Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [60]
While he’d been speaking, she felt as if she were being drawn to him. As if he had a level of charisma that went beyond normal charm or attraction. She felt she trusted him the way she trusted her therapist. When she took a deep breath, she tried to analyze the feeling, but could not.
“What was inside me?” Julie asked. “What did you see?”
“Just a glimpse,” he said. “Of something terrible. I…I don’t know what to tell you.”
“If you’re psychic, read my mind.”
“It’s not like that,” he said. “Mrs. Hutchinson, you’ve got an aura of death around you. I’m sorry to say this. You’ve been touched by someone who died.”
“That’s easy enough to figure out,” she said, feeling a bit harsh but happy to throw it back at him. “My husband died in April. That’s what you were so glib about in front of your audience.”
“No, this is a woman,” he said. “Somehow, she’s connected to you. She had answers for you but couldn’t let them out.”
9
She went out and got in the car. Mel was in the front seat, her mother in the back. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Just drive. I want to go home.”
She could feel them making concerned faces to each other, but she was pissed off at everybody. Fighting back the urge to cry like a baby. I am not a two-year-old. This is all bullshit. Hut was not part of some psychic program. Michael Diamond is a grifter with a camera in his face and probably six ghostwriters writing his bullshit books. It was all a guessing game. He had seen Hut’s obituary. He might’ve even heard about the murder. He had exposed himself already: in his book, hadn’t he said about how, if a show had a waiting list, the psychic could research the people in the audience? He’d have their names, a phone number, an address. How hard was it to find Hut’s obituary?
10
At home, Julie had another argument with her mother on the phone and accused her mother of setting her up for Michael Diamond’s show at a particularly vulnerable time in her life. As soon as she’d hung up the phone, it rang again. Thinking it was her mother, she picked up and said, “I am not changing my mind.” “Hello?” A woman said on the other end. “I’m sorry,” Julie laughed. “I thought you were my mother.”
“Mrs. Hutchinson?”
“Yes.”
“I’m calling about Amanda Hutchinson,” the woman said. Julie placed the voice: it was Gigi Kaufman, the social worker with the owl eyeglasses. “I’m afraid something tragic has happened.”
Julie held her breath, waiting.
“She died late last night. It was…well, she left a note. For you. Once the certificate is signed and everything has been put in order, we’ll send it on to you.”
Chapter Sixteen
1
A week later, after she got home, she checked the mail. Bills, mainly, for Comcast cable, and Sprint, and there was some invitation to a Health Care Forum in Montclair, and then a letter, with the name Kaufman on the return address.
She opened it up. It was a photocopy of the note that Amanda Hutchinson had written the night she had killed herself.
“Dear Wife Number Two Julie Hutchinson,
If you’re reading this, it’s because my plan to somehow jump out of this body worked. It’s the warm fuzzies. They fucked my brain up too much. They made me think different. They made me remember things wrong. Say things I don’t always mean.
You knew Hut. But you didn’t know him. You thought he loved you. But I knew he didn’t. It was all because of the hand. Five fingers, all separate, but they are all part of the hand. You can put your hand down a garbage disposal and turn it on, and it can tear into you and make your blood spurt up out of the sink. But when you pull your arm out, the hand is still there. Do you understand?
You will see Hut. He will haunt you. He haunts me. Even in the warm fuzzies I see him. He has come back now and he will never let you or your daughter alone. Do you understand? Do I make myself clear? Don’t hate the one who killed him. Sometimes, death is