The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

ON SPIRITUALISM

In October 1888, on assignment for the Philadelphia Sun, I was in the audience when Margaret Fox, the founding mother of the Spiritualist movement, stood before a packed hall at the Academy of Music in New York and confessed that she had been “instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too-confiding public.” A year later she recanted that recantation, bringing the whole filthy business full circle. One had the sense that it could never have been otherwise, that by discrediting herself as a reliable witness to her own actions, Margaret had achieved what had always been her objective. All she would own to was her invincible capriciousness. The press called her confession “the Death Blow to Spiritualism.” But the Spiritualists ignored Margaret’s call to disarm, and ultimately the founder was abandoned by the religion she created.

Violet Petra never publicly admitted to fraud. There are those who still believe she was the genuine article — a clairvoyant of extraordinary powers. However, near the end, there was a confession of sorts, wrung from her in a paroxysm of sobbing before a solitary auditor in the lounge of a shabby Philadelphia hotel, on a chilly afternoon in November 1894.

I was that auditor.

Fraud has long been one of my interests. Doubtless it began in childhood when, like most children, I experimented with pushing the casual fib to the outright lie. I said I’d drunk my milk when I’d actually poured it down the drain; I pretended to be ill when I was perfectly well; I blamed a little friend for breaking a toy I’d broken myself. I remember these three episodes because my falsity was quickly detected and the consequences were harsh. The devil, my mother adjured me, is a successful liar and his reward is a permanent residence in hell.

In my childish imagination this made perfect sense. For the duration of my effort to carry off the thing-not-true, I had felt I was living in a furnace. I gave up lying and became, in fact and in practice, a seeker after truth, such as I find it. And when I do find it, it is my business to record it for the public benefit. I am that risible hobgoblin of the contemporary male novelist’s imagination: the female journalist.

In the course of my investigations, I’ve closely observed some talented and professional frauds — they abound in our times as in all others — and have even been caught up in the havoc they inevitably wreak upon those weak-minded enough to trust them. Truly accomplished frauds are rare, but there exists a superfluity of ordinary and presumably intelligent people who are eager to court and to credit them.

The perversity of the liar is that he does not, as I did, dread the thought of being caught in the lie. In fact, the likelihood of exposure is for him no more bothersome than a buzzing insect, and his triumph is most complete when the contempt he has always on reserve for those who catch him out can be fully brought to bear.

A constant alternation between contempt and belligerence is essential to the amour-propre of the confirmed liar. He may be said to be driven from the pillar of one to the post of the other, a hectic gauntlet that constitutes for him a simulacrum of identity. As wind fills a sail, the flagrant dispersal of that which he knows to be false inflates his sense of self. His need for an audience is great, for a podium even greater, and it matters not if his auditors be only his family taken hostage at the dining table or a mob of strangers gathered on a street corner; his lies must be broadcast on the first available soil, they must be watered and cultivated and encouraged to bloom into misshapen flowers — not of evil — but of banality and inutility.

FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE CHARISMATIC SPEAKER AND CLAIRVOYANT MEDIUM VIOLET PETRA

I first saw Violet Petra in 1874 at a private gathering in the home of her patron, a banker named Jacob Wilbur, at his well-appointed town house near Washington Square in New York. She was very young, scarcely more than a girl, and her performance, while affecting, only hinted at what was to come. There was a rage for female trance speaking at that time and men of substance were combing the provinces for attractive young women to grace their parlors with prodigies of clairvoyance. Often these sessions began with a display of the speaker’s better than average knowledge of a subject; say, astronomy or Roman history, chosen at random by the assembled guests. It was understood that the speaker’s eloquence was attributable to the intercession of “spirit guides,” deceased know-alls who spoke through her, without her will or even her consciousness. Some of these were historical figures — Ben Franklin was a popular resource, which struck me as appropriate, given his reputation for meddling in the affairs of others and his preference for the company of pretty women. Once the fad for guides got under way, American Indians were much in evidence, presumably chosen for their spiritual purity. These guides served as conduits to the immense, sunny, happy land where the spirits of the dead wandered aimlessly waiting for a summons from the loved ones they had left behind.

Violet Petra didn’t have a spirit guide at that first gathering in New York. She spoke for fifteen minutes on the subject of magnetic attraction and took a few questions written on scraps of paper and tossed into a hat. I remember one, an inquiry about the health of the questioner’s relative who had recently decamped for California. This traveler, described only as “my niece,” had insisted on making the trip to join her husband, though she knew herself to be in a delicate condition. Violet read out the question to the group in her soft, clear voice, keeping her gaze upon the paper. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, and she dropped her chin upon her breastbone, which caused her dark, waving hair to fall forward, curtaining her features. A long moment passed, long enough for the gentleman next to me to finger his pocket watch and the air to grow thick with anticipation. Then she lifted her face, brushing her hair back with one hand, and I saw the trademark oddity of her left eye, which bulged in its socket, the iris wandering off to one side.

This peculiarity of Violet Petra’s eye was to become part of her myth. According to the brief autobiographical account sometimes appended to her speaking programs, it was the result of her first contact with the spirit world, which occurred when she was nine years old in a meadow near her bucolic childhood home in upstate New York. It was a warm summer’s day, and she was busily gathering clover to weave into a crown. Her older sister, propped against a maple tree with her writing desk in her lap, was composing a letter. Little Violet could hear the crop-crop of her pony grazing near the fence of his pasture. The sun brushed the world with a liquid light outlining each flower in gold, or so it seemed to her. She felt a kiss of cool air against her cheek, once, twice. Startled, she brought her hand to touch the spot. A voice close to her ear whispered her name, a voice she recognized as belonging to her grandmother, which was odd, as she knew her grandmother was far away, at her home in Philadelphia. But here she was, gently summoning her granddaughter by her pet name, which was Viva. The delighted child raised her eyes and for a moment looked into her beloved granny’s sweetly smiling face. In the next moment, with the speed and thwack of an arrow striking a target, a bolt of light sliced into her left eyeball. She was knocked backward by the blow, and sprawled unconscious upon the clover with her bouquet still clutched in her hand.

Some hours later she woke up in her own bed. Her mother rose from her chair nearby, laying her knitting on the side table as, with tremulous lips and moistened eye, she approached her daughter. “Where’s Granny?” lisped the winsome child. “I know she’s here. She called me.”

Late that night a telegram arrived from Philadelphia with the woeful news that Violet’s grandmother, a sprightly widow of independent means and spirit who until that day enjoyed excellent health, had collapsed on the sidewalk outside her town house. Before a doctor could be summoned to her aid, she passed from this life, expiring, speechless, in the arms of a stranger.

I’ve never been able to determine whether this story had some basis in the original trauma that resulted in the peculiarity of Violet’s eye, or was entirely fabricated to take advantage of a condition predating her first experience of spirit communication. Apart from the autobiographical sketch and another carefully documented article that has to do with her accurate prediction of a shipwreck during the war, Violet Petra’s history is a carefully guarded secret. She appeared in Boston, like Venus, full blown from some westerly town she refuses to name. She was, she claims, eighteen at that time, but she may have been younger. Like many of her coreligionists, she has a thorough knowledge of the Bible, which book she holds in contempt. She has a strong background and a keen interest in geology, suggesting to me that Petra is not her real name.

I knew nothing about her that evening in Mr. Wilbur’s lavishly furnished drawing room. When she raised her face to her attentive audience, the alteration in her features — for it wasn’t just the eye; her complexion was deathly pale and her lips dark and tumid — was so striking that I joined in the general intake of breath. She coughed, bringing two fingers to her sternum, as if opening a path from her heart to her throat. When she spoke her voice was deeper than her ordinary speaking voice. It wasn’t an entirely different voice; it wasn’t, as is sometimes the case with female mediums, a masculine voice, but it had a sonorous, humorless gravity, an irresistible authority that held her listeners in her sway.

“Bridget and her baby son have come over,” she said. “They are happy, they send love to Aunt Jane.” She paused while Aunt Jane, who had revealed neither her own name nor that of her niece, burst into tears. “I hear another name,” Violet continued. “It’s Jack. No, it’s Zachary, Bridget is watching over him. All will be well.”

Zachary, the sobbing Aunt Jane testified, was Bridget’s younger brother, a boy of ten who was very ill; in fact, it was feared, near death’s door, and under the doctor’s watchful care.

Violet closed her eyes, her head tilted to one side in an attitude of listening. The room grew silent, but for the subdued weeping of the questioner, as all attempted to hear what the medium was evidently no longer hearing. Perhaps thirty seconds passed before she fell back in her chair and opened her eyes, a smile of pure serenity lingering about her lips. “Have I been helpful?” she asked pleasantly, hopefully. Mr. Wilbur’s enchanted guests burst into wild applause.

How wild a guess was it that a pregnant girl on her way to California wouldn’t survive the trip? Or that a child sick with fever would recover? The odds are even, and an educated surmise tips the scale this way or that. In the case of the sick child, his death could be passed off as the result of his dead sister’s calling him home to her. Either way, Violet Petra’s prediction was pretty safe.

Of course, diligent journalist that I am, I spent the following morning tracking down the ailing Zachary, which wasn’t difficult, as the family was eager to give out the glad news that the boy’s fever had broken during the night, that he was cheerful, hungry, eager to be out of bed, and that his full recovery was confidently anticipated by all who loved him.

AMONG THE SPIRITUALISTS

After that first trance-lecture in Mr. Wilbur’s lavish New York flat, I didn’t see or hear of Violet Petra, nor did my thoughts linger upon her, for ten years. During that time the Spiritualist movement flourished until its adherents were so numerous that a confession of orthodoxy was called for and briefly embraced. As Mr. William James has observed, “When a religion becomes an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over; the spring is dry,” and so it was for the quarrelsome Spiritualists. In 1872, failing to achieve unanimity at their national convention, they splintered into diverse camps. And by camps, I don’t mean associations of coreligionists with conflicting views, but actual meeting places, complete with grounds, tents, and cottages, materializing like ectoplasm at a séance on the shores of sparkling New England lakes, and serviced by railroads, restaurants, furniture movers, cleaners, farmers, farriers, florists, resident musicians, photographers, and butchers. No one knew where the spirits of the dead spent the winters, but once the last trace of frost had retreated from the hinterlands, they gathered at Silver Lake and Lake Pleasant in anticipation of their devotees among the living. These camp meetings were so popular that they came to the attention of the press, and so one hot afternoon in August, having boarded the train at Fitchburg, I alighted at Lake Pleasant clutching my valise, and followed the wooden walkway through a shady grove of white pine, past the open-air dance pavilion, and down the sturdy staircase to the wide and welcoming veranda of the gleaming new Lake Pleasant Hotel.

Inside was a bustle of people and a few barking dogs, all evidently acquainted with and enthusiastic about the prospect of long summer days and nights passed in one another’s company. As I approached the desk, the strain of a violin rose above the chatter, weaving a cheerful, countrified ribbon of sound through the general uproar. The mustached clerk greeted me with extreme affability; my reservation was in order and my key at the ready. He regretted that I had requested only four nights; or rather he maintained that I would regret it. “Once our guests arrive, they generally don’t want to leave. You won’t find better company or a more beautiful setting in the state.”

“It is a lovely spot,” I agreed.

“And no end of entertainments,” he continued, folding a printed sheet and pressing it upon me. “Here’s the daily program, and the list of speakers for the week. There’s a band concert at the shell twice a day, and the orchestra in the evening at the dance pavilion. Everyone enjoys the dancing, young and old.”

I opened the sheet and glanced at the headings: “Instrumental Music,” “Vocal Music,” “Illuminations,” “Public and Test Mediums,” “Entertainments,” “Boating,” “Board and Lodging.”

“I had no idea it was so festive,” I observed.

“Well, Miss Grant,” replied the sharp-witted clerk. “You’re not among the Methodists here.”

I smiled knowingly. The Methodist and Spiritualist brethren were notoriously antipathetic, though they have at times shared the same campgrounds. Some years ago their summer meetings overlapped at Lake Pleasant and the results were, especially on the Methodist side, rancorous. “They have given themselves over to Satan,” the Methodist preacher complained to the local newspaper in a letter printed beneath the caustic heading “The Devil Takes Lake Pleasant.” The editor responded that most townspeople preferred the Spiritualist meetings, as “all are welcome at the dances and musical events.” After that, the Methodists retreated, and the Spiritualists virtually owned Lake Pleasant.

Considering the increased level of eccentricity facilitated by residence among the like-minded, I climbed the stairs and turned the key to my small but comfortably furnished room. If one person in a crowd of skeptics falls on the floor and declares that the spirit of Black Feather has a message for Mrs. Green, he may be presumed mad and carted off to an asylum. But if all the bystanders agree that Black Feather is as reliable as the newspapers, then the message will be duly delivered to Mrs. Green, and it won’t be long before someone else receives a message from Black Feather, or White Arrow, or Pocahontas, and the circle will begin to close out anyone who doesn’t find recourse to dead Indians a perfectly legitimate practice. There I was, unpacking my blouses in a sunny room in an efficiently run hotel booked solid with pleasure seekers who, on a summer day dedicated to the salubrious pastimes of boating, singing, dining, whist playing, and dancing, would find time for a séance or a session with the spirit photographer. I gazed from my window at two women seated on a wooden bench shaded by towering pines: a white-haired dowager with hooded eyes and a hawkish nose, engaged in feverish conversation with a plumpish matron in a billowing white lawn dress, the bodice trimmed in pink satin, languorously fanning her face, which was partially obscured by the wide brim of her straw hat. Farther down the dirt-packed lane, an elderly man with a flowing white beard, his plain farmer’s flannels covered by a long striped linen apron, pulled a wagon laden with colorful vegetables toward a cluster of bright summer cottages fronting on the lake. It didn’t look like an asylum, nor did it resemble a religious community, but it was, in my view, surely a little of both.

When I had unpacked my valise and hung my apparel in the wardrobe, I took a seat at the writing table and perused the program, which I noted was professionally printed on good-quality paper. There was a long list of speakers’ names and a short one of “Public and Test Mediums,” most of whom were men. Some qualified their listing with their specialties. There was Mr. Cyrus Walker, Slate Writing Medium, and Mrs. J. J. Spence, Clairvoyant Physician, and Dr. Charles Hodges, Magnetic Healer. I’d done a little research in preparation for my assignment, and some of the names were familiar to me.

My editor would be satisfied with a lively description of the scene, but my curiosity was aroused, and I had in mind a longer, investigative piece, something I might offer freelance to a journal — I knew of a likely one — devoted to debunking all things unscientific.

But how, exactly, might I best carry out my investigations? Should I fake an illness and seek the services of the “clairvoyant physician,” or simply appear at a test séance as what I was, a skeptic requiring persuasion? How close was the community, how incestuous the chatter among the practitioners? Upward of five thousand visitors were expected through the season; should I seek anonymity in the crowd or declare my intention to herald the glories of the Spiritualist movement to the world at large?

At length, noting in the column headed “Board and Lodging” the possibility of dining at the Lakeside Café, I made up my mind to do nothing more investigative than seeking out my supper. It was too warm in my room and lakeside dining might include a breeze.

This dining establishment consisted of a tent with low wooden sides and a wide, planked floor. The canvas on the lakeside, raised to form an awning, gave the diners a view of the various boating parties gliding on the smooth water. The tables were set with clean linens and vases of wildflowers, and the ceiling strung with Japanese paper lanterns that were not yet lit, as the sun was still low in the western sky. Though several groups were already seated, the room was by no means full. A young woman in a starched apron showed me to a table near the water. I ordered my food — there was no menu, only a few choices, fish or roast beef, two soups, potatoes or green beans — and settled myself, glancing about at my fellow diners. A breeze, as I had hoped, rustled among the lanterns, but it was stale and damp, like a human breath. I could feel my hair frizzing along my forehead and at the nape of my neck. At the table nearest me, an elderly couple earnestly spooned up soup as if engaged in a competition to empty their bowls. Beyond them, his back to me, a gentleman with wavy silver hair and wide shoulders stretching the seams of a striped linen jacket laughed abruptly. I leaned out past the soup-eaters to take in his entertaining companion, a young woman I could see only in profile. She was small and willowy, dressed in an odd, vaguely Grecian gown of white crepe, her heavy dark hair bound in a topknot and pierced by two large white feathers. She gazed at the man, who was dabbing his napkin to his lips in an attempt to stifle his laughter. Her own lips were slightly parted, her eyebrows lifted, her expression hesitant, as if she had not expected to provoke hilarity.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, spreading the napkin in his lap with feigned solemnity.

“I don’t see what’s funny about it,” she protested, but amiably, willing, with his assistance, to discover the lighter side of her own discourse.

“It’s just that you are so charming, my dear,” he said.

“Ah,” she replied.

Their waitress arrived with two plates of meat swimming in pale gravy. “Here’s your dinner,” the man said.

A crush of guests gathered at the opening of the tent filtered into the room, joyful and cacophonous, swooping down upon the tables like an invasion of crows on a calm summer evening. The waitresses went among them, taking orders, filling water pitchers and glasses, lighting the lanterns with long tapers, and in a few moments the scene was transformed and what had seemed a triste, tacked-together affair became a lively, glittering hall. My fish arrived, its flat dead eye gazing solemnly up at me. The flesh looked a little dry, I thought, though the waitress assured me it had been pulled from the lake only hours earlier. As I consumed my former fellow lake resident, I allowed myself the pleasure of anonymity in a place where strangers are few. I guessed at the relationships between various couples, wondering as I watched them which were the mediums and which their patrons. Or were they called clients? Sitters, perhaps, as séances involved sitting. Or seekers. It would be useful to know the agreed upon euphemisms of the Spiritualist trade.

I could no longer hear the conversation between the couple nearest my table, but my wandering eye returned to the fetching young woman, who had finished her dinner and was now tucking into a large slice of pie. As her jaws worked, the feathers in her hair shifted lightly from side to side. I couldn’t see the face of her companion, whose hands moved among the tea service, pouring out a cup for each of them, pinching sugar cubes from the bowl with the silver tongs — two for her, I noted. I thought he must be amused to see the relish with which his companion — was she his daughter? — devoured her dessert. She scraped the fork across the plate, gathering up the last crumbs, her free hand moving out to pull in the cup of tea.

There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t place her. She was an intriguing combination of a child and an adult. Her back was perfectly straight and strong; there was nothing gangly about the long pale neck that rose above the artfully arranged folds of her gown, or in the muscular forearms visible beneath the gauzy sleeves. The top-heavy mass of luxuriant hair gleamed with health. She looked strong enough to climb a tree, yet she was so slender, her movements so graceful, her hands small, manicured, the fingers tapered; all this gave the impression of delicacy and fragility. With her jaunty top feathers, she was like a hummingbird that hovers over the lily, whirring gently, its feathers smooth and sleek, its bony chest quivering over a heart the size of a grain of rice, giving no sign of the power and tenacity that allow it to fly the length of a continent. Her napkin slipped from her lap, and as she leaned down to retrieve it she felt my eyes upon her and glanced up at me. She smiled affably, as one safely smiles at a stranger in a sociable setting. I felt my own lips compressing at the corners, returning the courtesy. Still, her wide gray eyes lingered a moment beyond the smile, and I was conscious of a change in every detail of her expression, an alarming, speaking change, best described as a shift from “Have we met?” to “Save me.” Then she fished up the napkin and, straightening effortlessly, returned her attention to her table companion.

And that was when it came to me who she was: Violet Petra. That simple girl I’d seen in a rich man’s parlor so many years ago. She was much altered, thinner, paler, lovelier, a woman with a style all her own, and evidently a new patron, for Mr. Wilbur had been a round, balding man who by no feat of nature could have transformed himself into the impressive and well-coiffed individual who rose from his seat, extending his arm, and his protection, to the youthful Miss Petra. As they passed through the summer dining room, heads came up; greetings and hand flutterings were exchanged. And then the handsome couple passed out into the firefly-lit night.

On my return to the hotel, I learned that Miss Petra neither lectured nor advertised as a “test medium.” “She’s a reclusive lady, and much sought after. She only does private sittings,” my loquacious clerk informed me. “Folks make their appointments months ahead of time. She’s that much in demand.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, they say it’s because she is such a powerful clairvoyant and there’s no showmanship about her. She just asks you a few questions and then she knows all about you and your loved ones.”

“Dead and alive?” I said.

“Mostly the former, I’d say. You can find out about your living relatives fast enough with the telegraph these days.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, taking up my heavy room key. “We live in marvelous times.”

A MESSAGE UNDER THE DOOR

This is the text of the remarkable document that appeared with scarcely a whisper on the bare wooden floor inside my door. I was standing in my chemise at the washstand, patting my neck and shoulders with the hand towel, and I was momentarily startled by the manifestation of the envelope. My first thought was that it must be a message from the management. I listened for the sound of departing footsteps, but there was nothing save the rustle of the curtains in the evening breeze, carrying the muted voices of a few late-night guests returning from the lake. I hung up my towel, and, crossing the room, took up the envelope. The note was written on hotel stationery in an open, leftward-slanting script. I read it over twice, noting that the word “blessed” had been struck out and replaced by the word “idyllic.” A telling revision, though what it told, I couldn’t say. Taking the curious page to the writing table, I seated myself and read it over a third time. I thought it playful and daring, yet studied and designed to disarm. The careful dissembling of the author’s true intentions in the formulas of acquaintance-making and welcome, the puerile enthusiasm for sweets, the consciousness of possessing an element of drama and urgency in the manner of delivery, the final titillating, seductive wink (“Can I tempt you?” said the serpent, proffering the … doughnut), and the schoolgirlish closing, all fascinated me. No expectation of a negative reply was alluded to, no precise time was set, though presumably, I had best arrive in time for the doughnuts. Chocolate and doughnuts, I thought, a child’s breakfast. I wondered if the gentleman of the night before would be in attendance.

And I wondered who was paying for the suite with the charming balcony.

And why the “powerful clairvoyant” so seriously in demand was eager to make my acquaintance. What did she know about me?

I put the missive aside and climbed into my narrow bed, where I slept tolerably well, rising at six, as is my habit. Once dressed, I found I had time for a stroll to the lake. Wanting to be alert for my meeting with the clairvoyant, I stopped in at the dining tent for a cup of coffee, which I drank at my ease, gazing out at the amusing miniature steamboat drifting on its anchor chain above its rippled reflection in the calm water.

At a quarter past eight, I presented myself at the door of Room 204. Before I could raise my hand, the door flew open, and Violet Petra, dressed in a filmy white muslin gown heavily embroidered with tiny violets and embellished by a gold satin sash at the waist and a froth of old lace at the sleeves, her masses of dark hair loose and curling over her shoulders, her full lips rouged and parted, her clear gray eyes fixing tightly on my face, greeted me with the breathless affirmation of her own psychic powers. “I knew you would come,” she declared.

“How did you know?” I asked.

She ignored my question, her eyes flickering over my plain blouse and dirndl skirt, as she stepped back into the room, inviting me to follow with a wave of her hand.

Near the open doors to the balcony, a round table with a good linen cloth was laid for two. Between the plates an ornate china pot crouched above a plate of doughnuts covered by a screen cage. On a side table, next to a beige silk upholstered chaise longue, I noticed a copy of Godey’s and the daily camp news bulletin. The Boston paper, much rummaged, was scattered across the carpet. So our clairvoyant kept up with fashions and current events. Violet pulled a chair from the table and bid me take it. “We have much to talk about, I think,” she said.

I let her stand a moment as I appraised her offer with a purposefully mystified eye. I wasn’t willing to play the game of instant intimacy, which she evidently had in mind. As she apprehended my reluctance, for she was an adept at reading the subtlest changes of mood in her audience, her brows drew together thoughtfully. “You must think me very forward,” she said.

I advanced to the chair, maintaining my puzzled air as she took her seat across from me. “I admit,” I said, “I wonder how you came to know my name.”

She fussed over the pot, which had a candle beneath it to keep the contents warm, and poured the fragrant beverage into the cups. “Oh,” she said lightly, as if my naïveté was amusing, “everyone knows your name. Or everyone who reads the register, and many do. We’re a close community here, you’ll find, and you are a newcomer. There’s a great curiosity about you.”

“I see,” I said, lifting the cup and sipping the chocolate while she served us each a doughnut. She smiled at me so candidly that, as I set the cup back in its saucer, I decided to drop my defensive manner. “It’s very good,” I said, nodding at the chocolate.

“It is,” she agreed. “I never drink it at home, but when we’re here, I want it every morning.”

I remarked the plural pronoun, presumably not the royal “We.” “Are you here with your family?”

She lowered her eyes to the plate and said, with just the right vibration of regret, “I have no family. They’ve all passed away, some years ago now.”

“Then the gentleman you were dining with last night was not your relative.”

“Mr. Babin is my sponsor.”

“Which means?”

“He arranges things for me, introductions, appointments, things of that sort. Sometimes I have speaking engagements, but only for small invited groups. He sees to all that.”

“He’s your manager.”

Her spine stiffened; she fixed me in an icy glare. “I’m not an actress, Miss Grant.”

Her hauteur made me smile.

She looked down, picked at her skirt, failing to entirely suppress an answering smile flickering at the corners of her mouth. “Really,” she said. “You are a most exasperating person.” Then she helped herself to an unladylike big bite of her doughnut.

“I haven’t had chocolate since I was a girl,” I said.

She managed to smile through her zesty chewing, then swallowed hard. “Of course,” she said. “You drink coffee, and lots of it.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Don’t all journalists drink lots of coffee?”

“What makes you think I’m a journalist?”

“I don’t think you are a journalist. I know you are.”

“Really?” I felt rattled to have been unmasked so early in my investigations. “And how do you know that?”

She dropped the uneaten fragment of her doughnut onto the plate and patted her lips with a napkin, her eyes mischievous, almost gleeful at my discomfiture. Carefully she opened the square of cloth and laid it across her skirt, lowering her eyes to her preoccupied hands. “Oh, I know things,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”

“What? People’s professions? Is that clairvoyance?”

As she lifted her cup, her eyes still lowered, the martial strains of a band striking up near the lake jauntified the quiet atmosphere of the room, but when Violet looked up again, her expression was mirthless, even sullen. “No,” she said. “It didn’t require clairvoyance to know who you are. I read the Philadelphia papers, and I’ve a good memory for names.”

“I see,” I said, which was true. I did see quite a long way, but not far enough, as it turned out. I saw only what she wanted me to see: that she was a very pretty, frank, ambitious little woman. Nothing she said or did would be of any importance to me personally; she would not, she could not make a difference to me, yet I believed there was more to her than met the eye. Above all, I believed she was a charlatan, and as such, no matter how she might admire me, no matter that she might actually feel affection for me, someday she would be driven to deceive me and then to despise me for having failed her, for having been deceived by her. I determined to interest myself in her because I wanted to expose her. To do that I would have to catch her off her guard, and what I most clearly observed at this first interview was that her guard was very high, remote, and impressively fortified. She was innately cautious, perversely noncommittal. She presented what she knew was presentable. What was not, she kept to herself.

I also observed that she wasn’t suspicious of me. Her desire to know me was entirely a product of her self-interest. She thought I might be in a position to advance what she would have called her “cause.”

Her defensive mood had veered abruptly back to gaiety. “Are you disappointed?” she teased. “Is it just too ordinary of me to take note of a byline?”

“Not ordinary at all, in my experience,” I replied. “Most people don’t notice the names of journalists, unless they happen to be famous, which I decidedly am not.”

“Not yet,” she agreed. “But you might be. I thought your articles about that murder trial in Uniontown were first rate.”

I sipped my chocolate, raising my eyebrows over the rim of my cup, stupidly flattered and knowing I was stupid, but unable to help myself. I was particularly proud of the series she named.

The accused in the Uniontown trial was a young, handsome, charming, and promising lawyer named Nicholas L. Dukes, who was engaged to marry a wealthy young woman named Lizzie Nutt. For reasons no one could explain, including Dukes himself, shortly before the wedding day the future husband sent several outraged letters to his fiancée’s father, Captain A. C. Nutt, alleging that Lizzie was known to have been “criminally intimate” with a number of men and that he must therefore withdraw his proposal of marriage. Captain Nutt, mystified and incensed at the offense to his daughter’s honor, arranged a meeting with her accuser. During that confrontation, Dukes produced a pistol, and shot his future father-in-law to death. Dukes claimed to have acted in self-defense, as the older gentleman had threatened to strike him with his walking stick.

Captain Nutt was a prominent citizen and the community was much agitated by the trial, which was a long one. At last the fatherless Lizzie appeared to testify against her suitor. There was a hush when she entered the courtroom, for Lizzie was a woman of great beauty, poise, and distinction. She expressed her bemusement at her fiancé’s bizarre letters to her father. “If he didn’t want to marry me,” she explained calmly to the prosecutor, “he had only to say so. Why send slanderous messages to my father? I don’t understand it.”

I couldn’t understand it either. Surely this elegant, lovely, and wealthy young woman would have no difficulty finding another suitor, and it was equally clear that she was unlikely to be showering her favors upon the butcher or the postman. But Dukes was not on trial for slander, and in the end, to the fury of the mob in the street outside the court, he was acquitted of all charges.

Violet leaned back in her chair, pressing her fingertips to her lips, her eyes searching my face intently with an unwavering solicitude that unnerved me. “You drew those characters so clearly,” she said. “You must see all manner of cruelty and violence in your work.”

What was she imagining? That I followed murderers down dark alleys? That I frequented squalid tenements? “Not really,” I said. “I tend to see the consequences of cruelty and violence.”

“Those articles were so well written; it was like reading a story.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking up a doughnut. In the hopes of closing the subject of my profession I asked, “Do you live in Philadelphia? When you’re not here?”

“When I’m in Philadelphia, I stay with Mr. and Mrs. Babin,” she said.

“And where is your home?”

“I don’t, strictly speaking, have a home,” she said mysteriously. Outside the band, audibly on the move in the direction of the hotel, broke into the refrain of “Oh, My Darling Clementine.” Violet smiled, gazing at the balcony. “You are lost and gone forever,” she sang in a clear, high voice. “I like that song.” Turning back to me, she said, “Do you?”

I nodded. The marchers had paused beneath our window, and the music was so loud I didn’t attempt to speak over it. The voices of two men standing on the wide side balcony broke out raucously, “In a cavern, in a canyon …” while Violet and I sat smiling blandly at each other. I finished the doughnut, a heavy, sweet, chewy wad covered in fine sugar, which cascaded over my dark skirt. I dusted the powder away with my napkin while the band played on. At last, with applause above and shouts below, the marchers turned away, taking Clementine back to the lake where they had found her.

“They do that every morning,” Violet informed me.

“Surely not the same song?”

“No,” she said. “They have a repertoire.”

“How entertaining.”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her chin in her palms, studying me closely as if trying to determine what sort of animal I was. “Have you come among us as a skeptic or as a seeker?” she asked.

“Neither,” I assured her. “I try to maintain a professional objectivity at all times. Though I can’t deny I’m curious about what goes on here.”

She nodded, pursing her lips thoughtfully. Then her eyes brightened and she stretched her hand toward me, tapping her fingers conspiratorially on my arm. “Are you ‘on assignment’?”

I laughed at her eagerness. “I’ll be doing a short piece about the attractions of Lake Pleasant,” I said. “The charm of the setting, the comforts of the hotel, that sort of thing.” This wasn’t entirely a lie. I had a longer piece in mind, but my editor’s charge had simply been: “See what’s going on over there,” and he was giving me only four days of room and board in which to carry out that quest.

Violet was downcast. “It’s not just a resort, you know,” she said.

“I know that,” I replied. “But what I find odd is how much it does feel like a resort. Everyone seems so determined to have a good time.”

“Why shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves?” she replied. “The spirits of our loved ones are among us.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“Of course, what?” she asked gently, as if she suspected that my mind had wandered.

“The spirits,” I said, wagging my fingers at the air, where, presumably, they hovered.

“Which you don’t believe in.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Have you never had an experience of …” She paused, searching for the word that wouldn’t offend me. “Communication?” She paused again. “With someone you know is not …” Another pause.

“Alive?” I concluded for her. “No. I must say, I have not.”

She closed her eyes, touching two fingers to the bridge of her nose. It was the briefest of gestures and appeared to be entirely involuntary, so much so that I congratulated myself for having noticed it. In the next moment she rested her chin back on her hand. As her eyes, calm and solicitous, recommenced searching my face, she asked, “Not even on that night, in that cold, dark little room, when your mother died?”

ON GHOSTS

When asked, most people will tell you they don’t believe in ghosts. I know this, I’ve asked. I also know that with a little pressing it emerges that everyone has a ghost story. In an otherwise ordinary life of toil and struggle there intruded in this house, in that room, on that night, something extraordinary, inexplicable, something not of this world. One heard something: footsteps on a stair, a child crying, whispering voices in the hall; another saw something: a curtain rustling in a closed room, the impress of a head upon a pillow, a locked window standing open, a shadow stretching across a floor and up a wall. There was an oppressive atmosphere of sadness or malevolence, sometimes associated with a crime or a tragedy that one sensed upon entering the scene. Even the most thoroughgoing materialist has some little anecdotal evidence, some moment of doubting all, now easily recalled, and eagerly dismissed.

Ghosts. Great Caesar’s. Hamlet’s father. Christmas Past.

Violet was right. My mother died in a cold, dark little room in a scarcely respectable boardinghouse not far from the old Philadelphia station. We could hear the engines, like tired cart animals, wheezing and coughing at the end of their runs. We had once had better lodgings, but as the money ran out and her illness wasted the flesh from her bones, our options had dwindled. I wrote pleading letters to distant relatives, but as we kept changing addresses, I could never be sure there had been no reply, so I wrote again, reminding them of the new address.

In exchange for our miserable room and two meals a day, I did the washing up, assisted the laundress, cleaned the downstairs parlor, and ran errands for the proprietor, a blowsy, furious Irishwoman who could never be satisfied. That night I came in, exhausted from a run halfway across town in the bitter cold with only my cloth coat to protect me from the chill. I lit the lamp and carried it to the bed stand. Mother lay on her side, her breathing labored, her eyes wide and staring at the open door of the wardrobe. I stroked her forehead, which was damp and cool, arranged her blanket, and spoke reassuringly of the bread and cheese I’d saved from my dinner, though I knew she’d lost interest in food and was unlikely to be tempted. She seemed not to hear me or even to be aware of me. I turned away to pour some water from the pitcher into the glass, and when I looked back she was moving her legs under the blanket, flailing her arms as if she intended to rise from the bed, which I knew she hadn’t the strength to do. My effort to capture her hands was stymied when she suddenly gripped both my wrists hard, pulling me closer. I tried to break away; I was truly frightened by the power and fierce animation that had come over her. She raised herself from the pillow, moving her dry lips, her eyes burning with the urgency of her message. “I want to stay here,” she said. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here. I must stay here.” The effort to say this much — she had scarcely spoken for several days — exhausted her and she fell back, releasing my wrists. She lay panting while I looked down at her in the gloom, trying to think what I should do. Water, I stupidly thought, and turned away again. I heard a long intake of breath, followed by a quick plosive puff of air, like a child making a wish as she blows the fuzz from a dandelion. When I looked back her sunken eyes were closed, her mouth ajar, and I knew at once that she was gone.

She who had wanted, in spite of our poverty and friendlessness, to stay here.

I went to the door, stood there, but couldn’t open it. Something heavy and adamant stayed my hand. I approached the bed again, noting with a shudder that Mother’s eyes were now open, lightless and sightless. I crossed to the wardrobe — why, I asked myself, had it been left open? I could hear my own heartbeat, but otherwise the stillness in the room was confounding.

I stretched out my hand, laying my palm flat on the smooth wood of the panel. “Phoebe,” Mother said, in the exhausted, petulant voice I knew so well. “Don’t close the door.”

With a shout, I darted to the hall door, threw it open, and rushed out onto the landing. Mr. Widener, a fellow boarder, stood on the stair gazing wonderingly up at me.

“Sir,” I cried. “Please help me. My mother has passed away.”

I was fifteen years old.

ENTER THE PATRON

How did I respond to Violet’s unsolicited display of her clairvoyant powers that first morning at Lake Pleasant? I don’t now perfectly remember, but I got past it somehow, probably by employing the journalist’s strategy of failing to acknowledge that anything exceptional has happened. I must have changed the subject, because we were talking about the origins of the Scalpers marching band when there was a sharp rap at the door and Mr. Jeremiah Babin, evidently expected by my hostess, appeared, having come on purpose to make my acquaintance. I recognized him at once as the distinguished gentleman from the café the night before. He regretted that he hadn’t been informed of my presence, as he would certainly have invited me to join their table if he had. It was agreed that I should do just that for the rest of my visit, unless, of course, I had other engagements. Mr. Babin was respectful of my profession and approving of my mission. “I am at your disposal,” he declared. “You must ask me any questions that come to your mind. I am something of an authority on our residents here.”

“He’s something of a legal counsel to half of them,” Violet observed wryly. “But he won’t tell you their secrets.”

Mr. Babin chuckled at her witticism. “Confidentiality is incumbent upon me.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said. “Journalists have ethical obligations as well.” They both nodded knowingly at this assertion.

In the afternoons, Violet had appointments with “visitors” who craved messages from the next world or advice in this one, as it was known that her intuitions were acute in both venues. While she was thus employed, I made my investigations of the camp. I attended a lecture entitled “Summerland Eternal” by Dr. Albert Weevil at the speakers’ “grove,” enjoyed an excellent concert of Strauss waltzes at the Dance Pavilion, visited the bookstore where I bought the local papers — the camp was served by a surprising number of these, with names like The Wildwood Messenger and the Lake Pleasant Siftings—climbed up to the “highlands” for an ice cream at Gussie’s Tea Room, worked on my notes in the hotel reading room, or passed a pleasant hour catching up on the latest New York and British literary journals with which this bizarre outpost was impressively supplied.

On two occasions Mr. Jeremiah Babin joined me for a stroll around the lake, during which he divulged, at length and in detail, the dramatic story of how he had come to be so importantly connected to the clairvoyant Miss Petra, and how privileged he considered himself to be in that connection.

“I understand she lives in your house,” I commented.

“She does,” he admitted. “And I hope she may never leave us.”

“Then your wife feels as you do.”

“Oh, yes. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that Miss Petra has rescued my dear wife from a despondency that threatened her very life.”

“How wonderful,” I said.

“Yes.” He nodded, gazing out across the lake at the neat façade of the hotel wherein Violet Petra was perhaps at that very moment rescuing another sufferer. “To have such power,” he mused, “and yet to wear it so lightly.”

I agreed. Violet was a study in contrasts: a lighthearted, silly-headed, fashion-conscious child-woman whose influence was coveted by a bevy of large, prosperous, educated, self-confident men and women, all of whom willingly entrusted to her — in my view — their sanity.

“Do you think she knows,” I asked her patron, “how much power she has?”

He paused on the path, turning upon me a thoughtful, serious look. After a moment he blinked a few times, as if to disperse an unproductive line of thought. When he spoke, his tone was rueful. “My dear Miss Grant,” he said. “Let us hope not.”

A TRAGEDY RECOUNTED

Jeremiah Babin occupied himself chiefly in the administration of his family’s business and real estate interests. The fortune had its origins in the distant past when an enterprising relation cornered the Canadian fur trade, but it was solidified by lucrative investments in the railroad, the manufacture of steam engines, and the acquisition of vast tracts of real estate in the now burgeoning middle of the country. Jeremiah’s wife, Virginia, née Millbury, though of an old and respectable Boston family, had so many beautiful and charming sisters that her dowry was not sufficient to attract any but the most sincere suitors. Given that among these sisters, Virginia was neither the most beautiful nor the most charming — though all agreed she possessed that most winning of female virtues, a sweet disposition — her marriage was widely considered something of a coup. That she adored her tall, handsome, rich husband was a given. The marriage was blessed with two children, a boy, Victor, and a girl, Melody.

Like so many in their set, the Babins moved among their houses from season to season; spring in New York, summers in Maine or Newport, fall at the family’s manse in Philadelphia, and winter in Florida, though Jeremiah was sometimes forced by his business affairs to remain in Philadelphia through the early snows. It was in December during one such delay in the family’s migrations that tragedy struck a devastating blow.

All that morning, as a light snow drifted down from the pristine white sheet of the sky, the children had pleaded with Miss Jekyll, their governess, to be allowed a sledding expedition in the park. Diligently they worked at their lessons in hopes of the adventure, and at lunch they were rewarded when their mother, smiling at their eagerness, granted their teacher’s request. They had not far to go; the spacious plains of the park began just across the road from the Babins’ big stone house on Chestnut Street. When Victor and Melody were sufficiently wrapped in fleecy hats, scarves, gloves, woolen stockings, and fur-lined boots, and their sleds extracted from beneath the stair landing, they ventured out into the chilly air while their mother looked on indulgently from an upstairs window. The trio stood at the curb, each child holding a sled cord with one hand and Miss Jekyll’s kid-gloved fingers with the other. The traffic was light. A carriage passed on one side; a gentleman on horseback trotted by on the other. When the way was clear, they hurried into the cobbled street. Halfway across, Miss Jekyll’s boot skidded on an icy patch, and as Virginia watched from above, the governess came down awkwardly upon her side. The children dropped their sleds, rushing to her aid; Victor manfully bent over her shoulder to offer his assistance. Melody, standing behind him, looked back at the house, spotted her mother’s anxious face at the window, and waved. Miss Jekyll sat up in the street, adjusting her hat.

From out of nowhere, or so it seemed, though it was actually from around the corner, a cab hurtled into view. The horses were galloping full out, their muscular necks stretched to the limit, their heavy lips folded back over the bits, green with foam. Steam rose from their wet nostrils, their great chests heaved, and the furiously grinding hooves struck and struck the cobbles with the indifference of machine pistons. The driver had braced his boots against the ridge at the front of his box and wrapped the reins around his forearms. He was pulling with such force that his back was nearly horizontal to his seat. His hat was gone, his face crimson with fury and terror, his mouth open wide, teeth bared. His eyes looked down his face, focused on the surging heads of his horses. He couldn’t see the helpless woman, the attendant children, huddled in the street.

Virginia screamed and threw herself against the window, tearing at the sash, though it was certainly too late. By the time she had pulled it free and the cold air rushed in, carrying the din of the approaching annihilation, Miss Jekyll had risen to her knees and was attempting to push the children out of danger. Melody took one tentative step toward the house; Victor clung to his governess, determined to help her to her feet. The shriek of the wheels against the stone, the pounding of the horses’ hooves like rifle fire in a battlefield, the driver’s shouts, and Miss Jekyll’s anguished cry combined in a deafening, unearthly roar. In the last moment before the hooves struck, knocking the woman flat on her back, tossing the boy beyond her to be trampled before he could rise, Virginia saw her daughter look up, her expression confused but not frightened, and mouth the word “Mama.” Then the carriage wheel struck her from behind and she sprawled facedown before it.

A RESCUE

How does a mother recover from such a loss, how pass one night without revisiting, awake or asleep, some detail of that gruesome scene and its aftermath — the crushed, mangled bodies, the bloodied stones, the shards of Melody’s sled found wedged between the rails of the park fence, Miss Jekyll’s kid glove clutched in Victor’s death-frozen hand?

Virginia retired from the world. The window through which she had witnessed the destruction of all her joy was covered by a black drape. She couldn’t bear to leave the house where her children had been happy, yet every room reproached her with reminders of what was not there. She was silent, broken, a specter wandering through empty days in search of a door that would lead her out of her suffering. But there was no door.

“Inconsolable” was her husband’s diagnosis. He shared her grief, he felt it; his children had been infinitely dear to him, but he couldn’t stop living because they were gone. He grieved for the children and for his wife as well. He couldn’t reach her. She, who had been so generous, so loving, so admiring, now regarded him as if he were a stranger who couldn’t be entirely trusted. He longed to comfort her, but she shuddered at his touch.

Three years passed and Virginia showed only small signs of improvement. She went so far as to send brief messages to various well-wishers, but she would neither leave the house nor receive visitors. She wasn’t unkind and she encouraged her husband to take up his ordinary life; she had no wish to enclose him in her personal version of hell. Jeremiah, a lively, impressionable man, thrived on society as a plant thrives on watering, and was much in demand. Once a suitable period of mourning had passed he began to appear, with his wife’s permission, at small social events around the town.

One evening in early spring, when the trees were swollen with buds and the ground squishy underfoot, an old family friend invited Jeremiah to a gathering at which a “remarkable clairvoyant” would be presented to the gathered company. The host, Mr. Harold Bakersmith, dabbled in Spiritualism, hypnotism, and telepathy, and fancied himself something of an investigator into psychic phenomena. “There’s a lot of fraud out there,” he confided to Jeremiah, “but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in it.” He had visited the clairvoyant at a “sitting”—she didn’t like the word “séance”—and all present agreed the results had been simply staggering. “She’s as close to the real thing as can be found anywhere, in my opinion, and I am not easily persuaded.”

The company gathered, a group of fourteen, made up of lawyers, doctors, several fashionable ladies, and a few unfashionable dowagers, all lightly acquainted, agreeable and cultured personages. Mr. and Mrs. Bakersmith offered their guests refreshments and directed the servants in the arrangement of chairs so that everyone might have a comfortable view of their guest of honor. At length, Mrs. Bertha Bakersmith wandered to the makeshift stage, a small table and armchair facing the room, where, holding aloft a crystal glass and tapping it with her spoon, she urged her friends to take their seats, as Miss Petra was prepared to speak to them.

Violet came in at a side door, dressed all in white, her dark hair subdued in a thick braid wrapped over the crown of her head. Impractical golden slippers flashed beneath the loose pleats of her skirt as she crossed the carpet to the stage. She perched upon the armchair, sitting well forward so that her feet, in their golden slippers, could reach the floor. She adjusted her position, arranged her skirts, keeping her eyes down so that her audience could take in this pale, lovely, ephemeral presence, and only when every eye had settled firmly upon her did she look up. Her lips were lifted at the corners, her gaze as still and pellucid as a spring-fed pool. Mrs. Bakersmith approached, turned to the company, and, resting her palm on the wing of the chair, announced, “We are so pleased to have Miss Violet Petra with us this evening, and to introduce her to our dear friends in our own home. Many of you have heard tell, I doubt not, of her extraordinary gifts. If you have not, prepare to be astounded and comforted, for she bears tidings of peace and joy for us all.” Then, touching her fingertips to her breastbone to indicate the tumult within, the proud hostess took her seat, leaving the stage, such as it was, to the medium.

Violet remained perfectly still, her eyes moving candidly from face to face, like a schoolteacher taking in a class of restless children, seeking out the eyes that met her own as well as those that looked askance. But they were not children, as she knew very well. They were grown men and women, prosperous, powerful, and educated — what could they want from this frail creature with her golden slippers and her penetrating gaze? She was so small, so friendless, in that room that her courage alone commended her to them. The sight of her animated maternal feeling in even the gloomiest dowager’s heart and aroused in the gentlemen their most chivalrous and indulgent sympathies. The air in the room was still, yet charged with beneficent energy.

“I sense great loss, deep sadness,” Violet observed. Her voice was low, but it carried to the farthest corners of the room. “Fear, disappointment.” She paused, leaned back, then smiling, added, “but there is cause for joy as well. A new baby, a girl — her name is Dora — will be with us by morning.”

A startled “Oh” escaped the lips of a stout matron near the stage. “My grandchild is expected this week,” she said. “If a girl, she will be named for me, Dora Louise.”

Violet nodded. “She is well. Mother and child will be well.”

A light rustle of silk moved like a whisper through the audience as the ladies leaned toward one another. The gentlemen straightened up in their chairs to catch the eyes of their fellows. They perused each other, gauging the level of receptivity or skepticism in the open faces of their neighbors. For a few moments no one looked at Miss Petra and she took in her fill of them all. In twos and threes they returned their attention to her. When she again held them in her sway, she perplexed them by closing her eyes. Again the attentive, breathing silence freighted the atmosphere of the room. Violet raised her hands just above the armrests of her chair, her eyes still closed. When she spoke, her clear, soft voice had the intonation of one reciting a creed. “Our suffering ends at death’s door,” she said. “Our loved ones are among us.”

A furtive movement of eyes greeted this curious announcement; some glanced up behind the medium’s slightly bowed head, others looked from side to side, lifting their chins, tilting their heads, as if to listen more closely to a barely audible sound. A few cast their eyes down, lips compressed, like children who hope to escape attention.

Violet kept her eyes closed, her hands raised, palms forward, her eyebrows lifted, lips slightly parted, breathing softly through her mouth. A few long moments passed before she spoke again. “Is there a spirit present who will speak to us?”

Another silence, during which a gentleman near the front cleared his throat.

“No? Are you timid? Oh, I see.” She dropped her hands, opened her eyes, gazing at the audience with an expression of affectionate amusement. “It seems there is a skeptic among us,” she said. “Perhaps more than one?” Leaning to one side of her chair, she met the chilly eyes of a mustached gentleman, who, bristling at her cheerful scrutiny, looked down at his waistcoat, where he found some bit of infuriating lint to brush away. Violet’s gaze moved to a frail dowager sunk in an armchair near the door, so deeply ensconced and muffled in shawls and veils that it was impossible to see her face. Having identified the sources of incredulity in the room, Violet resumed her posture, hands raised, eyes closed, in an attitude of intense listening.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are many here who long for some message, some comfort.” She paused; nodding her head to some proposal only she could hear. “Of course. Yes. I will tell Abigail that you are content. This is a young man, very blond with such blue eyes. He is content. You are not to concern yourself with the will. The lawyer can be trusted.”

All attended the snuffle and gasp of a young lady, who murmured, “Oh, my darling,” as she applied her handkerchief to her eyes.

“This is a venerable gentleman,” Violet continued, “with a snow-white beard. He wishes to say that he was never happy on this side; that he was sometimes cruel and thoughtless to his son, whose name is Fredrick — no — Hendrick? Henry, yes. He regrets his cruelty, he is happy now, he watches you with love and affection. He approves. Well …” She paused, frowning. “He’s becoming teary, I’m afraid. He says, ‘Forgive me.’ ”

A middle-aged gentleman, known to all present as a prominent physician, leaned forward in his chair and covered his mouth with his hand.

“And here are two children. They are laughing, holding hands. Are they brother and sister? The boy has dark hair, the little girl is a pretty child, with such straight flaxen hair; she looks like a little Dutch girl. Tell Mama it is so lovely here. Tell her we miss her. We miss Papa too; the boy says that. Tell him there are many children here.”

Abruptly Violet dropped her hands and sank back in her chair. “They’ve gone,” she said, evidently speaking to herself. She raised her head, but kept her unfocused eyes lowered. After a moment she pressed her left fingertips over her left eye and sighed. “They’ve gone,” she said again. “I’m very tired.”

Mrs. Bakersmith rose from her chair, facing the audience as she advanced upon Violet, who appeared incapable of movement. “She’s exhausted herself,” she explained to the curious onlookers. “These sittings are so taxing to her faculty.” She bent over the clairvoyant, helping her to stand and to lean upon her arm. Then the hostess led her guest to a smaller parlor off the hall, where she eased her into a comfortable chaise, crooning sweet compliments and solicitous advice. “Let me bring you a glass of port to fortify you.”

“Port would be lovely,” Violet agreed.

Jeremiah Babin waited in the hall for twenty minutes before he was allowed into the parlor for his first interview with the woman he hoped might deliver his wife from the darkness of never-ending despair.

For two weeks Virginia Babin resisted her husband’s entreaties to allow Violet Petra into her presence. Perhaps, as is sometimes the case with the bereaved, she had discovered in the intensity of her suffering a kind of strength. The loss of her children had alienated her from God, and she had no wish to be reconciled to anything resembling a faith.

Jeremiah pointed out that Miss Petra required neither a profession of belief nor excessive ritual. In his conversation with her after the Bakersmith demonstration, he had found her to be without artifice or guile. She didn’t know how she was able to do what she did, but she was willing to assist anyone who believed she might be of use. “She told me she could try,” Jeremiah explained, “but it wasn’t so unlikely that she would fail.”

“No,” said Virginia. “I refuse to sit in the dark while some strange person goes into a trance at my dining table.”

“But the room isn’t dark and there’s no table,” Jeremiah protested. “There’s no tapping or writing on slates and she doesn’t speak in any voice but her own. She doesn’t accept money, she doesn’t go about to halls or put on shows, she gets no advantage from it. Honestly, my love, I do believe this young woman is genuinely gifted.”

“No,” replied Virginia. “Please don’t ask me again. I can’t bear it.”

In the end Virginia agreed that she would bear it, and Violet Petra was invited to tea. “And nothing but tea,” Virginia insisted. In this introductory meeting it was her intention to judge for herself the level of the clairvoyant’s guilelessness and artificiality.

Violet was delivered to the house by Mr. Bakersmith, who handed her off to Jeremiah with the hushed enthusiasm of an art dealer presenting a truly exceptional little picture to a possible buyer. “I’ll be back for her at four thirty,” he promised, doffing his hat to Virginia, who stood at the parlor door, obscured by the impenetrable gloom that seeped from the dark carpets and walls of the still and joyless house. Violet, dressed in a cream cashmere tea gown with a pleated lettuce-green silk underskirt, her hair braided tightly across her forehead and looped up at the back, resembled a slender column of light beamed into the foyer from some mysterious chink in the edifice. She had noticed Virginia on entering the hall and leaned out past Jeremiah to keep her in sight, as distracted and tense as a child who must endure formalities before opening a present. Murmuring the appropriate pleasantries, she offered her hand to Jeremiah, but her eyes remained on her hostess.

This eagerness of manner alarmed Virginia, and she took a step back from the door, feeling much put upon by the two wealthy and powerful men who had obviously been taken in by the fragile beauty of this clever, brazen impostor. She wanted to bolt up the stairs and hide in her room, but in the next moment Violet advanced upon her, confidently outstretching her gloved hand. “Dear Mrs. Babin,” she began. “Bertha sends you her warmest regards and she has asked me specifically to say that she is in great hopes that you will come to visit her in the nearest possible future.”

Virginia took the hand, ignoring the busy scrutiny of the unabashed eyes. “I don’t go out, Miss Petra,” she said. “As Bertha well knows. Will you sit down?”

Jeremiah followed, filling the doorway with his impressive bulk. His wife cast him a reproachful glance as he stepped inside and occupied himself by examining the tea service. It had been so long out of use that it was badly tarnished, and the maid, enthusiastically embracing the challenge, had polished it to mirror brightness. The pink iced cakes artfully arranged on a tray next to it were reflected in its round belly.

“I believe,” Violet replied as she took the chair her hostess indicated near the comforting warmth of the fire, “that Bertha hopes your kind invitation to me might be an …” She paused, searching for the word. Both Virginia and Jeremiah unconsciously lifted their chins in anticipation. “An indication,” she continued, “of your willingness to rejoin the many friends who so sorely miss the pleasure of your company.”

“Is that what Bertha hopes?” Virginia replied. Her tone betrayed little interest in any response to this rhetorical question. She seated herself before the tray, turning her attention to the duty of pouring out.

Jeremiah took up a glass plate and helped himself to the cakes. “Three years is a long time to stay indoors,” he remarked.

The cup in Virginia’s raised hand rattled lightly against the saucer. As she righted it, setting it on the table next to the pot, Violet studied her. The pressure of her guest’s close inspection disturbed in Virginia a myriad of conflicting emotions, the strongest of which was a determination to suppress any expression of genuine feeling. She expected Violet to echo her husband’s callous observation: Oh, yes, three years was too long. It was time to return to the larger world of her eager and sympathetic friends. Three years was an eternity. She steeled herself for some such effrontery, but when after a thoughtful pause Violet spoke, she said exactly what Virginia wanted to say. “Oh, I don’t think three years is such a very long time at all.”

Virginia allowed her hand to rest on the handle of the pot, raising her eyes to meet the penetrating gaze of this pert young woman whose intrusion into her solitude she had so dreaded. Violet sat stiffly, her eyebrows lifted, her lips compressed, her hands folded in her lap. Her expression was neither sympathetic nor solicitous, but rather disinterested and uncomplicated. No one had looked at Virginia without some internal shrinking from the magnitude of her loss since that day, three years, three months, and seventeen days ago. It was as if someone had thrown open a window and a gush of fresh, warm air had rushed in, dispersing the chilly, stale atmosphere of the long-closed room. Virginia took a long breath, experiencing as she did a pleasant release at the inner corners of her eyes, across her forehead, and in her jaw.

Jeremiah, munching one of the cakes and wondering why Miss Petra had contradicted his effort to bring Virginia into a more receptive frame of mind, considered the best method of encouraging his wife to speak of what he believed was always nearest her heart. Virginia poured out, added a dash of cream, and offered the filled teacup to her guest, who rose lightly from her chair to receive it. As Violet settled back, she looked up at him and he thought she would speak, but she didn’t. Instead Virginia, who had her back to him, addressed him. It gave him the odd sensation that Miss Petra was somehow speaking through his wife. But her voice was her own, calm, agreeable, and firm: the voice, he recalled, she had used when advising the children’s governess. “I wonder, my dear,” she said, “if you would be so very kind as to leave Miss Petra alone with me for half an hour.”

Jeremiah swallowed his cake. After all, this was exactly what he wanted. That his wife should actually express a desire to talk to someone, really anyone, was a much longed for event. Yet as he looked down upon Virginia’s unmoving head, a tinge of resentment at this cool dismissal pulled the corners of his mouth down — an unconscious reflex Violet was quick to notice. In the next moment he recovered his good humor, wiped his fingers against a napkin, and replied cheerfully, “Of course, of course. I’ll be off. You ladies have much to discuss.”

Turning hard on his heel, he crossed the carpet and let himself out at the hall door, closing it with exaggerated care behind him. Then he stood there, gazing mournfully up at the staircase. What was he to do for half an hour? He hadn’t even gotten his tea.

Virginia Babin and Miss Petra both knew why they had been brought together, but for several minutes neither of them alluded to it. The time-honored niceties of tea occupied them. Violet admired the painting of a dour ancestor over the mantel, correctly guessing the artist’s name, a name that had been fashionable during his life, but had languished in obscurity since his death, some half-century ago. Virginia asked a few polite questions about Bertha Bakersmith and her family. Neither woman mentioned what both knew: that Bertha’s oldest daughter, Margaret, had died from complications attendant on childbirth scarcely a year earlier. They spoke instead of Bertha’s son, who was studying at Harvard Divinity School, having turned his back, to his father’s chagrin and his mother’s delight, on the Law School.

Violet appeared so content to gossip that Virginia began to wonder if her guest might not be relieved to have no immediate demand for an exhibition of her celebrated powers. She chattered pleasantly, she was respectful but slyly amusing. She observed that Bertha wrote long and frequent letters to her son and received short and infrequent responses, whereas the epistolary exchange between Mr. Bakersmith and said son was exactly the reverse; the son wrote at length and often to his father, but received only brief and scarce replies. “It may seem odd that I know this,” Violet concluded, “but I am much entrusted with the mails at the Bakersmiths’. It’s a small service to offer when they have been so generous to me.”

“I’m sure having you there is a great comfort to Bertha,” Virginia said only to say something. She wasn’t sure of anything about Miss Petra, and she was out of practice at conversation. The young woman appealed to her, but there was something disturbing about her presence.

“I believe she has formed an attachment to me,” Violet confessed. She sipped her tea; her eyes, engaging Virginia over the edge of the cup, were as affable as a dog’s. Guileless, Jeremiah had said. Was it possible? When Violet had drained the cup and set it down on the side table, she dabbed her napkin against her lips. Was she preparing some polite formula for parting?

“May I pour you more tea?” Virginia asked, turning her attention to the pot.

“No, thank you,” Violet replied. She pressed her palms against the edge of her chair, lifting herself slightly and shifting forward on the cushion. “Perhaps a little later.”

Virginia took up the glass plate. “You haven’t tried these cakes. I believe they are excellent.”

But her guest made no answer, so she eased the plate back onto the table. When she looked back, Violet was leaning toward her, her back straight, her hands resting on her knees; her head, lifted on the slender, pale stalk of her neck, rotated oddly from right to left. She took no notice of Virginia. Her eyes were lowered, almost closed, her lips slightly parted. She was listening. A log fracturing in the fire gave a sharp pop, which startled Virginia, but Violet, who had now reversed her head’s trajectory from left to right, only fluttered her eyelids.

Virginia could feel her own brows knitting together and her mouth went dry. Oh, no! she thought, but she could not have said what she meant by this mental exclamation, only that she was suddenly swarming with fear. Violet completed her circuit and came to attention, resting her wide, calm eyes, like caressing fingers, upon the furrowed brow of her hostess.

“Miss Petra,” Virginia began. She felt a headache coming on rather fiercely — that would be the import of her remark. But she never got to deliver this bit of personal information. Violet lifted her hands, opening them before her, as if she were lightly pressing on an obstruction. A door. Or a window, Virginia thought. A wave of nausea rose so insistently at this image, which had triggered an intolerable recollection — a woman pressing at a window — that she laid her palm across her waist and sank back in her chair, conscious only of the need to escape. Yet she was also certain that she wouldn’t escape, that she was captured there, every nerve in her body arrested and strained, fixed and fascinated by the silent woman leaning toward her.

When Violet spoke, her voice was low and intimate, as if she were sharing a naughty secret with a trusted confidante. “There is no death,” she said. “Our loved ones are among us.”

A moment passed, than another. “Are there …?” she said, then, with a laugh, “Oh, I see. I’m not going to have to ask. This room is crowded with spirits. I wonder how you sleep in this house. Here is that gentleman in the painting. It’s a fine likeness, I see.”

The clairvoyant’s eyes were closed and Virginia had the opportunity to recover a little of her habitual skepticism. Her terror abated, but she had the eerie sensation that the room was, as Violet suggested, crowded, that the air had taken on substance.

“Here is a young woman,” Violet continued. “Very attractive. She says she regrets, that she tried, that she hopes you forgive her.”

What young woman? Virginia thought. Was she expected to believe this was Miss Jekyll?

“Ah, there they are. I knew they would come when I came in the front door. What pretty children. The little girl says, Tell Mama we are happy here, and the boy, he’s a serious boy, he says, There are many children here. They all long to send messages to their parents. He says that he is well, he misses Papa very much, and Mama very much …” She paused, appearing to listen to something she didn’t quite understand.

Virginia was coming to herself. Everyone knew how her children had died. There was nothing in these silly messages that distinguished these “spirits” from any other children, of which there were, evidently, so many. She drew herself up, recomposing and resisting the pull of what she now recognized as a frantic and irrational desire to believe that her children might somehow be restored to her. She frowned upon Miss Petra. Guileless, indeed, she thought.

“The little girl is anxious about someone,” Violet continued. “Is it a friend? No. Oh, bunny. Yes, it must be a pet. She wants you to be sure to take care of Bunny. No. She’s frowning. She’s not a pet. And her name is not Bunny.” She paused, stretching her chin forward, turning her ear as if to identify a sound at the limit of her hearing range. “Not bunny,” she repeated. “It’s Bunchie.”

Virginia came out of her chair with such force that her hips, colliding with the tea table, sent the cakes and cups flying onto the carpet. In three steps she had crossed the room and flung open the door. Jeremiah, slumped in an uncomfortable armchair in the hall, looked toward her with the dim hope that he might now have his tea. But when he rose to meet his wife, that expectation was dashed. Virginia rushed upon him, one hand outstretched, the other clapped across her mouth, her eyes overflowing with tears, her breath coming in tortured gasps, like a fish suffocating upon air. He opened his arms to her and she collapsed against him, her chilly hands encircling his neck, clinging to him. She was trying to speak; he was trying to understand. She brought her lips close to his ear. “My God,” she croaked in a voice he didn’t recognize. “They are here.” Then her knees gave out and Jeremiah bent over her, clasping her waist as he eased her unconscious body to the floor.

Bunchie, Jeremiah Babin informed me during a long walk around the placid lake, was his daughter’s doll, which she had so named for her own childish and mysterious reasons. “No one who didn’t know Melody could have known that,” he said. “It was prodigious.”

I couldn’t deny the prodigiousness of this incident. But what, I wondered, had Violet herself had to say about it?

“She remembers nothing,” he explained. “When she’s in contact with the spirits she is entirely a medium. They speak through her, without her knowledge.”

“So she didn’t know what she had told your wife.”

“Not a word,” he said. “It was …” He chuckled, pausing in the path to call up his sensation at the time. “Well, it was almost comical. Virginia came out of her swoon in such a state that I rang for the maid and we got her up to her bed, where I administered a sedative. I completely forgot that Violet was still in the parlor. When my wife was calm, I went downstairs and found her sitting by the fire. The dishes were all over the floor, but she’d poured herself another cup of tea and was eating one of the cakes, perfectly composed, as if she were at home. I went in, quite agitated, as you can imagine, and she looked up with that odd little smile she has, and she said, “Have I been helpful? I do hope so.”

THE ENNUI OF THE PSYCHIC

On my last day at Lake Pleasant, having largely completed my researches into the ways and means of the Spiritualists, I found myself with the opportunity to while away an hour or two before dinner in reading an issue of the British magazine Cornhill. This was a welcome distraction. The weather was stormy, which quite literally dampened the spirits of the Spiritualists, who believe the dead dislike bad weather and seldom materialize when it is raining. It never rains in Summerland where they abide, though miraculously the air is fragrant with flowers.

I was alone in the reading room. When I heard someone come in at the door, I knew by the stealth of her step that it was Violet. She took a childish pleasure in all manner of pranks and had nearly sent Mr. Babin backward down the stairs the evening before by jumping out from the linen closet in the hall as he came up to escort us to dinner. I pretended I didn’t hear her as she crept up behind my chair and stood silently looking down at me. “I know you’re there,” I said. She made no reply, but leaned forward, scrutinizing the paragraph under the title. “That isn’t correct,” she said. “It was 1872. And the ship wasn’t in tow. They sailed her to Gibraltar.”

I looked up, holding the journal open with my palm. “Have you read this account?”

“No,” she replied. “The name is wrong too. It wasn’t the Marie Celeste. It was the Mary Celeste.”

“You seem to know a great deal about it,” I observed.

She straightened, but she kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the offending text. “I knew the family,” she replied.

Then she crossed the room and she threw herself down on a settee near the bookcase, taking up one magazine after another, and paging through them distractedly until I had finished reading the article, which I found preposterous, though suspenseful and engaging. Before I could say a word, she snatched up the journal and disappeared to her room.

I took out my notebook and ensconced myself at the writing desk, elaborating my notes on Lake Pleasant. The gallery of the hotel was so wide that tables could be set up without fear of damp, and these were soon filled with whist players, chatting and drinking tea. Snippets of their conversations wove their way into my observations. “Hattie has derived great benefit from Dr. Skilling’s magnetic treatment. She says she hasn’t felt so invigorated in years.” “Mr. Leary’s corn is obviously the best, but the price!” “Mr. Whitaker’s son Harvey has come through again. Such a loving boy.” At length I capped my pen, closed my book, and went up to my room. Inside I found a folded sheet of paper wedged against the carpet. Writ large with more than necessary pressure on the page were three words: COME TO ME.

I crossed the hall and tapped on Violet’s door. “Come in,” she called out. She was collapsed upon the chaise, one hand over her eyes, the other brushing the floor where her shoes were lined up neatly next to the splayed copy of the Cornhill. As I took the chair opposite, she lifted her hand and scowled at me. “Who is this person?” she inquired. “This Dr. Jephson. Have you ever heard of him?”

“He says he’s from Boston,” I observed.

“It’s an outrage,” she said. “Poor Arthur. I’m sure he’s seen it already.”

“Who is Arthur?”

She pulled herself up, dropping her feet to the carpet, poking the journal with her toes. “I thought you journalists had standards. This account is replete with factual errors.”

“I don’t think Dr. Jephson is, strictly speaking, a journalist.”

“Well, he’s a doctor. Surely doctors have standards. Surely they’re not allowed to broadcast bald-faced lies in print.”

“I had the sense that the account was actually intended to be read as a fictional piece.”

“That’s not what it says,” she snapped. “It says …” She picked up the volume and turned its pages impatiently. “ ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.’ It doesn’t say story. It doesn’t say anything about it being fictional.”

“I think that may be the point.”

“The point of what!”

“Well, the author isn’t Jephson, but someone pretending to be Jephson. It’s not an entirely new thing. But the Cornhill doesn’t print the names of its contributors, so there’s no way of knowing.”

“But they know, don’t they? The people who published it must know if it’s meant to be a story or a true account. And they know people will read this — whatever it is — and think it’s true and that the ship actually went to Africa and this lunatic passenger — there were no passengers, by the way — killed everybody on the ship one by one, and that the crew was made up of Negroes, when they were only four Germans …” Here she threw the Cornhill at the breakfast table. “It’s just lies,” she concluded. “How is it possible, after all this time?”

“Who is Arthur?” I asked again.

She stood up and began pacing about the room, stopping when she reached an obstacle and turning back again. “He’s Sarah’s orphaned son,” she said. “He must be, let me think, he’s nineteen now. And Benjamin’s mother, Mother Briggs, she’s still alive, poor woman, though everyone she loved is dead. I’m sure she’s read this travesty.”

“Who is Sarah?” I persisted.

“Sarah Briggs,” she said, exasperated at my slowness. “Mrs. Benjamin Briggs. The captain’s wife. She was on the Mary Celeste and so was their daughter, Sophia Matilda; she was just two years old.”

“Jephson says the captain’s name was Tibbs.”

“He didn’t even get that right. Are there laws?” she exclaimed, stopping before me with her hands spread wide at her sides. “Can this Jephson person be sued? Or the Cornhill? Can the Cornhill be sued?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not if the author changed the names.”

Tears filled her eyes and she balled up her hands into fists, which made her look like the child she must have been not so very long ago. She stalked back to the chaise, sat down upon it. Resting her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, she muttered at the floor. “It just brings that whole awful time back,” she said miserably.

“Were you close to the family?” I asked.

A few tears, funneled by her hands, slipped down alongside her nose. “Sarah was my best friend in this world,” she said. Then, sniffing, she sat up straight, wiping her tears away with the backs of her hands. “I shall speak to Mr. Babin,” she said. “He will give me the benefit of his legal counsel.”

I was less interested in the legal recourse recommended by Mr. Babin than in Violet’s strong reaction to Dr. Jephson’s account, or story, or whatever it was, and whoever Dr. Jephson was. Her exclamation that Sarah Briggs had been her friend was the closest thing to a past she had owned to. I had been under the impression that her home was in upstate New York, but it was unlikely that a seafaring family would live that far inland. So, I concluded, Violet was from the East Coast, possibly Boston. I’d noted that she read the Boston papers assiduously.

Though all manner of spirits were welcome in Lake Pleasant, the alcoholic variety was forbidden. As the evenings wore on, it was clear that some of the band members and the wild young men who had a clubhouse and dressed up as Indians, terrifying old ladies who thought they were native spirits returning from the dead to scalp them, were clearly under the influence of something stronger than the ubiquitous lemonade. Jeremiah Babin, being a man of sophistication and culture, had provided himself with a bottle of excellent port, which he offered to share with us as a digestive aid after our dinner at the Lakeside Café. No sooner had we taken our seats in Violet’s sitting room and he had poured out three glasses of the ruby potion than she brought the issue of the Cornhill to his attention, expressing her conviction that the lead article constituted an actionable offense. “It’s full of errors and lies,” she avowed. “He doesn’t even get the captain’s name right.”

Jeremiah, recognizing at once the ship’s name, recalled what he knew of its melancholy fate. “At first they thought it was pirates. Is that right?” he asked. “But then, it was the crew. A mutiny? Was that it?”

Violet sipped her port, giving him a steady look that betrayed no feelings in the matter. “It was not a mutiny,” she said calmly. “That has been ascertained. But this account says that it was.”

Jeremiah nodded. “Yes, well. I would have to look into it. But I can tell you that if the names are changed, there’s probably nothing to be done about it, by way of legal action I mean.”

Violet turned upon me an inclusive smile. “Is there another kind of action?” she asked.

Jeremiah, seeing my puzzled expression, said, “She’s thinking of investigative journalism.”

“He has read my mind,” Violet said.

I considered the matter. “It might be difficult to interest the public in the factual basis of a story that appears in a literary journal, especially as it concerns an incident that happened so long ago.”

“You call it an incident,” Violet said glumly, reaching for her glass.

“Whatever it was,” Jeremiah said, rising from his chair. “It was a famous story at the time, and evidently this fellow is using it to put himself forward. I’ll leave you ladies to discuss your scheme of retribution. I have an early appointment with Dr. Plunkett. His magnetic treatment has cured my bad knee. I wonder if I can persuade him to set up in Philadelphia.”

When we had said our good nights to Violet’s benefactor, she and I sat for a few moments in silence.

I had enjoyed our dinner on the lakeshore. It was a mild, clear evening, the paper lanterns glowed charmingly, the food, though plain, was good, and the conversation wide-ranging and thought-provoking. Jeremiah Babin was a quirky gentleman, full of enthusiasms, an opera lover, a reader of contemporary poetry, well-traveled and informed about world affairs. There was no talk of spirits or second sight, though the ghost of Sir Walter Scott might have enjoyed the enthusiasm we three discovered we shared for his romances. Jeremiah was a great fan of Robert Louis Stevenson and spoke so highly of his Kidnapped, which I confessed I had not read, that I vowed to take it up at the next opportunity. Violet and I encouraged him to give Mrs. Gaskell his attention.

The meal ended on a lively note as a sudden breeze whipped in off the lake and set the lamps flickering. Our fellow diners smiled and laughed to one another, saying the spirits were off to bed, and so should we be. Violet had not mentioned her pique about the fallacious article and I assumed she’d forgotten it, but now I understood that she had been waiting to bring it up in a more private setting. Jeremiah’s dismissal irked her; I could feel that as we sat there without speaking, sipping the wine he had considerately left for us. This suited me, as it was my intention to draw her out on the subject, which so conveniently opened a door upon her past. I took up the journal, which Jeremiah hadn’t bothered to examine. “Are you still in touch with the Briggs family?” I asked.

She gave me a mildly startled look, a clear signal to me that her guard was down. “Not at all,” she said. “There’s not much left of them.”

“Were they numerous?”

“They were,” she replied. “Mother Briggs had six children. They all died at sea except for James, who had the good sense to go into business. And two of her grandchildren died as well. Well, one died, Maria’s boy, Natie, and then Sophy, Sarah’s little girl. She was on the Mary Celeste.”

“And Mother Briggs was Sarah’s mother?”

“Her mother-in-law. Also her aunt. Sarah and Benjamin were first cousins.”

“How devastating for her, to lose so many children.”

Violet looked away toward the open balcony, where two night birds were twittering in an overhanging branch of a pine. “Oh,” she said, watching their fluttering movements indifferently. “She had the comfort of her religion.”

“She was a pious woman?”

Violet smiled to herself, lifting her glass to her lips, taking, I noted, a healthy swallow. Then she turned to me with an eagerness I recognized — she had decided to reveal something she ordinarily would not. She’d regret it later, I thought. Perhaps we both knew that.

“People said that family was cursed,” she confided. “Mother Briggs’s husband, Captain Nathan, was an amusing old fellow, something of the town crank. He was killed by a lightning bolt that struck him in the hall of his own house.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “Was this before Benjamin and Sarah died?”

“Disappeared,” she corrected. “It was a couple of years earlier. Sarah’s father, Leander, the Reverend Leander Cobb”—she pronounced the title Reverend with mock solemnity—“he died scarcely two months before Sarah sailed on the Mary Celeste.”

“So he never knew.”

She frowned. “I was …” The pause was slight, occasioned, I suspected, by some subtle alteration of the actual sequence of events. “I visited Mother Briggs just after the first telegram came. I wanted to send Sarah a letter and I went to ask her for the proper address. She was calm as a clam. She told me the ship had been found derelict, so there was no point in sending a letter. Then James came in with Arthur, Sarah’s son. He was a grim little boy, nervous and timid, and of course, they’d told him nothing. James believed, we all did, that another ship might have picked up the crew and we’d hear from them as soon as they got to a port.”

She glanced up at me to see how I was responding to her story. Wanting to give the thin edge of agitation in her voice room to expand, I said nothing.

“It was so dreadful,” she continued. “Benjamin’s brother Oliver — he was a charming man, full of gaiety — he had sailed from New York a week later than Benjamin and Sarah. They all had plans to meet in Messina. Oliver had even told his mother what songs he planned to sing at their reunion — she told me that later. He had a fine voice. He and Sarah loved to sing together. What we didn’t know then, when they got that first telegram …” Again she paused, this time to raise her glass for another bracing draft of wine. “What we didn’t know was that Oliver’s ship — it was the Julia A. Hallock—went down in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. He and the first mate clung to some pieces of the deckhouse for four days before Oliver gave up and let go. The mate was rescued not two hours later.” Tears gathered in her eyes and she extracted a handkerchief from her sleeve.

When a heartfelt account moves the teller to tears, the natural response of anyone with ordinary human feeling is to offer kind words of sympathy and consolation, but my profession precludes such natural expressions, and the sight of tears tends to stir in me nothing so much as a sense of predatory anticipation. I watched Violet without comment. She dried her tears, sniffed mightily, coughed. Her eyes fell upon the journal, which was resting on my lap. “How could that person, that Dr. Jephson, how could he make such a mockery of other people’s suffering? People he didn’t even know.”

“Did the Briggs family live in New York?” I asked.

She gave me a look of consternation. She was having a difficult time getting anyone to share her outrage at the scurrilous Dr. Jephson. “They lived in Massachusetts. Why would you think they lived in New York?”

“I thought you grew up in New York. I seem to remember reading that. Upstate somewhere. Isn’t that correct?”

“Gloversville,” she said, too quickly. “We lived there until I was twelve. Then we moved to Marion.”

“I see,” I said. “And that’s where you met Sarah Briggs.”

“We went to the Academy together.”

“Do you still have relatives there?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly and she lifted her chin, contemplating me for a moment before speaking. “I have an aunt,” she said. “But she disapproves of me, so we’re not in contact.”

“She lives in Marion?”

“I don’t know where she lives now,” she replied. “Nor do I care.”

I smiled, thinking of my mother’s sister Claire, who had refused to help us when we were destitute because mother had married, in her view, beneath her.

“Have I said something funny?” Violet asked, looking pouty.

“I have such an aunt,” I said.

A snort of glee escaped her. “Do you?” she said. I nodded wisely. “Bad luck to them both.” She was now relaxed and warmed to me. We were two of a kind — orphans with heartless relations. I wondered if she had any money of her own.

“May I ask you a personal question?” I said.

“I think I know what it is,” she replied.

“What do you think it is?”

“You want to know if I have an income.”

It surprised me that she should have guessed my thought. “Yes,” I said. “I understand you don’t charge for the services you render, so I wondered …”

“I have a little money from my grandmother,” she replied. “Not enough to live on. But I can’t charge for what you call my services because if I did the people who really matter wouldn’t seek me out. They would assume I was a fraud, that I was in it for the money.”

“I notice at these séances advertised here, the psychics all charge admission.”

“Exactly. Twenty-five cents. How many of those would one have to do to make up the price of a pair of shoes?”

“Yes. I had that same thought.”

“Those people are hobbyists, and many of them are just ludicrous, obvious frauds. They make disembodied hands appear, or instruments play themselves. It’s entertainment.”

“I see,” I said. And I did, though I didn’t understand why people found being roundly duped an activity worth paying even twenty-five cents to enjoy.

Violet cast me a look tinged with desperation. “Oh, I wish I could be like you and earn my living by my pen!” she exclaimed.

“I fear you’d find it dull and tiring.”

“You’re out in the world, editors send you off to find out things and write up what you find, doors open to you, people respect you. No one patronizes you. Jeremiah said he thought you a brave sort of person. Level-headed and sound.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. He admires you.” She plucked at her skirt peevishly. “You may be sure no one ever thinks of me as level-headed.”

“Do you want to be level-headed?”

She raised her eyebrows as if the question bore consideration, then sighed, dropping back in her chair. “They tire of me,” she said. “At first it’s very exciting and I’m in a trance half the time, keeping them in touch with their loved ones. But after a while …” She raised her hand to her hair, patting a straying curl back into place absentmindedly. “Often the gentlemen develop little crushes on me. At the Bakersmiths’ it was the son. You should see some of the letters I’ve received! Then the wives begin to think of how much good I could do for their friends, a soiree is arranged, and I know I’m about to pack my bags.”

“They pass you on.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“How long have you been living like this?”

She sent me the frank look of appeal I’d seen that first evening, when she bent over to pick up her napkin. “Ten long years,” she said.

“Good heavens.”

“I’m just a pet. I’m the in-house clairvoyant.” She chuckled sourly. “Sometimes I play the tyrant, just to keep from dying of boredom.”

I pictured Violet in a tyrannical mood, doubtless a fearsome sight.

“What do you do?”

“Oh, I make them wait, or I get headaches and have my meals in bed. I actually do suffer from blinding headaches, so no acting is required. Sometimes I flirt with the husbands until they get so carried away they fear I’ll tell their wives. But I never do. I used to hope one of them might marry me, but now I know, if there’s one thing they dread, it’s scandal. And marrying a psychic would be a scandal, especially if a divorce was involved.”

“Tell me about the trances,” I asked. “Can you make them happen?”

“Oh, why is everyone so interested in that? Is that what you want to write about?”

“Not necessarily. I’m just interested,” I said. “Like everyone.”

“I have no memory of anything that happens in a trance,” she said firmly.

“Yes, Jeremiah told me that. It must be like hypnotism.”

“I don’t know about hypnotism. At first it happened when I was alone, working on my poetry. There would be this lapse of time and when I came back, I’d written several pages I had no memory of writing. And they were messages, but not to me.”

“You write poetry?”

This question pleased her. “I do. I always have. I have notebooks full of it. Would you like to see some? I never show them to anyone because I’m afraid they may be very bad.”

“Why would you show them to me?”

“That’s a good question,” she said, leaning over her knees to make some adjustment to her skirt. “Perhaps I won’t.”

I ignored this display of coquettishness, though I could see how well it might work on an interested gentleman. “Do you still receive messages while writing?”

She sat up straight, folded her hands in her lap, and presented me with the prim expression of an innocent bystander who has just been sworn in to the witness box. “Not much. It’s easier to just repeat what I’m hearing. Evidently the spirits prefer to use me in that way.”

Everything about this last statement irritated me. “Do they?” I said. “I wonder why.”

“That’s not something I could know.”

“It’s so convenient, that part, where you don’t remember what you’ve said.”

She frowned. “I don’t get to choose whether or not to hear what I hear and see what I see. Do you?”

“No. But I wonder, why you … I mean, why did these spirits choose you and not someone else?”

“I suppose because I’m open to them.”

“Could you close yourself to them? Could you make them go away?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“You don’t believe a word I say.”

“Let’s just say I believe you’re being used, but not by spirits.”

She was silent. Her gaze was so free of resentment that I was intrigued to hear her next words. “You think I make it all up, just to please people who will help me.”

I nodded.

“Do you imagine that possibility has never occurred to me?” she said.

“Has it?”

Abruptly she stood up and took a few steps toward the balcony, leaving me with a view of her profile. She took a deep breath, then another, evidently in the grip of a strong emotion. Her long, slender hands clenched into fists at her sides. More tears, I thought, more earnest protestations.

So I was surprised when she turned to me with dry eyes and an expression of powerful resolution. “I want to stop,” she said. “I want another life. Will you help me?”

I didn’t tell Violet I was unwilling to help her, but I did point out the unlikelihood that I could. My employment, which she persisted in envying, was a hand-to-mouth affair, and as she had no commercial skills beyond the one that currently provided a comfortable, albeit restricted, existence, there was no definite track that I could set her upon. She had the childish notion that if only her efforts were brought to the attention of the public, she would make her way as a poet. I recommended a course in typing, as it was a skill always in demand. When I asked if she had told Jeremiah Babin, who was in the most likely position to assist her and appeared to have a keen interest in her welfare, of her ambition to find gainful employment, she laughed. “No,” she said. “And don’t you tell him. He would not be pleased to hear it.”

Our conversation, as I recall it, was amiable, but I could see that she was disappointed, that she had imagined I would be her deliverer. By morning, when she woke with a headache from the port, she would be ashamed of her declaration at the window and resentful of my part in the dissolution of her fantasies.

When we said good night, I promised to consider her situation and perhaps recommend a course, beyond typing — which clearly had no appeal to her whatsoever — that she might take toward self-sufficiency. As I crossed the hall and let myself in at the door of my room, I reflected that my own situation, which sometimes struck me as arduous, lonely, dull, and pointless, was actually far preferable to the lot of the various citizens whose doings I was, as Violet put it, “on assignment” to investigate. All that day my article about the Spiritualists had been taking shape in my mind, and I had that pleasant, ticklish sensation of mental busyness, as well as a burgeoning confidence that must result, very soon — I could feel it — in my taking up my pen and my notebook and setting out on the journey into print. In my room I paused, admiring the moonlight, like spilled milk, on the desk. The apple I kept at the ready for midnight munching floated in a dark blue pool of its own shadow. I crossed to the balcony and stepped out into the still, warm, pine-scented evening.

The Spiritualists believe their spirit friends are fond of flowers. Summerland, their dwelling on the other side, is a garden that needs no tending, and they fill their airy rooms with all manner of blooms. As wildflowers are abundant in the woods and fields bordering Lake Pleasant, the guests are in the habit of gathering bouquets and setting them out in vases, pitchers, baskets, or even buckets, at odd places around the camp.

These portable arrangements were constantly falling over, or they were picked up, refreshed, rearranged, and moved about by passing campers; it was a harmless, charming game they played, one of their more sympathetic practices. I noticed that a new collection of colorful pitchers had magically converged at the end of the bench just across from my balcony. If only they would confine themselves to flowers, I thought. In a dreamy state of mind I turned back to my bedroom, pondering the bizarre revelation that Violet Petra imagined herself a poet.

I drew the curtain, leaving the door ajar to have the benefit of fresh air. My toilette was a simple washup at the basin, a few strokes of the hairbrush, and a quick change into my dowdy cotton gown. As I slipped beneath the stiff, starched sheets, I imagined Violet, just across the hall. Her gown was doubtless embroidered satin with lace insets across the bodice. She had expensive tastes and habits. At dinner she had pointed out that what I took to be amethysts sparkling on the broad bust of a psychic competitor were in fact “cheap garnets.” She was right to be worried about her future, as she couldn’t afford to live in the style required by the company she kept. For the time being the Babins provided her with a clothing allowance. “Even with that,” she had confided, “I have to have my shoes resoled.”

In this manner, puzzling over the question of what would become of the fascinating, though often aggravating, object of my investigations, I drifted into sleep.

I awoke in the oppressive and humid darkness of a deep wood on a cloudy moonless night. For a few moments I lay still, my eyelids heavy from sleep, listening to a repetitive clicking that had summoned me back to consciousness. At length I determined it was coming from the wardrobe. What was it? I also became aware of a hushed whisper, like leaves rustling in a mini-whirlwind, such as one observes of an autumn day. It was the pages of my notebook, I speculated, being riffled by a breeze.

When I turned my face toward this sound, a current of air brushed lightly across my cheek, like warm caressing fingers, tentative and tender, grazing my brow, lifting a strand of hair loose at my temple. Why was my room so dark? The curtain at the door was a summery voile, and the moon, though not full, had shone brightly when I stood on the balcony, but now my eyes couldn’t penetrate what felt more and more like a swirling current of blackness. It was as if I were in a whirlpool.

I sat up in the bed, pushing my pillow to one side. The clicking sound must be the wardrobe door, which, unlatched, was knocking again and again against the frame. The whispering intensified and had an impatience about it that made me think of old women defaming some young beauty in a church — I don’t know why this image came to me, but it did. A storm had whipped up, I concluded, and I must feel my way to the open balcony door and close it tightly. I swung my legs over the side, stood up, one hand resting on the bedpost, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. My movement animated the quarreling currents of air and a kind of pandemonium broke loose in my room. The wardrobe door slammed hard, the hinges complaining at the force. The cyclonic air ripped the curtain, which I could dimly make out fluttering grayly before the door, free of its rod, and sent it rushing toward me, as if to wrap me in its embrace. I heard small objects — my cologne, my hairbrush, my fountain pen, my ink bottle — scattering in all directions from the dresser and the desk.

I took a step, confident that I would reach the door, which I could dimly see, and close this maelstrom out. Another step. Abruptly something cold and hard struck me on the forehead, as if it had been thrown with pent-up malice by an assailant with excellent aim. I staggered and sat down on the floor. My notebook hurled itself from the desk and slapped me cruelly on the collarbone. I touched my forehead, which felt sore from the vengeful missile. Determinedly I crawled toward the door while a fresh gust lifted the pitcher from the washstand and smashed it against the floor. One of my shoes flew up and slapped me on the hip. I pushed on.

When at last — though it was not half a minute — I was near the door and could grasp the handle, I found to my astonishment that it was closed. At the moment when my fingers pushed against the panel, determining that the door was tightly seated in its frame, the fury in my room entirely ceased.

I was so confused that I sat there, my back against the glass panes, staring into the darkness. What world was I in? The room began to lighten, and I made out the apple resting against the leg of the dresser. Of course, I thought. The apple was the missile that had struck my forehead. Carefully I got to my feet and returned to the bed, my mental state still much confounded. As the dawn light gradually flushed up the walls, I sat on the edge of the mattress and surveyed the wreckage of my room. The curtain lay in a twisted skein near the door; my meager possessions were scattered across the floor. It looked as if some barroom brawler with a raging toothache had taken the place apart.

But he was gone now; the room was quiet and still, the air cool, charged as it is often after a storm. But what puzzled me was that there was no sound of wind or rain outside. The branches of the pine trees shading the balcony were unmoving, not even their needles trembled, as they did in the faintest breeze. I crossed to the door and stepped out onto the balcony.

It was a soft, fragrant summer morning of infinite sweetness, and the only sound was the soft cooing of a dove, and distantly the sharp rap of a woodpecker investigating a tree trunk. I stepped out to the rail. Surely the ground would be strewn with fresh needles and the flimsy vases toppled, the flowers strewn across the path. I looked down at the bench.

And there they were, undisturbed, four clay pitchers top-heavy with wildflowers, cheerfully greeting the day, announcing to passersby that the spirits of the dead were welcome in this place, that they might come and stay and do just as they pleased.

How was it possible?

All I wanted was to quit my room. I dressed quickly, stepped into the hall, locking the door behind me, and walked purposefully away from the hotel. I wanted to walk to Philadelphia and never see Lake Pleasant again, but I was soon standing on the shore, looking out at the still, calm surface of the eponymous body of water. The chortling ripples playing in the grasses near the edge mocked me. A ghostly mist lay across the water and in the hollows of the forest beyond. It was early; the waitresses were just setting up in the tent and only myself and an aged crone who sat muttering on a bench under a tree were about. To recover my composure, I decided to walk along the path to the highlands.

The natural world is rife with anomalies, but I believed everything in it could be explained by a thorough understanding of its properties and laws. Water, for example, which seeks the lowest ground, could be forced to run uphill, as it did in the aqueducts the Romans designed to refresh their citizens’ thirst from sources far away. Fire, with its ravenous appetite for fuel, could be cajoled into accepting a steady diet of candlewick or cotton strips soaked in kerosene. Wind, well, one couldn’t say wind was actually harnessed, though sailors liked to think so, and they had made such a study of its various temperaments that they contrived to use it to accomplish a marvelous feat; by adjusting sheets of canvas, they could move large ships across entire oceans. Wind in my view was the most capricious element, but there was one thing it couldn’t do and that was whip up a tempest in a closed box. Therefore, it was clear that the wind had entered my room from the outside. The door had been open and slammed shut just as I reached it. As for the vases of flowers, they might have been protected by the bench and the low shrubbery near the path.

So I reconciled myself to a practical view, and exercised by my climb, I arrived at Gussie’s Tea Room in a rational state of mind. As I drew closer, to my surprise, the screen door flew open and Jeremiah Babin barged out, walking briskly toward me, his head lowered and giving off an air of agitation, which struck me as odd because his nature, as I had observed it, was expansive, sociable, and not prone to vexation. When he glanced up to see who stood in his path, he appeared at first startled and then annoyed. “Good morning,” I said. “You’re up early.”

He stopped, scowling at me so intently that I took a step back. “I’ve been up since dawn,” he said coldly.

I felt nothing but relief at this news. “Was it the storm?” I asked. “It got me up too, but not before it wrecked my room.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’ve been up since dawn attending on our dear Miss Petra, who is in quite a state, thanks to you.”

“Now it’s I who am mystified,” I said. “She wasn’t the least excited last night.”

“Really?” he said, meaning he didn’t believe me. “She says you accused her of being a fraud, and she says you tried to get her to admit it, and she’s sure you have every intention of writing horrible lies about her in your newspaper and she’s back there”—he flung out his arm in the direction of the hotel—“packing madly because she wants to leave at once, though she has an important sitting this afternoon with Mrs. Grover Greenwich who has come all the way from Ohio on purpose to see her.”

“But that’s not true,” I protested. “I said nothing of the kind.”

“Well, you must have said something, Miss Grant. And I think it very small of you, as we’ve been nothing but welcoming and generous and willing to answer all your nosy questions since you came among us.”

My conscience stung me, but not because of my conversation with Violet. It was because I had allowed Jeremiah to pay for my dinner the night before. I shouldn’t have, and he knew it as well as I did. “I’m very sorry to hear that something I said upset Violet,” I said. “But I assure you, I made no accusations or any kind, nor do I intend to write anything critical of her.”

“What did you say?”

“I hardly said anything at all. I just asked what you call ‘nosy’ questions. Perhaps she regrets her answers, but not because I suggested she should.”

This appeal tempered his anger, but he was still uncharacteristically sullen. “I shouldn’t have left her alone with you,” he said. “Now I don’t know who to believe.”

We had been walking in a leisurely way as we talked and had arrived at a bench set in the shade of three birch trees that hovered over it, as if to eavesdrop on any conversation that might take place in their domain. “Let’s stop here,” Jeremiah suggested, and I agreed. When we were seated, he repeated his dilemma. “I don’t know who to believe.”

“What motive could I have for dissembling?” I asked.

He considered this question, and its corollary — what motive might Violet have for not telling the truth — and for several moments neither of us spoke. I was thinking over anything I might have said to Violet that would make her desperate. “I hope you won’t be offended,” I said, to break the silence. “But I think it isn’t a good idea to give her wine.”

His heavy brows drew together and he cocked his head to have a closer look at me, as if I were a cat who had unexpectedly offered advice. “That’s what Virginia says,” he admitted. “But Violet says it helps her sleep. She can be very insistent.”

“I believe that,” I said.

“That wine helps her sleep?” he asked.

“That she has trouble sleeping.”

He studied me with unnecessary intensity. “And why do you think that is? Why can’t Violet sleep?”

“Because,” I said measuredly, “Violet is a deeply unhappy woman.”

“Is she?” The thought appeared entirely novel to him. “But why should she be?”

I shrugged. How could he not know? was what I thought.

“Insomnia is a common female complaint, isn’t it? Many women suffer from it; men seldom do. Virginia takes a sedative most nights. She can’t do without it. Women have very complex nervous systems. They are too highly strung.”

“I’ve heard that view expressed by medical men,” I agreed.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s widely understood.” He stroked his hair back from his temple, as if to assist his brain in its pursuit of the solution to a puzzle. “Do you have difficulty sleeping?”

“Not as a rule,” I replied. The sleepless night I’d just passed nagged at me, and I realized it had left me shaken and dispirited.

“But you’re an unusual woman. I’ve observed that. I don’t think many women could live by their wits as you do. I certainly don’t think Violet could, nor should she. Her gift is too important; it must be protected.”

“You think she’s too sensitive to take care of herself.”

“I know she is.”

“Perhaps that’s what makes her unhappy.”

“Why should it?” he said sharply. “People come from miles around to consult her. She’s welcomed everywhere she goes. She’s had a great success.” He shook his head in profound perplexity.

Violet, I thought, had spent the morning “playing the tyrant” with her protector, and she had managed to vex and even to frighten him. My sympathies were not unengaged by his dilemma; he was an intelligent, open-minded, amiable, unimaginative man who wanted life to go smoothly and pleasantly. But where Violet was concerned, he was paddling about in a pond that was deeper and darker than he could possibly know. To such a man, Violet Petra must be well nigh unfathomable. Nothing in his nature could account for what was in hers. Now he regarded me with pleading eyes, eager for some useful feminine clarification, blissfully unaware that the obstinacy of his befuddlement had begun to wear on my patience. “No,” he concluded, “I can’t believe she’s unhappy. She has a fascinating life.”

I recalled Violet’s weary reply the night before—Ten long years.

“Is it such a life as you would want for your own daughter?” I asked my insistent companion.

The slow intake of breath, the drawing away that followed this question, didn’t surprise me. I lowered my eyes, waiting for his momentary confusion to be replaced by resentment or hostility. A gnat had struck at him, after all. But Jeremiah had better defenses in his arsenal. After a proper, nearly ceremonial silence, he said softly, without agitation, “I see.”

I met his eyes, which buried me in an avalanche of contempt. “I see,” he said again, calm and distant. All his courtesy and interest and earnest entreaty of my opinion had evaporated like the mist the sun had burned away while we had been talking.

“What is it that you see?” I asked, deflecting his iciness with a chill of my own.

He smiled joylessly. “What you do,” he said. “And why I found Violet hysterical this morning.”

Abrupt reversals in the terms of a professional relationship are not uncommon in my experience. A previously willing party to an investigation decides all at once to become an obstacle. My questions have touched some nerve, my intentions, which — I really think because of my sex — are presupposed to be honorable, are revealed to be ignoble. The story I’m after is not the one my subject wishes to be told. I may well take the liberty of printing “horrid lies.” I made no reply, as I had nothing to say, and I expected Jeremiah to fire some dismissive parting shot and walk away, but he sat there glowering at me in what could best be described as a huff.

Our fellow campers began to appear, sauntering in small groups toward the lake or up the path to the waterfall, eager to take in the delights of the new day. Two pretty children in white dresses and light summer shoes skipped on the path, their straight black hair cut in identical bobs, their heads inclined together, deep in conversation. They didn’t notice us as they passed, but I watched Jeremiah notice them, and some sliver of sympathy awakened in me — he must think of his own lost darlings whenever he saw living children, children who would grow up, children who would have more to say than “we are happy here.” His eyes rested upon them as they passed, but his expression didn’t soften.

A young man stepped out of the teahouse and, seeing the girls, called out to them. “It’s Mr. Talbot,” one gasped to the other, and they took off at a run to greet him. Mr. Talbot was the proprietor of the spirit photography shop; I’d seen samples of his work in the window. One sat for him and the resulting photograph invariably included a misty spirit hovering over the chair, or funneling in from the ceiling like a cloudburst. If these innocent girls had a dollar to spend between them, they might pass a titillating half an hour inside the tent, while Mr. Talbot, a handsome young impostor who always wore a boater hat and a floppy black tie, posed them and teased them and swore he could see the veiled face of a spirit rising up behind them, but they must not turn to look or the picture would be spoiled. I watched the girls, holding hands and laughing at some witticism from the droll photographer. An old couple, the man thin, the woman portly, appeared at the edge of the forest path, their eyes strangely glittering in the morning light.

A powerful sensation of revulsion rose up in me. Who were these bizarre, complacent people, these obstinate monomaniacs fixated on the patently absurd? Amid all this natural beauty, what most enlivened them was their conviction that death was not momentous, that life, as they put it, was continuous. The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice. That and the news that they were happy being dead, that life as they now lived it was better than it had been when they walked the green earth disporting themselves in flesh and blood.

The tumultuous events of the night, the condition of my hotel room, my anxiety to get away from it, the rush to the lake, the beauty and serenity of the scene, the timely intrusion of Jeremiah Babin with his provocative innocence and his sham interest, it all struck me as of a vicious piece, but a piece of what I couldn’t tell.

Jeremiah, emanating superiority and indifference, leaned forward beside me and dangled his hands between his knees. Did he really believe it? I wondered. Did this powerful, wealthy, educated man believe in the continuity of life? Or was he more interested in the continuity of his own comfort?

As if he felt my question, he turned to me. “I’d like to assure Violet that you won’t write anything against her,” he said.

“You may assure her,” I said. “I will tell you that when I met her, it was my intention to expose her as a fraud. And she may well be, for all I know. But I find I haven’t the heart to do her any harm. My article won’t mention her name.”

He was faintly disappointed, but I could see that his wish to return Violet to a state he thought of as normal was gratified by the idea that I would cause no further disturbance to her sensitive nervous apparatus. He stood up and looked down at me. “I’ll carry your message, Miss Grant,” he said. “And I trust you’ll make no further attempt to contact her.”

This amused me. “I never attempted to contact her to begin with,” I said. “She summoned me.”

“Did she?” he said, though of course he knew this, had been in on it. “Well, I don’t think she will again. Good day to you.”

“And to you, sir,” I said. Without looking back, he strode briskly down the path to the hotel. I watched his strong back, his well-coiffed hair, until he turned off at the lake and left my line of sight. I sat for a few moments more, mulling over my best course. At length I stood up and made my way down to the Lakeside Café, where the waitresses were serving coffee. I decided to drink a cup to brace myself for the tiresome business of putting my room back together and packing up my belongings.

An hour later, as I checked out, I asked the ever-cheerful desk clerk if he had been disturbed by a sudden storm in the night, which, I regretted, had resulted in my water pitcher being now in three pieces inside the basin. “No,” he said. “I sleep like the dead.” He winked at his own cleverness. “But things do go bump in the night here, don’t you know,” he continued. “We call them polterguests. There won’t be no charge for the pitcher.” I thanked him, paid my bill, and set out along the wooden walkway, past the dance pavilion and down the steps to the station platform. A soft breeze rustled in the white pines, a woodpecker was up and drilling, and I could hear the band running through scales in preparation for their morning parade. I plopped down on the platform bench, grateful to spend my last fifteen minutes at Lake Pleasant communing with nothing more spiritual than my valise. I made out the train, like a drop of ink spreading on a page, far down the track.

I had been waiting for perhaps ten minutes when I glanced up the hill and noticed a woman walking swiftly on the path from the hotel. As she reached the board walkway, she paused, bent over her ankles, and unbuckled her shoes. Then she sprinted, her skirt billowing, her dark hair loosening from the pins that restrained it, her stockinged feet flying across the wooden planks. At the stair landing she paused, gazing in the direction of the oncoming train, then at me, before she came pattering down the steps to join me on the platform. It was Violet, of course, flushed, wide-eyed, laughing at her own impetuosity. I stood up as she rushed to me, holding out her hands. “I couldn’t let you leave without saying good-bye,” she said, her breath coming in gasps. She took my hand in her own, shaking it gently as if we were just meeting. “Jeremiah said he told you I was angry at you, which is just ridiculous, I hope you know. I was angry at him!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, and I meant it. “But—”

“I couldn’t sleep after you left,” she continued. “I just paced the room until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I knocked on Jeremiah’s door and made him get up and listen to me. I tried to tell him how excited I was, and how I wanted to change everything, but he is so dense. I got frustrated and wound up in tears.”

The approaching train wailed as if in sympathy to her plight. Violet raised her voice over the racket. “But I was never angry at you. I had to tell you that.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said again. “But I fear you’ve torn your stockings.”

She raised one foot and we both laughed at the shredded silk. “I haven’t run in years,” she said. “Why do we never run?”

Now the engine was grinding and huffing and the brakes squealed as it lumbered to the platform. I picked up my valise and turned toward it. As I did, Violet caught my hand to stop me, and I turned to her. She released me at once, drawing back as if abashed by her own impulsiveness. “You have completely shaken me up, Phoebe Grant,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to,” I replied. The two carriages glided in before us; there was a wheeze and a cloud of white steam rose from below. The attendant yanked the heavy door open from inside. “Good luck to you,” I said, handing in my valise and following it.

When I looked back, Violet was smiling. “And to you,” she said. She had gripped her skirt in one hand, pulling it up and back so that the hem was lifted above her ankles. Another belch of steam issued from the train, washing over her torn stockings, her lifted skirt, up to the hand clutching the cloth at her hip. It alarmed me; I felt she was being swallowed up, and though I was perfectly aware that this was not the case, I had a strong premonition of something dark, something like doom gathering around this small, pert, eager woman who had made a most unladylike spectacle of herself in her anxiety to bid me farewell.

“Don’t forget me,” she called out, as the door slid shut and the train, with another wail of the whistle and screech of metal against metal, pulled away from Lake Pleasant.