“Like I said,” Constance offered. “I can make some calls.”
“I’ll go you one better,” I said as a vague memory edged into focus. “Ben, your sister performs hypnosis in her psychiatric practice, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, I think she does,” he replied with a nod.
“Do you think she’d be up for this tonight?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Hell, she never does anything other than work or sit at home reading, so I don’t see why not. One question though.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Actually it’s for Mandalay,” he replied as he looked over at her. “Say one of these two Twilight Zone’s us a crime scene. What’s the next step?”
Constance wrinkled her forehead and gave a knowing nod. “Guess we’ll have to go verify it.”
“And after that?” Ben pressed. “Which one of us is gonna tell Albright how we found it?”
“As much as I’d like to do it,” she told him. “I’d sure hate to steal your thunder, Storm.”
“Yeah, funny. Like I haven’t heard that one before.”
As it turned out, my friend had been incorrect this go around. His sister had in fact been out to dinner and not holed away in her house reading as he had said she would be. We were lucky, however, as her home number had been forwarded to her service and no sooner had Ben left a message than she called back. Fortunately, not only was she more than willing to come by the house, she was less than fifteen minutes away.
When Helen arrived, Felicity was in the kitchen starting a fresh pot of coffee, and Constance was hiding away in our bedroom for a few minutes so she could return some calls. Ben was expectantly standing at the open door when she pulled into the driveway. He met her on the sidewalk and immediately renewed the brotherly interrogation he’d originally launched on the phone.
Now that they were in the house, I was standing back and quietly watching the continuation of the small family skirmish that was taking place in my living room.
“I am a grown woman, Benjamin.” Helen Storm looked up into her brother’s face. Her voice was calm, but the words were underscored with an unmistakable note of no-nonsense finality. “Not to mention that I am your older sister. I can certainly go out on a blind date without your approval.”
There was no way one could miss the relationship between the two of them. The family resemblance was more than obvious even though Helen was of average height as opposed to her towering sibling. Both were possessed of the same dark eyes and typical angular profiles. Although in most ways they were the same, Helen’s features were far softer. Her pretty face was framed by a cascade of thick, black hair, streaked randomly with strands of grey. The touch of silver was the only visible indicator that she was actually older than her brother.
Having been in some sense a patient of hers, in both official and unofficial capacities, I was used to seeing her in conservative business attire. This evening, however, she was projecting a vastly different outward image via a somewhat flirtatious cocktail dress.
“That’s not what I’m sayin’, Helen,” my friend objected. “There’re a lotta nutjobs out… And that dress is…”
“My dress is just fine, dear brother,” she replied in the wake of his stammering. “And, I met him at the restaurant so that I would have my own car. I am quite capable of making rational decisions.”
“Yeah, but what’d you know about this guy?” he continued. “For all you know he’s a wingnut with a…”
“End of discussion, Benjamin,” she replied, cutting him off mid-sentence.
He stared back at her and shook his head but kept his mouth shut.
“I’m sorry we interrupted your evening, Helen,” I offered, slipping the apology into the mildly uncomfortable void that fell behind her last declaration.
“Don’t worry over it, Rowan,” she replied as she cast a pleasant smile toward me. “Benjamin sometimes forgets that I do in fact have a social life. The truth is, I was actually considering a trip to the ladies room just so I could page myself. I needed an escape, so as it turns out, your call was serendipitous.”
“Escape?” Ben asked.
“He was boring me to tears, Benjamin,” she said as she turned back to him. “That’s all, nothing more. Stop imagining the worst, please.” She cocked her head to the side and gave him a curious stare. “You have been drinking haven’t you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It would certainly explain your mood this evening,” she replied. “You are even more overprotective than usual.”
“So sue me.”
“And would I happen to know what prompted this little binge?” she pressed.
He brushed off the question. “It’s not important.”
“Yes, I thought as much,” she replied with an understanding nod, gleaning untold information from his evasive words. “We should discuss that later. At the moment, however, I seem to recall something being said about a murder investigation and the need for a hypnotist. Well, here I am.”
CHAPTER 17:
The flame on the candle reached upward, stretching into a thin tongue as it licked at the air. It undulated in an ever-increasing rhythm until it seemed to almost vibrate then it began to die back downward. I watched intently as the threadlike wisp collapsed into itself to finally become a flickering teardrop of yellow-orange that cast a soft glow into the dimness of the room.
After some discussion as to how a session of hypnosis was to be conducted, as well as detailing our ultimate goal, even Helen agreed that if it worked, there would still be some amount of danger involved. Given Felicity’s and my preternatural connection with the other side of the veil, we could very easily springboard from the hypnotic trance state directly into a full-blown ethereal excursion. Helen still felt confident that she could control the situation if it did in fact occur; however, as with anything in life, it was something she could not guarantee with absolute certainty. The fact that there was even a remote chance of slipping past the gates and into the world of the dead was a point of hot contention for my wife and I.
We both agreed that this was something that had to be done. Backing out of it was not even an issue. Given the circumstances, however, neither of us was willing to let the other be a guinea pig. The banter between us didn’t last long before Felicity simply insisted that she be the one to go under; or at the very least, that she go first. In her mind, I was only to become involved as a last resort if she was unsuccessful. And, she had every intention of seeing to it that she didn’t fail.
I, of course, was dead set against her facing any of this at all. I abandoned my earlier argument, not that it had been getting me anywhere to begin with, and without embellishment told her no, absolutely not; the subject of this experiment would be me, and only me, end of story.
She wasn’t ready for story time to be over yet.
As was her stubborn nature, she had just looked back at me in silence like I was speaking an unfamiliar foreign language. After a moment, she said something on the order of, “Damn your eyes, Rowan Linden Gant, if you sit in that chair, you’ll never make it under because I’ll be slapping you silly.” There may well have been a few Gaelic expletives interspersed, but that was the general gist of it, and she said it in dead earnest.
The important thing here is that this was the second time this evening Felicity had threatened to get physical. You always knew just exactly how serious she was whenever she intimated violence. While I figured it was unlikely that she would actually follow through, I had no desire to put it to the test. Manifest proof, yet again, that one should never argue with a redheaded, Irish Taurus when she has already made up her mind. With this one, at least, you simply could not win.
I suppose that one of these days I would wise up and take my own advice in that regard. Maybe.
So, having begrudgingly conceded, I now found myself sitting in our semi-darkened living room, quietly
