And he was telling us to move on. To let him go.
When Peter straightened and raised his head, his eyes were dry. “No. That’s okay. Thank you, I guess. I can almost hear him,” he said, chuckling. “Like a voice over my shoulder. I haven’t seen him in ten years, and it’s still hard to think he’s gone.”
I touched his arm. Like that would do any good. I could almost hear T.J.’s voice, too. I’d also had a voice whispering over my shoulder.
“It’s funny,” Tina said. “We try so hard to hold on to them. I think every ghost story, even the scary ones, is about the fear of dying. We don’t want people to just end. So we tell stories where they don’t. We try our damnedest to talk to them. We’ll believe anything. But I think if we asked them, the ones who are gone, they’d tell us to get on with our lives.”
Funny. I didn’t imagine Mick saying that. I imagined him saying, You were supposed to protect us.
Let it go, Kitty.
With an obvious flourish to break the mood, she drew out another sealed envelope. “I have something for you guys, too.” She put it on the table between Gary and Jules.
“What’s this?” Jules said.
“Remember the episode we did on Harry Houdini? About how he vowed that if there was a way to communicate from the great beyond, he’d do it?”
It took us all a minute to register the implications of that. Of that and her. My eyes got real big. “No way.”
In a near-frenzy, Jules tore open the envelope.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” Gary said.
Tina said, “I couldn’t say anything about it without blowing my cover or coming off sounding like a quack. We’d just debunked three fake examples of automatic writing. I couldn’t exactly say, ‘Yeah, here’s the real thing’ and not say where it came from. But. Well. I thought you’d be interested.”
Gary and Jules leaned in to read the sheet.
“What’s it say?” I was nearly out of my seat.
The note read, “Everyone who knew my codes is dead, this will not work, no one will believe you. But thank you for trying.”
“You’re having one over on us,” Jules said.
Tina said, “Here’s the thing. Most of the psychics are trying to contact Harry Houdini. How many of them ever try to contact Ehrich Weiss?”
Ehrich Weiss was Houdini’s given name. The really funky thing about it? The handwriting was different than the writing on Peter’s note. Wildly different. More different than someone could fake, unless they were really good.
I asked Tina, “You wrote these both?”
“I held the pen,” she said.
“Peter,” I said. “Does that look anything like T.J.’s handwriting?”
“I don’t really know. I could check, though.”
Then we’d have to compare the other note to samples of Houdini’s writing. God, this was weird.
“It’s like the channeling Arabic, isn’t it?” Jules said.
“I don’t understand it,” Tina said. “That’s why I hooked up with you guys, remember? Somebody’s got to figure out a way to explain stuff l
ike this.”
In the end, maybe that was what separated the real paranormal investigators from the charlatans. The charlatans kept up the aura of mystery and obfuscation. The real investigators kept asking why and how.
“Hey, it’s starting!” Shaun announced, punching at the remote to turn up the volume on the TV. The show’s intro came up, and there was a cheer. Everyone turned to look at the Paradox crew’s table. I beamed at them proudly.
“Have fun, guys. Let me know if you need anything.”