Chapter Four
The exposed wooden trim, the bull’s eyes in the doorframes, the corbels bookending the fireplace all were to be admired, LaGrange said.
Apparently that’s what he was doing as he shifted from one spot to another in the parlor: admiring things.
His overcoat shed, he wore a brown gabardine suit with a yellow pocket square.
His flat, dark, shiny hair was parted down the middle, and his face, with its full cheeks, looked babyish—even with the mustache. He was in his midthirties, Cal guessed.
LaGrange admired the little shelf of ceramic owls. The grandfather clock. “Swiss?” he asked.
“Cleveland,” Cal said. He sat on the couch, holding Skip’s hands while Skip pistoned his body up and down, still not clear on what his feet might be for.
Becky had excused herself to the kitchen to put together what she referred to as light refreshments.
This gabardined baby-man was here for a session, Cal assumed, but they were acting as if he were a special guest. Cal asked where he was coming from, and LaGrange said Fort Wayne, by way of Ann Arbor and Detroit—all by rail.
Cal asked where he was headed after this, and LaGrange said Boston, but he was in no hurry.
He’d taken a room at the Whitman Hotel, which he found to be grand and charming, if a bit run-down.
Cal, who’d lived his whole life in Bonhomie and never once stepped foot in the Whitman, asked what LaGrange did for a living.
“So hard to describe,” LaGrange said. He drew a breath. “I’m a scholar attached to no university. A researcher attached to no institute. I study humanity and try to give platform to its brightest psychic minds—Rebecca’s among them, I hope. What line of work do you find yourself in?”
“I find myself in hardware.”
“Wonderful!”
Was it? Light refreshments were taking a long time. “Would you excuse me?”
He carried Skip through the living room and dining area and backed his way through the swinging door that led into the kitchen. When the door had settled behind him, he whispered to Becky, “What’s this guy want?”
“He wants to talk to me,” Becky said without looking up from the cutting board, where she was chopping carrots and celery into little sticks. “He wants to observe me, in-session. For a book he’s writing—about people like me.”
“He needs a hotel room for that?”
She shrugged.
“Did you know he was coming?”
“I most certainly didn’t,” she said. “He mentioned that he might in one of his letters, but he didn’t say anything more specific than that.”
“He’s the guy from the letters? Mr. Awe?”
“Shh. Plug in the percolator, would you? And mash up some plums for Skip.”
—
At Becky’s invitation, LaGrange came back to the house the next afternoon, a Sunday, for a couple of hours of conversation Cal steered clear of (though he ate one of the sugar-dusted crullers LaGrange had picked up from the bakery near his hotel).
On Monday morning, Cal was on his way to work when he spotted LaGrange coming into the neighborhood on foot, clutching another paper sack. He waved as Cal pulled up to the stop sign. Cal rolled down his window.
“Such a beautiful day!” LaGrange said.
It was cloudy and cold, actually. “You’re going to see Becky?”
“Armed to the hilt.” LaGrange opened a wing of his beige overcoat and showed Cal a wide inner pocket with a notepad and pencils sticking out of it. He shook open the paper sack and held it forth. “Corn muffin?”
Yes, because they were still warm and smelled good, but was Cal supposed to just be okay with all this?
All this what? a voice in his head asked, because he wasn’t sure he knew, having excluded himself from the whole enterprise.
Was it really just research for a book about séances?
Or did this clown have something else up his sleeve?
Cal opened the store, then called home just to say hi.
An hour later, he called again to ask how things were going, and Becky said fine and that he didn’t need to keep checking on her.
When he called a third time, at noon, there was no answer.
Then the phone rang, and it was Roman. “Who’s the suit?”
“How did you find out about him?” Cal asked.
“Estelle Crowley. She had dinner at the Blue Top last night with a couple of friends and said this slick type was at the next table and struck up a conversation with them, admiring their brooches and whatnot and saying how friendly it was in this town, and then he started talking about Becky. How amazing and treasured she is. What do you know about him?”
Cal told Roman all he knew about Casey LaGrange, which wasn’t much.
He was keeping an eye on the situation, he said; he had it under control.
But Roman said, “I don’t know if you do,” and went on to tell him how this guy had asked Estelle and her friends if they’d been to Becky’s house for one of these séances—none of them had—then said they should, because Becky was going to be famous one day with his help.
Jesus, Cal thought. What kind of help? The kind that involved hands, no doubt. He assumed Roman was thinking the same thing.
But Roman said, “If this goes anywhere, it’s got to be in writing. And tell her not to sign anything without showing it to me first.”
When Cal got home that evening, Becky was just taking a lasagna out of the oven.
He asked how long the muffin man had stuck around for.
Half the day, she said. Doing what? “Talking,” she said, then clarified: she’d done most of the talking, and he’d written a lot of things down.
She was kind of talked out, honestly. Cal wanted to relay to her what Roman had told him, but maybe this wasn’t the best time.
For all he knew, Roman had called and told her himself.
“So…did he get what he needed? For his book?”
“No,” she said. LaGrange had observed one session—with Mrs. Dodson—but wanted to sit in on at least a couple more, and she’d told him he could. She had one scheduled for tomorrow, and one for the day after.
Cal didn’t want to ask but felt like he ought to—and had a right to. “Do you enjoy having this guy around?”
Someone in her field who took an interest in what she did? A colleague who was impressed with her? She twirled an oven mitt on her hand and watched steam curl up from the lasagna, then turned, almost smiling, to Cal. “Believe it or not,” she said.
—
It was a deliberately vague answer that had probably sounded like a yes to Cal, and she was okay with that.
She did enjoy Mr. LaGrange’s company—just not as much as she’d thought she would.
She was flattered by his attention and his questions, but a little of those things went a long way.
She didn’t know much about his background but sensed a long-term aloneness, and a sad determination, and a frantic energy just below the surface, scissoring like ducks’ feet.
She suspected the world received him in much the same way it received her: as an odd commodity.
Someone even loved ones glanced at sideways.
(Did he have loved ones?) By his third day in town, it was clear he’d brought with him just the one suit, and a handful of different pocket squares to go with it.
She’d noticed his shirt collars were a little dirty and his cuffs were a little ragged—not that she cared.
She’d also noticed that when she answered his questions, he doodled sometimes instead of taking notes.
Among other things that afternoon—while Mrs. Dodson babysat Skip across the street—they discussed the people he called “pioneers” in Becky’s field, though Becky didn’t consider them pioneers at all: the Davenport Brothers, who’d claimed to have a cabinet that held supernatural powers, only to be debunked when their trapdoors and hidden ropes were discovered; the Fox Sisters, whose ghostly rappings were revealed to be nothing more than the cracking of their own double-jointed toes.
“Houdini wrote an excellent book exposing the lot of them,” Becky said. “Have you read it?”
“Oh, certainly,” he said, and changed the subject to props. Did she ever use any? Talismans, or atmospheric adjusters?
Atmospheric adjusters sounded like something Nikola Tesla might have worked with. She burned sage, she said. She lit a candle because she thought it helped bring the room into focus—though she didn’t like keeping the candle on the table. She sometimes liked to have flowers in the spiriting room.
He told her about the other mystics he’d encountered and wanted to write about—the Belgian psychic in Ann Arbor, and the past-life regressionist in Detroit whom he’d mentioned in one of his letters.
Also a healer in Indianapolis, and a medium back in Fort Wayne who had an unusually high-pitched voice and was half-blind—but both those things only added to it, he said.
“Added to what?”
“The effect. On everyone in the room, from what I could tell.”
She was about to ask how many people had been in the room, but just then the doorbell rang.