The Diviners

She was tempted to blurt out a hasty yes, but she knew her mother well. If Evie didn’t make it seem like a punishment to be endured, like she had “learned her lesson well,” she’d be stuck in Zenith, apologizing to Harold Brodie after all.

She sighed and worked up just the right amount of tears—too much and they might relent. “I suppose that would be a sensible course. Though I don’t know what I’ll do in Manhattan with an old bachelor uncle as chaperone and all my dear friends back here in Zenith.”

“You should have thought of that before,” her mother said, her mouth set in a gloating smile of moral triumph.

Evie suppressed a grin. Like shooting fish in a barrel, she thought.

Her father checked his watch. “There’s a train at five o’clock. I expect you’d better start packing.”

Evie and her father rode to the station in silence. Normally, riding in her father’s Lincoln Boattail Roadster was a point of pride. It was the only convertible in Zenith, the pick of the lot at her father’s motorcar dealership. But today she didn’t want to be seen. She wished she were as inconsequential as the ghosts in her dreams. Sometimes, after drinking, she felt this way—the shame over her latest stunt twining with the clamped-down anger at the way these petty, small-town people always made her feel: “Oh, Evie, you’re just too much,” they’d say with a polite smile. It was not a compliment.

She was too much—for Zenith, Ohio. She’d tried at times to make herself smaller, to fit neatly into the ordered lines of expectation. But somehow, she always managed to say or do something outrageous—she’d accept a dare to climb a flagpole, or make a slightly risqué joke, or go riding in cars with boys—and suddenly she was “that awful O’Neill girl” all over again.

Instinctively, her fingers wandered to the coin around her neck. It was a half-dollar her brother had sent from “over there” during the war, a gift for her ninth birthday, the day he’d died. She remembered the telegram from the war department, delivered by poor Mr. Smith from the telegram office, who mumbled an apology as he handed it over. She remembered her mother uttering the smallest strangled cry as she sank to the floor, still clutching the yellowed paper with the heartless black type. She remembered her father sitting in his study in the dark long after he should have been in bed, a forbidden bottle of Scotch open on his desk. Evie had read the telegram later: REGRET TO INFORM YOU… PRIVATE JAMES XAVIER O’NEILL… KILLED IN ACTION IN GERMANY… SUDDEN ATTACK AT DAWN… GAVE HIS LIFE IN SERVICE TO OUR COUNTRY… SECRETARY OF WAR ASKS THAT I CONVEY HIS DEEPEST SYMPATHIES ON THE LOSS OF YOUR SON….

They passed a horse and buggy on its way to one of the farms just outside town. It seemed quaint and out of place. Or maybe she was the thing that was out of place here.

“Evie,” her father said in his soft voice. “What happened at the party, pet?”

The party. It had been swell at first. She and Louise and Dottie in their finery. Dottie had lent Evie her rhinestone headache band, and it looked so spiffy resting across Evie’s soft curls. They’d enjoyed a spirited but meaningless debate about the trial of Mr. Scopes in Tennessee the year before and the whole idea that the lot of humanity was descended from apes. “I don’t find it hard to believe in the slightest,” Evie had said, cutting her eyes flirtatiously at the college boys who’d just sung a rousing twelfth round of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” Everyone was drunk and happy. And Harold came around with his flattery.

“Hello, ma baby; hello, ma honey; hello ma Evie gal,” he sang and bowed at her feet.

Harry was handsome and terribly charming and, despite what she’d said earlier, a swell kisser. If Harry liked a girl, that girl got noticed. Evie liked being noticed, especially when she was drinking. Harry was engaged-to-be-engaged to Norma Wallingford. He wasn’t in love with Norma—Evie knew that—but he was in love with her bank account, and everyone knew they’d marry when he graduated from college. Still, he wasn’t married yet.

“Did I tell you that I have special powers?” Evie had asked after her third drink.

Harry smiled. “I can see that.”

“I am quite serious,” she slurred, too tipsy not to take his dare. “I can tell your secrets simply by holding an object dear to you and concentrating on it.” There were polite chuckles among the partygoers. Evie fixed them with a defiant stare, her blue eyes glittering under heavily kohled lashes. “I am pos-i-tute-ly serious.”