Leaving Time(50)

Jenna’s face drains of color. “That was my mom’s. And she never, ever took it off.”


When I meet a nonbeliever—and, sugar, let me tell you, they seem to be attracted to me like bees to nectar—I bring up Thomas Edison. There isn’t a person on this planet who wouldn’t say he was the epitome of a scientist; that his mathematical mind allowed him to create the phonograph, the lightbulb, the motion picture camera and projector. We know he was a freethinker who said there was no supreme being. We know he held 1,093 patents. We also know that before he passed, he was in the process of inventing a machine to talk to the dead.

The height of the Industrial Revolution was also the height of the Spiritualist movement. The fact that Edison was a supporter of the mechanical breakthroughs in the physical world doesn’t mean he wasn’t equally entranced by the metaphysical. If mediums could do it via séance, he reasoned, surely a machine calibrated with great care could communicate with those on the other side.

He didn’t talk much about this intended invention. Maybe he was afraid of his concept being stolen; maybe he had not come up with a specific design. He told Scientific American magazine that the machine would be “in the nature of a valve”—meaning that, with the slightest effort from the other side, some wire might be tripped, some bell might be rung, some proof might be had.

Can I tell you that Edison believed in the afterlife? Well, although he was quoted as saying that life wasn’t destructible, he never came back to tell me so personally.

Can I tell you he wasn’t trying to debunk Spiritualism? Not entirely.

But it is equally possible that he wanted to apply a scientist’s brain to a field that was hard to quantify. It is equally possible that he was trying to justify what I used to do for a living, by giving cold, hard evidence.

I also know that Edison believed the moment between being awake and being asleep was a veil, and it was in that moment that we were most connected to our higher selves. He would set pie tins out on the floor beside each arm of his easy chair and take a nap. Holding a big ball bearing in each hand, he’d nod off—until the metal struck metal. He’d write down whatever he was seeing, thinking, imagining at that moment. He became pretty proficient at maintaining that in-between state.

Maybe he was trying to channel his creativity. Or maybe he was trying to channel … well … spirits.

After Edison’s death, no prototypes or papers were found that suggested he’d started work on his machine to talk to the dead. I suppose that means the folks in charge of his estate were embarrassed by his Spiritualist leanings, or they didn’t want that to be the memory left behind of a great scientist.

Seems to me, though, that Thomas Edison got the last laugh. Because at his home in Fort Myers, Florida, there’s a life-size statue of him in the parking lot. And in his hand, he’s holding that ball bearing.


I am having the sense of a male presence.

Although, if I’m going to be honest, that might just be a sinus headache coming on.

“Of course you’re sensing a guy,” Virgil says, balling up the aluminum foil that housed his chili dog. I have never seen a human being eat the way this man eats. The terms that come to mind are giant squid and wet vac. “Who else would give a chick a necklace?”

“Are you always this rude?”

He picks off one of my French fries. “For you, I’m making a special exception.”

“You still hungry?” I ask. “How about I serve up a steaming platter of I told you so?”

Virgil scowls. “Why? Because you tripped over a piece of jewelry?”

“Well, what did you find?” The pimply boy in the corrugated metal trailer who served up our hot dogs is watching this exchange. “What?” I bark at him. “Have you never seen people argue?”

“He’s probably never seen someone with pink hair,” Virgil murmurs.

“At least I still have hair,” I point out.

That, at least, hits him where it hurts. He runs a hand over his nearly buzzed cut. “This is badass,” he says.

“You just keep telling yourself that.” I glimpse the teen hot dog vendor from the corner of my eye again, staring. Part of me wants to believe that he’s drawn to the spectacle of the Human Hoover polishing off the rest of my lunch, but there’s a niggling thought in my head that maybe he recognizes me as the celebrity I used to be. “Don’t you have some ketchup bottles to fill?” I snap, and he shrinks back from the window.

We are sitting outside in a park, eating the hot dogs I bought after Virgil realized he didn’t have a dime on him.

“It’s my father,” Jenna says, over a mouthful of her tofu dog. She is wearing the necklace now. It dangles over her T-shirt. “That’s who gave it to my mother. I was there. I remember.”

“Great. You remember your mother getting a rock on a chain, but not what happened the night she vanished,” Virgil says.

“Try holding it, Jenna,” I suggest. “When I used to get called in for kidnappings, the way I got my best leads was to touch something that had belonged to the missing child.”

“Spoken like a bitch,” Virgil says.

“I beg your pardon?”

He looks up, all innocence. “Female dog, right? Isn’t that how bloodhounds track, too?”