“Then they should show up for work and not complain,” Ling said.
Mabel’s voice grew even more heated. “The conditions at his mine are terrible! They’ve been mining uranium twelve, thirteen hours a day, and getting awfully sick from it.”
“Why does Jake Marlowe need so much uranium?” Ling wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” Mabel said. She’d never really stopped to think about it before.
Ling scoffed. “We all have to work hard,” she said, returning to the argument. “I know people in Chinatown who work seventeen hours a day. My parents never take a day off. I feel like a bad daughter being here and not there, helping them. As for your unions, I don’t see them sticking up for Chinese workers.”
Henry managed a strained smile. “I love this play. I can’t wait till it comes to Broadway next month,” he said, trying to smooth things over.
Ling knew Henry was kidding and she knew it was because he hated to see people fight. But it bothered her anyway, the way he slid around anything too uncomfortable. Ling didn’t have that luxury. She was an outsider among outsiders—a half-Chinese, half-Irish, partially paralyzed girl living in Chinatown. She could not escape the looks of pity and discomfort she garnered when she struggled into a room on her crutches. All those eyes on her, then all those eyes looking away out of a fear that they could catch the bad luck of her. It had taught her to be blunt, to lash out first. Better to frighten people a little and keep them at a distance than to suffer the eventual disappointment of them. Better to wound a little than to hurt a lot. Even Ling’s gift made people uncomfortable. The messages she carried back from the ancestor spirits she spoke to during her dream walks weren’t always what the relatives who’d hired her wanted to hear. When that happened, they often took it out on the messenger: Ling. Only in the scientific world, among the beauty of theories and observations, equations and atoms, did Ling feel she truly belonged. And in dreams, where she could do anything, even walk. Even run.
Ling turned her attention to the Metaphysickometer. It was cruder than Marlowe’s sleeker, newer inventions, and it encouraged her to know that everyone, even Jake Marlowe, had to start somewhere.
“What does it do?” she asked, examining its many dials.
“It measures electromagnetic radiation. Both ghosts and Diviners seem to emit much more of it than the rest of the population. In theory, Diviners together can disrupt or create energy fields.” Will flipped a switch on the box’s side and turned the crank a few times until a pleasant hum warmed the machine. The needle tipped up and down like a conductor’s baton. “Quite a bit of it in this room right now.” Will switched it off and the needle dropped like a fainting ingenue. “Mr. Marlowe was quite interested in what could be made from that energy—whole industries might be powered from it.”
“I thought Jake Marlowe hated Diviners,” Theta said. “He’s always running ’em down.”
“How come he does that if he used to be one of you, Sister?” Isaiah said, flipping the switch on the Metaphysickometer on and off until Sister Walker stopped him.
“Yes, what happened? Did one of the Diviners pick out the wrong Christmas present for him?” Evie said.
“Socks,” Sam agreed. “It’s always socks.”
“It’s a long story,” Sister Walker said. “And not important at the moment.”
“That Metaphys—needle thing—is all fine and dandy. But what about weapons? What do you have that gets rid of ghosts? Is there a Jake Marlowe ghost container lying around somewhere?” Evie asked.
“Ghosts were once people,” Will said. “People want things. Even dead people. You have to figure out what that thing is. John Hobbes believed he was the anti-Christ and that he could only be banished by luring his essence into a holy relic and destroying that relic. Wai-Mae could not rest until she could face the trauma of her death, until her bones had been given a proper burial. There isn’t one solution. You have to see them ghost by ghost.”
Theta reached into her pocketbook for a stick of gum. “No offense, Professor, but if I run into a ghost, I’m not asking it to dinner so we can talk things over.”
“Why don’t we begin?” Sister Walker led the group to the rug and the circle of chairs she’d put out.
“Say, how come Memphis and Isaiah call you Sister?” Sam asked, settling into his seat.
“We know her. She was friends with our mama. She lives near us,” Isaiah said.
Sam tried out his most charming smile on Sister Walker. “So can I call you Sister, too?”
“You may call me Miss Walker,” she answered, turning her attention to the Metaphysickometer’s dials.
“Was she ever a nun or a cop?” Sam whispered to Memphis.
“No. But I was a government agent,” Sister Walker said with a hint of a grin.
For the next few days, the Diviners reported to the museum when they could, in varying configurations, while Sister Walker and Will worked with them, pushing the boundaries of what they’d been able to do. There’d been small gains: By keeping a hand on Henry’s arm, Memphis could lessen the duration and intensity of Henry’s post-dream paralysis. If Evie read an object when Sam was near, she was somehow able to reach much deeper into the object’s past. “It’s almost as if your don’t see me routine has the opposite effect on my reading, Sam.”
“I’ll send you a bill,” he joked.
“I’ll deduct twenty clams,” Evie shot back.
But nothing so far had made a truly significant or lasting change in any of the Diviners’ powers. Sister Walker reassured them that this was all a normal part of the process, but it still felt like failure.
“We’ll just try again tomorrow,” Sister Walker said gently each time, but everyone knew that she and Will were concerned, and the Diviners themselves were growing frustrated. Whatever storm Liberty Anne had prophesied was still on the horizon, and they were no closer to knowing what it was or how to stop it.
It wasn’t just that the testing of the Diviners’ skills was going poorly that had everyone on edge. Ghost sightings had increased in the city. Every day, there was new, worrying gossip—disturbances heard in apartment hallways late at night. Rooms that went so cold that condensation formed on every surface. Objects gone missing only to be found later far from where they belonged. A diner cook had come in early one morning to find a towering stack of cans in the middle of the kitchen. All the windows and doors had been locked from the inside. A honeymooning couple at the Plaza Hotel left in the middle of the night, insisting that something shook their bed and whispered terrible things as they tried to sleep.
Ghosts, they all insisted. Ghosts, the people repeated.
The fear caught like a spark in wind and spread across the city. It was laughed at in speakeasies. Discussed down at the fish market and in the stands of Yankee Stadium, where the locals stopped to watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig practice. It was whispered about behind the perfume counters at Macy’s and Wanamaker’s and among the pushcart peddlers of the Lower East Side. Numbers were played for it in Harlem. At Webster Hall, a phantom-themed drag ball was planned. And in the noisy rooms of Tin Pan Alley, songwriters capitalized on the spooky phenomena with danceable ditties—“Goo-Goo-Googly-Eyed Ghosts!” “The Revenant Rag!”—because, after all, a buck was a buck. Switchboard operators’ fingers ached from patching in frightened callers to the police stations. Most reported pale faces spotted in mirrors or wispy movements glimpsed on the other side of fogged windows.