“I don’t know why, but I know it’s important,” Belestrade said. There was less spice and more honey in her voice today. Not that Ms. P had an appetite for either. “She’s been calling out,” the medium said, adding just the right amount of strain around the edges. “She needs help. I feel you’re the only one who can provide it.”
“Who needs my help?”
“Abigail,” Belestrade said, as if the answer couldn’t have been more obvious. “A person who dies by violence can linger for so long before moving on. They’re trapped by pain and fear. The rage grounds them to this world. Like a terrible millstone around their neck.”
I could see a dozen arguments flit across my employer’s face—all the ways she could take apart the spiritualist’s superstitions. I’d seen her reduce somebody to tears because they refuted evolution.
Instead, she surprised me. “Did Abigail Collins pass on any more information?” she asked in a tone of perfect seriousness. “The identity of her killer, perhaps.”
Belestrade shook her head sadly, her eyes wide and filled with sincerity, or at least a good replica. “I’m afraid not. Spirits who die by violence aren’t as clear as others. The rage disrupts things.”
My boss didn’t take her shot, so I decided to.
“I get the same problem trying to tune into the Dodgers game on a windy night,” I quipped, giving her my third-snidest smile. She responded with a woe-is-you head shake.
“I don’t expect you to believe me.”
“Then what do you expect?” Ms. P asked.
“That we could confer. I know you’re curious about me. I see no reason we couldn’t simply meet instead of sending Miss Parker to surveil me.”
Ms. P raised an eyebrow my way. Her way of saying we’d talk about this later. My stomach twisted at the thought of describing how Belestrade had played me.
For the clairvoyant, all of this may as well have been sketched out in neon.
“Ah,” she said, turning toward me. “So you weren’t sent by your employer. Perhaps our meeting was happenstance.”
There was that viper smile again. I wondered just how poisonous this woman was.
I didn’t find out because my boss rescued me.
“I give Miss Parker leave to use her own initiative in gathering information on suspects,” she told the medium.
“I’m a suspect? How exciting.” She said it with a perverse hint of glee. “Ridiculous, of course. I had no reason to wish Abigail harm. But it is thrilling in a very morbid way.”
“You live a rather morbid life—in the strictest definition,” Ms. P offered.
“My work is far more about the living than the dead,” Belestrade explained. “Providing comfort and guidance.”
Ms. P shifted a bit in her chair, arranging her limbs into what I think of as her interrogator pose. “Now that you’ve delivered your message from the late Mrs. Collins, would you be so kind as to answer a few questions?”
The clairvoyant thought about it—or pretended to think since she must have known the request was coming. “I’m a very private person, Ms. Pentecost.”
“Yet you do not shy away from attention, if your press clippings can be believed.”
A hit. A palpable hit.
“You’ve looked up my clippings? Did you have to seek them out? Or are they in your extensive files? The ones you keep upstairs.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only resident of our house she’d done research on. If my boss was fazed, she didn’t show it.
The medium waved a hand, as if brushing her own question away. “No bother. The times I’ve been mentioned in the press have always been as a supporting role in the lives of others. Never my own personal story. Which I feel is what you’re seeking.”
She put on another thoughtful face and I was reminded of poker games during my circus days. Specifically of my buddy Pauly, the clown. Even through three layers of greasepaint, he couldn’t hide when he was holding a big hand.
“I’ll make you a deal,” the clairvoyant said. “I’ll give you an hour right here, right now, to answer any questions that you pose. In exchange, the two of you must visit me at my parlor and give me an hour of your time.”
A big bet.
“For what purpose?” Ms. P demanded.
“To read your past and tell your future,” our guest said matter-of-factly. “And to provide what guidance I can.”
A long silence followed. I could practically hear the gears turning behind my boss’s eyes. Inside I was yelling, “Fold! Fold, damn it!”
We couldn’t trust any answer she gave. Besides, we’d eventually dig it all up ourselves given time and legwork. I didn’t want Ms. P walking into that spider’s parlor. Not that I’d ever call my boss a fly, but better safe than swallowed.
“Agreed,” Ms. Pentecost said.
I tried not to let my disappointment show, but considering the perceptive skills of the two women I was in the room with, it was probably a lost cause.
The smile from Belestrade belonged to someone who’d just made their flush and were waiting to rake it in.
“Ask away.”
CHAPTER 12
One of the first classes Ms. P had me take was shorthand. Twenty-year-old me, still insisting on overalls and flannel shirts, plunked down into the middle of two dozen prim and proper Midtown secretaries in training. Not my favorite three hours a week, but in the long run some of the most useful.
During that hour with Ariel Belestrade, I barely looked up from my notepad. True to her word, the clairvoyant answered everything thrown at her. No hemming, no hawing, no pauses as she internally edited. If she was fudging anything, I couldn’t tell.
If what Dr. Waterhouse said was true, she was a master of deception, so I took nothing for granted.
Here’s a transcript of the highlights.
LP: Where were you born, Ms. Belestrade?
AB: Please, call me Ariel. And I was born in New Orleans, but I grew up in many places. Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, California, for a short time London and Paris, and then most of my teenage years in Savannah, Georgia.
LP: What accounts for such an upbringing?
AB: My mother traveled.
LP: For work or pleasure?
AB: That…is a thorny question. You see, she was a professional mistress. Men would hire her to be their companion for a week or a month. Sometimes longer. Sometimes for a single special event. Or a vacation. Once a man hired her for a six-month tour of Europe. Thus my time in London and Paris.
Do you find that shocking?
LP: I find little shocking when it comes to how women are forced to make their way in the world. You accompanied her everywhere?
AB: Not always. When I did, a nursemaid or some other companion would travel with us. Or she would leave me with a friend she trusted in the city. During our trip to Europe, my grandmother accompanied us. At the client’s expense, of course.
LP: Your mother must have been very beautiful.
AB: That’s just it, Ms. Pentecost. She wasn’t. Or, I should say, she was attractive and fit but hardly stunning. Still, she was personable. Men found her to be a pleasure to be around.
LP: You mentioned your grandmother. Did she approve of your mother’s profession?
AB: Certainly not. But she learned early on that nothing she said could change my mother’s course. However, her disapproval was not rooted in sexual mores, but in her fear for me and my education and training.
LP: Your training?
AB: It was during our trip abroad that my gift was first noticed. My grandmother would catch me playing by myself. Having conversations with people who weren’t there. My mother had seen me do this, but I was a child—eight or nine—and imaginary friends are not uncommon.
But my grandmother took notice. When she asked me who I was tal
king to, I said Charlotte. When she asked who Charlotte was, I told her that she was a little girl like me who had been very sick. Then she woke one morning and no one could hear her or see her, not her mother or father or brother. And she was very afraid.
LP: Charlotte was a ghost?
AB: I don’t like that word. “Ghost.” The connotation it has with ghost stories. That their purpose is to frighten us. We don’t need to be afraid of the dead. That’s what my grandmother taught me.
She convinced my mother to let me come live with her in Savannah. The gift ran throughout that side of the family. Not in my grandmother, but in her sister and her mother. She knew how to help me and train me to use my abilities.
WILL HERE: I’m going to skip over her time in Savannah learning how to speak to spooks. A lot of sitting cross-legged on crypts waiting for spirits to appear. A whole sidetrack on the interpretation of tarot cards and which deck is better: the eighteenth-century French version or the more modern Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Interesting if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s just that I prefer my fiction properly labeled. Besides, I want to get to the present-day murder mystery.
I will say this. Belestrade told the story of her upbringing with a sense of dramatic timing that can only come from long practice. My guess is that these hard-coaxed private revelations had been hard-coaxed by any number of her clients.
Back to it.
LP: How did you meet Abigail Collins?
AB: A museum gala about two years ago. She was introduced to me by another client. I can’t remember who. We had an immediate connection. She made an appointment to come see me the following week.
LP: This immediate connection—can you describe it?
AB: It’s different with each client. For me, it means that there’s a clarity about a person. I can clearly see and feel the poisonous elements in their lives. For them, it means they see in me something they need in their life. Some are lost; some are struggling against something; with some there’s just an ease in speaking with me that they have nowhere else.
LP: It sounds like the relationship between a patient and psychiatrist.
AB: I suppose it is. Though, unlike a psychiatrist, I recognize that the inner world cannot always provide the answers. There is a world beyond this one.
LP: Which type of client was Mrs. Collins? Lost, struggling, or was she just looking for someone to talk to?
AB: She was a seeker. She wanted something more from this life.
LP: Can you expand on that?
AB: No.
LP: No?
AB: The details of what I discuss with my clients, of the spiritual journeys we go on, are sacrosanct. I’m bound to keep them private.
LP: Ms. Belestrade, a spiritual advisor is not a legal advisor. The law does not recognize confidentiality with your profession. Even if it did, that confidentiality would be eased with Mrs. Collins’s death.
AB: But it hasn’t! Abigail might have departed her body, but she has not left this plane of existence. She still holds her passions and her secrets close, and I must respect that. And, please, call me Ariel.
LP: Ariel…You must see that somewhere within what Mrs. Collins discussed with you, her passions and secrets, there might be a key to understanding her murder. If, as you say, she reached out from beyond the grave to direct you toward me, perhaps confidentiality can be ignored.
AB: I understand. And I sympathize. At the same time, I do not want to splay out her most intimate details for strangers.
I will say this. Abigail’s marriage was…difficult. She remained with her husband for the sake of her children and she paid a price for this, in her mind, heart, and soul.
LP: By “difficult,” do you mean she was physically abused?
AB: I’m afraid I can’t say any more.
LP: And how did you go about helping her?
AB: I showed her that there is light in the darkness. That she was not trapped. That there were paths back into a life where she could be happy.
LP: This was shortly before the death of her husband?
AB: Are you insinuating something?
LP: Merely establishing a timeline.
AB: Let me be clear. Abigail had no hand in her husband’s death. I have no reason to believe it was anything other than suicide, and she expressed the same to me many times.
LP: Did she have an opinion as to why her husband took his own life?
AB: Again, we’re stepping into intimate details of her life and emotions that I’m not comfortable discussing.
LP: What of her recent change of heart regarding her company’s contribution to the war effort? Are you comfortable speaking about that?
AB: As it’s something that Abigail expressed publicly, I am. Her conscience could no longer allow her to take part in man’s brutality to man.
LP: Was this change of heart due to your influence?
AB: Absolutely. When you understand that the veil between the living and the dead is so thin, and that the pain of life lingers far beyond that final breath, it’s much harder to dismiss the violent taking of a life. Even one taken in a so-called noble cause.
LP: Speaking of the veil between the living and the dead, let’s move on to the events of Halloween night. Whose idea was it to feature you as the party’s entertainment?
AB: It was entirely Abigail’s. I rarely do public readings like that. So many people; so much negative energy. My talents work best when I can focus on the intricacies of a single person, a single heart. Things like this have a tendency to turn into spectacle.
LP: Why did you agree?
AB: A feeling. A very strong feeling that I needed to be there. That a message needed to be passed on.
LP: Were you paid for your performance?
AB: I was provided a generous stipend.
LP: Was Abigail similarly generous throughout your relationship?
AB: Don’t be so coy. It’s beneath you. Just ask if I charged her for my services.
LP: Did you?
AB: Yes. And I don’t come cheap. I would think you’d sympathize. Being a woman whose talents are rare and in high demand.
LP: Please describe the events of the night of the party from your perspective.
AB: I arrived a little after eleven. Abigail wanted everything to be a surprise, so she didn’t want me mingling with guests. I came in through the back and was quickly ushered upstairs to the study, which had been set up according to my specifications.
I spent the next half hour there meditating and centering myself. Then Abigail brought her guests in. I began with simple readings, which are less about predicting the past or future and more about showing the person what paths are available to them. That seemed to go rather well, but overall the group was rowdy, a little drunk, and not very open.
Then we began the séance.
I felt a strong need to speak with Rebecca Collins and I asked her to sit for me.
I assume you’ve spoken with others about what happened. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about what was communicated. When I’m connected to the other side, I have very little memory of it afterward.
LP: According to witnesses, you spoke in a voice not unlike that of the late Mr. Collins. You said, “Please, let me be at rest. Don’t betray me, my love.”
AB: Then that’s what I said.
LP: Do you have a sense of why the spirit of Alistair Collins would say this?
AB: I’m sorry, I don’t. At the best of times, I can facilitate a conversation. In most cases—like this one—I’m merely a conduit.
LP: That sounds very frustrating. To be used that way. Against your will.
AB: It’s a privilege, Ms. Pentecost. Few can do what I can. It’s my duty to follow this calling. As I’m sure you
feel it is your duty to follow yours.
LP: Once you…emerged from your trance, what did you do next?
AB: When I came back to awareness, Abigail was telling everyone to leave. I was hurried out along with everyone else. I left the party soon after.
LP: After you left, where did you go?
AB: Home. Neal, my assistant, drove me.
LP: Where was he during the party?
AB: Waiting in the car. And before you ask, yes, he was there the entire time, and no, he didn’t see anything of note. I would have invited him to the party as well, but I was already imposing on Abigail’s generosity with one guest.
LP: You’re referring to Dr. Waterhouse. Why did you invite her to come and observe?
AB: I rarely go out of my way to provoke skeptics, but Olivia is so adamant in her disbelief and so passionate about discovering my so-called tricks. I can’t help but have a go at her.
LP: We’ve spoken with Dr. Waterhouse and she mentioned that you have extraordinary abilities when it comes to reading people. Would you agree?
AB: People are not books. I don’t open them up and flip through their pages. Rather, I open myself up. I become supremely sensitive to the world and the souls around me.
LP: During your time in the Collins house, did you…feel…anything notable from the other guests?
AB: Most people there were more interested in being seen than finding pleasure in one another’s company. Many felt disengaged. They were either waiting for a chance to talk business or putting in the time before they could leave. Sad, really. To waste your life like that.
LP: Do you believe that Abigail Collins was murdered by the spirit of her husband?
AB: I have experienced countless spirits piercing the veil.
I have seen them manifest corporeally. I have felt them enter my body and use me to speak with their loved ones. I have seen them enter the bodies of others and move within them. I have walked into houses beset by poltergeists—spirits so lost and forgotten they are little more than mindless rage given form. But I’ve never seen a spirit murder a living human being. In my experience, as I’m sure in yours, we mortals know enough of murder. We don’t need to rely on the dead.
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 12