In the Blink of an Eye Page 6

  “Interesting,” he mutters.

  “What’s interesting, Daddy?”

  “I never saw a light switch like this. It’s an old, old house, Dulcie.”

  “I can feel it” she says, her voice hushed. “Tell me about it.”

  “We’re in the foyer. There’s a stairway leading up—a really beautiful stairway with lots of carved wood and a banister with spindles and big round newel posts at the bottom. Looks like the kitchen is straight ahead, and on the left there’s a dining room with a fireplace, and there are double French doors over here to the right . . .” He tugs on one, pulling it open. “Oh, it’s a parlor. There’s lots of furniture, and it’s definitely not modern. A dark green sofa with a curving back and high arms, a couple of matching chairs, floor lamps with fringed shades . . .”

  Definitely not his style. That’s okay. They can sell the stuff. Maybe it’s worth something.

  “There’s pretty rose-colored wallpaper,” he informs Dulcie. “It’s textured. Here, feel it.”

  He guides her hand to the wall beside the door, letting her run her fingers over the velvety brocade as he describes the rest of the vaguely familiar room for her. “There are tall windows covered in heavy maroon drapes with tassels, and there’s a fireplace. Lots of framed pictures on the mantel.”

  “Pictures of who?”

  He lets go of her hand and steps closer. “They’re mostly family pictures. Iris, and your grandfather, and your mother,” he says, fighting to keep the emotion out of his voice.

  He picks up a photo of Kristin that he’s never seen before—an enlarged snapshot of her on a beach somewhere. It’s most likely Florida, definitely not here. White sand and palm trees. She looks about seventeen—flashing her dimples, blue-eyed and gorgeous, her long, pale hair blowing back from her face.

  He sets down the photo and glances at the one next to it. It’s a posed shot diagonally stamped Olan Mills in gold script lettering. Paine smiles faintly. When he was growing up back in California, his mother used to take him to Olan Mills studios for pictures, too. This photo shows a little boy awkwardly holding an infant on his lap. He recognizes the baby as Kristin and realizes that the boy must be Edward, her older half brother, Anson’s son from an earlier marriage. Kristin and her parents were estranged from him for years, and Paine knows little about the situation, other than that it was bitter and Kristin didn’t like to talk about him. He remembers Julia telling him after the funeral that Edward had been there, among the hundreds of mourners, but Paine didn’t meet him.

  Now he wonders fleetingly why Iris kept this photo of him on the mantel. Had she reestablished contact with Edward in recent years? Or has it been here all along? He doesn’t remember it from the first visit—but then, what does he remember? Only soul-searing heartache.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Dulcie asks.

  “Just looking around.” He returns the photo to its place on the dusty mantel and looks around at the cluttered bookshelves, tables, cabinets. “This room is full of knickknacks, Dulcie. The whole house is. Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  “AND NOW, I’D like to introduce our next medium, Ms. Julia Garrity. She’s our youngest medium in residence this season, and she was raised right here in Lily Dale as a spiritualist. Julia?”

  Along with the handful of other mediums, including her friend Lorraine, she had been leaning against a low platform to the right of the stage, beside the open door that led outside. Now she strides across the room to the head of the wide aisle between the rows of wooden seats.

  She takes a deep breath, exhales slowly, and looks out at the audience, scanning their faces with practiced scrutiny. She barely notices the outside sounds drifting through the big rectangular open-air gaps in the wooden walls—voices of passersby, children playing in the park across the way, cars crunching slowly along a nearby street.

  While waiting for her turn, she intended to begin by selecting an elderly woman in the center of the section on the right. Julia is certain she’s made a connection with the woman’s dead husband, or perhaps her brother.

  But now Julia’s gaze falls on the overweight woman in the purple polyester, the one she’d seen on the street. The woman is looking back at her with incredulous recognition, obviously surprised to see her here, among the mediums.

  Julia sees that a haze of energy is beside her, vaguely human in form. She closes her eyes, again hearing the fleeting surge of sound in her mind. This time it’s almost intelligible. She expertly strains to hear it again. The spirit obliges. The message is repeated, even more clearly this time.

  She opens her eyes. “I need to go to the lady in the back, on the far aisle,” she announces. “The lady in the purple top. Yes, you. I’m getting a name that sounds like Louis, or something similar.”

  “Lucas!” the woman cries out “Oh, my God.”

  Julia tilts her head and closes her eyes again. Lucas? Yes, that’s it

  The spirit is giving her more information. It comes via her own mental voice, but the contact isn’t always presented in that manner. Sometimes the spirits come through sounding like themselves—detached voices speaking in Julia’s head. Usually, their words are somewhat garbled, but occasionally they’re surprisingly intelligible, allowing her to make out fragments of one-sided conversation. The strangeness of this sensation has long since worn off.

  Sometimes Julia gets actual visions to accompany the voices, but more often the communication is strictly clairaudient. Funny how, when directly translated, the word means “clear hearing.” But for the most part, what Julia hears is fuzzy at best.

  After carefully listening to her mind’s voice, she tells her rapt subject, “Lucas is giving me the number six. This is symbolic. Either something happened in June, the sixth month, or on the sixth of a different month . . . ?”

  The woman is shaking her head, disappointment apparent in her eyes. Glancing at her companions, Julia sees that the daughter’s expression mirrors the mother’s, and that the son’s face is smug.

  “Think about it,” Julia says, ignoring the son, hearing the unmistakable whisper in her mind once again. “He wants me to refer to ‘six,’ and it’s—”

  “Oh!” The woman claps her hand over her mouth. “He’s been gone six years. Is that it?”

  “It might be.”

  “But what does he mean by this? What is he trying to tell me?”

  “It’s most likely his way of validating his presence to you.” Julia frowns as the spirit comes through again.

  She concentrates on Lucas’s energy, allowing it to seep into her, listening intently to what he’s trying to say.

  Chairs creak. People cough. In the back of the auditorium, somebody sneezes. Several voices whisper, “Bless you.”

  Julia tunes out the distractions. Lucas. Lucas. What are you trying to tell me?

  “Are you having trouble with your hand?” she asks finally, and the woman gasps.

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m getting something about a hand, and I’m feeling his concern for you.”

  “My wrist has been bothering me for days,” the woman tells her, waving her left arm in the air. “I don’t know why. I thought maybe it was just the damp weather.”

  Julia shakes her head, feeling Lucas’s urgency. “You need to have it checked out,” she says firmly. “It could be something more serious.”

  Alarm crosses the woman’s face. “Is there something really wrong with me? Is that what he told you? Is it like a warning?”

  “Just know that he’s concerned and you should have it looked at.”

  “What else is he saying? Is he all right where he is?”

  In the decade Julia’s been doing readings, she has come to understand that this is the most important information she can give to someone whose loved one has passed to spirit. People need to be reassured not just that their relative still exists someplace, but that the person is at peace.

  “Know that he
’s just fine,” she tells the woman with a smile.

  “Is that what he said?”

  Julia nods. It’s easier than trying to explain the intangible.

  People tend to assume that the messages she gets from the other side come through with the clarity of a long-distance telephone call. The reality is that most of the time communicating with the spirit world is like talking on a cell phone during a terrible storm, with a poor connection that keeps fading in and out and static that almost drowns out the few things that do come through.

  Thanks to years of experience, Julia can usually interpret the merest whisperings of information. She knows instinctively when a spirit is troubled and when it’s at peace.

  Luckily Lucas falls into the latter category. They don’t always.

  She jostles that thought away, hearing something else. “Do you know somebody by the name of Carla or Charlotte or . . .” She pauses, listening. “Or Charlie?”

  “That’s him. He’s our son!” the woman blurts, grabbing his arm.

  “Charlie, your father has a message for you,” Julia says. “It means nothing to me, but it might mean something to you. He’s saying . . .” Another pause. Then, certain she’s got it right, she says, “He’s saying something about the swing. He’s saying ‘sorry for the swing’ or ‘sorry about the swing.’ Does that make sense?”

  The mother cries out. Tears stream down her cheeks.

  Charlie’s face is ashen. His gaping stare is all the evidence Julia needs to know that she’s hit home.

  “Daddy was pushing Charlie on a tire swing when we were kids,” his sister speaks up emotionally, her hand clasped against her heart. “He was pushing him really high, and Charlie started screaming for him to stop. Then he fell off and broke his leg. Daddy always felt real bad about that.”

  “I can’t believe this,” the mother says, clinging to her son’s arm. “This is just . . . is there anything else?”

  Julia shakes her head, feeling the energy starting to pull back. “Just know that he’s okay and that he comes to you with love.”

  She redirects her attention to the white-haired old woman in the middle of the room.

  “I need to come to the lady there in the pink sweater . . . no,” she says to a hopeful, similar-looking woman in the row ahead, whose sweater is really more of a peach shade. “No, the lady right there, in the glasses. Your husband has gone to spirit, hasn’t he?”

  The woman’s jaw drops. “Yes, he has. How did you know?”

  It could have been a lucky guess based on the woman’s age, but it isn’t.

  There are plenty of phonies in this profession, some of them incredibly convincing. If you do enough readings, you eventually learn to interpret not just the stirring of sounds and images from the other side, but the body language and other details surrounding the people you’re reading.

  Julia suspects that she could come up with a fairly convincing reading based on nothing more concrete than her own intuition or a series of speculations. But that’s not what she’s about. When the energy isn’t there, she doesn’t fake it.

  This time, it’s there.

  She smiles at the old woman. “Okay, then I believe it’s your husband who’s coming through. Is his name Henry?”

  “Yes!”

  Bingo. Julia’s next try was going to be Harry. She’s getting a strong H sound at the beginning, and the ee sound at the end, but what’s in between is slurred.

  She proceeds with the reading, and when she’s through, the old woman thanks her with tears in her eyes.

  The moderator calls the next medium to the front of the stage. Julia retreats, drained. As she once again leans against the platform by the door, she glances outside to see if the rain has started yet.

  It hasn’t.

  But there’s an unfamiliar red car parked in front of Iris Shuttleworth’s house across the green, on Summer Street, and the shades have been lifted on the windows beyond the porch for the first time in weeks.

  Julia knows what that means.

  Kristin’s daughter has come home to Lily Dale at last.

  “KNOCK, KNOCK, DADDY,” Dulcie says, seated at the small round kitchen table.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Boo.”

  “Boo who?”

  “Don’t cry, it’s only me,” she says with a giggle.

  Paine laughs. Hard. As though it’s the first time he’s heard that one. He laughs as he’s laughed at all of her rusty knock, knocks for the past half hour.

  “Somebody’s coming, Daddy,” Dulcie says.

  “You know what, Dulc? Why don’t we lay off the knock, knocks for a bit because it’s hard for me to concen—”

  “No, I mean really. Somebody’s coming. I hear footsteps.”

  “Footsteps?” Paine turns off the water at the scarred porcelain kitchen sink where he’d been scrubbing his hands. He’s been in the house little more than an hour and already he’s filthy. All he’s been doing is wiping away cobwebs, throwing away stale food, and opening windows in an effort to air out the musty rooms.

  “Don’t you hear that?” Dulcie asks. “Footsteps on the porch.”

  He frowns. The house is silent, the only sound the wind and rain outside the open window above the sink. He’s about to tell Dulcie she was wrong when he hears the faint sound of a creaking board.

  Then, sure enough, somebody knocks at the front door.

  “You don’t miss a trick, do you?” He should have known she wasn’t hearing things. He’s become accustomed to Dulcie picking up sounds before he does. Her pediatrician told him that when a person loses sight, the other senses become more acutely developed to compensate.

  Dulcie smiles and pops another raisin into her mouth from a box he’d found in the cupboard—pretty much the only thing that was edible there.

  “I’ll be right back,” he tells her, wiping his hands on a paper towel from the nearly empty roll on a spindle above the sink.

  He crosses the foyer toward the door, seeing the outline of a person through the oval glass. He assumes that it’s Howard.

  But when he opens the door, he finds a woman standing there. Behind her, sheets of rain fall past the porch overhang, pattering softly on the overgrown lawn.

  She’s unusual-looking, all angles from head to toe—a sleek, geometric short haircut, jutting cheekbones, a sharply defined jawline. Long, skinny neck atop a long, skinny body with long, skinny limbs. Her hair, eyes, skin, and clothing are varying shades of brown. She’s smiling at him, and he finds himself smiling back.

  “Paine? I live next door. Pilar Velazquez. We met before, when you were here . . .”

  Trying to place her, he shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “That’s understandable.” She holds out a plate covered in plastic wrap. “These aren’t homemade—I don’t bake. That was just one of the things Iris and I had in common. But they’re from an excellent bakery, the Upper Crust over in Fredonia. I know kids like chocolate.”

  He realizes that she’s looking past him, and he turns to see Dulcie in the kitchen doorway. She’s holding on to the wall, and her clouded blue eyes are focused high on the wall to his right.

  He glances sharply at Pilar to see her reaction to Dulcie’s blindness.

  There is none. No shock. More importantly, no pity.

  “This is Dulcie,” he announces, deciding he likes Pilar Velazquez. He takes the plate from her.

  “Hello, Dulcie,” she says gently, wearing that same smile. “I brought some treats. They’re called chocolate volcanos—they’re rich little chocolate cakes. They have frosting, and a cherry on top, but no nuts. I don’t know many kids your age who like nuts.”

  “I don’t.” The corners of Dulcie’s mouth curve slightly upward. “But I like chocolate, and I’m starving. All Daddy could find in the cupboard was raisins.”

  “Sounds like raisins don’t rank much above nuts with you, huh, Dulcie?” Pilar turns to him. “I’m so sorry about your . . .” She hesit
ates only slightly. “ . . . about Iris.”

  “Thank you.” He likes her even more. He knows she’d started to say mother-in-law. That’s okay. If it were up to him, Iris would have been his mother-in-law and Kristin would have been his wife.

  If it were up to him, he’d be back in Los Angeles right now, walking on the sunny beach with Dulcie riding on his shoulders and Kristin by his side.

  “Have you made any plans for the funeral yet?” Pilar asks.

  “Not yet. Iris’s will specified that she wanted to be cremated, and for her ashes to be scattered over the lake here.” The lake where her daughter drowned. Did she put that in the will before or after Kristin’s death? He didn’t think to ask when Howard Menkin told him about it. “I thought maybe I could set up some kind of memorial service. Maybe next week.”

  “That would be good. Lots of people will want to come. Iris had so many friends.”

  He gives a tight nod, uncomfortable.

  “Well, I know you’re busy. I just wanted to tell you that I’m right next door if you need me,” Pilar says, and gestures. “On that side. In the blue house.”

  He realizes which house she means. He noticed it on his second trip in from the car, when he’d brought Dulcie some of her braille books to keep her busy while he cleaned up a bit. Actually, it wasn’t the house he noticed, as much as it was the shingle hanging out front. It read PILAR VELAZQUEZ, REGISTERED MEDIUM, he remembers belatedly—and with a twinge of disappointment.

  He doesn’t know why it bothers him that she’s one of them, but it does.

  “And if you need any help with anything, don’t hesitate to call me,” Pilar goes on. “I’m home most of the time.”

  “Thank you.”

  He wishes she would go, but she starts talking about Iris again. Saying she was absolutely stunned by her friend’s death, and that she’s going to miss her terribly.