"When I thought that, I could feel the change, from anger to something else—pleased pride. No one had admired her before! Ever! I say 'her' because she'd been a woman, I could tell; an old woman who'd lived unappreciated and scorned, and died neglected. Then she picked up a heavy glass tabletop and threw it in the fireplace. It broke in a thousand pieces! After that she stopped. Emmy Raye told me the ghost had never thrown anything heavy before. Mostly it hadn't really thrown things at all, just knocked things over and blew curtains—things like that. When it threw the tabletop, it felt to me as if it had already stopped being angry and was just showing off. I don't think it had ever admitted to itself how powerful it was."
My hair was standing up just hearing about it. For a minute there, psychic felt really real to me. I didn't doubt it had happened the way Tuuli said. It wouldn't be like her to exaggerate. Until after I started dating her, psychic had never been real to me at all, even though the firm hired a psychic consultant now and then; that's how I got to know Tuuli. And sometimes we'd gotten useful information from them. Now I asked myself what kind of world she lived in, where you communicate with ghosts. What was it like to have dishes and books and tabletops flying around? Tory had come back from the kitchen while Tuuli was talking. "Then what?" she asked.
Tuuli shrugged. "After a few seconds the poltergeist went away, and that was the end of it."
"How could you tell it had gone away?" I asked, "if it had already stopped throwing things."
"She wasn't there anymore. I could tell. I couldn't feel her anymore."
I let it go at that and turned to Vic, moving the conversation in the direction I wanted and needed. "According to Winifred Sproule, you're psychic. And you knew Ray Christman personally. Could you concentrate on him and find out whether he's alive or not? And where he is?"
He laughed. "If you want information like that, ask Tuuli here. Or Ole. I don't compete with folks in the consulting business."
His answer should have irritated me, but it didn't. I did wonder though whether he could but wouldn't, or would but couldn't. I changed the subject again, telling him what Sproule had said about his being the source of Christman's theology. That's the word I used: "theology." He grinned at it.
"I did send him write-ups from time to time. I needed to write it down anyway, so all I had to do was mail photocopies. A lot of it there isn't words for, of course, or familiar concepts to frame it in, so he'd fly out here now and then to go over it with us. But a lot of it he never fully got, and what he taught, and the procedures he applied, were his own, not ours."
"But wasn't your material the basis of his . . ." I had to grope for the word. "His cosmology? And his, ah, technical procedures? That's what Sproule said."
He nodded. "Yep, that's right. When Ray first decided to start a church, he wanted us to go in on it with him. We'd be the spiritual leaders, and he'd be the executive director, in charge of management and promotion. But it looked to us like the wrong thing to do. For one thing, we'd lose too much freedom."
"So what did you get out of it? If I may ask. What did he pay you for it?"
Tuuli's sharp elbow dug hard in my ribs.
"We never asked for anything; we didn't really need it. But when he came out, he always left us a check. Usually for twenty thousand." He turned to Tory as if looking for help in remembering. "That time he was here when we had snow on the ground, that was fifty thousand. And the time we took him up to visit the kachina in Mount Humphrey—" He looked back at me then. "Say three hundred thousand over the years."
A lot of money maybe, but not much from an operation that according to an L.A. Times estimate had grossed more than half a billion by 2006. Which brought to mind the question, where was all that money? Even if a lot of it had been lost in the worldwide Crash of '96 . . . The church was listed as the owner of a lot of real estate, but supposedly that made up no great part of the total. The Times had compiled a chart listing the property values, and the church had never built a new building. Its specialty was buying properties from owners who were in a serious bind for money. It would offer them twenty to forty percent of the listed value in instant cash, take it or leave it. It was impressive how many had gone for it. Christman had gotten the Campus for only eight mil. The land by itself had been worth more than that.
"Didn't that bother you?" I asked. "I mean, he made millions on millions, got a lot of recognition . . ."
"Nope. We didn't need the money. I'd done pretty well as chief technical editor for Bourdon Electronics, and before that from Viggers Technologies in Maryland. And I'd helped finance a few small but promising businesses." He grinned again. "The owner of one of them introduced me to Ray. Before I was fifty, we were living off investments.
"Now and then I'd do counseling on somebody with a lot of money, like Ray. One of them signed this place over to us; these eighty acres plus the buildings. Just gave them to us. The entire ranch is half a million acres, and he'd decided to run the whole spread from his headquarters over by Yellow Jacket. Actually I was still working for Bourdon then. Getting this place was what decided me to quit and work full-time on my research." He laughed. "Research, naps, and puttering around the place."
"What kind of research?"
"Nothing that science would recognize. I'd been a Noetie counselor before that, and before that I'd been interested in the mind and what the science fiction of that time called psionics. I'd had experiences that gave me something to work with, and training and experience in science and technical editing that gave me a viewpoint.
"There were problems, of course. The experiences had mostly been personal, or even subjective. So I went into it subjectively. I couldn't see any other way. Sometimes I use the psychogalvanometer and ask myself questions, to get me into it. Other times I start out with meditation. Usually not like in yoga though; generally I meditate on something. Not think, just put my attention on it. Then, after a while, things are likely to happen; I follow where they lead me, and watch or experience the results. After that I do the best I can to sort it out. Put it in words and diagrams like the ones I gave Ray. It's not always easy."
He gestured. "Tory gives me an anchor—Tory and sometimes the boys. Bails me out when I get in over my head." He grinned again, ruefully this time. "There were times, early on, when I foundered. They gave me an external viewpoint then. Seems like they'd get a sense of what was going on when I didn't." He paused. "Been interesting."
He'd been leaning forward while he talked. Now he sat back. "No," he said, "we live the way we like, and like the way we live. We do what we want, when we want. And we don't do without. Sometimes we don't see anyone for a week or two, until we go to town. Our nearest neighbors live seventeen miles from here. Now and then one or both our boys will drive out from Phoenix with their wives for a weekend. Other times friends will drop by, with or without their bodies."
With or without their bodies! I wondered if he was serious. Tuuli thought so. She was listening intently.
"Ole flies out from L.A. once or twice a year," Vic went on, "and now and then the Diaconos fly down from the Rim. It's a good life, and public attention would have spoiled it."
I got the message, and believed it: the Merlins were happier without recognition. Another dead end, I decided, but I still might get some useful insights out of the trip.