After the visions I’d had at the cop shop, I was feeling tired and sluggish, and not at all in the mood for lunch with my mother, especially since she’d insisted we meet at Dillon’s Country Store and Café.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll be persona totally non grata there, Mom,” I’d complained.
I didn’t look forward to coming face-to-face with Judy Dillon, since I’d been partly responsible for bringing legal troubles to her family a few months back.
My mother pooh-poohed my concern with an airy hand. “Judy should be grateful for what you did. Besides, you can’t avoid her forever, so you may as well get it over with. As your father would say, ‘Eat the toad!’”
“Frog,” I’d muttered, knowing that although she was wrong on the wording of one of Dad’s favorite expressions, she wasn’t wrong about getting the inevitable over with.
Parking in Main Street, I noticed that the Sweet and Smoky Syrup Emporium was closed, with an explanatory notice stuck on the front door and a black ribbon tied around the door handle. Again, I felt the compulsion to learn more about Laini Carter, to speak to the people she’d worked with, to find out more about her life and her death. Especially her death.
A big man clutching a marmalade cat to his chest sat on the bench outside Dillon’s, asking the patrons on their way in to buy him lunch.
“Hey, Lyle,” I said.
He studied me for a few moments while his cat stared off to the left side of me.
“You’re back,” he said in his low rumble of a voice. His cat narrowed its eyes and hissed at me.
“Can I buy you a sandwich?”
“I like hot beef on rye. Toasted. No pickles.”
“I remember,” I said, pulling the door open.
“No pickles!” he called after me.
Inside, Dillon’s was warm to the point of being stifling. I hung my coat on the hook at the door and joined my mother at a table in the center of the restaurant. While she chattered away about inanities, I rubbed at my temples, where a dull headache throbbed. I needed coffee — where was the waitress already? Glancing over my mother’s shoulder, I saw a pretty woman with long strawberry-blond hair striding toward us, a look of fury on her face.
Uh-oh.
Judy Dillon marched up to our table and stood, hands on hips, glaring down at me. Her mouth opened and closed a few times as she seemingly struggled to find words. I suspected if we weren’t in her place of business, she’d have given me a serious piece of her mind — and maybe even the back of her hand — but she needed to be polite in front of her other customers. Was that why Mom had chosen this restaurant? Sometimes, my mother was cannier than I tended to give her credit for.
Judy’s gaze traveled from my new boots up to my old sweater, while a succession of emotions chased across her face — outrage, dislike and finally, resignation.
“So,” she finally said, “you’re back, are you?”
“I am.”
She gave a hmmph of displeasure. “Are your eyes stuck like that, then?”
“I guess.”
“You could get contact lenses, you know? Wear a brown one over your blue eye, and then they’d match.”
“I could.” I kept my answers brief and neutral, minimizing the risk of saying something that would give Judy an excuse to lay into me, because she still looked like she was itching to.
“May we order?” Mom asked.
“I’m not a waitress here anymore,” Judy said. “I’m the manager.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
Judy sniffed. “But I guess I can give your order to the kitchen.”
“I’ll have the scrambled egg and smoked salmon popover,” Mom said.
“I’ll have …” I scanned the menu, then tossed it back onto the enameled top of the table. “Could you just bring me an Irish coffee? Extra, extra hot.”
“Daytime drinking?” Judy said, smirking at this evidence of my moral slackness.
“Make it a double,” I said, defiantly.
“It’s your liver, I guess.” Taking the menus, she sashayed back to the kitchen.
“Extra hot! And no sugar,” I called out after her. My mismatched eyes weren’t the only consequence of my death that remained. I still had Colby’s dislike of anything too sweet.
“Why aren’t you eating?” my mother asked me.
“I'm not hungry.”
My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a tragedy-sized lump of serpentine.
“I hope you’re not coming down with the flu.”
Sore head, fatigue, no appetite — it felt a lot like the flu. But the beings that affected me weren’t microbial.
As though she could read my mind, Mom said, “Any more messages from the beyond?”
“Not a one.”
“Nothing funny happening when you’re alone at home? No more signs or visions?” She looked as eager as a kid on Christmas morning.
I didn’t like lying to her, but right then I had neither the inclination nor the energy to get into what I’d experienced at the police station, so I threw in a distraction.
“My television changes channels by itself.”
She clapped her hands together and clasped them against her chest. “That’s a sign, Garnet, a definite sign! The electrics always go wackadoodle when there’s heightened paranormal activity in the vicinity. The spirits love to play static and to change stations on the radio.”
“It was the TV.”
“Same difference. It’s their way of trying to communicate. Oh!” she gasped. “You know what you need?”
A genetic test to confirm that I was in fact her biological daughter despite us having so little in common?
“I’m sure you’ll tell me,” I said.
“An EVP recorder!”
“A what, now?”
“An electronic voice phenomenon recorder. It’s a special kind of tape recorder that captures sounds the human ear doesn’t — like spirit voices. Ghost hunters use them all the time.”
I snorted. “You mean those gadgets the Winchester brothers run around with on Supernatural?”
“No, that’s an EMF meter — it measures the electromagnetic frequency given off by paranormal beings.”
I rolled my eyes.
“EVP recorders are channels of communication between us and the discarnate,” she said solemnly.
“Discarnate? Is that even a word?”
“The best kind are Panasonic DR60 recorders. They came out in the 1980s and were supposed to be the latest, greatest and up-to-datest dictation recorders because they used a chip not a cassette tape. But then customers started returning them in droves because when they played back their recordings, there were these very peculiar sounds on the sections when no one was speaking!” She looked at me as if expecting an amazed reaction to this tidbit of history. When I gave her a bewildered look, she continued, “They thought the recorders were faulty, you see. But really the machines were extra good, so they were picking up paranormal communications! If you listen very carefully to the recordings, you can hear what the spirits are saying.”
That sounded like auditory pareidolia — the tendency to incorrectly perceive meaningful sounds where there’s just random noise. But I could also think of a bunch of other reasons for the “peculiar sounds.” Static, background or white noise would be the most likely explanations, but the recorders might surely also be picking up faint radio signals, interference from other nearby electrical equipment, or even the internal operating noise of the device itself. And, of course, the “spirit voices” could simply be deliberate hoaxes by fraudsters.
“They go for a fortune these days,” Mom continued. “My friend Bettina says people sell them for a fortune on eBay and Greg’s List.”
“Craig’s.”
“What’s that, dear?”
“Craigslist.”
“That’s the one! Bettina says they go for $1500 and more —”
“Are you serious?”
“Which just goes to show how valuable they are.”
“Just goes to show how gullible people are, more like.”
Judy arrived with our drinks. “One cappuccino and one Irish coffee, extra hot, no sugar, with a double shot of whiskey.” She said the last few words loudly enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear.
A thin man at a nearby table turned around to look at us, then returned to reading his newspaper.
“That’s Kennick Carter, Laini’s brother,” Judy whispered to my mother. “Poor thing, he looks devastated.”
“Oh, my!” Mom craned around Judy’s midriff to get a good look, but the man had his back to us again. “And is he from the South?”
“Could be. His accent sounds like a little bit of everywhere.”
“He looks nice — what I can see of him,” Mom said.
“All you can see of him is his back,” I pointed out.
Talking to my mother, Judy said, “He’s attractive from the front, too, in a rakish kind of way.”
“Rakish? What is he, a pirate?”
A calculating look came over my mother’s face. “Do you know if he’s married?”
“Mom,” I said in a warning tone.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d tried to find a beau for me. She still believed a new romance could fill the hole left by the loss of my first love.
She was wrong.
“How long is he in town for, Judy?” she asked, sending the man another evaluating glance.
“Dunno. Would you like me to ask him for you, Garnet?” Judy said with an evil smile.
“No, I would not,” I snapped, irritation rising along with a dull flush.
“Your loss,” she told me.
“Please make me a hot beef on toasted rye and a tuna salad, both to go. On the sandwich, hold the pickle, and on the salad, hold the salad and the dressing.”
“So, basically, you want a tub of plain tuna?”
“Yeah.”
“Your money,” she said, giving me a look that clearly conveyed she thought I was cracked before heading back to the kitchen.
“Well, now, where were we?” my mother asked.
“Quite far down the rabbit hole,” I said and took a sip of the coffee. It was almost too hot and almost too bitter — just perfect.
“No, I think we were talking about EVPs.”
“Mom, let me tell you a story. There’s this huge astronomical observatory in Australia that has an enormous radio telescope which picked up strange signals for seventeen years. No one could figure out what they were. The scientists — and these were genius-level astrophysicists, mind you — were baffled. The best explanations they could come up with for the mystery signals were that they were due to distant lightning, or” — I paused dramatically — “to radio signals coming from a distant galaxy.”
My mother’s eyes widened in anticipation. I took another slug of coffee.
“Of course, those explanations didn’t account for why the signals were only detected during the daytime,” I said. “Anyway, they were convinced it came from the earth’s atmosphere or way beyond.”
“Signals from outer space!”
“Not so fast,” I said. “A couple of years back, a doctoral student figured out that the radio signals were interference coming from the microwave in the staff kitchen.” My mother’s face crumpled in disappointment. “When the staff, who only worked there in the daytime, used it to heat their lunch or coffee, and opened it while it was still cooking, it caused the strange signal which the telescope detected if it happened to be facing the kitchen at that moment. Voila! Mystery solved.”
“Well, that’s very interesting, dear, but what’s that got to do with the price of cheese in China?”
“The signal wasn’t what they thought it was, it was interference. Just like on your E-recorders.”
“EVPs.”
“The human brain has evolved to recognize patterns even when none exist.”
“They do exist!”
“Plus, there’s a psychological phenomenon called priming. People who believe in — what did you call them? Discarnate entities — well, those people hope and even expect to hear speech, and so they do. But it’s not really there.” My mother took an indignant breath, but before she could speak, I added, “And I’ll bet they always hear the words in their own language. They do, don’t they? That’s because they’re imagining it!”
“It’s not imagination, it’s proof! It’s science. Thomas Edison came up with the idea, and he was one of the brightest minds ever.”
I downed the last of my coffee. “Yeah, well, I’m not spending $1500 on a defective voice recorder, no matter what old Edison thought.”
“Maybe you could try using the recorder on your cell phone?” Mom said, sounding doubtful.
Judy came to our table just then, made a fuss of setting my mother’s food down for her, and dropped the wrapped sandwich and a can of tuna in front of me. “Can I bring you another Irish coffee, with a double shot of whiskey? If you like, I could hold the coffee.”
She was gone before I could reply, even though I was feeling better — which just proved the whiskey had been purely medicinal — and would’ve liked to order something to eat.
After a few minutes of alternating her attention between her popover (“This is delicious — you’re missing out, dear!”) and Laini’s brother (“Poor fellow, he’s not eating either, and he looks like he could use a square meal and a good woman to take care of him,”) my mother announced, “I’ve just had a brilliant idea.”
“An even better one than the EVP?”
“You could offer to help him.”
“Help who?”
“Your father’s worried about you, you know?” Mom pointed an accusing fork at me. “He says you need to start earning a living. I mean, you’re almost thirty!”
“I’ve just turned twenty-eight.”
“And when you finish your thesis, they’ll want the assistant’s job at the psychology department back, won’t they? To give to a student who’s still registered. And then how are you going to provide for yourself?”
It was something I’d been worrying about, too.
“He might even be willing to pay you a fee.”
“Who, Dad?”
“No, Laini’s brother.” She shot another glance at the man, who was tucking a couple of bills into the check folder.
“Pay me for what?”
“For helping him!”
Was she suggesting I get a job as a companion to console and feed the bereaved? “Mom, I’m lost.”
She waved the fork at me again, dropping a piece of egg onto the table. “You’re being deliberately obtuse! Lawdy, if there ever was a donkey as obstinate as you, I never met him. I mean, of course, that you could help him solve the mystery of his sister’s death.”
“Ohhh,” I said, finally getting what she was on about. She wasn’t matchmaking after all, at least, not in any romantic kind of way. “Oh, no way!”
“With great talent comes great responsibility, Garnet, and you have the second sight in spades.”
“No. Way,” I repeated.
“You could turn it into a business, like a private eye.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I can see it now” — she wrote big letters in the air — “McGee Paranormal Investigations. No, wait, I’ve got it! Garnet McGee — Psychic Detective!”
Laini’s brother stood up to leave, and to my horror, my mother waylaid him as he passed our table.
“Mr. Carter? I’m Crystal McGee, and this is my daughter, Garnet.”
He looked a bit bewildered but shook her hand.
“I wanted to give you my condolences on the sad loss of your sister. She was a wonderful woman.”
As far as I knew, my mother had never even met Laini Carter.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“It must be so difficult not knowing exactly what happened.”
“Mom,” I warned.
“But my daughter here could help you with that — she’s a psychic detective.”
“Mom!”
“She solved a murder here in Pitchford last Christmas.”
Kennick Carter blinked in confusion. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Please ignore her,” I told him. “She’s not right in the head.”
“She has the second sight, you know,” my mother continued, unperturbed. “She gets messages from beyond the veil, and sometimes when she touches objects, she gets readings. And she’s had visions about your sister.”
“Mom, stop talking now,” I told her fiercely, my face hot with anger and embarrassment. To Carter, I said, “I’m so sorry to have bothered you.”
“Here, let me.” My mother slid the folded newspaper right out from under his arm and scribbled something on a margin. “This is her name and number, in case you want to make use of her services.”
I hid my face in my hands and shook my head. When I looked up again, Carter had gone.
“I have never been so embarrassed in my entire life,” I said. “That poor guy must think we’re nuts.”
But my mother had a very satisfied expression on her face. “I think you’ll be getting a call from him,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? You think he’s the sort to contact random weirdos, do you?”
“I think he’s the sort who likes to take a chance. Didn’t you see what he was reading?”
“Uh, the newspaper?”
“The horse-racing results.”