Onyx Webb: Book Two

by Diandra Archer

  Dane pressed the channel changer a few more times and stopped when he found South Park. Dane had met Trey Parker once at a club in Amsterdam. Trey was funny and cool. Besides, you could never go wrong with an episode of South Park.

  A warning came on the screen, letting viewers know the episode included images of the prophet Muhammad, which might be offensive to some.

  Go, Trey.

  Dane finished the rest of the Ben & Jerry’s and considered getting dressed to go over to DJ’s Chophouse to have a drink at the bar while Robyn finished her shift. He’d have to call a cab. Or, then again, he could simply follow the train tracks directly into downtown.

  God, how long had it been since he’d walked anywhere? Or worked out for that matter?

  Dane threw on a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt. He grabbed his wallet and went into the living room to turn off the TV, but just before he did a face appeared on the screen.

  It was a face he knew.

  Vooubasi.

  It was the psychic medium who’d conducted the séance for Koda at the Casa Monica Hotel, but he was dressed differently.

  “Hello, this is Vijay Sharma,” the man on the TV screen said, “Host of the new series here on A&E, inviting you to tune in for the premier episode of…”

  Oh, no.

  “…How Stupid Can You Be?! In the first episode, watch as I pretend to be a psychic medium from India…”

  This was going to be bad.

  “…and convince an otherwise intelligent person into thinking I am actually speaking with the dead! And…”

  Really bad.

  “…you won’t believe the celebrity we trapped!”

  Really, really bad.

  In Loll…

  The girl found herself stumbling through the grayness again but something was different.

  Not the surroundings…

  No, it was something else.

  Something in her.

  It was a sense of awareness.

  Of understanding.

  She still had no idea of who she was or where she was or when it was, yet she had an awareness that these things—space and time and being—truly existed.

  And there was something else.

  When she reached out and touched the mirror—against the rules—and saw the young man looking back at her.

  It was the difference between the two worlds…

  The one in which she found herself—the one that was gray and dull and listless—and his world…

  A world alive with color…

  A world with the sounds of laughter and music.

  Music?

  Yes, that was the word for it.

  Ever since she’d started going to the hotel she’d found herself drawn to two things…

  The mirror…

  And the piano.

  The piano in the hotel lounge meant something…

  Something important to her, something personal.

  What were the rules again?

  Oh, yes…

  Rule one: Do not touch an animal.

  Rule two: Do not touch another person.

  Rule three: Never, ever, under any circumstance, touch a mirror.

  It seemed there were no rules about touching the piano. Besides, she’d broken the rule about touching the mirror and nothing had happened.

  The girl found her way back to the hotel again, though she had no idea how she was able to find it.

  The mirror was still missing.

  But the piano was there.

  She made her way behind the piano, to the bench, and sat down.

  I know how to play, the girl thought.

  She lifted her hand and looked at the tip of her finger—the one she had touched to the boy’s finger through the mirror—and saw that it still had most of the purplish-green color to it.

  The rest of her was gray, but her finger had color.

  Maybe remembering that she could play the piano had something to do with touching the boy?

  She looked down at the keys.

  Make two tight fists…

  Open fingers and stretch them out…

  Relax fingers completely…

  Place fingers on keys in starting position…

  Form a dome with fingers curved…

  Breathe in…

  Breathe out…

  Where did all that come from?

  A memory from her past?

  Then two words entered the girl’s mind…

  Be magnificent.

  The words made her happy.

  “Be magnificent,” the girl said aloud…

  Then she began to play.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Desoto, Missouri

  October 16, 1935

  It had been three days since anyone had seen Stick Boy, and Sister Katherine Keane assumed the worst. Why would he run away, as Sister Mary Margaret claimed? He had nowhere to go. When pressed for her reasoning, the elder Sister said the proof was the seventeen dollars that went missing from the Christmas fund kept in her desk—money that disappeared the same day the boy had.

  Sister Katherine Keane wasn’t buying it.

  Neither were Declan or Tommy.

  Stick Boy came to Declan the night before and told him what Mar Mar had asked him to do.

  “I told her I didn’t want to, but she threatened to…”

  “She threatened to do what?” Declan asked.

  Stick Boy lowered his eyes and began to sob. “She said she’d tell everyone about Father Fanning… and… and…”

  “And what?” Declan asked.

  “Father Fanning and me,” Stick Boy finally managed.

  “Jesus,” Declan said, shaking his head.

  Stick Boy looked up. “You won’t tell anyone, will you, Declan?”

  “No,” Declan said. “But if either of them tries anything with you again, you come to me, okay? Come to me, and I’ll protect you.”

  Declan never got the chance.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Tommy asked. Declan didn’t think—he knew. It was Sister Mary Margaret for sure. But proving it was something else entirely.

  “What do you think about going to Sister Kay Kay?” Tommy asked.

  “That’s a good idea,” Declan said. Not only was the younger nun easy on the eyes—even with the big scar on her lips, which she tried to hide with makeup—he felt they could trust her.

  “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  Declan and Tommy found Sister Kay Kay in the chapel kneeling before a statue of St. Therese of Lisieux, someone for whom Katherine felt a special affinity.

  St. Therese had found God at the age of eleven, and so had Katherine. St. Therese was one who openly spoke her mind, as did Katherine. Most importantly, both Sister Katherine and St. Therese had died young—only God returned Katherine to earth to continue his work and kept Sister Therese by his side.

  Declan and Tommy waited silently as Sister Katherine completed her supplication then stood and straightened her habit. “You’re here about Stick Boy, correct?” Sister Katherine said addressing the boys. “I knew you’d be coming.”

  Sister Kay Kay listened as Declan and Tommy told her what they knew.

  “Fear not,” she said when they finished. “This wrong shall be righted through my hand. I will see to it personally. You have my word. Now you’d best run along before Sister Mary Margaret arrives.”

  As Declan and Tommy left, Sister Mary Margaret approached the chapel just as Sister Kay Kay had predicted. The older nun eyed the boys but said nothing as they passed and then entered the chapel.

  “Yes, Sister?” Katherine asked.

  “You are needed in the infirmary,” Sister Mary Margaret said. “I hope Misters Mulvaney and Bilazzo are not feeding you any of their tall tales. Anything you think I should know?”

  “Yes,” Sister Katherine said. “You should know they are under my protection now, mine and God’s.”

  When Sister Katherine arrived in the infirmary she was told a man had arrived at the o
rphanage with his extremely ill wife.

  “A farmer found them stranded by the side of the road,” the orphanage doctor said. “He dropped them here because he didn’t think she’d make it all the way to a hospital.”

  Sister Katherine looked across the room and saw a man sitting by the side of the woman’s bed, holding her hand. “Do we know what is wrong with her?” Sister Katherine asked.

  “No idea,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “I was hoping you could sit with them until…”

  Sister Katherine understood—there was no expectation of recovery. She made her way to the side of the bed opposite the man and saw the woman, her skin so gray it looked as though someone had rubbed it with ashes.

  “Hello, my name is Sister Katherine. Can you hear me?”

  “I think she may already be gone,” the man said in a thick German accent.

  Just then the sick woman’s eyes fluttered open. With great effort, she slowly lifted her hand, reached up, and gently touched the scar running through Sister Katherine’s lips.

  “Katherine,” the ill woman whispered.

  “Yes, my name is Sister Katherine,” she said soothingly.

  “Katherine… from… the…”

  Sister Katherine leaned closer, the woman’s voice so soft and hoarse it was barely audible.

  “…basement.”

  Katherine’s eyes grew wide and her breath caught. She leaned back and suddenly realized who the woman was.

  “Onyx?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Orlando, Florida

  April 22, 2010

  The premier episode of the new A&E show, How Stupid Can You Be?, aired at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 22.

  The show was hosted by cable TV personality Vijay Sharma.

  Dane had gone straight to Koda’s penthouse after seeing the advertisement two weeks earlier and broke the news. Now, Dane and Robyn—who had become inseparable after their day together at Disney World—sat on the sofa in Koda’s penthouse apartment on the thirty-first Floor of the 55 West building in downtown Orlando. Koda and Mika Flagler sat directly opposite them, with Mika’s enormous dog, Tiny, a half-Great Dane, half-Newfoundland mix, on the floor by her feet.

  “I think you’re worried over nothing, honey,” Mika said, smoking a Virginia Slims Light with one hand and scratching the dog’s head with the other. “It’s probably someone else.”

  “It’s going to be me,” Koda said flatly, shooting a look at Dane.

  Koda had tried repeatedly to reach Vijay Sharma at his production company, but no one would tell him anything. The identity of whoever had been duped was a closely guarded secret.

  The phone number Vooubasi had given Koda had been disconnected, of course.

  “It’s starting,” Dane said, turning up the volume on the TV.

  When the upbeat music intro ended, Vijay Sharma sauntered to the center of a studio stage and introduced himself to the live studio audience who’d clearly spent the last thirty minutes being coached to clap and cheer on command.

  As far as Sharma’s appearance, he looked the same—yet, at the same time, very different. Gone was the long black and gray hair that hung past his shoulders that night at the Casa Monica. His hair was jet-black now, short and neatly trimmed. Also gone was the Beatles-era Nehru jacket, replaced by a navy blue Armani suit and maroon silk tie.

  The only thing about him that was the same were the ridiculous, over-sized platform shoes, something a short person—most likely with an inferiority complex bigger than the shoes themselves—would never be without, no matter where they were or what disguise they were wearing.

  Damn it, Dane thought.

  They’d been played.

  “For the last several hundred years,” Sharma began, “the method of choice for communicating with the dead has been the séance, conducted by a spirit medium with the ability to channel messages from the dead to the living.”

  Sharma pointed to a large screen on which a picture of Abraham Lincoln appeared. “During the heyday of the Spiritualist movement, holding a séance was all the rage. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, held regular séances in the White House, attempting to contact her dead son.”

  The picture of Lincoln faded into a new photo of magician Harry Houdini, wrapped in iron chains. “As did Bess Houdini, wife of the famed magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini. Bess held a séance every October 31 for ten straight years after her husband’s death, but the great Houdini never showed himself. And why?”

  The camera came back to Sharma, who smiled before continuing. “Because séances are scams, elaborate hoaxes designed to do one thing—to take advantage of desperate people—more specifically, desperate people with money.

  “But we’re not just going to tell you about the tricks employed by these modern-day charlatans, the so-called psychic mediums that use their skills and deceit to prey on the weak and the desperate—we’re going to show you exactly how it’s done. Using a set of six infra-red cameras designed to take crystal-clear video in the dark, we will demonstrate just how easy it is to trick even the smartest and wealthiest among us.”

  Sharma walked to the side of the stage and stood next to a large round table, covered with a black cloth with a five-pointed star in the middle, drawn in white chalk.

  Dane recognized the table immediately.

  As did Koda.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, tonight we’re going to show you our clever hoax, a hoax we perpetrated on someone who you’d think would know better,” Sharma continued. “But as you will see over the next few minutes, desperation can make otherwise intelligent people do really stupid things.”

  Then Sharma dropped the bomb.

  “The only question now is: Who is the mystery celebrity we tricked into writing a check for $10,000 to talk to a dead girl who doesn’t even exist? Hold on to your seats because the victim of our first show is none other than People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year… billionaire bad boy Koda Mulvaney!”

  A picture of Koda on the cover of People filled the screen behind Sharma. “Well, Mr. Mulvaney, our studio audience has one simple question to ask…”

  Sharma pointed at the studio audience who screamed in unison, “How stupid can you be?”

  And it went downhill from there.

  For the next fifty-two minutes, Vijay Sharma showed various clips from the séance, starting with Koda writing the check for $10,000 and signing the release.

  “This is just standard boilerplate stuff,” Vooubasi said on the video. In reality, it was anything but. Buried into an overly long paragraph of small print was a clause giving the A&E Network and Sharma’s production company the rights to use any and all video and audio recordings of the séance.

  “And just so no one claims we defrauded young Mr. Mulvaney,” Sharma said, “this is Mr. Mulvaney’s uncashed check.” Sharma reached into his pocket and produced Koda’s check, ripped it into pieces for dramatic effect, and tossed them into the air like confetti.

  As it turned out, that was the only good thing that happened the entire hour since there was virtually no money in Koda’s account to cover the check.

  After a commercial break, Sharma came back and showed clips of the production crew installing hidden cameras and microphones throughout the room on the day before the séance, as well as the team of producers and sound engineers gathered in the makeshift control room upstairs.

  But the grand finale of the show was Vooubasi pretending to channel the spirit of Ida Flagler using a voice modulator hidden in the collar of his jacket, and the apparent levitation of the large wooden table.

  “Watch closely as I use hidden metal rods strapped to my forearms—secreted beneath the sleeves of my jacket—to hook the edge of the table and lift it, creating the illusion of levitation,” Sharma said, “without having to use my hands at all.”

  Dane shook his head in disgust. He’d seen the exact same trick used at a séance by a fake medium in Lily Dale when he was a kid, yet still he’
d allowed himself to be fooled.

  “I know what you’re thinking. A big, wooden table would be far too heavy to lift with such a simple device, correct?” Sharma said. He walked back to the table, reached down and lifted it into the air with one hand. “Well, not when it’s made of lightweight balsa wood.”

  Sharma tossed the table across the stage as if it were a plastic toy, and the studio audience broke into wild laughter and applause.

  “Gallup surveys suggest that 77 percent of Americans believe in life after death,” Sharma continued, making sure to look directly into the camera. “Who knows? Maybe you’re one of the believers—maybe you’re not. Me? I’m not pretending to know the answer. But I do know this—as legendary showman P.T. Barnum famously said: ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ That I know for sure.”

  Just then, Tiny barked at the TV screen.

  “That’s right, boy, he’s a bad man,” Mika said, patting the dog on the head.

  Vijay Sharma started to walk away, then stopped—looked directly into one of the cameras—and said, “Oh, and Mr. Mulvaney—in case you’re still waiting by the mirror for Samantha to show up—well…”

  Sharma gave a big sweep of his arm, then pointed at the studio audience who shouted in unison:

  “How stupid can you be?!”

  Within thirty seconds of the end of the show, Koda’s cell phone rang. He looked and saw it was TMZ, so he didn’t answer.

  “I’m so screwed,” Koda said.

  “I don’t suppose this is a good time to tell you I found the mirror,” Mika said.

  Koda glared at Mika. After Mika remodeled his apartment, gutting the entire place without his permission—including the mirror where he saw the girl—he’d demanded she get it back.

  And now she had.

  “Don’t give me that look, honey,” Mika said. “You’re the one who told me to find it.”

  “Get rid of it,” Koda said.

  “What do you mean, get rid of it?” Mika asked. “It took two weeks of searching and cost me $4,000 to buy it back.”

  “I don’t care,” Koda said. “Throw it out, smash it—give it back to the Forsyth Park Hotel, whatever. I never want to see the damn thing again.”