“That psychic party you threw last week was fantastic!” she gushed. “My reading with Gil Godsend was amazing!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Claudia mumbled under her breath. She couldn’t escape Gil wherever she went. “There are no coincidences,” she said, mocking him.
“Gil knew that I’d sprained my ankle during yoga class!” said Sally.
That was just a clever guess, thought Claudia. Sally had hobbled into the coffee shop wearing yoga clothes.
“He knew that I have a Persian cat!”
Claudia assumed Sally had a pet of some kind because her yoga pants were covered in long white hairs.
“He also knew that I was born in Georgia!”
That’s because you still have a Southern accent, thought Claudia.
You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to make these observations. They were obvious to anyone who paid attention to their surroundings. It seemed to Claudia that Gil had used psychology in his reading, but not psychic abilities.
“I was surprised when Adam dared to come through in my reading,” said Rainbow about her deceased husband. “I didn’t think he’d be in heaven. I thought he would have gone straight to hell!”
“You told him to go there enough times!” laughed Sally uncomfortably.
She’d never confess it, but she’d once had sex with Adam in Rainbow’s walk-in closet. Rainbow had walked into her bedroom when Sally and Adam were mid-coitus, so they hid naked behind a bulky fur coat. Well, not entirely naked. Sally was wearing a pair of Rainbow’s stilettos, and exactly the pair that Rainbow happened to be searching for in her closet. When she couldn’t find them she grabbed another pair and finally left the room, none the wiser. Unbeknownst to Rainbow, her husband had slept with several of her friends behind her back.
“Do you remember Gil told me that my aunt was really my sister?” asked Rainbow.
“Don’t tell me…”
Rainbow nodded.
“He was right!” she said. “Indigo had a fake birth certificate her whole life and she didn’t know it! That night after the party we found her real birth certificate hidden in a book in my mother’s old trunk.”
To Claudia, this was probably a hot reading because it was too good. Her mind raced with possible explanations. Gil could have researched Rainbow’s background before the psychic reading. Perhaps Gil somehow planted the second birth certificate. Yes, it all sounded far-fetched, like a plot from an old spy movie, but any of these theories made more sense to her than Gil talking to the dead.
“Gil was incredible…and such a hunk!” enthused Sally.
She had a crush on Gil and meant to hit on him after the group reading, but he had disappeared.
Rainbow looked around the coffee shop conspiratorially.
“Did I tell you about my tryst with Gil?” she whispered loudly. She wanted people to overhear because she was proud of her conquest with the famous and handsome young man. Gil’s good looks reminded Rainbow of her husband when he was younger.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, thought Claudia. Not another client who’d had sex with Gil.
“No, you didn’t tell me!” cried Sally with a touch of jealousy. “Spill!”
“He arrived for the party an hour early. I showed him around my house and then showed him around my…bed.”
Come to think of it, Sally noticed that Rainbow looked slightly disheveled that day. She leaned in towards Rainbow.
“What was he like?” she demanded to know.
“He was big, if you know what I mean,” she said with a sly smile. “And he had stamina.” Bitterness crept into her voice suddenly. “He had so much stamina I discovered that he’d also slept with my sisters during the party…”
Gil’s womanizing also reminded Rainbow of her husband.
Sally acted shocked but this was juicy gossip. She would be on the phone telling their friends straight after her coffee date with Rainbow. She was also determined to book a private reading with Gil.
Claudia couldn’t stand it any longer. She had to say something but she wouldn’t win friends and influence people by interrupting the women’s conversation and blurting out, “You’re wrong and psychics don’t exist.” She decided to approach Rainbow and Sally in the only way she thought they would listen to her.
She glided over towards them.
“Hello ladies,” she said in a smooth voice. “I was just noticing this beautiful aura around you both. I thought I’d come over and share that with you.”
Rainbow and Sally looked at each other like they’d just heard something truly profound.
“Are you a psychic?” Sally asked Claudia.
“I am,” she replied as she looked out of the window dreamily.
“We just had a group reading with Gil Godsend and it was such an incredible experience!” said Sally.
“Oh, Gil and I go way back,” Claudia said casually.
Something in her voice made Rainbow think Claudia had slept with Gil too.
“Can you do a reading for us now?” Sally asked.
“Don’t be tacky, Sally!” Rainbow rebuked her. “That’s just like asking an off-duty doctor to take a look at your mole.”
But Claudia hoped they would ask her for a reading. She had a plan.
“No problem,” she said with a wistful smile. “It’s my duty to share my abilities whenever I can.” She waved her hands in the air mystically. “I can’t just turn my ability on and off, but let’s see what happens…”
In imitation of Gil, Claudia closed her eyes and breathed in and out deeply. She opened her eyes slowly and fixed them on Sally.
“You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself,” Claudia said.
Sally’s eyes widened and she nodded vigorously. She craved acceptance from others. During conversations with her friends she bragged incessantly about her possessions and name-dropped all of the important people she knew. She tended to buy her friendships with expensive gifts. She flattered her friends to their faces, but when they weren’t around she gossiped about them and backstabbed them. Sally was just as tough on herself. She was very self-critical and always putting herself down. She was too fat, too old, and too ugly. She often told herself that she wasn’t good enough and that she couldn’t do anything right.
“You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage,” Claudia said.
This was true. Sally had a law degree but she hadn’t practiced in decades. Her husband was a wealthy property developer and when they married and moved from Georgia to California she quit her job to become a housewife. She preferred the term “homemaker”. When she wasn’t shopping, going to yoga class, or homemaking, she spent her time raising money for various charities, but she still reminisced about her days as a criminal lawyer where she grilled witnesses until they broke down and cried. Without her career she felt like she’d lost herself over the years.
“You often have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or you have done the right thing,” Claudia said.
Sally always second-guessed herself. She spent too much time churning over everything she said and did. She played scenes out in her mind of how things might have gone if she’d acted differently. She had crippling self-doubts about every single decision she made, big or small, whether it was about her marriage or simply the drink she ordered that morning. She still thought she should have had a latte instead of that cappuccino…or an affogato, just like Rainbow’s. She always wanted what other people had.
“At times you are extroverted and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved,” Claudia said.
Sally was known as the life of the party. She was always the loud and obnoxious one in the room, especially when she had a drink in her hand. But this self-assurance was only superficial and masked her lack of confidence. Behind closed doors she was withdrawn and quiet. Sometimes she wouldn’t even answer when the doorbell rang. Occasionally,
she feigned sickness to avoid going to a party so she could stay at home, drink wine, eat chocolate, and read romance novels instead.
She suspected everyone hated her anyway.
“…And some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic,” Claudia said.
When she was browsing in a department store or shopping in a supermarket, Sally often had the feeling that a talent scout would discover her and that suddenly she’d be launched into a new modeling career or land a part on a TV soap.
“I hope my reading gave you some insight into yourself,” said Claudia with a flourish of her hand.
“You read me exactly!” Sally cried. “Can you read Rainbow too?”
“Oh, you don’t have to,” said Rainbow shyly, although she was keen to hear what Claudia would say about her. Gil Godsend had given her a remarkably accurate reading, but she was a little wary after her personal experience with him.
“Do you have a possession I can hold for me to connect to your energy?” Claudia asked her.
Rainbow wore a rhinestone brooch that was attached to her scarf. She unpinned it and handed it to Claudia.
“This psychic technique is known as psychometry,” said Claudia as she caressed the smooth metal. “I feel that this piece of jewelry has a connection to a female relative.”
“Yes!” confirmed Rainbow in surprise.
Men don’t usually wear brooches…
“This brooch is very important to you… I feel it belonged to your mother.”
“It did! She used to pin it to her scarves, so I wear it that way too.”
The odds were that it belonged to her mother. Claudia thought that the piece of costume jewelry must be of great sentimental value because the other jewelry Rainbow wore was made of precious metals and stones.
“Your mother passed long ago.”
“That’s right. She died in the 1970s.”
The brooch looked vintage because of its retro style, while the blue rhinestones and metal had lost their luster suggesting they were decades old.
“I see that this brooch has been kept in a jewelry box or a chest for some time… You found it again recently and have started wearing it in memory of your mother.”
“Yes! I just discovered this in my mother’s trunk.”
The brooch had a musty smell so Claudia supposed it had been stored away and forgotten until recently.
“Your brooch not only tells me about itself, it also tells me about you,” Claudia said mysteriously. “I have the impression that you live in a large house with views.”
“That’s true! I can see the Golden Gate Bridge from my house.”
Claudia noticed that Rainbow was dripping in designer labels. She assumed that the woman was wealthy, especially if she could afford a psychic reading with Gil Godsend, and that she probably had a fancy home.
“I see water near your house. I sense that you live near the sea.”
“Yes! I live in Tiburon overlooking the Bay.”
Claudia guessed that Rainbow lived near the water. Most people in the Bay Area did.
“I feel that travel is in your near future…”
“Wow, yes! I’m about to visit an ashram in India.”
On the floor beside Rainbow’s feet was a shopping bag from a travel store.
“And you had a recent… encounter… with a man that was less than satisfying, didn’t you?”
Rainbow paused.
“Yes…” she said glumly.
Claudia overheard Rainbow talking about her fling with Gil, and noticed how her voice changed when she spoke about his betrayal.
Rainbow was astonished. This girl was almost as good as Gil Godsend.
“How did you know all of that?” she asked.
“You told me.”
Rainbow and Sally looked confused.
“What do you mean?” Rainbow asked.
“I didn’t use psychic powers, I used my powers of observation,” explained Claudia. “The way you dress, your jewelry, and everything around you tells me about you. When I pay attention to these clues I can tell you about you. This is called cold reading. It’s a way to convince strangers that you know all about them. You don’t have to be psychic to be a psychic.”
“But my reading was different,” said Sally. “How did you know so much about me too?”
“Let me tell you about the Barnum effect,” said Claudia. “This is named after P.T. Barnum, the showman who once said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’.”
Rainbow realized she was about to become the sucker for this minute.
But this was too much like a lecture for Sally.
“Last century a psychologist named Bertram Forer gave a personality test to his students,” Claudia continued. “He ignored their answers and handed them all the same results. Most of the students ranked their analysis as highly accurate although Forer took the profile straight out of an astrology book. He discovered that people interpret vague and general personality descriptions as unique to themselves without realizing that the very same description can apply to most people. For your reading I quoted lines straight out of Forer’s original profile,” she said with a chuckle. “It works just as well today as it did then.”
“So you’re not psychic?” Rainbow asked.
“I’m not psychic, and neither is Gil Godsend.”
Sally liked Claudia better when she believed she was a psychic. She wondered if Claudia really was psychic but was in denial. She still wasn’t convinced that Gil Godsend wasn’t psychic.
Sally had an appointment with her esthetician to have Botox and dermal filler so she thanked Claudia politely for the reading but rolled her eyes behind her back. She didn’t like skeptics. Then she air kissed Rainbow and left the coffee shop. She had phone calls to make.
But a light bulb went on in Rainbow’s mind…
She had to shop for a new cashmere pashmina for her pilgrimage to the ashram in Tamil Nadu, but she couldn’t stop thinking about everything Claudia had said.
Could Gil have used these techniques too?
She sidled up to Claudia.
“Woman to woman, can I talk to you about Gil?”
“Absolutely.”
Claudia hoped this would happen.
Rainbow told her about the psychic party and Gil’s highly accurate readings. Claudia explained how hot readings work and suggested that he may have cheated. Then Rainbow admitted she had propositioned Gil before the party. He was resistant at first but then he’d changed his mind suddenly when she remarked that he looked a lot like her deceased husband. Then he’d said something weird about her husband being there with them the whole time. Later that night she discovered he’d also had sex with her sisters at the party. She felt hurt and betrayed.
A few days later she ran into Gil in an antique store in Napa. He was as charming and polite as always but he acted like nothing intimate had happened between them. When she confronted him he denied having had sex with her or her sisters. He said that it would be unethical for him to do so with a client. Then he said something strange about his body being taken over by the spirits of their deceased husbands.
“I couldn’t tell if he was insane or if he’s had so many women that he simply couldn’t remember me.”
“Or… he could be a fraud,” proposed Claudia.
Rainbow considered this possibility silently.
She smiled.
“Well, it was nice to have met you, Miss.”
She walked out of the coffee shop a skeptic…
It was time for Claudia to speak with Banachek.
She pulled her phone out of her handbag and gave him a call. He was busy working on a new trick. He was trying to figure out how to convince a man living in New York City that he had time traveled one morning and woken up in a medieval village in England during the Black Plague.
Claudia told Banachek that she had met with the women who’d complained to her about Gil Godsend. In her opinion, Gil was using hot and cold reading techniques during his p
sychic readings with Kate and Abby. She believed he was doing extensive background research on his clients that he used in his readings to give the appearance he was psychic. Then he was manipulating these women into having sex with him, if not actually forcing them, but then claiming it wasn’t him. He said he was channeling their dead husbands and that he had no recollection of what had happened.
Then Dawn had contacted Claudia as a client. Ironically, she had been a client of Gil Godsend who’d convinced her that her husband was cheating when he wasn’t. Gil manipulated Dawn into having sex with him, which almost destroyed her marriage.
“Then, as I was sitting here in a coffee shop this morning I overheard a woman at the next table telling her friend about how Gil did a group reading at her home and had sex with her and her two sisters! Not at the same time though,” she added, realizing how that sounded. “To win their trust I pretended to be psychic and gave her and her friend a cold reading to demonstrate the tricks used by psychics. She then confided in me that a few days later she saw Gil again but he denied any memory of having sex with her and her sisters. Then he claimed that his body had been possessed by the spirits of their dead husbands.”
Banachek was mortified.
“It’s one thing when psychics are fraudulent but it’s another when the psychic is a psychopath,” he said in disgust. “You’ve got to stop this guy.”
Claudia dropped her head.
“I know,” she said reluctantly.
“I’ll help in any way I can,” he promised.
“I’ll need it,” she said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Why don’t you start by going to some of his live shows and seeing what he’s up to nowadays?” Banachek suggested. “Watch out for any new tricks.”
“Will do,” she said. “I’ll report back what I find.”
“Keep gathering evidence,” he said. “We’ll get him on something. Don’t give up…”
Chapter 14
As part of his national tour to promote Messages From The Other Side, Gil hit the road for a series of live shows. Tonight he was appearing at an event center in Irvine, California.
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