Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (11 page)

“I don’t see how that’s any of my concern.”

“We need you for the Diviners exhibit. If you mentioned it on that radio show of yours and showed up as the guest of honor, we could guarantee a big opening—maybe enough to pay the tax bill before the collector puts the whole place up on the auction block.”

Evie’s eyes flashed. “Why should I help Will? I risked my life to help solve the Pentacle Murders, and then he tried to ship me back to Ohio. That was the thanks I got. Maybe it’s time to stop pulling rabbits out of hats every month, Sam. Maybe it’s time for Will to give up that old museum.”

“It’s his life’s work, Sheba.”

“Then he’ll find a way to save it, if it means that much to him.”

Sam shook his head. “You’re a real hard-hearted Hannah, Evie O’Neill.”

Evie wished she could tell Sam that if that were true, hers wouldn’t ache quite so much. She’d done the right thing by pushing Jericho away and toward Mabel. Hadn’t she?

A gentleman in a dark suit sidled up to Evie. “Could you sign this for me, Miss O’Neill? I’m a big fan.”

“Of course. To whom shall I make the inscription?” Evie said, taking her elocution-shaped vowels for a walk.

“Just an autograph is fine, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Evie said, pronouncing it “ah tall” and liking the sound of it. She put the last flourish on the inscription. “There you are.”

“I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” the man said, taking it from her, but Evie didn’t hear.
It’s about time
, Evie thought as she saw T. S. Woodhouse strolling across the street.

“Well, if it isn’t the Sweetheart Seer!” he said around a mouthful of chewing gum. He blew a bubble and it was all Evie could do not to pop it.

“How nice to see you
at long last
, Mr. Woodhouse,” Evie said.

Woodhouse yawned. “I was rescuing a bunch of nuns from a burning church.”

“You probably set the fire to get the story,” Evie shot back.

T. S. Woodhouse nodded at the cluster of schoolgirls running toward them across the street, whispering excitedly to one another. “Gee, I wonder who let the cat out of the bag that you were here at the Bennington?” Woodhouse winked.

The bum had delivered after all.

“Miss O’Neill?” one of the girls said. “I adore your show!”

“That’s awfully nice of you to say,” Evie said in her radio-star voice, and the girls fell into excited squealing. Evie loved being recognized. Every time it happened, she wished she could snap a photograph and send it back to Harold Brodie, Norma Wallingford, and all those provincial Ohio Blue Noses who’d misjudged her. She’d write along the bottom of it,
Having a swell time. Glad you’re not here.

Sam put his arm around Evie as she signed an autograph. “Doesn’t she have beautiful penmanship?”

T. S. Woodhouse smirked. “Say, you two look cozy there. Anything the
Daily News
readers should know about? There were those rumors a few months ago that the two of you were an item.”

“No. We are not,” Evie said firmly.

“Now, that’s a fine way to talk to your fiancé, Lamb Chop!”

“Fiancé?” Woodhouse raised an eyebrow.

At this, the girls squealed anew. More people had shown up. A small crowd always drew a larger one. That was the math of fame.

“He’s kidding on the square,” Evie said.

Sam gave her his best lovelorn look. “Why, I’ve been crazy about this kid since the day I first saw her in Penn Station.”

“Sam—” Evie warned through a tight smile.

“But who wouldn’t be? Just look at that face!” He pinched Evie’s cheek. She stepped down hard on his foot.

“Gee, that’s awfully romantic,” one of the girls said with a sigh. A few in the crowd applauded.

“The Sweetheart Seer’s got a sweetheart?” a man joked.

“No, he’s not—”

“Now, honey blossom. Let’s not hide our love. Not anymore.”

“I’d like to hide my fist inside your gut,” Evie whispered low near his ear.

“You trying to keep the lid on this romance, Miss O’Neill? More important, you holding out on me?” Woodhouse pressed, trying to sniff out a scoop.

“Miss! Your taxi!” The doorman held the taxi door open for Evie.

The first thin, spitting drops of rain hit the sidewalk. Sam practically pushed Evie into the backseat of the waiting automobile. “You run along, sweetheart! Can’t have my little radio star catching a cold.”

Evie rolled down the back window a smidge. “They’ll be dragging the river for your body tomorrow, Sam Lloyd,” she hissed just before the taxi lurched down the street.

“Did she just say they’d drag the river for your body?” T. S. Woodhouse asked, his pencil poised above his open notebook.

Sam sighed like a man deeply in love. “She did, the little bearcat. It’s the only defense that poor, helpless girl’s got against the animal pull of our love. Uh, you can quote me on that.”

“Animal… pull… of our… love…” Woodhouse was still scribbling as the skies opened suddenly, unleashing a gully washer.

Down the street, the slim man in the dark suit kept his head down and slipped through the anonymous New York horde as if he had no shadow, angling himself at last into the passenger seat of the unremarkable sedan. He handed the autograph to the driver. “There you are. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

The driver glanced at Evie’s signature before tucking it into his breast pocket. “Fitzgerald’s niece, huh? Interesting.”

“The world is an interesting and dangerous place, Mr. Jefferson.
Ghosts and Diviners. People claiming to see a man in a tall hat. Threats from within and without. Security is the cornerstone of our freedom. And we’re entrusted with ensuring that security.”

“From sea to shining sea, Mr. Adams.” The driver started the car. “Is she the real McCoy?”

“Difficult to say,” the passenger said, opening a bag of pistachios. “I suppose we’ll have to arrange a small test.”

Henry sat in his chair waiting for the clock to strike three and thought about the first time he’d laid eyes on Louis Rene Bernard.

It was May 1924. Henry was fifteen and home from his boarding school in New Hampshire. He’d suffered a bout of measles that had frightened everyone, and so his parents had allowed him to spend the summer at home to regain his strength. Henry’s father had business that kept him in Atlanta for weeks at a time. His fragile mother spent her days in the family cemetery, offering private prayers to stone saints with painted faces made porous by the relentless New Orleans humidity. For the first time in his life, Henry was free to do as he wished.

He decided to take a day trip on one of the excursion riverboats that churned up and down the muddy Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Paul. Most people came to dance. Henry came to listen. Some of the best bands in New Orleans honed their chops on board the boats; it was a floating master class in Dixieland jazz.

The band aboard the SS
Elysian
was terrific—nearly as good as Fate Marable’s. The sweet swoop of a clarinet rose and fell against the suggestive allure of a trumpet while sparkly-eyed passengers bounced shoulder to shoulder on the boat’s enormous dance floor under ceiling fans that did little to battle the Delta heat or the mosquitoes. But it was the fiddle player who captured Henry’s attention. He’d never seen a boy so beautiful in his life: He had thick, nearly black hair swept back from a face marked by strong brows, dark brown eyes, and a square jaw.
When he smiled, his eyes crinkled into crescents; his eyeteeth were slightly longer than his front teeth, and crooked. And he had a name like a stride piano roll—Louis Rene Bernard. By the end of the third song, Henry was utterly smitten.

Louis had apparently noticed Henry, too. When the
Elysian
docked in New Orleans for the evening, Louis ran after Henry as he disembarked.

“’Scuse me. I believe you may’ve lost your hat?” Louis said, pointing to the straw boater perched atop his head.

“I’m afraid that isn’t mine,” Henry said.

“Well, it surely can’t be mine. Looks terrible on me.”

“Oh, no! I can’t agree. It’s very…” Too late, Henry realized that Louis was right; the hat was far too small on him. He searched for a word to save the moment. “Boaty.”

Louis laughed, and Henry thought that laugh might be the best sound he’d ever heard, better even than the jazz.

“You like beignets?” Louis asked shyly.

“Who doesn’t like beignets?”

They went to Cafe Du Monde, where they chased the sugared, fried dough of the beignets with cups of strong chicory coffee. Afterward, they strolled along the riverbank, listening to the gulls and the call-and-response of distant ships. They stood beside each other for some time, waiting until the others had drifted off and they were alone, and then, after several exchanges of sheepish glances, Louis leaned over and kissed Henry softly on the lips. It wasn’t Henry’s first kiss; that honor had gone to Sinclair Maddington, a school chum back at Phillips Exeter. Their kissing had been awkward and fumbling and a little desperate. It was followed by weeks of mutual avoidance forged by shared shame. There was no shame in Louis’s kiss, though; just a sweetness that made Henry’s stomach fluttery and his head as buzzy as champagne. He never wanted to stop.

Louis placed the boater on Henry’s head. “Suits you better.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. That, my friend, is gon’ be your lucky hat.”

After that, Henry was never without it.

“What is that thing on your head?” Flossie, the cook, asked as Henry swept through the kitchen on his way out, the boater cocked at a rakish angle.

“My lucky hat,” Henry said.

She shook her head as she floured the chicken. “If you say so.”

That summer was the summer of Henry-and-Louis. Henry learned that Louis was seventeen and as much a part of the river as the fish and the moss-slicked rocks. Before he’d died, too young, Louis’s Cajun father had given him a love of music and the gift of a fiddle. His mother had given him an appreciation for self-reliance by leaving him first with distant relatives and then, finally, when he was barely seven, at a Catholic orphanage in New Orleans. Louis had run away when he was twelve, preferring life on the streets, the fishing camps, and the riverboats. A case of tonsillitis had given him a raspy voice that made everything he said, from “Fish are biting” to “
Dit mon la verite
,” sound like a flirtation. He lost money at Bourré and played the sweetest fiddle in the French Quarter. He never stayed in any one place for long, but for now, he was bunking in a hideously hot attic garret above a grocery store on Dauphine. He was crazy about his hound dog, Gaspard, whom he had found abandoned by the river. “Just like me,” Louis said, scratching the slobbery pup’s fuzzy ears. They took Gaspard with them everywhere. No one in the Quarter seemed to mind, and often there was a bowl of scraps set out for him.

Henry confessed to Louis something he hadn’t told anyone else: Ever since he’d been sick, he’d developed a curious habit of lucid dreaming. One night while sick with the measles, he woke gasping for air as if he’d nearly drowned, a terrifying sensation. When he settled, he realized that he hadn’t woken. Instead, he was fully conscious inside the dream.

“Did it scare you?” Louis had asked.

“Yes,” Henry said, enjoying the feel of his lover’s arms around him.

“Could you do whatever you wanted?”

“No,” Henry answered.

“If I could dream of any place, I’d dream of a cabin on the bayou,” Louis had said at the time. “A little cabin. Fishing boat. A newspaper fulla crawfish ready to eat.”

“Would I be there?” Henry asked quietly.

“Wouldn’t be a good dream if you weren’t.”

And just like that, Henry knew what it was to be in love.

That night, he walked in Louis’s dream. There was a rustic cabin on a sun-dappled river where ancient live oaks trailed braids of Spanish moss into the water. A hickory rocking chair sat on the front porch, and a fishing boat bobbed nearby. It was a brief walk—the dream shifted, and fight though he did, Henry was unable to stay in that beautiful spot. Still, it made Henry happy to have glimpsed it, even for a few minutes.

In June, they signed on for a stint aboard an excursion boat, playing for their supper. When they’d stop at various sleepy southern towns along the river for the night, Louis and Henry would buy food for the Negro musicians who weren’t allowed into the white hotels and restaurants.

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Henry had said to Louis.

“That’s because it ain’t fair.”

“There’s a lot of that,” Henry said. He wanted to hold Louis’s hand, but he didn’t dare out in public, where anybody could see them. Instead, they’d wait until the judging world fell asleep, then they’d sneak away and kiss till their lips, already weary from the southern sun, would make them quit.

July saw hot days of fishing and swimming. Most nights, they’d prowl the nightclubs and speakeasies of the French Quarter, from Joe Cascio’s Grocery Store, where all the bohemians came to dance and drink, to Celeste’s, where the proprietor, Alphonse, served them bootleg beer in teacups. Sometimes they’d buy a jug of homemade hooch, strongly scented with juniper berries, from an Italian widow who’d taken over the bootlegging business from her late husband. Then they’d take the Canal Street trolley out to the cemeteries to drink, talk, and dream. Surrounded by stone angels and appeals to God’s
mercy set in marble, a half-drunk Henry would spin out grand plans for them both: “We could go to St. Louis or Chicago, or even New York!”

“What’d we do there?”

“Play music!”

“Same thing we’re doing here.”

“But no one would know us there. We could be anybody. We could be free.”

“You’re as free as you decide to be,” Louis said.

“Easy for you to say,” Henry said, hurt. “You’re not a DuBois.”

Being a DuBois wasn’t a legacy; it was a noose. They were one of the first families of New Orleans society, with a grand antebellum mansion, Bonne Chance, to show for it. White-columned and flanked by strict rows of stately oaks, Bonne Chance had been built by Henry’s great-great-grandfather Mr. Xavier DuBois, who’d made a fortune in sugar off the backs of slaves. His heir, the first Henry DuBois, grabbed land from the Choctaw during the Indian Removal Act, and Henry’s grandfather had accepted a commission as a colonel in the Confederate Army, marching with General Lee to protect all that stolen land and the stolen people who came with it. Henry often wondered if there had ever been a DuBois who’d done a single noble deed in his life.

The only war Henry’s father seemed interested in fighting was the one with his son. It was a bloodless war; his father’s infallibility bestowed a certain calm confidence. He never questioned that his edicts would be followed, so there was never any need for him to raise his voice. That was for lesser men.

“Hal, you will not upset your mother.”

“Naturally, Hal will matriculate from Ole Miss.”

“Law is what you should pursue, Hal. Perhaps a judgeship from there. Music is not a noble profession.”

“These jazz and riverboat riffraff are not suitable companions for a young man of your breeding and position, Hal. Remember that you are a DuBois, a reflection on this family’s sterling reputation. Comport yourself accordingly.”

Henry’s delicate, unbalanced mother had long since been worn down by his father’s domineering manner. When she’d had her first breakdown, Henry’s father refused to send her to the sanitarium for fear of gossip. Instead, the family doctor had prescribed pills, and now his mother wandered the endless halls and rooms of Bonne Chance, a lost bird unable to alight in any one spot for long, until, finally, she’d take refuge in the family cemetery. She’d sit on the weathered bench, staring into the garden, thumbs working the beads of a rosary.

“It was the vitamins. I never should’ve taken them,” she’d say to Henry in a nervous voice. “I was afraid I’d lose another baby. So many lost babies. The doctor said the vitamins would help.”

“And they did. Because here I am, Maman,” Henry would say.

“She sent me a letter and told me I have to hide the bird,” she’d say, worrying the black beads between her frantic fingers.

Flossie would come out and lead Henry’s mother back to the big white house. “Come on, now, Miss Catherine. The saints won’t mind if you have your lunch.”

Henry would sneak away to Louis once more, and the two of them would hop the Smoky Mary out to the West End of Lake Pontchartrain, where they could fish from a pier in Bucktown, take a picnic near Old Spanish Fort, or play music in the Milneburg resorts and camps.

Louis never called him Hal. It was always Henri, said in a drawl as sultry as the air over the Quarter: “Let’s get us a mess of crawfish, Henri.” “You hear the way he laid out that line, Henri?” “Henri, don’t be a slowpoke. Ever’body’s waitin’ on us down at Celeste’s.”

And Henry’s favorite:
“Moi, je t’aime, Henri.”
Henry never wanted the summer to end.

Then, on a terrible, still day in August, Gaspard died. Before Louis could stop him, the sweet hound tore after an alley cat and was struck by the ice man’s truck as it rounded the corner of Rampart. There was a screech of wheels and one awful yelp. Louis and Henry pushed their way through the crowd. With a howl of his own, Louis sank to his knees and cradled his dead dog. The driver, a kindly man with a jowly
face, removed his hat and patted Louis’s shoulder like a father, sorry as could be. “He just come outta nowhere, son. Wadn’t time to stop. I’m real sorry. Got three dogs, myself.”

Louis was inconsolable. Henry bought a bottle from the Italian widow and they took refuge in the attic garret, Gaspard’s body wrapped in a blanket on the bed. Henry held Louis while he cried, feeding him sips of strong drink till Louis was glassy-eyed. Later, Henry borrowed a car from one of the patrons at Celeste’s, and they buried Gaspard out in bayou country under a lacy willow tree and marked the grave with a roast bone stolen from Flossie’s kitchen.

“She’d kill me if she knew I took her best soup bone,” Henry said, taking off his sweat-drenched shirt.

“He was a good dog,” Louis said. His eyes were red and puffy.

“The best.”

“Why do all the things I love gotta leave me?” Louis whispered.

“I’m not gonna leave you,” Henry said.

“How you gonna get your father to let you stay?”

Henry chewed his lip and stared at the freshly tilled earth. “I’ll think of something.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Henry said, but he had no idea how.

Late August settled in, bringing a bank of hazy clouds that promised but did not deliver rain. After a day of stifling heat, Henry and Louis sat on a blanket beside a cascading vine of morning glories, their mood tense. There’d been a cable: Henry’s father was returning from Atlanta the next day. School would start the week after Labor Day. Henry would be miles away from Louis.

“Why don’t you just tell your father you don’t want to go?”

Henry laughed bitterly. “No one says no to my father.” He yanked a morning glory from the vine and crushed it between his fingers.