by Rio Youers
“Bet she didn’t see that coming,” Martin had joked unhelpfully.
The numerous websites Laura visited offered little encouragement. They all appeared to be designed by ten-year-old Goosebumps enthusiasts. There was an unabashed use of creepy music, sound effects, and fonts. At last she happened upon Love Paranormal, a two-person team out of Utica. Their website elevated them from the crowd, in that it was understated and professional. They were further elevated by their promise of compassion, open-mindedness, and discretion. She—Paris Love—was a parapsychologist with thirteen years’ experience investigating supernatural phenomena. He—Philip Bean—was a renowned medium with a sensitivity to all forms of nonphysical energy.
They arrived the day after Laura called and spoke at length with her and Martin, who gave a thorough account of Edith’s latest “night terror”—how she’d transposed it to both her sister and the bedroom wall, and how some of the details were eerily close to what happened in Buffalo. They discussed previous episodes, along with other aspects of Edith’s character: Did she suffer from mood swings? Learning difficulties? Did she have an imaginary friend? Paris—elegantly tattooed, a purple streak running through her hair—asked Laura about the pregnancy. Were there any issues? Did she go full term? Was it C-section or natural birth? Both she and Philip made copious notes. They studied the symbols—the psychography, they called it—on Laura’s phone, looking for any occult or supernatural relevance. They found none, suggesting the characters were more like prehistoric cave drawings: a series of rudimentary illustrations depicting some story or event. Before leaving, Phillip—a hipster type, with a plaid shirt tucked into skinny jeans and a beard Rutherford B. Hayes would have been proud of—took an energy reading in Edith’s room. He sat Buddha-like on the floor for twenty minutes before declaring there was no notable aggressive activity.
On their second visit, they spoke briefly with Shirley, who grunted and sighed her way through several questions. Their conversation with Edith was longer, altogether friendlier. They talked about their favorite Vines and TV shows—all cheery stuff—before delving into what Edith called the “bad things.”
“Are you afraid to go to sleep at night?” Paris had asked her.
“Yes,” Edith replied.
“But the bad things can’t harm you.”
“I know.”
“So why are you afraid?”
Edith took a moment. Her brow wrinkled, then she turned the question around in a way that Laura thought was quite beyond her years.
“What are you afraid of, Miss Love?”
Paris shrugged, a bemused expression on her face. “Let’s focus on you, shall we? Why are—”
“Spiders? Snakes? Terrorists?”
Paris drummed her fingers on her knee, then nodded and went with it. “Okay. Crows. I don’t care for their hard beaks and scaly claws.” Her eyes brightened. She leaned toward Edith and said, “Shudder.”
Edith leaned forward, too. “What if you knew that, after you fall asleep tonight, a crow was going to fly into your room? It wouldn’t harm you. It would just sit on your bedpost, next to your pillow, and watch while you sleep.”
Paris smiled and made a “point taken” gesture with her hands.
“That’s why I’m afraid,” Edith said. “It’s like sleeping with a crow.”
This second visit concluded with Edith taking a Zener card test. Five distinct cards—a square, a star, a circle, three wavy lines, a cross—in a deck of twenty-five. Philip shuffled the deck, set it facedown on the table, and had Edith try to predict which card would be flipped over next. Given the numbers, a score of 20 percent or higher over numerous runs could suggest a clairvoyant influence. Edith did ten runs and got a total of forty-two hits. Not quite seventeen percent. An unremarkable number, according to Paris.
“So she’s not psychic?” Martin asked later, once the grownups were alone.
“There are different types of psychic sensitivity,” Paris replied. “The cards are a guide. They’re in no way conclusive, but when collated with other data—”
“Like a premonition,” Laura cut in. “Forget the damn cards—how do you explain the fact that my daughter looked into the future?”
“We’re still working on that,” Paris said. “But hey, maybe it wasn’t a premonition. There’s a theory that universal energy patterns shift prior to any significant disaster. It’s like a cosmic defense mechanism—a feeling in the air. I’m sure you’ve heard stories. People cancel flights for no reason. They stay home from work. They take a different route to their parents’ house. Are you with me?”
Martin nodded. “Happened to my brother Jimmy. He backed out of going to a Yankees–Red Sox game. Said he wasn’t in the mood. Which is crazy, because he breathes baseball. Anyway, his buddy’s shitty little Pontiac flipped on the Interstate. Three in the car. No survivors. Jimmy calls it the time he cheated the reaper. I call it freak luck.”
“There are any number of those ‘freak luck’ stories surrounding 9/11,” Phillip said. “A lot of people veered from their daily routine and wound up living to talk about it. Gets to a point when you sense a paranormal force at work.”
“Let’s roll with that,” Paris said. “Let’s say your brother, and all those people who inexplicably broke their routine on 9/11, experienced—without their knowing—a genuine psychic occurrence. Isn’t it possible that Edith tuned into a similar shifting energy, but in a heightened way? A one-off psychic blast? I know you’re querying her earlier night terrors, but there’s no evidence they were clairvoyant.”
“What about the link to Shirley?” Laura asked.
“A side-effect of the phenomena,” Paris said. “Again: heightened. Shirley claims she sometimes feels Edith’s emotions. I can believe that; sibling telepathy is well documented, most commonly between twins. There’s a pseudoscience attached to it. Quantum entanglement. It’s how a husband can sometimes feel morning sickness when his wife is pregnant, or how old couples can finish each other’s sentences. It’s unusual, but not necessarily paranormal.”
“Are you saying you can’t help her?”
“I’m saying she may not need help,” Paris said. “But we want to be sure. With your permission, we’d like to place a night vision camera in Edith’s room. We need to witness an episode. Determine whether or not it’s paranormal. Then we can assess and proceed accordingly.”
“And if it is paranormal?” Martin asked.
“There are ways of suppressing unwelcome psychic energy,” Paris said. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lovegrove. We’ll fix your little girl.”
They installed the camera the following day, positioning it high into a corner overlooking Edith’s bed. It was larger than Laura expected, with an unblinking lens and a ring of red lights that looked oddly extraterrestrial.
“I’m not sure about this,” Martin said in bed later. Neither of them could sleep, imagining the camera whirring away in the next room. “They could be watching her right now. Our daughter.”
“It’s not a live feed,” Laura said. “They’ll whizz through the footage as required. And they’re trying to help her. We need to remember that.”
“Right. Yeah.”
Laura took his hand beneath the covers and squeezed. “Thank you for standing by me on this. I know it’s an unconventional approach, but we have to try everything.”
They said nothing for a long time, staring into the settled gloom, listening to their own wakeful breaths and the occasional vehicle zipping along Melon Road. Moonlight seeped through and around the blinds.
“Apropos of nothing,” Martin said. They were still holding hands. “I googled my new therapist today. She used to be a Hollywood stuntwoman. Worked on Smokey and the Bandit.”
“Are you serious?”
“True story.” Martin held up his free hand as if he were taking an oath. Laura saw its silhouette against the blinds. “And that’s how truly fucking bizarre my life has become. I’m living on the set of Paranormal Activity and getting copin
g advice from Sally Field’s stunt double.”
Laura smiled, in spite of everything. But that was okay because she felt Martin smiling, too. Quantum entanglement at work. Then their smiles turned to giggles, which in turn escalated to a quite lovely laughter. They hushed each other. They touched, kissed, and laughed some more, and for those few moments they forgot about the camera in Edith’s room. They forgot about everything.
* * *
Anna sipped from her aluminum bottle and her russet eyes glazed over. This was an idiosyncrasy that Laura was already familiar with; it appeared that Anna was daydreaming, when in fact she was extremely aware, tuning into either her own or Laura’s vibe, seeking a clear signal amid the noise. She called this sieving. A little slice of New Age hoodoo from a woman who grew up mucking out cowsheds in the Cornhusker State. Laura, meanwhile, waited with her gaze on the water. The ducks’ quacking carried on the breeze, even though they were some distance downriver.
“You need someone who understands Edith,” Anna said a moment later. Her eyes snapped back into focus and she looked at Laura. “Someone who shares her sensitivities.”
“Therein lies the problem,” Laura sighed. “We don’t even know what her sensitivities are.”
Anna took a meditative breath, her face brushed by an expression Laura had never seen before. It looked, for all the world, like hesitation. Then her lips twitched at the corners and she said, “Do you want to try something wacky?”
“Wacky?” Laura’s turn to smile. “Sure. We’re already outside the box. Why not take a few more errant steps?”
Anna’s purse was on the bench beside her. She opened it and took out her wallet. “This may not work,” she said, and then corrected herself. “This almost certainly won’t work.” She flipped through several of the pockets, each jammed with wallet paraphernalia, then pulled out what Laura at first thought was a baseball card. It was about the same size, kept in a protective plastic envelope. When Anna handed it to Laura, she saw it was actually a photograph of a middle-aged woman with thick auburn hair and horn-rimmed glasses. The quality was not good. It was out of focus—layered, like a 3D image before putting the special glasses on.
“The trouble with hiring a psychic,” Anna said, “is that ninety-nine percent of them are charlatans. Yes, they’re extremely clever and convincing, but they don’t have a psychic bone in their bodies. Genuine psychics are hard to come by. They don’t advertise their abilities because they’re afraid of the consequences—of being misunderstood and vilified. It’s what happened to this lady back in the 1960s.”
Laura looked at the oddly blurred face in the photograph, tilting it like a hologram to see it more clearly. She had four irises behind only one pair of glasses, like some peculiar species of insect.
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Calm Dumas,” Laura replied. “That photo was taken twenty-some years ago, but it still works. Apparently.”
Laura frowned at this curious choice of words, but disregarded it in favor of the question preloaded onto her lips: “Carm, as in Carmella?”
“No. Calm, as in peaceful.”
“Of course,” Laura said. “Silly me.”
“She helped police solve a number of cases in the mid-sixties, including the highly publicized Bookworm Murders, which led to the arrest and conviction of Edwin Barclay. Her information was so precise—finding bodies, identifying murder weapons—that she was, perhaps understandably, put under the microscope. She was even considered an accomplice at one point. The FBI got involved. After two months of experiments and cross-examination, they determined that she was not a murderer or an alien—yes, there was genuine concern she might be from another planet—and she was allowed to return to her normal life. Needless to say, she kept a low profile from that point forward.”
“Jesus,” Laura said.
“These days she lives on a small farm in Virginia. She keeps her ability under wraps and helps very few people—only those she feels will truly benefit from psychic intervention.”
“And you think she’ll be able to help Edith?” Laura kept tilting the photo, trying to see the face clearly.
“I think it’s worth a shot,” Anna replied. “Miss Dumas should be able to determine whether or not Edith has some clairvoyant ability, and if so, how she can coexist with it.”
“Okay.” Laura nodded and exhaled heavily. The movement caused some weight to slide from her shoulders. Or so it seemed. “That’s exactly what we want. Exactly.”
“Well…” Anna shrugged. “… give her a call.”
There was more to it, though. Laura flicked back to Anna’s hesitant expression, and her odd choice of words. That photo was taken twenty-some years ago, but it still works. She frowned, turning the photograph over, looking for contact info.
“Does she have a website?”
“No,” Anna said.
“A telephone number?”
“Not exactly.”
Laura looked at Anna with one eyebrow raised. “Okay. You’re not telling me something.”
“The wacky part,” Anna said, throwing up her hands. “I don’t know if this will work. I suspect it won’t, but I don’t want it to affect your opinion of me.”
“It won’t.”
“It may, but hey, I can’t leave you hanging now.”
Laura raised her other eyebrow.
“You call to her,” Anna said, pointing at the photograph. “You and Martin. Find somewhere quiet, somewhere you can focus. Place the photograph on a flat surface, stare into her eyes, and repeat her name over and over. If she hears you, she’ll come.”
Laura shook her head. “What? She’ll just appear out of thin air—poof!—like Candyman?”
“I don’t think so,” Anna replied. “She lives in Virginia, remember? She’ll likely hop on a plane. It might take a couple of days.”
“So we telepathically call her?”
Anna nodded.
“But we’re not psychic.”
“You don’t need to be. Think of it like a Ouija board. You focus. You open spiritual pathways. You connect. And the best part … if it works, you’ll know she’s the real deal. You’ll know you can trust her.”
“That’s a pretty big if.”
“What have you got to lose?”
Laura pressed her lips together, looking at Calm Dumas’s strangely layered face. Her impulse was to toss the photograph into the river, let it float inside its plastic envelope all the way to Lake Onondaga. Instead, she unclasped her own purse and placed it inside, nice and deep, beneath purse crap, where Martin or the girls were unlikely to discover it.
“Thank you, Anna. I think I’ll keep it in my back pocket for now.” She looked at Anna and offered a warm but tired smile. “Martin just found out his therapist was a stuntwoman on Smokey and the Bandit. This might send him over the edge.”
Anna nodded. “Go with your heart.”
The river lapped at its banks. Laura closed her eyes and listened to it, and to the birches’ placid whispering—a bright harmony, emphasized by the sun on her skin. She opened herself like a window, aware again, although she never really forgot, just how curled and autumnlike she was inside, and how the rain rarely stopped.
6
The Warehouse District had earned the nickname Engine City because—back in the day, when businessmen wore fedoras and drove shiny black DeSotos—it had kept the town of Sternbridge, New Jersey, running. Located on the banks of the Hackensack River, the warehouses and businesses of Engine City had operated at about 30 percent legal—just enough to provide a credible front. The workers and bosses would return to their homes after a day’s graft. They would bounce their kids on their knees, eat spaghetti alla carbonara, then peel money from their fists and filter it through Sternbridge’s law-abiding communities. In the forties and fifties, the pie was sweet and plentiful enough for everybody to have a slice: the mayor, the councilmen, the chief of police. This unscrupulous kinship fragmented in the eighties when the misdeeds switched fr
om prostitution and racketeering to arms and drug trafficking. This triggered a semester of bloodshed that left nary a bad man standing. It was often said that there were more dead bodies in the river behind Engine City than in all of Sternbridge Cemetery.
By the midnineties, many of the corrupt businesses had either folded or been bought out by owners with a more lawful focus. This turnaround continued into the new century and beyond, and if the waterfront development north of Sternbridge was anything to go by, the restructuring would continue for many years to come.
Valerie Kemp had frequented Engine City over the years. She’d seen the changes one at a time, but was reliably struck by how different it looked to when she’d first arrived in 1982. The moniker prevailed, though. As did one—just one—of the businesses.
The White Lantern.
Valerie stepped out of a cab three blocks west and walked in a sunshiny air that smelled vaguely of copper. Her skin bristled. Her heart tapped a swift, distracting beat. She passed a string of produce stores with their goods arranged outside. Scents of apple, ginger, and lemongrass mingled with the copper. Her mouth watered, but she was hungry for something else. Within a block she came to the warehouses, where perspiring workers loaded crates into the backs of docked trucks. There was a time when they would have howled at her. Now, they barely glanced. Somewhere, a radio boomed “Hotel California” by The Eagles. She thought of Pace. He used to sing this to her. This and many others, usually while she rested in his broad, powerful arms. Behind the warehouses, the Hackensack rolled like an oiled conveyor belt.
She crossed Commerce Street and the White Lantern came into view, looking exactly as it had in 1982. A fresh lick of paint, of course, but the same colors: red and gold—dragon colors. The eponymous lantern hung above the door, made of fiberglass, more bone-colored than white. There was another in an upstairs room, this softer and quite alluring. The name of the restaurant was stenciled across the windows in English and Mandarin.
