Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (12 page)

She saw it in my eyes, the emotion that I
was trying to conceal. I had to break the eye contact. She squirmed
about on the couch, removed a pillow, slowly transferred it to the
floor, very quietly inquired, "Exactly what are you trying to tell
me?"

I took her hand, squeezed it between both of
mine, looked squarely into those worried eyes, and told her, "Carl
is dead. Karen has been charged with his death."

She moaned, "Oh my God!"

I said, "Can you think of any reason
why—?"

She cried, "Just get out of here! Please!
Get out!"

I offered, "I'll shut up and just hang out
for a while, if you'd like."

Tears had erupted and were
bathing her cheeks. "No, just please ... leave me
alone."

I went out of there feeling like a
bastard.

But Karen was the client, Marcia was not,
and right then Karen needed all the help I could engineer for
her.

I was giving it my best shot.

Chapter Fourteen:
Contexts

Several things troubled me about that
interview with Marcia. There were content problems and context
problems. How much could I believe? Was there any reason for not
believing all of it?

Putting the thing in context with our first
two encounters, I had to first make allowance for the fact that the
first two were colored by alcohol while the third was not only cold
sober but also post-trauma.

And while two and possibly three moods or
personality movements had been displayed during those
interactions, at least one apparently dominant character trait
came through in all three: forthrightness, a sort of natural
honesty. There was a refreshing directness to that character, even
when she was trying to be otherwise.

Even so, she had displayed
an amazing candor in revealing her plan to run away with Carl
Powell. I must tell you here, though—and I hope you can take the
comment as clinical, without ego—that I have noted a tendency among
women in general, who know about my background and interests, to be
sometimes embarrassingly candid with me in highly personal matters,
even some who are normally secretive and deceptive with
others.

So much so, in fact, that I
have had to recognize a certain intimidation factor inherent in the
label of
psychic
—not nearly as much in men as in women, however—to the degree
that I have learned not to discuss my work or "talents" in purely
social contacts. I have found that women are generally more
receptive than men to the reality of psychism—that is, more
believing. I have an interesting theory to explain that, but I will
not go into that here.

The point is that I am frequently told much
more than I really want to know about a woman's interior life—as if
to say, what the heck, he already knows it anyway so let's talk
about it.

That factor could have been at work during
that late-night conversation with Marcia Kalinsky.

I decided to accept—at least for the
moment—the question of basic context and go on to the more
troubling questions of content. And, really, a lot of bothersome
stuff had been developed during that brief talk.

The most bothersome to me,
vis-à-vis Karen Highland, was the information about her dead
mother, Elena. A lot of powerfully operative stuff,
there—operative, that is, upon the developing mind of a
child—possibly traumatic stuff. No way could I miss the obvious,
there: Was Elena the ethereal companion? If so, did she exist as
an actual disembodied entity drawn to this plane by the
frustrations of previous life here or did she exist purely as a
traumatized spin-off from Karen's own troubled
consciousness.

Bear with me, please. I am contextualizing
content, here. This is important stuff, much too important to
bang against a stone wall of preconceived notions.

Karen had given me to understand that she
did not know the identity of this "visitor." She had also stated
that the visits had begun in her early childhood, had grown more
frequent in later years—and, I gathered, personally bothersome to
Karen during recent times.

She claimed very little conscious memory
associated with either parent, even though she was fourteen years
old at the time of their deaths. She had also told me of a certain
confusion in distinguishing dreams from actual events.

Could her memory of childhood visits, which
she now likened to the ethereal visitations, actually be confused
memories of actual physical events involving her actual mother
during those infrequent periods when Elena was "between
institutions?"—and was that now the source of a traumatically
spun-off psychic-companion personality?

Her father, TJ, was—by the record—as much a
recluse as his father, JQ, which means that he must have been under
roof, so to speak, throughout Karen's early life. Why, then, did
she exhibit such careless memory of her father?

Carl Powell, if I could
believe my conversation with him, had her diagnosed as an Electra.
In the Electra complex, a female child is in love with her father
and hates her mother as a competitor for the father's affection. If
he had probed through her conscious and subconscious memories to
that extent, could he have missed entirely the ethereal
companion?"

Or had Carl Powell been as big a rat as
Terry Kalinsky now seemed to be shaping into and had he merely
helped to manufacture a psychopath—or an apparent psychopath—to
help Kalinsky keep control of the Highland billions?

Was Karen Highland a psychopath or merely a
victim of human greed?

Was she a killer?—and I had to take in, now,
the question of her own parents, Bruno, perhaps even Bruno's
brother—who thus far was only a postscript, but not a forgotten
postscript, to this developing drama—Marcia's mishap in the pool,
and of course Karen's psychiatrist and Marcia's imputed lover, Carl
U. Powell, M.D.

It was a time for answers and all I had were
questions.

And don't tell me to use my psychic powers.
I do not use them, they use me.

But I would have gratefully accepted any
small crumbs that they would feel inclined to toss my way.

Time was quickly running out for Karen
Highland. And maybe for Ashton Ford. I had to find some answers,
and I had to find them damned quick.

Chapter Fifteen: Resonating

Doc Powell's quarters were in the same wing
as Karen's and were expansive enough to house also a small
dispensary and a paneled study. I learned later that this had been
JQ's apartment for his final two years, during which time he had
confined himself within those walls. It had been a period of
considerable discomfort and pain, which perhaps accounts for the
depressing atmosphere I encountered there.

I have found that unhappy human experiences,
especially those of a repetitive or continuous nature occurring
within the same physical reference, or a singular event experienced
with severely traumatizing emotions, somehow become imbedded in
the molecular structures of that space-time field and sometimes
never dissipate to the point where a sensitive person does not
resonate them.

Sometimes the resonance is there long after
the purely physical structure has been totally destroyed—so maybe
the very earth, itself, is imbedded with this unhappiness.

To illustrate that latter connection, I
remember an incident a few years ago when I was driving through one
of the western states—Wyoming, maybe—and picked up a very strong
emotional resonance while stopped at a rest area along the
interstate highway. It was a feeling of desperation and despair
mixed with terror. Casual questioning of a maintenance man brought
out the story of a homesteading pioneer family of ten massacred on
the site by an Indian war party. This some one hundred years
earlier, yet somehow the event remained indelibly impressed in the
space-time matrix despite the disappearance of all physical
traces.

I was very uncomfortable in Powell's
quarters, despite the fact that they were charmingly decorated and
pleasing to the masculine sense of comfort. This feeling of
discomfort had nothing to do with the knowledge that I was working
on very short time before Kalinsky or the cops, or both, came
looking for the same thing I was looking for.

I had that feeling of urgency, yes, but it
was quite distinct and apart from some disturbingly resonating
factor impressed within those walls. I did not know, at the time,
that JQ had died in that apartment nor did I have any specific
feeling as to the nature of the disturbance; I knew only that
unhappiness had lived there.

This, coupled with the
time-factor urgency, may have had some effect upon the efficiency
of my search. I did find an entire library of open-reel tapes,
indexed by date and covering psychoanalytic sessions with Karen
over a five-year period. The periodicity indicated semiweekly
sessions over the entire period, which seemed to make a liar out of
Karen. She had told me point-blank that she had never thought of
herself as being "in analysis."

The surface evidence seemed to indicate that
she had been involved in some very heavy analysis. There were over
five hundred such tapes, a fact that foreclosed any thought of
carrying them away from there—besides which, it would have required
probably a thousand hours to simply listen to that entire library,
perhaps five thousand to come to any conclusions about the
information that might be recorded there. I had no such time at my
disposal. Five hours would have been regarded as a great luxury of
time.

Of much greater value, in the given
circumstances, would have been some sort of cross-index or catalog
of subjects covered in those tapes. A quick scan of such a catalog
could at least reveal the range and depth of those sessions, enough
maybe to allow a fast synthesis and give me a mental snapshot of
the trouble with Karen.

I found no such catalog, nor could I locate
a case file, which should at least show a psychiatric profile of
the patient as well as progressive commentaries by the doctor.

I did find a little
leatherbound notebook in the bookcase headboard of Powell's bed. It
was not labeled and the contents were written in what appeared to
be some sort of shorthand notation. Scrutiny revealed the shorthand
to be, actually, an abbreviated form of plain English; further
scrutiny satisfied me that the forty-odd pages of jottings all
concerned Karen Highland. I added this to my treasure
trove.

Ten more minutes of careful searching turned
up several more notebooks, a couple of unmarked cassette tapes, a
small desktop appointment calendar covered with doodles and more
shorthand, a couple of bankbooks that indicated that the five-year
residency had been profitable, indeed, for Doctor Powell, two
one-way airline tickets to Rome for the following Saturday, a small
legal tract on "Conservancy and the Mentally Disabled," and ten
thousand dollars worth of American Express traveler's checks in
Powell's name.

I took the notebooks, tapes, and calendar
and left everything else undisturbed.

And now I have to give you
one of those “suspended disbelief” items. I do not know how to
explain it in conventional logic nor even in a sensible
unconventional logic; I can only tell you what occurred, or how I
sensorially interpreted what occurred, and leave it to your own
conclusions.

As I was standing at the
front door and preparing to quit that apartment, I saw something
suspended in the air over near the bookshelves in the sitting room.
Now, the room was darkened, with only a small nightlight near the
front door, so this object or whatever had to be supplying its own
illumination. It had a very faint glow, somewhat like radium, and
exhibited a sort of undulating-wave appearance—if you can visualize
a sheer curtain panel being gently manipulated by the breeze at an
open window, sort of like that except that no constant form was
maintained.

The closest description I can arrive at, for
those who may have had a class or two in psychics, is that it
looked like an electronic screen representation of the electrical
field of an energy wave, with about the same degree of stability—at
maximum expansion, maybe ten inches wide and two feet long.

As I watched, this energy wave or whatever
moved into the bookcase and instantly contracted to a point and
disappeared. As it did so, a large volume was ejected from the
bookcase and fell to the floor.

I stood rooted to my spot by the door for
perhaps thirty seconds, then I turned the lights back on, went to
the bookcase, picked up the fallen book.

It was warm to the touch, front and back, a
heavy leatherbound tome titled "Principles of Economics."

What appeared at first to be a bookmark
tucked between the pages turned out to be two sheets of lined
yellow notepaper, legal size, folded twice and filled front and
back with finely scrawled handwriting.

The heading of the front sheet read: "The
True Final Will and Testament of Joseph Quincy Highland."

The second sheet was headed: "My Dearly
Beloved Karen."

Let me tell you that, even before I read
those final messages from JQ, my mind was fairly tumbling with the
implications of the event.

Please remember that I am a guy who does not
like any suggestion that supernatural agencies could be at

work in my reality. Yet I had been given an
at-hand demonstration of an event that seemingly could not be
explained in any other terms.

From somewhere out of the matrix that
separates the world of space and time from whatever other realities
may be only dimly guessed, an entity of will had found a way to
interact with the energy universe and to thereby place in my hands
the desires and instructions of a man more than ten years in his
grave.