In the Shadow of Blackbirds(33)

I knelt in front of his photos with my eyes closed and my mind open. I even laid my hands against the picture frames and called his name.

“Stephen. Stephen. Are you there? Stephen Elias Embers.”

No. Not quite right. I felt like one of those questionable people who advertised public séances in the newspaper.

TODAY ONLY!

MISS MARY SHELLEY BLACK

A REMARKABLE DEMONSTRATION OF SPIRIT COMMUNICATION

HEAR SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF RECITE MACBETH!




I opened my eyes. “You’re not like that.” I got off the floor and plopped onto my bed. “You’ve got to approach this more like … an experiment. Like … Phantom.”

That’s right: Phantom.

When I was ten, Dad and I had a devil of a time finding a mouse that was chewing through the cardboard cookie boxes in Dad’s grocery store. I nicknamed the little pest Phantom, for he came and went in the night like a supernatural entity. None of the traps in the usual places worked. We couldn’t find his means of entrance and escape anywhere. All we saw were the mysterious visitor’s nibble marks and half-eaten cookies.

After a week of fruitless searching, Dad and I became detectives. We lined the perimeter of the store and the backroom with talcum powder and tracked the tiny footsteps we discovered the next morning. Phantom seemed to be creeping out from somewhere behind the barrel of soap chips. We then used steel bars, springs, and peanut butter bait to build the finest mousetrap a father and daughter had ever invented—much safer than the store-bought ones Dad wouldn’t allow me to set. Once we had put our equipment in place, we captured that mouse the very next night.

Stephen was certainly no mouse, and I didn’t intend to trap him. But he was something to be coaxed out of hiding.

A mystery to explore.

A scientific mind like yours should want to explore the communication between spirits and mortals, Aunt Eva had said the day I arrived at her house. It’s no different than the mystery behind telephone wires and electrical currents.

She was right. If I could figure out why I was still able to see Stephen, it would be no different than Thomas Edison discovering how to create electric light out of carbon filaments and dreams. Or the Wright brothers proving humans could fly.

The impossible often turned possible.

Scientific detectives and Spiritualists could be one and the same.





AUNT EVA CAME HOME TO FIND ME DISEMBOWELING HER telephone.

“What on earth are you doing inside my telephone box?” She plunked a crate of onions on the wobbly worktable at the center of the kitchen and put her hands on her hips.

I blew a stray strand of hair out of my eye. “I’m dissecting it.”

“What?”

“My brain desperately needs exercise. I decided to see how the wires work.”

“Don’t play with any wires—not after shocking yourself to kingdom come.” She slammed the telephone box closed, just missing the tips of my fingers. “Bolt that up and stay out of there.”

I held up the silver bells. “I need to put it back together first.”

“Mary Shelley—”

“It’ll just take a minute. The phonograph took longer.”

“Leave the phonograph alone. It’s having trouble as it is.”

“Not anymore.”

She sighed, pulled down her grease-streaked flu mask, and grabbed two onions from the crate. “While you’re cleaning up your mess, I’m going to make supper.”

I screwed the bells back into place. “We’ve been invited to go somewhere tonight.”

“We have?”

“Julius wants to take us to a séance.”

She let an onion drop to the floor and turned toward me. “A séance?”

“He called about it this morning.” I watched her eyes water with disbelief and excitement behind the round frames of her glasses. “I guess you’re interested?”

Her cheeks flushed scarlet. “I am not interested in Julius Embers.”

“I meant the séance. I already know you’re interested in Julius.”

“He’s four years younger than I am. I’m a recent widow. Don’t be ridiculous.” She pulled a knife out of a drawer and went to work dicing the onions. The back of her neck glowed a radioactive shade of red. “He knows so many worldly people in downtown San Diego. And it’s the night before Halloween. I bet the séance will be quite the social event. What would I even wear?”

“I have no idea.”

“Wait a minute …” She turned my way with the knife in her hand. “Why do you want to go to a séance with Julius Embers?”

Instead of answering, I shut the telephone box and screwed the front cover into place.

“Oh, Mary Shelley.” Her shoulders sagged. “We can’t have another episode like the one at the funeral.”

“You said it felt like I brought part of the afterlife back with me. What if I have? What if I’m not all the way back from the dead?”

“You look alive enough to me.”

“But Stephen—what if he hasn’t made it to the other side? What if there’s a reason he’s not resting in peace?”

“I don’t want you causing another scene. It’s not healthy to refuse to let someone go.”