by Lucy Ness
“It’s worth a try.” I raised my voice and tried my best to sound as compelling as the mediums I’d seen work back in Lily Dale. “I invite you to join me. Please.” And I bowed and made a flourishing gesture toward the door. “Welcome!”
Doubt washed over her expression, but apparently doubt doesn’t get you far when you come from the wrong side of the tracks. After a second or two of hesitation, Clemmie’s chin went up and her shoulders shot back. As elegant as a duchess, she started up the steps.
At least until she got to the spot where the force field had stopped her before.
She slowed down. She gulped.
“Give it a try,” I said. “I’m right here to help you if you need it.”
And she walked up the next step, and the next, and the next.
Nothing stopped her.
When she stepped into the lobby of the club, I was waiting for her.
“Well, will you look at that!” Clemmie threw out her arms and spun around, taking in the scenery. “I’m upstairs!”
“And you’re not going down again,” I told her. “Unless you want to, that is.”
“What I want . . .” She raced to the front windows and looked outside. “Trees. And grass. And look at those contraptions going by out there on the street. Are those automobiles? They sure don’t look like nothing I ever seen.” She laughed. “Can I really stay up here?”
“I don’t see why not. Nobody but me will know you’re here. Unless . . .” I gave her a careful look. “You’re not planning on haunting the place or scaring people, are you?”
“Kid’s stuff,” she assured me. “I just want to look around.”
She did, racing into the ballroom, hurrying into the restaurant, the kitchen, getting up the stairs to the second floor in a flash, all the while exclaiming her amazement at the furniture, the light fixtures, the carpets.
“We never had anything like this at home,” she told me when I met her on the second floor. “It’s like heaven and the Ziegfeld Follies all rolled into one!”
Her happiness was contagious, and I smiled. At least until I thought about what I was going to do with Clemmie. It only took a moment to come up with the perfect solution. I led Clemmie up to the third floor.
“These are my rooms,” I told her and we peeked inside. “But there are plenty of other empty rooms up here. Pick out the one you want.”
She sucked in a breath. Blinked. Burbled. “You mean, a room of my own? Up here, where there’s light and maybe I can hear music and see people?”
“It’s not as elegant up here as it is downstairs, but—”
I guess the but didn’t matter. Clemmie leaped forward. “Well if you ain’t the duck’s quack!” And she pulled me into a hug that left me feeling chilled, and just a little damp.
* * *
* * *
Clemmie decided that arriving upstairs and being able to see the birds and the trees and watch the traffic that whizzed by outside the club was enough excitement for one day, so when I invited her to come with me to the grocery store and the Laundromat, she declined. By the time I got back (arms weighed down with bags since there was no way I was going all the way back down to the parking lot a second time), I found her in the room she’d staked out as her own. It was at the far end of the third floor and it had large windows that looked out over the back of the building and the maple trees just beginning to flame into autumn colors, and a deep ledge where Clemmie sat, her legs bent and her head on her knees.
“It’s beautiful,” she said before I could even ask how she was finding her first glimpses of the modern world. “But everyone dresses funny.”
I supposed my jeans and the purple sweatshirt I wore with them qualified, so I laughed. “You don’t eat, do you?” I asked her, even though I suspected I already knew the answer. “You don’t mind if I make myself some dinner?”
“Go right ahead.” She slipped away from the window and followed me to my suite, floating over the hardwood floors. “It don’t bother me or nothing. It’s not like I ever get hungry.”
I’d bought myself a bag of salad and an already-prepared chicken breast, and I pulled out a big bowl. “It must be weird to be . . .” Even my years of living in Lily Dale, the largest Spiritualist community in the world, hadn’t prepared me for the moment or taught me what to say. “What I mean is—”
“That it’s strange being dead. You got that right.” She wrinkled her nose. “Took me a while to get used to it.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I don’t think time works the same over here as it does for you,” she told me. “For me, one of your days is more like just a moment.”
I remembered her reaction when she got to the top of the basement steps. “But you knew it had been a lot of moments since you’d been out of the basement and in the light.”
“When I was down there, it didn’t feel like a long time. It just felt . . .” She brushed a finger against the counter that held my coffeemaker, a toaster, and a tiny microwave that I’d had since I got my first job and moved away from the familiarity—and what I’d always thought of as the weirdness—of Lily Dale. Even though there was a smudge of water on the counter, her finger left no marks. As if a shiver had skittered over her shoulders, she twitched. “It felt dark down there.”
A chill scraped my insides. “Dark, for a long, long time.”
Clemmie shot me a smile. “But not anymore.”
“You know,” I told her, “now that you’re upstairs, maybe you can help out. I’m investigating, and if you could keep an eye on people, listen to what they say, watch what they do, you might help more than just by listening at the heating ducts downstairs.”
She didn’t say she would or she wouldn’t, but she did ask, “Who do you think done it?”
“I wish I knew.” I poured salad into a bowl, put the chicken on top of it, and grabbed a bottle of green goddess dressing from the fridge before I sat down. “Tab Sadler’s looking like a possibility,” and then added, because Clemmie wouldn’t know it, “Muriel’s husband.”
Her expression soured. “It’s always the husband.”
I laughed while I poured my salad dressing. “That doesn’t say much about how you feel about love.”
Clemmie made a face. “How do you feel about it?”
I’d just scooped up some salad and speared a piece of chicken, and I paused with the fork nearly at my mouth. “I guess . . . well, I suppose it works out for some people.”
“But never for you?”
I set down my fork. “I’ve met some great guys. But none of them was ever the right one. Not the forever one. I’m still hoping to find that person someday.” A thought hit, and I took a bite of my dinner before I asked, “Did you have someone special in your life?”
Clemmie’s smile was soft and dreamy. “Alfred Higgenhooper.” She pressed her hands to her heart and sighed. “He was as handsome as Rudolph Valentino, and he played the ukulele. What more could any girl want?”
“Were you his girl?”
“Well . . .” She turned around and walked to the other side of the kitchen. When she got there, she spun to face me. “I would have been,” she assured me, “if, you know, if I lived.”
“But you didn’t.”
She raised her eyebrows by way of telling me I was being far too obvious.
“What happened?” I asked her.
Clemmie jiggled her shoulders. “You don’t really want to know.”
“I do. I mean, come on. After all the years you’ve been hanging around here, you’ve finally found someone who can see you and hear you. And after all the years I was convinced my aunt Rosemary and her friends were all wackos, I’ve found out I can communicate with the Other Side. I need to find out all I can. I want to find out all I can. What happened to you, Clemmie? Why are you still here?”
As if she w
ere alive and breathing, her chest rose and fell. “Like I told you, I came for the audition,” she said. “And I got the job. Six shows a week starting the very next night. I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep that night of the audition. I got here early the next day, the day I was supposed to start, and they gave me . . .” She touched a hand to the skirt of her beaded dress. “This dress, it was the most beautiful thing I ever did see, and the most expensive thing I ever touched. And I felt like a sort of princess. I had a dressing room, and I put on this here dress and my lipstick, and Avery, I couldn’t even sit still, that’s how excited I was about getting out there in front of that crowd to sing. I could hear them out there.”
As if she still could, she bent her head as if she were listening to the buzz of voices.
“And finally Joe, he was the manager of the place, Joe came to get me. It was time for me to go on stage!”
Her expression lit. Her eyes glowed. “I walked out there and the first thing I saw was two fellas at a table near the stage. They were bickering. You know, going back and forth at each other. I figured it was the hooch talkin’ and I didn’t think anything of it until—”
Just that fast, all the exhilaration drained out of Clemmie. Her mouth twisted. Her eyes filled with tears. Her words caught on a gasp.
“One of them fellas, he pulled out a gun. He fired it and—”
It was as if I could see it all happening right in front of my eyes, and in slow motion, too. Horrified, I grasped a hand to my throat. “The shot hit you!”
Clemmie hung her head. “That was it. I was a goner.” When she sobbed, it was a pathetic sound from a million miles away, a hundred years before. “I never had a chance to be star.”
And with that last word, Clemmie faded away.
CHAPTER 15
Clemmie never did show back up. Not the rest of that Sunday. I looked for her after I finished my dinner, and I did another turn around the mansion before I went to bed. There was no sign of her ectoplasm anywhere and I pretty much got the message—she wanted to be left alone.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about her.
About what happened to her all those years before and how that accidental shooting in a long-ago speakeasy had robbed her of her dreams of stardom. And her life.
A deep sadness settled over me. At least for a little while. But little by little, that sorrow morphed and solidified. Kind of like Clemmie did when she materialized right in front of my eyes. By the next morning, it was firmly implanted way down inside me and it gave me a purpose, a mission. More than ever, I knew I had to work to bring justice to the victims of murder. After all these years, I couldn’t do it for Clemmie, but I sure as heck didn’t want to miss my chance when it came to Muriel.
With that in mind, and nothing on my agenda but making arrangements to have a booth at an upcoming bridal fair where I could extol the wonders of the Dennison mansion to dreamy-eyed brides and their overanxious mothers, I sat at my desk and looked out the window, waiting.
I knew the time was right to make my move when I saw a man in dark pants, a red sweater, and a clerical collar lock the door of the neat bungalow next door to the church just on the other side of our parking lot and head over to begin his day’s work at St. John’s.
I gave him a couple of minutes. After all, I didn’t want to bother the man before he’d had a chance to get settled. Once I figured he was, I hightailed it out of the club.
From what I’d read, I knew St. John’s had been built around the same time Chauncey Dennison was planning his mansion, and back then, the church had been the pride of the neighborhood. It was beautiful, the way so many older buildings are, constructed of blocks of gray and sand-colored stone with ivy, its leaves tinged autumn red, hugging its walls and slithering up to the slate roof. The front of the church faced the street behind the mansion and had a main entrance complete with wide oak doors and a stained-glass window that had miraculously survived the years. Here at the back of the property, the building was simpler, square, and solid, with windows that were tall and narrow and had pointed arches.
Maybe it was a lack of enthusiasm or the fact that over the years, the church’s congregation had dwindled every bit as much as PPWC’s membership had. These days, the slate sidewalk that led to the back door was narrowed by the grass that grew over it, and the flower beds sprouted more weeds than anything else. I stepped over a crack in the sidewalk and went inside. Directly in front of me was the door that led into the church. I went to the left, following an arrow on a sign that indicated Offices.
The office door was open.
“Good morning!” The minister, a young African American man with a wide smile, rose from his chair and extended a hand. “Clifford Way. How can I help you?”
I told him who I was but not why I was there. Not right away, anyway. Not until I eased into a chair and declined the cup of tea he offered.
“I’m wondering about the Kids Coats charity,” I said.
His eyes sparkled. “We can always use more help. And more coats. One of your club members, Patricia Fink, she’s very involved and very enthusiastic. We’re grateful for her help.”
“Exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.” I leaned forward. “You had a meeting here last Tuesday.”
“Yes, we did.” Reverend Way didn’t have to consult the datebook that sat open on his desk. But then these days, maybe St. John’s wasn’t any more bustling than PPWC. “And Patricia was here of course,” he added. “You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but she’s a real whirlwind, that one. She’s got more energy than a whole boatload of batteries, and she’s willing to work hard for causes she believes in. Last Tuesday, that was the night . . .” Briefly, his gaze skimmed in the direction of the club. “That poor woman. I didn’t know her, but Patricia spoke of her often.”
I couldn’t control the laugh that burst out of me. “I bet she did!”
The reverend laughed, too. “You know, I get it. I really do. It’s hard to change long-standing beliefs, and here in Portage Path, the families that are considered the town’s elite go back a long way. They spent all of the last century thinking they were better than everyone else. That means we have a lot of years of outmoded attitudes to undo. Patricia was trying, at least with Ms. Sadler. And that’s the way real change happens, one person at a time. We both hoped Ms. Sadler would come around and see the advantages of making the club more inclusive.”
“So this meeting last Tuesday . . .” I inched my way toward my questions. “Can you tell me when it started?”
“Six thirty, same as always.”
Exactly what Patricia had told me. “And what time did it end?” I asked.
He eyed me for a minute, his lips pursed, his expression betraying nothing, his fingers rolling a pen back and forth over the surface of his desk. “Sounds to me like you’re confirming an alibi.”
“That obvious, huh?” I smiled because really, what else could I do? I was sure me sticking my nose where it didn’t belong sounded crazy to the reverend, but then, it sounded crazy to me, too. “It’s not that I don’t believe what Patricia told me about her being here, but—”
He held up a hand. “I understand. Sometimes getting answers helps us through difficult situations.”
“Tell me, what is the answer? What time did the meeting end?”
“Eight forty-five. Same as always. We’ve got volunteers who come from all around town and we don’t like to keep them out too late. And you know, if you don’t have a set time to wrap things up, committee meetings can easily get out of hand. Someone’s bound to go off on a tangent, and that brings up a topic totally different from what you were hoping to talk about.” He waved a hand, letting me know he’d come to expect it. “Happens so often, I don’t even blink an eye anymore.”
“You’re telling me there was nothing different about last week’s meeting?”
“Not a thing
! Except . . .” A thought hit and he cocked his head. “Well . . .” He peered at his calendar. “The days sometimes blend one into another. I’d totally forgotten until right now. The only thing different last week was that the meeting had to be rescheduled.”
It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it. I sat up a little straighter.
“We always meet on Wednesdays,” the reverend told me. “But last week I had a conference to attend up in Cleveland on Wednesday. I knew I wouldn’t be back in time, and I didn’t want to miss the meeting. It’s not that I don’t think the volunteers can handle things on their own,” he was quick to add. “They’re a terrific group of people. But Mae Hunnicut, she promised to bring brownies. Mae’s brownies . . .” His sigh was pure satisfaction. “Mae’s brownies are a thing of beauty and no way I was going to miss them. So we met on Tuesday instead.”
“And on Wednesdays? I mean usually, when the meetings are on Wednesday, Patricia is here?”
“Sure, the whole time. Just like everyone else. In fact, she usually stays late to help me get the coffee and the cookies we serve all packed up and put away.”
I held back what felt like a tingle of excitement. “And so last Tuesday, that’s what she did, right?”
“Well, now that you mention it.” He wrinkled his nose. “Patricia wasn’t too happy when I called her to say we were going to reschedule. In fact, she tried to talk me out of it.”
“Did she say why?”
“Not specifically. Not that I remember, anyway. Which is kind of weird because Patricia, she’s usually so straightforward. Plain talk, no beating around the bushes. If you know Patricia, you know that. But when I asked why Tuesday was bad for her, she hemmed and she hawed, and she mumbled about how Tuesdays aren’t really good days for meetings.” He chuckled. “Believe me, if I knew the optimum days for meetings, I’d take advantage of that!”
I was almost too much of a chicken to ask, but I had to get at the truth. “She came to the meeting, anyway, right?”