The Best of Connie Willis (27 page)

“You have?”

“Yeah. Tell me what you think of this: Ariaura wants to be big. Not just seven-hundred-and-fifty-a-pop seminars and sixty-dollar videotapes, but
Oprah
, the
Today
show,
Larry King
, the whole works. But to do that it’s not enough to have audiences who believe her. She needs to have somebody with credibility say she’s for real, a scientist, say, or a professional skeptic.”

“Like you,” she said cautiously.

“Like me. Only I don’t believe in astral spirits. Or channelers. And
I certainly wouldn’t fall for the spirit of an ancient priest of Atlantis. It’s going to have to be somebody a charlatan would never dream of channeling, somebody who’ll say what I want to hear. And somebody I know a lot about so I’ll recognize the clues being fed to me, somebody custom-tailored for me.”

“Like H. L. Mencken,” Kildy said. “But how would she have known you were a fan of Mencken’s?”

“She didn’t have to,” I said. “That was her partner’s job.”

“Her part—”

“Partner, sidekick, shill, whatever you want to call it. Somebody I’d trust when she said it was important to go see some channeler.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You think I went to Ariaura’s seminar and her imitation of Isus was so impressive I immediately became a Believer with a capital
B
and fell in with her nefarious scheme, whatever it is?”

“No,” I said. “I think you were in it with her from the beginning, from the very first day you came to work for me.”

She really was a good actress. The expression in those beautiful blue eyes looked exactly like stunned hurt. “You believe I set you up,” she said wonderingly.

I shook my head. “I’m a skeptic, remember? I deal in independently verifiable evidence. Like this,” I said, and handed her Lucius Windfire’s attendance list.

She looked at it in silence.

“Your whole story about how you found out about me was a fake, wasn’t it? You didn’t look up ‘debunkers’ in the phone book, did you? You didn’t go see a luminescence therapist with your mother?”

“No.”

No
.

I hadn’t realized till she admitted it how much I had been counting on her saying, “There must be some mistake, I was there,” on her having some excuse, no matter how phony: “Did I say the fourteenth? I meant the twentieth,” or “My publicist got the tickets for us. It would be
in her name.” Anything. Even flinging the list dramatically at me and sobbing, “I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”

But she just stood there, looking at the incriminating list and then at me, not a tantrum or a tear in sight.

“You concocted the whole story,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

I waited for her to say, “It’s not the way it looks, Rob, I can explain,” but she didn’t say that, either. She handed the list back to me and picked up her cell phone and her bag, fishing for her keys and then slinging her bag over her shoulder as casually as if she were on her way to go cover a new moon ceremony or a tarot reading, and left.

And this was the place in the story where the private eye takes a bottle of Scotch out of his bottom drawer, pours himself a nice stiff drink, and congratulates himself on his narrow escape.

I’d almost been made a royal chump of, and Mencken (the real one, not the imitation Kildy and Ariaura had tried to pass off as him) would never have forgiven me.

So good riddance. And what I needed to do now was write up the whole sorry scam as a lesson to other skeptics for the next issue.

But I sat there a good fifteen minutes, thinking about Kildy and her exit, and knowing that, in spite of its offhandedness, I was never going to see her again.

I told you I’d make a lousy psychic. The next morning Kildy walked in carrying an armload of papers and file folders. She dumped them in front of me on my desk, picked up my phone, and began punching in numbers.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? And what’s all this?” I said, gesturing at the stack of papers.

“Independently verifiable evidence,” she said, still punching in numbers, and put the phone to her ear. “Hello, this is Kildy Ross. I need to speak to Ariaura.” There was a pause. “She’s not taking calls? All right, tell her I’m at the
Jaundiced Eye
office, and I need to speak to her as soon as possible. Tell her it’s urgent. Thank you.” She hung up.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, calling Ariaura on my phone?” I said.

“I wasn’t,” she said. “I was calling Mencken.” She pulled a file out of the middle of the stack. “I’m sorry it took me so long. Getting Ariaura’s phone records was harder than I thought.”

“Ariaura’s phone records?”

“Yeah. Going back four years,” she said, pulling a file folder out of the middle of the stack and handing it to me.

I opened it up. “How did you get her phone records?”

“I know this computer guy at Pixar. We should do an issue on how easy it is to get hold of private information and how mediums are using it to convince their people they’re talking to their dead relatives,” she said, fishing through the stack for another folder.

“And here are my phone records.” She handed it to me. “The cell’s on top, and then my home number and my car phone. And my mom’s. And my publicist’s cell phone.”

“Your publicist’s cell—?”

She nodded. “In case you think I used her phone to call Ariaura. She doesn’t have a regular phone, just a cell. And here are my dad’s and my stepmother’s. I can get my other stepmothers’, too, but it’ll take a couple more days, and Ariaura’s big seminar is tonight.”

She handed me more files. “This is a list of all my trips—airline tickets, hotel bills, rental car records. Credit card bills, with annotations,” she said, and went over to her tote bag and pulled out three fat Italian-leather notebooks with a bunch of Post-its sticking out the sides.
“These are my day planners, with notes as to what the abbreviations mean, and my publicist’s log.”

“And this is supposed to prove you were at Lucius Windfire’s luminescence reading with your mother?”

“No, Rob, I told you, I lied about the seminar,” she said, looking earnestly through the stack, folder by folder. “These are to prove I didn’t call Ariaura, that she didn’t call me, that I wasn’t in Seattle or Eugene or any of the other cities she was in, and I never went to Salem.”

She pulled a folder out of the pile and began handing items to me. “Here’s the program for Yogi Magaputra’s matinee performance for May nineteenth. I couldn’t find the ticket stubs and I didn’t buy the tickets, the studio did, but here’s a receipt for the champagne cocktail I had at intermission. See? It’s got the date and it was at the Roosevelt, and here’s a schedule of Magaputra’s performances, showing he was at the Roosevelt on that day. And a flyer for the next session they gave out as we left.”

I had one of those flyers in my file on mediums, and I was pretty sure I’d been at that séance. I’d gone to three, working on a piece on his use of funeral home records to obtain information on his victims’ dead relatives. I’d never published it—he’d been arrested on tax evasion charges before I finished it. I looked questioningly at Kildy.

“I was there researching a movie I was thinking about doing,” Kildy said, “a comedy about a medium. It was called
Medium Rare
. Here’s the screenplay.”

She handed me a thick bound manuscript. “I wouldn’t read the whole thing. It’s terrible. Anyway, I saw you there, talking to this guy with hair transplants—”

Magaputra’s personal manager, who I’d suspected was feeding him info from the audience. I’d been trying to see if I could spot his concealed mike.

“I saw you talking to him, and I thought you looked—”

“Gullible?”

Her jaw tightened. “No. Interesting. Cute. Not the kind of guy I
expected to see at one of the yogi’s séances. I asked who you were, and somebody said you were a professional skeptic, and I thought, Well, thank goodness! Magaputra was
patently
fake, and everyone was buying it, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Including your mother,” I said.

“No, I made that up, too. My mother’s even more of a skeptic than I am, especially after being married to my father. She’s partly why I was interested—she’s always after me to date guys from outside the movie business—so I bought a copy of
The Jaundiced Eye
and got your address and came to see you.”

“And lied.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was a dumb thing to do. I knew it as soon as you started talking about how you shouldn’t take anything anyone tells you on faith and how important independently verifiable evidence is, but I was afraid if I told you I was doing research for a movie you wouldn’t want me tagging along, and if I told you I was attracted to you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think it was a reality show or some kind of Hollywood fad thing everybody was doing right then, like opening a boutique or knitting or checking into Betty Ford.”

“And you fully intended to tell me,” I said, “you were just waiting for the right moment. In fact, you were all set to when Ariaura came along—”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she said. “I thought if I went to work for you and you got to know me, you might stop thinking of me as a movie star and ask me out—”

“And incidentally pick up some good acting tips for your medium movie.”

“Yes,” she said angrily. “If you want to know the truth, I also thought if I kept going to those stupid past-life regression sessions and covens and soul retrieval circles, I might get over the stupid crush I had on you, but the better I got to know you, the worse it got.”

She looked up at me. “I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t set you up. I’d never seen Ariaura before I went to that first seminar with
my publicist, and I’m not in any kind of scam with her. And that story I told you the first day is the only thing I’ve ever lied to you about. Everything else I told you—about hating psychics and Ben Affleck and wanting to get out of the movie business and wanting to help you debunk charlatans and loathing the idea of ending up in rehab or in
The Hulk IV
—was true.”

She rummaged in the pile and pulled out an olive-green-covered script. “They really did offer me the part.”

“Of the Hulk?”

“No,” she said and held the script out to me. “Of the love interest.”

She looked up at me with those blue eyes of hers, and if anything had ever been too good to be true, it was Kildy, standing there with that bilious green script and the office’s fluorescent light on her golden hair. I had always wondered how all those chumps sitting around séance tables and squatting on lilac-colored cushions could believe such obvious nonsense. Well, now I knew.

Because standing there right then, knowing it all had to be a scam, that the
Hulk IV
script and the credit card bills and the phone bills didn’t prove a thing, that they could easily have been faked and I was nothing more than a prize chump being set up for the big finale by a couple of pros, I still wanted to believe it. And not just the researching-a-movie alibi, but the whole thing—that H. L. Mencken had come back from the grave, that he was here to help me crusade against charlatans, that if I grabbed the wrist holding that script and pulled Kildy toward me and kissed her, we would live happily ever after.

And no wonder Mencken, railing against creationists and chiropractic and Mary Baker Eddy, hadn’t gotten anywhere. What chance do facts and reason possibly have against what people desperately need to believe?

Only Mencken hadn’t come back. A third-rate channeler was only pretending to be him, and Kildy’s protestations of love, much as I wanted to hear them, were the oldest trick in the book.

“Nice try,” I said.

“But you don’t believe me,” she said bleakly, and Ariaura walked in.

“I got your message,” she said to Kildy in Mencken’s gravelly voice. “I came as soon as I could.” She plunked down in a chair facing me. “Those goons of Ariaura’s—”

“You can knock off the voices, Ariaura,” I said. “The jig, as Mencken would say, is up.”

Ariaura looked inquiringly at Kildy.

“Rob thinks Ariaura’s a fake,” Kildy said.

Ariaura switched her gaze to me. “You just figured that out? Of course she’s a fake, she’s a bamboozling mountebank, an oleaginous—”

“He thinks you’re not real,” Kildy said. “He thinks you’re just a voice Ariaura does, like Isus, that your disrupting her seminars is a trick to convince him she’s an authentic channeler, and he thinks I’m in on the plot with you, that I helped you set him up.”

Here it comes, I thought. Shocked outrage. Affronted innocence. Kildy’s a total stranger, I’ve never seen her before in my life!

“He thinks that you—?” Ariaura hooted and banged the arms of the chair with glee. “Doesn’t the poor fish know you’re in love with him?”

“He thinks that’s part of the scam,” Kildy said earnestly. “The only way he’ll believe I am is if he believes there
is
no scam, if he believes you’re really Mencken.”

“Well, then,” Ariaura said and grinned, “I guess we’ll have to convince him.” He slapped his knees and turned expectantly to me. “What do you want to know, sir? I was born in 1880 at nine
P.M.
, right before the police went out and raided ten or twenty saloons, and went to work at the
Morning Herald
at the tender age of eighteen—”

“Where you laid siege to the editor Max Ways for four straight weeks before he gave you an assignment,” I said, “but my knowing that doesn’t any more make me Henry Lawrence Mencken than it does you.”

“Henry
Louis
,” Ariaura said, “after an uncle of mine who died when he was a baby. All right, you set the questions.”

“It’s not that simple,” Kildy said. She pulled a chair up in front of
Ariaura and sat down, facing her. She took both hands in hers. “To prove you’re Mencken you can’t just answer questions. The skeptic’s first rule is: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ You’ve got to do something extraordinary.”

“And independently verifiable,” I said.