The Diviners

Evie’s smile faltered for a moment. “Just a lucky guess.”

“But—”

“Oh, look! Here comes the train,” Evie said, cutting off any further inquiry. She hugged them tightly, grateful for this last kindness. “Next time you see me, I’ll be famous! And I’ll drive you all over Zenith in my chauffeured sedan.”

“Next time we see you, you’ll be on trial for some ingenious crime!” Dottie said with a laugh.

Evie grinned. “Just as long as they know my name.”

A blue-uniformed porter hurried people aboard. Evie settled into her compartment. It was stuffy, and she stood on the seat in her green silk-satin Mary Janes to open the window.

“Help you with that, Miss?” another porter, a younger man, offered.

Evie looked up at him through lashes she had tinted with cake mascara that morning and offered him the full power of her Coty-red smile. “Oh, would you, honey? That’d be swell.”

“You heading to New York, Miss?”

“Mm-hmm, that’s right. I won a Miss Bathing Beauty contest, and now I’m going to New York to be photographed for Vanity Fair.”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Isn’t it, just?” Evie fluttered her eyelashes. “The window?”

The young man released the latches and slid the window down easily. “There you are!”

“Why, thank you,” Evie purred. She was on her way. In New York, she could be anyone she chose to be. It was a big city—just the place for big dreamers who needed to shine brightly.

Evie angled her head out the train window and waved to Louise and Dottie. Her bobbed curls blew about her face as the sleepy town slowly moved behind her. For a second, she wished she could run back to the safety of her parents’ house. But that was like the fog of her dreams. It was a dead house—had been for years. No. She wouldn’t be sad. She would be grand and glittering. A real star. A bright light of New York. “See you soon-ski!” she yelled.

“You bet-ski!”

Her friends were shrinking to small dots of color in the smoke-hazed distance. Evie blew kisses and tried not to cry. She waved slowly to the passing rooftops of Zenith, Ohio, where people liked to feel safe and snug and smug, where they handled objects every day in the most ordinary of ways and never once caught glimpses into other people’s secrets that should not be known or had terrible nightmares of dead brothers. She envied them just a bit.

“You gonna stay up there the whole ride, Miss?” the porter asked.

“Just wanna say a proper good-bye,” Evie answered. She turned her hand in a last benediction, waving to the houses like a queen. “So long, suckers! You’re all wet!”

MEMPHIS CAMPBELL, HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY

It was morning in Harlem, and mornings belonged to the numbers runners. From 130th Street north to 160th Street, from Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side clear over to Park Avenue on the east, scores of runners staked out their turf, ready to write out slips for their customers and race those hopeful number combinations back to their bankers, operating from the back rooms of cigar stores and barbershops, speakeasies and brownstone basements. It all had to happen before ten AM, when the clearinghouse down on Wall Street published the daily financial number, and somebody beat the thousand-to-one odds and struck it big or, more likely, struck out. It rarely worked out in Harlem’s favor, but they played the game anyway, on the chance that someday their luck would change.

Memphis Campbell, seventeen, perched beneath the street lamp in his spot on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, near the subway entrance, catching his customers as they headed off to work. He kept an eye out for cops as he wrote out slip after slip: “Yes, Miss Jackson, fifteen cents on the washerwoman’s gig.” “Forty-four, eleven, twenty-two. Got it.” “A dollar on the death gig, though I’m sorry to hear that your aunt’s cousin passed.” “Well, if you saw it in a dream, you’d be a fool not to play that number, sir.”

The numbers were all around them, patterns waiting to be discovered and turned into riches, luck pulled from thin air—from hymnals, billboards, weddings, funerals, births, boxing matches, horse races, trains, professions, fraternal orders, and dreams. Especially dreams.

Memphis didn’t like thinking about his dreams. Not lately.

When the work rush cleared, he took orders in apartment-building lobbies, stuffing the slips into a leather pouch he kept in his sock in case he got shaken down. He stopped in at the DeLuxe Beauty Shop, which was doing a brisk business in hair and gossip.