The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery)

by Max McCoy

  Death stares impassively at me.

  “You think I could have a few minutes to talk directly with Charlie Howart back there in the baggage car? If you would be kind enough to call your widdershins away from his coffin for just a few minutes so I could have a word, it might prove terribly useful to the case I’m working on up there, in my waking life.”

  Death folds his robed arms.

  “Go look for the temporary pass,” he says. “If you don’t find it, you will be trapped on this train forever in your dreams. There’s only one way out, and that’s to step off at the end of the line—in which case your waking life ceases as well. The other option is to stay aboard and eventually go mad. And I’m not sure but that I wouldn’t go mad as well for having to suffer your questions.”

  15

  I moved out of the Dodge House before dawn on Wednesday morning, the day after receiving the subpoena, but left a note promising to pay my outstanding balance within the month—even though I didn’t know how I was going to manage it. It scared me to be moving out of the hotel, because the room was pleasant and clean, and had been the only safe place I’d known since my childhood. But better to move out, I thought, than be thrown out.

  It took me only a few trips to walk my belongings to the agency, where Eddie already awaited me in his cage. There was neither a bed in the office nor a washstand, but I would have to deal with those everyday things once I returned from Colorado.

  It was 400 miles to Denver.

  I had gone to the Dodge City depot and traded the round-trip ticket to Canon City for a one-way ticket to Denver, and had gotten one dollar and fifteen cents in change.

  By rail, it would take only 27 hours, counting the time for stops and to change trains. Starting at the Santa Fe depot at Dodge, I would head west for 275 miles. At Pueblo—in the middle of the night—I would board a northbound Denver & Rio Grande train for the rest of the way, arriving in Denver at nine o’clock in the morning. I hoped that would give me enough time to walk to the courthouse.

  At ten minutes before time for me to board the train, I sat at my desk in the agency, my valise packed, and a letter to Doc McCarty in front of me. The letter explained my trip to Denver and asked that Doc—who had a key to the agency—would visit Eddie twice a day, to feed and water and talk to him. I had considered writing a letter to Calder as well, but I didn’t know when he would be back—or if he would care when he was.

  “Dammit, Jack,” I said.

  Eddie beat his wings, as he knew something was amiss.

  “Nevermore!” he cried. Then, uncharacteristically, he slipped into another poem. “Dream within a dream!”

  He had been taught to utter the lines for a stage act in which I recited bits and pieces of Edgar Allan Poe, and he finished many of the lines for me. The act was part of a larger spook show in which I would cheat people out of their money by pretending to answer, from the spirit world, their questions about dead loved ones. We hadn’t performed the act in more than a year.

  “I’m sorry, Eddie,” I said. “Perhaps we can play the game, just you and me, when I get this rotten Colorado business finished.”

  He stretched his wings and cocked his head and gave me a look that signaled incredulity.

  Then it was time to go.

  I started for the door, then hesitated. Going back to my desk, I removed Syrinx of the Seven Worlds and slipped it into my bag. Then I closed and locked the door behind me.

  Pausing next door, I knelt to slip the note to Doc McCarty under the door to the pharmacy.

  “Miss Wylde,” someone called behind me. “Oh, Miss Wylde.”

  It was Rose, from the China Doll, clutching her butterfly-pattern silk robe flapping loosely around her.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “The Sky Pilot is gone.”

  “I’m sorry, Rose,” I said, standing up. “Was he better?”

  “Much better, but Miss Phossy say he no longer can stay in the storeroom without doing work. When I go to check on him this morning, he was gone. What do I do?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do, Rose.”

  “But what if he walks off onto the prairie again?”

  “It’s not like you could have kept him chained up,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, misunderstanding. “I should have used a chain to keep him from getting away.”

  “No,” I said. “He may be crazy, but he’s a grown man, and you have to let him make his own decisions—even if it is to walk into prairies in the middle of a Kansas summer.”

  “I don’t understand him,” Rose said. “He had everything here. A place to stay, plenty to eat. And he had me. He had me, Miss Wylde, as a friend. All he had to do to make Miss Phossy Jaw happy was to do a little sweeping and cleaning. He decided to walk away instead.”

  “Men,” I said. “They’ll break your heart every time.”

  “Oh, Miss Wylde,” Rose said. “My heart’s been broken so many times it’s just like the china doll of the name, you know? Thrown down and cracked and not in one piece anymore. But I just wanted to be his friend.”

  I embraced Rose, patting her gently on the shoulder.

  “You go drink some tea. You’ll feel better.”

  She stared at me.

  “I have to catch a train, Rose,” I said. “But I hope you find your Sky Pilot. None of us has enough friends that we can afford to lose one.”

  “I just hope he’s still alive,” Rose said.

  Then I picked up my valise and walked to the depot, where the hulking and huffing black locomotive and yellow cars were waiting. The sky was the color of gunmetal, and the temperature was already uncomfortably hot; in another few hours, it would be another Kansas scorcher.

  As I stepped from the platform to the train, I remembered the last time I had boarded a train with almost no money in my pockets and facing an uncertain future—that had been just over a year ago, when I boarded the train that brought me to Dodge City.

  16

  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  Sitting in the witness stand, with my hand on the Bible, and before a packed federal courtroom, I swore that so help me God I would. The crowd didn’t make me nervous—I had played to audiences this large or larger—but my appearance did worry me. I hadn’t slept on the train, my clothes were covered in the dust and cinders that accompany steam travel, and my hair—well, let’s just say my hair had notions of its own.

  “Would you state your name and your current address?” the prosecuting attorney asked. He was an imposing, white-headed figure who had a habit of planting his feet and addressing his remarks to the ceiling over the jury box.

  “Ophelia Wylde,” I said. “Dodge City, Kansas.”

  “What is your occupation, Mrs. Wylde?”

  “I prefer Miss Wylde,” I said. “For the past year, I’ve run a consulting detective agency.”

  “Is there anything unusual about this agency?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’d advise you not to play games with the state.” This was directed in a booming voice to a spot about six feet above my head. “Answer the question, please.”

  It was at this point that I noticed, over to the side of the courtroom in the first row, a disreputably dressed group of men chomping on cigars and pipes, and with notebooks and pencils at various states of ready. Reporters. Every Denver paper appeared to be represented, as well as an out-of-town correspondent or two.

  “Miss Wylde.”

  “I answered your question,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything unusual in what I do. And I’ve traveled four hundred miles in the past twenty-seven hours to appear here, for a reason I know not, at considerable expense and tribulation, not to mention the toll it has taken on my personal appearance. I must look like a banshee.”

  Laughter rippled through the courtroom.

  The judge rapped his gavel.

  “The jury is instructed to carefully separate the
travel-worn appearance of the witness from the credibility of her statements,” he said. He was a gentle man, with longish black hair and a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose.

  “Does that include her mannish dress?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Mister Smith, this is ordinarily the place where your attorney would object to such a remark,” the judge said, directing his remarks to a pale and small-looking man hunched at the defense. “I am pointing this out as an example of the burden you have placed upon yourself by being your own counsel.”

  “I can afford no lawyer,” Smith said.

  “Very well,” the judge said. “The jury is advised that a manner of dress is little indication of veracity, and that Miss Wylde’s attire—while unusual—is appropriate for the setting. This is still the west, and only a little removed from the frontier, and we cannot expect professional women to dress as do the ladies in Boston or New York.”

  “Understood, your honor.”

  “Miss Wylde,” the judge continued, “you suggest that you don’t understand why you’ve been called as an expert witness here. Is that the case?”

  “It is, sir. I rushed here from the train depot and just arrived in the courtroom in time to hear my name called. I have conferred with no one about my reason for being here.”

  “The court apologizes,” the judge said. “But that was the intent. You have spoken to no one regarding your appearance here today?”

  “Only the unpleasant man who served the papers to bring me here,” I said, “and he was remarkably uninformed about the affair.”

  “And you do not personally know anyone here in the courtroom today?”

  “No, they are all strangers to me.”

  “As are the clients of Eureka Smith?”

  “I have met none that I am aware of.”

  The judge nodded.

  “This is an unusual feature in an unusual case,” the judge continued. “The court has called upon you as an expert witness because of the particulars of the charges. My name is Judge Isaac Stone. Mister Eureka Smith, the man sitting at the table there, has been accused of fraud for producing photographs that purport to show departed loved ones. The prosecution feels that this is part of a scheme to extort money from bereaved families here in Denver. Mister Smith has pleaded not guilty to the charges and claims the images have actually captured the shades of these beloved individuals. Would both you, Mister Smith, and you, Mister Decker, agree that this accurately summarizes the problem before the court?”

  “I do,” the prosecutor boomed.

  Smith nodded.

  “Please stand when you address the court,” the judge said. “And you must speak, so that your words can be captured by the court reporter.”

  Smith stood, somewhat unsteadily. His brown suit, which was much too big, was of a fashion that went out before the Civil War.

  “Yes, your honor,” Smith said.

  “Good,” the judge said. Then he turned to me. “What the court would like is for you to attempt an experiment for us.”

  “What kind of experiment?” I asked. “Your honor, I mean.”

  “We want you to examine some photographs that Mister Smith has taken and render an opinion as to whether they are genuine or not.”

  “Sir, I am unfamiliar with the photographic process.”

  “There is another expert, an Abraham Bogardus, who will inform the jury about the scientific principles involved. What we would like you to do is to examine the photographs and tell us whether you think, well, whether you believe they capture actual ghosts.”

  “All right,” I said. “I can try.”

  “That’s all we can ask,” the judge said.

  “But how on earth did you decide on me?”

  “Let’s try to keep our questions to a minimum,” Judge Stone said. “Suffice it to say the court has read about your exploits in some of the western papers and noted your claimed expertise in otherworldly communication.”

  I nodded.

  “What will happen now is that both sides get to question you about your credentials, which includes your education and background and so forth. Mister Decker, proceed.”

  The prosecutor thanked the judge, then stood and approached me.

  “Let’s see, I believe my last question was about your current occupation.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m a consulting detective.”

  “And I asked if there was anything unusual about your work. Now, I’m going to ask that question again, but a bit differently—would an ordinary person consider there is anything unusual about your work?”

  “Well, as the judge said, it involves communication with the dead.”

  “So, you talk to spirits.”

  “Yes, sir. Or rather, they talk and I listen.”

  “How do they talk? Is it like you and I speaking now?”

  “Not like that,” I said. “Seldom are there direct questions or answers. It’s more like I get to listen as they talk to themselves, or sometimes they act out things that happened in life that aids the detection of crime.”

  “What kinds of crime?”

  “All kinds,” I said. “But murder a specialty.”

  “Murder, is it?” he asked.

  “It’s printed on our cards.”

  “Our cards?”

  “My partner is a bail bondsman and bounty hunter.”

  “I see. And how long have you been doing this?”

  “A year now.”

  “And how were you occupied before that?”

  “I didn’t have a regular job,” I said quietly.

  “Were you a wife and mother, then? Or a school teacher?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Speak up, please. The jury cannot hear you.”

  “No,” I said louder.

  “Tell us, then, precisely what you were.”

  I remained silent.

  “Are we to guess?” Stone asked. “Should we start our list with fallen woman and—”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  “And yet you do not enlighten us.”

  Decker put his hands in his vest pockets and turned away from me.

  “Miss Wylde,” the judge said. “You must answer the question.”

  “I was a trance medium.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand.”

  “A trance medium,” I said. “But I was a fake. I did exactly what Eureka Smith is accused of doing now, only I didn’t use photographs. But it was trickery just the same. I pretended to contact the dead in order to extract money from my clients.”

  “Isn’t that what you do now?” Decker asked.

  “No,” I said. “I discovered—well, quite accidentally I discovered that I actually could speak to the dead. I confirmed that the tenets of Spiritualism, which I had believed in when young, were true, that the spirit does survive the death of the physical body. And I learned that I could help these restless ghosts cross over.”

  “Cross over?”

  “To leave their attachment to the earth and continue their journey.”

  “To heaven?”

  “You could think of it that way.”

  “How about hell?”

  “None of the spirits I’ve helped seemed bound for that place,” I said. “Which is more than I can say for some of the living persons I meet every day.”

  More laughter, and more gavel rapping.

  “And you charge for this service?” Decker asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “Oh, I mean to, but I can’t bring myself to take any money from the people we help. I feel too guilty.”

  “You won’t be in business long.”

  “That’s what my partner says.”

  Stronger laughter. Harder gavel banging.

  Decker walked over and placed a hand on the witness box, as if he were about to counsel an errant daughter. He looked me in the eye now, for the first time.

  “Let me be sure we have this right,” he said. “You were once
a liar and a cheat, but aren’t anymore. You really can talk to ghosts, but you can’t get all of your questions answered because they don’t converse like us. You solve crimes with the aid of these spirits, but you don’t charge the people who are helped by these acts of supernatural detection because you feel guilty. Is that about right?”

  “It sounds bad when you put it like that.”

  “I wouldn’t know any other way to put it,” Decker said, then looked away. “You must admit that it sounds quite damning. Can you not admit that?”

  “No,” I said. “You take—”

  “That’s all,” Decker said. “I have no more questions.”

  “But I didn’t get to finish,” I protested.

  “There was no question left unanswered,” he said.

  “Pardon, Mister Decker, but there was,” the judge said. “You asked Miss Wylde to admit that it sounded damning and you did not let her finish.”

  “It was rhetorical, your honor.”

  “From where I sit, there is no such thing,” the judge said. “Miss Wylde, you may finish your answer.”

  I nodded my thanks.

  “You might compare my habits to that of a great many citizens of Denver City on a Sunday morning. They sit in a church pew and sing praises to a being that can neither be seen nor heard. They listen with their hearts, and many of them believe they have direct communication with this otherworldly presence. They are earnest in these endeavors, or at least most of them are. They have no promise of material gain. Their only recompense lies in the spiritual realm. They are told that the sins of the past have been forgiven. Never once are they accused of charlatanism or trickery or dissembling.”

  There was silence in the courtroom.

  “Nothing more, your honor,” Decker said.

  “Mister Smith,” the judge said, “it is now your opportunity to ask questions.”

  Smith stood stiffly.

  “Thank you, but no,” he said. “I have no questions.”

  “None at all?” the judge asked.

  “No, sir. I will let my work speak for itself.”

  The defendant sat down.

  “Very well,” the judge said. “Thank you, Miss Wylde. You may step down, but please remain close at hand. The court will now take a thirty-minute recess, in which opposing counsel will meet in camera to discuss particulars of the experiment.”