What was good?
She thought she’d known once, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Arthur was waiting for her answer.
“And no one will get hurt? You promise?” Mabel said.
Arthur put one hand on his heart. “I promise.”
With a great fluttering of wings, the pigeon pushed away from the windowsill and disappeared. “Okay,” Mabel said.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” Mabel said. “I’m in. All the way.”
When the Diviners weren’t testing their abilities, they were reading through Will’s notes from his time with the Department of Paranormal and searching through the library’s thousands of books for any hint of Liberty Anne Rathbone’s unholy correspondence. So far, they’d found nothing. But Memphis enjoyed squirreling away on the second-floor gallery in a patch of sunlight behind bookcases brimming with dusty volumes whose musty smell and crackling pages were a comfort. He wondered if someday someone like him or Isaiah would be sitting in a library reading a Memphis Campbell book.
From Jericho, he’d gotten Cornelius Rathbone’s diary. Memphis turned the yellowed pages with care, hunting for clues to Liberty Anne’s final prophecy. There were riveting revelations—future steam engines and automobiles and assassinations seen from well before they occurred. But to Memphis, nothing was more compelling than young Cornelius’s confessions of his dreams and doubts. People didn’t lie in their diaries. They wrote their true hearts there:
Today is the darkest day of my life. Liberty Anne has left us. Pastor Poole tries to comfort Mother, but she is inconsolable. The light has gone from our family. We will never be the same. Godspeed, dear sister.
An ache pressed against Memphis’s throat. He remembered how unreal the days after his mother’s death had seemed. The procession of neighbors bringing food to the house, patting his back as they cried into handkerchiefs while Memphis appeared numb; there had been a great hole at the center of him waiting to suck him down with pain and grief, and he fought to keep it at bay. Even the sunlight had felt wrong somehow, as if it were trying to shine through a gauze bandage. Sometime during the long visiting hours after the funeral, Memphis had stolen away into his parents’ bedroom. He’d stretched out across the narrow indentation his mother’s body had left in the mattress where she had lain those last weeks, hollowed by the cancer, her cloudy gaze fixed to a spot on the ceiling, as if she were searching for something no one else could see, some link to the next world—a god the mourners crying in the other room believed in so fervently. A god Memphis felt had betrayed and abandoned him.
It wasn’t until his mother was gone that Memphis realized just how much she had been the glue holding them all together. Without her, they were their own familial diaspora, flung apart and into a new land where grief had arrived first and tilled the soil with sorrow. The painful memory of that loss still had a fierce grip. It would drag him under now if he lingered too long with it. Memphis put his own thoughts aside. The diary’s pages were disordered, and he was trying to piece together a history out of time.
Father has forbidden us to allow the slate to Liberty Anne during her fits. I argued that the messages she received from beyond could come from the Almighty himself, for haven’t angels with trumpets appeared to simple shepherds?
“What she draws is unholy. I will suffer no more of it,” Father told us, and he broke the slate into pieces.
Fits and drawings made Memphis think of Isaiah. He read on, growing more excited.
I dare not tell Father about the events of last night.
I had been up late reading by lantern on the porch. Father had traveled to town to deliver the widow Jenkins of a new son. Mother slept deeply, having taken a tincture of laudanum for a painful tooth, though I suspect it was more for the deep ache in her heart. The night was sharp of the sort that turns your thoughts into friendly companions. Looking at the sky stretching out across the tall prairie grass, the stars flung into constellations above me, I felt at one with nature and myself. When suddenly, from inside our cabin, I heard a stirring.
Inside, I found Liberty Anne up from her sickbed and crouched upon the braided rug with Mother’s stationery and pen and ink. She drew as if possessed and had, by my count, finished four drawings, each more terrifying than the one before. These were things far beyond my ken, dark birds filling the skies, strange explosions, clouds torn apart, and men flying through the air like broken angels. Around the edges, fearsome specters haunted the land, and always, there is the man in the hat, watching it all. I could only surmise that these events were yet to be and, should that be true, may God help us all. I fear if Father should find these, he will destroy them and commit Liberty Anne to a sanitarium. For this reason, I have hidden her unholy visions within the pages of my Bible, where they will not be seen—
Memphis sat straight up.
Unholy visions. Unholy. What if Liberty Anne’s lost prophecy wasn’t a letter or diary entry? What if they had been looking for the wrong thing all along?
“Hey, Sam, Jericho. Take a look at this,” Memphis said, bounding down the spiral staircase to the library’s ground floor. He showed them the passage and put forth his theory.
“So they’re drawings?” Sam said.
“It makes sense to me. Just like Liberty Anne, Isaiah’s been drawing his visions. During the sleeping sickness, he had a premonition about Ling and Henry down in the subway with all those wraiths. He drew it in my book and I got sore at him for it,” Memphis said. He felt guilty about that now. “Cornelius says he hid them in his Bible. We need to find that Bible.”
Sam looked at the two full floors of bookcases. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“At least we know what to look for now,” Memphis offered.
“Spooky spirit sketches,” Sam grumbled.
“Nice alliteration,” Memphis said.
“Nice what?”
“Alliteration. It’s when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase,” Memphis explained.
“Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty.”
“Ignore him, Memphis,” Jericho said with a roll of his eyes. “We all do. Come on. We might as well get started.”
As the first hour stretched into two and they’d still found no sign of Liberty Anne’s possibly prophetic drawings, Sam groaned and tossed aside another book. “If I have to look through one more of these, I’m throwing myself off that balcony,” he moaned.
“Let me know if you need help,” Jericho said as he calmly restored Sam’s discarded book to its rightful place on the shelves.
Memphis laughed. Those two. They were like squabbling brothers. Their arguments were better than going to the pictures.
“Maybe it’s not even here. Maybe it’s in a collection somewhere. I could always ask Mrs. Andrews for help,” Memphis said, closing another heavy book with a thump of dust.
“Who’s Mrs. Andrews?” Jericho asked.
“She’s my favorite librarian at the One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street library. If she can’t find it, it can’t be found.”
Sam smirked. “You have a favorite librarian?”