The Other Side - J. D. Robb [86]
“To cover up any noises we make. Brilliant!”
She laughed with delight. “I couldn’t sleep last night, trying to think of a way to turn the gramophone on by itself. I thought of wiring it to a clock, or rigging it to some kind of dripping water mechanism, but nothing worked, and then I thought of this.”
“Such a clever girl. How did you get so smart?”
She laughed again and started rummaging in a corner shelf.
“Seriously. Did your grandfather teach you?”
She turned around, holding a black metal cylinder. “He taught me to love playing with things, you know, physical objects, figuring out why they work this way instead of that way. And my grandmother taught me how to read.”
“Not your parents?”
She studied him for a second. “I’ll tell you something, but you can’t repeat it to another soul.”
“Not a word.”
“I’ve never been to school.”
“No!” He was surprised but not shocked.
“No time for it in Wild Johnny Darlington’s Traveling Musical Theatre Extravaganza. So when I’d come home, my grandmother, who was a great reader, would take me in hand.”
“And her favorite poets were Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”
“Yes!”
“Emily Brontë, too,” he added, remembering this morning’s message: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” If he’d had a pen handy, he’d have written back, “I am Heathcliff.” She’d have laughed at that.
“How did you know?” she asked, all wonder and amazement.
“A wild guess.” He grinned and wriggled his eyebrows, inviting her to confess.
“Oh, you saw the books in the library,” she said, fiddling with the metal cylinder until it emitted a thin ray of light.
Henry lost his train of thought. “What in the world is that?”
“This? Oh, something I made. I sent in a patent application for it a long time ago. I called it a ‘portable electric hand torch,’ which in retrospect may not have been snappy enough. Titles can make a big difference—my grandfather taught me that.”
“Let me see it.”
“You slide this tab, and it presses against the band and switches on the light. It won’t stay on very long; the battery’s too weak. I’m working on a smaller, lighter one that would take a number six.”
Henry flashed the light around the floor, the wall.
“I can imagine many uses,” Angie said, “but one of the main ones would be finding things in a dark closet. Think of all the fires that have started with somebody holding a candle or a—”
“I can imagine an even better use. At a séance, after you’ve contacted the spirits and now they’re trying to contact you. With a strange, unsettling beam of light.”
Angie drew in her breath. “Of course.”
“Rapping is old hat.”
“Rapping’s passé.”
“But blinking—”
“Blinking. It’s so much more—twentieth century!”
They whooped with laughter. “Oops.” Henry almost knocked over a seamstress’s dress form beside the worktable. “Beg your pardon,” he told it, sending Angie off again. “What’s this, a robe?” He lifted the edge of a soft, wooly garment covering the dress form.
“Actually, my grandmother invented that. She had an idea that people would buy something you could wear inside in cold weather. Not a blanket, not a robe, but sort of a combination of both. The sleeves leave your hands free.”
“But you’d look so silly.”
“That’s what we told her. She was going to call it ‘The Comfy.’ ”
They laughed some more.
“I have a question.” Angie leaned back against the worktable and folded her arms. “Is everybody going to be holding hands at this séance? Because if so, I don’t see how we’re going to be able to do anything.”
“Ah, but we will.”
“Yes, but how? A false hand? Even if we stuffed a glove with cotton or something, it would never really feel like a hand, would it?”
She ought to look like a sexless child in that too-big apron, but she didn’t. She looked adorable. He perched on the table beside her. Their hips bumped. “First of all,” he said, taking her hand. The slim, smooth feel of it excited him; so did