“I’m his niece, Evie O’Neill.”
“His niece,” Miss Walker said in wonder. “Well. Isn’t that something?”
Evie didn’t quite know what to make of Miss Margaret Walker. It wasn’t often that someone left her feeling so undone. “And do you work with my uncle, Miss Walker?”
Miss Walker’s mouth twitched, flirting with a semblance of smile before settling into something far harder. “No.” The woman started down the steps, then turned back. “Miss O’Neill, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Seventeen.” The woman seemed to consider this. “Have a pleasant day, Miss O’Neill.”
Evie turned the card over and was surprised to see that Margaret Walker had left a note in script that was as precise and clipped as she appeared to be.
It’s coming back.
What was coming back? Who was Margaret Walker? And who was she to Will?
Upon returning to the library, Evie was surprised to find Will there. “Oh, you’ve finished already. Someone was just calling for you. A woman. She left her card.”
Will stared at the name on the card. He turned it over and read the other side.
“Who is she, Unc?”
“No one I know,” Will answered and tossed Margaret Walker’s card in the wastebasket.
PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES
Evie was dreaming.
In the exotic, looping logic of dreams, she sat on the old wooden swing behind her family’s house in Ohio while James pushed her. She felt the desperate need to look behind her, to make sure he was there and to whisper a warning to him, but the swing rose higher and higher and she could do nothing but hold on tightly. On the fourth push, she swung so high that her pendant flew from her neck. Evie reached out a hand to grab it and fell down, down, down into a velvety forever.
A crow snatched it from her grasping fingers and flew with it into a churning, dark-gray sky above a vast wheat field. Lightning shot from the clouds and struck the land. The wheat burned. Evie put up an arm to shield herself from the heat.
When she took her arm away, she found herself on the streets of a deserted Times Square. Under the giant billboard for Marlowe Industries, the hollow-man war veteran sat in his wheelchair, rattling his cup. “The time is now,” he said.
The pretty woman in Uncle Will’s photograph skated past, laughing. “That’s you all over, William,” she said. Evie heard laughter and turned to see that it was Will, the young Will of family pictures. But when she looked again, it was James, standing on the edge of the familiar forest in the mist. He was pale. So very pale. Dark shadows lay beneath his vacant eyes. He waved to Evie, and she trailed him through the woods and into the army camp. Atop a barrel, a Victrola played, the record going round and round: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile….”
Sandbags formed a wall in front of a long trench. A barbed-wire fence stretched for miles. And the fog sat heavily over it all.
“Don’t let your joy and laughter hear the snag. Smile, boys, that’s the style….”
Above the tree line, a long, serrated roof appeared, like a forgotten fairy castle in the mist. Where was James?
The record spun: “What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile….”
The soldiers stood around talking, eating from tins, drinking from canteens. She blinked, and for a split second, the boys became skeletal specters. Evie screamed and hid her eyes, and when she looked again, they were just soldiers. One toasted her with his canteen. He smiled, and locusts hopped from his mouth.
“So, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, s—”
An explosion rattled the ground. A column of fierce white light pierced the sky and spread out in rapid waves, decimating the trees and the soldiers where they stood—flesh peeled back from bone, sockets missing eyes, limbs melting, mouths open in unheard screams while the Victrola turned on a hiss. Evie ran. Her bare feet squished through fields of bloody mud. It splattered her nightgown, face, and arms. The blood became poppies, which rose beside the scorched trees. She saw James up ahead, his back to her. He was alive and unharmed!
James. She called his name, but in the world of the dream, she made no sound. James, James! She was close. She would reach him and they would run away from this horrible place. Yes, they would run. They would be all right. They—
He turned slowly toward her and removed his gas mask and she saw that his beautiful face was ghastly pale and skeletal, his teeth garish now that his lips were gone.