Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(84)
“As opposed to an improper one?”
“I . . . I might have asked for Emma, but I didn’t do it in the usual prescribed fashion. I was one part afraid of failing, and one part afraid of succeeding. Besides, such an appointment with the dead is probably best left to the professionals.”
“Speaking of, have you ever been to Lily Dale?” I asked her quickly, for the question sprang to mind and flew out of my mouth in an instant. Lily Dale probably wasn’t the nearest spiritualist community to Fall River, but it was near enough—and quite famous.
“I haven’t yet had the pleasure. Perhaps after this little adventure of ours.”
“As a tourist, I hope—and not as a drop-in at a séance.”
She laughed then, and I think it was genuine. I adored her sense of humor, which was almost as awful as mine. “From your lips to God’s ears, as they say. Though if I ever do meet some untimely end, I hope you go looking for me.”
“Why is that?”
“The obvious, is all,” she said, giving one last look at the line of photographs drying on the string at the foot of my bed. “In case there’s another side, and no heaven or hell to be found there. Should that prove the case, I’d enjoy having a friend to chat with.”
“Then it’s a deal,” I vowed. “But you must promise me the same: Should you eventually learn of my untimely passing, I want you to try to reach me. Go to Lily Dale and seek me out for that incorporeal chat, and I’ll gladly get the conversation rolling. Let’s say this, shall we? We’ll need a secret phrase between us, something a charlatan couldn’t manufacture by way of guesswork or research. What should we use as a signal—if one of us is dead and reaching out for contact?”
“Nance,” she said quickly. Then she changed her mind, just as fast. “No, wait. Not Nance. That’s too obvious, and someone might guess it through patience or research. How about, instead . . .” Something unhappy and unpleasant crossed her face . . . perhaps a memory that caused her pain. It wasn’t painful enough to stop her, though. “Let us speak of the ocean . . . Let’s talk about starfish, shall we?”
“Starfish? That’s random enough.”
“No. It’s not random. It’s something between us, in a way. Doctor Seabury chattered about them quite a lot toward the end of his life. ‘Starfish hands,’ he would tell me. In his dreams, the creatures who waited there . . . they had starfish-shaped hands.”
“Very good, then. ‘Starfish’ it is.”
“Somewhere down the line, I hope. A very long time from now.”
I nodded. “Years and years. And not a moment sooner.”
Ruth Stephenson Gussman
OCTOBER 4, 1921
Maybe they aren’t spells at all. Maybe they’re something else, or maybe there’s more than one kind. I feel like a window is opening every time—and I’m seeing into some other place, only it’s not heaven and it’s not hell; it’s just where dead people go in the end. Some of the dead people, I guess. Not all of them, I hope.
These spells (or whatever they are) confuse me, and they scare me. Today’s was the worst one yet, but that’s only fitting, right? Because this time, the spell warned me of the worst thing yet, and I was still too dumb to do anything about it in time.
Unless the timing was wrong. Or the message was wrong. Everything might be wrong, but I couldn’t say one way or another. Not anymore. Not considering.
I left the house. I wasn’t supposed to, but I left the house—even though it isn’t a house, but that’s what I’m used to calling my home, no matter where I live. So I left the apartment, if that’s more correct, even though they all told me not to: Chief Eagan, the inspector, Lizbeth. Everybody said not to leave except for George, and he told me to get as far the hell away as I could. More or less.
Everybody else seemed to think it was too soon to take such drastic measures, and I ought to stay put, inside my own place where my daddy couldn’t find me and the reverend couldn’t reach me without going to a lot of trouble—and we’ve got good neighbors, as I think I’ve mentioned before. Someone would come and warn me, if he started asking around.
But I got that letter from George, and I took it over to that hotel—to give it to Lizbeth and the inspector. They didn’t chide me too bad about it, since I’d brought them something useful; but they didn’t want me coming with them, either.
I know it’s true that I’d only make trouble for them, and they’re trying hard to find out what George has gotten up to and what the reverend is getting up to . . . but I’m not a little girl and I don’t have to stay indoors just because they said I should. So what happened was, I didn’t go home after they left for the storage room at the civic building, even though I was supposed to. Pedro was at work, so he didn’t know the difference, and I was tired of being cooped up in the house all alone, or cooped up in the courthouse with everybody staring at me.
Instead, I went down to Five Points and visited a drugstore there—a little place where I used to get sweets and maybe a lemonade, if I had an extra nickel in my purse. I hadn’t been there since before I got married, and since you got killed.
And I had a nickel to spare.
It was strange, walking down the street and realizing that not every single person was looking at me hard. Not every soul in the whole city knew who I was, or what I looked like, and most of the ones who did know likely didn’t care. I’d just been at the middle of the storm for so long that it felt like I’d been in a fishbowl, or on a stage with the whole world watching, except it wasn’t the whole world at all. It was only a handful of people in a theater.