She blinked at me, then tossed the door open and turned her back, walking into the room. She was wearing a housedress of hideous plaid and a pair of heeled mules with bows on the tops. The mules clacked hollowly on the floor.
“I told her not to go,” she said.
“That’s not good enough.” I shut the door behind me. “There should have been no séance in the first place. She should never have even heard about it, never been given the choice. You should have stopped it.”
She flopped heavily on a sofa, her feet in their mules jutting out onto the scratched wood floor. Misery flinched across her face.
Anyone who had been in the spirit medium profession for any length of time had a set of rules. First, never agree to a séance with a group of unknown people; the dynamics were too risky, and the medium never knew whether a reporter or a skeptic was hiding undercover. Second, never do a session—of any kind—on client property. Every psychic needed to work within her own controlled environment.
And third, never go into such a situation alone, because most men saw us as easy women. Psychics and palm readers were everyday targets for robberies, passes, and worse. The setup in which Gloria died had been one only the most desperate amateur would agree to.
“I don’t know why you care,” Davies said sullenly. “How long has it been? Three years since you decided you were too good to associate with the likes of us?”
“I’d think it was the other way around,” I replied. I walked into the messy sitting room and looked down at her. “I wasn’t good enough, and neither was my mother. I think Gloria proved that rather conclusively, didn’t she?”
Davies rolled her eyes. “You always did take things too seriously. It was just one of Gloria’s whims. She’d forgotten about it in a week.”
I bit back a retort. My mother died six months after the incident that ended my friendship with Gloria, but Davies wouldn’t care about that. “Tell me about this séance,” I said.
“I couldn’t have stopped it,” Davies answered me. She wound a lock of greasy hair around one finger and tucked it ineffectually under one of her haphazard hairpins. “It didn’t go through me. It was Fitzroy’s idea. He went directly to Gloria, and before I knew it, it was done.”
I’d figured Fitzroy Todd would be involved, but still it sunk home to hear it confirmed. Fitzroy was an on-again, off-again lover of Gloria’s, a rich do-nothing who found it amusing to slum with those of us in the lower classes. He’d been the first person I thought of when George Sutter had spoken of a “good family who wishes to keep things quiet.” The Todds had kept more than one of Fitzroy’s drunken exploits quiet over the years. He had a few nice clothes and a droll way of speaking, but I’d never understood what compelled Gloria’s attraction to him.
“I thought she was finished with him,” I said.
“She was,” said Davies gloomily. “I was under strict instructions to put his letters in the trash. But he talked to her somehow, and the next thing I knew she told me she was going.”
“He was certainly there? At the session?”
“Yes, and I hope the police have made him good and uncomfortable. I hear they questioned everyone. If he killed her, I’ll wring his neck and save us all the trouble.”
I took a seat in the lumpy, mismatched chair opposite her, trying to picture fatally lazy Fitzroy murdering someone, and failing. “Who else was there?”
“Besides Fitzroy and Gloria, the clients. A couple of rich how’d-you-dos named Dubbs, if you can believe it. I never met them myself.” Davies opened a tin of tobacco and shook some out onto a paper, preparing to roll one of her awful cigarettes. She seemed primed to talk now. “They also brought in another psychic, a lightweight who calls herself Ramona. Strictly a skimmer, from what I hear, and a showgirl, too.”
I nodded. This was the language, the inner slang that was as familiar to me as the alphabet, though I never spoke it anymore. A skimmer was a psychic with no real powers who went for the easy money: the elderly, the naive who would be taken in by crystal balls and outdated spirit cabinet tricks. A showgirl was a psychic who did stage shows for profit. A psychic with any class never did a stage show. Never.
“That’s odd,” I said. “The second psychic.”
Davies lit her cigarette. “I know. I can’t think of why Gloria agreed to it. It certainly wasn’t the money. And I can’t think of why Fitz was so keen.”
“What did they want?” I asked, trying not to inhale the putrid smell of Davies’s homemade cigarette. I didn’t know where she got the habit—it wasn’t from her employer, who had smoked only the finest. “The clients. What was their story?”
“Grieving parents,” Davies said, waving dismissively. “Their only son died in the war. Felt a ghostly presence in the house and believed their son was returned to speak to them. Et cetera.”
I propped an elbow on my chair and rubbed my bottom lip, thinking. It was a simple setup I’d heard myself a hundred times since the war; Gloria, who specialized in communicating with soldiers, would have heard it almost every day. She could have had the grieving couple come to her flat and make contact there, as she had with every other client. Nothing about this enlightened me.
“Look,” Davies said. “I’m as torn up about this as anyone. Probably more. I loved her.” The cigarette drooped, the pain flitted across her face again, and for a second the angry facade dropped and she looked lonely. “I’m not one of those girls, you know, but I loved her. And aside from that, what am I going to do now? Where am I supposed to go?” She gestured briefly down to the housedress, the mules. “I’m hardly a candidate for finishing school, and Valentino isn’t going to sweep me away to the desert. I would do anything to go back in time. I mean it. But there was no stopping her when she set her mind to something.” Her voice cracked. “She told me everything would be fine.”