Intersections

by Megan Hart

  "Can't say as I have."

  "What about a town called Gallow's Grove?"

  She stiffened, and I knew that rang a bell. Nothing ever rattled her. "No."

  "Are you certain?" He must have noticed as well.

  She waved it off. "What about Gallow's Grove?"

  "Madame Nephthys is one of the more prominent mediums there. She is, in fact, more powerful than any psychic I've ever encountered. They say she can summon the dead as easily as you mixed that drink. I just spent a week with her myself and I can tell you with absolute certainty that her talent is unequaled. The things she told me... That she showed me..." He shuddered. "I hoped to convince Harry to see her, but..." The muscles around one eye twitched and he took a deep breath. "Regardless, I suppose it fitting one of the Irregulars visit her. If you became convinced, then surely Harry would come see her as well."

  I read the expression on his face. And then he and I can be friends again, it said.

  Persephone stared at him over the rim of her glass and smiled. "And what will you gain out of my proving she's a fake?"

  He laughed. "I don't think you'll be able to. I believe her gifts are not only genuine but beyond the ability to reproduce."

  "You said that same thing about Margery Crandon."

  Shifting in his seat, he smoothed his mustache with one hand. "Yes. Well. I still believe that Crandon is genuine. Harry may have been able to replicate her gifts, but just because a painter can mimic the image of a sunset does not mean the sun never leaves the sky."

  "Given up on your other theory, then? The one about Harry's debunking skills?"

  I leaned forward at that, curious what Sherlock Holmes thought of my mentor's mentor.

  "I'll pay two thousand dollars," he said, ignoring her question. "Plus expenses."

  I almost jumped out of my seat and kissed him. Two thousand dollars was a year's salary in those days and we needed every dime we could get our hands on since Old Man Gale cut off Seph's allowance. I don't know how much debt she was in that year, but her lifestyle could not have been cheap. They say the parties in The Great Gatsby were based on one of her shindigs. She went to school with Zelda Fitzgerald, so I'd believe it.

  Persephone almost choked on her drink at the offer. She leaned forward, placing the glass onto the coffee table, and folded her hands over her knee. Like that and she was the very picture of composure again. "That's an acceptable amount."

  "Boy, ain't it," I said.

  Sir Doyle smiled and opened his mouth to say something, but she held a finger up and silenced him.

  "But don't think for a minute I'll be compromised," she said. "Whatever I find, that's what's being published, regardless of how it makes anyone look."

  "Agreed," he said and extended a hand.

  Rather than shaking it, Seph held hers out, palm down, as though she were a queen accepting fealty. I thought he might balk at that, having been knighted by actual honest-to-God royalty. Instead he grinned and kissed the back of her hand. Men always did. She played them like violins. Or us, I guess I should say. In the end, she played me, too, I suppose.

  On the train to Gallow's Grove the next morning, I asked what Doyle's theory about Houdini was.

  "It's absurd, really." She closed the folder she'd compiled of news stories about Gallow's Grove's Spiritualists. "He believes our Harry is a powerful medium, one so powerful he can disrupt the abilities of other mediums. Harry hates that theory, but he refuses to show anyone how he does any of his illusions, even the ones reproducing psychic shenanigans, so I suppose he's earned it all with his secrecy."

  "If he never shows anybody," I asked, "how did you learn?"

  She smiled and patted my knee before turning to stare out the window as the city gave way to countryside.

  2

  Founded in 1875, Gallow's Grove was built atop the site of an old county jail. They say three hundred men were hanged there before the Fox sisters came. "The Mothers of Spiritualism," as they were called, spent a month at some kind of tent revival nearby, talking to the ghosts of the hanged men, and it wasn't long until a Spiritualist community sprang up on the site. It had quickly become the kind of place where tourists flocked on vacations and the anniversaries of deaths, eager for an entire town of psychics, mediums, and con artists to prey on their grief.

  At first glance, it didn't look much different than any other small upstate town. The houses were modest wooden constructions, two stories and a porch in most cases. A dozen or so large Victorians filled out the place, most with "Room for Rent" signs in the window, a few even going so far as to call themselves "Inns." Trees lined the streets and crowded the buildings, their early November colors intense to a kid like me used to the gray brick of the city.

  When we arrived, the mayor himself greeted us at the train station. Simon Carmichael was a large man, handsome, fighting hard to give the impression of old money. That trying is what gave him away. Old money had an effortless snobbery to it while his suit and hat clung awkwardly to him and he smiled a bit too much.

  "Miss Gale," he said and extended a hand.

  She stood there eying him for a breath too long. "Why, hello."

  He turned to me. "Mayor Carmichael," he said. "But you can call me Simon. I thought I'd drive you two into town."

  "Connie," I said and shook his hand. "Why's the mayor picking us up?"

  “I was here helping my parents off.”

  He motioned to another train platform where a man who could be his twin if not for the graying hair and lines around his eyes pushed a wheelchair. A woman sat in it, thin and pale, a blanket wrapped around her and a tight green turban on her head. A coughing fit took her and the man leaned over, rubbing her back and whispering into her ear.

  “Your mother?” Seph asked.

  “Doctors say it’s a disease of the nervous system. She’s on her way to see one now.”

  His father glanced our way and frowned as if he heard us talking about his wife.

  “We were prepared to take a taxi cab,” Persephone said. “It sounds like you may have had enough for one day.”

  "Are you kidding me?" He grinned. "I’m just glad the timing worked out. I mean, here you are, an expert trained by Harry Houdini and sent here by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to prove the truth behind Spiritualism. This might be the biggest thing to ever happen to this town.”

  "You're a Spiritualist, then?"

  "I'm a capitalist, Miss Gale. Where others see ghosts, I see dollar signs." He laughed and, strangely enough, she did too. It would have sounded sleazy coming from anyone else, but from him it was charming, sincere even. Honesty was rare in our trade, after all.

  "A hereditary trait?" she asked.

  "The Senator taught me everything I know," he said. "Except how to laugh. That I get from my mother."

  "Wait," I said, playing catch up and not liking it. "Your Pops is a Senator?"

  "State Senator. Need a hand with your bags?" He didn't wait for an answer and grabbed them up.

  It was strange watching this man carry our things. The son of a New York State Senator and the mayor of this town, waiting on us? It didn't help that Simon seemed too young to be mayor. Too young and too kind. In my experience up until then, authority figures tended to be ancient and crotchety. But Mr. Mayor couldn't have been much older than Persephone. I guessed his father got him into office. That's how I'd always heard politics worked, anyway.

  He escorted us over to his automobile, a gorgeous red Lancia Lambda. I whistled.

  "I just picked this up a few days ago," he said and ran a hand along the metal before opening the passenger side door. "It's the only Lancia in a hundred miles."

  Persephone took his hand and climbed in.

  "She's a beaut," I said and crawled into the back with the bags.

  His gaze on Seph, he went: "Yes, she is."

  Honest he did.

  I rolled my eyes but Persephone, weirdly enough, didn't seem to mind the corny come on.

  The car breezed down bumpy
country roads, dust kicking up around us.

  "Independent front suspension," Simon said and patted the steering wheel. "It's really a marvel of our time."

  Persephone reached out and ran a finger across the dials and gauges crowding the dash. "Don't forget the load-bearing unitary body. A simple innovation but one that truly adds to the performance, in my opinion.”

  Simon's eyes lit up. "You know automobiles?"

  "Persephone knows a bit of everything," I said, but he ignored me.

  She moved her hand to the window and let it drape over the outside of the car. "I'm an admirer of any great engineering feat."

  "In your line of work, I suppose you would need to be."

  She cut her eyes over to him and smiled.

  On the rest of the drive, it became obvious they'd taken a liking to one another. The way they touched hands and smiled at each other's jokes, how their eye contact lingered. It didn't surprise me for him. As I've said, Persephone was a knock-out. Even if she hadn't been, the sheer force of her personality would have drawn any man in. But I'd never seen her quite so taken with someone. Oh, I'd known her to flirt, and was pretty sure she had a fella or two she was stepping out with after I hit the sack at night, but this was different. Can't say I blamed her. He was tall and solid, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, intense blue eyes that pulled you in when you talked to him, and so it was easy to see how she might find him attractive.

  She even giggled at some dumb joke he made about a cattle pasture we drove past. I couldn't help but wonder if that was some kind of put-on. I'd never seen Persephone giggle at anyone's jokes. Smile, sure. Laugh when it was a really good one. But giggle?

  She knew Simon from somewhere, that's what I figured. They had some kind of history and for whatever reason were trying to pretend they didn't. I filed that little nugget of intuition away for later, hoping that maybe after she'd had a few drinks I could pry the secret out of her.

  As we drove into town, there were people out milling about, standing on street corners, nervously chatting, hats in hand, women wiping their brows even though it couldn't have been warmer than fifty degrees out. The air was thick with worry.

  Persephone straightened in her seat. "Has something happened?"

  "Someone died," Simon's voice barely above a whisper. "Last night, though they didn't find the body until this morning."

  "Who was it?"

  He glanced at her and turned down a side street. "I don't know. Don't know anything about it yet. First heard about it at the train station. Ah! Here we are."

  The Gallow's Grove Arms was a modest Victorian “inn” with about twelve rooms. It wasn't the kind of place that would go over well in Midtown Manhattan, but out here? Positively luxurious.

  Simon and Persephone said their goodbyes as I hauled our luggage up the walk. The goodbyes lasted a little too long and I wasn't the only one to notice.

  "Well, aren't they just adorable?" an old man on the porch said and snorted.

  "You're telling me."

  He crossed his legs and tapped a pipe clean on the bottom of his shoe. "She should be careful. I hear he's spoken for."

  "She's never careful," I said and lugged the bags in.

  Mrs. Massey, the old woman who ran the place, shuffled us to our rooms, all the while talking about what a fan she was of Houdini's and how much Sir Doyle's theory on Houdini's "powers" interested her. Turned out Sir Doyle had stayed here himself and had gotten along quite well with the townies. He'd wired ahead to arrange our accommodations and the innkeeper was so excited she never shut her trap once until we were in our rooms.

  Persephone, I thought, would dive right into things, doing research, asking around town, but instead she went down for a nap.

  "Don't you want to know about Madame Nephthys?"

  "I think I know everything I need to about her," she said. "What I'm more interested in is this death that has everyone in such a tizzy."

  "Why do you care about that? People croak every day."

  "Yes, they do. But in a town like this, where half the population claim to speak to the dead and the other half are so old they're teetering on becoming the dead, a heart attack or a fall wouldn't work the entire town up, would it?"

  "No. I don't guess so."

  "That means that either someone very important died or there was a murder. Either one is far more intriguing than yet another painted tennis ball floating on a string in the dark. Now, be a doll and see what you can find out, will you?"

  Something ruffled her feathers, that was easy to see. Her palm was sweaty as she handed me some cash, telling me to grab lunch while I was out.

  She closed her door before I could ask if she was okay.

  3

  Persephone was right, as always. Gallow's Grove buzzed with news of the murder. Cops were out, though there weren't many. As I've said, it was a small town. I learned it kept two officers on duty, mostly there for when some sad sack got angry at a medium for contacting the wrong deceased family member. Additional officers had been brought in from neighboring towns, though, and everywhere I walked there was always at least one in view. This was the kind of place with a lot of money flowing through it. Spiritualism had always attracted those rich enough to have the time for boredom. These wealthy tourists also spent their money in the nearby towns, fishing, hunting, going to hear music play, eating at the restaurants. Nobody in this little burgh wanted anything to put a damper on the cash cow that was Gallow's Grove.

  The stiff, it turns out, had barely been seventeen years old. Her name was Caitlin Ennis and what I heard more than anything was how stunningly beautiful she was. That's always the first thing anyone says about a woman who's died, ain't it? A man croaks and everyone talks about how smart and talented he was, what a work ethic he had, how much he loved his folks. A woman dies and it's all about her looks. Unfair, sure, but I guess I understand it some. The world is an ugly and brutal place. Anything else is a rarity and so maybe we should all mourn when something lovely is destroyed.

  Caitlin's mother and father had come to Gallow's Grove about three years prior. Their son died defending some unnamed patch of mud in France and they couldn't quite let him go. They tried every medium on the eastern seaboard, it seemed, but no one had been able to reach their boy.

  At least, no one until Madame Nephthys. She channeled their son for eight consecutive nights. After that, they'd moved to Gallow's Grove and purchased one of the smaller hotels, using the extra money it earned to stay in touch with him.

  Caitlin had been in high school, which around those parts was a triumph at her age. Hell, it was a triumph a small town girl like her hadn't gotten knocked up by seventeen. By all accounts she was smart and funny and determined more than anything to get the hell out of Gallow's Grove.

  Walking around that day, I couldn't say I blamed her. Almost every single house had a sign advertising whatever con they were pulling, all with exotic names and fancy titles. "Professor Montressori's Scientific Palm Reading" and "Visualize the Dead with the Duchess Orsini" and "Madame Elisabetta's Aura Cleansing," that kind of slop. After spending the last year and a half with Persephone busting psychic con men, the atmosphere of Gallow's Grove felt like sewage sticking to my skin. I couldn't wait to get out of there and bathe it off.

  The consensus was that Caitlin hadn't been seeing anyone, or had at least been damned smart about keeping it secret. Oh, there were a lot of potential suitors, don't get me wrong. Girl like that, it would have been strange if there weren't. A lot of boys tossed pebbles at her window and knocked on the door trying to get past her father, but she'd never seemed interested in any of them.

  The old man running the corner drugstore told me she'd come in after school and work a few hours for pocket money. He said she was too mature for her age, that's probably why she didn't take to any of the boys coming around.

  Not that she had a huge amount to choose from. Gallow's Grove's only had a one-room schoolhouse for good reason. I'm sure a lot of those boys throwi
ng pebbles were tourists, young men tagging along with family or friends and who thought a pretty local girl like Caitlin ripe for the picking. But from what I kept hearing, she was made from too strong of stuff to fall for that.

  No one seemed to know how she'd died, so instead of lunch I forked over my cash to one of the cops. He was a tall drink of water, maybe Persephone's age but probably younger, freckles dotting his face and a tuft of red hair sneaking out from beneath his cap. He told me to piss off at first, but I spun some lie about how one of the mediums was saying she talked to the girl as I held out my money.

  "Said Caitlin was shot, three in the chest," I said.

  He curled his lip in disgust. "Jesus. Already with that shit? Body ain't even cold."

  "So it ain't true?"

  Looking around to make sure no one else could hear, he pocketed the money and leaned over. "You breathe a word of this, kid, I swear I'll find you and throw you in the cooler with the meanest three-letter man you ever seen."

  I didn't know what that meant at the time, but it didn't sound pleasant. "I'll keep quiet. Honest."

  Sighing, he looked around again. He was starting to make me feel paranoid.

  "Beaten to death," he said. "Or so it looks like. Doc's still looking her over, but I seen her and it ain't pretty. We found her at the dump. Someone had tried to hide her in the trash." He swallowed and his voice quivered. "Whoever got a hold of her was angry. Real angry. Poor girl." He stood straight again and narrowed his eyes. "Now get out of here. And remember what I said would happen if you talk. I mean it."

  I gave him a mock salute and slipped off to go tell Persephone what I'd learned.

  4

  Standing in front of the mirror, Persephone shifted a cloche hat around on her head as I walked in.

  "Too dowdy," she said and sent it sailing across the room.

  She'd changed into a charcoal dress with a red shawl. The entire ensemble should have looked as dowdy as the hat she'd tossed, but somehow on her it seemed scandalous.