The gloom of January weighed on New Yorkers. The days were short and the nights were very long for people who’d grown to fear sleep. Mothers kept close watch by their children’s beds. The rich asked their servants to sit nearby and wake them every few hours. The bootleggers’ business was booming. The city was wary and afraid and close to violence.

But for Ling and Henry, it was the nights they lived for. Dreams provided an escape from the worries of the real world, a refuge of hope and possibility. While they waited in the beautiful old train station, Henry would play the piano, trying out new songs, looking to Ling for approval or boredom. If she wrinkled her nose as if something smelled bad, he abandoned it. But if she cocked her head to the side and nodded slowly, he knew he was on the right path.

“Anytime you want to come to the Follies, just say the word, and I’ll get you the best seat in the house,” Henry promised.

“Why would I do that? I can listen to you here.”

“It’s not just me, you know. There are grand dance numbers and singers, big stars. It’s very glamorous, don’tcha know?”

“It sounds long and tedious.”

“Most people love the Follies.”

“I’m not most people.”

“Darlin’, truer words were ne’er spoken,” Henry said and laughed.

Wai-Mae was always there to greet their train when it arrived in the forest. She’d beam at Ling and take her hands like a sister, then glance shyly at Henry.

“Miss Wai-Mae, you look radiant this evening,” Henry would say with exaggerated courtesy, and Wai-Mae would giggle behind the cover of her hand. Sometimes, Ling and Wai-Mae would join Louis and Henry for a picnic on the grass bordering the river behind Louis’s cabin, where music echoed across the forest—the bright syncopation of Dixieland threaded with the high notes of the erhu.

“Here, I’ll show you how to dance the Charleston,” Ling said, hopping up and taking Wai-Mae’s hand in hers.

But when she showed her, Wai-Mae begged off. “What a terrible dance! So ungraceful! Not like the opera.”

“Show us how it’s done,” Henry teased, and Wai-Mae moved with serpentine grace through the grass, rippling the sleeves of her gown as if she were spring coming to life.

“That’s beautiful,” Louis said. “I never seen anything like it. Not even at the balls in the Quarter.”

“If only women could perform,” Wai-Mae said, coming to sit beside Ling again.

“Women can’t perform in Chinese opera?” Henry asked.

“Oh, no! It’s only for men.”

“Even the female roles?”

“Yes.”

Louis grinned. “Hmm. Sounds like you got yourselves a drag ball.”

Henry laughed and looked away.

“What is a drag ball?” Wai-Mae asked.

“Nothing,” Henry said quickly, nudging Louis gently with his elbow. “Show us some more, Miss Wai-Mae, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Wai-Mae danced and Ling curled her toes in the dewy grass, enjoying the slick cool of it. She and Henry had come to accept this as ordinary. The old dream walking, which had once seemed strange and thrilling, bored them now. Here, they could write their own dreams, and every night, the dreams became that much more real.

Louis proved to be kind and funny, and Ling could see why Henry liked him so much. When she looked up at him, the golden sky at his back, Louis shimmered as if he were carved of sunshine. Ling liked the way he talked, as if his words had been dunked in warmed honey.

“Perhaps you should marry Louis,” Wai-Mae said as she and Ling walked back to their spot in the forest on the edge of the village. “He’d make a fine husband. He is very handsome. Almost as handsome as my husband-to-be. But not quite.”

Ling resisted the urge to roll her eyes. There was nothing Wai-Mae couldn’t turn into a penny-novel romance. “I’m not ready for a husband.”

“You’re seventeen!” Wai-Mae tutted.

“Exactly,” Ling said.

Wai-Mae’s sigh was weary. She patted Ling’s hand like a worried auntie. “Don’t fret, Ling. I’m certain your parents will find someone for you,” she said so earnestly that Ling could only take it in stride and not be insulted.

Wai-Mae’s patience did not extend to Ling’s scientific experimentation. “When will you be finished?” she complained as Ling stared at a house in the village that they had altered earlier, waiting to see if it changed in any way while she observed it. “Science is so dull!”

“Science is anything but dull,” Ling said. “And I need to test things.”

“These atoms you talk about. What are they?”

“They’re building blocks of energy. Everything in the world, all matter, is made of atoms,” Ling explained. “Even us.”

“What about dreams? What are they made of?” Wai-Mae asked.

“They’re born of people’s thoughts, I suppose. Their emotions. Endlessly renewing, endlessly creating,” Ling said. But she wondered: Could an energy field be generated from all the thoughts, desires, and memories inside dreams? Was that how the dead were conjured? And what happened when you put a few dream walkers inside that landscape? Could their interactions transform dream into reality?

Each night, toward the end of her dream walks, Ling conducted her experiments. First she marked her hands with ash from a fire. When she woke, she examined her hands for the marks, but there were none. The next night, she slipped a few pebbles into her pocket to see if she could bring them out of the dream, but it didn’t work. She’d even tried to bring a pheasant feather into the dream world for Wai-Mae, but when she stuck her hand into her pocket, there was nothing there at all.

“Perhaps some things are beyond testing,” Wai-Mae mused as she watched a sparrow hopping from branch to branch before it flew off toward the shimmering rooftops of the village and disappeared altogether. “Perhaps there are things that exist only because we make them so, because we must.”

Henry and Louis spent hours fishing the river or playing music on the cabin’s front porch, Louis on fiddle and Henry on harmonica. Other times, they’d go for long walks with Gaspard, and Henry would tell Louis all about New York and his friends there. “I’ll take you to Evie’s radio show and we’ll cut a rug at the Hotsy Totsy with Memphis and Theta—you’ll love it there. You get that train ticket yet?” Henry asked.

“Not yet, cher. But I’ll walk over to the Lafayette PO in the morning and see if it’s there.”

“Louis, do you ever remember your dreams in the morning after you’ve woken up?” Henry asked, worried. If Louis didn’t remember, then how would he know to go pick up the ticket?

“I reckon I must. Who could forget this?” Louis said, nuzzling Henry’s throat.

“Just in case, I want to try something. Louis: When you wake up, you’ll remember. You’ll remember everything.”

“Everything,” Louis whispered, and he kissed Henry, taking his tongue sweetly into his mouth.

There was only one uneasy moment in the dreams for Henry, and it was the thicket of morning glories. Every time they passed the purple-blue blooms, Louis would pull Henry away. He wouldn’t go anywhere near the thicket. In fact, he seemed downright afraid of it.

“What those flowers ever do to you?” Henry joked on one such occasion.

Louis didn’t laugh. “Don’t know. Just gives me a bad feeling,” he said, rubbing his head. “Smell gives me a headache.”

But the moment they were away from the morning glories, Louis’s mood lightened once more. He broke into an easy grin, yanked his shirt off over his head, and tossed it at Henry. “Gonna get to that rope swing first!” he shouted, running toward the sparkling river.

“Wait!” Henry called. Laughing, he dropped his own clothes on the grass and ran after Louis.

Sometimes, a part of the dream world lost its color or winked out, like a lightbulb that needed changing. When this happened, Ling and Wai-Mae would concentrate, pushing their energy into the dead portion, and the dreamscape would shift under their hands, warming and blooming.

“My, but that is something,” Louis would say, and if he was envious that he and Henry couldn’t seem to perform this alchemy, too, he never said it.

Above their heads, a steady stream of ones and zeros trickled down like rain, which made Henry think about music theory and song structure and Ling of the Bagua of the I Ching. Whole dream worlds were born of this numerical rain: The ghostly jazz bands of New Orleans’ West End inked themselves into existence against the filmy sky. A swooping Coney Island roller coaster skated a constant figure eight, a memory from Ling’s childhood. A Chinese puppet show appeared, the sticks operated by unseen hands.

It was as if all time and space were unfolding at once around them, a river without end. The borders of their selves vanished; they flowed through time, and it through them, till they didn’t know if these things they saw had already been or would come to pass. Henry had never experienced such a profound sense of happiness, of being right in his self and in the world.

“To us,” he said, raising a glass.

“To us,” the others echoed, and they watched the sky give birth to new dreams.

If the nights were magical, the days were less so. For the first time in their friendship, Henry and Theta were bickering. The dream walking exhausted Henry so much that he didn’t wake before three or four in the afternoon. He’d missed three rehearsals in a row.

“I can’t keep inventing stories to save you, Hen,” Theta warned. “And Herbie’s up to something. I think he’s trying to get his song in over yours. You better show up today, if you know what’s good for you, Hen.”

“I’m not worried about Herbie,” Henry said, reaching for one of Theta’s cigarettes.

“You should be. And since when do you smoke?”

Henry smirked. “I just need a little pep.” He wiggled his fingers like a jazz baby.

Theta swiped the cigarette out of his mouth. “Then get some sleep. Real sleep.”

But Henry didn’t listen. He couldn’t listen. There were only Louis and dreams, and Henry would do whatever he could to have both. Already he and Ling were pushing the limits of what they could tolerate. Each night, they set their alarms for later and later.

But here in the dream world, Ling was on to something. She could feel the energy coiled beneath her fingers when she transformed a featureless rock into sunflowers whose petals were repeating spirals of pattern, the Qi moving strongly through them both, all those atoms shifting, changing, whole universes being born. No—made. She and Wai-Mae were making them. We did that, Ling would think. Like gods. It was magic and it was science, a blend, like her, and it was more beautiful than anything.

One night, as the girls lay back in the dewy grass watching pink clouds drifting lazily across the perpetual sunset, Wai-Mae turned on her side to face Ling.

“What happened to your legs, Little Warrior?”

Ling sat up quickly. On impulse, she tugged her skirt hem down. “Nothing,” she said.

“No. I see the way you are with them, always hiding. You’re holding something back. Some secret.” Wai-Mae’s expression was resolute. “If we are to be friends, you must tell me everything.”

Ling hugged her knees to her chest—a simple action in the dream world, impossible when she was awake. “A few months ago, I got very sick. When it was over, the muscles in my legs and feet had stopped working. I need leg braces and crutches to walk now. But sometimes, just before I’m fully awake, there’s a moment when I’m still holding on to the dream. And I forget. I forget what happened to me. I forget about the sickness and my legs. For those few seconds, I think that the infection was a bad dream, and I’ll get up and walk out of my room and run down the stairs as if nothing ever happened. But then the truth creeps in. The only place I’m free is in dreams.”

“Dreams are the only place any of us is free,” Wai-Mae said, turning Ling’s face toward hers with just a finger. Wai-Mae’s hands smelled earthy, like moss on the hillside. “There was a boy in my village like you. Every day, they massaged his legs to help with the pain. You have to work fire back into the muscles, Little Warrior.”

Gently, Wai-Mae lifted the hem of Ling’s skirt and trailed her fingers down Ling’s shins. Then she began to work the muscles, kneading with surprisingly strong fingers. Ling suppressed a gasp. In the hospital following the infection, the doctors had immobilized her legs in plaster, then splints, then braces. Her legs felt separate. A caged exhibition. No one touched them. Even Ling touched her own body as little as possible.

“Do that every day,” Wai-Mae commanded. She leaned her head back, toward the sun, gazing out at the golden hills. “I, too, want to stay here always. In dreams. No pain, no strife.” Her face settled into sadness. “I will tell you a secret of my own. I don’t like Mr. O’Bannion. He is not a good man, I don’t think. He lies.”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard gossip today on the ship about one of the other girls he brought over. They say that when she arrived in America, there was no husband to greet her, no marriage. She had been tricked. Instead of a husband, the girl was forced to work in a brothel,” Wai-Mae whispered. “They say she is broken now. She cries all the time. Oh, sister, I must trust the judgment of my uncle, but still, I’m afraid.”

Ling wondered whether she should tell Wai-Mae about her own misgivings. But she didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily. She’d wait until she could speak to Mr. Lee. And she would redouble her efforts to find this Mr. O’Bannion. If necessary, she’d have Uncle Eddie speak to the Association so that they could make sure a similar fate wouldn’t befall Wai-Mae.

“Don’t worry. I’ll look after you,” Ling said.

Wai-Mae smiled at Ling. “I am so grateful that I have you.”

Ling looked into Wai-Mae’s endless brown eyes, and she felt the dream stirring inside her, shifting her molecules, rearranging her atoms, transforming her into something new and beautiful. It made her dizzy.

“What is it, sister?” Wai-Mae asked.

“Nothing,” Ling said, catching her breath. “Nothing.”

“Soon I will be in New York,” Wai-Mae said, a smile lighting up her face. “We will go to your uncle’s opera, or perhaps even Booth’s Theatre. And on Sundays, we can promenade like fine ladies in our very best bonnets. Oh, such fun we’ll have, Ling!”

“No one wears a bonnet,” Ling said, trying not to giggle.

“My village is very small,” Wai-Mae said, embarrassed. “You will show me what’s fashionable.”

“If I’m showing you what’s fashionable, you’re in trouble,” Ling said, feeling chastened for teasing Wai-Mae.

“We will be like sisters,” Wai-Mae said.

“Yes,” Ling murmured. But what she wanted to say as the pearl-white flowers shook down from the low branch of a blooming dogwood tree was No. We will be friends. True friends. Best friends.

“Come, dear Ling,” Wai-Mae said, jumping up and offering her hand.

And they passed the hours dancing under skies so shimmery blue it hurt to look up.

In the city of six million dreams, Evie and Sam were the dreamiest. New York couldn’t get enough of the newest gossip sensation. Everywhere they went, they were mobbed: Sitting ringside at the fights. Posed beside a millionaire’s champion horse at a Long Island stable. Dining in the elegant Cascades Room of the Biltmore Hotel beside an orderly row of potted cherry trees. Watching Bye, Bye, Bonnie at the Ritz Theatre. Stepping out of Texas Guinan’s infamous 300 Club with confetti in their hair or skating on the frozen pond in Central Park. Fans clustered outside the radio station and the Winthrop Hotel and even the museum hoping for a glimpse of New York’s latest golden couple. Nightclubs vied for their patronage. Gifts small and large arrived by messenger in boxes thick with tissue paper—“A token of our ‘divine’ affection!”—and inside would be a brooch or cuff links and a promise of the establishment’s best table on any night Sam ’n’ Evie would care to grace them with their presence and, oh, perhaps the Sweetheart Seer would be kind enough to mention their establishment fondly on the radio or in the papers?

Letters poured in by the thousands. The Daily News posted a picture of the adorable sweethearts in Mr. Phillips’s majestic office, buried up to their necks in fan mail. Radio Star listed Evie’s “Tips for Savvy Shebas,” which included “Never leave the house without rouging your knees” and “Keep your enemies close, and your flask closer.” Thanks to the two of them, WGI was fast becoming the number one radio station in the nation. A line stretched around the block from WGI to get in to Evie’s show.

She loved every minute of it.

“And don’t forget, darlings,” she reminded listeners. “Sam and I will be hosting the opening-night party for the Diviners exhibit at the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult next week. If you buy a raffle ticket, you can win a free object reading performed by yours truly.”

On the West Side of Manhattan lay a congested strip of real estate called Radio Row where an enterprising sort could purchase radio parts of all kinds, from the commonplace to the hard-to-find. What Sam sought now was very hard to find, indeed. It was all he thought about as he walked up Cortlandt Street, past stores blaring music and competing sidewalk salesmen trying to entice passersby with the siren’s call of the newest, most expensive models: “Brand-new crystal set!” “Westinghouse—it’s all electric!” “Radiola means quality!” “Trust Cunningham tubes—they’re insured!” “Sound so clear you could go next door and not miss a note through the wall!”

Sam stepped inside a dark showroom, past the boring suburban mom-and-pops admiring the showroom wares, carefully avoiding eye contact with overeager salesmen readying their smooth pitches. He kept his head down on his way to the sales counter, hoping he wouldn’t be recognized. At the counter, a mustachioed man with slicked-back hair finished writing up a sales slip and smiled at Sam. “Could I interest you in a new radio today, sir? We’ve the newest models in stock—six-, eight-, and ten-tube circuits.”

“What I really need is a Buffalo tube. But so far, I haven’t had much luck finding it. I understand Mr. Arnold carries them?” Sam said, sliding over a folded note attached to a five-dollar bill he’d lifted from a wallet on the way over.

The man’s smile vanished. “Mr. Arnold, you say?”

“Yes. Ben Arnold. That’s the fella.”

“Excuse me for a moment, won’t you?” The man disappeared behind a heavy drape at the back of the store. A few minutes later, he returned. “It seems that we don’t have that part right now, sir. It has been ordered.” The man returned Sam’s note minus the five dollars. “This is your receipt of purchase. But I’m afraid this is the last time Mr. Arnold can order this part for you, sir. Your particular model is very… popular at present. A bit too popular, if you take my meaning.”

Sam grimaced. Sam ’n’ Evie. The spotlight from their cooked-up romance was throwing a little too much glare on Sam’s private life.

“Pal, I hear you like a crystal set,” Sam said.

Out on the street, he opened the note. A key had been taped to the inside. There was no accompanying information. A salesman waved Sam over. “Could I interest you in a Zenith six-tube model with superior musical tone? It’s fully electric!”

“Thanks, pal. So am I,” Sam shouted. He shoved the note and key in his pocket, walking away from the cacophony of Radio Row toward the rumble of the Ninth Avenue El.

Down the street, the men in the brown sedan watched it all.

Every day, the newspapers carried bold warnings about the sleeping sickness.

New York’s health commissioner encouraged citizens to wash their hands frequently, to clean homes daily, and to avoid large crowds, especially open-air markets, protests, and workers’ rallies. Citizens needed to keep clear of buildings plastered with yellow quarantine posters. For the time being, they advised people not to travel to Chinatown or “foreign neighborhoods.” Some parents petitioned to have Chinese students barred from the classroom. Letters to the editor blamed the scourge on immigrants, jazz, loose morals, the flouting of Prohibition, bobbed hair, the automobile, and anarchists. Lawmakers argued about whether to add yet another brick in the ever-rising legislative wall of the Chinese Exclusion Act. They called for a return to traditional American morals and old-time religion. On the radio, Sarah Snow exhorted her followers to turn away from jazz babies and give themselves over to Jesus. Afterward, an announcer assured listeners that “Pears soap is the one to keep your family safe and healthy and free from exotic disease.”

In Chinatown, a large rock painted with a message—CHINESE GO HOME!—shattered the front window of Chong & Sons, Jewelers. An arsonist’s fire gutted the Wing Sing restaurant overnight; Mr. Wing stood in the softly falling wisps of soot-flecked snow, his sober face backlit by the orange glow as he watched everything he’d built burn to the ground. Police broke up social club meetings and even a banquet celebrating the birth of Yuen Hong’s first son. The mayor refused to allow the Chinese New Year celebrations to go on out of fears for public health. In protest, the Chinese Benevolent Association organized a march down Centre Street to City Hall, where the protestors were ordered to disperse or face arrest and possible deportation. The streets smelled of pork and winter, ash from the burnings and incense from the prayers offered to ancestors they hoped would look favorably upon them in this hour. On every street, red plaques appeared outside buildings to guide the dead back home. Talcum powder dusted the thresholds; entrances were watched for signs of ghosts.

Fear was everywhere.

At a eugenics conference in the elegant ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, genteel men in genteel suits spoke of “the mongrel problem—the ruin of the white race.” They pointed to drawings and diagrams that proved most disease could be traced to inferior breeding stock. They called this science. They called it fact. They called it patriotism.

People drank their coffee and nodded in agreement.

As Memphis Campbell made his runner rounds, his thoughts were elsewhere. He and Theta hadn’t spoken since their disastrous night at Small’s Paradise. Memphis didn’t understand how you could tell a fella you loved him and then run out like that. He missed her terribly, but he had too much pride to call. Theta would need to come to him first.

“Memphis, you listening to me, son?” Bill Johnson asked. “You get that number right?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Johnson. One, four, four,” Memphis said. “I’ll put it in for you, just like I did yesterday and the day before that. Don’t know why you keep playing it if you’re not winning.”

“Call it a hunch,” Bill said, but he sounded angry. The bluesman cocked his head, angling it toward the sound of Memphis’s voice. “Heard a peculiar story this morning over to Floyd’s. You know that ol’ drunk, Noble Bishop?”

“I know him some,” Memphis said. His stomach had gone to butterflies.

“Never known him when he’s not stone-cold drunk or shaking like a old dog from the lack of it. But this morning, he showed up to Floyd’s sober as a deacon and asking could he work around the shop sweeping up. Said he had a visitation from an angel. A miracle.” Bill paused a moment to let his next words sink in. “A healing.”

“Is that so?” Memphis said, trying to keep his voice even.

“It is.” Bill’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Seem like a waste of a miracle, you ask me. What’s that old no-account drunk gonna do with a gift like that? He prob’ly be back in the gutter by next Tuesday,” Bill spat out. “The Lord sure works in mysterious ways.”

“That’s what they say,” Memphis said and smiled.

“That is, in fact, what they say,” Bill said, and did not smile.

When Memphis got home, there was a telegram waiting for him.

DEAR POET, SORRY FOR THE DISAPPEARING ACT. FEELING MUCH BETTER NOW. P.S. HOTSY TOTSY TONIGHT? YOURS, PRINCESS.

“Who sent you a telegram?” Isaiah asked, wide-eyed. “Somebody die?”

“Nope. Everybody and everything is very much alive,” Memphis said, feeling like there had been two miracles.

That night, Henry and Ling set their alarms for their longest dream walk yet—a full five hours. The next day, Henry woke to Theta sitting at the foot of his bed, glaring at him through a cigarette haze. Light seeped under the roller shades.

“What time is it?” Henry asked. His mouth was dry.

“Half past three. In the afternoon,” Theta said tersely. “You look like hell.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Knight.”

“I’m not kidding. How long before you can get up outta that bed?”

Henry’s muscles ached like he’d been moving furniture all night long. He ran his tongue across chapped lips. “I’m right as rain. Just got a little cold, that’s all.”

“No, you’re not okay.” Theta slapped down a piece of paper. It was an advertisement cut from the newspaper for a lecture by “Dr. Carl Jung, renowned psychoanalyst” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. “This egghead fella, Jung—he knows all about dreams. Maybe he knows about dream walking. Maybe he could help you, Hen.”

“I’m fine.”

“I think we should go.”

“You go.”

“You could at least hear what he has to say—”

“I said I’m fine!” Henry snapped.

Theta flinched. “Don’t yell,” she whispered.

“Sorry. Sorry, darlin’,” Henry said, feeling guilty and angry at the same time. His teeth chattered and his stomach hurt. “Come sit next to me. It’s so cold.”

For a second, it looked like Theta might give in and lie down next to him with her head on his chest, like old times. Instead, she swiped back the newspaper advertisement and headed for the bedroom door without looking back. “I gotta bathe. Rehearsal’s in an hour. In case you care.”

At rehearsal, Henry was so exhausted he could barely concentrate.

“Henry! That was your cue!” Wally barked from the front row.

Henry looked up to see the dancers glaring at him.

“Sorry, folks,” Henry drawled, snapping back to the present. For a second, his eyes caught Theta’s. He saw the worry there just before it edged into anger. He tried to make her laugh with a silly face, but she wasn’t having it.

“If there’s anything I hate, it’s having my time wasted. Let’s get this show on the road,” she announced to no one in particular, though Henry understood the comment was meant for his ears.

Other stories appeared here and there: A couple of subway workers vanished underground. Their lanterns were found still glowing in the tunnel they’d been hollowing out for the extension of the IRT. A pocketbook belonging to a Miss Rose Brock mysteriously ended up on the tracks near the Fourteenth Street station. Despondent over a failed love affair, she’d gone to a speakeasy on the West Side with friends and disappeared. Suicide was feared. A token booth clerk was suspended on suspicion of drinking when he swore he saw a faintly glowing ghost down at the dark end of the tracks. One minute, the pale thing was crouched on its haunches, he claimed, and the next, it skittered up the walls and out of sight. Some riders reported seeing odd flickers of greenish light from subway train windows. Diggers working on the construction of the new Holland Tunnel refused to go below. Down in the depths, they’d heard the terrifying swarming sounds of some unnameable infestation. A Diviner had been called in to give his blessing; he insisted it was all clear, but the workers knew he’d been paid to say it, and now they would only go down in groups and wearing every one of their charms against bad luck. The vagrant population was down; all the unfortunates known to frequent subway platforms, sewers, and train tunnels for warmth in the winter had seemingly disappeared in a matter of days.

On the West Side, two boys had been playing near a storm drain when one was suddenly swept away. Police searched the area below the grate, shining flashlights in sewer lines. They found nothing except for the poor boy’s baseball and one of his shoes. But the surviving child insisted that it wasn’t the water to blame, for he’d seen an unearthly pale hand reach up from below and yank his friend down by his ankle, quick as a rabbit snatched by the strong jaws of a trap.

People disappeared. That wasn’t unusual in a city where ruthless gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Al Capone were as famous as movie stars. But the missing weren’t gangsters “disappeared” after a disagreement or turf war. Handmade signs appeared on lampposts and outside subway entrances, desperate pleas from frantic loved ones: VANISHED: PRESTON DILLON, FULTON STREET SUBWAY STATION. MISSING: COLLEEN MURPHY, SCHOOLTEACHER, AUBURN HAIR, BLUE EYES, TWENTY YEARS OF AGE. DO YOU KNOW: TOMAS HERNANDEZ, BELOVED SON? LAST SEEN ENTERING CITY HALL SUBWAY STATION. LAST SEEN IN THE VICINITY OF PARK ROW. LAST SEEN LEAVING FOR WORK. LAST SEEN. LAST SEEN. LAST SEEN…

But these were insignificant stories in a city full of them. These random accounts were pushed to the newspapers’ back pages, past flashy reports about Babe Ruth driving his new Pierce-Arrow touring car to Yankee Stadium or a shining picture of Jake Marlowe surveying the marshy ground of Queens for his Future of America Exhibition or exhaustive reports on what the Sweetheart Seer wore to a party with her beau, the dashing Sam Lloyd.

For the newspapers, it seemed, were typeset with dreams of their own.

“You write a lot of love songs. Have you ever been in love?” Ling asked Henry on the eighth night as they waited for the train.

“Yes,” Henry said and did not elaborate. “How about you?”

Ling remembered looking into Wai-Mae’s eyes.

“No,” she said.

“Smart girl. Love is hell,” Henry joked. He sat down at the piano and played something new.

“What is this song?” Ling asked. It sounded different from the other songs Henry had been playing. Those were forgettable. But the piece taking shape now was strange and lovely and haunting. It had weight.

“I don’t know yet. Just something I’m playing around with,” Henry said. He seemed embarrassed, like he’d been caught telling his deepest secrets.

“I like it,” Ling said, listening intently. “It’s a sad sort of beautiful. Like all the best songs.”

“Is… is that a compliment?” Henry put a hand to his chest in a mock-faint.

Ling rolled her eyes. “Don’t get cute.”

Sister Walker had been driving for twelve hours straight, so while she napped in her room back at the motel, Will kept a grip on his coffee cup and stared out the window of the Hopeful Harbor diner. Crepuscular light veiled the tops of the snow-dusted hills. The sky was a distant bruise. A bronze plaque in front of the courthouse across the street commemorated a spot where George Washington had once tasted victory. Quite a few Revolutionary War battles had been fought in this part of the country, Will knew, battles that turned the tide of the war and helped decide the fate of a new country, taking it from an exciting idea of self-governance to possibility and then reality. A government by the people, for the people.

America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.

Will knew this, too.

“More coffee?” the waitress asked Will and poured him a fresh cup anyway. “Shame you’re here at such a miserable time of year. The road up into the mountains is awful treacherous just now.”

“Yes,” Will said. “I remember.”

“Oh, so you’ve been here before?”

“Once. It was a long time ago.”

“Gee, what you ought to do is come back in the spring, drive on up there to the old Marlowe estate. Beautiful grounds. It’s closed now, but they open it up in the spring.”

Will fished out a quarter and left it on the table beside the full, untouched cup of coffee.

“Thank you. I’ll do that,” he said.

Back in the motel, by the weak light of a bedside lamp, Will read through his stack of clippings gathered from newspapers around the country:

THE BOSTON GLOBE

“… I was walking in old Salem, up near the hill where they used to hang the witches, you see, when Buster, my dog, barked up a storm, and a terrible feeling come over me. I saw them silhouetted by the mist in their black dresses, some with heads wobbling on broken necks and eyes dark with hate.…”

THE CEDAR RAPIDS EVENING GAZETTE

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Stuart of Altoona have asked for any assistance in locating their daughter, Alice Kathleen, who disappeared on her way home from a territory band dance. The orchestra in question, the Travelers, has also disappeared, and curiously, no other territory bands can remember much about them at all, though there are many accounts of people who’ve gone missing once the band has come through town.…

THE NEWPORT MERCURY

… Passing by the site of a former slave auction block, the ship’s captain, John Thatcher, claimed to hear terrible cries and swore that he saw, for a moment, stretched out along the port, the ghosts of whole families in chains, their eyes on him in accusation, inciting in him a feeling “as if a day of reckoning were at hand…”

THE DOYLESTOWN DAILY INTELLIGENCER

… Mrs. Coelina Booth will not enter the woods beyond her home anymore, for she believes they are haunted by malevolent spirits. “I noticed the birds had stopped singing in our trees. Then I got a chill for no good reason, and I heard giggling. That’s when I saw them—two phantom girls in pinafores with teeth sharp as razors and all around them the bones of the birds.…”

… The longtime groundskeeper reported graves desecrated and one tomb left open.…

… Graves disturbed… cattle mutilated…

… Sudden fog rising up on the road late at night near the old church cemetery…

… The farmer discovered his faithful horse, Justice, by the drinking pond, “torn apart and covered in flies.…”

… Claimed to see a gray man in a long coat and a tall black hat out in the field during a lightning storm…

… Claimed to see a man in a tall hat standing in the graveyard under a yellow moon…

… Claimed to see a man in a tall hat leading a band of ghosts into the dark woods…

As the last of his convenient illusions tore away, Will turned off the light and slipped into bed.

But sleep did not come for a very long time.