Who? Isaiah thought, and he knew the girl heard his thoughts.
“The King of Crows. He loves us and our gifts. And if we help him, he will give us everything we want.”
“What kind of help?”
“There’s another seer. A boy who draws. We need him. He won’t talk to us, though. But he’d talk to you.”
The girl attempted a smile, and that frightened Isaiah more than anything. Isaiah didn’t know if this was a dream or a vision of the future. He only knew that he didn’t want to be here anymore with this girl and the farmhouse and whatever lurked down the road in that dust.
The girl turned her head toward the ball of dust. She smiled her rotted smile. “Ghosts on the road,” she whispered.
“Isaiah!”
On the edge of the cornfield, Isaiah’s mother shimmered in the blue-black feathered cape he’d seen her wear in dreams before. She didn’t look sick and tired like she had at the end of her life. But she didn’t look entirely human, either.
“Mama?” he said.
“Isaiah. Concentrate. Wake up.”
“I’m too scared, Mama.”
“You can do it.” His mother’s voice rasped as if she’d had a bad cough. “I want you to imagine a door that you can walk right through, and then you’ll wake up.”
Make a door. He could do that. Isaiah pictured the open pocket doors of the library a few feet away. The strange girl was back, though, and she was screeching like a flock of mad birds at his mother. “He will punish you! You will not glory in his future!”
“Hush up!” his mother snapped like the girl was acting up in church.
But behind his mama, the dark moved like a living thing, and Isaiah was afraid for her.
“Go now,” his mother commanded in her strange, squawking voice. “Tell the others: Follow the Eye. Heal the breach. Protect Conor Flynn. Don’t let—”
The girl screeched and the sky was filled with black birds. Her hair flew up around her face. Her eyes were wrong. “We will meet again.”
The darkness swallowed his mama, the girl, the farm, everything.
“Mama!” Isaiah cried.
Isaiah came out of his trance thrashing and gasping. Memphis’s concerned face hovered just above his. “Isaiah? Isaiah!”
“Memphis!”
Memphis let out his breath in a big whoosh. “You okay, Ice Man?”
Isaiah nodded, coming back to himself, and Memphis pulled him in tight for a long minute.
Will checked his watch. “He was under for three minutes.”
“What did you see, Isaiah?” Sister Walker asked.
“It was a place, a farm, I think. The farm wasn’t doing so well. The crops had turned bad. And …” Isaiah licked his lips, trying to work some moisture back into them. He could still taste the dust in his mouth. “I think I saw another Diviner. But she wasn’t very nice. She was kinda scary.”
“Do you know her name?” Will asked.
“Huh-uh.” Isaiah hoped he hadn’t failed the test. “But when I asked where she was, she told me Bountiful, Nebraska.”
At Evie’s gasp, Memphis asked, “What is it?”
“Bountiful, Nebraska, was one of the places with a thumbtack stuck into it on that map Sam and I found,” she explained.
Isaiah looked to Memphis. “Mama was there, Memphis.”
Memphis swallowed hard. “She say anything?”
Isaiah nodded. “Told us to follow the Eye and heal the breach. Or else we’d be lost. And she said we should protect Conor Flynn.”
“Who or what is Conor Flynn?” Ling asked, but no one knew.
“Was there anything else you remember about that farm?” Sister Walker pressed.
Suddenly, Isaiah brightened. “The house had a number. Saw it on the mailbox!”
“What was it?” Sister Walker asked.
“One forty-four.”
“Evie!” Will called. Evie stopped on the steps of the museum and turned to him. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you before.”
“You should have.”
“I know. I made a mistake. That formula absolutely saved James’s life. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been playing god.”
Evie tried to imagine what her life would’ve been like if James had died of pneumonia before she was even born. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. “No. No, I’m glad,” she said on a long sigh. “If you hadn’t saved him … I couldn’t imagine not knowing James.” Then: “I suppose that explains Bob Bateman’s comb, then. Maybe James was just like me and he didn’t come into his powers until he was older.”
Will shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Maybe,” he said at last.
The first time Margaret Andrews Walker saw an actual Diviner at work, she was ten years old and helping her mother nurse the sick at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School in Philadelphia. On Sundays after church, Margaret’s mother had her come and read to the patients. An elderly woman named Lavinia Cooper had been brought in, weak and short of breath. In Mrs. Cooper’s hometown, there had been no colored hospital, and the white hospitals wouldn’t admit her. By the time she’d been brought to Frederick Douglass, her chest cold had progressed to pneumonia.
When Lavinia began to recover, word spread along the ward that she could talk to the spirits and deliver prophecy. Already, she’d saved the life of one of the young doctors. On a rainy night, she warned him not to take his usual route home—“I can see that road washed clean away.” Sure enough, a flash flood swept up four people on the very road that doctor would’ve traveled. A day later, Lavinia had clasped the hands of a young nurse and, with her eyes staring straight up to the ceiling, announced that the nurse was pregnant days before it was confirmed. Whispers circulated: Lavinia Cooper had the sight. She was a spirit talker. One of the cunning folk. What the old-timers called a Diviner.
Margaret was not an impressionable child. As far as she was concerned, doctors and nurses couldn’t afford to believe in that sort of superstitious nonsense. She found the Cooper woman highly suspicious and did her best to avoid her.
“You are not here to serve yourself, Margaret Andrews Walker,” her mother had scolded, swatting her across the bottom even though Margaret was already ten. “You are here to serve the sick and the needy. Now, please make yourself useful and go read to Mrs. Cooper.”
Scowling, Margaret had sat in the chair farthest from the woman’s bed, nursing her wounded dignity as she read aloud from Little Women.
“Come close, child,” Mrs. Cooper bade in a voice made scratchy from coughing.
Margaret dragged her chair nearer to the old woman’s bedside.
“Your grandmother’s here. She wants me to tell you something.”
“My grandmother passed on last spring,” Margaret said matter-of-factly. “Uh-huh, I know. But she’s here with us now, in this very room.”
“My grandmother is dead, Mrs. Cooper.”
“You don’t believe in spirits? Don’t believe in your ancestors, all your past kin?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” Margaret said.