“How awful,” his mother said when Elizabeth had finished. “Poor Anna, but I can’t believe Clarissa would be so reckless if she understood they really can’t afford this.”

“That’s just it,” Elizabeth said. “She doesn’t want to understand it. She wants to keep seeing the medium and hearing messages from David.” She gave Gideon a sympathetic glance.

David hadn’t been the sharpest fellow, but he’d been Gideon’s best friend since childhood. Gideon still missed him every day, and he could understand Mrs. Vanderslice’s desperation. Still . . . “But she isn’t getting messages from David. This woman is a charlatan. Nobody can speak to dead people.”

Elizabeth took his hand in both of hers. “Of course not, darling, but when someone chooses to believe it’s possible, no one can convince them otherwise.”

Gideon narrowed his eyes as he suddenly realized the truth about this medium. “It’s a con, isn’t it?”

She sighed. “Yes, it is.”

“What does your father say about it?”

If she was surprised that he’d guessed she would consult her father, she didn’t show it. “He didn’t know much about it. Séances went out of style a while ago.”

“Oh my, yes,” his mother confirmed. “They were very popular when I was young, though. We used to have them for fun, my friends and I. We’d sit around a table with a Ouija board, trying to get messages from beyond. We could never get the table to move, though.”

“That’s because you didn’t have a medium there to move it,” Elizabeth said with a small smile.

This was all so sadly ridiculous. “Can’t we just explain to Mrs. Vanderslice that it’s all fake?” he said.

“If she doesn’t want to believe she can’t afford the séances, she certainly won’t want to believe they’re fake.”

“People do become unreasonable about these things,” his mother confirmed. “I remember when the Fox sisters admitted they were phonies.”

“Who are the Fox sisters?” Elizabeth asked.

“They were famous mediums back in the day. Two sisters, or maybe it was three. I can’t remember. One of them finally wrote a book telling all their secrets. They would get messages from the spirits by having them make knocking sounds. The one sister admitted they were using their feet to make the sounds somehow. I can’t remember exactly . . .”

“Then we should get a copy of this book for Mrs. Vanderslice,” Gideon said, happy to have found a logical solution.

But his mother was shaking her head. “Even after that, the sisters went back to holding séances, claiming they had lied when they said it was all fake.”

“And people still believed in them?” Gideon marveled.

Elizabeth gave him a pitying look. “Of course, they did, darling, because they wanted to.”

“Then what does Anna expect you to do?”