The Other Side

by J. D. Robb

  “Then I think it should be all of us, plus one. And you, of course, Mr. Cleland, by virtue of your experience, must be our medium.”

  Lucien looked apoplectic. But when Mrs. Grimmett asked if anyone had any objections, he stayed mum. What choice did he have? Henry almost felt sorry for him.

  “What a wonderful idea, Mrs. Grimmett,” Angie said, all surprise and admiration. “At last, the mystery of Willow House will be solved.”

  “May be solved,” said Henry, once again the rational one. “Séances, even when everything goes perfectly, often disappoint. The spirits are fickle and don’t always come at our bidding.”

  “Who should be our ninth member?” wondered Walker Hersh, who had the look of a kind man sitting among children, trying not to let it slip that there was no Santa Claus.

  Everyone thought.

  “Mrs. Mortimer?” Angie ventured. “You don’t know her, Mrs. Grimmett, but I’ve been living in her home, and I count her as a friend. But more to the point, she’s extremely sensitive.”

  “Sensitive how?” Lucien asked irritably.

  “In the psychic sense. She has a way of—of knowing things in advance. It’s quite extraordinary. Not like a fortune-teller, but just ...”

  “A special sensitivity to the metaphysical?” Mrs. Grimmett guessed. “She sounds perfect. But what do you think, Mr. Cleland?”

  “Hm.” Henry pulled on an imaginary beard. “The only absolute requirements for séance participants are mental stability and an open mind. Beyond that, you want as many diverse temperaments as possible, positive and negative, male and female, so forth and so on, in order to form a battery, as it were, on the principles of electricity, or galvanism, so that the magnetic spheres emanating from the circle may empower the spirits.”

  So it was decided. Angie’s landlady, who read tea leaves for a hobby, would be their ninth.

  Nine

  “You were wonderful.”

  “No, you were wonderful.”

  “You were.”

  “Definitely you.”

  Angie sighed, sinking back against the stiff horsehair cushion of her cousin’s closed buggy. “All right, we were both wonderful. Also splendid and brilliant and crafty and clever. Especially you.” A passing streetlamp lit Henry’s face long enough for her to see his smile—a lovely thing, and she was falling into the habit of trying to provoke it. “I’m beginning to understand,” she said, “the appeal of your profession.”

  “That’s because it’s not your profession,” he said, and in the darkness she could tell he wasn’t smiling at all.

  A silent moment passed. She said, “Then why—”

  “Your cousin doesn’t have much use for me, does he? He looks at me with a lot of loathing.”

  Henry sidetracked certain subjects so regularly, she was getting used to it. “My grandfather used to call him the white sheep of the family, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. I think Lucien probably does loathe you, because you’re everything he isn’t.”

  Henry turned his whole body to face her. “That’s absurd.” His incredulity was real, and it made her like him even more.

  “Oh, Henry. Nobody likes Lucien. Everybody likes you.”

  “That can’t possibly be true.”

  “It is true. He’s homely and plain, you’re—not. He’s stiff and uncomfortable, not just with other people but with himself, and you . . . you’re the sort of man people want to be around, because you seem so at ease with yourself.”

  “I do?”

  She laughed. “Don’t you know it?”

  “No. I suppose that might’ve been true once, but . . . ” He shifted to face forward again. As the buggy turned a corner, she was vividly aware of the part of her thigh that pressed against his. He, she was sure, didn’t even notice.

  “What changed?” she asked when he didn’t continue.

  “Life. Circumstances.” He shook his head. “Anyway, thank you for the compliment.”

  “It wasn’t a comp—”

  “Do you think we can be ready for the séance by Thursday? I can tell Mrs. Grimmett something about the moon if we need more time—it needs to be full, it needs to be new.”

  “No, because the longer we wait, the longer it gives Lucien to find a buyer for the house. I’m afraid to delay.”

  “Then we’ll just have to work quickly.”

  “Yes. Even if we don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t. One thing I don’t understand, Henry. If everyone’s holding hands around a table, how can we play any tricks? Our hands will be tied—literally!”

  “Don’t worry. It can be done.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you—I can make smoke.”

  “You what?”

  “It looks like fog or haze. Very ghostly. Nothing to it, you just mix glycerine and distilled water in a ratio of about thirty to seventy.”

  The buggy had stopped in front of Mrs. Mortimer’s. Henry didn’t move, though, so Angie didn’t either. “You are,” he said, and stopped. “You are the most . . . ” She thought it would be another of their jokes—You were great; No, you were great—but his voice changed. “Angiolina Darlington, you are . . . the most amazing woman I’ve ever met.” His eyes, glowing with warmth, seemed to see nothing but her. He leaned nearer.

  He was going to kiss her. She was going to let him. Their faces were so close, she could feel the soft exhale of his breath on her skin. Hell with it. The dim thought floated past, and every scruple, every misgiving she’d ever had about him—and she’d had many—drifted away. They didn’t matter. Nothing did but this.

  The long, delicious moment stretched. I’m going to die, she thought clearly. She lifted her hand to touch him—just as he pulled away. “Late,” he mumbled, and opened the buggy door.

  With her own light out and the curtain open, Angie could see, across Lexington Street, the rectangle of gold that was Henry’s window. Once he even walked past it, a dark, fleet silhouette, but that was a quarter of an hour ago; since then, no sighting. But his light was still on. She imagined him in bed, reading.

  A flash of movement in the yard made her press her nose to the glass and peer harder. Oh—Astra. He’d recently fallen in love with the dog next door, a spaniel named Lulu with long, curly ears and saucer-sized eyes. Henry said he was hardly ever home anymore.

  Margaret, curled up at the bottom of the bed, never fell in love. Never came into her estrous cycle, was the technical term. She’d been born that way. Neutral.

  Angie used to feel a kinship with the cat in that way. Not literally, of course; metaphorically. Passion was something that afflicted other people, she’d thought, not her. She knew all about it, though. You could say she’d spent her childhood watching other people behaving passionately. What a mess it was. Chaos, absolute chaos—her parents’ marriage was a perfect example in miniature, and a traveling theatrical troupe was a perfect example in . . . whatever the opposite of miniature was. Maxiature.

  Her grandparents’ marriage—that was her ideal. They’d completely adored each other, but their love had been steady and deep and calm. Fight? Never, not a cross word. They’d lived a rich, satisfied life, like two devoted fish on the bottom of the ocean. Shouting was the sound that had characterized her parents’ marriage; her grandparents’—laughter.

  That’s what she wanted—if anything. Really, she was fine the way she was. But if she ever did have a chance for a partner, a life companion, God forbid it should be anyone like Henry Cleland. That would be like—like marrying her father. Another huckster, another showman, just in a different field. Please, God forbid.

  She might be an aging spinster, but she wasn’t completely inexperienced, no indeed. She’d had a suitor once, a serious one, too—Abel Odenton, of Spears, Rank, & Odenton Insurance Agency; they had an office on the square and one in Springfield as well, so he was an “up-and-comer,” or so he had often assured her. Maybe she should’ve married Abel. If anyone. Or someone like him: steady, even, safe. (Safe—an underappreciated qualit
y, practically ridiculed in romantic novels, where the hero was always the risky, exciting one. How childish.) Abel, unfortunately, had had a disqualifying flaw she’d managed to rise above until the first (and last) time he’d kissed her: fishy-smelling breath. (Why? Why? Did he eat tuna every day? It had been like kissing Margaret.)

  Henry . . . would be lovely to kiss. She even liked the smell of him. The way his hair fell. His strong, straight shoulders. His wrists. His sideburns. She could go on.

  Obviously he didn’t feel the same, although she would prefer to attribute other motives to him: he was too much of a gentleman to kiss her—he never mixed business with pleasure—he didn’t feel he’d known her long enough. But she couldn’t have it both ways. If he was the confidence artist she’d hoped for when she’d hired him, then he was unlikely to have gentlemanly scruples about something as frivolous and unimportant as kissing old maid Angie Darlington.

  He simply didn’t fancy her.

  What a cruel irony. She got in bed, and when the cat crawled up to snuggle, she asked her, “How do people ever get together?” Margaret yawned, reminding her again—twice in one night—of Abel Odenton. “Why couldn’t I have loved him? Why can’t Henry love me?”

  Pointless questions, the kind not to ask yourself right before trying to fall asleep. Anyway, this was no time to be distracted by a hopeless crush she’d be over as soon as Henry was gone. Focus, she told herself. You’ve got a house to haunt.

  Mrs. Mortimer had already gone to bed when she’d gotten home tonight, but tomorrow, first thing, Angie would pop the question her landlady had probably wanted to hear all her life but never realized it: “Would you like to go to a séance?”

  Ten

  Henry liked Paulton. That was curious in itself—he was a big-city man, or so he’d always thought—but even more curious was that Paulton seemed to like him.

  “Say, you’re that ghost feller, aren’t you?” Mr. Burt, the barber, asked him on Monday afternoon when he stopped by for a haircut. Three customers put down their newspapers to take a gander at him. He girded himself for skepticism, even derision—he was used to both—but all he got was curiosity and some good-natured joshing. By the time Mr. Burt slapped tonic on his cheeks and whipped the towel off his shoulders, everybody in the shop agreed it would be “a fine thing” if Paulton had its very own genuine, expert-certified haunted house.

  It wasn’t just at the barber’s either. Everywhere he went, people were nice to him. After two visits to the Acorn, Home Cooking Fit for a King, he had a regular table and a waitress who called him by his name. On the street, men tipped their hats and women came close to smiling. His fellow boarders at Smoak’s were friendly to a man, and Smoak himself never complained about his odd hours, or even about Astra. At first Henry thought all this politeness was because he was Miss Darlington’s protégé, and the town was tolerating him out of respect for her. Eventually, though, he decided it was just that good manners were part of the Paulton civic character.

  “How many people work for you, Walker?”

  “Seven or eight, depending. More if you count my news-boys.”

  They were in the printing room, where a man was setting slugs at a Linotype machine and another man was jamming wedges into a printing press. The noise, that rackety-clackety click of metal striking metal, flung Henry back into the past like a slingshot. The smells of ink and hot lead almost made him dizzy, they were so familiar, and he’d missed them so much. He hadn’t known how much.

  “That makes you kind of a one-man band,” he said as they walked back upstairs to the main office—what, on a bigger paper, he’d have called the city room.

  “I guess it does. I’m the news editor, the managing editor, and the chief editorial writer.”

  “And the publisher,” Henry reminded him.

  “And sometimes the rewrite man and the copy editor. I’m the photographer when my regular man’s too drunk.” He flung himself into the chair behind his big desk, as if listing all his jobs had exhausted him. Reaching into a bottom drawer, he pulled out a bottle. “Care for a—Oh, sorry. Forgot, you’re not a drinking man.”

  “No, but you go ahead.”

  “Not me.” He put the bottle back. “Just being polite. Got a paper to get out tonight, and my lead reporter’s down with the flu, or so he claims. I think he’s down with the barmaid at Wayne’s Tavern, but I could be wrong.”

  A rummy-looking old-timer at a distant desk looked up from his typewriter and chuckled. Another wave of nostalgia washed over Henry. Were all city rooms the same? All over the world?

  “Circulation’s up because we’ve got a Springfield edition now, plus Paulton’s spreading out, getting bigger.” Walker stuck his fingers in his thinning hair and pressed down on his skull. “Not enough hours in the day anymore.”

  Henry made sympathetic noises. An overworked managing editor was nothing new, but Walker looked done in. “You love it, though,” Henry said to console him. “As tough as it is, you wouldn’t be doing anything else.”

  Walker reached into another drawer, pulled out a couple of cigars, handed one over, lit them both with a safety match. They smoked for a while.

  “Actually, I would.”

  Henry thought he’d heard wrong. “Would what?”

  “Rather be doing something else. I inherited all this”—he swept the high-ceilinged, skylighted room with his arm—“from my old man. He started it, built it up from nothing. I just made it bigger.”

  “What would you rather be doing?” Henry asked, still in disbelief.

  Walker sent him some kind of a look—measuring? shy?—and blew a smoke ring. “Something quieter. A journal, maybe.”

  “A magazine? Like . . . ”

  “Like . . . The Century, but with a focus on New England. Sort of a common man’s Atlantic Monthly.” He said that with a self-deprecating laugh.

  “So, literary and political . . . ”

  “Topical, thoughtful. Progressive. Not stuffy. Some art, some pictures, but all grounded in good writing. It’s just an idea,” he said, waving his cigar in the air like an eraser, “one of my day-dreams. Hits hardest around deadline time. Or when my wife tells me I’m never home and my son’s growing up fatherless.”

  They talked a while longer—Walker did; Henry mostly listened—until Walker said he could do this all day, but he had to get back to work. Henry thanked him for the tour. They shook hands and said they should have dinner sometime.

  Henry walked home wondering two things: why Walker had confided in him about his “daydream,” and why any man would want to do anything else besides run a newspaper.

  He slept over at Willow House that night. To perform more ghost experiments, he told anyone who was interested, but the real reason was to reconnoiter—explore the house’s possibilities in preparation for the séance.

  Lying in bed, he wrote down a few thoughts to run by Angie tomorrow—they were to meet in the afternoon and go over their plans. He missed her; he hadn’t seen her since Saturday night. Sunday she had church and whatnot—she was a Unitarian—and today she had too many piano lessons to get away.

  He’d caught sight of her once, though, yesterday on her way to church, dressed in a plain gray skirt with a high-collared blouse and a little black jacket. Prim-looking, if you didn’t know her. If you’d never seen the dancing ghost. She’d stuck a clutch of yellow daisies in her hatband, and for some reason that had made him laugh. He’d watched her from his window, angling and craning till she was out of sight, thinking her outfit summed her up: perfectly proper but with flair. If she only knew it. But then again, maybe that was part of her appeal: the fact that she honestly thought she was plain. Somebody, or maybe everybody, had put it into her head that she was an old maid, so that was how she saw herself. Perhaps that made her sweeter-natured, who knew, but still. A woman ought to know herself better. Not to presume, but maybe he could help her out in that area. No, no thanks necessary; it would be his pleasure.

  He yawned, blew out h
is reading lamp. Miscellaneous creaks and cracks he hadn’t particularly noticed before sounded louder in the sudden dark. MWS&G, he reminded himself—the four main causes of all house-hauntings. Mice, wind, settling, and gullibility. But what accounted for that faint bubbling noise that came from time to time and sounded like nothing so much as laughter? Indulgent, delighted laughter, not the evil, mustache-twirling kind. Well, it had to be something; unless Angie was playing another trick on him, it couldn’t really be laughter. He probably just needed to add a P to his list of haunt causes: plumbing.

  The quarter moon would be mostly gone by Thursday, luckily—the darker a séance room, the better—but tonight it was sufficient to pick out the outlines of objects in the room. The frame around the painting of a young Angie, for instance. He didn’t need to see the details; the picture was as clear in his mind as if the light were still on. A sweet one to fall asleep to.

  Wait. “What the hell?” He sat up, squinting at the mirror over the bureau. No, that was impossible—surely he’d have noticed it if it had been there before. He threw back the covers and got up to read.

  ’Til I loved

  I never lived—Enough.

  He knew the poem; even if he hadn’t, the distinctive dash and that capital E would’ve given Miss Emily Dickinson away.

  Not a very chilling message this time; you’d think the dead, dancing Lucinda would have more baleful sentiments about true love to convey. But why, why had Angie scrawled those lines, those particular lines, on his mirror?

  The possibilities kept him awake for hours.

  Astra barked an ecstatic greeting when Angie came down the basement steps—Henry had left the outside door open for her. He abandoned the saw where it was, halfway through a plank, and went to greet her, smiling, not even thinking about hiding his gladness. “You’re late,” he said. He took both her hands, a purely spontaneous gesture—it felt as if he hadn’t seen her in days. “I haven’t seen you in days.”