Strong Spirits [Spirits 01] (37 page)

      
“Because there are guards there,” I said, trying not to sound as irked as I felt.

      
“But there aren’t many of them. Heck, Daisy, face it, the border into Mexico is easy to cross. Or he could have driven to Arizona and gone to Mexico that way.”

      
“They posted more guards at the California-Mexico border, specifically to stop Kincaid if he headed that way.” Golly, Arizona hadn’t once crossed my mind, and I felt I’d missed a good idea to fling at Rotondo. Sam. Whoever he was.

      
“Ah.”

      
“But it’s a lot harder to drive to Arizona than it is to drive to the Los Angeles Harbor,” Pa pointed out. “Think of all that desert to cross. I’m sure Kincaid has a better machine than we do, but no automobile ever invented can cross a desert without getting into trouble with water or blown tires. And if he has a machine with a battery, I hear they don’t do so good on the desert.” He shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t want to be stranded between California and Arizona, or Arizona and the Mexican border with no water. A man would die from dehydration before the day was out.”

      
I leaped upon this salient point with both feet. “Exactly! That’s why I think your precious Sam ought to notify the Coast Guard to be on the lookout for Kincaid’s get-away boat. Or whatever it is. But will he listen to me? Of course, not.” I thought
Sam
believed my ideas were foolish because I was a woman and a so-called fortune-teller, but I didn’t say that for Billy’s sake. If he liked the man, so be it. Nuts. “For all I know, Mr. Kincaid bought himself a yacht and plans to sail to the Hawaiian Islands.”

      
“I’ve got to admit you have a point there, Daisy,” Billy conceded. How generous of him.

      
“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” said Ma.

      
Now let me say right here and now that I adore my mother. She’s an excellent accountant and a whiz when it comes to dealing with numbers. Heck, she’s head bookkeeper at the Hotel Marengo, and has to deal with numbers in the hundreds of thousands (I’m talking about dollars here), but she doesn’t have enough imagination to fill a thimble. She could never even come up with bed-time stories for Walter, Daphne, and me when we were kids. It was Pa who had the imagination in the family. Well, Pa and me. When it came to imagination, I was a chip off the old fatherly block, in fact. But Ma . . . well, she was a swell person.

      
Therefore, when Ma endorsed my idea, I looked at it again, worried that Rotondo was right and I was a moron.

      
Oddly enough, it was Billy who came to my rescue. Since he’d come back to me, broken and wasted, I’d taken over the job as rescuer in our marriage. “It makes more sense to head for the ocean than to drive to the border, now that you’ve brought the desert into it, Pa.” He called my father “Pa” out of habit, since his own parents were gone.

      
“Exactly,” said I, pleased that Billy was actually agreeing with me for once. “That’s why I suggested that Detective Rotondo call on the Coast Guard to patrol.”

      
On a sigh, Pa said, “It’s a long border between Oregon and Mexico, and it’s a mighty big ocean, Daisy. It might be more difficult to find a man on water than on land, where motorcars have to drive on roads.”

      
I’d actually thought about that, too, and had an answer handy, more or less. “True, but they have new equipment. What do they call it? Radio? They can communicate from boat to boat using it. I read about it in the
Star News
a while back.”

      
“That’s right,” Billy said, sounding enthusiastic for once. “I read about that, too. The article said that one of these days, and not far off, either, people just like us will have radio-signal-receiving sets in our houses. Wouldn’t that be something?”

      
“It sure would.” Pa sounded even more enthusiastic than Billy. He always did.

      
“I guess,” I said. “But why would you want to listen to what the Coast Guard boats are saying to each other?”

      
“It wouldn’t be just the Coast Guard, Daisy.” Lord bless him, Billy didn’t scoff at me for my question. Much. “I read in a magazine at the library that once you’ve got your radio-receiving machine hooked up, you can listen to music or even hear stage plays over the receiver.”

      
“Really? Gee, I wonder what it would be like to hear a play and not see the actors acting in it.” A couple of times we’d gone to see Gilmor Brown and his Savoy Stock Company at the Old Savoy Theater on Fair Oaks.

      
I liked going to the theater, but it was difficult for Billy, since he had to climb up stairs, which spoiled him from doing any other kind of exercise for hours afterwards. And then somebody had to heave his wheelchair up the same stairs, and he had to sit in an aisle in order to watch the play, because he was too winded to climb out of his chair and sit on a real seat.

      
He’d
never
allow Pa to lift and carry him. Plus, he hated being noticed except when I wheeled him down Colorado Boulevard during the annual Armistice Day Parade, because he was only one of several other men in wheelchairs, most in even worse shape than he was. At the theater, people couldn’t help but notice him in his wheelchair because it blocked an aisle.

      
“I’m not sure I’d enjoy listening to a play without being able to see the actors,” said Ma, giving an example of that defective imagination I mentioned earlier.

      
“I think it would be great,” I said to her. Because she needed more explanation than most people due to the one flaw in her essential composition, I added, “It would be like reading a book, Ma. When you read a book, you see the words but supply the characters with their looks and so forth in your head.”

      
Ma said, “Oh.”

      
“Exactly,” said Billy. “Boy, it would be great to be able to listen to the news on a radio-receiving set, too.”

      
“But we get the news in the
Star News
,” said Ma.

      
“True, but maybe we’d get it faster over the radio-receiver than the newspaper. Even when newspapers print specials, it takes time.”

      
“And don’t ever forget that people are always coming up with new ideas,” said Pa, who actually
did
come up with new ideas occasionally, unlike Ma. “I’d bet my entire fortune—” This, needless to say, was a joke, since he didn’t have one. “—that if radio-signal-receiving sets become popular, folks will begin writing stories specifically for them.”

      
“Oh, boy, I hadn’t thought about that. What fun, to be able to sit down in your own house and listen to a real, live play on a machine!”

      
Okay, that made a dog and a radio-receiving set I was going to buy for Billy as soon as I could. For all I knew, radio-receiving sets cost a mint, but I was fairly sure I could get Mrs. Bissel to give me one of her dachshunds without much trouble. Mrs. Bissel was a sweetheart, but she was even dimmer than Mrs. Kincaid, and she absolutely loved people who loved her dogs. I expected her to call me to conduct a séance any day now, and I was going to see if she’d trade a séance for a dachshund.

      
Sometimes when I think about it, my life seems kind of strange. But it was mine, and I lived it as well as I could.

# # #

      
To my shock and intense pleasure, not to mention Billy’s, Mrs. Kincaid didn’t telephone the next day. Or the next. Or even the next. I went to choir practice on Thursday, praying I wouldn’t return home to a message begging me to race to the Kincaids’ house, and there wasn’t one.

      
We went to church on Sunday morning, and there was no Sam Rotondo sitting in the congregation to sabotage the service for me. As luck would have it, I didn’t have to sing any duets that day. He’d chosen the one day during which his presence would upset me to show up. I considered such behavior typical on his part.

      
He and Billy, however, were becoming closer and closer. Darned if the man didn’t come over twice that week to play gin rummy with Billy and Pa. He wouldn’t talk about the Kincaid case, claiming it was against police procedure. I just bet.

      
I chose to ignore them and make myself a new dress in a gorgeous cream-colored silk, having found the material on sale in Nash’s Department Store’s fabric department. I usually wear dark colors, but I’d rationalized the expenditure by deciding the creamy color would blend in with my skin tone and make me look mysterious. And if it didn’t, I could always wear the dress to church.

      
Billy must have told Sam—I was beginning to think of the man as Sam now, too, drat it—about radio-receiving sets, and they talked about them during one entire gin rummy evening. Pa joined in the conversation with gusto, as usual. As Ma brought out the hemming stick and stuck pins around the bottom of my cream-colored dress—it had one of those modern, up-and-down, uneven hems so Ma had to adjust the metal measuring stick every few pins—we could hear them, yakking away like gossiping woman.

      
“I don’t care what anyone says, Ma. Men are as bad as women when it comes to talking about silly things.”

      
She glanced up from her hemming stick, pins fanning out from her mouth and making her look like a gargoyle. “Do you think so, dear? I rather enjoy hearing Billy and your father enjoying themselves.”

      
When she put it like that, I felt guilty. “I do too, Ma,” I said, lying through my teeth.

      
What was the matter with me? I knew good and well that I was jealous of Sam Rotondo, and I couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps because we’d gotten off to such a rocky start (Sam and me, not Billy and me. Our rockiness had come with the war), I didn’t like the fact that Billy liked
him
, if that makes any sense.

      
Or maybe—and this scared me even more than the above—I was beginning to find Detective Sam Rotondo attractive. He wasn’t handsome, like my Billy or Del Farrington, but he had a sort of rugged charm.

      
No. Not charm. Rotondo definitely possessed no charm. I don’t know what it was, but it worried me, and I wished he didn’t come to our house so often. Which was selfish of me. Billy needed friends almost more than he needed his morphine.

      
In other words, I was totally confused and didn’t like my state of mind one little bit.

      
Mrs. Bissel called me on Monday, almost as if she’d heard my thoughts about trading séances for dachshunds, but there wasn’t a peep from Mrs. Kincaid. Harold had called me once or twice during those few days, but he only claimed nothing new had happened and that there had been no word from or about his father. I didn’t ask about Stacy, and he didn’t volunteer any information, so I assumed she was being as bratty as ever.

      
When Tuesday rolled around, I was starting to wonder if Mrs. Kincaid had found herself another spiritualist. Now
that
would put a serious crimp in my business. Harold called again that night to chat. He was a great one for chatting, and was very entertaining, although I didn’t suppose Billy would think so. I almost asked him if his mother didn’t like me any longer, but couldn’t quite make myself do it.

      
On Wednesday, I was just about to take a bold step and call Mrs. Kincaid for myself to see what was going on, when the telephone rang in the kitchen. My cream-colored silk slithered to the floor when I jumped up from the sewing machine. I didn’t even stoop to pick it up, I was so eager to get to the phone.

      
After persuading Mrs. Barrow and Mrs. Mayweather to get off the wire—I presumed Mrs. Lynch and Mrs. Pollard were off shopping or visiting somewhere—I recognized Mrs. Kincaid’s voice. Barely. Her voice was raspy, sounding amazingly like leaves scraping against a window on a dark and creepy night.

      
I wasn’t even sure it was her at first. “Mrs. Kincaid? Is that you?”

      
“Y-yes,” she whimpered.

      
Oh, golly, something bad must have happened. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Kincaid? What happened? You sound desperate.”

      
Now, if I were truly a person who could communicate with spirits, do you think I’d have had to ask her what was wrong? Neither do I, which either means that Mrs. Kincaid was as stupid as dandelion fluff or that she didn’t think like the rest of us do. I hope she never begins to, either.

      
“Oh, Daisy!” She started to cry. Of course. I was so accustomed to her crying at me by this time that I didn’t even wince. “It’s Eustace. Mr. Kincaid.”

      
Her voice choked to a halt, and I thought she was going to tell me they’d found his body buried in a remote spot on the desert and that Quincy Applewood really
was
guilty of murder, but I couldn’t ask. Not right out loud over the telephone wire. Besides, I couldn’t believe it of Quincy.

      
Instead, I donned my virtual spiritualist hat and crooned in a soothing tone, “All will be well, Mrs. Kincaid. The cards never lie.” I trusted her not to remember that the cards had predicted undefined but harrowing problems for her. “And neither does Rolly,” I added, just in case she did remember about the cards.

      
“Oh, Daisy, you’re of such solace to me. I wanted to have you over yesterday and the day before and the day before that, but Harold begged me to give you a rest. He said you mediums—or should I call you media?—Oh, dear, I just don’t know. But Harold said you needed a chance to meditate and center yourself or your powers would be drained or diminished or something like that, and I
couldn’t
do that to you, Daisy. You’ve been my mainstay and my support. With, of course, Freddy and Algie and Harold, but they’re men, don’t you know, and you know what men are.”