all, was anyone’s guess. It was a dark story, and one that Ann believed should be left alone, especially by someone as impressionable as Maureen Finch.
Ann told her again that she didn’t do past-life readings and didn’t know anyone around here who did. “I think you’d have to go out to California for that kind of thing,” she said.
“As if I can do that,” Maureen said.
MAUREEN’S OBSESSION CONTINUED LONG INTO that last summer. She tried the First Spiritualist Church, where she’d had some luck before, but they were mediums, not past-life regressionists. She read a book about Edgar Cayce, who believed strongly in reincarnation. She read many books about Buddhism, hoping to unlock the secrets to samsara or the process of rebirth. But she still couldn’t find anyone to help her.
Late that July she finally found a psychic down by the Willows who said she did past-life readings for a fee and booked an appointment for Maureen before she had a chance to change her mind.
Zee was immediately suspicious. She seemed to remember some kind of scandal a year or so back, where a psychic who lived down by the old amusement park had pretended she had a talent for talking to the dead and conned a senior citizen out of two Social Security checks before the old woman’s children had gone to the police. Zee didn’t know if this was the same psychic, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Though she knew that there was no talking Maureen out of anything once she decided to do it, Zee wasn’t about to let her go alone.
They parked the car over by the arcade and walked around back to a three-decker house with peeling paint and a second-floor sign that read WORLD-FAMOUS ARCANA, PSYCHIC TO THE STARS.
Their feet echoed up the two flights of stairs. A bare lightbulb cast a weak halo around itself on the upper landing making it appear, as they approached, as if it were an aura around Maureen’s head.
Arcana threw open the door just before they reached it, as though she had psychically sensed their presence. The gesture was overly dramatic and clearly for effect. Anyone with two ears could have heard them coming, but Zee could tell that Maureen bought it.
“Who are you?” Arcana demanded of Zee. Her feet were unshod, and she was wearing a caftan with a towel around her head, as if she had just washed her hair and couldn’t be bothered to dry it.
“I’m her daughter,” Zee said.
“It’ll cost you extra if you both want a reading.”
“She doesn’t want a reading,” Maureen said. “She just came to keep me company.”
The psychic grumbled and lit a cigarette. She gestured them to a card table covered with a plastic cloth. Zee noticed the posters on the walls, photos of Indian mystics, all wearing turbans. Maybe she hadn’t just washed her hair, Zee thought-maybe this was a bad attempt at a turban.
It wasn’t difficult for Zee to see that the psychic hated Maureen on sight. She demanded the money up front, which Maureen was glad to provide, but Maureen was nervous and couldn’t find where she’d put her wallet. Flustered, she sent Zee back to the car to look for it.
Zee looked under the seats and in the glove compartment but found nothing. Then she knelt down by the driver’s door and looked under the car, but all she found was an empty Almond Joy wrapper and one dirty child- size cotton sock. When she came back, Maureen was tense but finally located her wallet in her jacket pocket. The psychic rolled her eyes but took the money-and ten dollars extra because Maureen had brought Zee along. “I’m not used to working in front of an audience,” she said.
“You have done past-life readings before,” Maureen said.
“Of course,” Arcana said. “I do them all the time.”
Zee could tell that it was a lie, but the look on Maureen’s face was so hopeful that Zee took a seat on the couch and was quiet as the psychic had instructed.
Though the table was flimsy and the decorations looked fake, the psychic had some high-tech tools. On the floor under the table were two switches: a dimmer and a dial that controlled the sound system.
“I demand silence,” Arcana announced with the authority of a sanctimonious second-grade teacher.
Zee wondered at the declaration, since no one had uttered a word.
With her bare, simian feet, the psychic flipped the two switches, grabbing them each with her toes and turning the dials expertly. First the music came up, a cross between Indian mystic and theremin music from a bad fifties sci-fi film. With the other foot, her toes dialed the lights down until Maureen and Zee were left in near darkness. The only source of illumination was the neon sign for the midway across the street.
Maureen was anxious. “Am I supposed to do anything?”
“Not yet.”
For the next four or five minutes, the psychic did breathing exercises. Deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, making a great show of her hyperventilation.
When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave.
“Hello, this is ARCANA,” she said. “What is your question?”
Zee tried to keep from laughing.
“I don’t have a question. I’m here to find out about my past lives,” Maureen said softly.
“What is your question?” Arcana’s voice boomed.
Maureen looked at Zee. “I guess my question is whether I was Zylphia Browne in a past life.”
It wasn’t going at all as Maureen had told Zee it would. Somehow she’d gotten the idea, or had read somewhere, that she would be the one going into the trance. In the book she had read on past-life regressions, the therapist would put the seeker into a trance and then record the outcome. When the seeker woke up, she would be able to listen to what she’d said under hypnosis. Or, barring that, another approach would be that Arcana might go into a trance herself, the way Edgar Cayce did, and just start relating her impressions. Maureen seemed surprised that she would have to ask a question herself.
Zee was trying hard not to laugh.
The psychic said nothing. But Zee could feel her annoyance through her supposed trance. She couldn’t tell for sure that Arcana was faking it, but she would have bet she was. Zee was aware that the psychic was watching her. In another minute, if she couldn’t stop giggling, she was pretty certain that Arcana would kick her out.
“What is your question?” Arcana boomed.
“She told you. She wants to know if she was Zylphia Browne in another life,” Zee finally said.
“Silence!” Arcana hissed.
Maureen shot Zee a warning look. Maureen’s voice shook as she once again formed the question. “Was I Zylphia Browne in a prior life?”
Everyone in Salem knew the story of Zylphia Browne, who had killed her husband and then disappeared, never to be seen again.
“The MUR-der-ess?” Arcana bellowed, stressing the first of the separated syllables and arching her eyebrows like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
It was wrong to classify Zylphia as a murderess; rather she was a victim of severe abuse who happened to escape. Even Zee believed that much.
It didn’t take a psychic to figure out the answer Maureen wanted to hear. It also didn’t take a psychic to know how much this woman didn’t like Maureen. Maureen was a beautiful woman with a childlike presence that could seem ingenuous if you didn’t know her and which often had the effect of enraging women who had to make their own way in the world and weren’t having an easy time of it. Arcana seemed instinctively to know that her answer could do some damage to Maureen. And she seemed fully prepared to do it.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” she said to herself. The growl of a Harley from the street below drowned her words.
“Excuse me?” Maureen strained to hear her. Even Zee sat forward in her seat.
“You are not Zylphia Browne,” Arcana said in a voice that neither of them could miss. “But your daughter is.”
Maureen stared at her, uncomprehending at first.
Arcana poked an accusing finger out from under her caftan and pointed at Zee. “Your daughter is the young Zylphia Browne come back to life.”
Maureen stared in disbelief.
Arcana seemed to know immediately what she had won. The look of devastation on Maureen’s face was unforgettable.
