The Puppet Master

the angel of death, not the end of the world. According to Winifred Sproule, Ray Christman thought Tory was as powerful as Vic. I wasn't sure what Christman meant by powerful—I wasn't sure what I meant by powerful—but it seemed to me that if anything she might be more powerful than Vic. And I got that impression just in the minute or so between being introduced on the porch and her going into the kitchen to check on the coffee. She seemed to me like someone who could pretty much control whatever went on around her, if she wanted to.

The living room was big, the ceiling supported by vigas, rough-hewn timbers with axe marks on them. More than a century old, I'd guess. One wall had a wide adobe fireplace. Tuuli and I had taken seats on a comfortable benchlike sofa that might have been made of local cottonwood, upholstered with big fat cushions. Vic sat across from us in a wicker rocker that would have seemed old-fashioned to my dad, who was born in 1917.

'How did you know about Tuuli?' I asked.

He grinned at me. 'We've got friends who keep up to date on psychics and who did what.' He turned to Tuuli then. 'We first heard about you after you took care of the poltergeist that Emmy Raye Crockett had trouble with, after she bought that mansion at Pacific Palisades.'

I looked at my wife. She'd never told me anything about a poltergeist! It must have been before I'd met her. And for Emmy Raye Crockett! Doing a successful psychic gig for a major, free-talking country-western star must have gotten important word-of-mouth promotion, as well as publicity in the New Age magazines and newsletters.

'How'd you handle that?' he asked.

Tuuli blushed, something I'd never seen her do before. 'I'm not sure,' she said. 'Well, I guess I am now, partly, but at the time . . . When the dishes started to fly, and the ashtrays and books, my hair stood out like this.' She held her hands a foot from her head. 'So I admired it. I thought, you are amazing! Truly marvelous! And I meant it, because it was. It really was.

'When I thought that, I could feel the change, from anger to something else—pleased pride. No one had admired her before! Ever! I say 'her' because she'd been a woman, I could tell; an old woman who'd lived unappreciated and scorned, and died neglected. Then she picked up a heavy glass tabletop and threw it in the fireplace. It broke in a thousand pieces! After that she stopped. Emmy Raye told me the ghost had never thrown anything heavy before. Mostly it hadn't really thrown things at all, just knocked things over and blew curtains— things like that. When it threw the tabletop, it felt to me as if it had already stopped being angry and was just showing off. I don't think it had ever admitted to itself how powerful it was.'

My hair was standing up just hearing about it. For a minute there, psychic felt really real to me. I didn't doubt it had happened the way Tuuli said. It wouldn't be like her to exaggerate. Until after I started dating her, psychic had never been real to me at all, even though the firm hired a psychic consultant now and then; that's how I got to know Tuuli. And sometimes we'd gotten useful information from them. Now I asked myself what kind of world she lived in, where you communicate with ghosts. What was it like to have dishes and books and tabletops flying around? Tory had come back from the kitchen while Tuuli was talking. 'Then what?' she asked.

Tuuli shrugged. 'After a few seconds the poltergeist went away, and that was the end of it.'

'How could you tell it had gone away?' I asked, 'if it had already stopped throwing things.'

'She wasn't there anymore. I could tell. I couldn't feel her anymore.'

I let it go at that and turned to Vic, moving the conversation in the direction I wanted and needed. 'According to Winifred Sproule, you're psychic. And you knew Ray Christman personally. Could you concentrate on him and find out whether he's alive or not? And where he is?'

He laughed. 'If you want information like that, ask Tuuli here. Or Ole. I don't compete with folks in the consulting business.'

His answer should have irritated me, but it didn't. I did wonder though whether he could but wouldn't, or would but couldn't. I changed the subject again, telling him what Sproule had said about his being the source of Christman's theology. That's the word I used: 'theology.' He grinned at it.

'I did send him write-ups from time to time. I needed to write it down anyway, so all I had to do was mail photocopies. A lot of it there isn't words for, of course, or familiar concepts to frame it in, so he'd fly out here now and then to go over it with us. But a lot of it he never fully got, and what he taught, and the procedures he applied, were his own, not ours.'

'But wasn't your material the basis of his . . .' I had to grope for the word. 'His cosmology? And his, ah, technical procedures? That's what Sproule said.'

He nodded. 'Yep, that's right. When Ray first decided to start a church, he wanted us to go in on it with him. We'd be the spiritual leaders, and he'd be the executive director, in charge of management and promotion. But it looked to us like the wrong thing to do. For one thing, we'd lose too much freedom.'

'So what did you get out of it? If I may ask. What did he pay you for it?'

Tuuli's sharp elbow dug hard in my ribs.

'We never asked for anything; we didn't really need it. But when he came out, he always left us a check. Usually for twenty thousand.' He turned to Tory as if looking for help in remembering. 'That time he was here when we had snow on the ground, that was fifty thousand. And the time we took him up to visit the kachina in Mount Humphrey—' He looked back at me then. 'Say three hundred thousand over the years.'

A lot of money maybe, but not much from an operation that according to an L.A. Times estimate had grossed more than half a billion by 2006. Which brought to mind the question, where was all that money? Even if a lot of it had been lost in the worldwide Crash of '96 . . . The church was listed as the owner of a lot of real estate, but supposedly that made up no great part of the total. The Times had compiled a chart listing the property values, and the church had never built a new building. Its specialty was buying properties from owners who were in a serious bind for money. It would offer them twenty to forty percent of the listed value in instant cash, take it or leave it. It was impressive how many had gone for it. Christman had gotten the Campus for only eight mil. The land by itself had been worth more than that.

'Didn't that bother you?' I asked. 'I mean, he made millions on millions, got a lot of recognition . . .'

'Nope. We didn't need the money. I'd done pretty well as chief technical editor for Bourdon Electronics, and