The Diviners
“Sure thing, Mr. Ziegfeld,” Wally said, following the great man out. He looked back at Theta, and she stuck out her tongue at him.
The girls crowded around Theta, congratulating her on her good fortune, while Daisy stomped off, cursing a blue streak.
“Upstaging people isn’t very nice,” Don sniped as he breezed past.
“If you were any good, I wouldn’t be able to upstage you, Don,” Theta shouted after him. She hugged Henry. “Do you know what this means?”
“More rehearsal?”
“We can finally afford a piano, Hen. And everybody’s gonna walk out of the show singing your song.”
“Don’t you mean humming my song?”
“Don’t get cute. It’s a start.”
Theta hit him.
RAISING THE DEVIL
The New York Public Library, that grand beaux arts queen of books, presides over Fifth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second streets with a majesty few buildings can match. At exactly eleven o’clock in the morning, Evie arrived at the bottom of the grand marble steps, confident that she would find just what she needed to break open the case of the Pentacle Killer, and that she would find it in roughly a half hour, give or take. She’d pestered Detective Malloy for what he knew about John Hobbes, which wasn’t much, but he did tell her that the man was hanged, he believed, sometime in the summer of 1876.
“Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun? Ba-da-bum-bum, la-la-la-la. Ain’t we got fun?” she sang as she passed one of the pair of sculpted stone lions guarding the entrance. She gave its right paw a pat. “Nice kitty,” she said, and went inside. She was directed up three flights of winding stairs into a large, wood-paneled room crammed with bookcases. A librarian whose brass nameplate identified him as a Mr. J. Martin looked up from a copy of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. “May I help you?”
“Pos-i-tute-ly!” Evie beamed. “I have to get the goods on a murderer for my uncle, Dr. William Fitzgerald of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”
“Oh,” Evie said, deflated. “Well, then. What can you tell me about a man named John Hobbes who went to trial for murder in 1876? Oh, and could you be a doll and make it fast? There’s a swell sale over at B. Altman, and I want to get there before the crowd.”
Evie scribbled John Hobbes, murderer, and 1876 on the paper and slid it back. Mr. Martin disappeared for a bit, then returned with two stacks of newspapers bound on a wooden rod, which he placed on the desk in front of Evie. There had to be a week’s worth of work for her in those two volumes. She wouldn’t be shopping that day. Or possibly ever.
“All of this?” Evie said.
“Oh, no,” Mr. Martin said.
“Thank heavens.”
“I’ll be back with the others in a moment.”
“Others?”
“Yes. All fourteen.”
“I thought you went to the library,” Uncle Will said.
Evie cut her eyes at Will, who didn’t look up from his book. “Why do you think I’m so exhausted? If you’d like to know anything at all about this city in 1876, please raise your hand. No show of hands? Pos-i-tute-ly shocking.” Evie bunched a pillow into a corner of the settee and rested her face against it. “There is a hideous invention called the Dewey Decimal System. And you have to look up your topic in books and newspapers. Pages upon pages upon pages…”
Uncle Will frowned. “Didn’t they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?”
“No. But I can recite ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while making martinis.”
“I weep for the future.”
“There’s where the martinis come in.” Evie yawned and stretched. “I thought research would be more glamorous, somehow. I’d give the librarian a secret code word and he’d give me the one book I needed and whisper the necessary page numbers. Like a speakeasy. With books.”