The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Helen Tucker The Power of Suggestion from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

It was getting weird. Downright scary, in fact.

At first he had thought it was a trick, some kind of practical joke she was playing on him. But he soon realized that was a stupid idea, because in the fifteen years they had been married, he’d never known her to play a joke on him or anyone else, practical or otherwise. Nelda was not the joking type. For that matter, more often than not, she didn’t even get the point of a joke he told. She would give that little artificial laugh, but he could tell by the vacant look in her pale blue eyes that she simply didn’t get it.

After deciding it wasn’t a joke, he was positive that it must be some kind of fad or craze going around that he hadn’t heard about. After all, he worked all day and didn’t have time to waste on finding out what sort of nonsense currently occupied the minds of women. He was forty-two years old, one of the leading designers in Beldon and Nelms Architectural Company, and before the year was out, he expected to be made a partner in the firm. Sometimes he even worked at night (and sometimes he didn’t, but Nelda thought he did). You didn’t get to be a partner by staying home day and night to see what your wife was up to or what kind of crap she was reading. Before all this weird stuff began, he’d never known Nelda to read anything but fashion magazines and books about the beautiful people, whoever the hell they were.

He figured Nelda was pretty typical of the average forty-year-old housewife. She had a rinse put on her blond hair, which she wore in a Dutchboy cut, every so often to keep it that color, her skin was still pretty good (probably thanks to whatever that stuff was she slapped on at regular intervals), and she didn’t need a lot of makeup. She was tall, five-eight, and her figure was still good, though she had thickened a bit in the middle. She dressed sensibly, but always in style, and spent just about all the money he gave her on clothes. She could pass for… oh, maybe thirty-five, if you stretched your imagination a bit. She was interested in buying nice things for the house, trying out new recipes, her weekly bridge game with “the girls,” and lunching twice a week with some of her old college friends who lived in the city. To his knowledge, she had never been interested in occult mumbo jumbo or reading books about same.

The weird stuff started about six weeks ago and showed no signs of stopping or even letting up. It was, in fact, getting worse. Actually, it might have been going on for a while before he noticed. He first became aware of the spooky undertones one night after dinner when he sat down on the sofa, on the end by the three-way lamp, to catch up on the latest Architectural Digest. On the table, under the lamp, was a pile of books. The title of the top book was Psychic Experiences Through the Ages. What the hell was Nelda doing with a book like that? He took the second book off the pile. Early Spiritualism. The third book, Psychical Research. And the fourth, Telepathy in Everyday Life. Beneath that book was a bunch of brochures and pamphlets on clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, precognition, and altered states of consciousness.

“Jehovah’s Jaguar, Nelda! Where’d you get this stuff?”

She looked up briefly from her Queen Anne chair by the fireplace. “The library.” Then she was buried again in the book she held, the title of which was Hypnosis and Dream Telepathy.

“Why’re you reading this junk?”

She looked up again, the epitome of patience. “I don’t think it’s junk, Hugh. They were all written by experts in their field.”

“Whatever. Why’re you reading it?”

She lowered the book again. “A couple of the girls think I may have ESP or something like it, and I thought if I read up on the subject, I could find out for sure.”

“So now you’re going to start telling fortunes?”

“Hardly.” She gave him a condescending smile. “Some rather… odd things have been happening lately, and I confess I’ve been a bit shaken by them.”

“Like what?”

“Well, at a recent bridge game, it occurred to me suddenly that I knew every card that was going to be played before it was played.

When I realized that, I also sensed that I knew what cards were in the other three hands even before the bidding began. Of course, with an advantage like that, I mopped up that afternoon.”

He laughed, first uproariously, then derisively. “I’ll take you with me to my next poker game.”

“It isn’t funny, Hugh. It’s a little… frightening.” She paused, then said, “The next thing that happened was a lunch a couple of days later. Ruth and Barb and I were to meet at The Tea Kettle. Ruth arrived at the same time, and I said to her — I don’t know where I got the idea — ‘Barb isn’t coming. She’s going to phone and tell the hostess to tell us she’s ill.’ Sure enough, we had no sooner sat down than the hostess came over and said, ‘Mrs. Long just called and said to tell you she’s not feeling well and can’t make it today.’”

He couldn’t think of a word to say. He just looked at her, wondering if his very practical, down-to-earth wife had all of a sudden run mad.

He had planned to go to Sonja’s that night. After all, he hadn’t seen her for three days. But something about the seriousness of Nelda’s expression, her tone of voice, made him decide to stay home. It was easy enough to get away when he wanted to. All he had to say was, “We’re having some problems with the Grandy building,” or, “That new house on May Avenue, well, the owner has changed his mind about the shape of the deck, so I’ve got to have it done by tomorrow.” And he’d be off for a few hours of bliss with Sonja. Nelda was gullible as hell. She never suspected anything. But tonight — he didn’t know why — he thought he’d better not go.

“Anything else?” he asked. “Or is that the sum total of your psychic experiences?”

“Are you making fun of me?” A small frown furrowed her forehead.

“No, of course not. I’m just curious.”

There’ve been some little things that made me wonder, but nothing as significant as the two I told you about. The thing is, these experiences, as you call them, are happening more often, and each time I get a stronger premonition.” She stopped suddenly and looked toward the telephone on the end table. “Like right now. The phone is going to ring.”

He waited. A minute, two minutes, three minutes. Nothing happened. And then the phone rang.

“Don’t bother to answer it,” she said. “It’s a wrong number.”

An act of Congress could not have prevented him from picking up the phone. “Hello.”

“Has Jimmy come in yet?” asked a gruff voice.

He held the phone away from him, looking at it as though it were a hissing viper, then he barked into it, “Wrong number!”

She continued with her reading without looking up and without saying “I told you so,” for which he would have been grateful had he not been so befuddled. What the hell was going on here? Had the woman suddenly become possessed with some kind of strange powers? Ditch-water dull Nelda, whom he could read like a child’s primer? It couldn’t be.

“Has something happened to you, something strange?” he asked. “I mean — do you feel, er, different? Headache or… anything?”

“Not at all. I feel the same as I always have.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so he just sat staring at her, going over in his mind the horrendous difference it could make in his life if his wife really had suddenly become a seer into the future. But, of course, he didn’t believe in that stuff and his first thought had been correct. It was just a fad, a phase she was going through, reading all those crazy books. She’d get tired of it soon enough and go back to being ditch-water dull Nelda whose every move and sentence he could anticipate. And that made him psychic in his own right, didn’t it?

But that didn’t explain the telephone business. How had she known?

It had taken him hours to get to sleep that night, but by the next morning he was ready to pooh-pooh the whole psychic business. If you played bridge with the same people week after week, year after year, you could tell by looking at their expressions what kind of cards they were holding, just as he could tell by the expressions, or lack thereof, on the faces of the members of his poker club. And it was a safe enough guess that Barbara Long wouldn’t show up for a lunch date: That hypochondriac canceled half her social engagements because of some imaginary illness. As for the phone, what the hell? They never got any calls at night anyway, so if the phone rang, there was a ninety-five percent chance it was a wrong number.

Nelda was getting ideas from all that crap she was reading. She’d lose interest pretty soon and go back to fashion magazines and the beautiful people, whoever the hell they were.

He scrutinized himself in the mirror extra carefully while shaving. Had it been that long since he’d checked, or had his hairline receded a bit more overnight? And was that puffiness under his eyes the beginning of bags? He worked out at the gym once a week in an effort to keep a flat stomach, but there was nothing the gym could do about eyes and hair. He couldn’t afford to let himself go in any way, not if he wanted to keep Sonja. She was a beaut: statuesque brunette, heart-shaped face with sexy, pouty lips, skin that almost glowed in the dark, and she was fifteen years younger than he. He’d already invested a fortune in her: all that jewelry, lingerie, champagne, and room-service dinners (he couldn’t afford to take her out and be seen by someone who knew him; it would jeopardize his partnership). So he paid her rent in the hotel suite on the twelfth floor, and he hoped that he was the only one who visited her there. Had to be, he kept telling himself, because she was always available for him, even on the spur of the moment.

Tonight he would see her for sure. Nelda could predict ringing phones, sick friends, card games, or the end of civilization as we know it; his own prediction was that he’d have one hell of a night with Sonja.

It was about a week, possibly ten days, later that he had to go home unexpectedly in the middle of the morning. He’d left plumbing estimates for the Grandy building in a folder on the bureau, just walked right out that morning without seeing it. The house was quiet when he entered — no TV or radio talk shows or CDs playing golden oldies — and his first thought was that Nelda wasn’t home, but then he remembered seeing her car in the driveway.

He found her sitting at her little antique desk in a corner of the living room. She was studying something, her concentration so great that she did not even hear him as he approached. As he bent over her, he saw what she was studying so intently. A sheet of white paper, completely blank.

“What…” he began, but at the sound of his voice, she started violently, let out a little scream, and turned in her chair.

“Good Lord, Hugh, what are you doing home now? You just about scared me into apoplexy.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I forgot that folder on the bureau. Had to come back for it. What are you doing?” he added, although it was perfectly obvious she wasn’t doing a damn thing.

“I… I was just thinking.” She had a guilty look about her, as though she had been caught doing something underhanded. “About what?”

She hesitated a second or two, then, looking down at the Oriental rug as though counting figures in the design, said, “It’s gotten worse, Hugh. Much more prevalent.”

He really didn’t have time to stand there and jaw with her about the trivialities of her life. “What are you talking about, Nelda?”

“The ESP… clairvoyance, or whatever you want to call it.”

He didn’t want to call it anything; he’d prefer to ignore it, forget it altogether. She was still reading those stupid books all the time, and he’d certainly done a good job of ignoring that. “What now?” he asked with as much civility as he could manage. “You see something written on that blank paper?”

She nodded, then shook her head. “Not really, but when I first saw this piece of paper, it came to me that I’m going to get a letter today from someone I haven’t heard from in years. Someone I’d completely forgotten about. When you came in, I was trying to figure out who it could be.”

He laughed at her. “Why waste time? Just wait till the postman comes and you will know.” He laughed again. “It’s just your imagination working overtime because of those lunatic books you read. You’re turning into a real loony tune, you know that?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He went up to the bedroom, got his folder, and went back down to the living-room door. “I may be a little late coming in tonight,” he told her. “There’s a dinner meeting, followed by some business. May be eleven or after before it breaks up.”

She didn’t look around, just nodded.

As he was getting in his car, he saw the postman’s red, white, and blue jeep turn the corner. Ha! He would wait for the mail, take it to her, and convince her that this ESP she thought she had was nothing but pure, unadulterated rubbish.

He took the handful of mail from the postman, and without even looking through it, rushed back into the house and dropped it on the desk in front of her. “There,” he said, “show me the letter from your long-lost friend, or whoever.”

She went through the mail slowly: bills, advertisements, an envelope of coupons, and a letter addressed to her in a strange, circular handwriting. She looked up at him, a somewhat frightened expression on her face, then opened the letter. He leaned over her shoulder and read as she did:

There was a P.S. which gave the phone number.

He couldn’t get it out of his mind. Had his average, dull, ordinary wife really become possessed of some kind of psychic powers? Impossible! He didn’t believe it for a minute. And yet… What else could explain the strange goings-on?

That night when he went to his dinner meeting (with Sonja), he was still trying to find some logical explanation.

“What’s the matter with you?” Sonja complained after she had rolled the room-service dinner trolley out into the hall. “You haven’t spoken a dozen words since you came in. I ordered your favorite meal, your favorite wine, and I’m wearing the negligee you brought me last week. You haven’t commented on anything or even noticed anything.”

He knew if there was anything Sonja couldn’t stand, it was being ignored. He’d had some disappointing evenings — she had sent him home after about thirty minutes — when she’d been convinced she did not have his absolute and unconditional attention.

“My dear, beautiful girl,” he said quickly, pulling her down beside him on the small flowered-chintz sofa, “forgive me if I sometimes take all this perfection for granted. You see, I’ve come to expect nothing less from you. The way you look, the things you do… you are the ideal in every way.”

The words were so far removed from his usual pattern of conversation or compliments that he felt he was speaking a foreign tongue. It was almost funny, a joke, but it seemed to satisfy, even please her, for she smiled and snuggled closer to him. “Problems at work?” she asked. That, too, was unusual, because they always talked about her, not him.

“No, nothing like that,” he said, and then he decided to tell her. “Nelda has been acting… I don’t know… sort of strange lately. Well, not strange, maybe, but bizarre things have been happening.”

“She’s found out about us?”

“Oh, no. No way that could happen. I’m too careful.” And then he told her about the phone call and the letter and about all the books Nelda had been reading.

Anything Sonja didn’t understand was dismissed with a little shrug and a change of subject. As was this. “All those crazy books,” she said. “That would send anybody around the bend. How do you like my new perfume? Do I smell like Elizabeth Taylor?”

“I don’t know how Elizabeth Taylor smells,” he said, laughing, and from then on, they had an exemplary evening.

It was almost eleven-thirty when he went home. He expected to find Nelda fast asleep in her twin bed, possibly with the bedside lamp still on and one of those nutty books lying open beside her. What he found was Nelda sitting up in bed, her fingers pressed against her temples, her eyes closed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You got a headache or something?”

She opened her eyes slowly and looked around as though coming out of a trance or regaining consciousness after a coma. He almost expected her to say, “Where am I?”

For a long time she didn’t say anything, and then: “Hugh, I have been seeing the oddest thing: a series of pictures in my mind, all in still-life.”

“Nelda, what the hell are you talking about?”

He sat down on his bed and removed his shoes. Kee-rist, he hoped she wasn’t going to start her loony-tune business now. He was wiped out. Sonja had had the agility of an Olympic gymnast tonight. He smiled, remembering.

“I was trying to read,” she said, “but these pictures kept flashing across my mind. Then, I’m not sure what happened, but I seemed to go outside myself. Maybe it was an altered state of consciousness. The pictures became much clearer. Much.”

He’d be damned if he’d ask her what kind of pictures. He didn’t even want to know.

She told him anyway. “I saw a room. It was like a hotel room, a suite, maybe, but it was furnished better than the average hotel room. There were some pictures, family pictures I suppose, on a table, and there was a little sofa or love seat with flowered upholstery, and you were sitting there. You were by yourself, but your mouth was moving as though you were talking to someone. That picture faded and another came on — exactly as though it were being shown on a screen — and you were not alone anymore. There was a woman sitting beside you on the sofa, a very pretty dark-haired woman. Hugh, am I going crazy, or is it… is it the ESP again?”

He was staring at her, his mind in turmoil. “What… what are you talking about?” His voice came out scarcely above a whisper.

“I’m not sure. I saw it so clearly, but I’m not sure what it was I was seeing. Where was your meeting tonight?”

“At the Baxter Hotel. We met in the suite of a visiting architect.” He thought it best to get at least a remnant of truth in his answer.

“That explains it then.” She let out a sigh of relief. “I was seeing the meeting. But I wonder why I didn’t see more than just two people.”

He didn’t answer; he couldn’t.

She plumped her pillow several times and lay down. When he came out of the bathroom, she was either asleep or pretending to be.

But it was nearly dawn before he closed his eyes.

The first thing he did when he got to his office that morning was to call Sonja and tell her she would have to move from the Baxter to the Cromley on the other side of town.

“In your dreams, buster,” she said, furious at having been awakened and even more furious at being told she would have to leave her deluxe digs. “I’m not going to some second-rate fleabag.”

“The Cromley is a first-class apartment hotel, and I’ll see that you have as much space there as you have at the Baxter. I’ll make the arrangements this morning and you can move this afternoon.” He hung up before she could protest further.

He didn’t have a clue what had happened to Nelda or what was going on in her mind, but obviously she didn’t know (or hadn’t seen pictures) of his intimate moments with Sonja. It seemed to be a good idea to move Sonja farther away from Nelda (maybe proximity had something to do with the pictures she saw) before Nelda caught on.

No matter what was happening in her mind, it had made a wreck out of his own. He couldn’t concentrate on work, or even Sonja. All he could do was stare at Nelda when he was with her and wonder and wonder. And when he was away from her he wondered even more…

He was going bat crazy He was obsessed with it, couldn’t get his mind on anything else. He had never believed in all that psychic stuff; it was a hoax, a ripoff, like fortunetellers at a county fair. There had to be some logical explanation for the things that had happened rather than the psychological mumbo jumbo that Nelda kept mouthing. Extrasensory perception, altered states of consciousness, precognition. Horse hockey!

Yet he couldn’t come up with anything that even partially explained how Nelda knew the phone was going to ring, that it would be a wrong number, or that the postman was going to deliver a letter from someone she hadn’t heard from in years, or how — and this was the really scary one — she could describe a hotel room she’d never been in and even see him sitting beside Sonja on the sofa.

Could she have followed him that night, peeped through the keyhole? Common sense said no, that he was becoming paranoid. Nevertheless, he began seeing Sonja at lunchtime on the days when he knew Nelda was either playing bridge or meeting someone for lunch.

For a while, maybe a week, nothing unusual happened — except that Nelda kept reading those damn books. She would sit in her chair by the fireplace, a book in her hands, and every so often she’d look up with a strange little smile on her face, as though she knew an amusing joke on him which he wasn’t privy to.

Then one night the phone thing happened again. He was watching the Bulls go down in inglorious defeat (what could they expect without Air Jordan?) and she was reading a book entitled Authentic Witchcraft. Witchcraft, for God’s sake! Wouldn’t you know?!

The phone rang and he reached for it, but she said, “Don’t bother, it’s for me. Sheila wants to tell me that our bridge game has been postponed until next week because her daughter’s just been taken to the hospital. The baby will be born tonight.”

He froze, his hand extended in midair, while she picked up the phone.

“Hello, Sheila,” she said at once. “Yes, as soon as the phone rang, I knew it was you. You’re going to the hospital to be with Linda, aren’t you? Uh-huh, just my ESP at work.” She gave a little laugh. “Give Linda my love. No, I can’t tell you if it will be a boy or a girl, but it will be perfect. Yes, see you next week. Bye.”

He turned the TV off. He couldn’t focus on the game anymore. All he could do was stare at Nelda, his mind going round and round like a carousel, round and round and round in the same dizzying circle, getting nowhere.

She was bending over the bed, shaking him. “Hugh, wake up. Wake up! It’s almost nine o’clock. You’ve overslept.”

He turned over and groaned, opened his eyes then closed them again. “Go away,” he mumbled.

“You’re already late,” she persisted. “Get up.”

“I’m not going to the office today.”

“Are you sick?”

Instead of answering, he pulled the sheet up over his head. He was sick, yes. Sick of all the craziness that had taken over his life. He felt that last night had been the ultimate blow to what was left of his sanity. He wasn’t sure at this moment whether he could distinguish reality from fantasy anymore.

Yesterday he had decided that he was being overly cautious in seeing Sonja only during lunch, so after he left the office at five, he dropped in on her at the Cromley. It was nearly eight when he got home and Nelda met him at the door. “Hugh, the most peculiar thing…” she began. “Maybe you can explain it for me.”

“What?” He was totally enervated and the last thing he wanted right now was conversation.

“When you didn’t get home at the usual time, I started worrying, and then suddenly, my mind went blank for a second or two, and after that I started seeing those still-life pictures again. I saw a hotel room, not the same one I saw before, but — and this is what’s peculiar — there were the same family pictures around the room that I saw in that other room where you had the meeting. And the same woman was there, that dark-haired woman, and…”

He didn’t listen to any more. He started trembling and knew that if he didn’t get out of her sight at once, she would notice that he was having an acute attack of anxiety. He rushed upstairs, calling as he went, “I’ve already eaten, so don’t make any dinner for me.” He went straight to bed.

The trembling lasted a long time; it was as though he were having a hard chill. Finally it stopped and he took long, deep breaths. Something had to be done. Things couldn’t continue this way. He didn’t want to give up Sonja, but he couldn’t afford any scandal in his life right now (and Nelda would sure as hell divorce him if she found out) because Jim Beldon and Harry Nelms were both strong family men and absolute Puritans about practically everything. He’d have to stop seeing Sonja until after he made partner. Then he could relax a little and resume the relationship.

Nelda sat down on her bed and leaned toward his. “Hugh, I had the most peculiar dream last night.”

Kee-rist, please! He didn’t want to hear about her dream.

“You were in that room — the one I told you about with the pictures and the dark-haired woman — and all of a sudden a man came bursting in wearing a mask and with a gun in his hand. He said, ‘You don’t belong here, this is my territory,’ and he shot you right through the heart. Then he took the mask off and went to the dark-haired woman and said, ‘If I ever catch you fooling around again, I’ll kill you too.’ Then he kissed her and took her into a bedroom and…”

He came out from under the cover. “Nelda, for God’s sake, have you lost your mind completely? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“I thought so too,” she said calmly, smiling. “That’s why I told you about it, so we could both have a good laugh.”

Instead of laughing, he got out of bed and headed for the shower. “I’m going to work after all,” he said.

His first thought had been to go to Sonja at lunchtime to tell her he couldn’t see her again for a while, but then he decided he’d wait until the middle of the afternoon. He didn’t call ahead, just went at three o’clock. Sonja seemed only mildly surprised to see him. “Gee, Hugh, I never know when to expect you anymore. You’ve gotten to be a real drop-in visitor.”

He was trying to think of some way to break it to her gently that he was going to have to drop out for a while. “Sonja, baby, look, I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve got to…”

At that moment the door to the hall was thrown open and a man came in quickly and closed the door behind him. Hugh’s first thought was, He’s not wearing a mask; that’s a stocking over his head. And then he saw the pistol in the man’s hand, and he began shaking. “No!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot. For God’s sake, don’t shoot.”

“You don’t belong here,” the man said. “This is my territory.”

He was going to be shot, killed. He had to get out. How? The man was between him and the door, and it would do no good to go to the bedroom because the man would follow. Sonja had backed against the far wall and was cringing there like a terrified animal. The hell with Sonja; her other lover wouldn’t shoot her. Nelda had said as much.

He remembered the fire escape just under the balcony. If he could make it to that before the man pulled the trigger… He ran to the balcony and was climbing over when he saw the man coming out on the balcony, the gun aimed at his head. “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot,” he cried, reaching for the fire escape.

His foot slipped on the first rung and he tried to catch hold of the balcony rail but missed. He fell fourteen stories, landing on the concrete beside the Cromley’s pint-sized swimming pool. The last sound he heard was Sonja’s scream… or was it his own?

He was already sitting in the back booth when she arrived at The Tea Kettle. His name was Ivan. He was forty years old, had blond hair turning gray which looked the color of pale sand, brown eyes, a mottled complexion which probably was a result of teenage acne, and he was tall and skinny as a telephone pole. He had been a private investigator until his license was revoked three years ago. Now he clerked part time in a furniture store and took on “special jobs” investigating whenever one turned up, which was infrequently.

She slid in the booth across from him and, without a word, took a long white envelope out of her pocketbook and slipped it across the table to him.

Without opening the envelope, he pocketed it. “Gee, Nelda, it was so much fun, I should be paying you.”

She knew this was a bit of fawning, not truth. “You’ll find a little bonus in there, along with your fee.”

“I wasn’t expecting that,” he said, obviously pleased.

“That last episode may have been a little hairy,” she said. “You deserve something extra.”

“I’d have settled for a few explanations from you about how you managed it all.” He looked at her admiringly.

“I couldn’t have done it without your help,” she told him. “Not just any P.I. would have suited. Did I tell you I interviewed three before someone recommended you?”

“I get most of my jobs word of mouth. What’ll you have?” he asked as a waitress stopped at the booth. “My treat today. Shall we celebrate?”

“I’ll just have a cup of tea and an English muffin,” she said. “They don’t have the wherewithal for celebrations here.”

He ordered coffee and a pastry and as soon as the waitress left said, “Now tell me how you did it with what little information I gave you.”

“Easy,” she said. “Almost too easy. First I took home an armload of books on everything pertaining to psychology and boned up on all phases of it. Also, I made a point of reading the books constantly whenever Hugh was home. Then I started making up things to tell him. I told him about a fictitious bridge game in which I knew in advance every card that would be played. Then I made up something about a friend not joining another friend and me for lunch after I predicted she wouldn’t. That was the same night I had you call at nine on the dot and ask if Jimmy had come in yet. I had predicted that the phone would ring and that it would be a wrong number. I think that call shook Hugh up a little. The second time I had you call — that was when I chatted on about Sheila and her daughter’s expected baby — well, Sheila had called that afternoon with the information that her daughter had just been taken to the hospital.”

“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I just listened and marveled. You should have been an actress.”

“There was some luck involved also,” she admitted. “I wrote a letter to myself from someone who never existed, someone I supposedly hadn’t seen in ages, and then predicted the letter would arrive in the mail and what it would say. It was sheer luck that Hugh was home when the letter came, otherwise I would have had to wait until he came home to open the letter, and that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.”

He broke out in a big laugh. “You didn’t really need to hire a P.I., Nellie, my girl.”

“Oh yes, I did. You were the one who found out who the woman was, where she lived, and all the vital information. All I had was a suspicion that he was seeing another woman. Also, getting into her two suites was a stroke of genius. I couldn’t have done that. Knowing what her places looked like was really what did the trick.”

“Simple,” he said. “All I had to do was tip the room-service guy into letting me wheel in the trolley.”

They were both quiet as the waitress returned with their orders. Then he said, “I’ll miss our little sessions. Do you think we could see each other now and then?”

She was thoughtful for a minute. “Not right away. I’m going to do some traveling for a month or two. I always wanted to go to Paris for shopping, but Hugh was too busy to get away and too tight to let me go. Also, I thought a cruise would be nice, maybe to somewhere like Alaska. But after that…” She gave him her one-hundred-watt smile. “Yes, Ivan, I think we should keep in touch.”

He sipped his coffee, looking at her over the rim of the cup. “I’m not sure but what you really are psychic. How did you know your husband was going to rush out to the balcony and fall and kill himself when I went in there with a stocking over my head and a gun in my hand? All I said was what you told me to: “This is my territory, you don’t belong here.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought he might have a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. It never occurred to me he’d try to get away.”

“But I never would have shot him, or the woman. Murder’s not my thing. What made him panic like that?”

She gave a little shrug, then laughed. “It must have been the power of suggestion.”