Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator

by Jennifer Allison

  Juliet chewed on a fingernail. “But I don’t know what I could do to free her,” she said.

  “Well, maybe we’ll figure that out once we find a way into the tower.”

  21

  The Key

  Dinner is served!” Rosa announced.

  “Looks wonderful, Rosa,” said Mr. Splinter.

  Gilda and Juliet and Mr. Splinter sat at an outdoor table facing the overgrown garden behind the Splinter mansion. Perhaps as a result of Gilda’s previous attempts to interrogate him, Mr. Splinter seemed more reticent than usual; this time, he didn’t appear to feel any need to make conversation. The silence was broken only by the clinking noises Mr. Splinter made with his silverware as he cut his meat. Juliet was equally taciturn: she was strangely absorbed in a meticulous process of cutting her potato into tiny, dice-size bits and chewing each one a little too carefully.

  Gilda sensed the enormous secret sitting right in the middle of the table—an invisible presence that made everyone feel vaguely terrified of speaking. What would happen if she suddenly announced to Mr. Splinter that they had received a message from the ghost of his dead sister?

  “It’s chilly,” said Juliet, hugging her thin arms.

  “Ah, the chill of a San Francisco summer,” said Mr. Splinter, finishing the last bite of his steak.

  Gilda ignored this banal exchange and gazed across the tangled garden to a perfect view of the tower covered in vines. A layer of mist hovered over the angel fountain, rosebushes, and lilies.

  “Still enjoying your stay here, Gilda?” Mr. Splinter inquired politely (but a bit suspiciously, Gilda thought).

  “Oh, yes. Indeed I am,” Gilda replied, using an English accent on sudden impulse. The clipped articulation somehow seemed appropriate to the formal tone of the conversation.

  Juliet glared at Gilda. Mr. Splinter looked momentarily surprised, then shrugged, as if he had decided that impulsively switching to an English accent was yet another one of Gilda’s bizarre quirks.

  He eats one type of food at a time, Gilda noticed, observing Mr. Splinter. She remembered that her brother used to do the same thing when he was little. Stephen would scream if his carrots touched mashed potatoes and gravy, or if his chicken was tainted by the touch of broccoli. Of course, Mrs. Joyce had not tolerated this for long, and had served nothing but stew, sloppy joes, and pizza until the phase ended.

  “You know what I find fascinating?” Gilda decided to drop the English accent since Juliet wouldn’t stop glaring at her. “I find angels just fascinating.”

  Juliet’s fork made a loud clattering sound as it collided with her plate.

  “Excuse me?” said Mr. Splinter. “Did you say ‘angels’?”

  “Yes. Angels. How about you, Mr. Splinter?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Does the word angel mean anything special to you?”

  “Can’t say that it does. I’m not particularly religious, for one thing. Why do you ask?”

  “Gilda—” said Juliet.

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you talking about angels?”

  “I’m just making conversation,” said Gilda.

  Gilda turned her attention back to Mr. Splinter, who appeared to be transfixed by something in the garden. Evening sunlight had broken through the mist, casting the garden in an orange-red glow.

  Gilda abruptly stood up, as if she were about to make a toast at a momentous occasion.

  “What are you doing?” Juliet demanded, worried that Gilda was going to create some kind of embarrassing scene.

  Gilda sat down, but she could hardly contain her excitement. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

  There, in the middle of the garden, was the angel statue. Gilda wanted to run from the table immediately to investigate it more closely.

  Rosa returned to clear away the plates. “Would you like some coffee with your dessert, Mr. Splinter?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” said Mr. Splinter. “You know how caffeine keeps me awake at night.”

  Gilda fidgeted. She wanted everyone to leave so she could tell Juliet that she had just found a potential clue, although she had no idea what its significance might be.

  Rosa suddenly leaned close to Gilda: “There is a ghost there,” she said.

  “Where?”

  Rosa pointed in the direction of the purple and blue hydrangeas surrounding the angel statue. “See it? A lady, walking.”

  Gilda saw only flowers and mist. Why couldn’t she see ghosts like Rosa?

  “Don’t let Rosa scare you,” said Mr. Splinter. “She loves her ghost stories.”

  “I call them as I see them,” said Rosa.

  “Well, I certainly don’t see them,” said Mr. Splinter. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to finish in my office. Don’t stay outside too late, girls.”

  “We won’t,” said Juliet.

  Gilda squinted fiercely in the direction of the hydrangeas, determined to see something. “Why can’t I see the ghost?” Gilda protested.

  As Mr. Splinter walked away from the table, he whistled a tune in a minor key, then suddenly broke into song: “Angel eyes …”

  Gilda grabbed Juliet’s arm. “Did you hear that?!”

  “He just likes old songs,” said Juliet. “You know—jazz?”

  “I see,” said Gilda. “It’s an interesting coincidence, though.”

  “Rosa,” Gilda ventured as the housekeeper gathered the last of the plates from the table, “is the ghost still there?”

  Rosa squinted in the direction of the hydrangeas. “No. She’s gone.”

  Gilda leaned closer to Rosa. “Do you think the ghost you saw was Juliet’s aunt—the one who jumped from the tower?” she whispered.

  Rosa thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Her head was tilted to one side, like this.” She let her head fall to one side so that her ear nearly touched her shoulder. “It looked like her neck—it was broken.”

  Both Gilda and Juliet stared at Rosa with gaping mouths.

  “Really?”

  “That is why I stay away from that tower.” Rosa hastily crossed herself and turned to go inside the house before Gilda could ask further questions.

  “Come on,” said Gilda, standing up and grabbing Juliet’s arm. “We need to check out that statue.”

  Gilda ran down a narrow path until she reached the marble angel. It stood nearly six feet tall with palms open, its face gazing up at the sky. From a distance, the angel appeared to be singing, but up close Gilda saw that something about the angel’s open mouth and pained expression suggested a shout of protest or warning rather than a song of praise. The girls stared at the angel’s tumbling locks of curled marble hair, the strong facial features that might be either male or female. Its hands were open in a beseeching gesture and the stiff, long wings that arched from the statue’s back looked as if they would be too thin and narrow to keep the creature in the air had it actually been real. Something about the mouth particularly intrigued Gilda: the teeth had a horselike squareness.

  “What are we looking for?” Juliet asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Gilda. She examined the angel’s large stone feet anchored under the sand, dried twigs, leaves, and loose change that now filled the waterless fountain. “Let’s just see if we find anything.” Gilda and Juliet picked up twigs and poked through pennies, nickels, and debris in the empty pool, but found nothing that could be considered a clue.

  “‘An angel will speak and unlock,”’ Gilda said aloud, trying once again to find some significance in the words themselves. Maybe the word speak is important, Gilda thought.

  She gazed at the angel’s open mouth, and felt a very strong tickle in her left ear. “Juliet,” she said, “come here and give me a boost.”

  “What do you mean, ‘give me a boost’?”

  “I want to take a closer look at the angel’s face, but it’s too high. Just put your hands together like this, and I’ll put my foot there and use that as a step up. Hav
en’t you ever given someone a boost before?”

  “I think you’ll break my hands if you step into them that way,” said Juliet.

  “I’m actually very light,” said Gilda defensively, “but I suppose your arms might be unusually weak.”

  “But your feet look kind of dirty.”

  “Well, I hope that nobody ever has to count on getting a boost from you in a life-threatening situation where there’s anything so mind-shattering as dirt involved.”

  “But this isn’t a life-threatening situation, is it?”

  Gilda sighed. “All right, then I’ll give you a boost. Come on, just hop up there and check out the angel’s mouth more closely.”

  “You don’t expect this statue to start talking to us or something, do you?”

  “To be honest, I don’t know what I expect,” said Gilda.

  “Okay; just don’t drop me.” Juliet stepped gingerly into Gilda’s clasped hands and grabbed onto the angel’s head for support. She braced one knee in the angel’s outstretched hand. “I feel weird stepping on it like this,” she said. “I feel like I’m offending it somehow…’.” Her voice trailed off and she almost lost her balance, because now that she was face-to-face with the angel, she saw something that surprised her. Caught in the fading rays of the sunset, something gleamed inside the angel’s mouth—something that wasn’t marble.

  “What is it?” Gilda asked. “What do you see?”

  Juliet reached gingerly inside the angel’s open mouth, half fearing, for a moment, that its stone teeth might suddenly chomp down on her hand. She pulled something from the mouth.

  “I found it,” she breathed excitedly. “I found the key!”

  “Show me!” said Gilda, releasing Juliet’s foot a bit too quickly.

  The key was slightly rusted and surprisingly heavy—almost as large as Juliet’s hand. It seemed very old and magical—the kind of key that, in a fairy tale, might open a treasure chest or lead into a completely different world.

  The girls stood before the doorway leading to the tower. Clouds passing before the sunset turned the sky a dark shade of raspberry mixed with lavender.

  Gilda was surprised to discover that she suddenly felt nervous. “I think we should get some supplies first,” she said, hesitating to open the door. “I mean, this tower hasn’t been opened for ten years, and who knows what we’ll find? We need flashlights, a crucifix—”

  “A crucifix?”

  “In case of vampires or an evil spirit.”

  “Vampires?”

  “Well, who knows what lives in there? Better safe than sorry.”

  In the last minutes of fading sunlight, Gilda and Juliet stood at the foot of the tower, carrying flashlights and Gilda’s Polaroid camera (her Psychic’s Handbook recommended this type of camera for photographing ghosts or “manifestations of spirits”). Juliet wore a baseball cap and a shapeless plastic poncho, and Gilda wore a grandmotherly sunbonnet with a shiny vinyl raincoat.

  “I still don’t see why we need to wear this stuff,” Juliet grumbled.

  “What if there are bats in there?” Gilda replied. “Did you ever think of that? Do you want a bat getting caught in your hair? And if there are bats, you can be sure there will be bat poop. Bats poop a lot!”

  Gilda’s imagination ran wild: she envisioned shielding herself from explosions of protoplasm and cringing from an angry onslaught of bats. Rosa’s vision of a ghost with a broken neck had also unnerved her, and she felt a wave of self-doubt. What if she didn’t yet have the skills needed to handle a real psychic investigation?

  Gilda took a deep breath and decided to face this situation the way she normally faced frightening situations: by pretending to be brave.

  Tucking her flashlight under her arm, she pulled the heavy key from her raincoat pocket and thrust it into the keyhole. She almost hoped that the key wouldn’t fit and that the two of them could retreat back to the house.

  “Listen,” said Gilda, before she attempted to turn the key, “I don’t know what we’re going to find in there, but if it gets too dangerous, I’ll give you the signal, and we’ll leave right away.”

  Juliet nodded. “What’s the signal?”

  “I’ll scream.”

  “Good one.” Juliet also felt trepidation at the thought of entering the tower, but she feared violating her father’s ironclad rule (“You are never to go in that tower!”) as much as she feared whatever supernatural forces she might encounter within.

  The key fit. With a loud creak, the door swung open with surprising ease, revealing only darkness and a musty, metallic scent, much like the smell of an attic or garden shed mixed with a chemical odor. “It smells like something I remember,” said Juliet, “something from when I was really young.”

  They entered a small, circular room and waved their flashlights around. When their eyes had adjusted to the dim light, both girls screamed.

  22

  Inside the Tower

  An eerie collage of faces and emotions peered at Gilda and Juliet from the walls. Each face had hair and skin of unnatural colors—blue, green, red, purple—but they all stared with the same intense eyes.

  Juliet gazed into a pair of almond-shaped gray eyes that were very much like her own. The eyes stared out from a face that had blue-white skin, a crooked mouth, and was crowned by blond hair. It was a painting of a woman who looked very much like Juliet herself—or a version of how Juliet might look as an adult.

  Juliet instinctively recognized her aunt Melanie’s face. In fact, her aunt’s face was all around them.

  “It’s her,” Juliet said.

  Gilda focused the flashlight on the bottom corner of the painting where a signature had been painted. “Hey—it says ‘Melanie Splinter’! She’s the one who painted it!”

  “I know,” said Juliet. “It’s a self-portrait.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that your aunt Melanie was a painter?”

  “Because I had no idea until now!”

  Gilda moved her flashlight slowly around the circular room and saw an easel and a small table littered with crushed tubes of paint, plastic trays stained with a range of colors, and paintbrushes with dried, stiff tips. It looked as if an artist had left in the middle of an ordinary day’s work and never returned. Gilda was startled to see two girls wearing raincoats and absurd hats until she realized she was gazing into a mirror.

  “She must have used the mirror when she painted the self-portraits,” said Juliet. “They’re all pictures of her.”

  “It’s strange,” said Gilda, looking at an image of Melanie that had purple hair. “Each one looks so different.”

  “But I still recognized her face right away, didn’t I? I think this stuff is cool. It’s really modern.”

  As she inspected the various versions of Melanie depicted in the paintings, Gilda wondered if Juliet’s aunt had been the sort of person who liked to change her appearance and identity. If someone wanted to paint my portrait, which version of myself would I want to capture? Gilda wondered. Definitely not the ordinary me—the way I look when I’m going to school. Maybe I’d put on my séance outfit or one of my disguises.

  Juliet moved her fingertips lightly over one of the canvases. “I can’t believe all these paintings are hidden in here! Why didn’t my parents ever tell me she was an artist?”

  Juliet felt a small heat wave of anger along with her excitement at finally discovering something real about her aunt. Bits of her aunt Melanie’s life were emerging; the paintings were large missing pieces of a puzzle. But why had Melanie’s true identity been withheld for so long?

  Juliet suddenly remembered her father’s pained expression whenever she showed him her own artwork as a child. Her teachers had said she had talent, but both of her parents seemed unimpressed. She sensed that her father disliked the fantastic, fairy-tale creatures she created: he preferred antique oil paintings that had a high “market value” or realistic photographs of things like sailboats and houses. Her mother’s response was no be
tter: she had always placed Juliet’s drawings in a drawer rather than hanging them on the wall. “I don’t like any clutter,” she would say “Just hanging a few mirrors here and there is best; that way you don’t risk anything tacky.” Juliet knew that both of her parents valued practical, financially rewarding business pursuits, and that, in their minds, drawing pictures had nothing to do with building a “brilliant career” and a “promising future.”

  “Gilda,” said Juliet, “why do you think my father decided to keep these paintings locked in the tower?”

  Gilda thought for a moment. “Well, for one thing, there’s something scary about them when you consider the fact that Melanie killed herself. I don’t know about you, but they kind of make me feel like she’s right here—looking at us!”

  “Maybe that’s it,” said Juliet. “Maybe my father couldn’t stand to see her face around him, looking at him every day.”

  “Especially since she never made it to that Lilyvale Facility that was supposed to help her. I mean, what if your parents had gotten her there sooner? Maybe they could have helped her, and she wouldn’t have killed herself. I bet your father feels guilty about that.”

  Juliet remembered the soothing, glossy brochure from Lilyvale Residential Facility. She strongly suspected that Melanie would have resented the idea of “supervised activities” and having her personal belongings “subject to search.”

  “I bet she didn’t want to go,” said Juliet. “I bet she hated the whole idea. Maybe that’s part of the reason she jumped from the tower.”

  In the middle of the room, an iron staircase spiraled up toward the second floor. Gilda hesitated, unable to ignore the feeling that something might be lurking in the uppermost section of the tower, waiting for them. “I guess we should check out the next floor,” she said, trying to sound brave.

  The girls’ feet made loud creaking sounds that echoed as they walked. Gilda and Juliet looked at each other knowingly: the familiar sound of footsteps.

  They entered the room on the second floor and discovered that it had also been used as an artist’s studio. Thin streams of moonlight poked through cracks in the boards that concealed the windows. This room’s walls were also covered with paintings and sketches, but these images were dark shadows compared with the vibrantly colored compositions in the room below.