Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [56]
She had a nice talk with the cops who showed up, and told them about the tapes. One of them volunteered to sit down and fast-forward through the tape to see what he could make of it. When Matt came back up from the rec room, he said, “Julie, you must’ve erased the tapes last time you watched them.”
“Yeah,” the cop said. “It looked like Seinfeld reruns on one of them.”
“Mel,” Julie said.
Matt turned to the cop and said, “My Aunt Melanie. She loves Seinfeld. She taped over my movie of last year’s Fourth of July parade, too.”
10
Julie kept taping the hall and the bedroom for several days, but didn’t see the shadowy movement.
And Livy began sleeping through the night.
11
On the phone with her mother the next day: “Did you read it?” her mother asked.
“Read what?”
“That book. The Life Beyond.”
“Some of it.”
“Well? Did you love it?”
“Mom, you know I don’t believe in that stuff.” “I’ve seen him twice. He’s fascinating.”
“I am not going to delude myself, Mom. I’m not
going to pretend that there’s someone out there who speaks to the dead.”
“No, it’s not like that. He doesn’t do that,” her mother said. “He just picks up things about you. When I was there a year ago, he told a man that his brother was looking for him. And within a month, it turned out the brother he thought was dead was actually alive. And a woman who had blocked childhood memories suddenly recalled that she’d witnessed her mother and her uncle making love. And that’s why she’d hated her mother so much. It’s halfway between psychic and therapy.”
“I have a great therapist.”
“Anyone can be a therapist,” her mother said. “Michael Diamond is a psychic. A real one. Did you read the whole book? I thought not. He’s not like those others, sweetie, believe you me. I’ve researched them all. He’s not as flashy, maybe, but he delivers the goods. And we have tickets to his show. I’ve been waiting for them to come through since mid-May. And guess what? It must be fate. They came through today.”
“I am not going,” Julie said, and clicked the phone off.
Chapter Fifteen
1
“I don’t know how you roped me into this,” Julie said. It was a lie: she knew how her mother had done it. Julie’s interest had been sparked by Michael Diamond’s book, and by her curiosity about Hut’s childhood, and how it might be connected to psychic ability, whether that existed or not. People believed in it. Detective McGuane had even told her that while he didn’t wholly believe in it, he had seen psychics consult on murder cases once in a while, with impressive results. She didn’t believe in it. But people did. Even the U.S. government, for God’s sake. Even homicide detectives in New York City, the city that wasn’t exactly the city of gullibility. Cops who couldn’t catch killers believed it.
She sat sandwiched between her mother and sister in the television studio with its uncomfortable chairs and blinding overhead lights. The place was packed, but Julie guesstimated that there weren’t more than 200 seats. The stage was round and small. Three large cameras and their operators moved around on it. And various lights came up and down. Taping wasn’t scheduled for another twenty minutes.
“I can’t wait to get his autograph. I loved his new book,” her mother said. She had a small cloth bag stuffed with paperbacks. “Melanie, you really should read some of them.”
“I prefer to stick to the classics,” Mel said, grinning, poking lightly at her sister.
When the show began, Michael Diamond came out onto the stage. He was tall, and looked something like a gawky high school kid who had just hit his mid-40s. His hair was a little too long, and he had the sheen of one who has just been made up to look fantastic—but Julie was unimpressed. He looked slick and sort of comfortably geeky at the same time—not her type at all, although Mel raised