Chapter Four

Clementine stood at her upstairs window and watched as two women struggled down the street toward the hotel. She recognized one of them; the woman had been at the fusty little dry goods store the day before when she had called, and had seemed quite interested when she had been handed a card. The woman’s eyes had been red-rimmed. A recent loss, and a heavy one from the look of it, she had thought at the time. She would have spoken with the woman at greater length, but she had barely been able to get a word past the prattling of the little dressmaker who worked at a table in the corner. Fortunately, the gossipy woman had happily filled Clementine in on the details she needed to know after the woman had left.

“That’s Mrs. Sprung. Poor lady lost her little girl in an accident just a month ago. She’s only just managed to pull herself together and go out once in a while.”

“How dreadful,” Clementine had murmured. “Whatever happened?”

She was treated to a blow-by-blow account of a runaway horse, a small child slipping in the street in front of it, broken, shattered bones, and the wails of the mother when it was discovered that the life had been battered out of her child. She had filed each detail away in her memory. The dressmaker had a very loose tongue, and Clementine made a mental note to frequent the store as often as possible.

Clementine had known that it was only a matter of time until the grieving woman came to her, but she was surprised she had come so soon. It was nearly always a woman who made the first approach, and most often they brought someone with them the first time, for comfort and support. The second woman in the street beside her could be safely ignored.

“Is the room ready?” she asked the boy, over her shoulder.

“Yes, Mama.”

“Bring me my shawl.”

“Yes, Mama.” His tone was flat. The boy always did what she asked, and with his father gone he had proved to be an enormous help to her; but she realized that she was never quite sure what this pale son of hers was thinking. There was no time to worry about it now, though, for the two women had arrived at the front door.

Clara Sprung hesitated as she and her companion reached the hotel. If her husband, Ezra, knew what she was doing, he would be furious. She had wondered at it herself all the way down the street, but the prospect of once again talking to, maybe even seeing little Amelia, was a possibility that she couldn’t ignore. One part of her mind argued that the whole enterprise was a waste of money, and that Ezra would be sure to notice the missing coins. Another insisted that this woman could indeed hold the key to finding out what had really happened to her darling Amelia, in spite of the assurances of the preachers that the little girl had without doubt gone to heaven and was even now basking in the glow of God’s blessing. She needed to know firsthand. But just in case her judgment had deserted her entirely, she had decided to bring her sister Harriet with her.

She was a little taken aback when she stepped inside and saw Mr. Lewis in the hallway. Everyone knew about him, of course. He had tracked down a notorious killer and brought him to justice. The whole village had been atwitter when he and his ailing wife had moved into the community. But she had been so flustered at the thought of speaking with her sweet little girl again that she had forgotten that Lewis was now helping to run the hotel. She had attended Methodist meetings on occasion, before she had settled into the habit of going along to the Church of England, and she was fairly certain what this preacher’s view of trying to contact the afterlife would be. Would he remonstrate with her, right here in the front hall of the hotel? Send her away; tell her she was nothing but a foolish woman? But he merely nodded and showed her up the stairs to Mrs. Elliott’s sitting room. She and Harriet were invited to take a seat at the table and the door was firmly shut in the preacher’s face.

Lewis didn’t know either of the two women who disappeared into the sitting room, but Daniel passed them in the hall and was quick to fill him in.

“One of them is Ezra Sprung’s wife,” he informed him. “They lost their little girl a while back. I expect that’s why she’s here, to see if Mrs. Elliott can help. The other is Mrs. Sprung’s sister. Sad, isn’t it?”

With the arrival of a paying customer, Lewis’s dilemma regarding Clementine Elliott’s activities had suddenly moved from the theoretical to the actual. He tried again to persuade Daniel to put a stop to it. “Do you really think we should be subscribing to this?” he insisted. “It can’t be anything more than party tricks, and she’s using your premises to perform them in.”

Daniel was having none of it. “I don’t see that it’s any of our concern what she does in her rooms as long as it’s not illegal or outright immoral. If she wants to carry on her business while she’s here, who are we to stop her?”

Lewis felt that this statement was on extremely shaky ethical ground. “But if it’s fraudulent in any way, that would be neither legal nor moral. And you could be held culpable in the consequences.”

“I don’t see how,” Daniel scoffed. “Besides, who’s to say that she doesn’t have a genuine ability to communicate with the afterlife? God has wrought greater miracles. Think of Daniel in the lion’s den, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.”

Lewis was at a loss as to how he should counter this argument. God had indeed wrought many miracles in the Bible, but the preacher had a great deal of difficulty believing that the same agency was at work in a hotel room in Canada West. But as Daniel pointed out, it was a difficult argument to uphold. How could you convince people of the miracle of God’s grace if you denied them what they perceived as evidence of that grace, especially when it was impossible to prove it otherwise?

It was obvious that Daniel was not to be persuaded. For now, all Lewis could do was keep his eyes and ears open. When he had collected enough information to make his case, and he was certain that he would, he would once again ask Daniel to put a stop to the nonsense.

Lewis made sure to be standing near the landing when the two women descended the staircase two hours later. Tears were running down Mrs. Sprung’s face and she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Whatever had happened upstairs must have been upsetting, indeed, he thought, but then he realized that her sister wore a puzzled expression that was tinged with more than a little awe.

“There, there, Clara,” she said, patting the woman on the back. “It’s what you wanted, after all.”

“I know, I know, it was wondrous to see her again. It’s just that it’s given me such a turn.”

Lewis stepped back into the dining room before the women spotted him. He was puzzled. Whatever had happened in the upstairs room had affected Mrs. Sprung profoundly. Her sister less so, perhaps, but she had obviously been impressed. How had Mrs. Elliott convinced them that a dead girl was communicating from beyond?