Michael Stanton from the Berkeley Psychic Institute came to visit Sybil the next morning at ten A.M. The house was quiet. Alicia and José were cleaning their bedrooms, the children were at school, and Blake was at work.
Sybil told him as soon as he walked in that she had only had time to read a few chapters of Bettina’s book the night before, but it was fascinating, and everything appeared to be there. All she knew about them so far was that Bertrand and Gwyneth Butterfield had built the house in 1902, which she knew anyway. Their oldest son was named Josiah, and he’d been eight years old when they moved in. His sister Bettina was two years younger than he. Their son Magnus was three when they arrived, and he had been killed three years later, in a tragic accident, run over by a runaway carriage at the age of six. A daughter, Lucy, had been born in 1909, four years after Magnus’s death, and she had always suffered from frail health—she had a weak chest, as her older sister put it. Sybil also knew now, from the book, that the daunting dowager in the elegant gown was Gwyneth’s mother, Augusta Campbell, née MacPherson, who lived with them, and she was indeed Scottish. Gwyneth Campbell Butterfield had been born in Scotland as well. The older gentleman in the kilt with the mane of white hair was Augusta’s much older brother, Angus MacPherson. And Bettina had shared that he played the bagpipes atrociously, at every opportunity, and for some reason had come to live with his sister, his niece, and her husband and children in America, and was like an eccentric grandfather to them more than a great-uncle.
Sybil had gotten no further than that, but she shared the information with Michael Stanton, as he walked slowly from one portrait to the next, observing them closely. And for the first time, Sybil noticed that there was a set of bagpipes leaning against Angus MacPherson’s chair in his portrait. Bettina had added that her grandmother had had a black pug named Violet, which Sybil had noticed in the dowager’s portrait before. The tiara she wore in the painting was the same one Sybil had seen her wear the night of the earthquake. It was slightly concealed by her elaborate Victorian hairdo, and she was wearing several long strands of very large pearls.
Sybil didn’t say anything to Michael Stanton while he looked at the portraits, other than to explain who each of them was, which she knew now from Bettina’s book. She told him she had a box of photographs of them too. And then she walked him around the main floor. He stood for a long time in the dining room with his eyes closed, and when he opened them, he followed her up the grand staircase to the bedrooms on the second floor. They toured the entire house before she took him into the sitting room off her bedroom and they sat down. He looked tired, as though he had poured all his strength and energy into what he was trying to discern.
“What do you think?” Sybil finally asked him, and he nodded thoughtfully as he looked at her.
“The spirits are incredibly strong here,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house quite like this. It’s almost as though they’re still alive here, or think they are. I can hear Angus playing the bagpipes, and the old lady talking, the children laughing, and their parents are totally benevolent spirits. The little boy who had the carriage accident is very strong here too. His spirit must have returned here to be with his family, which isn’t surprising since he was so young. He’s full of mischief, and I get the sense that he wants to meet your little boy. And that the others want to meet you. I think the man you saw watching you from the dining room is not ominous. He’s some kind of manservant, who must have spent his entire career working for them here, so his spirit never left. He’s a less significant member of the group.”
“Are they going to stay here?” Sybil asked him uncomfortably.
“I don’t think there’s any question of it,” he told her honestly. “The question is, are you? They’re not going anywhere. They live here, and always have. I’m not sure what part of the house they have settled in. I don’t feel them strongly in the bedrooms or the upper floors. They seem to be mostly downstairs, on the main floor. Their aura is strongest in the dining room, and I think you might see them again there. They might be willing to simply leave the upper floors to you, and share the reception rooms with you. Bertrand Butterfield seems to be a very determined benevolent presence, and his wife is an extremely gentle, kind spirit, unlike her indomitable mother, who is harmless but a force to be reckoned with. And her brother, Angus, must already have been quite old when he got here. I get a sense from him that he’s slightly confused.”
His observations were fascinating, but it was not what Sybil wanted to hear, and how was she going to explain to Blake and her children that they would be sharing their home with the Butterfields for as long as they lived there? For a minute she hoped it was just hocus-pocus, but something very powerful told her it wasn’t, and that Michael Stanton’s reading of the situation, and the personalities they were dealing with, was accurate, even in the spirit world.
“I think that Bettina, their second child and oldest daughter, is the only one in the family who attained a great age,” Michael said, and Sybil knew from the bank that she had died at eighty-four. “Except for Augusta and Angus, of course,” he added, “but their spirits were already old when they arrived in the house. I think Bertrand died somewhere around sixty, during the Great Depression, when they lost their money, and Gwyneth not long after, although she was a few years younger than he. I don’t get the feeling that she died here. She must have passed away after the home was sold. And Bettina’s daughter, whom you mentioned sold the house after her mother’s death, doesn’t seem to be here at all, except as a baby. I don’t think she ever lived here as a child or an adult, and she seems to have no emotional tie to the house. She comes to me as foreign, French probably, and her adult life must have been there. She doesn’t feel American, nor linked to the house to me.”
“Bettina said in the chapter I read last night that she moved to France shortly after Lili was born. Lili was the child of Bettina’s first husband, who died in the Great War. Bettina moved to France with Lili after the war, married a Frenchman, and remained in Paris until she was widowed for the second time. She returned to San Francisco then to reclaim her parents’ home and bought it back from its owners at the time, and lived the final thirty years of her life in the house. But her daughter, Lili, remained in France.” Michael’s psychic sense about them was amazingly accurate. “You know who all the players are now, Mrs. Gregory,” he continued. “What are you going to do?”
“Do you think I will see them again?” Sybil asked, looking worried.