Leaving Time: A Novel (21 page)

When my clients used to come to me, all they wanted to hear from a loved one who had passed was
I will be waiting when you get here
.

Nine times out of ten, what they got instead was
You won’t be seeing me again
.

The girl looks sunken, small. “Jenna,” I lie, “if your mother was dead, I would know.”

I had thought I was going to Hell because I was making a living by scamming clients who thought I still had a Gift. But clearly today I am guaranteeing myself a front-row seat at Lucifer’s one-man show, by making this child believe in me when I cannot even believe in myself.

“Oh hey, are you two done with your picnic, or should I keep traipsing around here looking for a needle in a haystack? No, correction,” Virgil says. “Not a needle. A needle’s
useful
.”

He towers over us with his hands on his hips, scowling.

Maybe I’m not supposed to just be here for Jenna. Maybe I’m supposed to be here for Virgil Stanhope, too.

I get to my feet and try to push away the tsunami of negativity rolling off him. “Maybe if you opened yourself up to the possibility, you’d find something unexpected.”

“Thanks, Gandhi, but I prefer to deal in legitimate facts, not woo-woo mumbo jumbo.”

“That woo-woo mumbo jumbo won me three Emmys,” I point out. “And don’t you think we’re
all
a little psychic? Haven’t you ever thought about a friend you haven’t seen in forever, and then he calls? Out of the blue?”

“No,” Virgil says flatly.

“Of course. You don’t
have
any friends. What about when you’re driving down the road with your GPS on and you think,
I’m gonna take a left
, and sure enough, that’s what the GPS tells you to do next.”

He laughs. “So being psychic is a matter of probability. You have a fifty-fifty chance of being right.”

“You’ve never had an inner voice? A gut reaction? Intuition?”

Virgil grins. “Want to guess what my intuition’s telling me right now?”

I throw up my hands. “I quit,” I say to Jenna. “I don’t know why you thought I’d be the right person to—”

“I recognize this.” Virgil starts striking through the reeds with purpose, and Jenna and I both follow. “There used to be a really big tree, but see how it got split by lightning? And there’s a pond over there,” he says, gesturing. He tries to orient himself by pivoting a few times, before walking about a hundred yards to the north. There, he moves in concentric widening circles, stepping gingerly until the ground sinks beneath his shoe. Triumphantly, Virgil leans down and starts pulling away fallen branches and spongy moss, revealing a deep hole. “This is where we found the body.”

“Who was
trampled
,” Jenna says pointedly.

I take a step back, not wanting to get in the middle of this drama, and that’s when I see something winking at me, half buried in the thicket of moss that Virgil overturned. I lean down and pull out a chain, its clasp intact, with a tiny pendant still dangling: a pebble, polished to the highest gloss.

Another sign.
I hear you
, I think, to whoever is beyond that wall of silence, and let the necklace pool in the valley of my palm. “Look at this. Maybe it belonged to the victim?”

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?”

Ignoring him, I watch Jenna curl the necklace into her fist, squeeze her eyes shut. “Nothing,” she says after a moment.

“It’ll come,” I promise. “When you least expect it. You’ve got a lot of natural ability, I can tell. I bet you’ll remember something important when you’re brushing your teeth tonight.”

This is not necessarily true, of course. I’ve been waiting for years now, and I’m as dry as a bar in Salt Lake City.

“She’s not the only one who could use that to jog a memory,” Virgil says, thinking out loud. “Maybe the guy who gave it to Alice could tell us something.”

Jenna’s head snaps up. “My father? He can’t even remember
my
name half the time.”

I pat her arm. “No need to be embarrassed about the sins of the fathers. My daddy was a drag queen.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Jenna asks.

“Nothing. But he happened to be a very
bad
drag queen.”

“Well, my father’s in an institution,” Jenna says.

I look at Virgil over her head. “Ah.”

“Far as I know,” Virgil says, “no one ever went back to talk to your father, after your mom disappeared. Maybe it’s worth a try.”

I’ve done enough cold reading to be able to tell when a person is not being transparent. And right now, Virgil Stanhope is lying like a rug. I don’t know what his game is, or what he hopes to get out of Thomas Metcalf, but I’m not letting Jenna go with him alone.

Even if I swore I’d never go back into a psychiatric facility.

After the incident with the senator, I had a run of dark days. There was a lot of vodka involved, and some prescription medication. My manager at the time was the one who suggested I take a vacation, and by
vacation
, she meant a little sojourn at a psych ward. It was incredibly discreet—the kind of place that celebrities go to to
refresh
, which is Hollywoodspeak for
get your stomach pumped, dry out
, or
have ECT
. I was there for thirty days, long enough to know I would never let myself get that low again if it meant returning.

My roommate was a pretty little thing who was the daughter of a famous hip-hop artist. Gita had shaved off all her hair and had a line of piercings down the curve of her spine, linked by a thin platinum chain, which made me wonder how she slept on her back. She talked to an invisible posse that was absolutely real to her. When one of those imaginary people apparently came after her with a knife, she
had run into traffic and gotten hit by a taxi. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At the time I lived with her, she believed that she was being controlled by aliens through cell phones. Every time someone tried to send a text, Gita went ballistic.

One night, Gita started rocking back and forth in her bed, saying, “I’m gonna get struck by lightning. I’m gonna get struck by lightning.”

It was a clear summer night, mind you, but she wouldn’t stop. She kept this up, and an hour later, when a thunderstorm cell came sweeping through the area, she started to scream and rip at her own skin. A nurse came in, trying to calm her down. “Honey,” she said, “the thunder and the lightning are outside. You’re safe in here.”

Gita turned to her, and in that one moment I saw nothing but clarity in her eyes. “You know nothing,” she whispered.

There was a drumroll of thunder, and suddenly the window shattered. A neon arc of lightning staggered in, seared the rug, and burned a hole the size of a fist into the mattress beside Gita, who started rocking harder. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning,” she said. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning.”

I tell you this story by way of explanation: The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.

“My father’s not going to be helpful,” Jenna insists. “We shouldn’t even bother.”

Again, my cold reading skills shine: The way she cuts her eyes to the left like that, the way she is now chewing on her fingernail—Jenna’s lying, too. Why?

“Jenna,” I ask, “can you run to the car and see if I left my sunglasses in there?”

She gets up, more than happy to escape this conversation.

“All right.” I wait for Virgil to meet my gaze. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t trust you.”

“Excellent. Then we feel exactly the same way about each other.”

“What are you not telling her?”

He hesitates, deciding whether or not to trust me, I’m sure. “The night the caregiver was found dead, Thomas Metcalf was nervous.
Antsy. It could have been because his wife and daughter were missing at the time. And it could have been because he was already showing signs of a breakdown. But it also could have been a guilty conscience.”

I lean back, crossing my arms. “You think Thomas is a suspect. You think Alice is a suspect. Seems to me you think everyone’s to blame except yourself, for saying in the first place that the death was an accident.”

Virgil looks up at me. “I think Thomas Metcalf might have been abusing his wife.”

“That’s a damn good reason to run away,” I say, thinking out loud. “So you want to meet with him and try to get a reaction out of him.”

When Virgil shrugs, I know I’m right.

“Did you ever consider what that might do to Jenna? She already thinks her mother abandoned her. You’re going to take off her rose-colored glasses and show her that her father was a bastard, too?”

He shifts. “She should have thought of that before she hired me.”

“You’re really an ass.”

“That’s what I get paid for.”

“Then for all intents and purposes, you ought to be in a different tax bracket.” I narrow my gaze. “You and I know you’re not getting rich off this case. So what do you get out of it?”