“But the people who’ve been coming to me for years—”
“You can grandfather them in,” Claire said. “Confine the rate increase to new customers. But I wouldn’t.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No, and I’m costing my own self money by saying this, but I’ll say it anyhow. People appreciate less what costs them less. That woman in California, drives the red Tosteroni? You think she’d treasure that car if somebody sold it to her for five thousand dollars? You think People magazine would print a picture of her standing next to it? Raise your rates and everybody’ll think more of you, and pay more attention to the advice you give ’em.”
“Well,” she said, slowly, “I suppose I could go from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars...”
“Fifty,” Claire said firmly. “Not a penny less.”
In the end, she had to raise her fee three times. Doubling it initially had the paradoxical effect of increasing the volume of calls. A second increase, to seventy-five dollars, was a step in the right direction, slowing the flood of calls; she waited a few months, then took a deep breath and told a caller her price was one hundred dollars a session.
And there it stayed. She booked three appointments a day, five days a week, and pocketed fifteen hundred dollars a week for her efforts. She lost some old clients, including a few who had been coming to her out of habit, the way they went to get their hair done. But it seemed to her that the ones who stayed actually listened more intently to what she saw in the cards or crystal, or channeled while she lay in trance.
“Told you,” Claire said. “You get what you pay for.”
One afternoon there was a call from Detective Jeffcote. There was a case, she might have heard or read about it, and could she possibly help him with it? She had appointments scheduled, she said, but she could come to the police station as soon as her last client was finished, and—
“No, I’ll come to you,” he said. “Just tell me when’s a good time.”
He turned up on the dot. His hair was very short, she noticed, and he seemed more confident and self-possessed than when she’d seen him before. In the living room, he accepted a cup of tea and told her about the girl who’d gone missing, an eleventh-grader named Peggy Mae Turlock. “There hasn’t been much publicity,” he said, “because kids her age just go off sometimes, but she’s an A student and sings in the church choir, and her parents are worried. And I just thought, well...”
She reminded him that she’d had three nights of nightmares and headaches when Melissa Sporran disappeared.
“As if the information was trying to get through,” he said. “And you haven’t had anything like that this time? Because I brought her sunglasses case, and a baseball jacket they tell me she wore all the time.”
“We can try,” she said.
She took him into her studio, lit two of the new scented candles, seated him on the chaise, and took the chair for herself. She draped Peggy Mae’s jacket over her lap and held the green vinyl eyeglass case in both hands. She closed her eyes, breathed slowly and deeply.
After a while she said, “Pieces.”
“Pieces?”
“I’m getting these horrible images,” she said, “of dismemberment, but I don’t know that it has anything to do with the girl. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”
“You picking up any sense of where she might be, or of who might have put her there?”
She slowed her breathing, let herself go deep, deep.
“Down down down,” she said.
“How’s that, Ms. Belgrave?”
“Something in a well,” she said. “And old rusty chain going down into a well, and something down there.”
A search of wells all over the country divulged no end of curious debris, including a skeleton that turned out to be that of a large dog. No human remains were found, however, and the search was halted when Peggy Mae came home from Indianapolis. She’d gone there for an abortion, expecting to be back in a day or so, but there had been medical complications. She’d been in the hospital there for a week, never stopping to think that her parents were afraid for her life, or that the police were probing abandoned wells for her dismembered corpse.
Sylvia got a call when the girl turned up. “The important thing is she’s all right,” he said, “although I wouldn’t be surprised if right about now she wishes she was dead. Point is you didn’t let us down. You were trying to home in on something that wasn’t there in the first place, since she was alive and well all along.”
“I’m glad she’s alive,” she said, “but disappointed in myself. All of that business about wells.”
“Maybe you were picking up something from fifty years ago,” he said. “Who knows how many wells there are, boarded up and forgotten years ago? And who knows what secrets one or two of them might hold?”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
Perhaps he was. But all the same the few days when the police were looking in old wells was a professional high water mark for her. After the search was called off, after Peggy Mae came home in disgrace, it wasn’t quite so hard to get an appointment with Sylvia Belgrave.
Three nights of nightmares and fitful sleep, three days of headaches. And, awake or asleep, a constant parade of hideous images.
It was hard to keep herself from running straight to the police. But she forced herself to wait, to let time take its time. And then on the morning after the third unbearable night she showered away the stale night sweat and put on a skirt and a blouse and a flowered hat. She sat in the garden with a cup of hot water and lemon juice, then rinsed it in the kitchen sink and went to her car.
The car was a Taurus, larger and sleeker and, certainly, newer than her old Tempo, but it did no more and no less than the Tempo had done. It conveyed her from one place to another. This morning it brought her to the police station, and her feet brought her the rest of the way — into the building, and through the corridors to Detective Norman Jeffcote’s office.
“Ms. Belgrave,” he said. “Have a seat, won’t you?”
His hair was longer than it had been when he’d come to her house. He hadn’t regrown it entirely, hadn’t once again taken to combing it over the bald spot, but neither was it as flatteringly short as she’d advised him to keep it.
And there was something unsettling about his energy. Maybe it had been a mistake to come.
She sat down and winced, and he asked her if she was all right. “My head,” she said, and pressed her fingertips to her temples.
“You’ve got a headache?”
“Endless headaches. And bad dreams, and all the rest of it.”
“I see.”
“I didn’t want to come,” she said. “I told myself not to intrude, not to be a nuisance. But it’s just like the first time, when that girl disappeared.”
“Melissa Sporran.”
“And now there’s a little boy gone missing,” she said.
“Eric Ackerman.”
“Yes, and his address is no more than half a mile from my house. Maybe that’s why all these impressions have been so intense.”
“Do you know where he is now, Ms. Belgrave?”
“I don’t,” she said, “but I do feel connected to him, and I have the strong sense that I might be able to help.”
He nodded. “And your hunches usually pay off.”
“Not always,” she said. “That was confusing the year before last, sending you to look in wells.”
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”
“Surely not.”
He leaned forward, clasped his hands. “The Ackerman boy, Ms. Belgrave. You think he’s all right?”