The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

“I’ll bet he did. I hope you didn’t tell him where the thought came from.”

  “Oh, sure. ‘Sylvia Belgrave scanned my reflex centers with a green pyramid and picked up a wheat allergy.’ Believe me, I know better than that. I don’t know why I bothered to say anything to him in the first place. I suppose I was looking for male approval, but that’s nothing new, is it?” They discussed the point, and then she said, “But it’s so hard, you know. Staying away from wheat, I mean. It’s everywhere.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bread, pasta. I wish I could cut it out completely, but I’ve managed to cut way down, and it helps. Sylvia? Are you all right?”

  “A headache. It keeps coming back.”

  “Really? Well, I hate to say it, but do you think maybe you ought to see a doctor?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I know the cause, and I even know the cure. There’s something I have to do.”

  * * *

  —

  When Sylvia was nineteen years old, she fell in love with a young man named Gordon Sawyer. He had just started dental school, and they had an understanding; after he had qualified as a dentist, they would get married. They were not officially engaged, she did not have a ring, but they had already reached the stage of talking about names for their children.

  He drowned on a family canoe trip. A couple of hours after it happened, but long before anybody could get word to her, Sylvia awoke from a nightmare bathed in perspiration. The details of the dream had fled, but she knew it had been awful, and that something terrible had happened to Gordon. She couldn’t go back to sleep, and she had been up for hours with an unendurable headache when the doorbell rang and a cousin of Gordon’s brought the bad news.

  That was her first undeniable psychic experience. Before that she’d had feelings and hunches, twinges of perception that were easy to shrug off or blink away. Once a fortune-teller at a county fair had read her palm and told her she had psychic powers herself, powers she’d be well advised to develop. She and Gordon had laughed about it, and he’d offered to buy her a crystal ball for her birthday.

  When Gordon died her life found a new direction. If Gordon had lived she’d have gone on working as a salesgirl until she became a full-time wife and mother. Instead she withdrew into herself and began following the promptings of an inner voice. She could walk into a bookstore and her feet would lead her to some arcane volume that would turn out to be just what she needed to study next. She would sit in her room in her parents’ house, staring for hours at a candle flame, or at her own reflection in the mirror. Her parents were worried, but nobody did anything beyond urging her to get out more and meet people. She was upset over Gordon’s death, they agreed, and that was understandable, and she would get over it.

  * * *

  —

  “Twenty-five dollars,” Claire Warburton said, handing over two tens and a five. “You know, I was reading about this woman in People Magazine, she reads the cards for either Oprah or Madonna, don’t ask me which. And do you know how much she gets for a session?”

  “Probably more than twenty-five dollars,” Sylvia said.

  “They didn’t say, but they showed the car she drives around in. It’s got an Italian name that sounds like testosterone, and it’s fire-engine red, naturally. Of course, that’s California. People in this town think you’d have to be crazy to pay twenty-five dollars. I don’t see how you get by, Sylvia. I swear I don’t.”

  “There was what my mother left,” she said. “And the insurance.”

  “And a good thing, but it won’t last forever. Can’t you—”

  “What?”

  “Well, look into the crystal and try to see the stock market? Or ask your spirit guides for investment advice?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “That’s what I knew you’d say,” Claire said. “I guess that’s what everybody says: You can’t use it for your own benefit or it doesn’t work.”

  “That’s as it should be,” she said. “It’s a gift, and the Universe doesn’t necessarily give you what you want. But you have to keep it. No exchanges, no refunds.”

  * * *

  —

  She parked across the street from the police station, turned off the engine and sat in the car for a few moments, gathering herself. Her car was not a red Testarossa but a six-year-old Ford Tempo. It ran well, got good mileage, and took her where she wanted to go. What more could you ask of a car?

  Inside, she talked to two uniformed officers before she wound up on the other side of a desk from a balding man with gentle brown eyes that belied his jutting chin. He was a detective, and his name was Norman Jeffcote.

  He looked at her card, then looked directly at her. Twenty years had passed since her psychic powers had awakened with her fiancé’s death, and she knew that the years had not enhanced her outward appearance. Then she’d been a girl with regular features turned pretty by her vital energy, a petite and slender creature, and now she was a little brown-haired mouse, dumpy and dowdy.

  “ ‘Psychic counseling,’ ” he read aloud. “What’s that exactly, Ms. Belgrave?”

  “Sometimes I sense things,” she said.

  “And you think you can help us with the Sporran kid?”

  “That poor little girl,” she said.

  Melissa Sporran, six years old, only child of divorced parents, had disappeared eight days previously on her way home from school.

  “The mother broke down on camera,” Detective Jeffcote said, “and I guess it got to people, so much so that it made some of the national newscasts. That kind of coverage pulls people out of the woodwork. I got a woman on the phone from Chicago, telling me she just knows little Melissa’s in a cave at the foot of a waterfall. She’s alive, but in great danger. You’re a local woman, Ms. Belgrave. You know any waterfalls within a hundred miles of here?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. This woman in Chicago, see, may have been a little fuzzy on the geography, but she was good at making sure I got her name spelled right. But I won’t have a problem in your case, will I? Because your name’s all written out on your card.”

  “You’re not impressed with psychic phenomena,” she said.

  “I think you people got a pretty good racket going,” he said, “and more power to you if you can find people who want to shell out for whatever it is you’re selling. But I’ve got a murder investigation to run, and I don’t appreciate a lot of people with four-leaf clovers and crystal balls.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “Well, that’s not for me to say, Ms. Belgrave, but now that you bring it up—”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice. Detective, have you heard of Sir Isaac Newton?”

  “Sure, but I probably don’t know him as well as you do. Not if you’re getting messages from him.”

  “He was the foremost scientific thinker of his time,” she said, “and in his later years he became quite devoted to astrology, which you may take as evidence either of his openmindedness or of encroaching senility, as you prefer.”

  “I don’t see what this has to—”

  “A colleague chided him,” she said, brooking no interruption, “and made light of his enthusiasm, and do you know what Newton said? ‘Sir, I have investigated the subject. You have not. I do not propose to waste my time discussing it with you.’ ”

  He looked at her and she returned his gaze. After a long moment he said, “All right, maybe you and Sir Isaac have a point. You got a hunch about the Sporran kid?”

  “Not a hunch,” she said, and explained the dreams, the headaches. “I believe I’m linked to her,” she said, “however it works, and I don’t begin to understand how it works. I think…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid I think she’s dead.”

  “Yes,�
� Jeffcote said heavily. “Well, I hate to say it, but you gain in credibility with that one, Ms. Belgrave. We think so, too.”

  “If I could put my hands on some object she owned, or a garment she wore…”

  “You and the dogs.” She looked at him. “There was a fellow with a pack of bloodhounds, needed something of hers to get the scent. Her mother gave us this little sunsuit, hadn’t been laundered since she wore it last. The dogs got the scent good, but they couldn’t pick it up anywhere. I think we still have it. You wait here.”

  He came back with the garment in a plastic bag, drew it out and wrinkled his nose at it. “Smells of dog now,” he said. “Does that ruin it for you?”

  “The scent’s immaterial,” she said. “It shouldn’t even matter if it’s been laundered. May I?”

  “You need anything special, Ms. Belgrave? The lights out, or candles lit, or—”

  She shook her head, told him he could stay, motioned for him to sit down. She took the child’s sunsuit in her hands and closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply, and almost at once her mind began to fill with images. She saw the girl, saw her face, and recognized it from dreams she thought she had forgotten.

  She felt things, too. Fear, mostly, and pain, and more fear, and then, at the end, more pain.

  “She’s dead,” she said softly, her eyes still closed. “He strangled her.”

  “He?”

  “I can’t see what he looks like. Just impressions.” She waved a hand in the air, as if to dispel clouds, then extended her arm and pointed. “That direction,” she said.

  “You’re pointing southeast.”

  “Out of town,” she said. “There’s a white church off by itself. Beyond that there’s a farm.” She could see it from on high, as if she were hovering overhead, like a bird making lazy circles in the sky. “I think it’s abandoned. The barn’s unpainted and deserted. The house has broken windows.”

  “There’s the Baptist church on Reistertown Road. A plain white building with a little steeple. And out beyond it there’s the Petty farm. She moved into town when the old man died.”

  “It’s abandoned,” she said, “but the fields don’t seem to be overgrown. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “Definitely the Petty farm,” he said, his voice quickening. “She let the grazing when she moved.”

  “Is there a silo?”

  “Seems to me they kept a dairy herd. There’d have be a silo.”

  “Look in the silo,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  She was studying Detective Jeffcote’s palm when the call came. She had already told him he was worried about losing his hair, and that there was nothing he could do about it, that it was inevitable. The inevitability was written in his hand, although she’d sensed it the moment she saw him, just as she had at once sensed his concern. You didn’t need to be psychic for that, though. It was immediately evident in the way he’d grown his remaining hair long and combed it to hide the bald spot.

  “You should have it cut short,” she said. “Very short. A crew cut, in fact.”

  “I do that,” he said, “and everybody’ll be able to see how thin it’s getting.”

  “They won’t notice,” she told him. “The shorter it is, the less attention it draws. Short hair will empower you.”

  “Wasn’t it the other way around with Samson?”

  “It will strengthen you,” she said. “Inside and out.”

  “And you can tell all that just looking at my hand?”

  She could tell all that just looking at his head, but she only smiled and nodded. Then she noticed an interesting configuration in his palm and told him about it, making some dietary suggestions based on what she saw. She stopped talking when the phone rang, and he reached to answer it.

  He listened for a long moment, then covered the mouthpiece with the very palm she’d been reading. “You were right,” he said. “In the silo, covered up with old silage. They wouldn’t have found her if they hadn’t known to look for her. And the smell of the fermented silage masked the smell of the, uh, decomposition.”

  He put the phone to his ear, listened some more, spoke briefly, covered the mouthpiece again. “Marks on her neck,” he said. “Hard to tell if she was strangled, not until there’s a full autopsy, but it looks like a strong possibility.”

  “Teeth,” she said suddenly.

  “Teeth?”

  She frowned, upset with herself. “That’s all I can get when I try to see him.”

  “The man who—”

  “Took her there, strangled her, killed her. I can’t say if he was tall or short, fat or thin, old or young.”

  “Just that he had teeth.”

  “I guess that must have been what she noticed. Melissa. She must have been frightened of him because of the teeth.”

  “Did he bite her? Because if he did—”

  “No,” she said sharply. “Or I don’t know, perhaps he did, but it was the appearance of the teeth that frightened her. He had bad teeth.”

  “Bad teeth?”

  “Crooked, discolored, broken. They must have made a considerable impression on her.”

  “Jesus,” he said, and into the mouthpiece he said, “You still there? What was the name of that son of a bitch, did some handyman work for the kid’s mother? Henrich, Heinrich, something like that? Looked like a dentist’s worst nightmare? Yeah, well, pick him up again.”

  He hung up the phone. “We questioned him,” he said, “and we let him go. Big gangly overgrown kid, God made him as ugly as he could and then hit him in the mouth with a shovel. This time I think I’ll talk to him myself. Ms. Belgrave? You all right?”

  “Just exhausted, all of a sudden,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping well these past few nights. And what we just did, it takes a lot out of you.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But I’ll be all right,” she assured him. And, getting to her feet, she realized she wouldn’t be needing any more aspirin. The headache was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The handyman, whose name turned out to be Walter Hendrick, broke down under questioning and admitted the abduction and murder of Melissa Sporran. Sylvia saw his picture on television but turned off the set, unable to look at him. His mouth was closed, you couldn’t see his teeth, but even so she couldn’t bear the sight of him.

  The phone rang, and it was a client she hadn’t seen in months, calling to book a session. She made a note in her appointment calendar and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She was finishing the tea and trying to decide if she wanted another when the phone rang again.

  It was a new client, a Mrs. Huggins, eager to schedule a reading as soon as possible. Sylvia asked the usual questions and made sure she got the woman’s date of birth right. Astrology wasn’t her main focus, but it never hurt to have that data in hand before a client’s first visit. It made it easier, often, to get a grasp on the personality.

  “And who told you about me?” she asked, almost as an afterthought. Business always came through referrals, a satisfied client told a friend or relative or coworker, and she liked to know who was saying good things about her.

  “Now who was it?” the woman wondered. “I’ve been meaning to call for such a long time, and I can’t think who it was that originally told me about you.”

  She let it go at that. But, hanging up, she realized the woman had just lied to her. That was not exactly unheard of, although it was annoying when they lied about their date of birth, shaving a few years off their age and unwittingly providing her with an erroneous astrological profile in the process. But this woman had found something wholly unique to lie about, and she wondered why.

  Within the hour the phone rang again, another old client of whom she’d lost track. “I’ll bet you’re booked solid,” the woman said.
“I just hope you can fit me in.”

  “Are you being ironic?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Because you know it’s a rare day when I see more than two people, and there are days when I don’t see anyone at all.”

  “I don’t know how many people you see,” the woman said. “I do know that it’s always been easy to get an appointment with you at short notice, but I imagine that’s all changed now, hasn’t it?”

  “Why would it…”

  “Now that you’re famous.”

  * * *

  —

  Famous.

  Of course she wasn’t, not really. Someone did call her from Florida, wanting an interview for a national tabloid, and there was a certain amount of attention in the local press, and on area radio stations. But she was a quiet, retiring woman, hardly striking in appearance and decidedly undramatic in her responses. Her personal history was not interesting in and of itself, nor was she inclined to go into it. Her lifestyle was hardly colorful.

  Had it been otherwise, she might have caught a wave of publicity and been nationally famous for her statutory fifteen minutes, reading Joey Buttafuoco’s palm on “Hard Copy,” sharing herbal weight-loss secrets with Oprah.

  Instead she had her picture in the local paper, seated in her garden. (She wouldn’t allow them to photograph her in her studio, among the candles and crystals.) And that was enough to get her plenty of attention, not all of which she welcomed. No one actually crept across her lawn to stare in her window, but cars did slow or even stop in front of her house, and one man got out of his car and took pictures.

  She got more attention than usual when she left the house, too. People who knew her congratulated her, hoping to hear a little more about the case and the manner in which she’d solved it. Strangers recognized her—on the street, in the supermarket. While their interest was not intrusive, she was uncomfortably aware of it.

  But the biggest change, really, was in the number of people who suddenly found themselves in need of her services. She was bothered at first by the thought that they were coming to her for the wrong reason, and she wondered if she should refuse to accommodate such curiosity seekers. She meditated on the question, and the answer that came to her was that she was unequipped to judge the motivation of those who sought her out. How could she tell the real reason that brought some troubled soul to her door? And how could she determine, irrespective of motivation, what help she might be able to provide?