The Dead of Winter

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Weird,’ Joy said. ‘There were two mediums or whatever: one gave like messages and stuff, and the other did tarot readings and used a crystal ball. Mum had a reading done, and it was just a bit disturbing how close the woman was to what had happened. She saw two tragedies and a lot of pain and a strong man supporting Mum in the background who would become even more important to her in the future. It all made sense. Then the psychic woman who gave the messages, she kept trying to tell Mum about a cat. I mean, Mum has nothing against cats, but we don’t have one and I don’t think we ever have, but this woman was insistent, like it was really important.’

  ‘But the tarot reading, you said that was accurate?’

  ‘Yeah, my dad and brother both . . . Well, we lost them both last year. The strong man in the background made sense, and I hope the rest is true, too, that Mum and our friend Fitch will get together. I know dad would want them both to be happy; he wouldn’t want Mum to be on her own.’

  Rina nodded; she hoped for the same thing. Bridie was deserving of happiness. ‘Looks like we’re going to get breakfast now,’ she said.

  ‘Oh good, I’m fading away to nothing here.’ Terry stood and stretched, exhibiting bulging biceps and frighteningly flat abdominal muscles. ‘You said you lost your father and your brother? I’m really sorry to hear that.’

  Rina could hear the curiosity and wondered how Joy would respond.

  ‘Thanks,’ Joy said. ‘There was a car crash. It was all a major shock.’ She got up from the stairs and led the way down to breakfast, leaving Rina to walk with Terry Beal.

  Yes, there was a car crash, Rina thought, but it was all a bit more complicated than that. She didn’t blame Joy for not wanting to explain.

  ‘I hope I’ve not upset her.’ Terry Beal seemed genuinely concerned.

  ‘No,’ Rina assured him. ‘You did nothing wrong. Oh, and I meant to ask – I was told that there was only a room for me because someone had dropped out. Do you know who?’

  Terry shook his head. ‘I think it might have been a Professor Meehan,’ he said. ‘He was on the original list my agent got for me. He was some kind of historian, I think. Melissa said he had family problems and had to leave early.’

  ‘But he was meant to be the other neutral witness?’

  ‘Sorry, Rina, I really don’t know. Come to think of it, though, he can’t have been, because he was here over the Christmas. Originally, they asked if I’d be a neutral observer, then when I got here they said there’d been a change of plans and that I’d need briefing and you would be standing in for me, if you see what I mean.’ He shrugged again, ‘Sorry, Rina, I didn’t really ask. This is just a job on the road to preparing for a job, you know?’

  They descended, joining the crush in the main hall where Rina and the others had drunk coffee the day before. Small tables had been set out here and in the dining room, and buffet tables set up in both rooms. Even so, it was crowded. Joy had already commandeered a table and waved at them. ‘You get me something to eat and I’ll keep our seats.’

  ‘Right you are. What about Tim?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve lost him. He was in a huddle with Rav and Jay last time I spotted him.’

  Terry had grabbed two trays. ‘It’s like being back at school.’

  ‘I hope not. The food at my school was dire. So,’ she asked as she filled two plates with bacon and scrambled egg, adding mushrooms and toast for Joy, ‘what is this mysterious part you’re researching? Someone said you were playing an exorcist.’

  ‘Someone was right,’ Terry confirmed. ‘I’ve got to admit I had mixed feelings about it, but we thought we should try and expand my range a bit. You can’t spend your entire life throwing yourself off buildings and escaping from burning cars. Not unless you happen to be Bruce Willis, that is. I started out on stage, playing some quite serious roles, and last year did Shakespeare in the Park in New York – only a small role, but I got the taste for the serious stuff again. I’m making an art house film this spring: low budget, and all rather gritty and grimy, where I get to play a writer who spends more time boozing than he does putting down the words. Shall we take these to the table? Then I’ll go back and get us some drinks. Tea?’

  ‘Lovely,’ Rina told him. He left Rina to unload the trays and returned a few minutes later with cups and teapot. ‘So, this other role? The exorcist?’

  ‘Well, I got offered it a year ago and said no, it wasn’t me. Then they came back with a rewrite. It’s set in the Midwest of America in the nineteen twenties, and this preacher in a travelling show has a sideline doing exorcisms. It all gets very dark, and he’s very corrupt and isn’t above creating the phenomena just so he can then get rid of them. For pay, of course. It’s brooding and menacing, and I still get to throw myself off things, but the action stuff is more integrated into the story rather than: OK, we blew up a helicopter and thirteen cars in the last film, how can we top that this time?’

  ‘And how is this preparation for that?’

  Terry shrugged and loaded his fork with mushrooms and egg. ‘Beats me,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it’s a job on the way to another job. So long as someone pays me for it, I just go where I’m told.’

  The morning had been surprisingly enjoyable, Rina thought as she met Joy again after lunch. Joy was buzzing with excitement. ‘Gail and Tim are doing a thing,’ she said. ‘Now, in the carriage house.’

  The carriage house, dining room and library had been the locations for the three lecture strands that morning, leaving the large hall free for serving meals. It worked well enough, Rina thought, though it did mean that Melissa and the temporary staff had to carry everything through from the kitchen on the other side of the entrance lobby. Not exactly convenient.

  ‘What is Tim doing?’

  ‘He and Gail are doing some kind of demonstration. I’m not sure.’ Joy grinned at her. ‘It’ll be good, anyway. Tim’s doing it.’

  Following her out of the orangery and running across to the little door Rina had seen Melissa use the night before, Rina reflected that Joy was probably right. Tim’s performance techniques had expanded exponentially in the past year, especially since he’d abandoned his hated alter ego, the Great Stupendo, the clown act he had developed for the children’s parties that had once been his bread and butter work.

  Stupendo, orange wig and clown costume, had been ceremoniously cremated in Rina’s back yard just a few weeks before he’d met Joy and following a particularly acrimonious children’s party – and a particularly unsettling choking incident. Tim didn’t like to talk about him these days.

  They crept into the carriage house and took up position at the back of the already packed room. Rina gathered that this was something of an impromptu performance. She recognized some of her fellow delegates from that morning. Professor something who lectured in parapsychology and comparative religion, and Ray who designed special effects, and Margaret who said she was some kind of researcher, though Rina was pretty certain she was actually a journalist. She took far too many notes and seemed to specialize in asking what she presumably felt were searching questions.

  Tim stood on a raised dais at the end of the carriage house. Gail – their medium for that evening and Professor Franklyn’s PhD student – stood at his side. She looked no happier, Rina thought, than she had the previous evening when she’d been talking to the professor and given the impression she’d like to run away.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ Tim had switched into performance mode, and Rina could see he was enjoying himself. Made even taller by the dark suit he wore and more angular and ascetic looking by the oddly angled lights, Tim Brandon was the archetypal magician in Rina’s eyes. She could tell that he had slipped into his mentalist persona: the one he made use of in his cabaret performances at the Palisades. He studied his audience, making momentary but deliberate eye contact with seemingly random people, holding their gaze for just a fraction too long for comfort before shifting to someone else. Even among these experienced diehards, Rina thought, you could
still feel that thrill of anticipation.

  Gail, on the other hand, stood with eyes cast down and made no attempt to interact. Tall – though not as tall as Tim, who was over six feet – Gail was blonde and almost fragile looking. Rina had gained the impression that Gail was doing all she could to keep apart from the rest of the company, and she was slightly surprised that the younger woman would agree to this display – whatever it turned out to be. Professor Franklin stood at the side of the room, watching Gail intently, and Rina found herself watching him in turn.

  He thinks he’s a Svengali, she thought, and I suspect Gail is about to teach him otherwise.

  ‘My friend, here –’ Tim was indicating Gail – ‘was born with a gift. She is what some people choose to call psychic, a channel for that which few of us would claim to understand.’

  Gail looked up for the first time and stared out across the assembled audience. Still she made no attempt to engage them, leaving all of that to Tim.

  ‘Clever,’ Rina murmured, realizing for the first time that Tim and Gail were playing their own game. She glanced at Professor Franklin and, judging by his expression, understood that he, too, had experienced that revelation.

  ‘I make no such claims,’ Tim went on, ‘but what I do claim is that anything Miss Perry might be able to do by her means, I can replicate using mine.’

  Gail glanced briefly in his direction and then closed her eyes.

  Tim seemed to take that as his cue. ‘Let us begin,’ he said.

  Gail took a deep breath and released it slowly; Tim continued to scan the audience in that slow, deliberate way. Rina, who had seen him do this countless times, could not help but smile. She felt a little nervous though; his performances were usually for the entertainment of the paying public, well oiled with drink and relaxed by the good food and convivial atmosphere of the Palisades. Here, the audience was not on his side – or Gail’s. They were predators, Rina thought, who would be only too happy to trip him up.

  ‘I’m sensing something,’ Gail said. ‘A woman. Her name is Jane or Janet.’ She opened her eyes and scanned the audience. ‘She passed over not long ago, a year, maybe two, and it was very sudden.’

  Nothing. Rina held her breath. To her surprise, Tim took the baton.

  ‘She was quite young,’ he said. ‘Thirty, thirty-five, and had been in good, though not perfect, health.’

  He’s found his mark, Rina thought. His broad focus had shifted, and now he looked at someone on the right side of the room. Rina could not see who.

  A man coughed. ‘Um, that might be my daughter-in-law,’ he said. ‘Her name was Janet—’

  ‘But you called her Jan,’ Gail interrupted.

  ‘Yes, we called her Jan.’ Rina could hear from the change in the man’s tone that he was hooked now. Reluctantly so . . .

  ‘She had children,’ Tim said. ‘A boy and a girl.’

  ‘No, a girl and a boy,’ Gail corrected him. ‘The girl was born first. She was—’

  ‘Seven when her mother died, or, no, eight, and the boy was six?’

  ‘Almost six,’ the man said.

  ‘She sends her blessings,’ Gail said. ‘She sends her love.’

  ‘And she forgives you for the argument you had with her. Don’t feel guilty,’ Tim added. He held the man’s gaze a moment longer and then shifted his attention, moving on before anyone could react. ‘I’m getting something, a series of numbers, not a phone number, not a lottery number, or is it? Is it someone who plays the lottery every week? You, madam. You play the lottery each week.’ He paused, got a giggling acknowledgement.

  Oh, she’ll be easy, Rina thought. She’s already engaging with him.

  ‘Birthdays,’ Gail said. ‘You play birthdays . . . and one anniversary date.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ someone said, and Tim laughed with them.

  Gail smiled, but there had been a fractional pause. She takes herself far too seriously, Rina thought.

  ‘No, not just birthdays – you play ages,’ Tim said. ‘Now, let me focus on this. Think it, please, madam. See the numbers in your mind. See them as clearly as you can—’

  ‘Ten,’ Gail said.

  ‘Ah, my lovely assistant has the first one right, doesn’t she?’

  Gail glared at him and then remembered where she was. ‘So would my lovely assistant like to guess the rest?’

  More laughter. Tim bowed mockingly. So I needn’t have worried, Rina thought. They’ve read the room right. She wondered if Gail’s intimations of annoyance were also part of the act they had worked out.

  Tim closed his eyes and placed his fingers to his temples, massaging gently as though the receipt of knowledge caused him slight discomfort.

  ‘I’m seeing a four,’ he said, opening his eyes again. He wagged a finger at the woman with the lottery numbers. ‘Oh, fie on you madam, trying to fool a poor illusionist like that. She’s making me see a four, ladies and gentlemen, when in fact she should be showing me a fourteen, isn’t that right, madam?’ He reached behind him and picked up a notepad and pencil from a small table Rina had not noticed before. ‘As you can see,’ he said, flicking the pages open for the audience to look at, ‘nothing is written on this pad. I will now attempt to ascertain the remaining four lottery numbers and will write them on this pad.’

  Rina sensed momentary disappointment. This was a knowledgeable crowd; they would be expecting something like this, for Tim to use a sleight-of-hand gimmick to write the numbers after they had been said.

  Tim had finished scribbling now and handed the pad and pencil to Gail. She looked at them and shook her head. ‘You’ve got one wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ He leaned over to look. ‘I’ll bet I haven’t.’

  ‘Oh, how much?’ Gail challenged.

  Rina smiled. The room was happy now; things had once more taken an unexpected turn. She watched, amused, as Tim dug in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll bet ten pounds, a packet of mints and some fluff,’ he said.

  ‘OK, I’ll raise you fifteen pounds, a pack of chewing gum and a lipstick.’

  ‘What colour?’ More laughter. Tim waved them into silence and returned to his grave performance tone. ‘Madam, would you please tell everyone what your favourite lottery numbers are?’

  ‘Fourteen, ten, twenty-one, seventeen, thirty-six and two.’

  ‘Two? Are you sure?’ Tim looked dismayed, Gail triumphant.

  ‘I told you so,’ Gail said. She held out the notepad to a man in the front row of the audience. ‘Sir, would you mind standing up and reading what is written on the pad?’

  A tall man stood, held the notebook up and showed the remainder of the audience, and then read: ‘I predict that the remaining numbers are twenty-one, thirty-six and twenty-two.’

  ‘And if you would read what is underneath that?’

  ‘It says: and Gail predicts he’s got it wrong and the last number is just two.’

  Laughter and applause: some of it, Rina could hear, very reluctant. ‘Nicely subverted,’ she said to Joy. ‘Did you know what they were going to do?’

  ‘Not really. They got together for a few minutes before lunch and came up with it. It worked well, didn’t it?’

  Rina nodded. Tim had joined them now, and the audience, making their way out, offered congratulations.

  ‘I didn’t think she’d do it,’ Tim said. ‘She’s very defensive of the psychic stuff, but I think she knew how much it would piss David Franklin off if she stood up there with me and performed.’

  ‘He’s an odd man,’ Rina mused. ‘The sort of man who likes to be in control, no matter what.’

  ‘Doesn’t happen,’ Joy said. ‘Not for anyone. Life has this way of knocking you for six, just when you think you’ve got it figured out.’

  NINE

  As they waved the buses off, the snow had begun to fall harder. Rina could not see clearly even across the width of the gravel drive.

  ‘The snow has set in for the night,’ Melissa said glumly. ‘I can’t see
the buses making it back in the morning. I’m going to let the temporary staff go home, just in case.’

  Rina nodded. ‘Is that going to be a major problem for you? Financially, I mean.’

  Melissa shrugged. ‘The consortium who own this place take out insurance against having to cancel, so I suppose not, but it isn’t helpful, not when you’re trying to build a business. And you know how it is – even if it’s not your fault, you feel responsible.’

  Rina patted her arm sympathetically. It seemed odd to see the exuberant Melissa looking so glum. ‘It’s all gone very well today,’ she said. ‘No one can predict the English weather, not even a houseful of psychics and mentalists.’

  Melissa laughed. ‘I guess you’re right. You all set for tonight?’

  ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Rina told her, then noting the younger woman’s worried look she added: ‘Oh, I’m sure it will all be fine. It’s just not really my cup of tea, you know?’

  Melissa leant towards her and whispered confidentially, ‘Not sure it’s mine. In fact, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t in the job description – but hey.’ She smiled. ‘Best get back to the kitchen. Go and eat, in fact, please go and eat. We’ll have food coming out of our ears if the buses can’t make it back. There’s only so much I can freeze down.’

  The phone in the hall began to ring, and Melissa went to answer it. Rina was making her way back to the big room when she was called back. ‘Rina, it’s for you. Your friend Mac? Tell him if he fancies a free meal, we’ve got more than enough to spare.’ She smiled, handed Rina the phone and then disappeared back into the kitchen.

  ‘Mac!’ Rina was very pleased to hear his voice. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘About four or five miles away at the B&B. Is everyone all right? This is mean weather. The landlord says it’s going to get a lot worse, so I thought I’d see how bad it was your end.’

  ‘Blizzarding. You know you have to come up a gated road? One thing: if you do make it here and then get stuck, there’s enough food to withstand a siege.’