First Maureen went to her friend Ann, asking for a past-life reading. But Ann, whose New Age belief systems had only recently led her to Wicca and not yet to reincarnation, said she didn’t do such things. The only things Ann read in those days were the bumps on your head and a few astrological charts, and even those were a recent addition to her repertoire of New Age razzle-dazzle.
“Why do you want a reading?” Ann asked. She had of late begun to worry about Maureen, whose behavior had been growing more and more erratic in recent months, causing her to neglect both her home and her child in favor of this fairy tale she couldn’t finish. Though it was based on a true story, like many true stories it was left uncompleted, and Maureen had taken it upon herself to supply the happily-ever-after ending the story needed. But she’d been agonizing over the tale for several years, and it had become Ann’s opinion that not only was Maureen never going to finish the story but that in all probability the story might just finish Maureen.
“I think I was Zylphia,” she told Ann one day when they were at the shop. Zee had been busy flipping through the pages of the book entitled 100 Easy Spells for the Young Witch.
“Excuse me?” Ann said.
“I think I was the main character in my story,” Maureen said. “In another life, I mean.”
At this point Zee looked up. Her eyes met Ann’s.
“What makes you think that?” Ann asked as calmly as she could.
“Don’t patronize me,” Maureen said.
“I’m not.”
“And don’t be careful with me either. I hate it when people are careful with me.”
“I’m not being careful with you. I just asked you where you got this rather unusual idea,” Ann said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Maureen said. “I live in her house, I have the same bad marriage.”
“Not exactly the same, I hope.” The husband in the story had beaten and tortured his wife and essentially held her prisoner.
“You know what I mean,” Maureen said.
Zee was pretending to be absorbed in her book. But they both knew she was listening, so they lowered their voices, which only made the girl listen more intently.
“It isn’t just that I live in her house, it’s everything else,” Maureen said. “I dream about her all the time. I know the torture her husband put her through. I even know how she killed him, or how the housekeeper did.”
Maureen had spent the better part of last summer trying to figure out how Arlis Browne died. It was murder, no doubt, but historic records were sketchy about who had poisoned him. Maureen had determined (for the sake of her story) that it was the Haitian housekeeper and not Zylphia who had administered the poison. Though she was determined to stick to the facts in her storytelling, she needed a sympathetic heroine, she said.
“Strychnine,” Maureen said.
“They didn’t have strychnine in the early 1800s,” Ann said. “It wasn’t even introduced until the 1840s.”
“Yes, but they had the nux vomica plant, which is where strychnine comes from.” Maureen smiled at her discovery. “It grows in India or Southeast Asia, and it is quite possible that it could have come in on one of the Salem ships.”
Zee had put down her book and was now clearly listening to the conversation.
“You can buy the stuff at a garage sale,” Maureen said. “Do you know they used it as late as the sixties in small amounts as a medicine? This incredibly toxic substance, and they were feeding it to us.”
Ann wanted to say that they were still using it, that you could walk into the homeopathic section of any health food store and find nux vomica, which was still widely used, though the amounts were minute. But she decided against telling Maureen.
“Let’s change the subject,” she said, indicating Zee’s interest. Not only did Ann not want to talk about such subjects in front of a twelve-year-old, but she hesitated to talk with Maureen about such things at all. The previous year Maureen had taken Ann’s advanced herbal class for the sole purpose of learning how to poison someone, which hadn’t helped either the class or Ann’s reputation in Salem. Ann was studying to be a Wiccan high priestess and wanted to make sure her respectability was sacrosanct. In those days witches were not yet commonplace in Salem. Ann had been one of the first. Though Ann knew a lot about many substances and their effects, both good and ill, she didn’t think it wise to share any information that could potentially hurt anyone.
Ann tried to avoid talking to Maureen about her story. She didn’t like the idea of Maureen fictionalizing the tale, filling in its historic blanks. Some stories should remain unfinished, Ann told her friend. But Maureen didn’t listen. She was too obsessed by the plight of the young wife and by trying so hard to prove her happily-ever-after. The only real evidence of any ending to the story was the husband’s poisoned body and the worn oarlocks or thole pins in the abandoned boat. How the young lovers had escaped Great Misery Island, if they had indeed escaped at all, was anyone’s guess. It was a dark story, and one that Ann believed should be left alone, especially by someone as impressionable as Maureen Finch.
Ann told her again that she didn’t do past-life readings and didn’t know anyone around here who did. “I think you’d have to go out to California for that kind of thing,” she said.
“As if I can do that,” Maureen said.
MAUREEN’S OBSESSION CONTINUED LONG INTO that last summer. She tried the First Spiritualist Church, where she’d had some luck before, but they were mediums, not past-life regressionists. She read a book about Edgar Cayce, who believed strongly in reincarnation. She read many books about Buddhism, hoping to unlock the secrets to samsara or the process of rebirth. But she still couldn’t find anyone to help her.
Late that July she finally found a psychic down by the Willows who said she did past-life readings for a fee and booked an appointment for Maureen before she had a chance to change her mind.
Zee was immediately suspicious. She seemed to remember some kind of scandal a year or so back, where a psychic who lived down by the old amusement park had pretended she had a talent for talking to the dead and conned a senior citizen out of two Social Security checks before the old woman’s children had gone to the police. Zee didn’t know if this was the same psychic, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Though she knew that there was no talking Maureen out of anything once she decided to do it, Zee wasn’t about to let her go alone.
They parked the car over by the arcade and walked around back to a three-decker house with peeling paint and a second-floor sign that read WORLD-FAMOUS ARCANA, PSYCHIC TO THE STARS.
Their feet echoed up the two flights of stairs. A bare lightbulb cast a weak halo around itself on the upper landing making it appear, as they approached, as if it were an aura around Maureen’s head.
Arcana threw open the door just before they reached it, as though she had psychically sensed their presence. The gesture was overly dramatic and clearly for effect. Anyone with two ears could have heard them coming, but Zee could tell that Maureen bought it.
“Who are you?” Arcana demanded of Zee. Her feet were unshod, and she was wearing a caftan with a towel around her head, as if she had just washed her hair and couldn’t be bothered to dry it.
“I’m her daughter,” Zee said.
“It’ll cost you extra if you both want a reading.”
“She doesn’t want a reading,” Maureen said. “She just came to keep me company.”
The psychic grumbled and lit a cigarette. She gestured them to a card table covered with a plastic cloth. Zee noticed the posters on the walls, photos of Indian mystics, all wearing turbans. Maybe she hadn’t just washed her hair, Zee thought-maybe this was a bad attempt at a turban.
It wasn’t difficult for Zee to see that the psychic hated Maureen on sight. She demanded the money up front, which Maureen was glad to provide, but Maureen was nervous and couldn’t find where she’d put her wallet. Flustered, she sent Zee back to the car to look for it.