“So your pediophobia is rooted in the trauma of that night.” Jo slipped a small device from her pocket and began tapping its keys rapidly. “Thank you. Getting to know the receiver is a vital part of this process.”
“You want to know Becca Healy?” Marty eyed Jo over the rim of her glass. “She works with kids in foster care. She remembers every one of their birthdays, and she brings them cakes she makes herself. She’s kept every friend she’s ever made, and kept Kaddy and me close for twenty-five years. She knows our favorite orders in every restaurant on the Hill.”
Jo’s fingers stilled on the small keyboard. “I’m sure Becca is—ˮ
“I was out of town when Kaddy found a lump in her breast last year. Becca stayed with her every night until the biopsy came back clean.” Marty swirled the soda in her glass and downed it. “If you need to ‘get to know your receiver,’ Doc, you could focus in a little smarter.”
“She went with us when we had to put our Angel to sleep, too. Our sweet little beagle. This girl is the kindest, most thoughtful creature I know.” Khadijah’s brown eyes were warm behind her small granny glasses. “Go ahead and blush. It’s all true.”
Becca cursed her feeble tears. Lord, she had no more emotional stamina than a Pop-Tart these days. “Well, that was nice. Thanks. I just don’t know if Jo needs sterling character references right now.”
She smiled weakly at Jo, who was watching them with an odd combination of muted wonder and sadness. Jo’s eyes lingered on Khadijah’s hand clasping Becca’s, and for a moment she looked as vulnerable as a child.
“Of course, all information about a receiver is useful.” Jo slid the screen of her device shut slowly. “It would be helpful to learn something about your mother as well, Becca. Her personality, her habits. I’d like to see how closely she fits the profile of the typical EVP reporter.”
“Ooh, there’s a typical reporter?” Khadijah brightened. “This stuff fascinates the hell out of me, by the way. You mean all the dead folks able to send messages have things in common?”
“Well, no, that’s a little misleading.” Jo nodded stiffly at the young pink-coiffed woman in a fedora offering to replenish her tea. “Messages have been recorded from voices that could hail from any demographic. We hear more often from men than from women. From older voices rather than young, which stands to reason, as the dead tend to skew older.”
“And what do they say, all these noisy dead people?” Khadijah asked.
“Gibberish mostly.” Jo lifted one shoulder, as if apologizing for a child’s clumsy performance. “Snatches of words. Coherent, the best of them, but odd tangles of meaning. One recording is of an older man shouting, ‘Tab the bathroot!’ over and over. Another is a woman saying quite clearly, ‘Scallops, my best gender. Steal tomatoes.’”
“So no one tells where the family treasure is buried?” Marty looked faintly disappointed. “Or says anything personal, that makes sense?”
“Some do make sense.”
Becca was studying the dynamics of the women around her; an automatic inner shift to safer ground. She noted Jo’s body was changing, softening as she leaned into the table. Her transformation was subtle but striking. That guarded glaze was lifting from Jo’s eyes as the warmth of Khadijah’s interest drew her in. She glanced at Becca. “I have some recordings with me. Would you like to hear?”
“Are you serious?” Khadijah scraped her chair closer over the rugged floor. “Bring it on, girlfriend.”
Jo smiled with a note of shyness that touched Becca. She flipped open her device again, swept her finger across several screens, tapped keys. She rested it on the table and turned the small screen so they could see it. “This has strong little speakers.”
The screen was an oblong of eerie green light, vivid in the dim lamps of the bar. Its glassy smoothness was featureless for a moment, then a multi-digit number appeared in the upper left of the screen, along with the notation 07.14.76/1400hrs.
Becca heard a soft hiss from the speakers, and a faint white line darted across the green rectangle. The hiss deepened and more lines followed, tracing the electric contours of the sound in jagged spikes and valleys. The voice spoke abruptly and quite clearly.
“And the merriest of Christmases to you all!”
Becca sat back hard in her seat, astonished at the bright cheerfulness of the woman’s voice, its distinct southern accent. Marty’s eyebrows shot up, and Khadijah laughed in delight.
“So who is that?” Khadijah asked. “She sounded so normal!”
“No one knows.” Jo stroked the screen with one finger. “These are all unidentified, or unclaimed messages, collected during lab experiments over the years.”
Becca saw more numbers on the screen, and she leaned forward. 02.05.84/0815 hrs. The low hiss sounded again, and the white lines danced.
“Two hours it took me to haul in that fish.” A man’s voice, his tone mellow and relaxed, and unmistakably proud.
Becca, Marty, and Khadijah all grinned, caught up in these surreal post-mortem pronouncements. Becca felt a tingling at the base of her spine, and goose bumps rose along her forearms. She wasn’t ready to believe with certainty that she was hearing the voices of the dead, but these messages carried an odd flavor of the distant, a kind of remote, antique cadence. The sounds of the Rose faded around the table as they leaned closer again, their food forgotten.
“Jenny, I know you borrowed my sweater!” A woman, sounding irritated, from 1992.
“I fought in Patton’s army.” An elderly man, in 1984.
“Why are you all here? Please go away!”
That one, from a woman in 1980, gave Becca chills. She sounded resigned and hardly threatening, but Becca could imagine that voice echoing through a haunted house.
“We’ve recorded many voices demanding that intruders leave their house,” Jo said as the screen flickered again. “It’s a common message. And we’ve captured over a hundred varieties of the word ‘hello’ or simple greetings, in almost every modern language.”
“That tool chest is for Tom!” A man, commanding from 1993.
The hissing rose, subsided briefly. A woman spoke next, and a shudder went through Becca.
“I will see you no more.”
“Good my Lord.” Khadijah sounded wounded. “Can you play that again, Jo?”
Becca didn’t want to hear that message again. When Jo tapped the keys and the hiss issued from the speakers, she was swept with despair before she heard the woman’s bleak voice.
“I will see you no more.”
An older woman, perhaps very old. The screen reflected a recording date of 1959. There was such cheated hopelessness in her words, spoken softly but with terrible grief. This was a woman who had believed her entire life that death would end in reunion, and it had not. She was lost to those she loved who still lived, lost to those who had gone before her, and utterly alone. Becca heard it all in those six words, the pathetic surprise and bitterness of that discovery, that fate. A tear splashed down on her clenched hands.
“Becca, I should have realized that one hit you hard.” Khadijah stroked Becca’s hair.
Becca managed to raise her head. Marty and Khadijah were studying her with concern. Jo’s expression held a mixture of regret and self-disgust, as if she were castigating herself again. “I’m all right. She was just…” Becca gestured helplessly. “She sounded so lost.”