Lyle cringed at the thought of how long it must have taken her to save enough for a private sitting. But she'd said on her questionnaire that she'd come to him because he was black—didn't say African-American. Black.
Melba Toomey wanted to know if her husband Clarence was alive or dead; and if he was dead, she wanted to speak to him.
Lyle did his utmost to avoid the class of sitter whose concerns deprived him of precious wiggle room. Melba was the worst of that class: Alive or dead… was there a more black-or-white, yes-or-no proposition than that? It left him zero wiggle.
He'd have to do a cold reading on Clarence through Melba to try and get a grip on what kind of man Clarence was so as to make a roughly educated guess on whether he might be alive or dead.
I'm going to be sweating for my daily bread this round, he thought.
Lyle had placed two potato-size stones on the table, telling her that they were from Ogunfiditimi's birth place and, because Ogunfiditimi hadn't met her before, it enhanced first-time contact if she kept a good grip on those stones. It also kept her hands where Lyle could see them.
To set the mood—and kill some time—Lyle treated Melba to the histrionics, the table and chair tipping, then settled down to business.
Lyle came out of his pseudo trance and stared at her, watching closely. Her features were slightly fuzzy in the dim red light from overhead, but clear enough to pick up what he needed. Body language, visual cues in a blink of the eyes, a twist of the mouth, a twitch of a cheek… Lyle could read them like an old salt reads the sea.
First, some try-ons. She'd mentioned on her questionnaire that Clarence had been missing since June second. He'd start there.
"I'm getting a sense of a state of absence… of separation since… why does early June keep popping into my head?"
"The second of June!" Melba cried. "That's when I last saw Clarence! He went off to work in the morning and never came home. I haven't seen or heard from him since." She worked a used tissue out of her housedress pocket and dabbed her eyes. "Oh, Lord, you do have the gift, don't you."
Oh, yes, Lyle thought. The gift of remembering what you've forgotten you've told me.
"Please keep your hands on the stones, Melba," he reminded her. "It weakens contact when you remove them."
"Oh, sorry." She placed her hands back on the stones.
Good. Keep them there, he thought.
The last thing he wanted her to do was reach for her pocketbook. Because Charlie, covered head to toe in black, should have crept out of his command center by now and be ready to grab it from where it sat on the floor next to her chair.
"I told the police but I don't think they's doing much to find him. They don't seem the least bit interested."
"They're very busy, Melba," he told her.
Her distress sent a shot of guilt through Lyle. He wasn't going to do any more for her than the cops.
Value for value…
He shook it off and formulated another try-on. The first had been just an easy warm-up, to break the ice and gain a smidgen of her confidence. From here it got a little tougher.
Look at her: cleans houses, bargain-rack clothing; he couldn't see Clarence as a corporate exec. She mentioned him going off to work as if it were a routine thing. Good chance he had a steady blue-collar job, maybe union.
Try-on number two…
"Why do I want to say he worked in a trade?"
"He was an electrician!"
"A loyal union man."
She frowned. "No. He was never in a union."
Whoops, but easy enough to save. "But I get the feeling he wanted to be in the union."
"Yes! How did you know! That poor man. He tried so many times but never qualified. He was always talking about how much more money he could be making if he was in the union."
Lyle nodded sagely. "Ah, that was what I was picking up."
Let's see… blue-collar, frustrated… maybe Clarence liked to knock back a few after work? And even if he was a teetotaler or an ex-drinker, the temptation to drink offered a ready fallback.
"I'm getting the impression of a dimly lit place, the smell of smoke, the clink of glassware…"
"Leon's! That awful place! He'd go there after work and come home reeking of beer. Sometimes he wouldn't come home till after midnight. We had such terrible fights over it."
Drunk… frustrated… go for it, but keep it vague.
"I'm led to say that some harm was done?"
Melba looked away. "He never meant to hurt me. It's just that sometimes, when I got him real mad after he came home late, he'd take a swing. He didn't mean nothin' by it. But now that he's gone…" She sobbed and grabbed the tissue to dab at her eyes again. "I'd rather have him home late than not at all."
"I'm losing contact!" Lyle said. "The hands! The stones. Please stay in contact with the stones."
Melba grabbed them again. "I'm sorry. It's just—"
"I understand, but you must hold the stones."
"Got her wallet here," said Charlie's voice in his earpiece. Obviously he'd made it back to his command center with the pocketbook. "Picture of her and some fat guy—I mean, I could be looking at the Notorious B.I.G. here—but no kid pics."
Lyle said, "I'm looking for children but…"
He left a blank space, hoping she'd fill it in. As with most sitters, she didn't disappoint.
"We didn't have any. Lord knows we tried but…" She sighed. "It never happened."
"Not much else goin' down here," Charlie said. "Keys, a lipstick, hey—beat this: a harmonica. Bet it ain't hers. Good shot it's her old man's. I'll get the bag back lickity."
While waiting, Lyle made a few remarks about Clarence's weight problems to bolster further his psychic credibility. The picture he'd formed of Clarence was that of a frustrated, money-squeezed, bad-tempered drinker. An answer to a dead-or-alive question on a guy like that had to lean toward dead. He might have got himself involved in some quick-buck scheme that went wrong, leaving him food for the worms or the fish.
Lyle felt a tap on his leg: Charlie had returned the bag.
Lyle cleared his throat. "Why am I hearing music? It sounds reedy. Could it be a harmonica?"
"Yes! Clarence loved to play the harmonica. People told him he was terrible." Melba smiled. "And he was. He was just awful. But that never stopped him from trying."
"Why do I sense his harmonica nearby?"
She gasped. "I brought one with me! How could you know?"
Preferring to let her provide her own answer to that, Lyle said, "It might facilitate contact if I can touch an object that belongs to the one we seek."
"It's in my handbag." Melba glanced at her hands where they rested on the stones, then back at Lyle. "Do you think I could…?"
"Yes, but one hand only, please."
"We gonna take this poor lady's money, bro?" Charlie asked in his ear. "She ain't exactly our usual breed of fish."
Lyle couldn't give him an answer, but the same hesitancy had been nibbling at him throughout the sitting.
He watched Melba free her right hand, pull her handbag up to her lap, and fish out a scratched and dented harmonica with "Hohner Special 20 Marine Band" embossed along the top.
"This was his favorite," she said, pushing it across the table.
Lyle reached toward it, then stopped as warning alarms rang through his nerve ends. Why? Why shouldn't he touch the harmonica?
After a few awkward seconds, with Melba's expression moving toward a puzzled frown, Lyle set his jaw and took hold of the harmonica—
—and cried out as the room did a sudden turn and then disappeared and he was standing in another room, a suite in the Bellagio in Vegas, watching a fat man he knew to be Clarence Toomey snore beside a blonde Lyle knew to be a hooker he'd hired for the night. He knew everything—the half-million-dollar lottery prize Clarence had won and kept secret from his wife until he'd collected the money, how he'd left home and never looked back.
Melba's cry from somewhere in fron
t of him: "What's wrong?"
Charlie in his ear: "Lyle! What's happenin'?"
The feel of the harmonica in his hands… uncoiling his fingers one by one until…
The harmonica dropped onto the table and abruptly Lyle was back in the Channeling Room, looking at Melba who faced him with wide eyes and her hands pressed against her mouth.
"Lyle! Answer me! Are you all right?"
"I'm okay," Lyle said, for Melba's sake as well as his brother's.
But he was anything but okay.
What had just happened? Was it real? Had he truly been looking at Clarence Toomey or imagining it? It had seemed so real, and yet… it couldn't be.
Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He didn't know what to make of it.
"Ifasen?" Melba said. "What happened? Did you see anything? Did you see my Clarence?"
What could he say? Even if he were sure it was true—and he wasn't, not at all—how do you tell a woman that her husband is bedded down in Vegas with a hooker?
"I'm not sure what I saw," Lyle said. Couldn't get much truer than that. He pushed back from the table. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut short our session. I… I don't feel well." No lie. He felt like hell.
"No, please," Melba said.
"I'm sorry. I will refund your money."
"Mah man!" Charlie said in his ear.
"I don't care about the money," Melba said. "I want my Clarence. How will I find him?"
"The lottery," Lyle said.
She looked at him. "The lottery? I don't understand."
"Neither do I, but that was the message that came through the clearest. Check with the New York State Lottery. Ask them about Clarence. That's all I can tell you."
If she did that, and if Lyle's vision had been real—a big if—she'd learn about Clarence's big win. She could hire someone to track him down, maybe get a piece of whatever was left.
She wanted to find her husband, but success was going to bring her only a load of hurt.
Charlie appeared, looking at him strangely. He had to be bursting with a million questions, but couldn't ask them while Melba was here.
Lyle said, "Kehinde will show you out and return your money. And remember what I told you: Check with the lottery. Do it today."
Melba's expression was troubled. "I don't understand any of this, but at least you tried to help. That's more than the police have done." She held out her hand. "Thank you."
Lyle gripped her hand and stifled a gasp as a whirlwind of sensations blew through him—a brief period of anger, then sadness, then loneliness, all dragging along for a year and a half, maybe more, but certainly less than two, and then darkness—hungry darkness that gobbled up Melba and everything around her.
He dropped her hand quickly, as if he'd received a shock. Was that Melba's future? Was that all she had left? Less than two years?
"Goodbye," he said and backed away.
Charlie led her toward the waiting room, giving Lyle an odd look over his shoulder.
"Ifasen is not himself today," he told Melba.
Damn right he's not himself, Lyle thought as uneasiness did a slow crawl down his spine. But who the hell is he?
4
Jack will kill me when he finds out.
Gia stood before the flaking apartment door and hesitated. Against all her better judgment she'd gone back to the abductedchild.org web site and called the family number listed on Tara Portman's page. She'd asked the man who answered if he was related to Tara Portman—he said he was her father—and told him that she was a writer who did freelance work for a number of newspapers. She was planning a series of articles about children who had been missing more than ten years and could he spare a few moments to speak to her?
His answer had been a laconic, Sure, why not? He told her she could stop by any time because he was almost always in.
So now she was standing in the hot, third-floor hallway of a rundown apartment building in the far-West Forties and afraid to take the next step. She'd dressed in a trim, businessy blue suit, the one she usually wore to meetings with art directors, and carried a pad and a tape recorder in her shoulder bag.
She wished she'd asked about Mrs. Portman—was she alive, were they still married, would she be home?
The fact that Tara had written "Mother" with no mention of her father might be significant; might say something about her relationship with her father; might even mean, as Jack had suggested, that he was involved in her disappearance.
But the fact remained that the ghost of Tara Portman had appeared to Gia and Gia alone, and that fact buzzed through her brain like a trapped wasp. She'd have no peace until she learned what Tara Portman wanted. That seemed to center on the mother she'd mentioned.
"Well, I've come this far," she muttered. "Can't stop now."
She knocked on the door. It was opened a moment later by a man in his mid-forties. Tara's blue eyes looked out from his jowly, unshaven face; his heavy frame was squeezed into a dingy T-shirt with yellowed armpits and coffee stains down the front, cut-off shorts, and no shoes. His longish dark blond hair stuck out in all directions.
"What?" he said.
Gia suppressed the urge to run. "I—I'm the reporter who called earlier?"
"Oh, yeah, yeah." He stuck out his hand. "Joe Portman. Come in."
A sour mix of old sweat and older food puckered Gia's nostrils as she stepped through the doorway into the tiny apartment, but she stifled her reaction. Joe Portman hustled around, turning off the TV and picking up scattered clothing from the floor and a sagging couch; he rolled them into a ball and tossed them into a closet.
"Sorry. Didn't expect you so soon." He turned to her. "Coffee?"
"Thanks, no. I just had some."
He dropped onto the couch and indicated the chair next to the TV for her.
"You know," he said, "this is really strange. The other night I was sitting right here, watching the Yankees, when I suddenly thought of Tara."
Gia seated herself carefully. "You don't usually think of her?"
He shrugged. "For too many years she was all I thought of. Look where it got me. Now I try not to think of her. My doctor at the clinic tells me let the past be past and get on with my life. I'm learning to do that. But it's slow. And hard."
A thought struck Gia. "What night was it when you had this sudden thought of Tara?"
"It was more than a thought, actually. For an instant, just a fraction of a second, I thought she was in the room. Then the feeling was gone."
"But when?"
He looked at the ceiling. "Let's see… the Yanks were playing in Oakland so it was Friday night."
"Late?"
"Pretty. Eleven or so, I'd guess. Why?"
"Just wondering," Gia said, hiding the chill that swept through her.
Joe Portman had sensed his daughter's presence during the earthquake under Menelaus Manor.
"Well, the reason I brought it up is, Friday night I get this feeling about Tara, then this morning you call wanting to do an article about her. Is that synchronicity or what?"
Synchronicity… not the kind of word Gia expected from someone who looked like Joe Portman.
"Life is strange sometimes," Gia said.
"That it is." He sighed, then looked at her. "Okay, reporter lady, what can I tell you?"
"Well, maybe we could start with how it happened?"
"The abduction? You can read about that in detail in all the old newspapers."
"But I'd like to hear it from you."
His eyes narrowed, his languid voice sharpened. "You sure you're a writer? You're not a cop, are you?"
"No. Not at all. Why do you ask?"
He leaned back and stared at his hands, folded in his lap. "Because I was a suspect for a while. Dot too."
"Dot is your wife?"
"Dorothy, yeah. Well, she was. Anyway, the cops kept coming up empty and… that was the time when stories about satanic cults and ritual abuse were big in the papers… so they started looking
at us, trying to see if we were into any weird shit. Thank God we weren't or we might have been charged. It's hard to see how things could have worked out any worse, but that definitely would've been worse."
"How did it happen?"
He sighed. "I'll give you the short version." He glanced at her. "Aren't you taking notes?"
How dumb! she thought, reaching into her bag for her cassette recorder.
"I'd like to record this, if that's okay."
"Sure. We lived in Kensington. That's a section of Brooklyn. You know it?"
Gia shook her head. "I didn't grow up in New York."
"Well, it sounds ritzy, but it's not. It's just plain old middle class, nothing special. I worked for Chase here in the city, Dot worked out there as a secretary for the District 20 school board. We did okay. We liked Kensington because it was close to Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery. Believe it or not, we saw the cemetery as a plus. It's a pretty place." He looked down at his hands again. "Maybe if we'd lived somewhere else, Tara would still be with us."
"How did it happen?"
He sighed. "When Tara was eight we took her to Kensington stables up near the parade grounds. You know, so she could see the horses. One ride and she was an instant horse lover. Couldn't keep her away. So we sprung for riding lessons and she was a natural. For a year she rode three days a week—Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Saturday morning. On Thursdays she'd have to wait a little while before Dot could pick her up. We told her to stay at the stables—do not under any circumstances leave the stables. And for a year it worked out fine. Then one Thursday afternoon Dot arrived to pick her up—right on time, I want you to know—and… no Tara." His voice cracked. "We never saw or heard from her again."
"And no witnesses, no clues?"
"Not a single one. We did learn, though, that she hadn't listened to us. Folks at the stable said she used to leave for a few minutes on Thursdays and return with a pretzel—you know, the big kind they sell from the pushcarts. The cops found the pushcart guy who remembered her—said she came by every Thursday afternoon in her riding clothes—but he hadn't seen anything different that day. She bought a pretzel as usual and headed back toward the stable. But she never made it." He punched his thigh. "If only she'd listened."