Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [38]
On the phone, the person who had picked up said nothing, but Julie heard breathing.
Julie waited a few seconds, glancing out to the golden afternoon beyond her window.
The breathing quieted, and then she heard a woman’s voice whisper, “It’s her.”
Then, the dial tone.
Julie tried calling back again, but the line was busy.
Then, she tried again. This time, again she heard the breathing.
“Who are you? Did you know my husband? Did you?” she asked. She heard a faint echo, as sometimes happened, and it pained her to listen to her own stressedout voice coming back at her, “Who are you? Did you know my husband? Did you?”
She closed the phone, and set it down and began weeping.
Chapter Ten
1
The next day, she tried the number again, but it was disconnected.
2
Julie got an email from her mother:
Dear Juliet,
Melanie told me about the cops and the psychic stuff, and I don’t know if you knew this, but there were programs, sponsored by our own government, for special schools and testing projects for children who showed psychic ability. Maybe Hut was one of those? There was a fire at one, in Chelsea, in 1977. Seven children died. Four instructors. It was an off-shoot of the Manhattan Psychical Research Institute, but was funded by tax dollars. I found all kinds of stuff online about it. What are the odds? Also, if Livy keeps having nightmares, you might want to get her another nightlight. That might help. Tell her that Gramma loves her.
Love, momma.
Julie sent an email to Mel:
Mel—
Please don’t encourage Mom with anything you hear from me about Hut and the murder. She now is Googling search engines to find out every psychic program in existence to prove her point that Hut was psychic. The Horror Show that is our mother is set loose upon me and I want it to stop. SOS.
Then, from Mel, she got this:
Julie—
I didn’t know any of this was off-limits. I’ll call mom off you. But do you think she’s right? She told me once that Hut told her that she needed to get her brakes fixed, and how would he have known that? Maybe he was psychic.
Love, Mel
Julie shot off another email to Mel:
Mel—
Stop it. It’s upsetting me. Yes, he had those little intuitions, but he was an intelligent, welleducated man, and many people could guess that a woman who drove a twenty-year-old car and never took it into the shop might want to get her brakes checked.
Between you and McGuane and mom, you’d have Hut involved in some conspiracy theory with UFOs. You don’t believe in psychics, do you?
Jules.
Mel wrote back:
Julie—
Sometimes, I believe in just about everything.
Open mind, sez me.
Mel
Then, one from her mother that sent her over the edge:
Dear Juliet,
I found this online. Did you know that between 1970 and 1995, the U.S. government spent more than $20 million on research about psychics? They called it “remote viewing,” and it was to find weapons and bunkers in wartime, during the Cold War and after. They set up testing programs here. New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago. I can send you a link to the article if you want. Why don’t you ask his parents if he had any psychic aptitude? Or maybe I can research some more. You know, I belong to a group that meets sometimes. They know about psychic stuff more than I do. I could call Alice in New York. She worked on that psychic hotline. I bet she’d know something. Let me know. I always knew Hut had more to him than met the eye.
Julie deleted the email before she read the rest. Then, she just blocked her mother’s email address so that she’d get no more emails from her.
3
In early August, Julie Hutchinson got a call from Shakespeare & Company, the bookstore in the city. She had forgotten all about the book—time had both stood still to some extent and had flown, and between the legal wrangle she’d been dealing with, and getting the kids to settle in to a normal day without their father, then out of school for the summer, and balancing her work with her therapy sessions, the last thing she’d been thinking about was a book she’d ordered in some kind of fugue