The Clairvoyant Countess (21 page)

“A stamp?” repeated Mrs. Trumbull, looking bewildered.

“I took the liberty of showing it to a dealer this
morning and then I rented a safe-deposit box for it in your name. The dealer said it’s one of the rarest regular-issue United States postage stamps, only two of its kind in existence, and the other one sold at auction last year for twenty-seven thousand dollars.”

“Hey, now,” said Mrs. Larkin.

“Well, now,” whispered Mrs. Trumbull.

“I think,” said Madame Karitska gravely, “it’s time to start the party.… Welcome home, Mrs. Trumbull.”

She had seen them on Eighth Street from time to time, sometimes just the woman carrying a shopping bag and looking like a cheerful little bird, and sometimes the man too, with his hand on her arm. They were a pleasing sight, for they gave every evidence of still enjoying each other’s company. Their clothes were ordinary, their faces worn, but they had somehow remained uncorrupted and wholesome. They had great simplicity.

They were in fact the last two people Madame Karitska had ever expected to find at her door but—on this Thursday morning in November—here they were. They stood and looked at her and then the woman nervously cleared her throat and said, “We heard about you.”

Her husband nodded and Madame Karitska noticed that his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

“But of course—do come in,” she said. “I was about to have a cup of coffee, won’t you join me?” She drew them in and closed the door.

As if he’d not heard her the man said in a harsh voice, “We wondered—we wondered, Ellen and I, if you know how to contact the dead.”

“Like the seances we’ve seen in movies,” the woman put in eagerly.

Madame Karitska’s brows lifted. “I don’t really approve of seances,” she told them, and meeting the terrible appeal in their eyes she added, “Suppose we have some coffee and you tell me about it.”

“If we could only persuade you!” cried the woman. “It’s all been so sudden, it’s such a shock.”

“Now Ellen,” said her husband.

“Please,” Madame Karitska told them firmly. “Just sit down, won’t you?” Walking into the kitchen she added two cups to the tray and carried it in to the low table. “You live in this neighborhood, I think, don’t you?”

Each of them nodded. “Our name is Heyer, Mr. and Mrs. Fritz Heyer.” The woman’s hands trembled as she accepted the cup of coffee.

“We’ve just come from the burial,” Mr. Heyer added in a broken voice.

“Try to drink a little, Fritz,” his wife begged. “It’s good hot coffee, just what you need.”

“Our granddaughter’s burial,” he said.

“She’s lived with us for the last ten years,” explained the woman, pressing a cup of coffee into her husband’s hands. “Ever since her parents died. It was like living with a songbird in the house. For ten years she was like a daughter to us—”

“She was killed in a car crash Tuesday morning on the way to the airport,” broke in Mr. Heyer. “Our only son’s daughter, our only grandchild. And so beautiful.”

“A psychologist,” put in the woman with astonishment.

“Yes, and she was on her way to the airport for her first vacation in Paris.”

“I see,” murmured Madame Karitska, blinking.

“It was a very bad accident. They say death must have been instantaneous, for which we’re thankful—”

“—but it’s frightening,” said the woman, “that if it wasn’t for the car’s license—and the passport they found—they wouldn’t even have known she was Jan. Or notified us. They might have buried her in a—in a—”

“Now, Mother,” he said, patting her hand.

Madame Karitska was accustomed to being plunged into other people’s worlds and she had been listening with sympathy. Now she said, “But a seance?”

“It’s my wife,” explained Mr. Heyer. “She can’t accept it, she can’t sleep, what’s worst of all she can’t cry. So we thought—You see, Jan had the gift of second sight—”

“Jan?”

“Our granddaughter. We never talked about it—it always alarmed us—but we thought with Jan having this second sight, as they call it, she might—well, give us a message.”

“She must be waiting to give us one,” put in his wife pleadingly. “Even with her own apartment now and her own friends she came to dinner with us every Sunday, and for every opera there were tickets. Always she was so thoughtful.”

“But sometimes,” said Madame Karitska softly, “it’s better not to trouble the dead, to bind them to us. It’s kinder to let them go free.”

“Just one word,” begged the woman. “You must understand how it was, there was only the telephone call—so abrupt, so sudden—and nothing but her effects to identify. Effects … such a strange word, isn’t it? Because of the fire. It was so unreal.”

“The fire?”

“The car began burning. She was only twenty-four, Madame Karitska, she was the light of our lives.”

“Yes,” said Madame Karitska and sighed. She disapproved of their request, but no matter how she personally felt she was confronted by two elderly people in need of comfort and reassurance. “I can try,” she said, nodding.

“Oh bless you,” cried the woman.

Madame Karitska arose and drew the curtains across the window, then asked them to move so that she could arrange three chairs in the approximation of a circle. “What was your granddaughter’s full name?” she asked, sitting down.

“Jan Cooper Heyer.”

She nodded, asked that they hold hands, and closed her eyes. “We are asking,” she said in a low voice, “for a message from Jan Cooper Heyer, killed Tuesday in an auto accident.”

There was a long silence and Madame Karitska, feeling her eyes grow heavy, knew she was slipping into a light trance. She could feel presences, she could sense disapproval, mute communications, and an uncomfortable prickling of her nerves, and then someone sneezed loudly and she opened her eyes.

It was Mr. Heyer. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I sneezed.”

She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been in trance for nearly fifteen minutes. “Did I say anything?”

Mrs. Heyer shook her head. “Nothing.”

Madame Karitska nodded. “That is the impression I gained, too.
Nothing.
”

“You’ll try again?” pleaded Mrs. Heyer.

Madame Karitska tactfully skirted this by saying, “Perhaps if I had something belonging to your granddaughter it might be of some help before making another effort.”

“Well—there’s her passport,” said Mr. Heyer doubtfully. “They gave it to me at the morgue Tuesday night and I have it with me.”

“The passport that was on her when she died?”

Mr. Heyer brought it from the inside pocket of his jacket, handling it carefully, as if it were a priceless treasure. “Here,” he said, pressing it into her hand.

Madame Karitska accepted it none too happily and closed her eyes over the thin blue book. The Heyers were silent, a little awed as they watched her, not understanding what this cost her, for Madame Karitska was at once plunged into the final moments of the girl’s life: all other impressions faded before anything so powerful as death. The car … it was really quite horrible, she could feel its insane and reckless speed, she could feel the defiance and the excitement of the girl at the wheel, see her dark head bent forward, eyes narrowed, face intent, her lips moving to the beat of the music blasting from the car radio. And then came the unexpected curve in the road and the utility post
leaping up in front of the windshield. She could feel the quick intake of breath, and in the split second before impact Madame Karitska experienced with Jan Heyer a glimpse into the girl’s life. Then,
“Tommy!”
she screamed, and there was nothing.

Madame Karitska opened her eyes and looked at the old couple. How could she tell them that their granddaughter was not at all what they had believed her to be, that in that last moment when Jan Heyer looked into what she was and had been, Madame Karitska, too, had looked and seen her as neither kind nor good but deeply troubled and destructive.

“Yes?” asked Mr. Heyer.

“She died with the name of Tommy on her lips.”

“Tommy?” They looked at each other wonderingly.

“She was too busy to go out often with men,” said Mr. Heyer. “Perhaps it was one of her patients.”

“Patients?”

“Yes, she was a psychologist. For a year now she’s been in private practice. Two days a week she gave to the Harlow Settlement House.”

“Was she a fast driver? Have you ever driven with her?”

“Many times,” said Mrs. Heyer. “No, she never speeded. She was careful even about stop signs. When she was driving she wouldn’t even turn on the little radio that came with the car, she said it was too distracting.”

Madame Karitska said sharply, “She
was
dark-haired, wasn’t she?”

“Dark!” exclaimed Mr. Heyer. “No, no, she was fair, you can see that by the passport.”

Madame Karitska opened the passport and looked
at the attractive, high-cheekboned face and then she looked at them. “But this is not the young woman who was killed in the car.”

“What do you mean?” faltered Mrs. Heyer.

“I mean—” Madame Karitska stopped and frowned. “I do not wish to lift your hopes, but the young woman who died in the car was dark, very restless, with much confusion in her.”

“But what can you mean?” asked Mrs. Heyer in astonishment.

“I don’t know,” said Madame Karitska simply. “The body—the remains—were unidentifiable?”

Mrs. Heyer turned white. “Yes.”

“But the passport survived?”

Mr. Heyer looked a little sick. “Yes. It was outside the car when they found her. You understand there was a fire—”

“Yes, I understand,” Madame Karitska said, and nodded. “If I were you I would ask them to make further inquiries. There must be some way. Teeth, fingerprints—”

“But we just buried her,” cried Mrs. Heyer. “Fritz, what is she talking about, what does she mean?”

Mr. Heyer gave Madame Karitska a reproachful look and stood up. “I think we’d better go, Mother, we’ve taken up too much of this lady’s time.”

The woman said blankly, “All right, but Fritz, I don’t understand.”

“She can be of no service to us, Mama,” he explained gently, and helped her to her feet. Turning to Madame Karitska he said simply, “I’m sorry for you. I’ve heard of people like you but I thought—I’m tempted to report you to the police but we’ve had
enough heartache. We came to you freely so I leave a dollar with you, for I’m a man who pays his debts, but to raise false hopes—this to me is the most despicable crime in the world.” He spoke it like a curse.

“As you wish,” said Madame Karitska. “I quite understand your feelings.” She saw them to the door, closed it behind them, and glanced ruefully at the dollar he had left in the basket. For a moment she experienced doubt—enough to question herself severely, for it was very hard to be taken for a charlatan—but no, she could not doubt the impressions she’d received.

Nevertheless it was not until several appointments later that she was able to forget the searing accusations in Mr. Heyer’s eyes.

That night Madame Karitska slept fitfully. She woke up at one o’clock, at two, and again at three, and found this difficult to understand because she was by custom a sound sleeper. At four o’clock she fell asleep and experienced a vivid dream. She was walking down a long hallway lined with windows. She stopped suddenly and said to the man who was escorting her—it was Pruden—“I have to look in that window.”

“Why that one?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She moved to the window and looked inside. Sitting on a bare cot was a young woman in blue-jeans and a faded sweat shirt. She glanced up and saw Madame Karitska and her lips silently framed two words:
Help me.

Madame Karitska woke up and knew that the girl was Jan Heyer. It seemed a very natural dream, since the grandparents’ visit was still on her mind, but on
the other hand there were differences that made her thoughtful: the girl in the dream was not a copy of the photograph Madame Karitska had been shown earlier in the day. It was the same girl, yet different. Madame Karitska, for instance, remembered her from the photograph as aloof, rather like a model in a fashion magazine, with high cheekbones and a smooth blond head. In the dream the girl was not like that at all, she was almost urchin-like, her face alive and full of passion.

Pruden, stopping in early the next morning, found Madame Karitska troubled. “Something bothering you?” he asked, accepting a cup of coffee from her.

“Frankly yes, my friend. I am becoming convinced that a girl who was killed three days ago is still alive.”

He said, “Perhaps you’d care to tell me about it?”

She described the Heyers’ visit on the preceding day and he listened attentively. When she had finished he said, “I certainly know better than to ignore these impressions of yours, but as a detective I have to point out a few flaws in your theory that she may still be alive. For instance, if this accident took place on Tuesday—and this is Friday morning—then where
is
Jan Heyer?”

“I don’t know.”

“She was about to fly off on a plane to Europe. She was on her way to the airport in a car licensed and registered in her name. There was—or so we have to assume—no one else in the car with her, and it was her passport found beside the car.”