was a threat coming, he knew. While everybody was dancing in nightclubs and reading Harriet Henderson’s gossip pages and arguing about evolution and Prohibition and how short women’s skirts had gotten. While people were letting themselves get distracted by the latest John Barrymore picture or Mae West sex scandal and telling themselves that everything was the berries because men like Jake Marlowe were making the stock market soar. Woody was twenty-one and as ambitious as they came. That was true. But even more than making a name for himself like his hero, H. L. Mencken, Woody wanted to report the truth. Because he was afraid of what he was learning. Yes, he was afraid.
Woody gazed up at the looming stone fortress that was the Manhattan jail.
How was he going to get in to see Margaret Walker?
As Woody turned the corner, he saw Roy Stoughton, Theta Knight’s supposed husband, talking to some of Dutch Schultz’s henchmen. Woody pretended to be taking notes, but he was listening.
“What do you mean you lost her?” Roy said. He was angry.
“She disappeared, Boss.”
“Did you put out the word with the Empire?”
“Talked to the Grand Dragon myself. They’re telephoning every klavern and asking them to pass along the word. No matter where she goes, she’ll have our boys looking for her.”
Roy Stoughton was in with the KKK. As the son of Irish immigrants, Woody had no love for those cowards with their white sheets and burning crosses. But the Diviners were in a heap of trouble if the Klan was looking for them, too.
Woody reached into his pocket and took out one of the clippings, reading it once more with dread. “They’re everywhere,” he muttered and hurried back to his office.
THE GHOSTS INSIDE THEM
West Virginia
It was lunchtime, and the breaker boys were headed home from their first long shift at the mines. All morning they’d climbed up the noisy, constantly moving chutes, sorting through the day’s haul to separate useless rock from valuable coal.
They’d just come over the ridge and were taking their favorite shortcut through the holler down toward the company town where they all lived. The walk was steep through the trees. The smoke from the coke ovens cooking down the coal hung along the pipe-cleaner tops of the mountains, erasing the sky. The dark seemed to come earlier here. Some said the mountains were haunted by the ghosts of dead miners. There were moonshiners up there, too, and they kept watch over their stills with rifles.
The four of them had been laughing about something that had happened earlier in the day. One of the younger boys, Giuseppe, had picked up two pieces of rock and stuck them in his cheeks like a squirrel gathering nuts. Well, they’d all fallen out over that one, laughing until the foreman barked at them to get back to work. That shared laugh had broken up the long day, though, and they enjoyed reliving it now on their walk.
“Naw, Jakub. It weren’t like that,” Buster said, trying to catch his breath. “It were more like ’is.” Buster dropped to his haunches and hopped around, scratching under his armpits and mewling.
“Buster, you plumb crazy. That ain’t no squirrel—’at’s a dadgum kitty cat!” Buster’s brother, Junior Lee, said, coughing along with his laugh. He was thirteen, and next month, he’d graduate from working the chutes to going down into the mines proper with his daddy and his uncle Joe.
“Do it more!” Gabor said. He was only ten, and his English was tinged with the soft rhythm of his parents’ native Hungarian.
Jakub hopped around, trying to make his pals laugh again, but Junior Lee had stopped short in the blue-gray woods. He held up a hand. “You hear sump’in’?”
Buster’s ears still rang from the constant agitation of the mine’s machinery. “Like what?”
Junior Lee smiled mischievously. “I’ll bet it’s some o’ the other boys playing a trick on us. Let’s hide here and wait for ’em!”
Delighted, the boys grabbed pebbles and pine cones, stuffing them into their trouser pockets, then picked their hiding places—Junior Lee cloaked by a hemlock tree, Buster and Gabor crouched behind a large rock, and Jakub, the smallest, on his haunches in a th
icket of bushes. They waited with coiled glee. What a good time this would be! Those pranksters sure would be surprised when they got hit with rocks and pine cones. But the other boys were taking their sweet time.
Junior Lee was the first to feel that something wasn’t right. In a matter of seconds, the woods had gotten very cold. “Feels right airish all of a sudden,” he said.
They abandoned their hiding places. The mist that had been side-stepping up the mountain had swooshed into the holler and filled up the gaps between the trees. They knew these woods well, and yet, which way was home?
The sound was back, and this time, it was plain that it wasn’t coming from boys playing tricks. There was a high whine like mad hornets escaping a nest and coming to sting. A deep, low growl echoed off the mountains. The boys hunted some, but this didn’t sound like any animal they’d ever aimed for with their daddy’s guns. Whatever it was, it seemed to be everywhere.
The sky had gone dark as a bucket of coal dust. The trees were nothing but skeletons in the gray wool fog. Buster had heard his daddy talking about the time he’d narrowly avoided being trapped by a cave-in, how seconds before, the canary had started screeching; it had made his whole body go tight as a wire. Buster was tight now. The birds flapped up from the trees in one giant wave. There was something here with them in the mist. The boys felt it deep in their bodies, lighting up the parts of their brains that hadn’t changed for humankind since their cave ancestors had hidden from predators in the dark.
“Mama be expectin’ me,” Buster said feebly. It was easier than saying, I’m afeared of these woods.
The mist had come up so hard and fast they could hardly get their bearings. And that hornet sound. Sweet Lord, but it put the hair on the back of Junior Lee’s neck to standing on end.
