Gloria’s was the attic flat, a studio consisting of a large single room under a varied ceiling. On either end the roof buckled under the slopes of the house’s upper gables; in the center it was tall and high beamed, the wood a pretty honey brown color that was pleasantly rustic. A cramped gas stove, icebox, and sink crouched in one corner were the only evidence of a kitchen, and a beet red curtain had been hung on a rod with gaudy brass rings to separate off a messy square of bedroom. The rest of the flat was living space: mismatched furniture like Davies’s in the flat below—probably cast off from a former occupant—scattered about, low bookshelves filled with volumes of poetry and Russian novels mixed with movie magazines, topped with an odd Chinese ornament or clay head of Buddha. The wallpaper was repellent, the electric lights cheaply installed in old gas jets and unreliable, yet the place somehow had a friendly, lived-in air.
At the center of the room was a large round table of dark cherry-wood, the most expensive item in the room by far, and the only one Gloria had had made. It was circled with matching wood chairs, a runner matching the red curtain placed across its center. This was the heart of Gloria’s business: the séance table.
A round table is best for séances, as it allows all participants to view one another at equal angles. A rectangular table with the medium at the head encourages everyone, naturally, to look at the medium throughout the session; in fact, the medium would rather the participants look at one another. My mother had reluctantly given up her round table when she’d married my father and agreed to stop doing group sessions. It’s harder to pinpoint the source of knocks and raps at a round table, and it feels more intimate, the participants drawn into a tight knot from which their attention rarely wanders, making it simpler for the medium to set up her tricks in the background.
If, that is, the medium was employing tricks.
“The police have been here,” Davies said, turning on the feeble electric light. “A good-looking one, too. I told him if he took anything of Gloria’s, he’d have to answer to me.”
I reluctantly pulled my gaze from the séance table. “I don’t think you can prevent the police from taking anything they like.”
“They can just try it,” Davies said darkly.
I sighed and moved past the séance table, giving it a wide berth. I had never witnessed one of Gloria’s séances; we had never watched each other work. But I knew there would be no false panels or hidden drawers, no hollow spots hiding ball bearings, no clever hinges to make the table tilt. James Hawley was an experienced psychical researcher, and he’d nearly taken Gloria’s table apart piece by piece before he’d written his report. He’d found no tricks—which, of course, brought up the question of why Gloria had a round table in the first place if it wasn’t to accommodate tricks. I wondered whether the question kept him awake at night.
The answer was simple, at least to me. People expected to see certain things at a séance, and Gloria gave them what they wanted. Illusions within tricks within illusions—the spirit medium’s stock-in-trade.
Scattered around the rest of the room were pieces of Gloria’s life. Postcards from traveling friends were tacked to the walls; a fringed scarf of dark blue and pink was draped over the china shade of a table lamp. Sunlight from the gabled windows pressed illuminated squares onto the worn secondhand rugs. A closet door stood half open, spilling out the arm of a wool winter coat and the tail of a belt from a fashionable bright green raincoat. A pair of pearly satin heels lay discarded next to one chair, toppled over each other in disarray. An ashtray on a low end table overflowed with cigarettes, many of them not even half smoked. Behind the bedroom curtain, the bed was unmade and a low shelf was cluttered with thick, fragrant face creams and half-used makeup. The place smelled like sun-warmed attic, Gloria’s perfume underlaid with wood rot, and something gone bad in the neglected icebox.
I picked up the fringed scarf from the lamp shade and ran it gently through my hands. I slowly circled the room, feeling Davies’s eyes on me. I ran the scarf over my palms, feeling the tickle of its satiny fringe. Psychometry, it was called. The process of receiving a psychic transmission by touching a physical object. James Hawley had written about it in one of the New Society’s journals; the New Society itself claimed to be very interested in proving its existence. “It is unknown,” James had written, “whether psychometry is initiated by the medium or the object, but it is proposed that the object’s natural energy field, combined with the medium’s sensitivity, produces the effect.”
All I knew was that it wasn’t my specialty.
“Well?” Davies said to me from the doorway, impatient.
My gaze caught on a painting hanging on one wall. Done in a rustic style of heavy lines and bright colors, it depicted a mermaid on a washed blue background, as if swimming through water. Her top half was unashamedly naked, her hair streaming behind her, her shimmering green tail waving as she swam.
My hands stilled on the scarf and my throat closed. I had a sudden memory of a similar image of a mermaid printed on a postcard. Of turning that postcard over and over in my hands and reading the words written on it in a familiar bold scrawl.
“Bollocks,” Davies said accusingly. “You’re not going to do anything, are you? I should never have brought you up here.”
I closed my eyes briefly, let the world fall away, and ran my fingers along the scarf in my hands. An image flared in my mind, as brief and vivid as a camera flash. I opened my eyes again.
“Gloria bought this for five pence in a secondhand stall on Carnaby Street,” I said to Davies, holding up the scarf. “She was getting over a cold that day, and she’d just eaten a bowl of barley soup in a café.”
Davies’s homely face wrinkled in disgust. “For God’s sake. I should have known you’d be no use.”
“Did you think this scarf would tell me the name of her murderer?” I asked, suddenly angry. I shut my eyes and put the scarf to my forehead, as theatrical as any showgirl. “My God, I see everything! I have all the answers! It wasn’t the butler or the Prince of Wales. It was you, Davies! In a fit of mad jealousy!”
“Fine,” Davies said, clacking back toward the door. “I’m going back to my flat to have a smoke and another cry. And maybe I’ll think about what to do with my worthless excuse for a life.”