“I sense your questions are more facetious than truth seeking.”
Right on, Mr. T. If this peculiar charade is truth, I’m a linebacker for the Seahawks. “So, where did you get the name? You draw straws for them – if there are straws in your dimension - and you lost?”
“I can see I made a mistake about you.” The gravelly voice slid into the frost zone, its proprietor apparently not pleased with my impertinence.
A silence followed, interrupted only by the tick of the grandfather clock and Tom’s heavy breathing. I felt there should be the slam of a door, because Trafalgar was apparently closing one on me, but perhaps other-dimensional doors don’t slam.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Tom muttered. “You made him mad. He’s gone away.”
I jumped up. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Tom, you can’t expect me to believe—”
“I think he’s capable of retaliation.”
I turned to stare at Tom. Did he really believe some entity from another dimension had been talking through Mary Beth? And that maybe said entity would zap me because it didn’t like my attitude?
The chubby figure on the sofa suddenly stood up. “so sweet of you to—” She spoke as if continuing an already-started sentence, then stopped short when she spotted me. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you come in.”
“This is my neighbor, Andi McConnell. Andi’s Limousine Service.” Tom didn’t give it the limouzeen pronunciation I use for the business, courtesy of the spelling eccentricity of the uncle from whom I’d inherited the limo. Tom, the man whom I’d heard ask for “one of those lat-ee things” at an espresso stand, was suddenly into every-syllable-correct word usage? “Trafalgar wanted to talk to her, so I went out and got her.”
“Trafalgar was here? And asked for her?”
“Yes.”
Mary Beth’s mouth made a little O of awe in her round face. Then, seeing my scowl, her ringed fingers fluttered an apology. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t often show up uninvited. It’s awkward when he does, if someone is unprepared. But you must be someone very special for him to ask for you.” She studied me as if trying to discover something special about me.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt as if I’d stepped into a rather odd dimension right here. Finally I mumbled, “Well, uh, that’s okay. You, uh, don’t know when he’s here?”
“When I invite him, I can tell he’s coming. I get warm all over, as if a wonderful cloud of heat and light is enveloping me, and my face tingles. But while he’s actually here, I’m just not here.”
“So you’re not aware of what he says? Or what other people are saying?”
“I’m just the channel for him to speak to others.”
Oh, channeling. So that’s what this was supposed to be. I’d heard the word, but I’d never known anyone who participated.
“Although I can have someone ask him a question for me and then relay the answer to me later,” Mary Beth added.
“She made him mad.” Tom frowned in my direction as if I’d committed an unforgivable faux pas in any dimension.
“Oh.” Mary Beth touched a finger to her candy-red lips. Then she reached over and patted my arm. “I’m sure it’ll be okay. Trafalgar is usually very understanding and forgiving of those of us on this lower plane.”
“If you’ll pardon me, I find this all very hard to believe.”
“That’s understandable. That’s how we usually feel when we’re confronted with something totally new and foreign, isn’t it?” She unexpectedly giggled, an infectious sound. “That’s how I felt the first time a friend showed me her laptop. How you could just sit up in a tree or anywhere and get on the internet, if you wanted.” Another fingertip to the mouth. “Oh dear, I’m revealing my technology-challenged age now, aren’t I? But that’s how Trafalgar is. No visible connection, he’s just there. Here, actually.”
At the mention of her age, I suddenly remembered what this day was. “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you! It’s the traumatic one, you know, the big five-O.”
“No, I’d never have guessed,” I said honestly. She looked close to ten years younger than that.
“Oh, you’re so sweet!” She patted my arm again, then reached over and ruffled Tom’s hair. “And Tommy is making the age of fifty bearable. The Log Cabin and a limo! And just by being his own sweet self, of course.”
I’d have figured anyone who ruffled Tom’s thinning hair would risk loss of a limb, but he practically wiggled with pleasure.
And Tommy. Sweet self. Not words I’d ever expected to hear in connection with the man who raced to snitch to Animal Control when a neighbor’s dog got loose, complained that other neighbors were naked in their hot tub (which he couldn’t have seen unless he stood on a stepladder at the edge of his back yard), and made a fair attempt to convince the police I could be a murderer when a body was found in the trunk of the limo.
Mary Beth’s unlikely description of Tom should have come off saccharine and phony, but somehow, from her, the words sounded sweetly sincere. And, I had to admit, she’d worked changes in Tom. She stood on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on his cheek, and a pleased blush rose right up through that thinning hair.
I took a closer look at her. Chubby, yes. Hair definitely over-goldy, and too curly too. But sparkly blue eyes, an engaging smile, a vivacious manner, and a girlishly pink complexion. Her voice was now higher and also a bit girlish. Tom was obviously smitten.
“Sit down, won’t you?” she invited. “We’ll talk about this.”
I hesitated, but something the curse of curiosity, I suppose made me drop back to the ottoman. “You’re channeling this, umm, entity from some other dimension to this one?”
“I don’t particularly like that word channeling.” Mary Beth wrinkled her cute little nose. “But I suppose it’s as good as any. There are all sorts of vibrations and signals and waves flowing around us . . . flowing right through us, actually! Radio and TV waves. Cell phones. Wireless internet. Who knows what else? And my contact with Trafalgar comes in that what-else category. My vibrations and his can be synchronized, and then we’re in contact.”
Like that strange story I’d heard once about someone’s tooth fillings picking up radio waves, so the person was hearing rock ‘n’ roll from a molar?
“I suppose someone else might call him an entity or an astral being, but to me he’s my Guide and Helper. Usually I contact and invite him to come, but sometimes, like he did with you, he just shows up.”
“Contact him how?”
“I close my eyes and concentrate, but relax too, and tell him I’d like him to come for a visit.”
“He’s always there?” Never off doing whatever entities do in their other dimension? Or maybe entities didn’t have socks to wash and teeth to floss.
“I’ve never had a problem contacting him. He’s very receptive to communication. But, as I said, I’m not aware when he’s here. He just takes over, and I kind of go away. Then, when he’s gone and I come back, it’s as if no time at all has passed even if it’s been an hour or more.”
Which would account for her starting to speak in mid-sentence, I suppose.
“I may feel somewhat tired, and my voice is hoarse afterwards. People tell me he speaks in a much deeper voice than I do, which I suppose is what causes that.” She smiled. “You’re still skeptical, aren’t you?”
“I don’t believe in the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny.”
She let that snarky jab pass. “Actually, I was skeptical too, when it first happened to me. But then a friend showed me something in the Bible. It’s in the book of John, a verse about God giving us a new helper, and that’s what God did for me, he blessed me with a Helper, Trafalgar.”
Mary Beth was explaining this goofiness with a Bible verse?
Tom looked at his watch. “We’d better get going. Our reservations are for eight.”
Mary Beth apparently saw me surreptitiously eyeing a birdcage filled with silk flowers. “You think my house is a
disaster, don’t you?” She laughed again. “Tom no doubt told you I stage houses, and you’re thinking, why would anyone want someone like me to do that, when my own house looks like this?”
“It has a nice, uh, cozy feeling,” I said lamely.
She waved a hand around the room. “The houses I stage don’t look like this. I keep all these things here to use in my work. It’s easier than storing them away in a warehouse. The right painting or accessory, like that carousel horse or one of those plants, can do wonders to perk up a place. I’ll show you sometime, if you’d like.”
At the moment I didn’t feel like committing to anything with Mary Beth, so all I said was, “Maybe sometime. Although I’d just as soon do it without your friend along.”
She laughed again, that infectious, girlish tinkle. “I can’t promise. Apparently he found you of interest.”
“But Tom says he’s mad at me.”
“He may not request to talk to you again if he feels you’re, oh, negative about him, but if you want to talk to him sometime, I don’t think he’d hold a grudge. He exists on a much higher plane than we humans do.”
Great. I wouldn’t want some superior, higher-plane entity holding a grudge against me. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
My head felt floaty. We were carrying on this conversation as if this were all normal, as if we were discussing a neighbor who’d popped in for a visit. But I also felt a bit confrontational.
“Do you do séances too? Use a Ouija board? Talk to the dead, that kind of thing?”
Mary Beth touched her throat, blue eyes startled. “Oh, my no. I don’t believe in that. Though you did say, didn’t you, Tommy, that one time someone asked Trafalgar about a person who was dead?”
“That woman who thought her husband had hidden some money before he died, and she wanted Trafalgar to ask him where it was. But Trafalgar told her the dead were in a different place than he was, and he had no contact with them.”
Apparently you needed astral diagrams to make proper connections in this area of multi-dimension.
Chapter Three
I drove them to the Log Cabin. The night had turned drizzly and chilly, and Mary Beth was concerned that I was going to be uncomfortable sitting outside waiting for them. I assured her this was my job, I did it all the time, and the limo had a good heater. I asked Tom to call me on my cell when they were ready to leave, and I’d pick them up at the door.
For a moment, as Mary Beth looked between Tom and me, I thought she was going to suggest I come in to dinner with them. Apparently Tom was afraid of that too, because he grabbed her elbow and almost yanked her toward the door of the restaurant. He had the foil-wrapped package in his other hand.
“We’ll see you later, then,” she called back.
“Take your time. Enjoy yourselves.” Perhaps I should have pointed out I was charging by the hour and the longer they took to eat, the fatter my wallet.
Although I’d already decided to give Tom a break on the hourly rate. He’d always seemed more miserly than actually poor, but I doubted his budget allowed for limo service. Right now, I welcomed time alone to think about the peculiarities of this evening, which now seemed even more unreal.
I parked the limo in a secluded corner of the lot and poured coffee from the Thermos I always brought along on evening runs. Then I remembered the Bible I’d started keeping in the glove compartment. I turned on the dome light and got it out.
I found the verse that Mary Beth was probably referring to. John 14:16: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.”
But that wasn’t referring to some Trafalgar-type being. It was the Holy Spirit! I was still tiptoeing down the path of understanding with God, but I knew that much from a Bible study a while back. I hurriedly looked further and found the verses we’d studied in John 16 and Acts that made plain this Helper was the Holy Spirit.
I already had a big skepticism about Mary Beth actually channeling some entity from another dimension, and I was appalled now that I saw how she’d twisted and interpreted scripture to justify whatever it was she was doing.
Fitz. I needed to talk to Fitz about this. I grabbed my cell phone, then hesitated. Fitz wasn’t openly antagonistic toward God. He showed tentative leanings toward the Lord fairly often now. But he was even farther back on the pathway to being a fully committed believer than I was, and I’d recently sensed there were things he’d never confided in me holding him back. He might not understand why I was so disturbed about this misuse of Biblical words.
Yet he was a smart detective, and even though his detective experience had been mostly on his TV show some years ago, he seemed to know something about almost any subject.
I punched his number into my cell phone. The charter boat business had slowed at this time of year, but they were on a four-day sail around the San Juan Islands with some guests from Texas. I was almost ready to give up before he answered.
“Fitz, the man of your dreams, here.”
His phone was set to give a special ring when it was me calling, and his often outrageous greetings always gave me a lift. And maybe he was the man of my dreams. I wasn’t certain yet. Was I the woman of his dreams? Another hmm. But I liked his cheerful self-confidence and didn’t argue the point. I heard music and voices in the background. “Party?”
“One of the guests brought a guitar. I was just doing my Johnny Cash imitation.”
“I didn’t know you could do a Johnny Cash imitation.” Every once in a while some surprising new facet of Fitz’s personality turns up. Never a dull moment with this man.
“Hold on a minute, and I’ll go out on deck where it isn’t so noisy.” A minute later he said, “There. That’s better. It’s cold here, but the stars are out and the water’s calm. Very romantic. You should be here.”
“I’m sitting outside the Log Cabin. My clients are inside, and it’s raining now. No stars. No romance. But I met someone tonight. A man from another dimension.”
Brief pause, as if Fitz was trying to decide if this meant competition for my affections, or if I’d just taken a tour in the Twilight Zone. On second thought, I wasn’t sure I should have referred to Trafalgar as a man.
“Limo client?” he asked finally. “Blind date? Bad referral from a cut-rate matchmaking service?”
“You’re familiar with matchmaking services?” I tossed back.
“It was a facetious question, my dear. It’s just that ‘I met a man from another dimension’ isn’t a statement you hear every day. Tell me about it.”
So I did. From Tom’s surprising request to hire the limo, to the voice booming out of Mary Beth, to her statement that she wasn’t aware of what was going on when Trafalgar was present.
“She actually claims it’s this entity speaking through her?”
“They both do. Tom seems quite in awe of him. I guess it’s a him. The voice sounded masculine. Or at least as masculine as is possible with a woman’s vocal cords.”
“Does she do this for other people? Charge for putting them in touch with this so-called entity?”
“You’re thinking along the same lines I am: what’s in it for her?”
“Right.”
“I don’t know if it’s a money-making venture. The entity didn’t suggest a donation would be nice. But that’s certainly a thought.” A mud-covered Jeep pulled into the parking spot next to the limo. I’d always liked that about Vigland. A Jeep or a limousine, a logger or a lumber tycoon, all were equally welcome. But an “entity” had to be a little unusual even for broad-minded Vigland. “Apparently I ticked him off. He departed rather suddenly.”
“You, my sweet and gracious Andi, ticked off an other-dimensional entity? How do you do that?”
“I wasn’t taking him seriously enough. Maybe I was supposed to ask for insights into world peace or the theory of relativity or something.”
“And you did what? Ask him why lint collects in your belly button?”
; “I didn’t think to ask that, although it does strike me as an appropriate inquiry.”
“You aren’t taking this seriously, then,” he said.
“How could I? I mean, c’mon, an entity from some other dimension talking through this chubby little lady with too much Seriously Blonde on her hair?”
“You’d be more convinced if it were a swami in a turban?”
“No. It’s all preposterous.” And yet
He caught that flicker of unspoken doubt.
“Don’t get mixed up in this stuff, Andi.” Fitz’s lighthearted tone sobered. “It was popular down in southern California for a while.”
“Among your Hollywood people?”
“Among a lot of people. The plumber who came to fix our plugged-up toilet was into it. It can be bad stuff.”
“Bad stuff how?”
“I don’t know what ever happened to the plumber with it, but I knew some people who really messed up their lives. A writer on the show actually broke up her marriage because the guide – that’s how they referred to him - told her she was in the wrong relationship, that her husband wasn’t her soul mate, and she should look for the man who was. A costume designer on a friend’s sit-com had cancer, and she went off her medical treatments because the guide said she should concentrate on inner healing. And she died. Stay away from it, Andi.”
“Did you get involved with it?”
“Not involved, though I went to a group session once. Mostly I figured the whole channeling thing was a big ripoff. The group sessions weren’t too expensive, but the price went way up for a private session. But the whole setup also made me uneasy. If there was anything to it, who knew what you were really making contact with?”
“Like it could be something evil? Demonic?”
“It was a ripoff,” he repeated firmly, without answering the question. “Phony as that pig on TV that could supposedly work mathematical problems.”
I liked Fitz’s no-nonsense take on this. It squelched whatever minimal thoughts I had that it could be real rather than some other-dimensional snake oil. “Thanks, Fitz. I knew you’d have a good insight on this.”
For Whom the Limo Rolls Page 2