He handed it to Sophie, who looked down, her eyes zeroing in immediately on the young girl at the center.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” Gabe asked.
Sophie nodded. The young girl in the photo looked so sweet in her dress and gleaming curls, but the expression on her face was pure fear. A tall man behind her stood with his hand resting on her shoulder, as if to remind her that he was there.
“Yes, that’s her.”
“Eliza Mayfair. The man behind her is her stepfather, the one assumed to have killed her and probably her mother, in that basement.”
“And you thought it was her mother haunting the place?”
“Yes, it seemed logical. According to what we could find, the mother came looking for her when she was missing, didn’t find her, and then went missing. Assumed dead as well. We figured wrecking the place was her way of getting things out of the way as she’s looking for Eliza, or expressing her anger, etc, but obviously that hypothesis was wrong, and probably why we never saw anything. Tell me something. You mentioned seeing three images of Eliza. What did she look like, and what did you feel when you were confronting her?”
Sophie thought back, wrapping her arms around herself as she experienced a chill, even with her sweater on. “It seemed like there were three. . .versions of her. One was extremely angry, the others were. . .sad. . .sort of lost-looking, and blank or blurry, not quite formed, you know?”
Gabe nodded. “I think you may have seen several aspects, trying to reconcile. Amazing. How did you feel?”
“I-I don’t know. . .surprised, I guess? There was a lot of rage and fear and. . .I don’t know how to describe it. Confusion, though that may have been me.”
“Keep going. This is good.”
Encouraged, Sophie focused more on the moment she’d seen Eliza. “I guess there was a sense of want, need. . . something like that. A deep sense of need.”
Gabe nodded. “Maybe looking for her mother?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Can we try something?”
“What?”
“Just a little experiment.”
He went to another shelf and brought back a barely-used set of Rider-Waite tarot cards. “I keep these around, though I don’t use them much. I have never really related well to the tarot. It requires too much imagination,” he said with a smile, handing her the deck. She didn’t know what to make of that comment.
“Do you want a reading?” she asked, confused.
“No, but maybe see if you can focus on your moment with Eliza, and maybe use the picture. Lay out one card, and let’s see what happens.”
Sophie shrugged. “Okay,” she said, not entirely seeing the point, but what could it hurt, she figured?
Taking a deep breath she focused on the picture in front of her and felt the emotions course through her, thinking about what the little girl had suffered, and what she was suffering now, if her face when she’d appeared in the basement was any indication. Sophie’s hands shuffled the cards like they were an extension of herself, her mind drifting between the memory of the basement and the photo, until she felt it was the moment to cut, and did so, laying out one card.
Justice.
“Very interesting,” Gabe murmured, leaning in close and breaking her concentration.
“I suppose. There’s no guarantee it’s about her. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the energy for a reading is coming from unless the querent is very focused.”
“Explain?”
“It could be about Eliza, but you’re the one in the room, and you asked me to read. Eliza might want justice after what happened to her.” Sophie turned her head toward him and realized he had leaned in very close, though he studied the card, not her. “But you’re the one sitting here, who touched the cards. Is there anything you want justice for? The card can mean a lot of things, most of them centering on ideas cause and effect and universal balances. The need to do the right thing, to set injustices right.”
Gabe smiled. “Unless it’s talking about what happened at a committee meeting today, I don’t think this would be about me,” he said lightly, though he didn’t meet her eyes, either.
“Hmm.”
“Maybe we could go back to the site, and you could try more direct communication there, but this is a start.”
“Why do you think that would work?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Sophie, how much do you remember of what your aunt did?”
“She was just a tarot reader as far as I know. I’m never one hundred-percent sure of my memory though, after the amnesia from my fall.”
“I remember reading about that. Amnesia is a tricky thing. My guess is that your forgetting is more like a network. You didn’t just lose the day. You lost everything associated with it, which is why you can’t seem to remember much about your aunt’s work. That makes complete sense, especially if you see it having any connection to her murder.”
“She never wanted me to know about what she did, though. She may simply have not thought it was appropriate for a child. Patrice said she was trying to protect my innocence.”
“So she never taught you?”
“No.”
“How did you learn to read so well?”
“I taught myself to do basic readings after they died, more out of necessity than anything. I had the shop, and for a while, I had nothing to do while I recovered from my injuries and subsequent surgeries, so I studied the cards, read books. I had to make a living, though I think using the cards made me feel close to her, too, in a way. I wanted to keep that legacy alive as much as I could. I discovered I could do decent tarot readings without being a psychic. It’s just about knowing the cards and listening to people. Maybe that’s all she ever did, too.”
Gabe pursed his lips. “Well, okay. I told you I had met your aunt once. I went to her for a reading. I lost someone when I was young, and I wanted her to contact him. She did much more with her cards. She was a medium, Sophie. She could contact the dead through her cards. They communicated with her that way.”
Sophie’s breath seemed to come short, and she swallowed. “Oh,” was all she could say. She hadn’t seen that coming—or had she? On some level, had she always known?
“I imagine maybe she was protecting you in some way by not telling you. It could be pretty intense stuff for a kid, probably. It sounds like they loved you very much,” he said gently.
“I think they did, too. Did she contact your friend?”
“When I met with her, she wasn’t able to help, unfortunately. She said the spirits came to her if they wanted to make contact, but she couldn’t call them to her. She didn’t claim to see them, they just spoke to her. My friend apparently didn’t want to talk, so I never went back except for that one time I came to see you,” he said with a smile, but his eyes were intense, haunted. Sophie wondered what happened to the friend he’d lost.
“Tell me more,” he invited.
“Well, okay. I think there was something special with my Dad, too, but I don’t know what he did. He just ran the business. But I heard them talking once, heard my father say my mother left because she didn’t like what they did. I always figured he meant, you know, just running the shop. We took a lot of flack back then. People automatically think you are a fraud, using people when they are vulnerable to make money.”
“I understand. And so your mom left?”
“She left when I was seven, and I never knew what happened to her. Aunt Doris argued with him, but they never talked about any of it to me.”
Sophie had so many whys. . .why didn’t her aunt want her to know what she did for the people she helped? Why did her mother leave? Why was her family gunned down in cold blood, and why was she suddenly discovering she could see ghosts?
“I see. Well, it’s difficult to speculate about the past, but Sophie, if Josh is right—and he usually is—then you may be very gifted. Your repressed psychic energy could be what’s causing the overload, why he was burned, or maybe you
have even stronger power than your aunt did. You may very well be under a lot of stress as your doctor diagnosed, but that very stress may be releasing this ability in your mind, triggered by the sense of being threatened or afraid. But you’re not losing your mind or making things up. I believe you. I think this is worth checking out, don’t you?”
Sophie sat for a moment letting the phrase I believe you ring in the room. She believed he did, too.
“How do you check something like this out? Do I have to have more tests?” she said, hating the idea of anything medical.
“Not in the way you’re thinking. No electrodes or mad scientist labs, I promise,” he said with a grin. “Maybe we could start by going back to Charlestown and seeing if you can attract Eliza’s attention again, see what she wants. And we can meet up with Josh again, see if he can give us something more specific on your energy. We can also try to find some information on your ghost – what research have you done already?”
“I did some research into Harvard yearbooks and looked up some stuff online, but I didn’t find anything.”
“Could you draw him?”
“I can’t draw a straight line.”
He chuckled. “Well, I know someone who can. Or, if you want, you could spend some time searching through the KGD—the Known Ghosts Database. It has images of all reported ghosts and information about where they were seen, who they were, whatever people send us to record. You may find him in there. You may not be the first person he’s tried to contact.”
Sophie was shocked to find there even was such a thing. “There are that many ghost sightings?”
He grinned. “That and more. Maybe a little background education is called for. Here, take these,” he said, plucking some books off his shelf and handing them to her. “They’ll give you a starting point.”
“Um, okay.”
“And there are a great many ways we can test what psychic abilities you might have. I’d be very interested to work with you. Finally, if you want, we could do some regressive hypnosis. I’m rather good at it, and maybe we could find out something you’ve forgotten about your youth, the attacks, or even your situation at the moment.”
Sophie stood, walking to the window, putting distance between them. “I don’t think so. The police, they suggested the same, years ago. I don’t want anyone poking around in my head and I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Believe me, hypnosis is nothing like what you imagine. You would be completely alert to everything happening, and completely in control. We would set ground rules, and decide what we would ask and look for before we started. I wouldn’t be making you cluck like a chicken,” he said with a wry smile. “I would simply put you in such a relaxed state that you’re unconscious mind, the stuff you can’t reach, is more accessible. I promise absolute confidentiality. I’m just offering, but it’s entirely up to you.”
Sophie took a deep breath. He was trying not to pressure her, she could tell, but she felt the weight of his excited tone and his interest more keenly than she liked. She didn’t want to be anyone’s lab rat.
“I don’t know. I have to think about it, about all of it.”
“Of course. Listen, this is a lot on top of what you’re going through already, and I only want to help. You let me know how I can do that, okay?”
She relaxed, just slightly. “Okay. I think I’ll go home for now, but I appreciate your help.”
“It’s what I’m here for. By the way, is Sophie short for Sophia?”
She nodded, though no one had called her that since her father, and then only when he was being stern with her.
“It’s Greek for wisdom. Knowledge, vision and sight, Sophie. Your name is that of one who knows. Don’t be afraid of knowing. Knowledge can only bring you power.”
Sophie wasn’t sure what to say in response. Did she want to know? What would her life become if she found all the answers to her questions?
Thanking him quietly, she took her books and left.
* * *
Sophie got back from Dr. Mason’s—Gabe’s—and sat on her bed for a while, thinking the day through. Too much was going on in her head, and she was starting to lose her sense of direction. Standing, she walked to her closet and pulled a small box from the shelf, carrying it back to the living room where she ordered a pizza and settled in. She didn’t know what led her to doing this from time to time, but every now and then she just found herself going through it all, keeping touch with what happened, as if she feared forgetting. As if.
She reached in and delicately removed a stack of papers, all the newspaper stories and cards that were sent to her in the days after the shootings. She’d clipped them all, spent weeks scouring all the news she could find, even asked for copies of the police reports because she wanted to know what happened and hoped something would jostle her stubborn memories. Those hadn’t been easy to get, but Roger had managed. He’d outright refused to get her the autopsy reports.
The sympathy cards were from many people Sophie didn’t even know, all of her aunt’s clients, and other people whose names were slightly more familiar. There was even one from Theo, the old bastard, she thought without rancor.
Some of the stories showed her Aunt Doris and her father working in the shop, standing by the register, the pictures happy and normal while the story detailed the gruesome event. Others showed her, Sophie, being taken out on a stretcher, and police swarming the place. Roger had been among them. The light on her desk flickered, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop. Sophie frowned, tightening the bulb. She thought about turning up the heat, but didn’t move from her chair, too caught up in her memories.
Nothing here ever told her anything new, but it helped her stay in touch with it all, reminding her not to forget, as if she ever could. Shoving the papers all back in the box, she put them away and turned to the stack of books she had on her coffee table. Looking at the clock, she knew sleep was going to be impossible tonight and grabbed the stack of books she’d come home with.
Hours later, Sophie felt like she was hoarding a dirty little secret as she sat among books on her apartment floor, an open pizza box on the end table. Gabe had sent her home with all of these for her general interest, and she poured through them, more captivated than she would have guessed.
Our Haunted Lives. The Case for Ghosts, and Why Do Ghosts Exist? by Dr. Gabriel Mason. She’d spent the last six hours reading the last one beginning to end.
“E.T. go home,” Sophie murmured, chuckling at herself. It was all so strange, like an entirely different world that existed within the known world that everyone walked around in. People obsessed with ghosts, with extraterrestrials, as if the billions of people crowding the planet weren’t enough to worry about?
Some of it made sense, though, and a few passages had her particularly transfixed, and completely creeped out. Somewhere in the middle of reading, the book dropped from her hands to the floor. Sophie finally passed out on her sofa curled up in an afghan that Aunt Doris had made, her head overly full of ghost facts and too many questions to count.
* * *
Sophie didn’t get up to Harvard much but she’d walked among the stately buildings and beautiful lawns a few times over the years. Right now, she drew in a breath of air as she crossed the Spring-green world of Cambridge, the weather warm, the students rushing back and forth through iron gates and past the brick buildings of the Old Yard. She lifted her face to the sun, smiling as she passed through the gates with the throng of quickly-stepping students.
She walked into the yard where she spotted a group of well-dressed men talking. She looked down at pajamas, though no one seemed to notice. They were all dressed so formally, not like students she knew.
Her gaze was drawn to a thin young man standing at the edge of the group of men. His face was a bit drawn, as if he’d been ill, or maybe he was just tired, like she was. The intensity of his eyes rooted her to the spot, a darker presence in the sunlight yard, his shadow casting a little longer than th
e rest.
“It’s you,” she whispered, recognizing him as he turned away, walking quickly north.
“You! Stop!” she yelled, trying to get his attention, calling him back, but he moved quickly, not looking back and she struggled to keep up, thwarted by the increasingly thick traffic of students between them. “Stop!” she yelled again, hoping he would wait while simultaneously she wanted nothing more than to escape the dream—which she was very aware of as a dream—and yet her heart was pounding, her mind frantic as she searched the crowd for him.
Suddenly he was there, in front of her, and she nearly ran into him. When he reached out and placed his hands on her shoulders, she turned stone cold and sucked in a breath, held by his eyes, unable to turn away.
“You have to find him. Perkins twenty-eight,” he said, looking behind himself like he was being watched, or followed. She pulled back, wanting his hands off her. “You have to find him,” he repeated, standing before her whole and handsome as he must have been in life.
“You know who killed her, who killed Patrice. Tell me!” she demanded, but he was backing away, losing himself in the crowd and she pushed through, calling, but the students blocked her passage and she started to suffocate, to gasp, and couldn’t find a direction. Thrashing to escape, she awoke on the hard floor, staring up at the ceiling in the dark.
She wasn’t in her apartment any more, though. She was on the floor of the reading room downstairs, freezing cold, and having no idea how she got there. As her vision cleared, she focused in on a vague light and saw a man standing in the entry to the room—him—the man who had been following her earlier. Abject fear curdled any words in her throat, her heart thundering. She closed her eyes, trying to stay calm, and when she opened them, the dark-haired man was gone.
It wasn’t over.
When she turned her head, she saw her ghost standing over her. A droplet of blood formed from his chest and slowly gravitated downward, toward her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t avoid its downward path.
Sophie wasn’t aware that she was screaming until someone turned on the lights and she bolted upright, pushing herself back against the wall, her breath coming hard. Unbelievingly, she saw Claire, who looked as terrified as she felt.
Past Tense Page 13
