• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

There it was! That was it! She knew how to sell the house!

“Your martini, Missus Freeboard.”

“Thanks, Tony. Tell George it looks perfect.”

“Yes, Missus.”

Freeboard took the glass but did not drink. She was plotting.

Not every epiphany originates in grace.

Freeboard’s party that Friday was lively and crowded, crammed with playwrights, politicians and corporate executives, models and socialites and Mafiosi, anyone who’d ever bought a property from her. For the space of half an hour the hostess was nowhere to be found, nor was her publisher guest, James Redmund. When Freeboard reappeared among her guests, she seemed pleased.

Step One of her plan had been completed.

On the following Thursday, five days later, the renowned British psychic, Anna Trawley, sat by a fire while she sipped at tea in the den of her Cotswold cottage in England when a message arrived from a total stranger, an American Realtor named Joan Freeboard. Her little face a cameo, delicate and pale, Trawley, in her forties, had a quiet beauty and her small and limpid chestnut eyes glowed faintly with some distant but ineffable sadness on which they seemed constantly inward turned. Beside her on a small, square teakwood table waited mail and a fresh-smelling copy of the Times, and on a paneled wall hung a few remembrances: a photo of herself with the Queen; a newspaper headline NOTED PSYCHIC FINDS KILLER; and a photo of a child, a pretty, dimpled young girl who, in the blur of retouching and tinting over the black-and-white photo with pastel colors, seemed lost in some other dimension of time. Beneath an open window lay a plastic Ouija board upon a table with two facing chairs.

“Mum?”

Trawley turned to the girl who had entered, her pretty, young maid, newly hired. “Peta?”

She was holding out a small, round silver tray. Trawley absently stared at a deep white scar tucked into the maid’s right eyebrow for a moment, wondering what painful event it commemorated and whether it had happened by chance; then she lowered her gaze to the offered tray. Upon it, in a square dull yellow envelope, lay a cablegram and a message that, by a path at once straight yet labyrinthine—depending on the viewer, man or God—would bond Trawley’s destiny forever to Joan Freeboard’s.

“Thank you, Peta.”

“Yes, mum.”

The maid quietly walked out. Trawley picked up the envelope, slipped out its contents and saw that the cable ran on for six pages. She read them and then rested the papers in her lap, put her head back on the chair and closed her eyes. A sudden breeze sprang up from the wooded outdoors that ruffled the white lace curtains of the window, and below them, perhaps pushed by the brief, sharp gust, the coned glass planchette that had rested on the Ouija board slid from the center of the board to the top, and there it rested directly on a word.

The word was no.

Chapter Two

“I’ve been dead for eight months, just in case you hadn’t noticed.” Tall and Byronic, urbane, aristocratic, Terence Dare swabbed his brush at a yellow on the palette and then dabbed at the canvas propped before him in the sunlit, high-ceilinged, pitched-roof studio of his Fire Island home. “Ever since Robert walked out of my life,” he mourned in a rich and cultivated voice. “No, I can’t write a word,” he sighed. “I’ve no heart.”

“Shit shit shit!” muttered Freeboard. “Shit!”

Dare wiped a spatter of red from his finger onto the painter’s smock that he wore above a T-shirt and faded black denim jeans and then shifted a hooded blue gaze to the Realtor, who was smoking and pacing back and forth in agitation, the echoing clacks of her spike-heeled shoes on the oaken floor bouncing up to a skylight. She swatted at a haze of grayish smoke in her path.

“It’s the cover of Vanities, Terry! The cover!”

“Let me get this straight,” said the world-famous author: “James Redmund repels you, he’s a prig and a bore and is also among that elite corps of rectums who are constantly telling us how