psychics, to play the odds, to use verbal and visual clues to make educated guesses about people. It wasn’t so different from being a psychologist. People were unique, each with an impossibly complicated inner life, a mosaic of personality, history, and perceptions. Their inner lives were vast, nebulous symbioses of memory and the present moment, no incident or experience standing alone from the incidents or experiences that formed them. But the problems people faced were often the same. And things like appearance, tone, body language, facial expression spoke volumes to the trained observer, to someone with empathy. Maggie’s fear and hesitance to speak must have told Eloise Montgomery everything she needed to know about why Maggie was making that call.
By the time she pulled into the short drive in front of a small white house, Maggie felt more solid, more in control of herself and her intentions. The house was off a narrow rural road about twenty miles from The Hollows. It sat prim and proper on a small rise; everything-white clapboards, black shutters, a red door-looked freshly painted. A few piles of raked leaves lay beneath the towering oaks on the property.
Even as Maggie made her way up the stone path to the porch, golden and orange leaves were fluttering around her. The sun had already dipped below the horizon. But the air had gone balmy again, the frigid cold from yesterday forgotten.
As she rang the bell and waited, Maggie noticed that three large pumpkins and a collection of gourds sat by the door and thought how she hadn’t bothered to put out their fall decorations. And something about that thought brought tears to her eyes. She was wiping them away as Eloise opened the door and led her inside.
• • •
“I’ll start by telling you that there is no confidentiality here. So anything you don’t want me to know, you should keep to yourself. I’m not a lawyer or a priest.”
Eloise ran thin fingers over her short, salt-and-pepper hair as she sat across from Maggie. Maggie remembered her as bigger, more powerful. She had the look now of someone who didn’t think much of food, with lean limbs and thin lips. Her collarbone pulled her skin taut. But there were three pies cooling on the counter in the kitchen where Eloise had led her, filling the air with the scent of warm pastry. Eloise had offered coffee, and Maggie had declined. But Eloise had placed a cup in front of her anyway, prepared with milk and one spoonful of sugar. Maggie sipped it to be polite and found that it was just what she needed.
“I was a junior in high school when Sarah was murdered. My mother, Elizabeth Monroe, was the principal of Hollows High.”
“I remember her. She’s a good woman.”
“Yes, she is,” Maggie said. “Thank you. Recently, she hurt herself. My son found her and she was delirious. She told him some things, things that have me worried. Things that have me remembering Sarah.”
Eloise nodded slowly, looked down at her fingernails. Maggie noticed they were ragged and bloody, bitten to the quick.
“She told my son, ‘She was already dead when he found her.’ She claims now that she doesn’t remember saying it. But it resonated with me.”
Eloise looked at her with dark eyes, as though she knew something more powerful had led Maggie here. Maggie looked away, cast her eyes about the kitchen. A ceramic hen, a chalkboard covered with scrawled notes, a countertop peeling at the corners-she looked everywhere but back into those dark pools.
“Once, a long time ago, your mother sat where you’re sitting now. She didn’t believe Tommy Delano killed Sarah Meyer.”
Maggie issued a surprised little laugh. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. No offense, but I just can’t see my mother visiting a psychic.”
Eloise smiled. “She came here to ask me why I’d said what I did. She accused me of being a fraud.”
“Are you? Are you a fraud?”
Maggie was surprised at herself for asking the question. It was disrespectful, crass, and unlike her. It was more like Elizabeth.
But Eloise just shook her head slowly. “I wish I were. I wish this were all just a scam I came up with to make money. I wish I didn’t spend half my life seeing things no one would ever want to see.”
There was no anger or bitterness in her tone, just the level of sadness of someone resigned to her condition. Maggie noticed a battalion of prescription bottles by the sink, all lined up.
“What did you tell my mother?” The refrigerator started to hum, and Maggie heard some cubes drop from the ice maker in the freezer.
“I pick up frequencies, images. The best way I can describe it is to say that there’s something inside me like a scanner. I see things with varying degrees of lucidity. Some things make sense; some things don’t. Sometimes I’m connected, like I was to Sarah’s family. Sometimes the things I see are a world away. There’s no pattern.”
Eloise caressed the edge of the table with her fingertips, seemed to have finished what she was saying.
“Did Tommy Delano kill Sarah?” Maggie asked.
“I used to think so, though I knew there was much more to the story than I could see. I knew he had a terrible rage inside him, something that had lived in him since he was a small boy. It didn’t belong to him; his spirit was cursed with it. It was something inherited, that he couldn’t exorcise, didn’t know how. I knew that he had a hunger for her, that he’d been watching her, following her for a long time. He kept that demon caged for so long, but it was thrashing inside him. I saw him touching her, cutting her.”
Eloise’s eyes had taken on a shine; she was staring beyond Maggie as though she was no longer there. But her voice was as steady and unemotional as if she were talking about something she’d seen on television.
“And that’s all I told them. Because that’s what I saw. He later confessed.”
“And now what do you think?”
Eloise lifted a finger, got up, and left the room. When she returned a moment later, she held an envelope in her hand.
“A few days after Tommy Delano died in prison, I received this in the mail. He hanged himself, maybe you remember.
Maggie felt a cold shiver, an urge to get up and run. But she stayed rooted in her seat. Outside, the sun had set and it was dark. She felt like they were the only two people in the world.
“This is his suicide note. He sent it to me.”
“Why? Why would he send it to you?”
“He wanted someone to know the truth, to know who he was, what he’d done. He claimed he could feel me inside his head. I don’t know if that was true or not. I doubt it, but I’ve learned not to judge. There are too many things we don’t understand.”
Eloise handed Maggie the letter. As Maggie reached to take it from her, Eloise held on to her hand. Her grip was gentle but firm. Maggie looked up to meet the older woman’s eyes and saw only kindness there.
“I knew you’d come here and want answers one day,” Eloise said. “I knew it the day your mother came to see me.”
Something about her words or her tone brought tears to Maggie’s eyes again. “How could you know that?”
Eloise sat back down and wrapped her arms around herself. “Because I told your mother to stop looking for answers. I told her to accept things the way they were, and let Sarah and Tommy Delano go. I told her that if she didn’t, she’d lose you. I didn’t know the specifics, how or why. I just knew that it was not her place to keep looking, and if she did, she’d pay an awful price.”
The information landed hard and dead center. Maggie remembered what her mother had said to her in the car when she’d asked Elizabeth if Tommy Delano hadn’t killed Sarah, then who had. She’d said,
But Elizabeth was not a superstitious woman, not one to bow to the prophecy of a psychic. Maggie said as much to Eloise, who offered a deferential nod of her head. Maggie realized that Eloise was a woman accustomed to being disbelieved. It didn’t faze her in the least. The longer Maggie spent with Eloise, the more credible she seemed. Maybe Elizabeth had come to feel the same way.
Maggie held the letter in her hand for a moment, then slipped the page from its envelope. Tommy’s message was written in a looping, childish hand.
Dear Miss Montgomery,
I believe you’re the only person alive who knows me. I can feel your eyes on me and I know you can see who
