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"Clearly, she couldn’t see everything," the boy in the golf trousers said "That will never happen"

Will rapped his knuckles on the desk "Knock wood, as they say" Will grinned and the College Joes laughed at his superstitious joke He fidgeted with a silver lighter, turning it end over end, occasionally flicking his thumb across the flint wheel so that it sparked "Liberty Anne died a ed from the woods Toward the end, her prophecies beca storm,’ a treacherous time when the Diviners would be needed"

"Diviners?" Evie repeated

"That was her name for people with powers like her own"

"And ould these Diviners do?" the boy in the golf pants asked

Will shrugged "If she knew, she didn’t say She died shortly afterher brother, Cornelius, bereft He becaood and evil, and with the idea that this was a country haunted by ghosts That there was so beyond e see He spent his life--and his fortune--trying to prove it"

The boys fell into heated discussion until one of them shouted over the others "Yes, but Professor, do you yourself actually believe that there is another world beyond this one, and that the entities from that world can act to help or hurt us? Do you believe that our actions here--good or bad--can create an external evil? Do you believe there are ghosts and de us?"

Uncle Will took a cloth from his pocket and wiped the lenses of his spectacles " ‘There are s between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are drea the spectacles over his ears again "That quote is fro or two about both humanity and the supernatural But for your exa concrete inforroaned as Will fired off a dizzying plethora of inforled to keep up

Evie slipped out and went to wait for Will in his office The steady click of the mantel clock kept her company as she took a look around His desktop ash in newspaper clippings and perilous-looking stacks of books Bored, Evie leafed through the newspaper clippings They were reports fros, and such strange goings-on as dead relatives appearing for seconds in a favorite chair and red-eyed "dehtened the caretaker of a junkyard in upstate New York Sos were two or three years old, butan article about a girl who claimed to be able to speak to the dead and who had been warned by "kind spirits" of trouble to coirl’s sudden disappearance when Uncle Will announced his presence with a soft clearing of his throat

Evie shuffled the clippings to one side "Hello, Unc"

"That’s htly "And a tidy one it is, too"