There were a few quiet gasps in the audience, and one shocked sob.
“Get to the show!” one of the drunk men shouted. The tension cracked. I turned instinctively and looked at the hard-eyed man with the mustache, the one I’d guessed was a plant. He was frowning at the stage, but he sensed my gaze and looked at me. I looked away.
Beside me, James let out a breath. “Hell,” he said. “This doesn’t sound like a script. She’s improvising.”
I turned back to the stage. “Who disbelieves?” Ramona cried now, her raspy voice cracking. “Which of you fools still believes in a happy afterlife, in heaven and hell? That you’ll be judged by your worth after death, that it is not just random biology that makes us who we are? Who here wants to summon the dead from their icy graves?”
The plant did not speak. Instead, a voice came from the other side of the theater.
“Take me!” it shouted. “Use me!”
It was one of the drunken men. He leapt from his seat, tears streaming down his leathered face. When Ramona blinked slowly at him, surprised, he called to her: “You’re wrong, you cow. I know my Sam is happy. You call on him and you ask him, if you even can.”
Ramona took a step and her gait wobbled. Perhaps she was upset, or perhaps she’d had a few drinks herself before the show. “Yes,” she said to the man. “I can summon him. Just close your eyes and let me try.”
I glanced at the mustached man again, but he was gone. The seat was empty.
The man in the audience closed his eyes, but his friends were jeering.
“Think of the person you wish to speak to,” Ramona said over the noise. “Call to him. Give me your hands.”
James flinched next to me. “What the hell?” he said.
“What?” I couldn’t take my eyes from Ramona, wondering what she would do. “What is it?”
“That’s how Gloria did it. In her séances. She would have people call to their loved ones while holding her hands.”
I blinked. Ramona would never have attended Gloria’s séances; Davies would never have allowed it. There was a faint noise somewhere up in the balcony, where no one was sitting. I twisted in my seat to look.
“Just think,” Ramona said to the inebriated man again. She had approached the edge of the stage and held out her hands, but the man in the audience stayed where he was. “Let the one you love hear you calling and—”
Something flew through the air and landed on the stage. A man’s shoe. It missed Ramona but caught the edge of her skirt on its downward arc, brushing the side of her leg and tumbling onto the stage. Ramona broke her concentration and looked around, her gait stumbling again. There must have been a signal somewhere backstage, for just in that moment the curtain fell, the lights went down, and the houselights slowly came back up. The piano player was gone. All was silence.
There were a few jeers, but something about the finality of it affected the crowd. They rose from their seats and began to file from the room, some of them grumbling, some of them dazed.
James gave a low whistle. “Well,” he said, still in his seat. “That wasn’t bad. It was fake, but it wasn’t bad.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “Ellie, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. I was still sitting turned in my chair, looking up into the balcony. The lights were on and the balcony was empty, just as it had been during the show.
But someone had been there. As the lights had come up unexpectedly, I’d glimpsed a shadow of someone exiting, a dark figure who slipped from the balcony in silence. Someone who had been watching the whole time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
We made our way through the thickening rain, from the Gild Theatre—where the thin crowd, exiting, quickly dispersed—down a succession of side streets, our steps clicking softly on the empty pavements. James led the way. He had taken me under his umbrella again, and in the intermittent light of the passing lamps his face was in grim shadow beneath the brim of his hat. I leaned into his familiar scent of shaving soap and damp wool, relieved to have him with me in the dark.
He pulled a watch from his pocket with his free hand as we walked, tilting it under a lamp to check it. “The séance isn’t scheduled to begin until eleven o’clock,” he said, “but something tells me she’ll be early.”
I shuddered, and not just with damp cold. I didn’t particularly want to attend one of Ramona’s private séances, not after that show, which had left me both depressed and strangely frightened. But there was no help for it; we had agreed to see Ramona in person to try to question her. I needed to hear for myself her account of Gloria’s death.
Soon we were on the street that I recognized as Ramona’s. James stopped us under an awning, lowering the umbrella and checking his watch again. I turned and realized we stood in front of the wig shop I’d noticed on my first visit here. Dummy heads stared vacantly at me from the darkened window, adorned with Renaissance tresses, eighteenth-century Marie Antoinette curls, and modern pageboys. CLOSING PERMANENTLY, announced a sign on the door. I peered at the handwritten page attached beneath it and read:
I am Retiring
My only son died in the War and I have no one to take over the Shop
Closing permanently end of month
Thank You for your Patronage
“There are others waiting,” came James’s voice. “At the door to Ramona’s block of flats. Let’s go see who our fellow seekers are, shall we?”
I pulled myself reluctantly away and followed him. Four people huddled on the stoop where I’d stood two days before, a man and three women. James lifted the umbrella and nodded at the small knot of people as we approached. “Good evening,” he said.
The man peered up at him. He was fortyish, with a face that sagged with premature age and, I thought, some saddening grief. “She hasn’t let us in yet.”
“When will she begin?” James asked.