The hotel operated as sort of a central dispatch for the mediums. Some worked in the hotel, covering hours in shifts, while others met clients in their homes. The psychic Lauren had come to see was named Dixie Witte, and Lauren had gone to the hotel first, so that was how Mark approached it.
He had a gun on under a light soft-shell jacket. He usually carried a nine-millimeter, but today he had a.38-caliber revolver. That was the caliber of gun that had killed Lauren, and Mark wanted to return the favor accurately. He also had a small digital recorder in one pocket and a tactical flashlight in the other.
Once he was inside the hotel, though, the idea of needing any of these things seemed laughable. It was an open, charming place with a wine bar and a coffee shop. A sign indicated that appointments with mediums could be made inside the gift shop, which was tended by a woman in her fifties dressed in a swirl of loose fabric, everything flowing and brightly patterned and billowing around her. She told him cheerfully that of course she could set up an appointment with Dixie. Bracelets with heavy stones adorned her left wrist; he saw she wore rings on every finger when she dialed the phone. The little gift shop sold the kind of cheap trinkets that did not seem likely to promote anyone’s belief in the legitimacy of the camp, making it feel more like a tourist trap than a place of heightened communication. He listened to the woman’s side of the conversation, and then she put the phone to her chest and said, “Are there any special issues you’d like to discuss? She’ll spend some time channeling the proper energy if she knows what to be open for.”
Mark nodded as if that made perfect sense, thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Tenants.”
The cheerful woman frowned. “Tenants?”
“Yes. I have some questions about tenants.”
“Can you specify an emotional connection you have to this question about tenants?”
“Rage.”
Her eyes narrowed and she seemed about to ask him something, but she held off, lifted the phone again, and said, “Mr. Novak has questions about…um, tenants, and he has issues with anger.” She listened for a few seconds, then said, “Good,” and hung up.
“Dixie will see you this evening at seven.”
“That’s great.”
She took out a map and drew a circle and a square on it. “The square is us, and you’re headed to the circle. It’s easy to find, but there are two houses on the property. You’ll want forty-nine A, not forty-nine B.”
Garland Webb had rented 49B once. Fortunately for Garland, Dixie Witte didn’t like record-keeping, and she dealt in cash. She’d never been able to recall whether he was present on the day in question. She also hadn’t volunteered his existence as a tenant until after the prison snitch turned up with his report.
“I’m sure I’ll find the right place,” Mark said. “I assume the neighbors all have an uncanny sense of direction.”
It was his first slip, the sarcasm bubbling forth already when he’d promised himself to contain it, promised himself that he would take them seriously, as Lauren had. Five minutes in town, and he was losing his footing.
“This is a place of healing, Mr. Novak,” the woman said. “It’s not the place you think it is, which I can see in your eyes. You have much scorn for us. That’s fine, but it won’t help you. If you wish to open yourself to possibility here, you’ll be rewarded.”
“I’ve seen some of this town’s rewards,” Mark said.
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be a skeptic. But the reading will help, whether you’re open or closed to it. A skeptic walks out of a reading with doubt intact, but also with echoes.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mark said, and then he left the gift shop and walked through the hotel lobby and back into the humid day, glad to be out of the place. The breezes were gone and the sky was a flat gray and when a truck passed by, the dust it lifted fell swiftly back to earth.
The woman in the hotel had felt too familiar to him, had stirred old angers. She was the sort who peddled bullshit statements that people could easily mold to fit their own situations. The crime of it, Mark thought, was that those people believed they’d been granted insight, not a fortune cookie. Mark’s mother had been good enough at that. Her favorite role was Snow Creek Maiden of the Nez Perce, a white woman passing herself off as an American Indian because so many white people believed that Indians were more spiritually in tune, never sensing the inherent racism there. She would dye her hair and skin and don traditional garb. The tourists would look into her eyes-they were blue but shielded with dark contacts-and nod with amazement because whatever generality she tossed at them connected with something in their pasts. They made the connections themselves, but they credited her for it. And paid for the joke.
It was this experience that had left Mark with scorn for the people who practiced their games in a place like this, and it was that scorn that led his wife to take an assignment that had been headed for his desk and claim it as her own. The interview with Dixie Witte had been Mark’s job. Lauren didn’t think he’d be able to approach it with sincerity, thought that he was biased against anyone who claimed psychic gifts, and so she’d interceded and come to Cassadaga herself.
Never left.
Thunder, long and loud, chased Mark as he walked away from the hotel and through the camp. The air was thick with humidity and scented with jasmine and honeysuckle. There was only one paved street, the road that ran through the center of the camp, and the rest of the homes were built off narrow lanes of crushed stone and hard-packed earth. The lanes were framed by tall oaks that were cobwebbed with Spanish moss.
It was a strange little place. Some of the homes were neat and well kept, recently restored in a few cases, and others looked like they’d been built by someone using the wrong end of the hammer. Mark walked by a man who was doing clean and jerks with a barbell and a pair of forty-five-pound plates in the middle of his front yard. He was shirtless and had a thick mat of black hair across his chest and stomach, shining with sweat, and he called out the reps in a grunting voice as he powered the weights up. Who needs a gym when you’ve got a front yard? Or a shirt when you could grow your own? Ten feet to his side, chickens clucked and scratched their way around a coop that had been made out of an old truck’s camper shell. The local power-lifter seemed to be of the waste-not, want-not mind-set.
Each street sign included a bold white 911 inside a green circle. Mark had never seen anything like it. The idea probably had something to do with giving emergency services a firm address on roads that had previously been unmarked or unnamed, but the effect was disconcerting, seeming to cry out that a disaster waited down each winding lane.
Mr. Novak? I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share. It’s about your wife.
The deputy who’d come for him that night, who’d found Mark waiting at the Siesta Key beach house where he and Lauren were supposed to have a romantic weekend escape, had never heard of Cassadaga. That night, Mark had heard of it only from his wife.
Since then, he’d spent much of his time in the place, in mind if not in body.
Mr. Novak? I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share. It’s about your wife.
The day after their engagement, Lauren’s father had invited Mark over for a beer, just the two of them. Mark was expecting the typical “Now, you take good care of my baby girl” speech, and while he received a version of it, he wasn’t prepared for the depth of pain in the other man’s eyes. It was the first time he’d understood the fear that lived like a heartbeat within a parent. A good parent, at least.
“Having a child,” Lauren’s father had said, “is to spend your life swimming with sharks. You think I’m joking, but it’s only because you don’t know yet. You haven’t seen one grow up and walk off into the world, and when you do, you’ll think about all the things that could be waiting out there; you’ll think of car accidents and cancer and kidnappings and all the other horrors in a way you didn’t before you had a child. You always knew they were out there, but you didn’t care in the same way. Then you have a daughter, and…well, then you see the sharks. They’ll start circling in your mind, and they’ll never leave. You’ll just pray they keep circling forever. You understand what I’m saying?”