All Things Undying

by Marcia Talley

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Alison said. ‘You’d be amazed how many haunted places there are in Britain.’

  Considering that the history of the country went back to before the Stone Age, I could believe it. One Celt runs an iron sword through another and a restless spirit is born. ‘If she’s open to suggestions, I think I have an idea for her show.’

  Alison was sorting through some DVDs on the end table. She looked up. ‘Oh? What’s that?’

  ‘What if she were to go to Torcross? She could stroll along the beach at Slapton Sands and see if she encounters any of the soldiers or sailors who died there. If any spirit is restless, it ought to be one of those poor guys. Dark, cold, wet, severely burned. They were a long, long way from home when the end came.’

  Alison pressed her hands together and clapped silently. ‘Brilliant!’

  I bowed my head in mock modesty. ‘Thank you.’ I didn’t know how Cathy Yates felt about medium-slash-clairvoyants, but if the idea captured Susan Parker’s imagination, and the people on the London end of Dead Reckoning agreed, I’d have something positive to tell the American.

  Or maybe Cathy would think I was as nutty as a fruitcake.

  I hadn’t known Cathy very long, but when it came to uncovering information about her father, I figured Cathy would leave no stone unturned, no matter how unconventional.

  And I was betting that Susan would go for it, too.

  EIGHT

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right. I don’t like being wrong one bit. But, maybe this once I might be a little wrong.’

  Lady Elaine Fairchilde, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

  Early the following morning, I was awakened in our room at Horn Hill House by my iPhone vibrating like a dentist’s drill on the bedside table. I fumbled for it, thumbed the screen on.

  ‘Mumpf.’

  ‘It’s Alison, Hannah. I was able to bag three tickets to Susan’s live show in Paignton on Wednesday night!’ she bubbled. ‘Do you and Paul want to go?’

  ‘Let me check.’ I touched mute, then nudged my husband awake. When I asked him the question, he groaned, covered his eyes with his hand and said, ‘I’d rather crawl naked through a nest of fire ants.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no, then.’

  Paul raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Besides, I’m sailing Biding Thyme to Cowes with Jon, remember?’

  Back on the phone, I skipped the part about the fire ants and reminded Alison that Susan’s show would conflict with my husband’s plans to help her husband sail Biding Thyme to victory at Cowes.

  ‘Blimey! I was so excited, I completely forgot! Well, never mind. I’ll figure something out.’

  ‘Do you want me to ask Janet Brelsford if she’d like to join us?’

  ‘Uh, no. I’ve just had a radical idea, Hannah. I’m going to ask my dad!’

  If you’d asked my opinion, I’d have said that Stephen Bailey would be down on the ground along with Paul, crawling through that nest of fire ants, but it was Alison’s ticket, so I kept my opinion to myself. Besides, Alison was volunteering to drive. ‘The show starts at seven, Hannah, so we’ll pick you up at half five.’

  Alison and her father were waiting at the foot of Horn Hill in a sleek blue Prius pulled to the curb in the little lay-by directly opposite Khrua Thai Restaurant. I didn’t recognize them until Alison gave a light tap on the horn, then waved at me from the window.

  ‘What happened to your Micra?’ I asked as I climbed into the back seat of the Prius.

  ‘It began begging for a new transmission,’ Alison explained, checking the wing mirror and letting a minibus pass before pulling out into Higher Street. ‘Jon said no way were we going to throw more money at it. This is Dad’s car.’ She smiled at her father who was belted so securely into the front passenger seat that I thought he was in danger of getting gangrene from the waist down. White hair tamed and slicked back, he wore a striped shirt and a checked sports coat, both patterns at war with a yellow paisley tie. ‘Dad’s letting me drive for a change.’

  ‘I have to confess I’m surprised to see you, Mr Bailey. You seemed like such a skeptic the other day.’

  ‘Ulterior motives,’ Bailey mumbled. ‘Haven’t seen the Palace since they finished the renovations back in oh-seven. Hear they did a smashing job.’

  Alison grunted. ‘Dad thinks I need a chaperone.’

  Ably chaperoned by the two of us, Alison drove in a clockwise direction through town, taking the long way around to the foot of Coombe Road where we waited at the Floating Bridge Inn, engine idling, for the Higher Ferry, a newly commissioned, state-of-the-art vessel that had been in service only a couple of months. During the short three-minute ride across the Dart, I stepped out of the car briefly to watch in fascination as the ferry was pulled across the river on stout steel cables. Once we reached the Kingswear side and were on our way again, I loosened my seat belt and leaned over the back of Alison’s seat, speaking into her left ear. ‘Do you think they’ll be taping Susan’s show for television?’

  ‘They usually do, but only the best bits will make it to the telly.’

  ‘What do you expect, Alison?’ grumped her father from the passenger seat. ‘They’re not going to show her being wrong on the telly, now, are they?’

  ‘True enough,’ I said. ‘That’s why I think it will be interesting to see what she does in front of a live audience. She’ll be on stage for two hours, performing without a net, as it were.’

  ‘Complete and unexpurgated,’ Alison added.

  ‘There will be shills,’ her father proclaimed in the same confident tone of voice that God must have used when he said, ‘Let there be light.’

  ‘I’ve seen only a bit of that one show you captured on video, Alison. What are they generally like?’

  ‘It’s an hour long, and they’re usually in three parts. First, there’s a pre-arranged reading. I remember one . . .’ She paused, lightly braking to take a curve at a more prudent speed. ‘Susan didn’t know anything about the woman, had never met her, but she brought a message from the woman’s husband, a soldier who’d been killed in Afghanistan. It was a private detail about a silver bracelet he’d given her on the last night they’d spent together before he was deployed. The woman was in tears, and so was I.’

  Bailey exploded. ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘You didn’t see it, Dad. Susan was amazing.’

  ‘You said three segments?’ I asked, trying to keep the conversation on track.

  ‘Right. There’s the part where she walks up to strangers in shops or on the street – like what happened to you, Hannah, but with cameras. Then she’ll go somewhere that’s haunted, and my God, we do have a lot of places like that in England, don’t we, Dad?’

  ‘Henges, circles and barrows. England’s got more haunted places than dogs have fleas.’

  ‘And they’re not all crumbling ruins, either, with wailing damsels or ghostly knights in armor clattering around the courtyards on horseback,’ Alison continued. ‘This couple in a semi-detatched in St Albans complained to Susan about objects constantly being moved. One photograph, in particular, kept ending up face down on the mantel. Susan said it was their dead son trying to get their attention. He’d committed suicide. Or so they thought,’ she added mysteriously.

  ‘And?’ I prodded.

  Alison shot a quick glance over her shoulder. ‘Turns out he wasn’t alone when he passed.’

  ‘So that Parker woman said,’ muttered Alison’s father.

  ‘So she said.’

  Stephen Bailey loosened his seatbelt and swiveled in his seat so he could face me. ‘You can see why I’m coming along on this little excursion, can’t you? Jon aids and abets her in all this nonsense. Someone has to grab Alison’s ankles and pull her back down to earth when she goes off like this.’

  Alison’s eyes caught mine in the rear-view mirror. ‘How sweet to see he’s still looking after me.’

  ‘Devon might be starring in another segment of Dead Reckoning, Mr Bailey, if Cathy Yates has her way.’<
br />
  ‘That American?’ Bailey snorted, apparently forgetting that I was an American too.

  ‘As you know from when you talked to her, Mr Bailey, Ken Small’s book got Cathy all fired up. So she delivered a copy to Susan’s flat the other day, with Post-it notes stuck in all the relevant places. Cathy hopes Susan will be able to locate that farmer’s field where Small said the bodies had been buried in a ruined air-raid shelter.’

  ‘Good luck to them, then,’ grumbled Alison’s father. ‘There were thirty thousand acres of farmland in the area that was evacuated in ’forty-four. She can’t tramp over all thirty thousand with that daft cow and her camera crew.’

  ‘I imagine she’ll start at the Sherman tank and seek direction from any spirits she finds hanging around there,’ I said sweetly.

  Bailey turned to face me, nose twitching. ‘Not you, too!’

  ‘The jury’s still out, Mr Bailey. I like to keep an open mind.’

  ‘Drop me off at the nearest pub,’ he harrumphed. ‘That’s where they’ve got spirits I can relate to.’

  When we reached Paignton, we tucked the Prius snugly away in Artillery Lane, had a quick bite at a little Chinese restaurant, then walked back to the Palace Theatre, a lovingly restored red and white brick structure overlooking an elliptical park.

  ‘And here I thought we were so early,’ Alison observed as we trudged up the hill. ‘People are already queuing!’

  ‘I think they’re Susan’s groupies,’ I said when we got a little closer.

  And so they were. A man dressed like a missionary in dark pants and a white short-sleeved shirt stood on an upturned milk crate next to a red pillarbox, holding a Bible out in front of him. Sparse strands of yellowish-gray hair were combed over his pink skull, and sideburns crawled along his cheeks. His eyes flashed with the zeal of the book of Revelation, from which he appeared to be reading, raining fire and brimstone down on all who dared enter the theater doors.

  The other members of his team carried picket signs that, on closer inspection, proved to be constructed of two pieces of foam board taped around a dowel. One was the quote from Deuteronomy I recognized from Alison’s video, carried by a young man this time, while False Prophets Shall Bring in Damnable Heresies. Peter 2:1 was being waved back and forth like a windshield wiper by a woman who was probably the young man’s mother, considering the similarity of their profiles.

  Next to her, a dark-haired young woman wearing a red headband and an ankle-length flowered dress held aloft a sign that said Exodus 22:18 in black gothic letters.

  ‘Are we supposed to know what that means?’ Alison wondered. ‘John three:sixteen I know. The twenty-third Psalm, ditto. Exodus twenty-two:eighteen doesn’t exactly roll trippingly off the tongue.’

  ‘I’m usually good with chapter and verse, but I’m not familiar with that one,’ I confessed. ‘Hold on.’ I whipped out my iPhone, touched the Google icon and began tapping letters. After a few moments, I had the results. ‘Jeesh.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  I showed Alison the screen: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

  I’d rarely seen rage bubble up so quickly. It started in Alison’s shoulders, stiffened the tendons in her neck, reddened her cheeks and the tips of her ears then exploded from her lips. ‘What’s the matter with you people?’ she shouted at the Stepford Wife who was holding the offending sign. ‘Don’t have the balls to say it out loud? That is a threat! Someone ought to report you to the police!’

  Bailey grabbed his daughter’s arm and pulled. ‘Come on, girl.’

  I lagged behind, staring at the object of Alison’s anger, the woman with the headband, who stared back with about as much emotion as a mannequin in a shop window. ‘I honestly can’t see your objection,’ I told her. ‘As a Christian, don’t you believe in life after death?’

  The woman didn’t say anything at first, and I wondered if the guy standing on the milk crate had trained his minions to keep their mouths shut, no matter what the provocation, like the guards at Buckingham Palace. ‘Alf!’ she shouted, to my utter astonishment. ‘You got any brochures left in the boot?’

  ‘Who is worthy to open the book and loose the seals thereof,’ Alf proclaimed breathlessly from atop the milk crate. ‘Two boxes of ’em, girl . . . and no one in the heaven, or on the earth . . .’

  ‘Come with me,’ the young woman said. She propped the offending sign against the wall and led me around the corner to a car park and a dark blue vehicle so covered with window decals and bumper stickers that I would have been hard pressed to come up with its make and model.

  TGIF – THANK GOD I’M FORGIVEN

  ABORTION: 1 DEAD, 1 WOUNDED

  I SAID, THOU SHALT NOT KILL. GO VEGETARIAN.

  THE ROAD TO HEAVEN IS A ONE-WAY STREET

  TEN COMMANDMANTS, NOT SUGGESTIONS

  ‘This your car?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah. It’s Alf’s.’ She balled her hand into a fist and gave the lid of the boot a solid thwack. It popped open obediently, revealing a jumble of boxes, oily rags, jumper cables and empty one-liter beverage containers. She stripped the packing tape off one of the boxes, pried up the lid, and peered into its depths. ‘Keep it,’ she said, and handed me a glossy brochure entitled WTL Guardians. The group was represented by a logo that superimposed images of a cross and a book over the rising (or it could have been setting) sun.

  ‘What are you guardians of?’ I asked, tucking the brochure into my handbag to read later.

  ‘Way, Truth and Life,’ she replied. ‘WTL. Get it?’

  I got it. ‘What’s WTL’s problem with Susan Parker, then?’ I asked.

  ‘S’plains in the brochure,’ she said, slamming the lid of the trunk closed. ‘My name’s Olivia Sandman, by the way. What’s yours?’

  ‘I’m Hannah.’

  ‘You from Canada?’

  ‘Vancouver,’ I lied. ‘Well, thanks for the brochure,’ I said, patting the side pocket of my handbag. ‘I’ll give it all the attention it deserves. Right now, though, I’d better hurry to catch up with my friends.’

  I hustled back up the hill, passed Olivia’s colleagues, keeping my eyes down, and joined Alison and her father in the queue of early arrivals, snaking up the handicapped ramp toward the entrance doors. Eventually we were allowed into the lobby where we joined still another line waiting to be let into the theater proper.

  To our right, groups of theater-goers clustered around long, cloth-covered tables selling Dead Reckoning: Season One DVDs, copies of Susan’s autobiography, I’m Not Dead Yet, and souvenir T-shirts in a variety of pastel shades. While Stephen Bailey held our places in line, Alison and I joined a clot of fans milling around the T-shirt table.

  After carefully considering how it would go with my sister’s prematurely white hair, I bought a blue ‘I’m Not Dead Yet’ T-shirt for Ruth. I thought she might enjoy reading Susan’s book, too, but decided to buy it from my friendly, neighborhood independent bookseller once I got home to Maryland. I was ounces away from the weight limit already. No way I was going to pay British Airways an additional £30 for an overweight bag.

  ‘Watch me rattle his cage.’ Alison positively twinkled as she held up a green T-shirt for her father’s inspection. ‘Want one, Dad? Birthday coming up.’

  Bailey folded his arms across his chest and scowled.

  Alison selected a yellow T-shirt for herself, paid for it with cash, then joined me back in line. We moved along slowly, amusing ourselves by listening to the conversations going on in the line around us:

  – This is the third of her live shows I’ve been to. I’m hoping Lucy will come through.

  – Can’t afford two hundred pounds for a private reading, can I?

  – She told Sandra that her mother’s ring was just gathering dust and that she should get it sized and wear it!

  – Why don’t they ever say, ‘I forgot to tell you about the bank account I have in Switzerland. The number is CH10 0023 blah blah blah’?

  I wondered about that last
one myself.

  Our seats, when we found them, were primo, on the aisle and only four rows back from the stage. ‘I need the seat on the aisle,’ Stephen Bailey insisted, standing to one side as we passed by him into the row. ‘Might have to leave in a hurry.’

  ‘Bladder,’ Alison whispered as we eased into the plush velvet seats, the red upholstery as yet unbaptized by food spots, bubblegum, or hair oil.

  ‘How did you get these seats?’ I was impressed. ‘Susan told us the show has been sold out for weeks!’

  ‘I called the number on Susan’s card,’ Alison said as she sat down. ‘But the waiting list was a mile long, so I went to Plan B.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Jon has friends in high places.’ Alison smiled enigmatically.

  ‘Old school tie?’ I asked.

  ‘More like those who sail together . . .’ she giggled. ‘He and this chap share a London club. Apparently ITV hold back a certain number of tickets for emergencies.’

  ‘Like if Charles and Camilla take a notion to attend?’

  ‘Exactly. Jon’s mate calls them “Ooops tickets”.’

  Feeling grateful that the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were otherwise engaged, I settled into my seat and admired the set. Bathed in soft lavender light, it looked for all the world like my late grandmother’s living room in Cleveland, Ohio. A round table covered with a lace cloth and an upholstered wingback chair were tastefully positioned on a scrap of oriental carpet. An enormous arrangement of golden daylilies sat in a vase in the center of the table. Giant closed-circuit television screens were mounted overhead on each side of the proscenium which showed the set from different angles. To our right, a long-necked boom camera bobbed and weaved. Nearer the stage, a technician wearing earphones fiddled with a black control box and communicated with someone high at the back of the steeply raked auditorium who appeared to be adjusting the controls at a similar workstation. A second cameraman shouldered his Steadicam, shrugged it into position, and faced the stage. Everything seemed to be ready, but as yet, there was no sign of Susan.