by Mary Bowers
“I kinda thought so,” Taylor said. “That’s why I mentioned that Dobbs was under the age of thirty. The younger they are, the better they are with all this app-stuff. Also, he was probably watching Teddy even more closely than you were during the shoot, and if you picked up on it, he did too. But now I’m having second thoughts about talking to him about it. Maybe we shouldn’t let him know what we suspect. It makes all too much sense that he’s involved, somehow.”
“No no, you’re quite right. If we get bogged down in the details – if we find ourselves wandering around in a technological maze – I can always consult with my friend Sparky Fritz. He’s good with devices and apps.”
Taylor gave him a wry smile, remembering Ed’s tricky little friend. “I don’t trust that guy either. Teddy Force, Sparky Fritz, and now, ready or not, The Marvelous Dobbs – they’re all the same. You’re the only one I’d believe if you ever told me you’d witnessed something extraordinary. You’d never get involved with a hoax – not knowingly, anyway.”
“I’m so ashamed,” Ed said, in the face of this glowing praise. “That it’s come to this! Perhaps it’s my duty to take a stand after all, and finally quit the show. I can hardly do that without explaining my reasons to the viewers who have come to trust me, though, and I find myself extremely reluctant to expose Teddy. Yes, he’s a pompous ass, yes, his research methodology amounts to lowbrow comedy, but I’ve never been able to really dislike him. There’s a boyish core to him that keeps him from being completely detestable.”
“Some endorsement,” Taylor said.
“At first I had nothing but contempt for him,” Ed said mistily, remembering. “He grappled me onto the show through sheer force of will.”
“He bullied you into it,” Taylor said. “I was there. Don’t sugarcoat it.”
“Well, yes, you could put it like that. Telling him no is like screaming into a hurricane. But in the course of time, I’ve come to admire his pluck, his enthusiasm, his pure, natural joy in each new situation we tackle together. But if he’s creating counterfeit phenomena . . . no, I can’t tolerate that. I think Carly knows it too . . . that he’s hoaxing, and doing it so clumsily that he’s bound to get caught.”
“Holy cow,” Taylor said. “This is dynamite. No wonder Carly wants to focus more on you. If Teddy gets caught, bang goes the show. Your reputations will be ruined. Teddy will land on his feet somewhere, probably doing another type of reality show, but this is your life, Ed. This is what you do. You have to come out about this. You have to get ahead of it, before Teddy gets caught and you become a laughingstock.”
“If he was controlling things with his cellphone,” Michael said, “then this house’s security system is controllable from an app. I wonder who installed it.”
“Oh,” Ed said in a small voice, as if he’d just remembered something.
“What?” Taylor said.
“After I first met Britt, Tiffany and Kent, I asked Dobbs a few questions about them. It was obvious that Dobbs was jealous of Britt, and is attracted to Tiffany. I think he mentioned that Britt worked with security systems somehow.”
“Wow.” Taylor sat back and stared at the counter. Suddenly, the sight of the junky food spread out over the counter made her feel sick.
“We have to tell Detective Bruno,” Michael said.
Taylor held her hand up. “Not yet. Ed, you didn’t sound like you were sure about Britt’s job. We need more information. If Dobbs is just jealous and he told you a pack of lies about Britt, we’re just going to be making fools of ourselves.”
“It’ll put Bruno on the right track,” Michael pointed out. “He needs this information.”
“It’s not information yet,” Taylor insisted. “It’s just what we suspect. For all we know, Teddy had the app-control installed somehow and this has nothing to do with the murders. And it’ll also expose Teddy. They just did their show, and he wants to lead off the season with it, and now, suddenly it’s revealed that the exact effects he’s presenting as part of a haunting can be accomplished with a simple phone app? You don’t need a roadmap to follow that one right back to Teddy.”
“Better we kill the episode now, instead of waiting until that can come out,” Ed said. “Damn and blast Teddy! I’m calling Carly.”
“No, wait,” Taylor said. “Just wait, both of you. Let’s find out all we can before we start throwing around accusations and jumping to conclusions. We need time to think. And I’m not sure I want other people to know we’ve figured this out yet. Don’t forget . . . oh.” She stopped and looked across to the hallway to the foyer, as the irritating series of peeps sounded, signaling Dobbs’s return.
He called out to Ed from the foyer, then said, “You didn’t tell me Taylor and Michael were still here. Their car is outside.”
“Let me do this,” Taylor told Ed and Michael quietly. “I don’t want him to know what we know yet. We have to find out how involved he is first.”
“Involved?” Ed asked. “How?”
“Ed, he was here when Jessamine died. We know now that she was murdered, but her husband’s death is still in doubt. That may have been an accident, like she said. And then . . . Dobbs came.”
“And then she died, and that was definitely murder,” Michael added, speaking just above a whisper, because Dobbs was coming down the hall. He seemed to be talking to someone.
When he came out of the hallway, he was carrying Bastet in his arms. “Look who came to the door to say hello,” he said, stroking the cat.
Bastet turned her head just enough to meet Taylor’s gaze, looking cool and disinterested.
“What are you guys looking so grim about?” he asked, releasing the cat and coming to the end of the breakfast bar to join the group. “Seriously, guys? You’ve been sitting here eating that stuff instead of coming to The Oasis? What did the cops want?”
“What do cops ever want?” Taylor asked. “To know everything about everybody, everywhere.”
“So what did you tell them?” Finally, because he couldn’t stand it any longer, he asked, “Did they say anything about me?”
“They didn’t talk much,” Taylor said. “They mostly listened. We just told them about the séance.”
“They wanted to know about the séance?” he asked, incredulous. “They’re cops!”
“I know, right?” Taylor said. “You’d think they wouldn’t be into the paranormal, but I guess sometimes they get so desperate they’ll try anything.”
Dobbs relaxed visibly and grabbed a potato chip. “But they’re gone now right? It’s just us. We can analyze the results we got tonight. You guys not drinking?” he asked, turning to stare back into the bar.
“No,” Ed said, “and neither are you. You’ve had enough for one night, and you need to have your wits about you. As you say, it’s a good time to go over our results. Please retrieve my equipment from the media room. We’ll move to the dining room table and spread out. I think I saw some policemen outside, down by the river. We’ll stay inside for the time being.”
“Good call,” Dobbs said, hopping down and grabbing a few more chips to take along with him.
Before they moved to the formal dining room, Taylor gazed back at the lanai.
“They were lurking down by the dock,” Ed said. “You won’t be able to see them, if they’re still there.”
“I’m not looking for cops,” she said distantly. After a moment she lowered her head, nodded, and murmured something.
Michael thought he caught the word, “Troubadour.”
Chapter 23
Even though he’d been relieved that the police hadn’t mentioned him, Dobbs seemed nervous. With the restlessness of a party animal who hadn’t partied himself unconscious yet, Dobbs sat down at the dining room table – a long, narrow board set across a heavily scrolled trestle – gazed at the way Ed was setting up his notes, recorder and writing instruments, then started to abstractedly drum his fingers on the table.
“Please don’t do that,” Ed said without lo
oking up.
“Sorry,” Dobbs mumbled, and he subsided into broody silence. In a moment, he was cracking his knuckles.
Ed quelled him with another glance, then told the table at large that he was ready to begin and activated the recorder.
“Really?” Dobbs said at the recorder. “We’re still, like, in investigator mode?”
Ed murmured that the medium was still present and could be overtaken by another trance at any moment.
“Oh, right,” Dobbs said, looking at Taylor with sudden awe.
Taylor gazed back, trying to look oracular.
“Okay, what have we learned tonight?” Dobbs said, cutting off Ed. “That Jessamine’s spirit is keeping her distance from Alan’s spirit. That’s significant, I think. You know? Could mean she’s afraid of him. Could mean she was guilty all along. My read on it is, she killed him. What do you guys think?”
“We don’t make judgments like that in investigations such as ours,” Ed informed him. “And certainly not at this point.”
“Oh, sorry,” Dobbs mumbled. “You take the lead, doctor.”
Ed looked to Taylor. “What do you remember about tonight? Anything?”
She suddenly looked worried. “Well, actually . . . I remember Mark.”
“That’s all?”
“I don’t know,” she said peevishly after a few moments’ deep thought. “Sometimes I think I get into the act a little too well. Things usually comes back to me later, but not if I’m trying.”
“Fascinating,” Dobbs said.
“You were inhabited by Jessamine,” Ed told her. “She seemed to be accusing somebody. Did you understand whom she meant? She never said a name.”
Mentally groping, Taylor said, “There was something about love. Betrayal.”
Before Ed could silence him, Dobbs told her, “She said she wanted Tiffany and Kent to like her, but they never did.”
“Dobbs,” Ed said with great self-control, “one never coaches the medium. You’re leading our witness. Let her speak for herself.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m really screwing up, huh?”
“Patience, Dobbs. Taylor, if you would. As much as you can remember.”
“There was something,” she said uncertainly. “I think it was . . . guilt.”
“What kind of guilt?” Michael asked. He noticed her slipping back, somehow, and wasn’t happy about it. He prompted her mainly to get it over with faster. “Did she kill him?”
“I . . . don’t think it was that. She knew she’d taken something that wasn’t hers. Alan. She took a man who belonged to other people. Maybe that was it. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about her. Let’s move on.”
“Of course,” Ed said easily. “Alan Pissarro came to you next. Roy summoned him. Do you remember that?”
She nodded, but looked unhappy.
“Did you gain any knowledge of the interactions between the two of them?”
“The three of them,” she said immediately.
Dobbs started to say something and Ed quelled him with a glance. “Three, you say?” Ed prompted quietly.
“That’s what it was all about,” she said thinly. “The three of them. Alan didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.”
Before Ed could stop him, Dobbs said, “The classic triangle: Alan, Jessamine and Wendy.”
Snapping her eyes wider, she looked up nervously and said, “I tell you, I can’t remember. Or at least . . . .”
Recognizing that she’d hit a mental blockage, Ed spoke to her soothingly. “You went straight to the media room after leaving the lanai. How did you know where it was? You’d never been upstairs in this house.”
“I don’t remember going there.”
“I see,” Ed said. Curious about the blockage she’d hit, he obliquely approached it again. “To continue: we followed you to the media room; Alan’s room. Do you remember getting there? Sitting down at the table?”
She was growing frustrated now, and she blurted, “Am I supposed to? Because I can’t. I saw Bastet. She was with me.”
“Relax, Taylor,” Ed said. “We won’t go on much longer. Alan’s partner, Roy, called him to us. He had questions, and he didn’t get the answers he wanted. It was obvious, at least to me, that he didn’t want the rest of us to know what his question was. Was anyone able to interpret what he was asking?”
Dobbs shook his head, and Michael said, “No, but I was struck by something. He said he hadn’t expected to get real results from the séance.”
“Yes, I remember. Why did that strike you? Many people are hard to convince, until they see it with their own eyes.”
“Well, he was the one who wanted the séance in the first place, wasn’t he?” Michael said. “If he doesn’t believe in the occult and he didn’t expect results, why did he even want a séance?”
“Excellent point,” Ed said. He looked around the table. “When he first approached us with the idea, I remember he said he’d even consulted another medium and rejected her. He didn’t get the idea from looking me up on the internet and seeing my connection to Taylor. Any ideas?”
“He called Alan’s stepdaughter and told her about it,” Taylor said. “He must have known she’d insist on coming, and bring her brother with her. He wanted them there, for some reason.”
Ed was nodding. “And if he didn’t buy Purity’s act, he was afraid they wouldn’t either.”
“Did he call anybody else about the séance?”
Ed told her, “No, but as I understood it, Tiffany then called her mother and told her. And of course, Kent came too. The three of them.” He watched Taylor for a reaction but she didn’t seem to be listening.
Instead, Michael said, “So he may or may not have wanted Wendy there, but he definitely wanted Tiffany and Kent. He probably figured she wouldn’t come without her brother, and maybe the boyfriend, Britt, too. So – the three of them? Is there some way we can find out exactly who it was that Roy wanted at the séance, without asking him directly?”
“I can do that,” Dobbs said, raising his hand. “He lives right next door here. I’ll go over there tomorrow and just casually ask him a few questions, sort of come at him sideways so he doesn’t suspect what I’m up to.”
The others looked at him dubiously. There was a silent pause.
“He’s my client. I’ll tackle him,” Taylor said reluctantly.
“Superb,” Ed told her. “We need to know exactly what he was trying to set up here, so we can assess what he said at the séance. He was hoping to shock something out of the family, that much is obvious. He might have been planning on pretending that he believed Alan Pissarro was there, and then, much to his own surprise, he did believe it. At that point, he must have changed tactics. Let’s concentrate on how his attitude changed after he saw his old friend in Taylor’s eyes.”
“He got angry,” Dobbs said. “Alan was refusing him something, something they’d agreed to while Alan was still alive, and he was mad about it.”
“Good point,” Ed said, and Dobbs preened. “Although I think you missed something. He said it was something they had discussed while Alan Pissarro was still alive, not something they had agreed to. Something to do with the business?”
“It can’t be,” Michael said. “Whatever it is, he still wants it, and Alan isn’t his partner anymore. Kent and Tiffany are. If he wants whatever-it-is, he can just tell them their father had agreed to it and go ahead and do it.”
“Like what?” Dobbs asked.
“How do I know? Maybe they were planning on redecorating. He mentioned something about paint color.”
“No,” Taylor said. “No, not paint, or anything else to do with the business.”
“No?” Ed asked, surprised. “What, then?”
“You’re asking me?” she said. “I wasn’t even there, remember. I was in the room I go to when I’m not with you anymore.” This seemed to startle and worry Ed, but she went on as if she didn’t notice. “I’m just saying, Roy Angers doesn’t need approval from Alan
Pissarro anymore to do anything, especially not things to do with the business. So why would he even bother to ask?” Becoming steadily more frustrated, Taylor finally stared at Ed. “You never trust anybody to do your recordkeeping for you, if you can help it. I bet you had your little pocket recorder out by that time.”
Ed nodded, looking wary.
“Replay that part for me. I keep having the feeling that there’s something just out of reach, and it’s important. If I hear what he said, it might help me remember. Help me feel whatever I was sensing at the time.”
Ed looked back at her for a few seconds, then cautiously said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Taylor. For your own equanimity, I . . . hesitate.”
“Do it,” she said.
He took a deep breath, made up his mind, then found the right place in the recording and let her hear it.
“I was right the first time,” she said after Ed turned the recording off. “It wasn’t about the business.”
“I think you’re right,” Michael said. “He wanted something brought up in front of the family, but it had nothing to do with The Big Catch. In that case, it could only have been about one thing: Alan’s death.” He looked around the table, worried.
They pondered on that for a while, coming up with unsatisfactory ideas until Ed said, “We’re stumbling around in the dark, and this kind of discussion is never profitable. Take it from me. I have years of experience with this. Interpreting the disjointed messages you get from the Other Side at a séance can take a long time. Sometimes you have to wait for things to come to pass before you can make the connection. It’s good to review what has happened at a séance immediately afterwards, but one mustn’t try too hard. The temptation is there to fabricate. No, friends, we must be patient. Keep it in the backs of your minds. Sleep on it. I’ve known answers to suddenly seem obvious at 2:30 in the morning when you pop awake, much, much later. Let it simmer inside you and let me know what you think over the coming days and weeks.”
