Skin Deep (21 page)

15 - Things of the Spirit

The Spirit, according to the people who believe in it, never sleeps. That was probably the reason the dreary little storefront with "Things of the Spirit" scrawled across the window had a large open sign in its door at nine-fifteen on a Monday evening.

I'd checked my notes twice. This was the address that Hammond had grudgingly given me for Rebecca Hartsfield, the teenager whom Toby had matriculated in the school of hard knocks at the Ontario Motor Speedway. Things change fast in Hollywood, but things of the Spirit are eternal, and the shop certainly looked as though it had been sitting right where it was, on one of the scuzziest blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, for all eternity.

The window was crammed full of things of the Spirit. Crystals glittered from transparent nylon fishing lines that suspended them in space. Garish mandalas challenged my equilibrium with confusing permutations of concentric circles, looking like targets for spiritual archery. Reassuringly thick books offered answers to all the eternal questions between fake vellum covers embossed with confused combinations of crosses, pentacles, and symbols for infinity. Tiny glass vials filled with colored liquids glowed prismatically. In the whole window there wasn't anything I knew how to use.

I backed away to the curb and looked up. Like so many Hollywood storefronts, this one had once been the bottom floor of an apartment house. Two stories of apartments still squatted above it, lighted windows set in a plain brick wall. Maybe Rebecca Hartsfield lived in one of them.

A decidedly earthly buzzer announced my intrusion. Once it quit, I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.

The music was almost immediately drowned out by the smell. Things of the Spirit stank like an old-fashioned whorehouse. The smell suggested that every bouquet ever picked had been reduced to its essence and crammed somehow into a single aerosol can, and that can had then been emptied into the store. It was enough to make a bee sneeze.

And I sneezed.
"God
bless you," someone said with more emphasis on the first word than on all the others put together. I heard a whisper of fabric, and I turned.

She was something to look at. Her age was impossible to guess. The skin on her face was as smooth and unlined as a girl of twenty, but her hair was snow white. At first glance it seemed as though there were yards of it, cascading over her shoulders and down her back. Framed by all that white, her face looked like an apple in the snow. The eyes were that pale, low-horizon sky blue that almost disappears in black-and-white photographs, giving the impression that, for once, the windows to the soul are two-way instead of mirrored from the outside. A seamless robe of blue, embroidered at the neck with what looked like amber snow-flakes, hung straight from her shoulders to the floor.

She was smiling. I felt myself smiling back. "It's the concentration of aromas," she said as though we'd been talking for half an hour.

"What is?"

"Your sneeze. People used to believe that the soul could escape during a sneeze and be claimed by the Devil. That's why we still say
'God
bless you.' " Again the emphasis on the first word. "If the soul were to escape here, though, I don't think the Devil could snare it. There's enough positive energy here to keep him or her miles away."

"Or at least across the street."

She looked puzzled for a second and then looked over my shoulder and through the shop window. Then she laughed. Her laugh was in the same key as the piano. "The porno theater, and the massage parlor, you mean. Well, yes. That's why we're here."

"It is?"

"Why carry coals to Newcastle? Why set up a fourth gas station at an intersection where there are already three?"

"I've wondered why they did that. They always seem to."

"The analogy isn't precise, I'm afraid. Credit cards is why. Faced with a choice of gas stations, people will use the card they carry. But the soul carries no credit cards."

"And it requires a different kind of fuel."

"Yes." She looked pleased. "That's exactly right. What people buy here powers them upward as well as forward. How may I help you?"

"What
are
the fragrances? I've never smelled anything like them."

"Aromatherapy. We have the largest stock on the West Coast. If you don't count San Francisco, that is."

Since San Francisco
is
on the West Coast, and will be until it finally shakes loose and floats picturesquely into the Pacific, the answer was less than ingenuous. On the other hand, she'd popped the balloon herself, and I was willing to give her credit for it.

"And aromatherapy does what?"

"Aromas are the cutting edge of holistic medicine. Given a proper spiritual balance in the subject, aromas can strengthen the body's defenses against any kind of infection. Would you like me to show you some?"

"Sure," I said, "if you think you can show someone an aroma."

The seraphic smile wilted slightly. "A literalist. Well, why don't you tell me what it is that ails you?"

"Insatiable curiosity."

She pursed her lips, sending the leftovers of the smile into some parallel universe, glanced down at my shoes, and then looked slowly up at the rest of me. It wasn't so much a look as a survey that mapped my clothes and placed them precisely in a low-rent district. I felt like I'd been denied admission to the new age.

"Curiosity," she said slowly. "I don't know that I've got a cure for that."

"Actually, I sort of hope not. Without curiosity, where would we be?"

"Happier, probably. What is it you're curious about?" We weren't having fun anymore.

I took the plunge. "Rebecca Hartsfield."

"Rebecca?"

"Hartsfield," I said.

"I heard you. I know the name. I'm Chantra Hartsfield. What do you want with Rebecca?"

"You're her sister," I said chivalrously.

"Ease up," she said. "Don't work quite so hard. Try mother."

"She's here, then."

"No. She's not."

"Where is she?"

"Not here."

"You already told me that." I tried a smile. No dice.

"Yow haven't told
me
anything," she said severely. "Not why you want to see Rebecca, not how you got this address. Nothing at all."

It was time to try frank. "I got the address from the police."

She put both hands into the pockets of her robe. "Police," she said. "Rebecca's not in trouble. I'd know. I always know."

She sounded so positive that I had to ask. "How do you always know?"

"Psychic linkage. Don't look skeptical, it's common between mother and daughter, if both women know how to tune in to it."

"You can read her mind?"

"Mind reading is a charlatan's stunt. No one can read anyone's mind. But people who have an affinity can feel strong emotions that the other person in the link experiences."

"Feel them how?"

"Why did the police give you this address?"

"Same answer as before. Because I asked."

"Why?"

We looked at each other for a moment.

"Well," I said, "we both want to know something, don't we?"

She tilted her head upward and studied me. "What exactly do you want to know?"

"How you feel the other person's emotions."

She gave a patient, well-bred sigh. "Hell, the same way I know that you don't mean any harm to Rebecca. If a person is open enough, the strong feelings of others resonate in her. Your emotions are part of the total electromagnetic field of your nervous system. Every thought, feeling, or dream you have is a scattering of electrical impulses, jumping across millions of synapses between the nerves. When you're extremely agitated or gripped by a powerful emotion, your electromagnetic field becomes stronger and more agitated. If a person is receptive, her nervous system will sense the other's static, producing a faint sensation of joy or fear or sorrow."

Since I couldn't think of anything to say, I nodded.

"It happens all the time between mothers and daughters, even at long distance. Does that explanation make sense to you?"

"Sure, I guess so. It's like magnetism. You can't see it, but you can see its effects."

She smiled again. "Amazing," she said. "Even the most skeptical person will accept an explanation if it's dressed up in enough electromagnetic mumbo-jumbo. There's no scientific explanation of gravity, either. Does that make you doubt its existence?"

"Not as long as the change in my pockets feels heavy."

"Money is heavy beyond its physical weight. Gram for gram, money is the heaviest thing in the world."

"Grams?" I said. "You're metric?"

"Ten is a powerful number."

"What about metric astrology? Which two signs of the zodiac would you eliminate to get it down to ten?"

For a moment I thought she was going to laugh. "Gemini and Cancer."

"Why?"

"My ex-husband was on the cusp." The laugh decided not to show up. "And now that we've finished playing, why did you ask the police how to find Rebecca?"

"I'm interested in something that happened four years ago. At Ontario Motor Speedway."

She closed her eyes for a long moment. When she reopened them they were fastened on mine. "We've let go of that," she said. "That's not part of our baggage anymore."

"I may have to ask Rebecca to reclaim it."

"Why would you do that?"

"Maybe to keep some other little girl from having to go through what Rebecca did."

She pulled her hands from her pockets and surprised me by cracking her knuckles. Large semiprecious stones sparkled on her fingers. "Well," she said, "you can't talk to Rebecca. She's at college, and I won't tell you where, so don't ask."

"Look. You've already figured out that I'm not dangerous. Is there someplace we can sit down?"

Her eyes burned into mine for a moment. Norman Stillman would have killed for that gaze. Then she walked briskly past me and reached into the window, turning around the open sign. Before she did, I read the other side. It didn't say
CLOSED
. It said
THE FLOW IS TEMPORARILY INTERRUPTED. PLEASE COME BACK.

"The flow?" I said.

"Skip it," she said shortly, heading for the back of the shop. I followed her through a door behind the counter and into a back room. The smell, if anything, was more powerful in there. The shelves were jammed with stock, and what seemed like millions of identical books were stacked everywhere. She pulled out a chair, angled it around toward one of the stacks of books, and sat in it. "Take a load off," Chantra Hartsfield said.

"Where?"

"There." She pointed and let the smile bloom. "Don't worry, they'll hold you."

I sat on the books. They sank slightly beneath my weight and gave off a vaporous sigh of aroma that literally made my eyes water. "God in heaven," I said. "I feel like I've been sentenced to life imprisonment inside a flower."

"These are my catalogs. I'm going national."

I looked around at the stacks. "If you'll excuse my saying so, they don't seem to be moving very fast."

"It's a problem. I can't figure out how to market them."

"What do you mean? Buy a mailing list from the Scientologists or somebody and send them out."

"Yeah," she said, "that's just it. They're something brand new. They're the first scratch-and-sniff aromatherapy catalogs."

"Smells like a great idea."

"I think it is. But how do you control it? I mean, if an ounce of, let's say, chamomile will cure cancer of the colon in the right person, what effect would a scratch-and-sniff have on the common cold? I could put myself out of business."

"Ah," I said sympathetically.

She offered up a helpless smile. "I'm not really much good at business."

"Well," I said, "if you're selling chamomile to cure colon cancer, the profit margin must be pretty impressive."

"I'm not selling dink," she said without taking offense. "You're sitting on my catalogs."

I shrugged, a mistake in judgment that released several pounds of perfume directly into my nostrils. "I'm not much good at business, either," I said, fanning it away. "Hey, do you know anything about computers?"

"I can't work a calculator," she said. "It's a dilemma."

We commiserated silently for a moment, one failed businessperson to another. I shifted again, with the same result. "Listen," I said, "why not sew them into pillow slips and sell them as whoopie cushions?"

She thought about it, shook her head, and dusted her hands together in a workmanlike fashion. "So. Tell me why you're here."

"Our friend Toby Vane. I've been assigned to keep an eye on him."

"Assigned by whom? And for what reason?"

"By the company that produces his shows. To keep him from slamming any young women around for the time being."

"Since when do they care? What do you do for a living?"

"I'm supposed to be a detective."

"And you work for the production company?" There was an undertone in her voice I didn't understand.

"Yes."

"For Norman Stillman Productions?" The undertone was pure acid now. She said the words as though she had to get them out of her mouth before they dissolved and choked her.

"Right." I waited.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" she said. It was about the ninth time she'd surprised me.

"Not if you give me one, too."

I got arched eyebrows. "You don't look like a smoker."

"Neither do you. But I'd smoke a highway flare to muffle these damned aromas."

She gave me a staccato laugh, crinkling appealingly around the eyes, and opened a drawer in a little wooden desk to withdraw a package of the same long cigarettes Nana smoked.

She handed me one and lit them both with practiced precision. "I can't smoke in the shop," she said. "Bad for the image. I learned about image the hard way. Image is the reason the geniuses at Norman Stillman Productions would want to keep me quiet."