Addie cried out as if bitten. She stumbled into her bedroom and yanked open the top of her music box. Beneath the plush red velvet, the secret compartment was empty, the iron box gone. A terrible memory came to her: A few weeks before, Addie had dreamed of the man in the hat. In the dream, he’d been sitting right there in the Morris chair—oh, merciful heaven; it was all coming back to her. The trickster had spoken to her in her sleep. She’d carried the iron box to the garbage chute. She’d untied the binding string and thrown it all—Elijah’s finger bone, the tooth, the lock of his golden hair, and his photograph—down into the incinerator.
She’d undone the spell!
“Addie! What’s the matter? What has happened?” her sister, Lillian, called as Adelaide staggered back into the parlor and slumped against the wall. Her heart beat frantically.
Lillian raced to her side and placed a nitroglycerin tablet under Adelaide’s tongue to settle her sister’s heart.
In the kitchen, the teakettle screamed.
“Addie! You’re frightening me! What is it?”
A trembling Addie pointed to the floor, to the desiccated daisy petals that had slipped from the book, a gift for her.
Elijah had come home at last.
Mabel was late. Being late made her anxious, and she was already anxious about this evening. As she raced along Carmine Street, she wondered why she had wasted her time at the museum. “You’re not even a Diviner,” she muttered to herself, drawing strange looks from a man selling handmade cigars from a wooden stall. The minute Mabel had set foot inside the museum, she’d known it was a mistake. She’d felt small and out of place and ill-equipped among all those Diviners. Even non-Diviner Theta was on her way to becoming a movie star. Being surrounded by so much special was hard to take—and Sam’s comment about Jericho and Evie had been the icing.
Mabel wanted to make a difference in the world. But she couldn’t read objects or heal people or see the future. What power did she have? When would it be her moment to shine?
A throng of boisterous children ran around either side of Mabel like a river, their coats flapping open in the February wind. A woman sweeping the sidewalk yelled to them in Italian, and the children’s faces sobered as they buttoned their coats to the neck and carried on. The same woman eyed Mabel suspiciously.
No need to worry, Mabel thought. Haven’t you heard? I’m nobody.
“Pardon me,” Mabel said. “I’m looking for Maria Provenza?”
With a sharp nod, the woman indicated the building next door. Mabel knocked and read over the note in her hands as she waited: Miss Rose, I meet you in Union Square last October. My sister Anna missing still. Please come? Sixty-one Carmine Street.
At least she might be able to help someone. But when Maria Provenza opened the door, she glanced anxiously up and down the street. “Quickly, quickly,” she said, leading the way up steep, narrow flights of stairs, and once again, Mabel wondered what she was doing.
The tenement was cold and dark. It smelled of kerosene and rancid oil. Mabel followed Maria down a skinny, dim corridor past the one bathroom shared by all the tenants of the floor to a tiny apartment with a sink and a coal stove. An old woman and three young children crowded around a small, newsprint-covered table, where they assembled paper roses they could sell on the street. They’d have to sell a lot of paper roses to make ends meet, Mabel knew. Maria said something to the others in Italian, and the children gave up a chair for their guest, making Mabel feel humbled and a little guilty.
“Thank you for coming,” Maria said.
“To be perfectly honest, Miss Provenza, I don’t see how I can help. You’re better off going to the authorities if your sister is still missing.”
Maria shook her head vehemently. “No. You. It must be you. Ever since we are young, my sister sees visions. Who will marry or die or journey far. But then she sees something and she is afraid. That night, she made this.”
Maria removed a loose brick from the wall behind the stove, inching out a scroll hidden inside the cubby. She unrolled it for Mabel. The charcoal had smeared a bit, and Anna’s talent was not art, but it was disturbing nonetheless: Lightning in the sky. Terrifying creatures looking out from between trees. And some strange metal contraption like a diving bell. Mabel had never seen anything like it.
“You will help us find my sister?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Mabel said. “May I take this drawing?”
Maria nodded. Mabel noted that the drawing had been made on the back of a pamphlet for the Fitter Families for Future Firesides, one of those eugenics tents they set up at state fairs and carnivals. They usually subjected visitors to a physical examination plus a lengthy questionnaire about heredity. Mabel’s parents had said that it was bigotry dressed up to look like science.
“There is something else,” Maria said. “My sister, she sees you in a vision.”
“Me? What did she see?”
“She sees that you help many people.”
“Oh,” Mabel said, deflated. “That’s me. Good old Mabel, the helper.”
“No. She was worried for you. For the trouble to come.”
“What sort of trouble?”
Maria shook her head apologetically. “The one who knows is my sister, and the men took her away from the factory.”
“Who were these men? Management?”
Maria shook her head. “There are two. Dark suits. I falsi sorrisi, eh—false … smiles.”
“That’s not much help, I’m afraid,” Mabel said.
“Wait! They wear a pin like—” Maria struggled for the word in English. She grabbed the pencil, and in a corner of her sister’s sketch, she drew an eye with a lightning bolt coming down.
Mabel swallowed hard. A few weeks earlier, she had spied two men in a brown sedan across the street from the museum, just keeping watch. A lifetime working with radicals and labor organizers had taught Mabel how to ferret out Pinkerton Detectives, Bureau of Investigation agents, and plainclothes cops, and the men in the sedan had that air about them. When she’d taken a closer look, she noticed that they both wore that same odd lapel pin. Maybe it was time for Mabel to find out more about those men and whomever it was they were working for. So she couldn’t read an object and glean its history, but she could be nosy and ask around.
The bells of a distant church tolled the hour. “Jeepers! I’m later than I thought!” Mabel rolled up the drawing and shoved it into her handbag. It was too big and poked out of the open top.
“Miss …” Maria looked embarrassed.
“What is it?”
“I am ashamed to ask. Could you spare some money? For the children?”
“Oh. Um. Of course.” Mabel fished in her coin purse and handed over the quarter she’d planned to use for a Photoplay magazine and a pastry. She’d really wanted both, but it was better that the money go to feed Maria’s children.
“Bless you, bless you,” Maria said, taking Mabel’s hands in hers. “Please: Be careful, Miss Rose. Those men, I feel they are out there, watching us.”
The bell over the door of the Bohemian Reader jingled as Mabel blew in. Behind the counter, the bookshop’s owner, Mr. Jenkins, was busy chatting with a customer. Seeing Mabel, he jerked his head toward the back of the shop. Mabel nodded and walked past the shelves and tables stacked high with books she longed to stop and read, and slipped behind the heavy velvet drapes, trotting up the set of rickety wooden steps to Arthur Brown’s attic garret. She gave the secret knock, and a moment later, Arthur opened up.