by Karen Leabo
“She’s around,” Tess said with a grimace. “At the Dowling Mental Health Facility. Her official diagnosis is schizophrenia. But if you ask me, she’s just plain old possessed.”
“Plain old, huh?” As if possession were an everyday occurrence. “Spirits? Demons? That kind of thing?”
“No! I’m not talking The Exorcist here. It’s just that, well, there’s someone else inside her, someone mean and evil. Not the mother I remember from my early childhood. Mildred DeWitt was kind and loving and, well, open-minded. Okay, she was a little weird. But then she started calling herself Morganna, and she changed completely.”
“When she found the Crimson Cat?”
“Yes, exactly then.”
Nate pondered this new information. It was possible, he supposed, that if Tess’s mother had believed in the curse herself, then after she’d found the cat, she’d psyched herself into her current state. Kind of like the way voodoo worked—the victim of a curse has to know about it. Then his or her own subconscious creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All right, so he didn’t know much about it, but it was an angle to be investigated. “You think she might know how to deactivate the curse?” He realized he had a vested interest in this thing now. If the stupid statue had driven Morganna crazy, who was to say the same thing couldn’t happen to Tess? He couldn’t bear that thought.
“I think she does know, at least in theory,” Tess said thoughtfully. “She tried once. I remember. But it didn’t work.”
“Then what makes you think—”
“Because there was something missing from whatever spell she cast. She didn’t have all the pieces put together right or something. Maybe, if she could tell us how it’s supposed to be done, we could do it.”
Nate tried to stretch his mind around these concepts, but he couldn’t do it. What Tess suggested was just too far-out. She wanted them to cast a spell, for crying out loud? He realized he was shaking his head before he’d made any conscious decision to do so.
“Okay, I know you’re skeptical, and I don’t blame you,” Tess said. “But I really need your help with this. I’d do it by myself, but the more people you have working on a piece of magic with the same mind, the better your results. At least, that’s what I was always told. I don’t have a lot of practical experience with conjuring, myself.”
Magic? Conjuring? Nate’s head was spinning. What if his friends found out he was dabbling in witchcraft? Or worse, one of his editors? He’d be the laughing-stock of the entire journalistic community. He would have to move out of Boston and change his name.
“I want to help, really,” he said. “But this is pretty far into the Twilight Zone.”
She looked at him with her soulful blue eyes, and Nate felt that old kick in the gut. And suddenly he wanted to do anything for her. No wonder pretty females found it so easy to wrap him around their little fingers.
“Do you believe in psychic energy?” she asked suddenly. “ ’Cause that’s all I’m talking about. Witchcraft, magic, conjuring, it’s all about energy.”
“Well … I guess I don’t disbelieve in it,” Nate hedged. He’d had a hunch or two in his lifetime that had paid off. Sometimes he knew who was on the other end of the phone before he picked it up. Sometimes he knew what would be in the mail before the postman arrived. But that was more along the line of gut instinct. Still, wasn’t she talking about a matter of degree?
“If I prove to you that psychic energy exists, will you go with me to see my mother? Help me do the magic, if I can figure out how?”
Now he had her. Proof was a pretty high order. To him, proof meant the scientific method. Repeatable results. “Okay, sure. You show me some magic—real magic, not a parlor trick—and I’ll help you any way I can. But if I do, will you let me write my story?”
“I can’t really stop you, can I?” she said, paling beneath her already fair complexion.
“But I don’t want to do it without your cooperation.” Oh, man, was he getting soft in his old age or what? “I can shield your identity.”
She was silent for a long time, studying her neat, blunt fingernails. “I’ll think about it,” she finally said. “First, the magic. And I’ll tell you, I don’t like doing this because it makes me feel like a trick poodle. But it’s necessary in this instance.”
She looked around the room thoughtfully. “I need you to find an object that I couldn’t possibly know anything about, and hand it to me.”
“Any object?”
“Something that has significance to you.”
“Okay.” This could be fun. He scanned his bookshelves, finally spying the perfect item for this experiment—an ugly little ceramic frog. She couldn’t possibly guess the complicated history behind the deceptively simple-looking figurine.
Tess took the frog, held it between her hands, inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again after several long seconds, they had that otherworldly look he was becoming familiar with.
“I see something that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” she said, “but maybe it will to you. I see lemons. And I see a little towheaded boy in a red-and-white T-shirt. I sense some anger over the object, then laughter. Then a sort of … void.”
Nate was sure his heart had stopped beating.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
He had to struggle to get the words out. “My little sister, Cathy, made the frog in her art class.” He remembered that day so clearly, as if it had just happened the previous week. His tomboy sister, wearing her favorite red-and-white shirt, her hair cut boyishly short. She’d brought the frog home, so proud, and Nate had told her it was the ugliest frog he’d ever seen. She’d poured a pitcher of lemonade over his head and had stopped speaking to him for days. As adults, they’d laughed over the incident.
After her death several years earlier, he’d wanted nothing from her effects except the stupid frog.
He took the frog away from Tess, illogically affronted that she should pry into his memories. “Could have been a lucky guess,” he said.
“Give me something else, then. I can do this all day.”
He gave her a framed photograph of his grandfather, looking dapper in a bow tie and bowler hat.
“Steel mills,” she said. “And I smell pipe tobacco—Turkish pipe tobacco. Broken collarbone. Does the name Alexander mean anything?”
“How are you doing that?” Nate demanded, snatching the photo away. Everything she’d said was dead on the money. His grandfather, Alexander Wagner, had grown up in Allentown and had worked in the steel mills. He’d smoked a Turkish pipe. He’d broken his collarbone during a fall, shortly before his death. Tess was scaring the hell out of him.
“The same way I found out you were writing a story about me. I inadvertently picked up your notebook. The answers come through my hands in the form of vibrations that I—”
“No. No way. I’m not buying this.”
“You are one tough customer.” She sighed, sounding bored. “Give me something else.”
Almost desperately, he handed her a book of matches.
“Dinner.” She licked her lips, then wrinkled her nose. “Caesar salad. Steak, rare. Very pretty blonde in a white silk dress. She wears Opium perfume, I think. Mm, I’m sorry.”
“About what?” he asked warily.
“She dumped you that night.”
“She did not dump me. I’m the one who broke it off. She was getting too demanding, always making me take her to those expensive places, ordering bottles of wine and then not drinking them. I—” Nate cut himself off as he realized what he was saying. He looked at Tess, really looked at her. “You really are a witch!”
She gave him a somewhat pitying look back. “You’ll get used to it.”
Since Tess refused to let Nate move the cat statue from its resting place in his trunk, and since she also refused to go anywhere in the car while the cat was there, she allowed him to talk her into taking his motorcycle to the sanitarium where her mot
her lived.
The day had cleared and warmed up, so the elements weren’t a problem. The problem was putting her arms around Nate’s waist. Well, there was no help for it, she thought as she gingerly grabbed onto his belt loops. Anyway, she’d touched him before and nothing terrible had happened. His vibrations were starting to feel familiar to her. Even pleasant.
As they made the thirty-minute trip out to Braintree, where the sanitarium was located, she focused on the passing scenery. But Nate’s essence was always there, simmering in the back of her mind, taunting her with sensual images that would take over her whole consciousness in a heartbeat if she let them.
But she never let them, not entirely. If she had, the experience would have swamped her, overwhelmed her, knocked her clean off the bike. To her delight, she discovered that she could control the sensations if she applied herself. She remembered a long-ago lecture her mother had given her about learning to control her powers and shield herself from negative energies, but at the time she’d been disinterested, preferring to avoid those negative vibes rather than managing them.
At the time she’d hated the gift that made her so different from other children and had no intention of developing it, the way her mother wanted her to.
She wished now that she’d listened. Then she would have a better idea of what was going on. All she knew was that for the first time in her life she was holding on to another human being for an extended length of time, and the experience was not unpleasant. A surge of hope filled her, despite her current dire circumstances, despite the terrible task that lay ahead of her.
Tess directed Nate to turn down the long, tree-lined avenue toward the private sanitarium where Mildred DeWitt had resided for the past fifteen years. It was expensive, but despite the DeWitt family’s problems, they’d had money. Tess’s father, who’d died when she was two, had left a sizable estate and life-insurance benefits. Tess and her mother had lived simply, so there had been plenty left when “Morganna” had been committed. Although she’d only been thirteen, Tess and her guardian, a cool and disinterested paternal aunt, had put the money into a trust for her mother’s care.
The sight of the lovely old redbrick building, with its stately white columns and huge oak trees, filled her with a sense of dread. She’d approached the sanitarium countless times over the years, always hoping that things would be different. Each time her hopes were dashed.
Nate pulled the motorcycle into a space in the visitor parking area and cut the engine. Somewhere a bird called. An oriole, Tess thought. When she’d been a child, she and her mother had spent hours walking the countryside, gathering the herbs and wildflowers needed for various concoctions. Mildred had patiently schooled her distracted daughter on how to recognize local species of flora and fauna.
Some of it had stuck, Tess realized. She could still recognize certain birdcalls and wildflowers.
“These are some digs,” Nate commented as he helped Tess off the huge bike. He stowed their helmets in a compartment on the back of the Harley. “Is it as comfortable inside as it looks from out here?”
“All the comforts of home,” she quipped. He would see soon enough. For all its luxurious trappings, Tess had always considered Dowling a chamber of horrors. Though she assiduously avoided touching anything while she was there, the vibrations assaulted her anyway—so many lost souls, confused, sad. No matter how qualified the nurses and doctors, no matter how kind and caring the attendants, the very air smelled of desolation.
The star horror was Morganna herself.
The front entrance hall could have belonged to a luxury hotel, with its shiny black-and-white tile floor and a chandelier that probably weighed more than Nate’s Harley. Except for the wheelchairs that lined one wall.
An elegant woman in a power suit appeared from nowhere to greet them. “Good morning. May I help you?”
“I’m Tess DeWitt. I’m here to see my mother, Mildred DeWitt.”
“Oh, Tess, of course. I didn’t recognize you at first. You haven’t been here in a while.”
Tess didn’t bother to explain her prolonged absence. What good did driving all the way there do, when Morganna refused visitors? Tess had stopped counting back to figure out how long it had been since she’d last laid eyes on her mother, but she suspected it had been more than three years this time. In all the years she’d been here, Morganna had tolerated her daughter’s presence maybe half a dozen times, and then only for five or ten minutes.
“I’ll check with your mother’s nurse and see if she’s receiving visitors today,” the woman said, as if Morganna were a duchess instead of a patient in a mental institution. “You may have a seat in the parlor.” She gestured with one long, well-manicured hand, then turned smartly on her heel.
“Receiving visitors?” Nate repeated when the woman was out of earshot.
“I probably should have warned you. Morganna doesn’t like me much. She would prefer for me to leave her alone, but I keep coming back, like a dog that doesn’t mind getting kicked if there’s even a chance he might get a pat.”
Instead of offering words of sympathy or pity, which she would have hated, Nate simply asked, “Why doesn’t she like you?”
“She blames me. I took it as long as I could. But when Child Protective Services launched an investigation of our home life, I told them everything. I guess I didn’t realize the repercussions. Suddenly we were swimming in social workers, investigators, lawyers, doctors. They took me away from her.”
“That wasn’t what you wanted?”
She shook her head. “I wanted someone to bring my real mother back, that’s all. In retrospect, I suppose the authorities did the best they could. And I was somewhat relieved to be out of that house.” She shivered even thinking about the gloomy nightmare her once-happy home had become. “But I hadn’t realized that I would be cut off from her completely, by her own choice.”
“What if she won’t see you today?”
As in answer to his question, a nurse dressed in old-fashioned whites and a cap appeared in the parlor. “Tess.”
“Heidi. It’s nice to see you again.” Tess stood and took the nurse’s hands in hers. Heidi Pavel, Morganna’s primary nurse for several years now, smiled in greeting.
But Heidi’s smile didn’t last long. “I’m afraid she won’t see you,” she said. “She’s actually having a pretty good day, in terms of lucidity, but she doesn’t want visitors.”
Tess sighed. She simply had to get in to see Morganna. “Heidi, will you do me a favor?” she asked impulsively. “Will you go back to my mother and tell her I’ve found the Crimson Cat, and that I need her help?”
Heidi looked puzzled, but she nodded. “I can try.” She turned and left, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking against the polished linoleum as she walked.
“You think that’ll work?” asked Nate, who’d been standing by anxiously watching Tess’s exchange with the nurse.
“If she remembers the Cat, she’ll be intrigued enough to find out how I became involved with it. If she doesn’t remember it …” Tess shrugged. “Then I was wrong. She can’t help us.”
Heidi returned almost immediately, smiling warmly this time. “Apparently those were the magic words. Your mother said to send you back.” She lowered her voice. “What’s a crimson cat, anyway?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Nate said.
Nate followed Tess as she led him unerringly down a maze of hallways, enjoying the gentle sway of her hips beneath the cotton print skirt. Certainly he would rather look at Tess’s backside than the other choices available to him—the residents of Dowling.
They sat in wheelchairs along the wide hallways, strapped in or down. They stared with glassy eyes at the wall, or carried on loud and imaginative conversations with nonexistent friends. One woman shouted obscenities as they passed.
Nate shivered. He was a journalist. He was supposed to be inured to the harsh realities of life. But this place made him feel worse than the meanest streets he’d ev
er walked. He knew this was probably the best care available to the mentally ill. He also knew that it would make him feel awful to have a loved one locked up there.
Tess strode onward, seemingly oblivious. She said hi to one old man who greeted her with a wave and a big, toothless smile, but other than that, she didn’t interact. As sensitive as she was, he figured she had to work pretty hard to distance herself from all this. But that was apparently what she’d done, or what she was trying to do.
He was still a little blown away by this “psychic energy” business. But she’d proved, to his exacting standards, that she received information from some other source than the normal five senses. Some might call him a gullible fool for believing in any sort of hocus-pocus, but better gullible than downright stupid. To ignore the evidence she’d provided him would be stupid.
So, Tess was psychic. And the feats she’d demonstrated on television as a preadolescent hadn’t been tricks. He was still numb from the realization. But he was also intrigued. If there really was such a thing as psychic energy, then the world as Nate knew it had just turned upside down. If the impossible was suddenly not only possible, but palpably real, then who was he to say that a Gypsy curse from a couple of centuries ago was hogwash?
Tess finally stopped at one of the gleaming white doors, which was open a crack. She tapped on it with her knuckles. “Morganna?”
No answer came from within. Just a blood-chilling cackle.
Tess apparently took the laughter as a signal for her to enter. “Good morning, Morganna,” she said, her voice carefully modulated as she slowly entered the room. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“Don’t thank me till the visit’s done,” Morganna said ominously.
Nate was struck by his first glimpse of the woman, who bore little resemblance to the exotic creature he’d seen on the videotape of the Don Woodland Show. Morganna Majick was a haggard shell of a woman, bent, emaciated. Her hair, a mixture of light brown and snow white, hung in limp shanks halfway down her back. Nate remembered her hair as being jet-black, the way her daughter’s had been on the TV show. They both must’ve dyed their hair for effect.
