Helen curled herself tight into a ball, put her hands over her ears, tried to silence the screams.

CHAPTER 27

Ann Whitcomb Gray

MAY 23, 1980

Miss Vera with her blue hair in a tight perm comes every Friday at three, asks me to read the tea leaves, the cards, to gaze into my scrying bowl and see what the future holds for her, to see if she has any messages from the beyond.

“What do you see, Ann?” she asks. “What do the spirits show you?”

I gaze into the black water of the bowl, concentrate, furrow my brow and let my eyes go glassy by not blinking.

“Is my darling Alan trying to reach us?” she asks.

“Oh yes,” I say, peering into the bowl as if Alan were a goldfish circling in the murky water. “He’s calling from the Great Beyond. He wants you to know how much he loves you and that he’s okay.”

I don’t really see any of this, of course, but I’ve learned to tell the ladies of Elsbury what they most want to hear. Especially the old, the lonely. Poor Miss Vera with her humped back, her swollen arthritic fingers. The diamond engagement ring and white gold wedding band that rattle around, loose now, clearly fitted for a plumper, younger finger. And though I don’t see any spirits of the present, I can clearly picture the past: Vera as a young woman on the altar, beautiful and happy with Alan by her side. He slips the ring on her finger, takes her in his arms and kisses her, and that kiss transcends time and space, fills the air in this room now, nearly sixty years later. The kiss that came before everything else: before four children, the oldest of whom would die in a car wreck; before Vera’s breast cancer, which she survived; and before Alan’s lung cancer, which he did not. Two packs a day for sixty years will get you in the end.

“He’s here now,” I say, gazing into the cut crystal bowl filled with water and black dye—a few drops of RIT poured from a bottle.

“What does he say?” the old woman asks. “Does he have a message for me?”

I squint down into the bowl and am startled by what I see. It’s not Alan’s face looking back at me (real or imagined), nor is it my own reflection.