“At least he paid me in advance,” I said to no one.
The room stared silently back at me. Theatrical, my mother had called the decor, yet respectable. It’s the sort of look that works best.
The Fantastique. That was what my mother had called herself. It had made my father uneasy and the neighbors had never approved, but séances were a very lucrative business. For as long as I had memory, there had been a small hand-painted sign in the window next to our front door, a crystal ball with striped rays emanating from it. THE FANTASTIQUE, it read. PSYCHIC MEDIUM. SPIRIT COMMUNICATION. DO YOU HAVE A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD? Everyone, it seemed, had someone dead they wanted to talk to.
“It looks a bit like a sunset,” I’d said to my mother of that painted crystal ball when I’d been old enough to notice.
“It’s theatrical, yet respectable,” she’d replied. “It’s the sort of look that works best.”
Then my father died in the war, and my mother and I were left alone in our little house in St. John’s Wood, my mother grieving and, eventually, sick. She taught me everything she knew. And when she died three years ago, what was I to do? Her clients still needed someone. The money was good enough, and steady. I was beholden to no one. Now The Fantastique was me.
But I meant to get the sign changed. The Fantastique now found lost things; that was her only offering. She didn’t do séances anymore.
I left the sitting room through the velvet curtain and went up the small staircase to my bedroom on the first floor. I undid my dress—a custom creation, dripping in black jet beads, that had been my mother’s—and set it carefully in the wardrobe. It was The Fantastique’s only costume. I disposed of my stockings and heels and untied the black scarf wound in my hair. I brushed out my short waves with a silver-backed brush. Then I tied a silk wrapper over my underthings and went barefoot to the kitchen, making a stop in the lav to wash the makeup from my face.
Supper was set on the table, a dome placed over it. I removed the dome and looked at a chop, a potato, and cooked carrots. I had a daily woman who came, cleaned, prepared a few meals, and left again, always while I was working. She didn’t mind me and I didn’t mind her. I paid her on time and she ensured I had a bottle of wine uncorked by supper. It worked out well enough.
I sat and ate in silence. Work always made me ravenous, if it didn’t give me headaches. I cleaned the plate of every crumb, trying not to think of Mr. Baker, of the sadness in his eyes. I wondered whether I should buy a gramophone to break the silence. But no, the image of a girl alone listening to a gramophone seemed a lonely one.
After supper, I poured myself my first glass of wine for the night and took up my cigarettes. It was the first week of September, with summer just beginning to let go, and the cold and dark not yet arrived. Night had fallen when I stepped into my tiny back garden, and there was no breath of heat on the breeze, but the stars were clear and the air that slid down the neck of my wrapper was warm enough to be soothing.
I lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match I saw a man at the back gate.
I stilled. He stood in the lane that ran behind the row of houses, the wrought-iron fence barely reaching to his chest. He loomed as tall as he had in my sitting room.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Baker.
I couldn’t see him in the darkness after the match died, but I didn’t hear him move any closer. “I can scream,” I said, my voice curiously calm. “There are neighbors in every direction.”
“I don’t mean to frighten you,” he said from his place in the dark. “Really I don’t. You needn’t scream.”
I took a drag of my cigarette, thinking. I was still close to my back door, close enough to duck inside if he came at me. I hadn’t been lying about the neighbors. I wasn’t friends with any of them, but they would at least come to investigate if I screamed. I felt horribly vulnerable in my wrapper and bare feet, the makeup scrubbed from my face. “Look,” I said. “Just leave. I don’t know how else to make this clear. I’m not selling what you’re buying.”
“Dear God, it’s nothing like that.” Even through his desperation, he sounded disgusted. “I apologize for what happened . . . in there. I was rather shocked. I hadn’t expected . . .”
“The truth? Of course you didn’t.”
“I can explain all of it,” he said. “You’re right—the brooch was a lie. I had a good reason. I had to see you for myself, see what kind of person you are. It was important.”
I sipped my wine. I still wanted nothing to do with whatever drove him, but I was a little curious despite myself. Perhaps I’d find out why a powerful man had taken the trouble to come to a paid psychic on a Tuesday night. “And did I pass?”
He made a hoarse sound that was almost a laugh; it was unpracticed, as if it was a sound he’d never made before. “You find lost things,” he said at last. “You really do.”
“It’s my specialty, yes.”
“You knew what I was thinking. Exactly what—” He cut himself off, then made the hoarse sound again, only this time it sounded like grief. “Ellie Winter,” he said. “You have to find my sister.”
I shook my head, a senseless weight of dread filling my stomach. “No. Oh, no. I don’t find people. I made that clear to you from the beginning. I make it clear to every customer.”
“I know. You told me.”
“No exceptions, Mr. Baker.”
“My name isn’t Baker,” he said. “It’s Sutter. George Sutter.”
There was a long beat of silence in which I stared into the dark and hoped I was wrong and none of this was happening, not ever.
“My sister is—” The man at my gate stumbled over the words. “My sister was Gloria Sutter.”
My cigarette fell to the ground. “Gloria is missing?”
“Gloria is dead.”