The Other Side

by J. D. Robb

  “I know.” She beamed back, color dotting her cheeks, while Astra ran around her in circles. “I almost called you on the telephone last night, but we wouldn’t have had any privacy.” Both Smoak’s and Mrs. Mortimer’s telephones were in their respective communal living rooms. “Oh, it’s so nice and cool down here,” she said as she dabbed at moisture on her upper lip with her hankie. She must have come on her bicycle. She bent over to kiss Astra on the nose—nothing else would stop his frantic welcome. “What are you making?”

  Henry led her over to his basement worktable. “The séance table has to be round, so I’m making these sort of half-moon extensions out of some wood I found in the shed. What do you think?”

  “Hmm . . . ” She unpinned her hat and threw it on another table.

  “Don’t forget, I’m a ghost detective, not a carpenter.”

  “We’ll put a tablecloth over it,” she said kindly. “What room are we having the séance in?”

  “Well, that’s our first decision. Is the music room too small? Course, we’d have to move the piano.”

  “The music room? Why?”

  “So we can use the secret stairs. Unless you think—”

  “No, we can’t—everyone knows about the secret stairs.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Uh-oh. Does that ruin everything?”

  “By no means. Plenty of ways to skin a cat.”

  “Henry, have you really done this ‘many times’?”

  He made a broad gesture with both arms. “What is ‘many’? Isn’t everything relative to everything else? In the grand scheme of things—”

  “Henry.”

  “Hm?”

  “Have you ever been to a séance?”

  “Angie.” He put his hand on his heart. “You wound me.” There, he’d made her laugh, his favorite pastime. “Right, then, we’ll use the dining room. Big room, big table, and it has two more valuable amenities.”

  “What?”

  “A wainscoting, behind which it will be child’s play to construct a sliding panel. Through the wall behind that alcove in the drawing room, which we can seal off with a bookcase.”

  She looked thrilled. “And the other amenity?”

  “Your grandfather’s ceiling trolley system.”

  “I thought of that! What will we do with it?”

  “I don’t know yet, but we’ll think of something. By the way, can you make the elevator go up and down without being anywhere near it?”

  “I’ve been thinking of that, too!”

  They grinned at each other for a while.

  “I need to hammer a few nails in the dining room floor. Is that all right?” he asked.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “The floorboards squeak. There must be absolute silence when you’re moving around the room.”

  “Will I be moving around the room?”

  “I hope you’re going to be dancing.”

  “Oh, Henry. This is going to be such fun.”

  He went back to sawing while Angie put on an apron that was too big for her, probably her grandfather’s, and said she was going upstairs to oil the cable. “I’ve got an idea for the elevator, too. It might not work, but—”

  “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. We are nothing if not resourceful.”

  “And ingenious,” she called back from the stairs.

  “Versatile and adaptable.”

  “Clever and adept!”

  Half an hour later, she returned, carrying a small wooden box. “Look what I found in the attic.” She opened the lid, and inside, a tiny porcelain man held a violin and a tiny porcelain woman danced with her arms over her head. A music box. “It was mine when I was little, a present from my grandparents.”

  “Does it work?”

  “No, but I think I can fix it. It plays something from La Traviata . Which is 1850s, but I don’t think anyone will recognize it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I was thinking we could say it was Lucinda’s—it certainly looks old enough. And we could play it during the séance, say it’s to help call up her spirit, but the real reason would be—”

  “To cover up any noises we make. Brilliant!”

  She laughed with delight. “I couldn’t sleep last night, trying to think of a way to turn the gramophone on by itself. I thought of wiring it to a clock, or rigging it to some kind of dripping water mechanism, but nothing worked, and then I thought of this.”

  “Such a clever girl. How did you get so smart?”

  She laughed again and started rummaging in a corner shelf.

  “Seriously. Did your grandfather teach you?”

  She turned around, holding a black metal cylinder. “He taught me to love playing with things, you know, physical objects, figuring out why they work this way instead of that way. And my grandmother taught me how to read.”

  “Not your parents?”

  She studied him for a second. “I’ll tell you something, but you can’t repeat it to another soul.”

  “Not a word.”

  “I’ve never been to school.”

  “No!” He was surprised but not shocked.

  “No time for it in Wild Johnny Darlington’s Traveling Musical Theatre Extravaganza. So when I’d come home, my grandmother, who was a great reader, would take me in hand.”

  “And her favorite poets were Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

  “Yes!”

  “Emily Brontë, too,” he added, remembering this morning’s message: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” If he’d had a pen handy, he’d have written back, “I am Heathcliff.” She’d have laughed at that.

  “How did you know?” she asked, all wonder and amazement.

  “A wild guess.” He grinned and wriggled his eyebrows, inviting her to confess.

  “Oh, you saw the books in the library,” she said, fiddling with the metal cylinder until it emitted a thin ray of light.

  Henry lost his train of thought. “What in the world is that?”

  “This? Oh, something I made. I sent in a patent application for it a long time ago. I called it a ‘portable electric hand torch,’ which in retrospect may not have been snappy enough. Titles can make a big difference—my grandfather taught me that.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “You slide this tab, and it presses against the band and switches on the light. It won’t stay on very long; the battery’s too weak. I’m working on a smaller, lighter one that would take a number six.”

  Henry flashed the light around the floor, the wall.

  “I can imagine many uses,” Angie said, “but one of the main ones would be finding things in a dark closet. Think of all the fires that have started with somebody holding a candle or a—”

  “I can imagine an even better use. At a séance, after you’ve contacted the spirits and now they’re trying to contact you. With a strange, unsettling beam of light.”

  Angie drew in her breath. “Of course.”

  “Rapping is old hat.”

  “Rapping’s passé.”

  “But blinking—”

  “Blinking. It’s so much more—twentieth century!”

  They whooped with laughter. “Oops.” Henry almost knocked over a seamstress’s dress form beside the worktable. “Beg your pardon,” he told it, sending Angie off again. “What’s this, a robe?” He lifted the edge of a soft, wooly garment covering the dress form.

  “Actually, my grandmother invented that. She had an idea that people would buy something you could wear inside in cold weather. Not a blanket, not a robe, but sort of a combination of both. The sleeves leave your hands free.”

  “But you’d look so silly.”

  “That’s what we told her. She was going to call it ‘The Comfy.’ ”

  They laughed some more.

  “I have a question.” Angie leaned back against the worktable and folded her arms. “Is everybody going to be holding hands at this séance? Because
if so, I don’t see how we’re going to be able to do anything.”

  “Ah, but we will.”

  “Yes, but how? A false hand? Even if we stuffed a glove with cotton or something, it would never really feel like a hand, would it?”

  She ought to look like a sexless child in that too-big apron, but she didn’t. She looked adorable. He perched on the table beside her. Their hips bumped. “First of all,” he said, taking her hand. The slim, smooth feel of it excited him; so did her low intake of breath when he nudged back the lace of her sleeve, exposing her wrist. “Such a clever hand,” he murmured, then cleared his throat, trying to clear his head. “In order to call up a spirit from the other side, you need power, so at a séance you must act in concert as much as possible—act as one. To that end, the most propitious and effective contact between sitters is not hand in hand.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. It’s hand on wrist. Like so.” He surrounded her small wrist with his hand, pressing gently, feeling the fragile bones. “This way, each can feel the other’s pulse. The group’s heart beats as one. The collective magnetism is liberated, and the force becomes . . . irresistible.”

  He bent toward her. “And then, if the medium momentarily breaks the circle”—he let go of her wrist—“because he needs his handkerchief, for example, or he must write something down, any excuse will do—to reunite the circle, he simply shifts a little, grasping his right-hand neighbor’s wrist again”—he took Angie’s wrist back—“while the neighbor on his left, thinking he—or she—is taking the medium’s left wrist again, actually takes . . . his right.”

  Angie’s face, so close, was a study in awe.

  “And now the medium has a free hand with which to do . . . anything he likes.”

  And what he wanted to do was touch the side of Angie’s face with his fingers, caress her soft skin, gently tilt her mouth to his and kiss her. But he held perfectly still. If either of them was breathing, they made no sound.

  Then something wonderful happened. Angie slid her hand from Henry’s grasp and laid it on his shoulder. Slowly, her eyes downcast, she moved her head toward his. Their lips met. So lightly. As if—almost—by accident. The moment held, stretched, until the flutter of her eyelashes undid him. He pulled her close with both arms and kissed her.

  When he let her go, something—an excess of belated gentle-manliness, perhaps, although that seemed unlikely—prompted him to say, “I’m sorry.”

  “You . . . are?”

  Too late to say, No, that was a lie, and instead he compounded the error by adding, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  She colored, looking away, and he remembered that she’d started it. “I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said.

  “Well, what I meant—”

  “No, you’re right, seduction wasn’t part of our bargain.” She stepped away. “But don’t worry, you’ll still get—”

  “Angie!” he said in alarm.

  “You’ll still get paid without adding that to your duties.”

  “Stop it, you know that’s not—”

  He froze: so did she. Footsteps sounded directly above them.

  Who? he mouthed.

  My cousin, she mouthed back.

  They couldn’t be found down here, manufacturing séance props. Angie hid her portable electric hand torch in a dark shelf corner, and Henry shoved the music box under the workbench. The half-sawn boards were all right, nothing wrong with making the séance table round. But the dressmaker’s form might make a good ghost, so he pushed it behind a cabinet and threw a burlap bag over it.

  “Hurry,” Angie urged. “Go.”

  He went ahead of her up the outside stairs while she switched off the light and locked the door, then raced up the steps after him. Astra, who had been dozing under a dogwood, jumped up to greet them, expecting a game.

  “Now what?” said Henry.

  She’d left a canvas bag on the grass. She found a pair of pruning shears in it and pushed them into his hands. “Now prune something. But not really! Just pretend.”

  “Thanks for your vote of confidence.”

  She didn’t smile. He’d ruined everything.

  She took a pair of garden gloves from the bag, knelt down, and started to weed under a rosebush. “Quick, before he comes out. You’re pruning. You’re helping me.”

  “Fine.” He made a few snips in the air near a rose trellis. “But as soon as he leaves, you and I are going to have a talk.”

  Lucien’s affection for Henry hadn’t increased any since last they’d met. His doughy, vacuous face soured when he saw him pretend-clipping roses. “You,” was his cordial greeting. “What are you doing here?”

  “Lucien,” Angie said, rising, brushing pretend grass from her knees. “Lovely to see you. To what do we owe the honor?”

  He didn’t even glance at her. “Why are you here? This property belongs to the Paulton National Bank. You’re trespassing—you both are.”

  A futile stratagem, of course, and he knew it. When Angie said, “As you know, Lucien, Mrs. Grimmett very much wants Mr. Cleland to investigate the house—” he cut her off with a stifled oath and a slash of his hand. Frustration made his cheeks turn darker than their normal puce. Just the sight of Henry seemed to set him off.

  “Investigate! You, sir, are a scoundrel. If you’re thinking of profiting from my cousin’s gullibility, think again. I’m on to your deceptions. My advice to you is to leave town before you’re exposed for the conscienceless trickster you are.” Conscienceless trickster was hard to say; it made a dot of spittle form at the corner of his lips.

  It was quite an insult, too. Henry weighed the pros and cons of calling him out. Was dueling legal in Massachusetts? On the whole, it didn’t seem worth it. If he’d been angrier, maybe, but it was hard to muster up enough indignation to take a shot at Lucien when half of what he said was true.

  Angie was the furious one. Henry could imagine her smacking him across the cheek with her garden glove. “What have you come here for?” she demanded. “If it’s just to insult Mr. Cleland, you can leave right now!”

  “I’ll leave when I’m good and ready.” He smiled a smug smile and reached into his coat pocket. “For you,” he said with a little bow, and handed her an envelope.

  She eyed it suspiciously. “It’s been opened.”

  “It was never sealed,” he corrected. “Mr. Wimrode works for the bank.”

  “Who’s Mr. Wimrode?” asked Henry.

  “He’s my lawyer. My lawyer,” she repeated to Lucien, whose smile only widened. “Why would he share my business with you?”

  “Don’t be silly, my dear. We’re all just acting in your best interests.”

  If she was angry before, that made her livid. She almost tore the envelope in half to open it. A two-page missive, Henry saw by craning his neck, cover letter and short document. Angie’s face paled. “Oh,” she said and sat down on the garden bench.

  “I’m sorry if the news disappoints you,” Lucien lied, “but I can’t say it surprises me. I never thought Uncle William’s lawsuit ever had any merit.”

  Henry stepped in front of odious Lucien, as if he could shield Angie from him. “The bicycle pedal?” he asked softly.

  She looked up at him, miserable-eyed. “He forgot to pay the maintenance fee on the patent application. It expired.”

  Having done his worst, Lucien took his leave. More false sympathy for Angie first, though, and then another warning for Henry. “If you really plan to go through with this absurd séance business, you’ll be sorry. None of your cheap tricks will work here.”

  Thick-witted, unimaginative, acquisitive, capitalist blockhead. Henry let him have the last word and sat down next to Angie when he was gone.

  “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “No, it’s not.” She put her head back and closed her eyes. She wasn’t crying, but she looked as if she’d been mugged. “Even if the séance works and nobody wants to buy Willow House, there’s no windfall n
ow, no money coming. I have to face reality,” she said, looking him in the eye. “I’ve lost my home.”

  He took her hands. “We’ll think of something. We’ll stall longer, and something will happen. You can’t give up now.”

  “Does it seem like giving up to you? I’ve been fighting this fight for so long. I’m tired, Henry. I’m beaten.”

  “No, you’re not.” He shook his head, not letting her look away. “You’ve been fighting on your own too long, but now you’ve got me. And I’m not going to let them beat you.”

  The gold flecks in her eyes swam in a sudden river of tears. “Why?” she whispered, trying to wipe her cheek on her shoulder—he wouldn’t let go of her hands. “Why would you want to help me?”

  “Don’t you know?” He wished she did, so he wouldn’t have to say it. He wasn’t any good at saying it. “This brings us back to where we were before knucklehead came.”

  She laughed wetly. He put his arm around her, and she let him, even rested her cheek on his shoulder. “When I said I was sorry for kissing you, I was, of course, lying.”

  “You don’t have to say this. I know I’m—”

  “Be quiet. Where I went wrong was, I mistook you for a different sort of girl. A conventional girl, if you can believe that. The sort of girl who would mind, or at least pretend to mind, if a man she liked a little bit tried to kiss her.”

  Angie lowered her head.

  He touched his lips to her forehead. “What about it? Do you like me just a little?”

  She heaved a sigh. “Oh, Henry. What a silly question. But I need someone . . . ”

  He was tired of chatting. He pulled her close and kissed her, a long, deep kiss, the sweetest he’d ever given or received. With his eyes shut tight, everything merged, the warm breeze, the perfume of roses, Angie’s soft, unpracticed lips. “You need someone . . . ”

  “Completely . . . ”

  “Completely . . . ?”

  Her eyes cleared for a second. “Different. From you. You are exactly the kind of man I don’t want. Need, rather. I do . . . I do want ...”

  They could argue or they could kiss. They kissed again, and again, but then he had to say, “You don’t know me. I am the kind of man you need; I just don’t look it.”