“Yes, we’ve been anxious to tell you all about our trip to see the medium.”

He nodded and allowed her to lead him into the parlor. His mother greeted him, and he sank down onto the sofa with a weary sigh. His mother frowned but didn’t ask any questions. She knew he couldn’t discuss his work with them. He forced a smile. “Now tell me how your séance went.”

“It was quite enlightening,” his mother said. She was embroidering something and didn’t even look up, although he noticed she was grinning.

“Was it what you expected?” he asked Elizabeth.

“Yes, exactly. Madame Ophelia was wearing a turban, so I’m guessing she had an operator’s headset under it. She must have been hooked up to a telephone system somehow. She was already in her chair when we came in, and she never got up until after we left, so it must involve wires or something. Anyway, that would be how she was told . . . Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, she had us write down the questions we had for the spirits.”

“Tell him about the bag,” his mother prodded, still grinning over her embroidery.

“We wrote our questions down and folded the papers up. Then we dropped them into a cloth bag her assistant passed around.”

“And then the assistant pulled them out and burned them all up right in front of us,” his mother couldn’t resist explaining. She finally looked up, and her eyes were fairly glittering with delight.

“Then how did the medium know what the questions were?” Gideon asked.

“Tell him,” his mother said to Elizabeth.

“The bag we put the questions into was a magician’s bag. It has two sections and a lever in the handle that allows you to switch the opening back and forth between them. We dropped the questions into one side, the assistant switched the opening to the other side, and she pulled out blank papers identical to the ones we dropped in.”

“How do you know all this?” Gideon asked in amazement.

“Simple magic tricks can come in handy when you’re conning someone,” she explained. Gideon decided he didn’t want to know any more.

“Except the papers she burned were blank,” his mother added, in case he hadn’t figured that out. “She burned the blank ones and took the real ones away with her.”

“And then she read them to the medium over the telephone thing,” Gideon guessed. “But how does the medium know what to tell people? Obviously, she’s not getting messages from real spirits.”

“She collects information,” Elizabeth said. “She probably makes her clients sit in the waiting room for a long time so she can eavesdrop on what they talk about.”

“It’s only natural to talk about who you are hoping to contact and what you hope to find out while you’re waiting,” his mother said.