Beyond Recognition

18

Daphne knocked loudly on the door to the purple house. Hearing just how loudly and impatiently she knocked, she questioned whether or not she had the open mind necessary for the ruse she intended. A majority of psychics were nothing more than clever con artists. Dial a 900 number, and through the miracle of caller ID and on-line computerized credit information, the so-called psychic on the other end knew more about you-income, marital status, spending habits, the car you drove, the house you owned, the catalogs you shopped-than could possibly be used in a single session. Though she was loath to admit it to Boldt, she didn’t trust any of them, not even Emily Richland. There was no telling what connection Emily might have to the arsons. She lived in a low-rent neighborhood and made her living telling lies. She would have to prove herself one hell of a mind reader to convince Daphne otherwise.

Daphne’s mission was multilayered: to reverse roles, tell lies of her own, and subtly interview Emily Richland in an effort to test the woman’s authenticity; to attempt to trap the woman into admitting some connection-professional or personal-with the arsons or the arsonist; to offer to pay the woman for information, but only as a last resort.

The door opened.

The woman’s long dark hair was pulled back, stretching the skin of a freckled face that took ten or more years off her forty. Her eyes were a haunting blue under too much mascara. She wore a thrift-store black velvet gown that emphasized her breasts even though the rest of the dress appeared a size too large, and was cinched tightly around her narrow waist by a blue-and-white beaded Indian belt. A string of dime store pearls hung around her neck, and a pair of earrings featured black-and-white photographs of Elvis. Her smile was radiant and yet mysterious-surprisingly natural; her eyes, probing and curious.

“Welcome.”

“Do you have time?” Daphne feigned embarrassment, awkwardness.

“Please,” Emily said, gesturing inside. She wore peach nail polish with silver-blue glitter. She was wearing ballerina slippers with black ribbon bows and worn toes, as if she had been on point. “I’m Emily.” She made no more small talk. She led Daphne to an upholstered chair with a green chenille slipcover that faced a small unadorned table with a pack of thumb-worn tarot cards waiting in one corner and a giant stump of a candle that might take years to burn itself out. There were nudes painted on the wall.

Daphne saw the woman’s hand gently brush the edge of the table as she took her seat. It was a clever, practiced move. The lights dimmed and established themselves at the level of the candle that the woman lit next, using a yellow Bic lighter. The room then smelled faintly of incense, reminding Daphne of her radical years at college.

“You have a question that needs answering,” the woman stated. She studied her. “You’re having trouble with a man.”

Daphne felt her heart in her throat all of a sudden. How on earth could she know about the problems with Owen? Then she realized that on entering the neighborhood she had spun her engagement ring around so that Owen’s absurdly sized engagement diamond was hidden under her finger, not showing on top. The good ones can read a subtle change in skin tone, voice inflection, body language, she reminded herself. Daphne had studied paranormal phenomena in her undergraduate years. For any psychologist with an open mind, it was a fascinating area.

She felt her face flush, at which point there was no sense dodging the question. “Yes, a little bit of trouble,” she admitted, “but that’s not why I’ve come.”

“Something to do with work,” Emily said, eyes searching Daphne’s left to right, left to right. Slightly hypnotic. “You’re a doctor,” the woman speculated, then shook her head no. “Something close, but that’s not it. A paramedic maybe … no … not a nurse. Something medical. Am I close?”

Daphne shifted uncomfortably in the chair, then chastised herself for giving herself away so easily. Concentrate! she demanded of herself. The woman was good. Better than expected. She worked fast. Calm voice. Penetrating eyes. She missed nothing. She was staring at Daphne’s neck, probably counting my pulse, the policewoman thought. Or curious about the long scar there. Focus!

“My fiance’s a doctor”-Daphne lied convincingly-“of economics, not medicine. Can’t put a Band-Aid on his own finger,” she said, amused. “But he’s rich as Croesus,” she included, completing the picture. “But no, it’s not about work, not about him.” She prepared her fiction carefully. “I came to you because of a dream I had. Have you ever dealt with a person’s dreams?” She knew the weight psychics put in such things.

“Dreams can be windows, my dear. Into the past, the future. Do you want to tell me about the dream, or should I tell you a little about you first? You’re not a believer, are you. It’s all right, you know. I mean, not trusting in the powers. They aren’t my powers, you understand. Not mine at all. It’s important to me that you understand. I’m not channeling, I don’t mean that. I’m not a channeler, not a conduit. But I do see: the past, the future. I see wonderful things; I see terrifying things. I can’t help what I see, so I may not please you with what I tell you, but I’ll tell you what I see.” She spoke quickly but without a sense of urgency, so it came off as a smooth monologue that one wouldn’t want to interrupt. Her voice was musical and lilting, her eyes calming and warm. “You’re someone who’s well prepared. You think out potential problems in advance. You’re neat. You keep a clean house and you pride yourself on the little details. You’re angry at your fiance, but it’s not about another woman-a young girl, perhaps.”

Daphne felt a chill all the way to her toes. As quickly as Emily talked, Daphne attempted to reconstruct how she might arrive at such things. Some of it might be explained by Daphne’s appearance, her choice of dress, her use of makeup, but how could she know about Owen’s daughter Corky? How could that be explained? She couldn’t allow herself to be led; she needed to take control. “It’s my dream I’m concerned with,” Daphne said definitely, in a dry, flat tone.

“No, my dear. I don’t think we can deal with the dream until I’ve convinced you, and I haven’t convinced you, have I? Not yet. Not entirely. I’m sorry. It’s a two-way street, and I feel you tensing, and I’m afraid I haven’t got much else to offer. If you like-no charge. You can go. We can try again another time or not, as you like.”

One hell of an effective sales tool, Daphne thought. Offer the door for free, or more to stay. Amazingly, Daphne found herself more convinced of this woman’s authenticity than she was willing to admit. “No,” she said, “I’d like to stay.”

A quiet descended over them as the psychic appraised her, only the light New Age music playing. The other woman’s brow knitted and she whispered, “There’s another man, isn’t there?”

Daphne felt her eyes pool with tears, her gut wrench. This was too much! “This is not about me,” she blurted out, feeling violated and invaded, taken advantage of. The only image before her was the face of Lou Boldt. She felt saddened to her bones. She felt exhausted. Finished. She wanted no more of any of this-no psychic, no Owen, no police department.

“Of course it’s about you,” Emily said. “It’s in the past now, isn’t it? In the past, but always in the present.”

“I will not talk about this!”

“No,” Emily said. “There’s no reason to talk about it, is there? What’s in the past is better left there.”

“You’re staring at me.”

“I’m looking at you, yes.” She hesitated and then said, “I think we can talk about that dream now. What do you think?”

A guess, Daphne decided. The woman had made a lucky guess, had scored a bull’s-eye, and had pursued it until to try for anything more risked the guess revealing itself as such. She knew nothing of it. She was no mind reader. Daphne had not been thinking about Lou. Or maybe she had been; she wasn’t sure. She felt confused and angry. Confusion was a foreign country to her; she didn’t speak the language or know the customs. She returned to her years of reading, of study, of conducting interviews, of forming psychological profiles. She stepped toward its safety as a person lost in the dark will head for even a faint glimmer of light.

Daphne inhaled a long slow breath, collecting herself. She closed her eyes slowly and said dramatically, “In the dream it is always the same: a man … I can’t see his face. He never looks at me, never directly at me. He’s a strong man. Imposing. And I see people burning,” she said, in a hoarse, dry, frightened whisper, knowing without opening her eyes that she had gained control of the other woman. “Houses burning. White-hot flames. Dancing flames. Women burning.” She saved the best for last.“Never his face. Just his …” She squinted tightly and shook her head no. She waited for the other woman.

“What, dear?” Emily asked.

“His hand. A burned hand. Disgusting. Fingers burned …”

Emily gasped audibly.

Daphne opened her eyes, containing her delight. Touche! The psychic paled considerably. Daphne asked, “What is it?” And then, reversing roles completely, she sat up straight and said, “Do you know this man?”

The psychic shook her head no.

“You’ve had the same dream?”

No again. Emily’s eyes remained enlarged. She was preparing some comment to make, preparing to take back control.

Daphne had to speak, to maintain her position. “You’ve met him,” Daphne stated plainly. “He came here.” She looked around the room and put onto her face her best mask of terror. She crossed her arms tightly, as if fending off the cold. “He’s been in this room,” she stated, noting with great satisfaction that Emily remained pinned by her comments. “Who is he?” Daphne asked. “Why have I seen him in my dreams?”

She waited, uncrossing her arms and placing her hands on the table before her. She leaned forward. “Who is he that he enters my dreams this way? Is he going to kill me? Is that it? Is it the man burning these houses? Is it the news? Is that all?”

“Who are you?” Emily choked out.

“You’ve seen that hand. I know you’ve seen that hand.”

The other woman’s face took on a look of terror. “You’re a friend of his. His girlfriend? You’re checking up on me?” She allowed it to slip.

“You have seen him!”

“You’re lying to me,” Richland said, her eyes lowered dangerously. “Do not lie to me.”

“The hand,” Daphne repeated. “You’ve seen that hand. I know you have. I saw how you reacted. I can tell you’ve seen that hand. Why? Why have I come here to you?” She tried to sound as emotionally unstable and fearful as possible. “I could have gone to any psychic. Why you?” Feed the ego, she reminded herself, having used this same principle on dozens of suspected felons.

“Because I can help you,” Emily answered, the suspicion in her eyes lessened. “Tell me about the dream.”

Daphne asked, “Am I psychic? Is there a way to stop it, control it? I don’t like these dreams. I don’t want any more of them. Is that how it starts? A dream? Dreaming?”

“We all have the ability to glimpse the future,” the woman answered clearly. “We’ve all done it: thought of an age-old friend whom we haven’t seen in years just moments before the phone rings and it is that friend on the line. Worried for a friend or relative, only to discover something terrible-or even something wonderful-has happened. Although I’ll tell you this,” she said, as an aside. “The dark, the evil, is somehow more powerfully transmitted than the good. It has been said that people close to those who have died have experienced a pain or even fallen to the floor, which, when traced later, can be connected to the exact moment of this other person’s death. Skeptics call this coincidence. I call it the Power. The difference between those people and me-between you and me, my dear-is that I can summon the Power. I can harness it. Connect with it, at my choosing. But at its core, it is no different from your dreams. Yes, I can tell that you’ve connected during those dreams. Something in this man has stirred a place in you. There may be others with this same dream; there may be none. None of that matters. What matters is that you’ve connected. And yes,” she said-answering honestly? Daphne wondered-“so have I. I know the man. I’ve seen him. He has sat in that chair.”

Daphne leapt from the chair and bumped the table in the process, and although the psychic reached out a steadying hand, the tarot deck separated and spilled across the surface, and a single card fell to the floor. The psychic stared at the card-which was face down-and a growing menace filled the room. “I’m sorry,” Daphne apologized. But Emily Richland waved off her apology and, stooping, reached for the card and turned it face up.

“Death,” she announced, her eyes finding Daphne’s. “It can be a good card,” she said, “but not always.”

Death had occupied a place in Daphne’s life since she was a child. Through her years of study and soul-searching, and some time on the therapist’s couch, she had come to understand that death is an integral part of life, but as a child she was far from that knowledge, that understanding. For years she had identified with the character of Scout in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird (she had not read the book until a young adult): the young tomboy, raised in Kentucky bluegrass country, surrounded by wealth, privilege, and death. Her father, like Atticus, a defense attorney, had won and lost cases where men’s lives were at stake. Her first close look at death was when her pony, Dell, got colic and died on a Saturday night in August. Daphne had spent that night in Dell’s stall; despite everything done for her, the old girl cried out in pain and died, Daphne’s arms clenched around her sweet-smelling neck, tears pouring out.

Death had followed her closely from that day forward. Her dearest friend on earth, her neighbor Jon Crispell, had been hit head on, killed on his twelfth birthday, coming home from a fishing trip with his sixth-grade teacher, a close friend of the family. In college, a sorority sister, made drunk by an oversexed football player, fell backward out of an open window and broke her neck in the front lawn of the Phi Gam house. Janie Whimfiemer, Daphne’s roommate during graduate school, had traveled to Africa and died there in her sleep, the cause of her death never discussed, as if the reasons for death did not matter, only the event itself. Janie was flown home to Indiana in a metal casket. Daphne had met the plane along with the family, and this had been her first sight of an actual coffin. She could remember the horror of that day still. When she drew close to people, they died. So for years she had avoided that opportunity.

She looked down at the card and shuddered. “Death and I are old friends,” she said, the room noticeably colder.

Emily picked the card off the floor and restored the deck on the table. “Tell me about the dream,” she repeated.

“I never see his face, just that hand. There’s fire, a woman screaming.”

Emily nodded gravely. She’d witnessed that hand.

“I thought about going to the police,” Daphne said, “after reading about the fires. But what’s to tell?”

“They won’t believe you,” Emily said. Her voice sounded far off, and there was weariness in her tone.

Daphne hesitated and said, “You can see the connection, can’t you? The possible connection? A man with a badly burned hand, the newspaper articles. I’m sorry. I’ve never believed in this kind of thing-psychic phenomena-but now it has happened to me, now I’ve experienced it…. What I was thinking: Maybe you could make the call to the police for me.”

Emily swallowed dryly, her throat bobbing, eyes glassy. “I can’t help you. I wish I could, but-”

“But you can,” Daphne emphasized. “Of course you can. You’ve seen him, met him; he’s been here. You could call the police and tell them that.”

“I think we’re all done here. If that’s why you’ve come, there’s really nothing I can do.”

Daphne allowed a long silence to settle over them. Still maintaining eye contact, she said, “Maybe they would pay you for such information.”

Her lips trembling, Emily gasped hoarsely, “What?”

“It’s the car, isn’t it? My car? You see, I remembered that I had left mail in the front seat. That’s how you knew I belonged to the Northwest Medical Society, which is why you were guessing doctor.” The words hit Emily as small bombs. “You know I’m neat, that I keep things clean, because that’s the way I keep my car. That’s what gave you away. I thought it might be my appearance at first, orderly and all. But the comments about my fiance-the ring, of course-and mention of Corky-the young girl-threw me off. Kept me off balance for a moment. But Corky’s notebook is in the back of the car, and her name is on it. Whoever you’re working with told you the name, didn’t she-he? — but you elected not to use it.” Daphne stood from the chair.

“Sit down!”

She took two quick steps toward the door behind Emily and pushed it open in time to see the kitchen screen door thump shut. She heard Emily right behind her. Daphne reached the back door and pulled it open, but whoever had been there was long gone. Fast, she thought.

“Stop it!” Emily cried out.

Spinning on her heels, Daphne said loudly to the woman, “You have nothing to say about this!” She took a step forward, driving Emily back. “I make one phone call, and we bring you in on a handful of fraud charges. You’re out of business.”

“You’re a cop?” It was a question, but also a statement-a realization-at the same time.

They stood only inches apart, Daphne a full head taller. She searched the other woman’s eyes and asked pointedly, “Are you part of the arsons? Straight answer: yes or no?” Their eyes locked, darted back and forth in unison.

“No,” Emily gasped, eyes averted for the first time, head lowered in submission. Exactly where Daphne wanted her.

Daphne believed her, but she waited just the same, for the woman’s next movements and words would be the final test of her guilt or innocence, whether to take her downtown or leave her here and work with her.

“It was some kind of business deal. Drugs, maybe.” Emily glanced away, then directly back into Daphne’s eyes. She drummed her thigh absent-mindedly with her peach-glitter nails. “A decent amount of scratch involved-he was willing to pay the sixty for the chart. It was the date he was worried about, why he came to see me. People consult you for dates, you know: weddings mostly. One woman, I think it was because she was having an affair … or wanted to.” Emily appeared nervous and scared. Daphne fought off a grin of satisfaction. She lived for these moments. “Because of the astrology,” she said, pointing toward the neon window. “I do charts, you know. And I do have the Power.”

“The sixty bucks. Cash or check?”

“Honey, do I look like I’d take a check? Gimme a little credit here.”

Daphne’s hope for a quick and easy solution slipped away. So did her hope that this woman would soften for very long. Then a second thought occurred to her. “The car. His car.”

“A truck.”

“His truck,” Daphne corrected. “Description?”

“Light blue. Old model. Maybe ten years old. White camper shell, not in good condition.”

“The dates?”

“October second the first time. I checked the papers on the third. Nothing much had happened. No fire,” she emphasized.

The Enwright fire had occurred September tenth; Heifitz, October fourth. “The second? You’re sure?” He might have set the accelerant for a future fire, she thought.

“Positive. And then again just-” She caught herself.

“When?” Daphne shouted.

“This last weekend,” Emily answered. “Saturday.”

Daphne’s pounding heart occupied her chest painfully. The timing seemed off-too rushed-unless October second had accounted for Heifitz. In which case, what was the significance of the weekend just past, another victim yet to come?

Daphne said, “We need to talk to this man with the burned hand. We need your help.”

“You could have just offered me the scratch. We’d been jake. I’d have told you what I knew. But now … this. I don’t like this. I don’t like the way you do business.”

“You helped us before,” Daphne reminded. “Was that the Power, or was that smoke and mirrors?”

“You remember that?”

“We credit you on the case report.”

“People talk when they’re in that chair. What can I tell you? They open up. And you know why?” she asked, shoving Daphne back and away to create some space between them. “Because they want to believe. They don’t believe in much anymore, but they’ll believe in me because they want to. They open up to me.”

Daphne understood. The detectives she saw as clients were no different. Solid at first, tight, unwilling to share. And then little by little she convinced them to believe in her, and suddenly the dam unleashed and they were spewing intimacies about impotency, suicide wishes, abusing their children, stealing from their day job. An endless laundry list of failures, both personal and private, and all because they discovered a sanctuary, a person willing to listen without judgment-they believed. Daphne realized that she and this woman before her were not so very different. The thought troubled her. “I need everything you have on the man with the burned hand.”

“Why should I?”

“Two hundred dollars in your pocket, and I walk away.”

“You-people like you-never just walk away. You’ll be back. That’s the thing about you.”

“Will he?” Daphne asked hurriedly, hopeful. “The man with the hand? Be back, that is?” Her heart pounded strongly in her chest-the possibility had not occurred to her-but people who believed in such things returned for more.

Emily met her eyes and nodded slowly. “Probably,” she said reluctantly. She nodded more strongly. “Yes, I’d say he will be back.” And then she added caustically, “But, honey, that one’s going to cost you people. That one’s gonna cost big.”