ONE
The young woman who identified herself as a psychic medium moved with almost absentminded confidence among the fifty people who had paid forty dollars each for a seat in the community center lecture hall with the hope that she might help them connect with a dead mother or father, uncle or aunt, a dead child—but no promises.
She was tall and slender with shoulder-length hair, high cheekbones, and amber-tinted eyes; if you met her at a party or in a club you would say, “You should be a model.” Both beautiful and dashing. Even her name had a kind of au courant vibe—Hannah Braaten. At least that’s what Shelby Dunston was thinking when the woman slowly strolled up the aisle toward where she was sitting.
Shelby braced herself. She had come with the hope of connecting with her grandfather, but now she wasn’t sure if she wanted to. What would he tell her after all these years? “Sorry I died on your sixteenth birthday? Sorry that now whenever June eleventh rolls around your mother and father and aunts and uncles and cousins get sad and mournful?”
Hannah halted two rows from where Shelby was sitting, looked directly into her eyes, and smiled.
Okay, this is why I came, Shelby told herself.
Only Hannah turned her head and looked off toward the people sitting on her left.
“There’s someone stepping forward,” Hannah said. “A woman—oh, this one is a talker. She’s talking a hundred words a minute—Yes, I hear you. Yes … please slow down. Okay, okay.”
Hannah glanced to her right and then to her left.
“Alice?” Hannah asked.
No one responded.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “Alison.”
A woman in her early sixties, Shelby decided, was sitting half a row away. She cautiously raised her hand.
“The woman who came forward, she’s your mother,” Hannah said.
The older woman shook her head as if she didn’t want to believe it.
“People called her Chrissy,” Hannah said. “But it wasn’t short for Christine or Christina. Her real name was Chrysanthemum.”
The woman clasped her hand over her mouth; tears appeared in her eyes as if someone had turned on a faucet.
Hannah clutched the right side of her chest.
“Okay, I feel that,” she said. “Chrissy, I feel that. Alison, your mother died of lung cancer, didn’t she?”
Alison nodded, her hand still covering her mouth.
“She wants you to know—your mother wants you to know, that she’s sorry. She used to always have a cigarette in her hand. She used to wave it around when she talked, and she talked a lot, didn’t she?”
Alison nodded some more.
“Chrissy says she never went more than five minutes without a cigarette. She’s making me smell it. C’mon, Chrissy, don’t do that … She says she’s sorry. She said that everyone smoked back then and that she didn’t know any better. She’s sorry that she left you and your sisters so young. She says—Chrissy, wait, too fast … She says you have to stop blaming yourself. She says—Alison, did you win a writing contest with an essay on the dangers of cigarette smoking?”
Alison nodded her head. She removed her hand from her mouth and spoke softly. Shelby could barely hear her.
“In the eighth grade,” Alison said. “The winners read their essays live on WCCO radio.”
“Chrissy wants you to know that she was very proud of you, not only for the essay but for the woman you’ve become,” Hannah said. “She wants you to know that you can’t blame yourself for not trying harder to make your mother quit smoking and that she’s sorry she didn’t pay closer attention to your essay. But you have to remember that she was the parent and you were the child. She was responsible for you, but you weren’t responsible for her. You would tell her, ‘Don’t smoke anymore, Mama,’ and she’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and keep doing it anyway. That’s her mistake, not yours. She says—oh, you have a daughter that’s named after a flower, too. Poppy. You named your daughter Poppy.”
Alison nodded her head vigorously.
“Chrissy said that the poppy was her favorite flower.”
“I know,” Alison said.
“That’s why you named her Poppy.”
Alison nodded again.
“Chrissy says thank you. And she says—wait—okay—she knows that Poppy is pregnant again. Things didn’t go well the last time.”
“She miscarried,” Alison said.
“Chrissy says not to worry about a thing. She says it’ll go perfectly this time. Expect another baby girl. She says she’s been watching over Poppy and—and she’s been watching over you and your two sisters and your two daughters and your four nieces and nephews all these years and she’s going to keep at it.”
“I’ve often felt like she was with me,” Alison said.
“She always will be, too.”
Alison bent forward in her seat and began weeping. The woman sitting closest wrapped her arms around her; Shelby didn’t know if they’d come together or not.
Hannah retreated back down the aisle and began moving up the next.
* * *
Shelby shifted in her chair, tucking her long legs beneath her the way she does. She was surrounded by multiple strings of Christmas lights, and they gave her a playful appearance, although she wasn’t happy at all.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“So you know that she’s legitimate,” she said. “So you know that Hannah Braaten is the real thing, that she’s not a phony.”
“I don’t know that.”
“She knew Chrissy’s name and that it was short for Chrysanthemum and that she died of lung cancer. She knew Alison’s name and that she wrote the antismoking essay. She knew about Alison’s daughter, the number of her sisters and her daughters, and the number of her nieces and nephews.”
Nina Truhler was sitting next to me on the sofa in the Dunstons’ living room, her legs tucked beneath her just like Shelby’s. That’s where the resemblance ended, however. They could swap their size four/six dresses, and had on rare occasions, yet while Shelby had shoulder-length wheat-colored hair and eyes the color of green pastures, Nina had short black hair and the most startling silver-blue eyes I had ever seen.
She leaned forward, retrieved a long-stemmed wineglass from the coffee table, and said, “Facebook,” before taking a sip.
“I know you don’t believe in an afterlife,” Shelby said.
“I do believe in an afterlife,” Nina said. “At least I want to. I want there to be a heaven because if there’s a heaven than there’s a hell and people like Putin and al-Assad and Kim Jong-un and the president will get what’s coming to them. I just don’t believe in ghosts.”
“How can you not believe in ghosts? Your jazz club is haunted.”
“Rickie’s is not haunted, and I wish people would stop saying that.”
“Your own daughter—”
“Erica was pranking me.” Nina turned toward me. “That’s what the kids call it, pranking?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Erica was pranking me. She was pranking all of us. It was her going-away gift before she went off to Tulane University.”
“I don’t even know exactly what a psychic medium is,” I said.
“A medium can talk to the dead,” Shelby said. “A psychic can tell you what’s going to happen a week from Thursday. A psychic medium can do both.”
“If that were true, wouldn’t they all be making millions of dollars betting basketball games in Vegas?”
“It’s more personal than that.”
“Besides,” I said, “why would you care if I believe this woman—what’s her name?”
“Hannah Braaten.”
“What do you care if I believe that this woman is legitimate?”
Shelby cast a worried glance at her husband.
Robert Dunston was the best cop I had ever known—much better than I was. We started together at the St. Paul Police Department nearly twenty-five years ago. I retired to accept a reward on a rather ambitious embezzler—$3,128,584.50 before taxes—that a financial wizard named H. B. Sutton had more than doubled for me over the years. The plan was to give my father, who raised me alone after my mother died, a comfy retirement. Unfortunately, he passed six months later, leaving me both rich and bored. Meanwhile, Bobby stayed with the SPPD, eventually moving up to commander in the Major Crimes Division, mostly running the Homicide Unit. Still, Bobby didn’t look like a cop while dressed in his Minnesota Wild hoodie and sipping a Grain Belt beer. He looked like a guy watching a movie that he already knew the ending to.
“Oh, it gets better,” he said.
Copyright © 2020 by David Housewright
