“The first incident which attracted our attention on reaching Mathura happened on the platform itself. The girl was in L. Deshbandhu’s arms. He had hardly gone fifteen paces when an older man, wearing a typical Mathura dress, whom she had never met before, came in front of her, mixed in the small crowd, and paused for a while. She was asked whether she could recognize him. His presence reacted so quickly on her that she at once came down and touched the stranger’s feet with deep veneration and stood aside. On inquiring, she whispered in L. Deshbandhu’s ear that the person was her ‘Jeth’ (older brother of her husband). All this was so spontaneous and natural that it left everybody stunned with surprise. The man was Babu Ram Chaubey, who was really the elder brother of Kedarnath Chaubey [Lugdi’s husband].”
The committee members took her in a tonga, instructing the driver to follow her directions. On the way she described the changes that had taken place since her time, which were all correct. She recognized some of the important landmarks which she had mentioned earlier without having been there.
As they neared the house, she got down from the tonga and noticed an elderly person in the crowd. She immediately bowed to him and told others that he was her father-in-law, and truly it was so. When she reached the front of her house, she went in without any hesitation and was able to locate her bedroom. She also recognized many items of hers. She was tested by being asked where the “jajroo” (lavatory) was, and she told where it was. She was asked what was meant by “katora.” She correctly said that it meant paratha (a type of fried pancake). Both words are prevalent only in the Chaubes of Mathura and no outsider would normally know of them.
Shanti then asked to be taken to her other house where she had lived with Kedarnath for several years. She guided the driver there without any difficulty. One of the committee members, Pandit Neki Ram Sharma, asked her about the well of which she had talked in Delhi. She ran in one direction; but, not finding a well there, she was confused. Even then she said with some conviction that there was a well there. Kedarnath removed a stone at that spot and, sure enough, they found a well.… Shanti Devi took the party to the second floor and showed them a spot where they found a flower pot but no money. The girl, however, insisted that the money was there. Kedarnath later confessed that he had taken out the money after Lugdi’s death.
When she was taken to her parents’ home, where at first she identified her aunt as her mother, but soon corrected her mistake, she went to sit in her lap. She also recognized her father. The mother and daughter wept openly at their meeting. It was a scene which moved everybody there.
Shanti Devi was then taken to Dwarkadhish temple and to other places she had talked of earlier and almost all her statements were verified to be correct.
DR. K. S. RAWAT, “THE CASE OF SHANTI DEVI”
Thirteen
The Thomases of Ashview, Virginia, were not a lucky lot.
Ryan “Tommy” Thomas was killed at sixteen after his Honda Gold Wing motorcycle collided with a Dodge Avenger on Richmond Highway.
Tomas Fernandez was dead of unknown causes at six months.
Tom Hanson, eighteen, overdosed on heroin in an apartment outside of Alexandria.
Thomas “Junior” O’Riley, twenty-five, fell off a ladder while fixing his neighbor’s roof.
Anderson sat at the desk in his empty office and clicked through another year of obituaries in the online Ashview Gazette. He started with the month of Noah’s birth and went backward. Without a last name for Tommy, he knew the search would take a while, but he didn’t mind—there was nothing like being back in the game, trying to solve a case. And if he had to read the names a couple of times to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, there was no one there to notice.
He’d hoped initially that by simply Googling Thomas, Tom, or Tommy, Ashview, Child, Shooting, Drowning, Death, he would hit something somewhere, but perhaps the name was too common or the time frame too long—if he could use the Potter books as a benchmark, it went back up to fifteen years. The Social Security Death Index, which was spotty when it came to kids anyway, was useless in this case.
Tom McInerney had an aneurism at twenty-two.
Tommy Bowlton died of smoke inhalation at twelve along with his two sisters during a house fire on Christmas Eve. (The age felt right, but since Noah had no fire or Christmas phobias, and had spoken of a brother, he’d put this one aside for now.)
Thomas Purcheck shot himself while cleaning his rifle, but he was living in California at the time and was a robust forty-three.
He had to admit it: he’d missed being engrossed in a case. He even missed the microfiche machines he’d had to use before everything went online, tucked invariably in a corner surrounded by shelves of dusty atlases and encyclopedias. The machines were like old friends to him, the way the knob fit firmly in his hand, the way the text scrolled horizontally across the screen.
They always reminded him of college, working in the stacks, where he’d first stumbled upon a slim book from 1936 called An Inquiry into the Case of Shanti Devi, and rushed back to Wright Hall to share it with his roommate Angsley. They’d spent hours at Mory’s over the next few years poring over the implications between pints of beer, reading the reincarnation theories of Pythagoras and McTaggart, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire.