The Summer We Lost Alice (15 page)

"If only I'd been able to say good
-bye," they would tell him, and he would close his hand over the bereaved's and say, "You just did."

These days he had Suzette gather the pre-show data purely as a precaution. He never knew when he'd find himself onstage
shotgunning for all he was worth, racking up miss after miss, and willing to sell his soul for a direct hit. Then Suzette's notepad would be there when he needed to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a non-existent hat.

By the time Suzette wrapped up her electronic eavesdropping, she had key information on a dozen audience members. She highlighted Heather's seat number so she could locate it on a moment's notice. Heather was young, female, and good
looking. Ethan was sure to sense a strong spiritual connection with her.

Ethan
Opos—real name Ethan Opochensky—had graduated from high school with mediocre grades, no high school activities, and blue collar parents. A state college he could attend while living at home had been his only reasonable option. The time passed agreeably enough. He'd graduated squarely in the bottom third of his class with a major in philosophy and a history minor. His education had prepared him well for a career in fast food or, at best, as a government clerk.

Ethan himself couldn't explain his lackluster performance in academia. Somehow, what he wanted most to learn wasn't a part of the curriculum.

His experience in Meddersville that summer had changed him. His familiar reality had cracked. Through that crack he had glimpsed something baffling and terrible. There was another world behind the one he knew. It was a world that hated children for a reason that he could neither imagine nor protect himself against. He had fallen in love and, in the same month, lost that love, and he was only a child. If such heartbreak could be visited upon a mere child, what horrors waited for him as an adult?

There was nothing to do about any of it. It was hopeless. The more he thought about what happened, or what he thought had happened, the less he understood it. The memories dimmed, the faces blurred.

"Things aren't what they seem."

She had said those words.
The witch, Mrs. Nichols. It's what he remembered most of that evening, from the time he and Boo sneaked into the nursing home until Uncle Billy found him, cold and wet, in the woods.

Things aren't what they seem.

What a truth to learn at such a tender age! More discouraging was the way in which everyone around him—his parents in particular—seemed so certain of what was and what wasn't. They were intent on his learning what they knew, but they knew nothing, nothing that was in any way important. They knew what they could see and hear and touch, but they didn't know anything about what lay on the other side of their neat, self-contained reality. They didn't know how that other world could impose itself on their own and steal all that was precious, leaving only a black absence that itself was something palpable and other-than-real.

What was the point in learning math or science or anything that pretended to certainty, when it was entirely possible that everything the world wanted to teach him would be wrong? There was a larger truth that had nothing to do with human experience as others knew it. It was that truth
which he sought. He sought it in philosophy and, of course, religion.

Religion had been his greatest disappointment, because it had promised so much and delivered so little.
Answers, yes. Truth, not so much.

The mystics had been no better than the priests. The ghost hunters, the mediums, the benders of spoons, and the mind readers—all had taken their place in his pantheon of frauds and the delusional.

They'd led him to a promising career, though, he had to hand them that.

He trained for his career as a television psychic by selling life insurance, which introduced him to the concept that most human lives fall into neat little patterns. His first day on the job he learned that young people tended to die in car crashes or other accidents, while old people died of heart disease or cancer. Lives, it turned out, were like the balls in a pachinko machine. They bounced through
a complex arrangement of pegs in a higgledy-piggledy fashion and then dropped into a limited number of slots.

On his sales calls, he learned to read people as clearly as he could read an actuarial table. He could tell when his spiel was getting through by observing the way the person breathed, the way this
one's eyes darted or how that one's hands fluttered.

He carried these observational powers to the poker table on Friday nights
. He became so adept at discerning the tells of his fellow players that he was soon banned from friendly play. He gained minor notoriety on the professional poker circuit, but one night in Vegas he happened to turn on the television in his musty hotel room and encountered his first television psychic. After ten minutes he was convinced that he could do better, make a more consistent income than he earned from playing poker, and not have to spend so much time in private rooms that, despite air-conditioning, reeked of spilled alcohol and stale smoke.

Virtually overnight, Ethan
Opochensky ceased to exist.
Parting the Veil with Ethan Opos
debuted on one cable channel and was rerun on a second. Given the downhill trend of broadcast television, it would be only a matter of months before he broke into prime time on a major network. One good writer's strike would do it.

He rushed into the studio an hour after the audience had been seated. He waved away Suzette's notes, preferring the spontaneity
of a cold reading. If he needed help, he would use the code word "swarming" and Suzette would prompt his confederate in the audience who would feed him clues. With the confederate's clues in hand, he would return to the troublesome subject and amaze one and all with his insight.

Ethan took the stage to warm applause.

"The spirits are strong here tonight," he said, locking eyes with the attractive young woman in section B. It was two o'clock on a bright Southern California Saturday afternoon, but the taped show would be broadcast at eleven p.m. some weeks later.

"I'm sensing a strong female who has passed through the veil," he said, striding back and forth on the stage, fingers to his temples. "A wife or a mother, someone of strong will. Her name
... her name begins with . ..I'm getting an 'N' sound, or an 'M.' M-A something." With more female names beginning with "M" than any other letter, and so many of those starting with "M-A," it was a conservative opening.

A middle-aged man raised his hand. "My mother passed away. Her name was Marion."

It was an easy hit. A middle-aged man's mother. Most likely she'd died of heart disease or breast or lung cancer, though pneumonia was always a good possibility with the elderly. The chest was a nice, wide target.

"It was a slow death, wasn't it?" Ethan said. "I'm sensing disease, something in the chest. She lingered." "Lingered" was a choice word. It could mean days, weeks, or years.

"It was cancer," the man said. "Lung cancer."

The audience went
aahh
and Ethan held up his hand for silence.

Ethan closed on the man. He put on his most compassionate voice. "It caused you great distress, watching her fade."

The man nodded. There was something more, something that had brought him to
Parting the Veil
. Nine times out of ten, that something was guilt.

"You were angry with her for not taking better care of
herself," Ethan said. "You fought over her smoking."

The man shook his head. "She wasn't a smoker. It wasn't that."

But it was something—they fought over
something
. If not smoking, then what?

"She didn't want the treatment," Ethan ventured.

"Oh, she wanted it all right," the man said, "but it was expensive."

"It cost you dearly."

"I told her to take out the long-term care insurance, but she never did. She wouldn't do it, and when she needed it—"

"It wasn't there."

"It wasn't there."

The audience applauded. Two wrong guesses out of three, and still they applauded. Ethan held up a hand.

"You had an argument," he said.

"A terrible argument, just before she died." Tears welled in the man's eyes. "I never got to tell her I was sorry."

Ethan placed a hand on the man's shoulder.

"You just did," Ethan said.

In the control room, Suzette stifled a yawn. Ethan had gone for an easy one, and this audience was on his side. Not like the night the Skeptics Society had packed the house. God, that was one for the books! She still brought out the DVD at parties, though she'd sworn to Ethan that she'd wiped the hard drive storing that night's episode.

"Your mother is with us this evening," Ethan said. "She says
... she says she was wrong and you were right, and she's sorry for all the trouble she caused you."

"She's got nothing to be sorry for," the man said, his voice cracking. "I'm sorry, Mama! I'm sorry for the hateful things I said!"

"She forgives you. She says ... she doesn't want you to think another thing about it."

The man started. "She
... that's what she used to say, exactly those words. 'Don't think another thing about it.'"

The audience murmured.

Ethan smiled. A common phrase, uttered millions of times a day, just lent proof to his psychic ability.

Funny how that works.

* * *

The spirits being fickle entities, the reading for the pretty young woman in section B was a disaster.

Ethan assumed from her age that she'd lost a parent. He called out for a parent. The woman was unresponsive. A major miss. That left a husband, a friend, a lover, or a child.

"It could be someone who's passed through the veil who's missing a father."

No response.

"I'm getting a 'J' sound.
Maybe a 'G.'"

He was
shotgunning. The most common male names begin with "J."

Nothing from the young woman.
People were raising their hands. They'd lost fathers named Jack and Jeff, there was an uncle Jim and a cousin Jerry. Ethan accepted the hits gratefully. He parroted the marks' own words back to them and they reacted as if he'd peered into their souls. He observed the obvious, he guessed at details and hit just enough of them right to maintain his credibility. It didn't matter that he had more misses than hits, as long as, ultimately, he told the people what they wanted to hear.

"He's here, and he understands." "She forgives you." "He loves you still, even from across the veil."

But the pretty young woman remained as inscrutable as an Easter Island head.

He returned to section B, his fingertips pressed to his forehead.

"We have a strong spiritual connection," he said to her, "but there are so many voices trying to get through. The spirits are swarming around me."
Swarming
, the code word.

Suzette, who had fallen into an almost hypnotic stupor, snapped awake. She leaned into the microphone. "Her husband died in a car wreck," she said. Her voice traveled to Ethan's confederate in the audience. An elderly woman in section C touched the earphone of her "hearing aid," the sign that she had information for the troubled host. Ethan veered in her direction.

They played through their pre-arranged scenario: Her daughter died of breast cancer while the mother was on a senior cruise. She felt guilty for not being there when the daughter passed. The daughter (through Ethan) said that she didn't want her mother to remember her that way, sick in bed, and she was sorry for the mean things she'd said to her in her teen years. The elderly woman replied, her voice weak, "Honey, I'm sorry, too. And I hope you can forgive me."

None of the conversation mattered but two letters, the first letters in the first sentences the old woman spoke directly to her
daughter. H for husband. A for auto. It was all Ethan needed. He felt himself pulled by spiritual forces back to the young woman, knowing that her husband had died in a car wreck.

From that point on, it would have been a walk in the psychic park but for one thing—as Ethan turned his attention back to section B, as his eyes fixed on the face of the young woman, she was biting her lower lip and, around the length of her index finger, she was twisting her hair.

The audience swam before his eyes. The floor seemed to undulate. He closed his eyes but that only made the dizziness worse. He fastened his gaze on the young woman and stepped closer, measuring each step as if drunk. He wondered if the audience could see his sudden incapacity. He knew he should turn away and announce a commercial break. Suzette could handle that, the next promo was already cued up on the computer. But he couldn't take his eyes off the girl.

It's a common enough habit
, he thought.
It doesn't mean anything!

He wasn't even sure what he
thought
it meant. All he knew was, he had to speak with this girl. He had to hear her voice. Her eyes had to meet his and they had to make a connection, no matter how tenuous.