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The woman's eyes lit up, and she nodded so vigorously I thought
the forlorn flower might fly completely off. "I'd get to talk on
the telephone, that's what my boy Aloysius said. I'm real good at
that," she insisted. "I'm a modern woman, I am, not afraid of
newfangled machinery. Why, I took to the telephone just like a duck
to water!"

"That's right, she did," Wish confirmed, still beaming.

Yes,
I thought. I remembered how Wish used to tell me
about his mother calling the precinct house where he'd been working
as a rookie policeman, and how unless you stopped her she'd keep
you on the telephone for hours. . . .

"Where's your phone?" So, Edna Stephenson was on such familiar
terms with that instrument that she had already adopted the
shortened form of its appellation, as more and more people seemed
to be doing these days.

"Oh," she crowed, "there it is!" and then she pounced. Quite a
feat that was, since she had to get all the way across the room
from her son's desk to mine on those tiny little feet before
pouncing. But she managed it in record time.

I scooted back out of her way and watched, a little stunned, as
Edna seized the telephone, removed the ear trumpet portion and held
it to her ear, jiggled the hook a couple of times, and then said
into the mouthpiece on the base, "Hello, Central?"

Central apparently said hello back, because Edna was quiet for a
moment, while her little round, brown eyes danced in pleasure. "No,
thank you," she rather abruptly sang out, "I do not wish to make a
call. I just wanted to be sure my telephone is in working order.
Ta-ta!"

"It's working," she announced. "Now let's see the rest of the
place."

I couldn't help but smile, even as I shook my head slowly, in
amazement. Edna was already pattering her erratic way toward the
conference room, so I said, "Wish, why don't you help your mother
off with her coat and bonnet, and show her the rest of our office
space. When you're in the kitchen, you may want to make a new pot
of coffee. Meanwhile I'll clear my stuff out of the front desk so I
won't have to bother her later to get my things."

Wish winked, and the beatific smile became more of an elf's
grin. He'd pulled off a coup, and he knew it. "Mama!" He reached
one long arm out after her. "Hold up. Let's hang up your coat and
hat first, like Fremont says."

Edna was in that three-foot-deep arched passageway between the
office and the conference room, rapping on the walls and asking
with impatient curiosity, "What's this, then? What's backthere
behind this wall? Is there a door? Is it a closet? Well, son, speak
up, I can't hear you!"

"I'm trying, Mama, if you'll just be quiet long enough for me to
tell you."

"So I'm quiet. Like a mouze." "Nize" for nice, "Mouze" for mouse
... I wondered how many more of these charming little
eccentricities of speech Edna had.

"We don't think there's anything back there," Wish explained.
"Certainly there's no door or anything. Architect probably just
made a mistake in the proportion of the downstairs rooms compared
to the upper ones, and to balance it out created a dead space."

"Oh?" Edna cackled. "Ha-ha, hee-hee, that's a good un, dead
space, for a detectives agency. Dead space! Ha-ha, hee-hee ..." And
she was off again.

I smiled, shook my head again in answer to Wish's mute shrug,
and began the job of removing my files and so on from the desk. Of
course I had no idea where I was going to go; I hadn't thought that
far ahead, had assumed there would be candidates for the
receptionist position to be interviewed before things got so far as
my needing to relinquish my desk.

Perhaps Michael's study, since he wasn't here? Only as a
temporary measure, of course. I approached the small room with my
arms full and, in the doorway, stopped, waited a moment, then
abruptly turned away.

Michael's study smelled like him, a subtle masculine scent that
I could not possibly describe, somewhere between soap and leather
and . . . skin. I couldn't work in there, it would drive me
mad.

So I camped out at the end of the conference-room table,
stacking and arranging things that had been in drawers-and when I
was done, I preferred the table to any desk I had ever owned.
Everything so easily to hand, plenty of room to spread out. The
coffee was perking; its delicious smell wafted from the kitchen,
and I let my nose ("noze," Edna would probably say) lead me back
there. Soon the three of us were laughing and talking, and Edna was
telling stories on Wish as a boy; then she asked me how I'd liked
coming West on the train . . . and then the telephone rang.

Edna Stephenson was up like a shot, those short legs and tiny
feet pumping along with far greater reliability than one would have
thought possible. I heard her pick up the instrument and say into
it clearly, "The J&K Agency. This is Mrs. Stephenson, the
receptionist, speaking. May I help you?"

"You taught her what to say?" I asked Wish, quietly.

"Yep. Made her repeat it to me about a million times."

"She did it very well," I acknowledged.

"Fremont, give her a chance. She needs something else to do
besides whist at the church and her women's sodality. We won't have
to pay her much, and if we hit a bad patch and can't pay, well,
she's well enough off it wouldn't hurt her once in a while. My dad
left her pretty well fixed for money."

"Hey, Fremont!" yelled a big voice out of a little round woman,
all the way from the front room. "This call's for you!"

Three days later I had to admit that Edna Stephenson was not
turning out to be at all the disaster I had feared. Wish had done
us a favor, probably at some expense to himself-because she did
treat him more like a son, like a boy, than like the man he had
long ago become. But he bore it with good grace, and Edna, true to
her word, had no fear of modern machines whatsoever, so she was
soon teaching herself the typewriter. To coin a phrase from school
report days, she "showed initiative," and was forever plucking
papers, or whatever, out of my hands, saying, "Here, let me have
that, I can do it for you on the phone."

She could, too. Edna would do things on the telephone that never
would have occurred to me. Library research, for example. She would
call a reference librarian who was a personal friend ofhers and
say: "Listen, dearie, I'm at me job-What, you din't know? I got me
a nize little job now. Days, working for a detective agency. That's
right, a detective agency, like for investigatin' things, same as
the police do only better. My son works here, Aloysius, you know.
Now, dearie, here's the thing. We need to know. . . ."

Whatever we needed to know, if it was in a book, Edna's friend
would find it-and usually pretty quickly, too. (Probably because
Edna wouldn't leave her alone until she'd done it, but no matter.)
Edna also had a very neat handwriting, much easier to read in truth
than her typing-at least so far-and she produced copious,
meticulous notes on whatever subject she had been asked to tackle,
plus a few she decided to tackle just because they interested
her.

Edna's favorite subject at the moment was Ingrid Swann. She had,
by relentless telephoning around town, uncovered something that had
not been in any of the newspapers: Ingrid Swann had had a husband,
from whom she was not divorced. Nor had she lived with the man for
years and years, but he was right here in San Francisco. On the
south side, in Bernal Heights. His name was Conrad Higgins. Ingrid
Swann's real name had been Myra Higgins-not a bad name at all, but
not nearly so exotic, nor as descriptive of the woman's beauty, as
Ingrid Swann. I decided that I would go to see Conrad Higgins,
because if the police had located him they hadn't told the
newspapers. And I badly wanted an edge if not an outright coup.

But first I had to leave some instructions with Edna. I rather
dreaded it, for although she was great at taking initiative, she
was not so good at following orders. Quite frankly I worried about
leaving her alone.

"Edna," I said in a forthright manner, "I have to be out for a
while, but there are some things I want to tell you before I
leave."

"Sure, okay, Fremont." She leaned back in her chair-her feet
didn't touch the floor, so she looked a little like an old
child-and laced her fingers together over her round middle. "What
do you need? Don't look so serious on me. Has someone died?"

"No, quite the contrary. But I'm just a little concerned . . .
Um, it's about these people who are coming here to the offices this
afternoon. One is the principal client in this case you've helped
me with so much, by gathering all that information on Ingrid
Swann."

"Ooh, that's the double murder! And the client's coming here?
How exciting."

"It wasn't exactly a double murder," I said patiently, "there
was one murder and then another. Some weeks and some days lapsed
between the two. First Abigail Locke and then Ingrid Swann."

"Yes, I know," Edna said, nodding wisely, "and they were both
your so-called mediums, though your first one hasn't been nearly so
effective as the second one, meaning Ingrid, used to be. Dunno what
to think of that."

I didn't know what to think of that either. In fact, I hadn't
understood a word after "mediums." I said, "I beg your pardon?"

"Oh, you don't have to do that, Fremont, though it's very
nize
of you all the same. You didn't do nothing to be
pardoned for, far as I know."

I suppressed a smile. "What I intended to say was, I don't take
your meaning, about the first and second mediums-you know, what you
said just now."

"Oh, now I see! Fremont, for a nize girl, sometimes you do talk
funny."

"Probably because I'm from Boston." Conversations with Edna did
have a way of getting out of hand. If she didn't explain herself in
the next sentence, I intended to press on with my own agenda.

"Boston!" She winked. "Well, la-dee-dah. I better be on me peaze
and queuz. Anyways, about those two mediums: The first one, that
Abigail Locke? She was never as great as Ingrid was in her best
times. Mrs. Locke, she didn't have style. She just sat there and
talked up a storm. Could maybe contact a few dead loved ones, that
was all. Nothing exciting. Soze I heard tell, you unnerstand."

I nodded, to keep her talking. So she did know something after
all. I wondered if she, being a widow with some money and time on
her hands, had ever availed herself of a medium's services-
particularly the services of the two in question.

"Now Ingrid Swann, she was something else. Beautiful woman,
that. Kind of woman even other women, as well as all the men of
course, could admire the looks of. And oh, she had talent. She
didn't just talk. Ingrid weren't no trance channeler, no sireee,
she could do all the fancy stuff: Psychokinesis, apports, remote
views, ectoplasmic extrusion ..."

"I've heard about the ectoplasmic extrusion. She worked in a
cabinet, yes? You wouldn't happen to have seen any of that, would
you, Edna?"

Edna beamed, and tipped forward in the chair so that her
tippytoes reached the floor. To keep from slipping right down, she
had to hold on to the chair arms with both hands. "Me and a couple
thousand others!" she announced with glee.

"Thousand? Edna, that sounds hardly possible. There's no place
in all of San Francisco to hold such a large audience."

"Well, it wasn't all on the same night, Fremont. She did seven
performances, seven nights in a row, back about five years ago, I
think it was, in one of the bigger the-ay-ters. I fergit which one.
Nearly killed her, so they said. The effort, you know. But it made
her famous all in one fell swoop."

"And you saw one of the performances. Would you describe it to
me?" I had been standing near a corner of my former desk, which was
Edna's now. But I took a chair, the one designated for prospective
clients, from against the wall and sat down at an angle.

Edna scooted back in the chair, refolded hands over tummy, and
told the tale with a glittering eye: "It was like thiz, now. The
stage was all hung in black drapes, black as night they were. Nize
material, looked like, probably black velvet. Anyways"-she closed
her eyes for a moment and screwed up her features a bit as if that
might help her remember-"right in the middle of the stage was this
black box-the cabinet, that was-inside a big huge box made all of
glass. Like a little room of glass built right there on the
stage-walls, ceiling, and everything. Had a door, too. Only thing
wasn't glass was the frame of the thing, to hold it up, you
know."

Fascinating!
I thought, but did not interrupt.

"So out comes thiz man what works with Ingrid Swann, her
consurge or whatever he was-"

I doubted "concierge" was the word she'd been looking for, but
accepted it without breaking into giggles, which took some
effort.

"And he does his introduction: 'Ladeez and gentlemens,' and all
that. Dee dum dee dum dee dum. Then here comes Ingrid Swann, and
that whole audience gasps, everybody all at once, like some huge
animal taking a breath. Oh, you shoulda seen her, she looked like a
bride in a silvery dress, silver threads sewed right in. No, not a
bride, more like an angel, or a fairy. You know, a good fairy like
in one of them fairy tales. 'Ceptin' no wings."

"It must have been very exciting," I contributed.

"Oh, it was," she nodded, "it was that. Exciting, and she hadn't
never even done a thing yet. So she goes right up to thiz glass box
and the consurge, he makes a coupla fancy passes at the door of the
thing, like a magician, and then he opens it. And in she goes. In
he goes, too. They both go right up to that other box, which is
black and looks like a steam cabinet, you know with the head poking
out and all the rest of the person inside."

I nodded. Steam cabinets were a fairly common phenomenon, though
I had certainly never tried one myself, nor did I intend to.

"Then the consurge, he opens that black cabinet up wide and
calls two men out of the audience to come take a look-see, that
there's nothing inside it but only a stool for Ingrid to sit on. No
false panels, no light switches, no levers nor strings to push and
pull. Which there wasn't. Then the men leave and Ingrid, she sits
down on that stool and the consurge, he locks that cabinet up
around her tight as a drum, with only her pretty head sticking
out."

Edna's voice dropped a notch. "Then he leaves by the glass door,
locks that too. In her glass cage, Ingrid Swann, she closes her
eyes while the consurge steps over to the edge of the stage-he has
a real big voice, y'know-and says in a kinda confidential tone but
not so soft as you can't hear: 'And now we must ask for complete
silence and ab-so-loot stillness from the audience. Anyone who is
easily frightened should be warned, you're about to witness an
eerie experience that is not for the faint of heart to see. If you
think it might upset you, you should leave now, because any noise
or other disruption during Mrs. Swann's direct link of her body
with the spirit world could cause her serious physical harm.' "