by Jack Lynch
The woman gave a quiet sigh. Whatever it was, it wasn’t easy for her to talk about.
“Would you mind if I repeated some of that conversation we had that day? It sounds silly, I know, but if I can help you remember, if I can show you how very important that was to me, then maybe the other things I have to tell you won’t seem so bizarre.”
“Go ahead. I remember you told me you were going to jump off the bridge that morning.”
“That’s right. And you asked if I meant the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“And you told me yes,” I remembered. “You said you could see it from where you were sitting. You said it was particularly beautiful that day.”
“And you said,” the woman told me now, “ ‘Oh boy,’ and I heard a very deep sigh. I asked what was the matter. And you said it wasn’t the sort of story you wanted to cover. And then you said something like, ‘Hey, look, could we just talk for a minute?’ And I said that yes, we could talk, but I asked you what was wrong. I asked you if you didn’t do stories about people who go off the bridge. You told me you did, ‘but not with a light heart.’ And I think right then, Mr. Bragg, I realized that I was speaking to somebody who was more than just a newspaper reporter.” She paused again. “You seemed that day to have difficulty choosing your words.”
“You were making me a nervous wreck,” I admitted. “You were so damn calm about it.”
“I had made up my mind, is all. At least I thought I had. But then, what you told me next made me realize how really uncomfortable our conversation was for you. You told me that through the years you had known too many people who had committed suicide. The first, you said, had been the mother of a youngster you grew up with. And you said there had been plenty of others since then. Do you remember telling me that?”
“Yes.”
“And was it true?”
“Yes.”
“I could tell.” She paused again. “Talk about the shoe being on the other foot. For that brief moment my heart went out to you.”
There was more silence on the line. I shifted in the chair. I doubted that I would have leveled with her that way if it had happened today. She of course remembered all this better than I did.
“Do you remember what you said next?” she asked.
“Afraid not.”
“You needn’t apologize. You said to me, ‘Look, you must be in an awful state. I mean, your life has to be absolutely shitty right now.’ ”
“I said that?”
“Your very words. And dear God, what a help it was to hear you say them. It made me laugh. Not happily, but laugh all the same, and I told you that you were so right. And then you told me that these awful things, these moods, pass in time.”
“I was looking up the number for Suicide Prevention while I told you that,” I remembered.
“And you went on to tell me that you also had talked to people who had attempted suicide in the past, but who had either failed, or been stopped in one way or another. I take it you talked to them in your capacity as a reporter.”
“Some of them. Others were just people I knew. Same as with the ones who succeeded in doing what they set out to do.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad you were willing to tell me about them that Sunday morning.”
“I don’t remember all that.”
“You told me that those people you’d spoken to, the ones who had tried to take their own lives, but for one reason or another had failed, you told me that every one of them had said they thanked God they hadn’t gone through with it. You said all those people had learned that things do change, that problems can be solved, or at least made tolerable. And then you said the most important thing of all to me, Mr. Bragg. Do you remember?”
“Not right now.”
“You said you could understand how a person whose brains had been blown away on drugs might not see things that way. But you told me that I sounded like a very composed and together lady. You said to me, ‘Damn it, I don’t want you to die.’ ”
If I had still smoked cigarettes I would have lit one right then. I had been right. This was not one of the hilarious memories from my newspaper days.
“You went on talking for a good while longer,” the woman continued. “You were being rock-bottom honest. You cared about me, I was convinced of that. You told me there were people who could take me by the hand and walk me through whatever mess I was in. You asked me to give you the phone number I was calling from. You said you would have one of these people call me. And you know, by then I felt as if you really were a friend. Somebody I could trust. And so I gave you my number. And a short while later somebody from Suicide Prevention did call me.”
I stared at the ceiling. It was nice to know something had worked out that day. The woman on the phone might have been reading my mind.
“It saved my life, is what it did,” she told me in a quieter tone. “Not that all the gloom and doom lifted like a magic veil. But you, and then the woman from Suicide Prevention, well, you got me to a place where I felt I could cope for a while longer. I phoned back a few days later to thank you for that conversation. That’s when I learned your name. But they told me you had quit your job.”
“That’s right. That’s the day I quit my job.”
She waited, giving me a chance to say more. When I didn’t, she continued.
“Anyway, Mister Bragg, you were being honest with me that day, weren’t you? That day so many years ago?”
“Gut level,” I told her. “And forget the mister. Just call me Bragg. I never did learn your name.”
“It’s Maribeth.”
“Nice name. It somehow goes with a composed and together lady.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, because this is the part that starts to get tricky.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, as I said, I see your name from time to time and I know you’re in the detective business. Meanwhile, I’ve become…oh God, Bragg, please don’t laugh…but I call myself a mind consultant. It’s misleading. I’m not a psychologist or mental health worker as such, though I’ve studied those fields as part of what I do.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what it is that you do?”
She hesitated, then said in a quiet voice, “I’m a psychic consultant.”
I shifted the receiver to my other ear. “You don’t sound very sure of yourself.”
“I’m sure enough when I’m doing it,” she said with a bit more authority. “It’s the trying to explain it to people that ties me in knots. Well come on, tell me, what do you think of people who call themselves psychics?”
“I don’t laugh outright,” I told her. “Not all the time anyhow. I think there are people who sense things the rest of us don’t.”
“That’s good to hear,” she told me. “That means I can tell you the rest of it.”
“Please do.”
“This all came about out of that earlier episode we shared.”
“The suicide thing?”
“Precisely, the suicide thing. On that Sunday, thanks in part to you, I survived. But one of the closest friends I ever had, a woman I’d known since childhood, did not survive. She was living on the East Coast then. On that day I phoned the newspaper and talked to you, she swallowed a fatal combination of tranquilizers and bourbon whiskey. It was, I learned later, the culmination of a crushing depression which had gripped her since her husband had died a year earlier. She had never told me about the state she was in. Not verbally.”
The woman let the silence build.
“I guess I’m beginning to get it,” I told her.
“Are you?”
“You think it was your friend’s depression you were feeling the day you called and talked to me.”
“I’m certain of it. I’m more positive as the years pass. Except for you, I might have gone right down the tubes with her, although in a little more dramatic fashion. I always did have a certain flair. My father thought I should have gone onto the stage. He said I was a regular
Virginia ham.”
She was trying to make light of things, but I felt there was something else starting to catch up with her.
“I’ve got to get this out,” she said abruptly.
“I can tell.”
“Trust me, then. I am reasonably successful as a ‘mind consultant,’ as I call it, but what I really mean is that I have considerable psychic abilities which I have recognized and trained and honed since my friend Betty took her life, and I just know that was what I was feeling that Sunday I spoke with you. I make money at what I do, but more importantly, Bragg, I know I have this ability. I’m not infallible, but I do have this God-given ability, and I try to use it to help people the best I know how. But I didn’t call you today to tell you how you turned my life around and launched me on my brilliant career.”
“Go on.”
“The first time we talked I wanted to kill myself. This time, I want to stay alive.”
“What is it, Maribeth? What’s been happening?”
“For the past two weeks, I have had two absolutely crystal clear impressions. This is a part of the psychic business. The sure end of it. This isn’t a possible, or a maybe, like I tell my clients when I’m not sure. This is the real thing.”
“What are the impressions?”
“One, there’s an open field somewhere north of here, in a rural area, but not too distant, and there are bodies buried there. It’s not a cemetery. It’s near a sort of picnic area. And the people buried there are victims of violence. There are several of them. And the second impression, and this is where you come in, Bragg, is that because of these bodies, I too am threatened with violence and death. I can’t think why. I don’t know what to do about it.”
When she spoke next her voice had a catch to it. “And so I decided to phone you again. I didn’t say it the first time we talked, but I’m saying it now, Mr. Bragg. Help me. Please help me.”
TWO
Detective Sergeant Barry Smith of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department was a man of tolerance and professional courtesy. At least he treated me that way because I had traded on a name we both knew, Burt Danstadt. Danstadt was patrol commander of the neighboring Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Danstadt and I were pretty good friends, had been for years. And that, I figured, was the reason Detective Sergeant Barry Smith was patiently listening to my story there on a midday Saturday in the offices of the Violent Crimes Unit in the Sonoma County Hall of Justice in Santa Rosa, because no matter how adroitly you told it, no matter how you couched your terms, there was no easy way to tell a detective sergeant that a woman who claims to be psychic said he had a number of homicide victims buried in some patch of his bailiwick.
Smith burned off a lot of nervous energy listening to the story. He was chewing gum and fiddling with a pencil and pad in front of him. He was a small-framed man of about thirty-five with a round face and pale complexion. He had dark hair and blue eyes that stared intently. When I’d finished the story Smith’s jaw stopped working the gum, as if the process of chewing had been making a record of it.
He dropped the pencil and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his flat stomach. He was wearing a pair of cream-colored, hard-napped slacks and a short-sleeved, white dress shirt that had pale pink stripes through it. What appeared to be a .38 Police Special protruded from a belt holster and what looked like a very large diamond was set in an elaborate setting on his right ring finger.
He seemed for a minute to be staring at something over my left shoulder, then gave a thin smile. “That’s one helluva story to have to come in off the street with cold and tell some cop you’ve never met before.”
I nodded. “Thank God for Burt Danstadt.”
“So what do you think of it all?”
“I think it was worth a trip up here to tell it to you. I’ve never even met the woman face to face, but the two telephone conversations I’ve had with her were pretty intense. I did some checking around. Among people who seem to know about these things, she’s considered top flight in her field. She’s worked with one of the police jurisdictions down on the Peninsula. I don’t know just which one, Los Altos or Sunnyvale, I think. I didn’t check with them. I thought you could do that better, if you want to. I personally feel she believes what she told me. I think she thinks there are bodies somewhere up here waiting to be found. I think she thinks she’s in danger.”
“Because of the bodies?”
“That’s what she says.”
“Why didn’t she want to come up here and tell us the story herself?”
“The way she explained it to me, she’s still a little quirky about being a psychic. She thinks she has the gift, or whatever you call it, but it embarrasses her to tell other people about it.”
Smith grunted. “At least she isn’t a showboat. Why does she say Sonoma County?”
“She said it seems about right. She said it’s a ways north of San Francisco, but not too far. She said she felt it was beyond Marin County. You’re next in line and she said the sort of country she senses is similar to what she’s seen when she’s been up in this area.”
“It couldn’t be over the ridge into Napa?”
“I asked her that. She said no, Napa County doesn’t do it.”
“Mendocino? You suppose I could sell her on Mendocino County?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
Smith picked up the pencil and let it fall back to the desk again. “Christ. Sheriff’ll go ape if we start digging up bodies.” He looked across at me. “What’s your feeling? About psychics in general, I mean.”
I shrugged. “The jury’s still out, but I’ve been known to have a hunch or two myself for no reason. What about you?”
Smith smiled. “You talk like a cop. You and Danstadt must spend a little time bullshitting together.” He shifted in his chair. “Sure, I have hunches. And there are times you just know some son of a bitch is bad, even though you’ve never set eyes on him before. Actually, we’ve even tried using psychics from time to time. Not me personally, but the department. We for now have a sheriff who’d import a Jamaican witch doctor if he thought it could help us get to going down the road. But frankly, the ones I’ve encountered always seemed a little too imprecise to be effective. They might let you know there’s trouble in the neighborhood but can’t seem to find the right doorstep.”
“I guess just learning there’s trouble in the neighborhood could be a help, if you didn’t know about it before.”
“That is true.”
“And that really is why I came up to tell you her story. I didn’t expect everybody in the department to pick up shovels and go out and start digging. Maybe something else will turn up that fits in with all this.”
Smith nodded. “I appreciate it, and I’m not discounting the possibility the woman’s on to something. Thank her for the tip.”
“I will. Actually, she told me she did phone up here one day last week. She didn’t know how to go about it, really. She asked someone if you had any unusual missing person cases or something.”
“Did she say who she talked to?”
“She didn’t get a name.”
Smith put his hand on the telephone, thought a moment, then changed his mind.
“Sergeant?” asked a woman’s voice from the doorway behind me.
I glanced around. She was a tall woman of thirty or so with dark, lank hair she wore in a Prince Valiant cut. She was large boned and stood a little awkwardly in the doorway, her eyes giving me a quick look then returning to Smith. She was wearing tan Levis and a plain white blouse. The holstered revolver at her waist had a longer barrel than Smith’s did.
“What is it, Rachel?”
“I’ve been all through the Coddingtown Mall with Proctor’s photos,” she told him. “Also went through the Plaza. Nothing there, either. I figured those were the only two places he had time to hit before he left town.”
Smith picked up the pencil and tapped it briefly against his teeth. “How about Montgomery Village?
”
“Out there? That’s off his route. I’d kind of like to get back to the Binkly kid thing. I’ve got a lot of people I still want to talk to on that one.”
“After you canvas Montgomery Village,” he told her.
I heard the angry squeak of her rubber-soled shoes as she turned back into the big, outer office filled with cabinets and desks and normally peopled with clerks and other sheriff’s detectives.
Smith sighed. “You ever had to work with a woman detective?”
“I’ve never even met one.”
“They’re a real treat. But the sheriff says since we’re an Equal Opportunity Employer, we gotta have them. Otherwise the Feds cut back on money we get for bullets or something.” He stared briefly at the doorway. “I’ll tell you one thing about that woman detective, though. She’s a shooter.”
“On the range or on the street?”
“Either one. That’s what got her out of khakis and onto my squad. Which would be fine if we had a bunch of people out there who needed shooting. We could just cut her loose then.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Oh, Christ, nothing really. We just approach things differently.” He got up from the desk. “Stay a minute, I want to pull something.”
He left the office and I took a look around the place. The half dozen other desks in the room were empty. Papers, reports and files were scattered here and there. A corkboard on the wall was covered with California Lottery tickets.
When Smith returned he sat back down and studied the document in front of him. “This is compiled by the Department of Justice in Sacramento. It’s a list of people who’ve been reported missing in this state for more than thirty days.” His eyes ran quickly down it.
“Nothing here that seems special.” He put the list to one side. “The problem is there’s just nowhere to go with it at this point. Did she give you much of a description about the lay of the land where these bodies are supposed to be?”
