Then that puts us all on even ground.
Judi and Frida waited for his answer.
“I’d like to think it over. See if there’s even enough to go on to track this down,” he said, turning to leave. “I’ll get out of your hair until then—”
“Wait—you never said how Amy passed away. Is there anything else you can tell me about what happened to her?” Judi leaned in, on the verge of reaching out to him.
He said, “No. I’m sorry. I wasn’t there, it was my friend who was with her. I’m mostly doing all this for my friend.”
The aunt said, “Is it possible—could I talk to this friend? I’d just like to know as much as I can. It’s been over a year since I heard from Amy, and I just … I’d like to know.”
He understood the request. What he didn’t want was to drag Kitty back through that trauma—there was a reason he’d insisted he could do this on his own. He knew if he asked her to talk to Judi, Kitty would say yes. Best to let her make that decision, he supposed.
You could counter-bargain. Tell her Kitty will talk to her if she’ll decode the book for us.
Cormac mentally shook his head. That wouldn’t be right, when the woman was just looking for some closure.
“I’ll see if she wants to talk,” he said. “She may not want to.”
“All right. Thank you.”
He nodded at them and left the shop.
Chapter 5
AMELIA WAS familiar with the Spiritualist movement, which rose to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. More than familiar with it, she’d dabbled in it herself in her quest to learn everything she could about the occult, its practitioners, and the methods they used. The core idea of Spiritualism: through the guidance of a medium performing certain rituals, one might be able to communicate with spirits who have passed on. Primarily, people hoped to speak to loved ones and be assured of their comfort on “the other side.” But others hoped to learn arcane secrets, to speak with great magicians and sages of the past, to gain power. Mostly, the only power these mediums displayed was the ability to dupe their clients and acquire their money.
Even when she was alive, she’d begun to hate the Spiritualists because, in general, they made her job harder. She couldn’t simply follow stories of magic and ghosts and otherworldly monsters. No, she had to make judgments, don an air of skepticism, and investigate before she truly began investigating. Was this person making claims really a psychic communicating with dead spirits, or a charlatan cracking her toes under the table? It was all a supreme waste of time.
In her current experience, as a spirit who actually had passed on and returned, most people were less inclined to willingly speak with the dead than such beliefs would suggest. She’d tried for a century before finding someone able to listen to her—Cormac. Speaking with the dead in reality was not a safe parlor-bound activity, as the old Spiritualists insisted. No, in all the stories that had a seed of truth to them speaking with the dead required hardship and sacrifice, journeys to the underworld and copious amounts of blood.
Since meeting Cormac and coming back to life, she learned that the movement still existed in one form or another. She learned about the Cottingley Fairies and the great rivalry between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the photographs. The skeptical Mr. Houdini, Amelia decided, was a man she’d have very much liked to speak to, another reason to curse her early death that prevented such a meeting. But Sir Arthur believed utterly. Amelia thought the creator of the great Sherlock Holmes really should have known better. However, the First World War and accompanying horrific loss of life had inspired a renewal of interest in Spiritualism. Sir Arthur had lost a son in the war. Amelia supposed she could forgive him for succumbing to an emotional response.
Amelia had started on her path bec
ause she desperately wanted to see fairies, exactly the kind of fairies that those little girls made cutout pictures of and posed in their garden. That alone should have raised doubts—the pictures were just what a late Edwardian little girl would imagine a fairy should look like, based on all the storybooks, paintings, and drawings surrounding her. Reality never matched expectations so precisely, in Amelia’s experience. A hundred years ago, photography was still new enough that no one could believe that two young girls could falsify pictures. Photographs were the great truth-tellers, the artificial eye; they could not lie as paintings could. Except they could, and they had been made to lie from the very beginning. What would Sir Arthur make of the current era of computerized photo manipulation? How could one ever find the truth?
One simply had to keep looking, keep asking questions, and take nothing for granted.
* * *
THE DRIVE back to Denver seemed to take forever.
Do you know, Frida and Judi—I think they’re together. As in a couple.
That had occurred to Cormac. He figured it was none of his business.
I had a spinster aunt, one of my mother’s sisters, who lived with another spinster friend of hers. The family always spoke of how lovely it was that they got along so well and could live together with such economy without troubling their respective families. But there was much the family didn’t say about them as well, and I wondered.
He got a hint of the memory as she rambled, an image of two dowdy middle-aged women standing arm in arm as if holding each other up, dressed all in black like they were shadows. They’d babysit sometimes, and Amelia remembered them teaching her croquet, when Amelia was young enough to wear her hair in pigtails tied up with big satin bows.
It seemed an alien world to Cormac, and he had nothing to say. But he suspected that, yes, there had been more to the women’s relationship. The thought amused him, the two hiding behind propriety so stiff and formal that no one even questioned.
You know, he thought to Amelia, nobody says spinster anymore.
Well, yes, certainly. Etymologically, the word was doomed, considering so few of the women called spinsters actually spun wool anymore. So what do people call unmarried adult women now?
Um. Women, he said.