The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery)

by Max McCoy

  “Ah, you break my heart,” he said as he led me back to his desk, which was so cluttered it looked as if every single page of last Saturday’s edition had been wadded, creased, and added to the pile. His little brother, Lloyd, was on a stool in front of the type case, his arms folded over a half-finished form, unconscious.

  “Is he all right?” I asked.

  “He just had too much to drink last night,” Walter said. “When he wakes up, he will have a great pain in his head.”

  “Poor devil,” I said.

  “Poor printer’s devil,” Walter said. “All part of the black art.” He moved some books and newspapers from a chair beside the desk and asked me to sit. “He will have to learn to hold his whiskey, or he will never a journalist be.”

  “I should think he could get more done sober.”

  “Ah, but where’s the fun in that?” Walter asked, easing himself into his chair. “Now, what can we do for you, Miss Wylde? Have you been on another ghostly adventure you’d like to share with our readers?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Job printing, then. Excellent. I’ll share a secret with you. See that hulking thing in the back?”

  “The press?”

  “Yes, the Washington hand press,” he said. “Journalism is a profitless diversion. It is the job printing generated by the mere possession of the wondrous beast that feeds our cat and keeps us in whiskey. If we eliminated the Times, we would have the same money, but twice the leisure in which to spend it.”

  “But a town needs a newspaper.”

  “It does drive business to our door,” he said.

  “And there must be some small satisfaction in seeing your name in print.”

  “Small,” he said. “Some days, small indeed.”

  “But young as you are—”

  “I am twenty-three!”

  “—you are an experienced writer, the veteran of thousands of inches of typeset copy. That’s why I’ve come to ask your advice on some literary matters that have been troubling me for some time.”

  “Literary matters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not job printing?”

  “No,” I said.

  He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of whiskey. He uncorked it and poured a few inches into a coffee mug he snatched from the floor.

  “Want some?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  He shrugged and took a drink.

  “I harbor a desire to write,” I declared. “Inspired by the Mystery of the Girl Betrayed, and remembering what pleasure I had with books as a young girl, and seeing the interest with which readers snatched up the Times account of my adventure, I decided to try my hand.”

  “And what was the result?”

  “Wretchedness itself,” I said, surprising myself at the depth of my emotion. “I have defaced many sheets of perfectly good foolscap for no discernible reason. Not only have I failed to bring joy to myself through the effort, but the result is likely to inflict pain on any who bump up against it.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “But it is,” I said. “It is absolute torture.”

  “Many enjoy the act of composition.”

  “Fools all,” I said. “Graphomaniacs. Hacks and hucksters. Posers and politicians.”

  He smiled.

  “I did not mean you, Walter.”

  “My fellows on the city council might disagree,” he said. “But what you’ve discovered is the hard truth of the matter, that writing worth reading is hard work.”

  “I thought you might have, you know, some tricks of the trade.”

  “Besides whiskey?” he asked. “Well, no. There are none, apart from genius.”

  “I’m out of luck there.”

  “Perhaps not,” he said gently. “Where I grew up in Ohio, a great emphasis was placed on a classical education, and for a boy of ten or twelve that meant the study of Latin. The word genius comes from Latin, and those smart old Romans had a somewhat different concept of the word than we do today. What they meant by it was a kind of guiding spirit that is attached to every individual at birth—and to places and things, for that matter.”

  “A guiding spirit.”

  “Yes,” Walter said.

  “The soul.”

  “Similar, but not exactly,” he said. “We think of giving our souls up to God, but the Romans had enough gods to fill a calendar, with a month left over. So, you had to choose carefully which ones you were going to honor, the ones you thought could do you the most good—or the ones that could do you the most harm if ignored—and you especially had to be mindful of the little gods of the hearth and home, including your own particular genius. And do you know how they honored their personal spirits?”

  I shook my head.

  “By sacrifice.”

  “You mean living sacrifices?”

  “Animal sacrifices, sometimes,” Walter said. “But mostly things that were dear to them: wine, incense, salt. Those things seem kind of cheap in the modern world, but there’s one thing that all of us agree is precious.”

  “Money?”

  “Time,” he said. “You can recover money, even if you lose a fortune. But you can never get back a single moment of time. And that is what we must sacrifice, if we are to care for our personal genius.”

  “Time.”

  “And in ample amounts,” he said. “Nothing worth having comes cheap, and we become our own living sacrifices if we are to develop our natural talents. Tell me, Miss Wylde, how long have you been trying to compose your spirit adventures? A few weeks, yes? It will take much, much longer than that. I am twenty-three, as you have already noted, and have been at this trade for nearly five years. I hope to prove competent by the time I am thirty.”

  “Thirteen years?”

  “I am an average study,” he said. “For some, it comes quicker.”

  “Then I will grow old in this apprenticeship.”

  “We grow old anyway,” Walter said.

  “Not all of us,” I said, suddenly near tears, thinking of poor dead Jonathan. “I’m sorry, I am merely discouraged. This is all more difficult than I thought it might be, and I came here with some silly notion that you could share some kind of recipe with me that would make, well, if not literature, then at least a book-shaped thing. And I discovered that I don’t have a writing problem, I have a spiritual problem. Thank you, Walter, for your honesty and wisdom.”

  “It was the whiskey talking, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sorry I called you a boy earlier.”

  “Don’t give it a thought.”

  “You really are very sweet, but my heart belongs to another.”

  “I know,” he said, suddenly sober and sad.

  “Have you written that down?” I asked. “I mean, what you just told me.”

  “No,” he said. “Nobody asked me the question before.”

  “It seems you ought to record it,” I suggested.

  “I don’t think the readers of the Times would be amused,” he said.

  Then the door opened and the cat snarled and a small man dressed in brown plaid with hat in hand stood in the doorway and asked for the proprietor, W. C. Shinn.

  8

  The man in brown plaid had dark, slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache that danced atop a forced smile, even when he was complaining. The cat, he said, was in need of discipline.

  “The feline has drawn blood,” the man said, lifting a plaid pants leg to reveal a furrow of bloody welts on his ankle. “Is that your cat, sir?”

  “That cat is a citizen of the world,” Walter said, giving me a wink. “He darkens whatever door he pleases, helps himself to whatever larder is afforded by generosity or opportunity, and makes a general mockery of the law of ownership.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” the man in brown said.

  “I should think not,” Walter said, and held up the whiskey bottle. “Here, pour some of this on that scratch. It is recommended by
Dr. Lister.”

  “I am not acquainted with the man.”

  “Of course not,” Walter said, disappointed. He returned the bottle to the desk drawer and gave me a look that said he must attend to business.

  It was my cue to leave.

  “I am grateful for your time,” I told Walter, and gave his arm a gentle squeeze. Then I rose and walked toward the door, which was still occupied by the man in brown.

  “I am here to place another advertisement,” he said. “I am Clement Hill and you may remember me from a few days before, when I placed a notice in your columns. Business has been very good and I believe I will extend my stay—and my notice—for another week.”

  “Very good,” Walter said.

  I paused, waiting for Hill to move out of the way, but he lingered.

  “If you will excuse me,” I said.

  “Madam, may I ask you a question?” Hill asked, the mustache bobbing absurdly.

  “Anything,” I said with wasted sarcasm.

  “What is your life worth to you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your life,” he said. “Have you thought about what your life is worth?”

  “Constantly.”

  “Ah, a serious woman,” Hill said. “What a delight.”

  “I could find witnesses who would differ,” I said. “But yes, I have pondered the question. So far, there is no answer.”

  “Ah, I can help,” he said. He pulled from his pocket a narrow pamphlet filled with columns of very small print. “The answer is here.”

  “I hadn’t imagined anyone was keeping track.”

  “Oh, yes,” Hill said. “Now, how old are you? Thirty-five?”

  “I’ll have you know I am just twenty-nine.”

  “An honest mistake,” Hill said. “Now, here we are. A woman, aged twenty-nine, in good health. You are in good health, are you not?”

  “I am sound in body if not in mind.”

  “Not a smoker or a drinker?”

  “Smoking is disgusting and I’m somebody else when I drink, so I avoid the hard stuff. I have a glass of wine now and again.”

  “Quite right,” he said, and ran his index finger down the battalion of numbers. “Now, we can assure your life for a thousand dollars for only pennies a day. Pennies.”

  “Pennies?”

  “Thirteen cents a day. Suicide excluded, of course.”

  “You are selling life insurance.”

  “Of course.”

  “The man from the Western Mutual Life Assurance Company, here to protect us from the Deadly Wheel.”

  “Of course.”

  “I had some small hope you were engaging me in a conversation about the worth of a human life, instead of a merely pecuniary interest. Tell me, Mister Hill, what is this dreaded wheel? I had an image in my mind of blind and veiled Fortuna spinning her wheel.”

  “It is the loss of a limb or faculty to mechanization,” he said. “We do a good business in policies for brakemen and other railway workers, and for miners, considering the prevalence of accidents in those professions.”

  “How disappointing that such a poetic phrase is used to describe something so crushingly grim.”

  The mustache twitched.

  “You seem to be an independent woman,” Hill said. “A widow, or a grass widow perhaps, and you must have loved little ones who depend upon you. Think of your children’s smiling faces, and think what it would mean to them to lose your support. Think of all the hardships that await orphans in this world, and for just a few pennies—”

  “Thirteen pennies.”

  “—a day you can save them the shame of the county poor farm.”

  “I don’t think Ford County has a poor farm. Do we, Walter?”

  “Not yet,” Walter said. “But there’s been talk.”

  “I don’t have children, Mister Hill.”

  “A sister, then, or a younger brother . . .”

  “I am not a gambler,” I said. “But if I were, this kind of proposition would strike me as odd. You are asking me to bet against myself, to place a cash wager on the odds of the unthinkable happening. To win the bet, I must die, sooner rather than later, and, of course, I see none of the money—nor do I have anyone to bequeath.”

  “You are forgetting the funeral expenses,” Hill said. “You would not want your brothers and sisters in Christ to bear the cost of your burial without recompense.”

  “You approach offense.”

  “How so?”

  “You reduce human beings to a column of figures.”

  “The Western Mutual Life Assurance Company prides itself on the best value for the insurance dollar, madam,” Hill said, indignant. “We provide an indispensable service.”

  “Can you bring people back from the dead?”

  “What?”

  “If you truly provide the service you say you do, then you would have to bring people back from the dead. Say I’m a little boy who uses my thirteen pennies to buy a policy insuring the life of my mother. If she dies, I don’t want the money, I want her back.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Please, Mister Hill,” Walter said, stepping forward. “Sit down with me and we can discuss your job printing.”

  Hill ignored him.

  “Take the Sanborn Company,” Hill said. “They are a fine company and engaged in a great civic service by mapping, town by town, all of the communities in the West in order to judge their fire risk. They contribute not only to individual security, but they provide a valuable service by encouraging communities to improve their fire battalions.”

  “Is there a point in sight?” I asked.

  “If you have a policy with the good folks at Sanborn—say you are an honest woman with a millinery store, and through no fault of your own that store burns to the ground. You will receive the amount for which you insured your place of business. Nothing could be more fair.”

  “Nothing could be more cold-blooded,” I said. “Perhaps that millinery store—and I’m going to give you the type of business here, although as a woman I’m offended that you didn’t say bank or law office—maybe that hat store was the very reason for my existence, perhaps the building had been passed down through generations of women in my family, and perhaps I could see very little point in living once separated from this font of meaning. My point here is the same as with the child, that you cannot restore the mother or the millinery store, you can only settle for farthings.”

  “That,” he said, now wagging his finger at me, “is absurd.”

  “Remove that finger from my face,” I said, “or prepare to lose it.”

  “Five thousand dollars isn’t farthings.”

  “It’s exactly two million farthings, but farthings nonetheless.”

  I grasped the offending digit and held it fast.

  “Unhand me!”

  “You infuriate me.”

  “What have I done?”

  “My family had a plantation in Memphis before the war,” I said, twisting the finger. “They were slave holders. And the salesmen for the Southern Life Assurance Company of Atlanta came round and sold my father policies on his slaves, so that he would be compensated for the loss of his property should any of them die or be killed. And every few years, he would collect on a policy—five hundred dollars, as I recall, for being deprived through death of the ownership of a human being.”

  I twisted the finger a bit more, and Hill shrank with pain.

  “And not a penny went to the widows or the orphans.”

  I released the finger.

  “That was all perfectly legal,” Hill howled.

  “You deserve a thrashing.”

  “Please,” Walter said, stepping between us.

  “She is a madwoman,” Hill said, vigorously rubbing his finger. “And yet, I find myself strangely attracted to her.” Then, to me: “Would you take supper with me at the Dodge House?”

  I slapped Clement Hill.

  “So, that means no?”

  I
walked into the street. The cat was sitting on his fat haunches, watching the action through sleepy green eyes.

  “Sic him, Rutherford B.”

  9

  My intent was to return to my room at the Dodge House and nap. I was weary and snappish, and an hour or two of sleep might restore my mood and my faculties.

  As I passed the Saratoga on my way to my quiet room, I noticed a group of women and children gathered at a wooden table. The women were wearing their Sunday best, even though it was Monday, and the children were leaning forward on their elbows, playing some kind of game. A girl of ten with golden curls spun a teetotum and her eyes sparkled as the wooden top-like thing wobbled and fell.

  “Five!” the children squealed, more or less in unison.

  The girl moved her token five spaces.

  “Cupid,” the girl said. “Matrimony is next.”

  I walked closer, because I knew the game. “The Checkered Game of Life” was common among Union soldiers during the war. The board had sixty-four squares, like a checkerboard, but alternating squares were labeled with all manner of pedestrian boons and calamities, from being rewarded for industry with wealth—and for intemperance with poverty. It was invented by a New York lithographer as a means of teaching moral instruction. I hadn’t thought of the game in years, not since Jonathan and I had played before his enlistment.

  “You know Mister Bradley’s game?” a woman in a blue sun bonnet asked. She cradled a Bible in her arms.

  “A version,” I said. “But why are you doing this here?”

  “As Christian women of the Union Church on Gospel Hill,” she said, “we feel a duty to offer wholesome entertainment to those wretches who seek diversion but risk damnation in the pleasure domes of sin around us.”

  “I’m not sure this is the hour to save the patrons of the Saratoga from themselves,” I said. “You might have better luck at ten o’clock at night, rather than ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “Don’t be silly,” the woman said. “We couldn’t have the children out that late.”

  “Of course not. What was I thinking?”

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” the woman said in a voice choked with forced cheerfulness. “My name is Beatrice Babcock. My husband was Samuel Babcock, but he was called home to Jesus last winter when he was crushed beneath a Murphy wagon full of buffalo hides. The weight of the moisture in those frozen hides snapped the axle and the wagon tipped over.”