“He’s my uncle.”
At that, the cabbie fell blessedly quiet.
At last the taxi turned onto a side street near Central Park and pulled up to the museum. Tucked away among the grit and steel of Manhattan, the museum itself seemed a relic, a building out of time and place, its limestone facade long since grimed by age, soot, and vines. Evie glanced from the sad, dingy shadow before her to the beautiful house in her photograph. “You sure this is the joint?”
“This is the place. Museum of the Creepy Crawlies. That’ll be one dollar and ten cents.”
Evie reached into her pocket and pulled out nothing but the lining. With mounting alarm, she searched all her pockets.
“Whatsa matter?” The cabbie eyed her suspiciously.
“My money! It’s gone! I had twenty dollars right in this pocket and… and it’s gone!”
He shook his head. “Mighta known. Probably a Bolshevik, like your uncle. Well, little lady, I’ve had three fare jumpers in the past week. Not this time. You owe me one dollar and ten cents, or you can tell your story to a cop.” The cabbie signaled to a policeman on horseback down the block.
Evie closed her eyes and retraced her steps: The tracks. The druggist’s window. Sam Lloyd. Sam… Lloyd. Evie’s eyes snapped open as she recalled his sudden passionate kiss. There’s just something about you…. There sure was—twenty dollars. Not an hour in the city and already she’d been taken for a ride.
“That son of a…” Evie swore hard and fast, stunning the cabbie into silence. Furious, she pulled her emergency ten-dollar bill from her cloche, waited for the change, and then slammed the taxi door behind her.
“Hey,” the cabbie yelled. “How’s about a tip?”
“You bet-ski,” Evie said, heading toward the old Victorian mansion, her long silk scarf trailing behind her. “Don’t kiss strange men in Penn Station.”
Evie rapped the brass eagle’s-head door knocker and waited. A plaque beside the museum’s massive oak doors read HERE BE THE HOPES AND DREAMS OF A NATION, BUILT UPON THE BACKS OF MEN AND LIFTED BY THE WINGS OF ANGELS. But neither men nor angels answered her knock, so she let herself in. The entry was ornate: black-and-white marble floors, wood-paneled walls dimly lit by gilded sconces. High above, the pale blue ceiling boasted a mural of angels watching over a field of Revolutionary soldiers. The building smelled of dust and age. Evie’s heels echoed on the marble as she made her way down the long hall. “Hello?” she called. “Uncle Will?”
A wide, elaborately carved staircase wound up to a second-floor landing lit by a large stained-glass window, and then curved out of sight. To Evie’s left was a gloomy sitting room with its drapes drawn. To her right, pocket doors opened onto a musty dining hall whose long wooden table and thirteen damask-covered chairs looked as if they hadn’t been used in years.
“Holy smokes. Who died?” Evie muttered. She wandered till she came to a long room that housed a collection of objects displayed behind glass.
“ ‘The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies,’ I presume.”
Evie passed from display to display, reading the typewritten cards placed beneath:
GRIS GRIS BAG AND VOUDON DOLL,
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
BONE FRAGMENT FROM CHINESE RAILROAD
WORKER AND REPUTED CONJURER,
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, GOLD RUSH PERIOD
CRYSTAL BALL USED IN SÉANCES OF
MRS. BERNICE FOXWORTHY DURING
AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM PERIOD, C. 1848,
TROY, NEW YORK
OJIBWAY TALISMAN OF PROTECTION,
GREAT LAKES REGION
ROOT WORKER’S CUTTINGS,
BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
FREEMASON’S TOOLS AND BOOKS, C. 1776,
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
There was a series of spirit photographs populated with faint figures, gauzy as lace curtains in a wind. Poppet dolls. A ventriloquist’s dummy. A leather-bound grimoire. Books on alchemy, astrology, numerology, root workers, voudon, spirit mediums, and healers, and several volumes of accounts of ghostly sightings in the Americas starting in the 1600s.
The Diary of a Mercy Prowd lay open on a table. Evie turned her head sideways, trying to make sense of the seventeenth-century handwriting. “I see spirits of the dead. For this they hath branded me a witch….”
“They hanged her. She was only seventeen.”
Evie turned, startled. The speaker stepped from the shadows. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had ash-blond hair. For a moment, with the light from the old chandelier shining down on him, he seemed like some severe angel from a Renaissance painting, come to life.
