The Barker Street Regulars (12 page)

As Robert was taking close-ups and distance shots, one of the French doors opened. Ceci, apparently alerted by the flashes of the camera, appeared on the terrace. Her fluttery manner hinted at the sort of dissociated woman who cloaks herself in full-length dead animals, but has hysterics at the sight of the furry corpses the cat drags home; I had the sense that practically from the moment she’d been born, everyone around her had engaged in a conspiratorial, if unconscious, program of operant conditioning that systematically reinforced that
kind of internal split. If so, maybe Ceci’s dogs had made her whole again. She wasn’t wearing fur. Rather she had all but vanished inside a long, thick quilted coat, heavily padded boots, Polartec mittens, and a matching tam-o’-shanter. She was dressed to walk a dog on a cold night.

“Has my Simon been back?” She was childishly eager.

Robert, who seemed to specialize in dealing with Ceci, replied, “Someone or something has stood or been placed near this angle between the window and the wall of the house. The damage to the vegetation appears recent.”

“My Simon,” said Ceci indignantly, “would be most unlikely to tromp down my flowers.” With hurt feelings, she added, “And he’s never been this close to the house before.” As if mouthing someone else’s words, she said hopefully, “He is not yet ready. The time will come.”

“The hypothesis,” Robert said severely, “concerns the presence of a human being.”

Flinging a mittened hand toward the lower part of the yard, she said, “The police spent all their time below, where Jonathan had his accident.”

“Ceci,” Robert said firmly, “Holly is beginning to feel the cold. Take her in and give her a cup of hot tea.”

Ceci agreed, but as I climbed the steps to the terrace and followed her through the open French door, she made the justifiable complaint that Hugh and Robert treated her like an imbecile. “I am perfectly competent. I went to Wellesley, you know, just like Madame Chiang Kai-shek, not that I stayed long, girls didn’t in those days, you know, I left to marry Ellis, girls did that back then, but Ellis made sure that I understood practical matters, he was a stockbroker, you know”—I
hadn’t—“and I have always had my own checking account and reconciled my bank statements and taken care of my charge cards. You see, in his business,” she continued as I trailed after her into the kitchen, “he saw a great many women who suddenly lost their husbands and didn’t know how to make out a deposit slip or cash a check, never mind understanding investments, and he was determined not to leave me in that position. We’d no sooner returned from our honeymoon, Niagara Falls, less trite then than now, when Ellis sat me down and said, ‘Ceci, buy and hold!’” Filling a teakettle, she concluded, “
I
am no imbecile!”

“Of course not,” I said. As I was reflecting that if I were in Ceci’s financial position, I’d forget Ellis’s dictum and sell enough to update the old-fashioned kitchen, Ceci hunted through a cupboard, extracted a box of graham crackers, and with an exasperated click of her tongue complained that Jonathan had polished off all the nice lemon wafers. Worse, Ceci said, instead of replenishing the supply, Mary had gone and bought graham crackers. Ceci went on to lament Mary’s insistence on leaving at three in the afternoon. “And,” Ceci said, “she positively will not work weekends. But I must admit that she’s the first one I’ve had for longer than I care to remember who doesn’t smash the china, and when she
is
here, she’s a hard worker.”

Watching Ceci resentfully arrange a teapot, cups, saucers, spoons, a sugar bowl, a creamer, and a plate of the unsatisfactory graham crackers on a wooden tray, I sensed a gap between us that was as generational as it was financial: From Ceci’s viewpoint, why remodel a kitchen? Why spend money on the domain of the hired help?

If we were going to drink something, shouldn’t it be decaffeinated coffee? Brandy? Ovaltine? But tea was
what Robert had suggested. I took Ceci’s compliance as a sign of suggestibility. We did not, of course, have our tea in the kitchen. Ceci politely rejected my offer to help with the tray. With no apparent effort, she lifted it herself and carried it across the kitchen and hall, and through the living room to a side table in the alcove. The potted palms, the bone china, the whole scene gave me the bizarre sense that I should be wearing white gloves and a perky little hat with a decorative veil. After sitting, I crossed my legs at the ankles.

“It’s rather drafty here,” Ceci apologized, “but it’s where Irene receives best.” Ceci could have been talking about a radio.

“Yes?” I prompted, thinking,
Oh, so Irene makes home visits.

“Naturally, Simon comes back to his own yard. How many sugars?”

When she’d served me and poured for herself, I asked when Simon had begun to reappear.

Ceci glowed. “Exactly one week ago today. Monday. Of course, I’ve been communicating with him for the past year, and it has been a great consolation, not that I ever for a second believed that Simon had
ceased to exist,
if you understand me, but I was blocked by the wall that isn’t there.”

“Does Simon …?” I fished for a serious-sounding alternative to
bark
or
woof.
“Does Simon speak to you, uh, directly?”

With touching sweetness, Ceci explained that Simon spoke
through
Irene. “I ask him a question, and he responds through her.” She sounded as I would if I had to explain the simplicity of E-mail to a Rip Van Winkle whose idea of high-tech communication was the carrier pigeon.

Consequently, it seemed better to focus on the content
than on the technology. “Questions like …?” I asked.

“Well, naturally, one of the first things I wanted to know was why on earth he died! And why
then,
when Ellis had passed on only a year before and I’d just had to put Althea in the nursing home. It was no time to leave! And as soon as he answered, I felt like such a selfish fool!”

It seemed to me that with investments bought and held, daily help, and more than enough room for Althea in this palatial house, Ceci damned well ought to feel selfish. Not that Althea complained about the Gateway. But has anyone ever really wanted to move to a nursing home?

“And what did Simon say?” I felt ridiculous.

“Well, it’s really quite obvious, but Ellis needed him, you see, because he was having difficulty in adjusting to the Great Transition.” She sipped her tea and remarked lightly, “Ellis always did hate to travel. After he passed on, everyone kept telling me I ought to fly off to Europe, now that I could, but I didn’t want to leave Simon, and I was very busy, very active in the church, and Althea and I were always going places in those days, symphony, out to lunch, and there’s a very pleasant group of people who get their dogs together at one of the parks near here, and I took Simon there to play with his friends, and I had no desire to go dashing off to some foreign country all by myself. And then after I lost Simon, before I found Irene, I could barely … There were weeks when I never left this house. I let myself go completely. I could think of nothing, you see, except all my departed ones, my baby, Willie, who lived only two days, and my Nancy, who was such a beautiful girl—she’s been gone thirty years now—and all my beautiful dogs, and then my Simon. I was in a
terrible state, you see. There didn’t seem to be any point to anything anymore, with everyone
gone
.”

“Yes.”

“So one of the very first things I asked Simon was, what was I to do?”

“And?”

Ceci deftly placed her cup in its saucer. “Simon quite simply ordered me to pull myself together. He was distressed and Ellis was distressed at the way I’d let myself go. It made them feel rejected and unloved, you see, that I’d stopped caring about my appearance. So, straight away I got my hair done, and I bought a new suit and a few other odds and ends, and not in black, either! Simon does not like to see me in black. On a Newfoundland, it’s one thing, of course, but on me, he finds it very depressing.”

“How often do you, uh, hear from Simon?”

“Well, at first, it was only once or twice a week, when I had to go all the way into Cambridge to Irene’s office, but then Simon communicated his wish to come home here to Norwood Hill, and Irene was very obliging.”

I’ll bet she was,
I thought. “And now?” I asked.

“Simon is always
with
me,” Ceci replied, “just as your dear what’s-her-name is always with you.”

“Vinnie,” I said.

“But for several months now, I’ve arranged to communicate with him almost daily.”

At Irene’s fee? Plus, I guessed, a premium for at-home consultation.

As if reading my thoughts, Ceci continued, “That’s what irritated Jonathan, of course. He was very, very annoyed with me, and unpardonably rude to Irene, well, not unpardonably, after all, forgiveness is forgiveness, but really very rude.”

“In his, uh, recent communications?” I was surprised. I’d always imagined the dead as more courteous than the living, why I’m not sure. Did the Book of Judgment have an appendix devoted to etiquette?

“No, no, no. All is forgiven now. Jonathan simply did not understand, and Irene naturally has extensive experience in coping very tactfully with the ignorance and hostility of skeptical materialists.”

“So Jonathan actually met Irene? Before, uh, his—”

“Before he
died.
Once one comprehends the word in its true sense, Holly, there is no longer any need to avoid it. All events have their place in the great hierarchy of the cosmos. Death, too. Of course,
passing on
does express the literal truth. But death, you see, is not death as the agnostic understands it. It is but a trance state. Or as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so beautifully phrased it, the door is not shut, but merely ajar.”

I was astounded. “
The
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”

“Spiritualism was the great passion of his existence in this sphere. Those silly detective stories were simply a diversion. Once he made the Great Discovery, he devoted himself to spreading the joyful news.”

“The
same
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”

Put out, Ceci said, “From the moment he departed this life, he has communicated very generously with those who listen. I certainly don’t find anything so surprising about it. After all,
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable,
must be the truth.
”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Would you care to see Simon’s footprints?” Ceci asked.

B
UNDLING HERSELF IN HER
winter dog-walking outfit and arming herself with a flashlight, Ceci implored me in hushed tones to use common sense, as she phrased it, by keeping mum about what she’d just told me. “The unenlightened,” she confided, “readily misinterpret the experiences of those who truly see.” She continued, in an apparent non sequitur, “Take this Baker Street Irregulars nonsense. When you think about it, it’s childish, isn’t it? Pretending those imaginary people are real? These people are, after all, adults, and there they are giving themselves these silly nicknames—the Science Master, that’s Robert—and playing all those games about
trivial
Not that Althea is brainless, far from it, and neither was Ellis, who has, of course, come to view all that foolishness in perspective now, naturally, but a woman beyond the blush of first youth”—she pulled on the tam-o’-shanter—“is terribly vulnerable to misinterpretation and can be robbed far too easily of the opportunity to communicate with those who have passed beyond.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And stripped of her right to control her own life. And finances. Not that a guardian or whatever isn’t necessary for someone in Althea’s condition. Fortunately, Jonathan had her power of attorney, not that she has anything, really, but she’s as blind as a bat, you know, and if she fell into the clutches of some unscrupulous person, she’d sign any sort of document that was put in front of her, speaking of which, for goodness’ sake, who is going to manage Althea’s affairs now? There can’t be much more to it than writing checks to the nursing home, I suppose, but I really cannot be expected to deal with her affairs as well as my own. Where was I? Oh, in any event, it’s dreadful enough to have Althea locked up in that place, but there was no choice, really, and my own competence is perfectly evident, but one never knows what misunderstanding may arise, and I’m sure you’ll agree that one shudders to contemplate ending up in an institution merely because one has passed through the doors closed to, well, closed to closed minds.”

With that, Ceci opened not the sort of door she was discussing, but one of the French doors to the terrace. “The path leads straight down,” she remarked. This time, the reference was not metaphysical. Ceci briskly marched down the steps from the terrace to a bluestone walk that did, indeed, run straight down the sloping yard toward an area on which Robert and Hugh were now concentrating. The camera flashed.

“Now, watch that you don’t trip the way Jonathan did!” Ceci called out. To me, she said, “We’ll have to go beyond the gate.”

Of the pearly variety? But as we approached Hugh and Robert, I pulled out my flashlight and trained it directly ahead. I saw, framed by an evergreen hedge, a black chain-link fence with an earthly wrought-iron
gate. To the right of the path, a few yards from the hedge, stood a granite sundial. Robert and Hugh were busily examining an area a few feet from its base. Adding the beam of my flashlight to the light from their lanterns, I saw a roughly dug hole that suggested someone’s premature and abandoned attempt to plant a small shrub in the frozen lawn.

“That,” said Ceci, pointing to the shallow hole, “is where poor Jonathan caught his foot.”

Robert cleared his throat. Hugh grunted.

“And,” Ceci continued, “he reached out for the sundial to catch his balance, you see, but missed it. His hand slipped, and he fell and injured his head.”

The scenario Ceci proposed was outright impossible. The hole, in which someone really might have tripped, was so close to the sundial that if Jonathan had caught his foot, lost his balance, and fallen in the direction of the sundial, he’d have bruised his upper thigh, perhaps; to have hit his head, he’d have had to be the height of a small child.