Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(95)

“Hold the end,” he instructed. I did. He held the other end, took a deep breath, and began without further preamble. “If there’s anyone listening who might have cause to help Ruth Gussman, or anyone who bears a grudge against the Chapelwood Estate, then I would ask you: Spirit, show me your sign.”

At first, nothing happened. We sat there in the dirt, the auto’s headlamps glaring at us, and its engine rumbling smoothly in the background, almost drowning out the bugs and the frogs that clicked and squawked somewhere out of sight. The trees loomed tall overhead, so tall I couldn’t see their tops; and they seemed so thick around us that they might have been solid walls of stagecraft scenery.

Something like a fluttering mist appeared before my eyes, and I was momentarily encouraged. Then it tried to sting me, and I realized that I was merely an object of interest for a small cloud of mosquitos. I waved them away, telling them to shoo.

If the insects bothered Simon, he didn’t let it interfere with the business at hand. Again he tried, “Spirit, show me your sign. And, Lizbeth, both hands on the stick, please.”

I gave up defending myself, and did as he asked. The tiny winged things sparkled like fairies in the strong, straight light of the car.

This time, I felt a tug on the stick. It wasn’t a little tug, but it stopped short of being a yank—drawing the pseudo-planchette away from me, toward Simon. Then it pulled to the left, and toward me, and to the right . . . in a pattern like a large oval, drawn over and over again.

My breath caught in my throat. I looked hard at Simon’s hands, but he held the stick as lightly as I did, and the grim concentration on his face suggested he wasn’t out to test the limits of my gullibility. On and on, the stick swirled—a spoon stirring a pot, a toy train running around a track. It thrilled me, and gave me a wash of chills despite the sticky warmth of the Alabama evening.

“Spirit,” I said in a whisper that could scarcely be heard above the idling engine, the hoots of owls, the drone of stinging things that fluttered between the trees. “Give us your name.”

The pattern slowed, but didn’t quite stop. It changed shape and it changed rhythm long enough to draw our small stub of wood over to the letter “R,” then “U,” then “T” . . .

“Stop that! Leave us, trickster,” he commanded, and forcibly drew the stick over to the place where I’d scrawled “no.”

I was panting now, gasping as I breathed and watched, and felt the draw of the makeshift planchette ebb and then leave altogether. “That wasn’t Ruth. I don’t care what it said. It couldn’t have been Ruth.”

“It almost certainly wasn’t. I told you, the things that like to speak when a board is presented . . . as often as not, they’re liars and fiends. This kind of contact only works if the spirits of our friends are stronger than the little pests that hover about, drawn like moths to a flame—or those gnats to your nose. Let us try again.”

My hands shook, but I nodded.

This time, the pattern that emerged was more of a figure eight. When asked its name, it spelled out “George,” but Simon didn’t believe that was George Ward. By way of explanation, he told me that, as far as he knew, the newly dead can’t muster the strength for communication like that; for some reason, it takes time. Days or weeks, at least, and we knew that both Ruth and George had been alive much more recently.

I believed him because I had to, for the sake of my own sanity; but still I shook like the hood ornament on the car behind me, my bones knocking together in time to the fire and clang of the motor’s combustion.

“Stay strong, Lizbeth. This was your idea, remember?”

“No, it was yours—but you were only joking. Don’t worry about me: I’m strong. I’m ready. One more time, and then . . . then we admit that this was a silly stunt after all.”

“Let the third time be the charm, eh? Spirit,” he said, directing his attention to the stick, and to the letters I’d scratched into the earth, “show me your sign.”

Slowly, jerkily, the sign began to form. This one had angles, or so it became apparent when it found its stride. It swooped up toward Simon, down toward me, then to his left, and off to my right. Once it’d created that jagged groove, worn in the fabric of whatever separated us, the gesture became smoother as it repeated itself again, and again, and again.

It looked familiar. It looked like what a priest does, or what a Catholic does, when he bows his head to pray.

“James.” Simon breathed. “Please, be James.”

The stick dragged us gently to the “yes.”

I jumped right in, afraid that my friend would banish this one, too—though the look on his face and the moisture in his eyes told me that, this time, maybe he wouldn’t. I began with a simple hello, like we were at tea and required a formal introduction. “Hello, Father Coyle? We haven’t met, and you don’t know me—but I’m Lizbeth Andrew, and we have some friends in common.”

The stick swung out of its pattern, and began to spell.

Borden.

“Yes . . . yes, that’s . . . that’s right,” I stammered. I don’t know why it surprised me. But then again, I had no idea how much the dead may know, or why they know it. “My name was Borden.”

Help her.

“We’re trying,” I told him with all my heart.