The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [90]
The dead uncle’s name was, indeed, Jerry. Over her head, Lodge exchanged an excited glance with Myers. Still, this might yet be no more than another exceptional telepathic demonstration. Lodge knew the name; it was readable in his thoughts.
Tell me something then, said Lodge, something that only you and your brother Robert might remember. Some story that I couldn’t possibly know.
She continued to turn the watch in her hands, carved back to carved front, over and over, in a ceaseless golden circle of motion.
Phinuit began to talk of the brothers swimming a creek together when they were children. It was dangerous. They came close to drowning once. They once killed a cat in Smith’s field. Jerry remembered that as a child he owned a small rifle. That he’d treasured a long, peculiar skin. Phinuit thought it was a snakeskin.
Lodge immediately wrote again to his Uncle Robert, asking if any of these stories were correct. His uncle wrote back that he definitely remembered their risky swims in the creek. And he still had his brother’s prized snakeskin. He wasn’t too sure about the rest of it, but then, his memory wasn’t what it used to be. Perhaps his younger brother would recall more.
So Lodge wrote next to his other uncle, who replied with evident surprise. He remembered all of those events: the way the creek flowed past a treacherous millrace, the stiff action of the rifle, and even the poor cat, trapped in Smith’s field. He wanted his nephew Oliver to know that he was not particularly proud of that story, and that the brothers had tried to keep it a secret.
But secrets leak. If his uncle remembered, Lodge reasoned, so might others. Perhaps, despite all their precautions, Mrs. Piper had managed to track down these odd details of his uncles’ long-ago childhoods, knowing that he might inquire about family members. Lodge sent a private investigator to the town where his three uncles had grown up, to find out whether she could have culled the information somehow from sources there.
“Mrs. Piper has certainly beaten me,” the investigator wrote back. There was no indication that anyone else had made such inquiries. And even if they had, nothing in the local records or newspaper back files contained the details that she had provided. Apparently, she had just snatched them out of the air.
IN THE SAME autumn that saw the Pipers traversing the icy Atlantic, Cesare Lombroso, the Master of Turin, gave in and decided to visit Naples, after all. He would expose this so-called medium, who refused to disappear from public view, whose exploits continued to appear in newspapers, to be talked over at spiritualist meetings.
In late November 1889 Lombroso checked in to a luxury hotel and demanded that Eusapia Palladino be brought to him. When the sturdy little woman entered, swathed in black, he regarded her unsympathetically. He wanted her tied to a chair, he said flatly. He’d brought thick strips of linen with him for that purpose. He himself would turn up the lights; he wanted the shadows banished to the bare corners.
Trussed like a turkey, the medium sat, muttering a little to herself. Lombroso watched her, stiff with distaste. Impatient after some ten minutes of nothing, he rose to get rid of her. But then the curtains lining a window some three feet away began to move, as if a wind was rising beneath them. They blew toward him, away from the window, which was set into the curve of an alcove. A small table, tucked into the alcove, began to slide toward the medium. Two of Lombroso’s colleagues immediately dove behind the heavy velvet curtains to grab her confederate.
No one stood there.
The windows were locked tight shut on the inside, just as Lombroso had secured them before the woman had arrived. The curtains continued to blow in their invisible wind, and the little table kept chugging along toward her.
Lombroso stomped over to find the attached wires. He found none. He thumped