The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  He watched me pace, his expression closed. “Go ahead.”

  “You’re the one who wrote the article about her for the New Society,” I said. “I think that, deep down, you are wondering whether somehow that paper, the work you did with her, is the reason for her murder.”

  He was silent.

  I turned on my heel and looked at him. “Am I right?”

  He dropped his gaze. “All right. I always felt a little sorry for Gloria. I think she was used by everyone she knew, myself included. Everyone except, possibly, you.” He raised his eyes to mine again. “But yes, part of me thinks it’s possible. Her death was so soon after the story in the newspapers. If I’m somehow responsible, I want to know.”

  Our gazes locked for a long moment as a gust of wind blew up and threw rain at the windows. I lowered my glass to my side. “How could that be?” I asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I wrote that would make someone want to murder her. I just feel . . .” He shrugged. “I can’t rest until I know for certain that I didn’t contribute to this.”

  “Did your tests include spirit sessions?” I asked him.

  “At least a dozen.”

  “Perhaps it has to do with someone she found on the other side. Something she learned.” I thought it over. “My mother and I learned a lot of family secrets in the spirit medium business. Things people take to their graves.” We had spoken once to a woman who had died giving herself an abortion, though the fact was kept from her grieving husband. We had heard about infidelity, and babies given away for adoption, and money stashed in places where the heirs would never find it.

  James looked thoughtful. “I don’t recall any shocking revelations offhand. It’s a possibility, I suppose, but it’s a distant one. If Gloria died because she uncovered secrets, then she could have uncovered those secrets during her regular business. That means hundreds of clients, hundreds of suspects. And Scotland Yard is already covering that.”

  “It would be someone recent,” I said, thinking of Inspector Merriken saying, Murderers tend to be impulsive. “Someone from the past few weeks. Perhaps someone on this schedule is a client because they read the article.”

  “Or perhaps he’s just a madman who likes killing spirit mediums.”

  A shiver of cold fear went down my spine. “In which case, James, your article is blameless.”

  “Except that it gave her publicity in the news.”

  “Gloria made her own publicity. And Ramona’s name was never in the papers, so why did she die?”

  “It’s a gut feeling, Ellie. None of which tells me why you don’t want to pass information to Scotland Yard.”

  I sighed. I was exhausted, but since my experience that afternoon, a part of me felt more awake than I could ever recall. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but if you get carted away in a black van and interrogated in a windowless room somewhere, please don’t blame me.”

  “Ellie, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “George Sutter,” I said. “You told me in Trafalgar Square that you don’t know who he works for.”

  “No, and I still don’t.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “But whoever it is, it’s an office that has full access to every report Inspector Merriken submits regarding this case.”

  James blinked, then shoved back his chair and stood. “And you know this how?”

  “Because he told me when he hired me. He said he’d give me everything I need from Scotland Yard’s reports. And he has.”

  I told James everything I knew that hadn’t been in the papers, or anywhere else—that she’d been hit once in the face, very hard, to subdue her, and then she’d been stabbed calmly through the heart and dumped in the pond. I told him what George had said of the layout of the property, the possibility of neighbors, the paths the killer could have taken to and from the Dubbses’ house.

  “The damned coroner’s report and everything,” James said when I finished. “You waited a hell of a long time to tell me, Ellie.” His voice was rough, and he was starting to use profanities, which meant he was tired.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He dropped onto his single narrow sofa, his body graceful even in exhaustion. “Did Sutter tell you the Dubbses had left town? Did you already know that?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t know. The Yard may not know, either—I got the information from my own channels.” He looked up at me, standing in the middle of the floor in my stockinged feet, holding my forgotten wineglass. “What is it?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean the look you’re giving me. What is it?”

  I gathered my scattered nerves, took a breath. I felt jumpy, terrified and strangely free at the same time. “I’m going out there,” I said to him. “To the Dubbses’ property. I don’t care that they’re not there. I’m going myself.”

  He watched me from his lazy pose on the sofa. “And what do you expect to find there?”

  “Answers. Courage, perhaps.” I swallowed. “I’m going to do what Gloria asked of me, what George wants of me. I’m going to find her on the other side. I think that if I’m there, in the place where she died, I may have the backbone to do it. And I have to do it soon.”

  James was quiet, his face in shadows. “All right,” he said at last.

  “There’s more,” I said. “I’m going to travel in daylight. No hiding. Let whoever wishes to follow me follow me.”

  “Ellie.”

  “I can draw him out, James,” I said. “If he wants me, he’ll be able to find me. At least this time I’ll be ready.”

  “For what? Are you going to tackle him to the ground, then? Arrest him?”

  “No. But the police can, if we have Inspector Merriken on our side.”

  James looked at me for a long moment, then shook his head. “He’ll never go for it. Never.”

  “He already has.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When I used the telephone in the hall to call my daily woman, I tracked down the inspector as well. I told him I had reason to believe the killer will come after me next. And that our best chance of success is to have me draw him out of London.”

  “And he believed all of that? With no evidence?”

  That had struck me as well. I hadn’t wanted to tell the inspector about my close brush with Ramona’s murderer, because he’d want to bring me into the Yard for questioning. “I think he has his own reasons for believing it. Certainly Ramona’s murder creates a pattern of dead spirit mediums, as you pointed out. He may know that Davies is missing as well.”

  James’s expression had drawn tight; I could tell he didn’t like the plan. “So you’re to go to Kent tomorrow, and the police will follow you. That’s what the two of you cooked up?”

  “He’s moving fast, James,” I said, meaning the killer. “If he’s going to get rid of me, he’ll move as quickly as he can. He’s proven he can kill with impunity when he can fade into the city crowds. In the country, he’ll be more visible, less able to hide.”

  “He did a good job of killing with impunity in Kent, it seems to me.”

  “Because the police didn’t expect him.” I put down my glass and walked toward him, my voice softening. “I’ll be fine. The inspector is going to call on the local police for extra men. All I have to do is take the train to Kent, then hire a motorcar. Inspector Merriken and his men will already be there, watching the roads—there are only so many roads one can take in that part of the country. The killer has evaded everyone so far, but he’s just a man. He has to transport himself somehow.”

  He raised his gaze to me, still unconvinced. “And George Sutter. You think he won’t hear about this plan?”

  “If he wants to send men from MI5, so much the better. I’m sure the ins
pector could use the help.”

  I watched him wrestle with himself. He wanted nothing more than to accompany me to Kent, to guard me, to keep me safe. But his presence would be the ruin of the entire plan. “I’m coming with you,” he said finally. “I’ll go to Merriken first thing in the morning. I won’t get underfoot with his men, but I’m going to be there.” He sighed. “It doesn’t matter how safe you think you are. You’re going to be in danger, Ellie.”

  “I know.” I stepped close, unable to stop myself. “I don’t care. I want to stop him. I have to. I’ve done nothing with my life for the past three years, and now I want to do what’s right, no matter the cost. I don’t care if he puts his hands around my neck and—”

  “Stop it.”

  I had reached the sofa, and I lightly hiked up the hem of my skirt and straddled him, sitting on his long, hard thighs. He smelled clean and pleasantly pungent, a man who had put in a long day. He did not move beneath me, but his gaze darkened and his expression went blank with careful control.

  “But you won’t let that happen to me,” I said, my voice a whisper. “I know it. You won’t.”

  His shoulders were tense under the palms of my hands, his skin hot through his shirt. He took a harsh breath and gripped my hips, his hands strong and surprising, and then he slowly let his palms slide upward to my waist, pulling at the fabric of my dress.

  I leaned toward him and rubbed my cheek against the rasp of his, the sensation setting fire to everything inside me. I was wild in a way that had nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with being on a sofa with James Hawley, with the rain outside and the two of us the only people in the world. “I saw the way you looked at me,” I said to him. “The first night you met me. And when you saw me in Trafalgar Square.”

  His hands twitched a little on my waist, then gripped me tighter. “I’ve been very patient.”

  “I know.” I rubbed my cheek against him again.

  His breath seemed to grow heavier. “What changed?”

  “I grew up,” I said, knowing as I spoke the words that they were true.

  His hands slid up my rib cage, his thumbs running along my torso and the undersides of my breasts, and I nearly gasped.

  “You’re agreeable?” he said, his breath harsh in my ear.

  “Yes.”

  He put his hands to my face, as he had earlier that night, and looked into my eyes. The shadows played with his brows and his cheekbones, the fine line of his mouth, the column of his neck. He was staring at me with the intensity I recognized. “Do you see anything?” he asked, seeming to push the words from his throat. “When I touch you like this?”

  It took a pathetic second for me to understand what he meant, and I shook my head. “No. Nothing.”

  His gaze flickered, his thoughts dark behind his eyes. His thumbs moved across my cheekbones. “Whatever it is about you,” he said, “I’m damned if I know.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” I breathed, and he pulled me in and kissed me.

  In the bedroom, he unbuttoned my dress and let it slide to the floor. He knelt before me as I sat on the edge of the bed and unfastened my garters from my stockings. I looked down at his dark blond head and the bunched line of his shoulders, feeling his fingers moving between the fabric and my skin. I had never done this before, and he probably knew it. I was supposed to be afraid, and I was supposed to be ashamed, but somehow I couldn’t make myself feel either. All I knew was that I could have died that day without ever having felt this kind of pleasure, pure and so intense it was nearly painful. When he rolled down my stocking and pressed a kiss to the inside of my thigh, I couldn’t breathe.

  He rose and pulled off his shirt, his skin supple in the watery light.

  As night moved through its darkest hours, I learned several things. That I liked being touched extensively, and in a certain way. That James Hawley had a length of scarred skin on the side and back of one thigh. And that when he twined his fingers with mine and pinned my arms over my head, both of us gripping the headboard—and when his body came over mine, musky and heavy—I no longer cared about what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be, and everything else was washed away.

  * * *

  “I want to tell you something,” I said to him in the dark, hours later. I rolled over, tucked my chin into the crook of his neck. “The answer to a riddle.”

  He moved sleepily, crooked a hand behind his head as he lay on his back. “Go ahead.”

  I sighed a breath and closed my eyes, letting the secret lift from me like a burden. “My mother was a true psychic,” I said. “There is no doubt of it. If you’d tested her when I was a child, you would have been amazed.”

  He was quiet, awake now and listening.

  “When I was sixteen, my mother told me she no longer wanted to do spirit sittings. I had developed my own powers by then, and she had trained me to use them. My father was gone, and there was no reason for us to pretend anymore. She told me that she got no pleasure from the sittings and she wanted to stop. She didn’t tell me the truth, which was that she couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “Ellie, are you saying—?”

  “Yes. It took me a long time to figure it out, I suppose. I didn’t question it, and I just wanted to help. She didn’t want to do the sessions anymore, but she was The Fantastique and I was just a girl. She was the one the clients came to see. So she did the sessions, and I sat behind a curtain and summoned the messages from the dead.” I traced a finger idly on his chest as I spoke, touching the springy hair there and feeling his heartbeat. “But she didn’t stop because she chose to. Do you see? She stopped because she had to. Because her power disappeared.”

  “Of course,” he said softly. “It explains why we heard so many accounts of her powers. It could have been a natural function of age.”

  “That day you did the tests on us.” I rolled over on my back, looked at the dark ceiling. “I always asked myself why she agreed. Gloria asked her to do it, fed her a line about how important it was to her that the New Society complete their research.”

  Far from offended, James made a derisive sound. “Gloria didn’t care about the New Society. She liked the attention our tests gave her, and she liked to show off. But mostly she did it because we paid her for every test we did. Rather handsomely, too, by the end.”

  “I know. My mother knew it, too. Gloria suspected from the first that it was me doing the sessions, and she wanted proof of it. She wanted to win; it was just her way. So I couldn’t understand, at first, why my mother would agree at all to a session that was set up expressly to humiliate her.”

  “That wasn’t the intent on my part,” James said.

  “That’s because you didn’t know what the outcome would be. But we all knew it, my mother most of all.”

  He seemed to think this over. He rolled to his side, propped himself on one elbow, and looked down at me. “So why did she do it?”

  “She was tired,” I said. “She was sick by then, although she hadn’t seen a doctor yet. She didn’t want to lie anymore. I think that, instead of admitting that her powers were gone and she’d been lying, it was just easier to let herself be officially exposed.”

  “And it kept you out of it.”

  I shrugged against the pillows. I hadn’t thought of that. “Perhaps.”

  He ran one finger along my collarbone. I tried not to shiver. “You’ve left out one part of the riddle. What about you, that day of the tests? We saw no trace of your powers, either. And yet yours are strong.”

  I thought back on that day, sitting tied to the chair, helpless and angry. “I could have tried,” I admitted slowly, “if I had calmed myself down, made myself focus. It wouldn’t have been easy in that situation, but I could have done something. But—” He traced my collarbone again, and I lost my train of thought. “She asked me not to. She made me promise. She told me that if I he
lped her that day, she would never forgive me.”

  “Jesus, Ellie. I had no idea.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know you didn’t. You couldn’t have. I was angry at you for so long, even though I wished you’d noticed me at the same time.”

  “I did notice you.”

  I blushed in the dark. “It was embarrassing, yes. But you didn’t force my mother to agree to it—no one did. You didn’t know what else was going on. You didn’t know that my mother was using you, using the Society, to get what she’d wanted for a long time. But there’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  I swallowed. “When I went to the New Society office to look for you, I spoke to Paul Golding. I wanted to prove something to him—childish, I know, but there it was. I told him where he’d left his favorite watch, which he’d thought he’d lost. And he pulled it out of his pocket and told me he’d already found it.” I turned and looked up at James’s face in the dark. “That has never happened to me before, James. Never. In all the sessions I’ve done, finding lost items for clients, I’ve never once found an item that had already been found.”

  He took a soft breath. “You think—”

  “Yes. I’ve been having headaches, getting tired. Sometimes my powers go out of control, like at Ramona’s séance. Other times they don’t work. I could fool myself, I suppose, since much of the time they work as they always have.” I thought of the messages I’d received when Inspector Merriken had brushed my hand, coming as easy as water. “But the truth is that things are changing. Perhaps my powers won’t be gone next year, or the next. But I think they’re leaving me.”

  “My God,” he said, putting the pieces together. “Gloria.”

  “That schedule of hers is too light; it was never like that when I knew her. Gloria could handle three or four appointments a day, and she usually did. Four appointments in a week? Five? It didn’t hit me at first, but it isn’t the kind of schedule she used to handle. And, James, she needed money.”