15
The Spirit, according to the people who believe in it, never sleeps. That was probably the reason the dreary little storefront with "Things of the Spirit" scrawled across the window had a large open sign in its door at nine-fifteen on a Monday evening.
I'd checked my notes twice. This was the address that Hammond had grudgingly given me for Rebecca Hartsfield, the teenager whom Toby had matriculated in the school of hard knocks at the Ontario Motor Speedway. Things change fast in Hollywood, but things of the Spirit are eternal, and the shop certainly looked as though it had been sitting right where it was, on one of the scuzziest blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, for all eternity.
The window was crammed full of things of the Spirit. Crystals glittered from transparent nylon fishing lines that suspended them in space. Garish mandalas challenged my equilibrium with confusing permutations of concentric circles, looking like targets for spiritual archery. Reassuringly thick books offered answers to all the eternal questions between fake vellum covers embossed with confused combinations of crosses, pentacles, and symbols for infinity. Tiny glass vials filled with colored liquids glowed prismatically. In the whole window there wasn't anything I knew how to use.
I backed away to the curb and looked up. Like so many Hollywood storefronts, this one had once been the bottom floor of an apartment house. Two stories of apartments still squatted above it, lighted windows set in a plain brick wall. Maybe Rebecca Hartsfield lived in one of them.
A decidedly earthly buzzer announced my intrusion. Once it quit, I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.
The music was almost immediately drowned out by the smell. Things of the Spirit stank like an old-fashioned whorehouse. The smell suggested that every bouquet ever picked had been reduced to its essence and crammed somehow into a single aerosol can, and that can had then been emptied into the store. It was enough to make a bee sneeze.
And I sneezed. "God bless you," someone said with more emphasis on the first word than on all the others put together. I heard a whisper of fabric, and I turned.
She was something to look at. Her age was impossible to guess. The skin on her face was as smooth and unlined as a girl of twenty, but her hair was snow white. At first glance it seemed as though there were yards of it, cascading over her shoulders and down her back. Framed by all that white, her face looked like an apple in the snow. The eyes were that pale, low-horizon sky blue that almost disappears in black-and-white photographs, giving the impression that, for once, the windows to the soul are two-way instead of mirrored from the outside. A seamless robe of blue, embroidered at the neck with what looked like amber snow-flakes, hung straight from her shoulders to the floor.
She was smiling. I felt myself smiling back. "It's the concentration of aromas," she said as though we'd been talking for half an hour.
"What is?"
"Your sneeze. People used to believe that the soul could escape during a sneeze and be claimed by the Devil. That's why we still say 'God bless you.' " Again the emphasis on the first word. "If the soul were to escape here, though, I don't think the Devil could snare it. There's enough positive energy here to keep him or her miles away."
"Or at least across the street."
She looked puzzled for a second and then looked over my shoulder and through the shop window. Then she laughed. Her laugh was in the same key as the piano. "The porno theater, and the massage parlor, you mean. Well, yes. That's why we're here."
"It is?"
"Why carry coals to Newcastle? Why set up a fourth gas station at an intersection where there are already three?"
"I've wondered why they did that. They always seem to."
"The analogy isn't precise, I'm afraid. Credit cards is why. Faced with a choice of gas stations, people will use the card they carry. But the soul carries no credit cards."
"And it requires a different kind of fuel."
"Yes." She looked pleased. "That's exactly right. What people buy here powers them upward as well as forward. How may I help you?"
"What are the fragrances? I've never smelled anything like them."
"Aromatherapy. We have the largest stock on the West Coast. If you don't count San Francisco, that is."
Since San Francisco is on the West Coast, and will be until it finally shakes loose and floats picturesquely into the Pacific, the answer was less than ingenuous. On the other hand, she'd popped the balloon herself, and I was willing to give her credit for it.
"And aromatherapy does what?"
"Aromas are the cutting edge of holistic medicine. Given a proper spiritual balance in the subject, aromas can strengthen the body's defenses against any kind of infection. Would you like me to show you some?"
"Sure," I said, "if you think you can show someone an aroma."
The seraphic smile wilted slightly. "A literalist. Well, why don't you tell me what it is that ails you?"
"Insatiable curiosity."
She pursed her lips, sending the leftovers of the smile into some parallel universe, glanced down at my shoes, and then looked slowly up at the rest of me. It wasn't so much a look as a survey that mapped my clothes and placed them precisely in a low-rent district. I felt like I'd been denied admission to the new age.
"Curiosity," she said slowly. "I don't know that I've got a cure for that."
"Actually, I sort of hope not. Without curiosity, where would we be?"
"Happier, probably. What is it you're curious about?" We weren't having fun anymore.
I took the plunge. "Rebecca Hartsfield."
"Rebecca?"
"Hartsfield," I said.
"I heard you. I know the name. I'm Chantra Hartsfield. What do you want with Rebecca?"
"You're her sister," I said chivalrously.
"Ease up," she said. "Don't work quite so hard. Try mother."
"She's here, then."
"No. She's not."
"Where is she?"
"Not here."
"You already told me that." I tried a smile. No dice.
"Yow haven't told me anything," she said severely. "Not why you want to see Rebecca, not how you got this address. Nothing at all."
It was time to try frank. "I got the address from the police."
She put both hands into the pockets of her robe. "Police," she said. "Rebecca's not in trouble. I'd know. I always know."
She sounded so positive that I had to ask. "How do you always know?"
"Psychic linkage. Don't look skeptical, it's common between mother and daughter, if both women know how to tune in to it."
"You can read her mind?"
"Mind reading is a charlatan's stunt. No one can read anyone's mind. But people who have an affinity can feel strong emotions that the other person in the link experiences."
"Feel them how?"
"Why did the police give you this address?"
"Same answer as before. Because I asked."
"Why?"
We looked at each other for a moment.
"Well," I said, "we both want to know something, don't we?"
She tilted her head upward and studied me. "What exactly do you want to know?"
"How you feel the other person's emotions."
She gave a patient, well-bred sigh. "Hell, the same way I know that you don't mean any harm to Rebecca. If a person is open enough, the strong feelings of others resonate in her. Your emotions are part of the total electromagnetic field of your nervous system. Every thought, feeling, or dream you have is a scattering of electrical impulses, jumping across millions of synapses between the nerves. When you're extremely agitated or gripped by a powerful emotion, your electromagnetic field becomes stronger and more agitated. If a person is receptive, her nervous system will sense the other's static, producing a faint sensation of joy or fear or sorrow."