“Mmmm. Well. They surely do believe in you.” Mrs. Cooper looked up at the ceiling, and Margaret had the distinct impression that the old woman was speaking to someone else. “Yes. Yes, all right, then. Your grandmother and me having a chat. She says she got a special name for you. Now. What might that name be?”
Margaret decided to test Mrs. Cooper. “Lil Bit,” she lied.
“Lil Bit? Lil Bit, is it? All right. Lil Bit.”
Margaret’s anger spread at Lavinia Cooper’s satisfied smile. Grandmother Walker had been young Margaret’s favorite person in the whole world, and her passing had nearly broken Margaret’s heart. How dare this woman, this stranger, trespass on that sacred memory!
The old woman managed a feathery laugh between wheezes. “Your gran says you best quit lying ’fore she has to reach out from the grave and give you a slap like she did that time you put your cousin Dee in the attic for tattling. A bat got in there, and Dee screamed so loud it made a vase fall off the end of your gran’s sideboard. The vase had been a wedding present from your granddaddy Moses, and when your gran come in from putting the canning up in the basement, she let Dee out and gave you a proper whupping. Even made you break off your own switch. Your gran never called you no Lil Bit. She called you Sister on account of how you boss everybody ’round, just like you was in charge.”
That night, Sister Walker had lain awake. Only she and her grandmother knew that story. It had been their secret. That moment with Lavinia Cooper had been the start of Sister Walker’s conversion to belief in the supernatural world. She wanted to ask Mrs. Cooper all sorts of questions: What was this power? Where was her grandmother now? How many other Diviners were out there? But when she’d returned to Frederick Douglass two days later, Little Women in hand, the bed had been stripped. Mrs. Cooper was gone. The pneumonia had weakened her heart, and she’d died peacefully in her sleep.
Margaret “Sister” Walker read everything she could find about Diviners. It was an obsession that saw her through medical training at Howard University. It was noted by a professor who, in turn, recommended her for a job at the newly created U.S. Department of Paranormal, where she would meet the only other person who shared her devotion: Will Fitzgerald. They made a formidable team: Will was scholarly but impulsive, too trusting and given to romantic ideals; Margaret, whose life hadn’t allowed her the privilege of romantic ideals as a birthright, was forthright and wary, organized and patient.
And when the eugenicists argued that her people were inferior by design, Margaret Walker meant to prove them wrong. After all, Lavinia Cooper was a Diviner, an exceptional person. And that exceptional person was black, like her. If she found more people like that, she could prove those eugenicists and their pseudoscience wrong. She would combat prejudice with real science. With fact and study and documentation. If there truly was a golden age coming in America, if the land of opportunity was at hand, she would make sure that her people weren’t left out of it.
And when presented with the perfect chance to make sure of that, she took it. She even went to prison for it. What would she be willing to do now? Sister Walker tapped her fingers on top of the file she’d saved. It held everything about Memphis: The records of Viola’s pregnancy. The monitoring. Dates. Addresses. Names of family. There were newspaper articles about the boy healer up in Harlem. It was foolish to keep them, she supposed. But it was a record. It was a witness to what they’d done. She’d seen how easy it was for her word to be dismissed. A person needed evidence. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Sister Walker closed the files back up in the cubby and blocked it with the painting of Paris, a city she’d always longed to visit, the city where Josephine Baker and Ada “Bricktop” Smith had found themselves.
A racking cough rumbled through Sister Walker’s lungs, a souvenir of the war and her time in that damp prison. She placed a lozenge under her tongue and waited for the spasm to subside.
There’d been one thing that Lavinia Cooper had said to Margaret that fateful night that had stuck with her for all these years. Margaret had thought that Lavinia was sleeping. But as she bent closer to the old woman, Lavinia took hold of Margaret’s wrist. Lavinia’s eyes were wide and frightened.
“I see you. You and your friends. You mustn’t let him in, child!”
Margaret’s wrist hurt. “Let who in?”
Lavinia shook with the force of her vision. “Before the Devil breaks you, first he will make you love him. Beware, little sister. Beware the King of Crows!”
Margaret hadn’t understood then.
She understood now. And she was afraid.
When Evie returned to the Winthrop, there was a letter waiting for her from the superintendent at the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane. Evie ripped it open and read with mounting excitement—they had approved her visit and spelled out the rules: The warden would personally escort her around the grounds and the hospital itself. But under no circumstances could they allow her to speak with Luther Clayton, by order of the police. Evie had charmed her way around plenty of rules, though. This would be no different. She raced upstairs to call Woody and Sam. Then she got to work selecting just the right outfit, something that would look swell in the Daily News under the headline SAINTLY SWEETHEART SEER FORGIVES MAN WHO TRIED TO KILL HER.
The following afternoon, Evie, Sam, and T. S. Woodhouse boarded the steamer from Manhattan, traveling up the East River toward Ward’s Island.
“Is that it? What a forsaken little spot,” Evie said as the boat pulled up to the long wooden pier sticking out from the stone seawall. Ward’s Island wasn’t much—a dotting of barracks-style buildings that Evie had heard were for the nurses, a collection of simple white outbuildings, a few scrubby trees. At the island’s far end, a train rattled across the Hell Gate’s elevated tracks, though there was no stop on Ward’s. The boat was the only way onto or off of the island. Everything about the place felt vulnerable and exposed—except for the asylum. Set back from the river a good five hundred feet or so, the enormous gothic masterpiece dominated the island like the witch’s palace in a twisted fairy tale, all turrets and spires and barred windows.
“Looks like a big spooky bat made outta bricks,” Sam said as they stepped onto the pier.
He was right, Evie thought. The main building sat out in front as a welcome to visitors, but the asylum’s many three-story pavilions—the long brick rectangles that housed the patients—all connected to one another through a series of zigzagging right angles that swept out and around, like the giant wings of a bat.
“The island of the undesirables,” Woody snarked. “That’s what they call this place, you know. It’s where they stick everybody the rest of the swells would rather not see. It used to house the drunks, the juvenile delinquents, the consumptives. Before Ellis Island, it’s where they sent immigrants for processing.”
Evie didn’t need to hold an object to feel the sadness, the loneliness coming off the island. It made her feel unsettled. And they hadn’t even gone inside yet.
The warden, a Mr. John Smith, trundled down the pier, waving. He was a jovial man with a well-trimmed mustache and a stiff collar that looked to be pinching his neck.