“Tick-tock. Party? Cake?” Evie reminded her and dropped into a chair in the lobby to wait. She pushed the heavy velvet drape aside and peered out the front windows. Still no sign of T. S. Woodhouse, the good-for-nothing. Before they’d left Gimbels, Evie had slipped into a phone booth and tipped him off that “Miss Evie O’Neill had been seen escorting her best friend to the Bennington Apartments for the first time since she’d left in November, in case interested parties wanted a story for the papers.” It might’ve been a paltry sum Evie paid Woody to keep her name in the news, but it was still hard-earned money, and he’d better not be spending it in a speakeasy instead of making both of them more famous.
Someone was pushing through the revolving door. Finally, Evie thought. She jumped up and posed herself beneath a gilded sconce, turning her best side toward the entrance in case Woodhouse had been clever enough to bring along a photographer. The door swung all the way around. It wasn’t Woodhouse who swept into the lobby, but Jericho. He stood for a moment, unwinding his scarf, not seeing her. Evie’s stomach gave a carnival-ride flip as the feelings she’d worked to forget came bubbling up. She remembered that morning in the hotel room up in Brethren after Jericho had been shot, the way they’d been with each other, so open, so honest. Evie had never felt so naked with anyone, not even Mabel, as if she could say anything and be understood. It was heady. And dangerous. A girl needed armor to get by in the world, and Jericho had a way of dismantling hers so easily.
Jericho’s eyes widened, then his mouth settled into the loveliest smile. “Evie!” he called, walking straight toward her, and her resolve to leave him alone began to erode.
“Hello, Jericho,” Evie said softly, and they stood uncertainly in the foyer. People passed by, but Evie was barely aware of them. She’d forgotten the specific handsomeness of Jericho—the severe cheekbones, the sharp blue of his eyes. A long strand of blond hair had been shaken loose, falling across one cheek. He tried to tuck it back, but it fell again, and all Evie wanted to do was cup her hands at the base of his neck. It would be so easy to touch him.
“How are you—” Evie said at the same moment Jericho started to speak. They laughed nervously.
“You first,” Evie said.
“I’ve been listening to your radio show. It’s very good. You’re a natural.”
“Gee. Thanks,” Evie said, blushing at the compliment.
An awkward silence descended. Jericho cleared his throat and gestured in the direction of the dining room. “Have you eaten? We could have tea in the dining room. For old times’ sake.”
Evie glanced toward the elevator. “Oh. I’m actually on my way out. I’m just waiting for Mabel.”
Jericho stepped a little closer. He smelled clean and woodsy, as he had that morning on the roof when they’d kissed. “I’ve missed you,” he said in his deep, quiet way.
Evie’s breath caught in her chest, a painful ballooning. Her feelings for Jericho had been manageable when he was only a memory. In the whirl of parties and the radio show and, yes, the arms of other, fun-loving boys, thoughts of him could be pushed aside, she’d found. But here in person, it was an entirely different matter. Evie looked up into his eyes. “I…”
“Is that the Sweetheart Seer?”
“Why, it is! It’s her!”
Excited burbling filled the front of the lobby as a few of the Bennington residents recognized Evie. She took in a sharp breath and stepped back.
“I… I have to go. I’m late for a cake—I-I mean a party! A party with a cake,” Evie said, sounding as dizzy as she felt. “Tell Mabel I said good-bye.”
“Wait! Don’t go.”
Jericho reached for her hand, catching the tips of her fingers just as the elevator doors opened and Mabel flounced out in her new yellow dress like one of Isadora Duncan’s dancers.
“Daaaahling! It is I, Mabel BaraSwansonKnightBow… oh.”
Quickly, Evie yanked her hand out of Jericho’s reach and trotted toward her pal. “Mabesie! You are a vision in that dress!”
“A vision of what?” Mabel joked. Her eyes flicked from Evie to Jericho and back.
“Isn’t it funny? Who should I run into but our old friend Jericho,” Evie said, far too brightly. She could feel Jericho’s gaze on her and she didn’t dare meet it.
“Golly. You looked like you were having a very serious conversation. I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Mabel said.
“Just passing the time until you arrived,” Evie chirped, her panic mounting. Any minute now, she feared, he’d say something about what had happened, breaking Mabel’s heart and scarring their years-old friendship.
The revolving door swung around again as Sam pushed through, talking loudly to Jericho across the lobby. “See, the trouble with Nietzsche, besides his being a real killjoy, is that he thinks like a spoiled seven-year-old who doesn’t want to share his sandbox toys—”
“Sam! Sam, over here!” Evie blurted.
A smirking Sam sauntered over with his hands in his pockets. “Well, if it isn’t the Queen of Sheba. Just the girl I’m looking for. Did Freddy tell you the news about our Diviners exhibit? I was thinking that—”
Evie threw her arms around Sam’s neck. “Sam, there you are! You’re late. Oh, but I don’t mind. How handsome you look!”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “Forgive me, Miss. I thought you were Evie O’Neill. Clearly I’ve mistaken you for someone else.”
Evie laughed too hard. “Oh, you! Always the comedian.” She slipped her arm through Sam’s, giving him a small pinch as she did. “Now, I’m late to the Whoopee Club, and I need you to escort me, won’t you? So long, Mabesie, darling! Let’s do this again soon!” Evie nodded at Jericho. “Lovely to see you again, Jericho.”
As she and Sam walked away, Evie chanced a look over her shoulder and saw Jericho watching her, wounded and stoic. It had to be done, even if it felt awful.
Once outside the Bennington, Evie slipped free of Sam’s arm. “On second thought, it’s too chilly for a walk, and it looks like rain. I’d better grab a taxi here.”
Sam smirked. “What? And interrupt our cozy, heartfelt reunion?”
“Yes, I’m all broken up about it, too. But I’m sure I’ll recover.” Evie signaled to the doorman.
“You remember the day we met in Penn Station?”
“When you stole my twenty dollars? How could I forget?”
“You told me then that you weren’t an actress.” Sam tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “I think you pulled my leg on that one.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Sam Lloyd.” Evie looked hopefully toward the street, where the doorman stood with his arm raised.
“I’m sure you do. Don’t worry—I won’t blow your cover. But I need something from you in return.”
“Have you given up petty theft in favor of blackmail now?”
“This isn’t for me. It’s for your uncle. He’s gonna lose the museum, Evie, if we don’t pull a rabbit out of a hat.”
“I don’t see how that’s any of my concern.”
“We need you for the Diviners exhibit. If you mentioned it on that radio show of yours and showed up as the guest of honor, we could guarantee a big opening—maybe enough to pay the tax bill before the collector puts the whole place up on the auction block.”
Evie’s eyes flashed. “Why should I help Will? I risked my life to help solve the Pentacle Murders, and then he tried to ship me back to Ohio. That was the thanks I got. Maybe it’s time to stop pulling rabbits out of hats every month, Sam. Maybe it’s time for Will to give up that old museum.”
“It’s his life’s work, Sheba.”
“Then he’ll find a way to save it, if it means that much to him.”
Sam shook his head. “You’re a real hard-hearted Hannah, Evie O’Neill.”
Evie wished she could tell Sam that if that were true, hers wouldn’t ache quite so much. She’d done the right thing by pushing Jericho away and toward Mabel. Hadn’t she?
A ge
ntleman in a dark suit sidled up to Evie. “Could you sign this for me, Miss O’Neill? I’m a big fan.”
“Of course. To whom shall I make the inscription?” Evie said, taking her elocution-shaped vowels for a walk.
“Just an autograph is fine, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Evie said, pronouncing it “ah tall” and liking the sound of it. She put the last flourish on the inscription. “There you are.”
“I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” the man said, taking it from her, but Evie didn’t hear. It’s about time, Evie thought as she saw T. S. Woodhouse strolling across the street.
“Well, if it isn’t the Sweetheart Seer!” he said around a mouthful of chewing gum. He blew a bubble and it was all Evie could do not to pop it.
“How nice to see you at long last, Mr. Woodhouse,” Evie said.
Woodhouse yawned. “I was rescuing a bunch of nuns from a burning church.”
“You probably set the fire to get the story,” Evie shot back.
T. S. Woodhouse nodded at the cluster of schoolgirls running toward them across the street, whispering excitedly to one another. “Gee, I wonder who let the cat out of the bag that you were here at the Bennington?” Woodhouse winked.
The bum had delivered after all.
“Miss O’Neill?” one of the girls said. “I adore your show!”
“That’s awfully nice of you to say,” Evie said in her radio-star voice, and the girls fell into excited squealing. Evie loved being recognized. Every time it happened, she wished she could snap a photograph and send it back to Harold Brodie, Norma Wallingford, and all those provincial Ohio Blue Noses who’d misjudged her. She’d write along the bottom of it, Having a swell time. Glad you’re not here.
Sam put his arm around Evie as she signed an autograph. “Doesn’t she have beautiful penmanship?”
T. S. Woodhouse smirked. “Say, you two look cozy there. Anything the Daily News readers should know about? There were those rumors a few months ago that the two of you were an item.”
“No. We are not,” Evie said firmly.
“Now, that’s a fine way to talk to your fiancé, Lamb Chop!”
“Fiancé?” Woodhouse raised an eyebrow.
At this, the girls squealed anew. More people had shown up. A small crowd always drew a larger one. That was the math of fame.
“He’s kidding on the square,” Evie said.
Sam gave her his best lovelorn look. “Why, I’ve been crazy about this kid since the day I first saw her in Penn Station.”
“Sam—” Evie warned through a tight smile.
“But who wouldn’t be? Just look at that face!” He pinched Evie’s cheek. She stepped down hard on his foot.
“Gee, that’s awfully romantic,” one of the girls said with a sigh. A few in the crowd applauded.
“The Sweetheart Seer’s got a sweetheart?” a man joked.
“No, he’s not—”
“Now, honey blossom. Let’s not hide our love. Not anymore.”
“I’d like to hide my fist inside your gut,” Evie whispered low near his ear.
“You trying to keep the lid on this romance, Miss O’Neill? More important, you holding out on me?” Woodhouse pressed, trying to sniff out a scoop.
“Miss! Your taxi!” The doorman held the taxi door open for Evie.
The first thin, spitting drops of rain hit the sidewalk. Sam practically pushed Evie into the backseat of the waiting automobile. “You run along, sweetheart! Can’t have my little radio star catching a cold.”
Evie rolled down the back window a smidge. “They’ll be dragging the river for your body tomorrow, Sam Lloyd,” she hissed just before the taxi lurched down the street.
“Did she just say they’d drag the river for your body?” T. S. Woodhouse asked, his pencil poised above his open notebook.
Sam sighed like a man deeply in love. “She did, the little bearcat. It’s the only defense that poor, helpless girl’s got against the animal pull of our love. Uh, you can quote me on that.”
“Animal… pull… of our… love…” Woodhouse was still scribbling as the skies opened suddenly, unleashing a gully washer.
Down the street, the slim man in the dark suit kept his head down and slipped through the anonymous New York horde as if he had no shadow, angling himself at last into the passenger seat of the unremarkable sedan. He handed the autograph to the driver. “There you are. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
The driver glanced at Evie’s signature before tucking it into his breast pocket. “Fitzgerald’s niece, huh? Interesting.”
“The world is an interesting and dangerous place, Mr. Jefferson. Ghosts and Diviners. People claiming to see a man in a tall hat. Threats from within and without. Security is the cornerstone of our freedom. And we’re entrusted with ensuring that security.”
“From sea to shining sea, Mr. Adams.” The driver started the car. “Is she the real McCoy?”
“Difficult to say,” the passenger said, opening a bag of pistachios. “I suppose we’ll have to arrange a small test.”
Henry sat in his chair waiting for the clock to strike three and thought about the first time he’d laid eyes on Louis Rene Bernard.
It was May 1924. Henry was fifteen and home from his boarding school in New Hampshire. He’d suffered a bout of measles that had frightened everyone, and so his parents had allowed him to spend the summer at home to regain his strength. Henry’s father had business that kept him in Atlanta for weeks at a time. His fragile mother spent her days in the family cemetery, offering private prayers to stone saints with painted faces made porous by the relentless New Orleans humidity. For the first time in his life, Henry was free to do as he wished.
He decided to take a day trip on one of the excursion riverboats that churned up and down the muddy Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Paul. Most people came to dance. Henry came to listen. Some of the best bands in New Orleans honed their chops on board the boats; it was a floating master class in Dixieland jazz.
The band aboard the SS Elysian was terrific—nearly as good as Fate Marable’s. The sweet swoop of a clarinet rose and fell against the suggestive allure of a trumpet while sparkly-eyed passengers bounced shoulder to shoulder on the boat’s enormous dance floor under ceiling fans that did little to battle the Delta heat or the mosquitoes. But it was the fiddle player who captured Henry’s attention. He’d never seen a boy so beautiful in his life: He had thick, nearly black hair swept back from a face marked by strong brows, dark brown eyes, and a square jaw. When he smiled, his eyes crinkled into crescents; his eyeteeth were slightly longer than his front teeth, and crooked. And he had a name like a stride piano roll—Louis Rene Bernard. By the end of the third song, Henry was utterly smitten.
Louis had apparently noticed Henry, too. When the Elysian docked in New Orleans for the evening, Louis ran after Henry as he disembarked.
“’Scuse me. I believe you may’ve lost your hat?” Louis said, pointing to the straw boater perched atop his head.
“I’m afraid that isn’t mine,” Henry said.
“Well, it surely can’t be mine. Looks terrible on me.”
“Oh, no! I can’t agree. It’s very…” Too late, Henry realized that Louis was right; the hat was far too small on him. He searched for a word to save the moment. “Boaty.”
Louis laughed, and Henry thought that laugh might be the best sound he’d ever heard, better even than the jazz.
“You like beignets?” Louis asked shyly.
“Who doesn’t like beignets?”
They went to Cafe Du Monde, where they chased the sugared, fried dough of the beignets with cups of strong chicory coffee. Afterward, they strolled along the riverbank, listening to the gulls and the call-and-response of distant ships. They stood beside each other for some time, waiting until the others had drifted off and they were alone, and then, after several exchanges of sheepish glances, Louis leaned over and kissed Henry softly on the lips. It w
asn’t Henry’s first kiss; that honor had gone to Sinclair Maddington, a school chum back at Phillips Exeter. Their kissing had been awkward and fumbling and a little desperate. It was followed by weeks of mutual avoidance forged by shared shame. There was no shame in Louis’s kiss, though; just a sweetness that made Henry’s stomach fluttery and his head as buzzy as champagne. He never wanted to stop.
Louis placed the boater on Henry’s head. “Suits you better.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. That, my friend, is gon’ be your lucky hat.”
After that, Henry was never without it.
“What is that thing on your head?” Flossie, the cook, asked as Henry swept through the kitchen on his way out, the boater cocked at a rakish angle.
“My lucky hat,” Henry said.
She shook her head as she floured the chicken. “If you say so.”
That summer was the summer of Henry-and-Louis. Henry learned that Louis was seventeen and as much a part of the river as the fish and the moss-slicked rocks. Before he’d died, too young, Louis’s Cajun father had given him a love of music and the gift of a fiddle. His mother had given him an appreciation for self-reliance by leaving him first with distant relatives and then, finally, when he was barely seven, at a Catholic orphanage in New Orleans. Louis had run away when he was twelve, preferring life on the streets, the fishing camps, and the riverboats. A case of tonsillitis had given him a raspy voice that made everything he said, from “Fish are biting” to “Dit mon la verite,” sound like a flirtation. He lost money at Bourré and played the sweetest fiddle in the French Quarter. He never stayed in any one place for long, but for now, he was bunking in a hideously hot attic garret above a grocery store on Dauphine. He was crazy about his hound dog, Gaspard, whom he had found abandoned by the river. “Just like me,” Louis said, scratching the slobbery pup’s fuzzy ears. They took Gaspard with them everywhere. No one in the Quarter seemed to mind, and often there was a bowl of scraps set out for him.
Henry confessed to Louis something he hadn’t told anyone else: Ever since he’d been sick, he’d developed a curious habit of lucid dreaming. One night while sick with the measles, he woke gasping for air as if he’d nearly drowned, a terrifying sensation. When he settled, he realized that he hadn’t woken. Instead, he was fully conscious inside the dream.