Mabel moaned. “I mean it. I feel dreadful. I am ending my association with liquor.” She raised her right hand. “You may be the notary public to this announcement.”
“Noted. Public’d.”
Mabel dropped her hand, her face screwed into an expression of fresh misery. Evie jumped off the bed.
“What is it? Are you about to blow?”
Mabel reached under her bed and pulled out what was left of Evie’s headache band. It was bent in the middle, where someone had obviously stepped on it. Several of the rhinestones were missing, and the peacock feathers drooped like spent chorus girls. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh…” Evie swallowed down a curse word. Mabel’s mouth twitched and Evie could tell she was on the verge of a legendary weep. She tossed the headache band aside as if it were rubbish. “That old thing? I was tired of it, anyway. You’ve done me a favor, old girl, putting it out of its misery like that.”
Mabel cocked an eyebrow. “You’re lying, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Just to make me feel better?”
“No. To make me feel better. Otherwise I’ll cry.”
“Thanks.” Mabel managed a weak smile. She crooked her pinkie. “Pals for life-ski?”
Evie hooked her pinkie with Mabel’s. “For life-ski.” Evie kissed Mabel’s forehead and turned off the bedside lamp. “Get some sleep, Pie Face.”
Evie left the Bennington and walked down Broadway, past the shops. A radio store played its latest model, letting the sound drift out onto the sidewalks to entice customers. Evie idled for a moment, listening as she painted her lips in the window’s reflection.
“… This is Cedric Donaldson, reporting from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, where just moments ago Jake Marlowe landed his American Flyer, an aeroplane of his own invention. You can hear the enthusiasm of the crowds who’ve gathered here on this fine autumn day to give the millionaire inventor and industrialist a hero’s welcome! And here is the Bayside High School marching band playing ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ ”
The man in the shop peered disapprovingly at Evie through the glass. She pumped her arms and legs up and down in imitation of a marching band, gave the man a salute, and continued her meandering walk to the museum. At the newsstand, Evie stopped cold. The front page of the New York Daily Mirror trumpeted MADMAN OF MANHATTAN STRIKES AGAIN! She grabbed the paper and flipped past a store advertisement for Solomon’s Comet binoculars to the story on page two.
“Hey, doll, you gonna pay for that?” The newspaperman held out his palm.
Evie tossed him a nickel and, clutching the paper, ran the rest of the way to the museum.
Will was sitting in the library with Sam and Jericho. He looked pale.
“I… I just heard….” Evie said, out of breath. She held up the newspaper.
“Tommy Duffy. Twelve years old,” Will said quietly. “The killer took his hands.”
The horror of it made Evie’s stomach roil. “Is it the same killer?”
Will nodded. “First he posted a warning note to the papers.”
Jericho opened the previous evening’s late-edition Daily News. “ ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. For the Beast will rise when the comet flies.’ ”
“He seems to like attention, this fellow,” Will said. “He left another note with the body.”
Evie unscrolled the thin parchment, which resembled the first, with strange sigils along the bottom.
“Careful with that—it’s on loan from Detective Malloy,” Will explained.
“ ‘And in those times, the young were idle. Their hands were absent from their plows and they did not raise them in prayer and praise to the Lord our God. And the Lord was angry and commanded of the Beast a sixth offering, an offering of obedience.’ ” Evie read. “The hands. With Ruta, he took the eyes, and with Tommy Duffy, the hands. Why?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Will agreed.
“The murder of a child could never make sense.”
“I meant the symbology.” Will was up and pacing the room. “Tommy Duffy was posed. He was hung upside down with one leg bent. That’s not a Christian symbol. It’s pagan. The Hanged Man, as seen on the tarot. It hints at magic or mysticism. Yet, this was found shoved into the boy’s back pocket.”
Will slapped a pamphlet down on the table. On its cover, a man in white robes and a pointed hat stood below an open Bible and a cross, ringing a liberty bell, while the ghostly face of George Washington looked on in approval.
