Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Why would it...”

“Now that you’re famous.”

Famous.

Of course she wasn’t, not really. Someone did call her from Florida, wanting an interview for a national tabloid, and there was a certain amount of attention in the local press, and on area radio stations. But she was a quiet, retiring woman, hardly striking in appearance and decidedly undramatic in her responses. Her personal history was not interesting in and of itself, nor was she inclined to go into it. Her lifestyle was hardly colorful.

Had it been otherwise, she might have caught a wave of publicity and been nationally famous for her statutory fifteen minutes, reading Joey Buttafuoco’s palm on Hard Copy, sharing herbal weight-loss secrets with Oprah.

Instead she had her picture in the local paper, seated in her garden. (She wouldn’t allow them to photograph her in her studio, among the candles and crystals.) And that was enough to get her plenty of attention, not all of which she welcomed. No one actually crept across her lawn to stare in her window, but cars did slow or even stop in front of her house, and one man got out of his car and took pictures.

She got more attention than usual when she left the house, too. People who knew her congratulated her, hoping to hear a little more about the case and the manner in which she’d solved it. Strangers recognized her — on the street, in the supermarket. While their interest was not intrusive, she was uncomfortably aware of it.

But the biggest change, really, was in the number of people who suddenly found themselves in need of her services. She was bothered at first by the thought that they were coming to her for the wrong reason, and she wondered if she should refuse to accommodate such curiosity seekers. She meditated on the question, and the answer that came to her was that she was unequipped to judge the motivation of those who sought her out. How could she tell the real reason that brought some troubled soul to her door? And how could she determine, irrespective of motivation, what help she might be able to provide?

She decided that she ought to see everyone. If she found herself personally uncomfortable with a client’s energy, then she wouldn’t see that person anymore. That had been her policy all along. But she wouldn’t prejudge any of them, wouldn’t screen them in advance.

“But it’s impossible to fit everyone in,” she told Claire Warburton. “I’m just lucky I got a last-minute cancellation or I wouldn’t have been able to schedule you until the end of next week.”

“How does it feel to be an overnight success after all these years?”

“Is that what I am? A success? Sometimes I think I liked it better when I was a failure. No, I don’t mean that, but no more do I like being booked as heavily as I am, I’ll tell you that. The work is exhausting. I’m seeing four people a day, and yesterday I saw five, which I’ll never do again. It drains you.”

“I can imagine.”

“But the gentleman was so persistent, and I thought, well, I do have the time. But by the time the day was over...”

“You were exhausted.”

“I certainly was. And I hate to book appointments weeks in advance, or to refuse to book them at all. It bothers me to turn anyone away, because how do I know that I’m not turning away someone in genuine need? For years I had less business than I would have preferred, and now I have too much, and I swear I don’t know what to do about it.” She frowned. “And when I meditate on it, I don’t get anywhere at all.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Claire said. “You don’t need to look in a crystal for this one. Just look at a balance sheet.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sylvia,” Claire said, “raise your damn rates.”

“My rates?”

“For years you’ve been seeing a handful of people a week and charging them twenty-five dollars each, and wondering why you’re poor as a churchmouse. Raise your rates and you’ll increase your income to a decent level — and you’ll keep yourself from being overbooked. The people who really need you will pay the higher price, and the curiosity seekers will think twice.”

“But the people who’ve been coming to me for years—”

“You can grandfather them in,” Claire said. “Confine the rate increase to new customers. But I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No, and I’m costing my own self money by saying this, but I’ll say it anyhow. People appreciate less what costs them less. That woman in California, drives the red Tosteroni? You think she’d treasure that car if somebody sold it to her for five thousand dollars? You think People magazine would print a picture of her standing next to it? Raise your rates and everybody’ll think more of you, and pay more attention to the advice you give ’em.”

“Well,” she said, slowly, “I suppose I could go from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars...”

“Fifty,” Claire said firmly. “Not a penny less.”

In the end,she had to raise her fee three times. Doubling it initially had the paradoxical effect of increasing the volume of calls. A second increase, to seventy-five dollars, was a step in the right direction, slowing the flood of calls; she waited a few months, then took a deep breath and told a caller her price was one hundred dollars a session.

And there it stayed. She booked three appointments a day, five days a week, and pocketed fifteen hundred dollars a week for her efforts. She lost some old clients, including a few who had been coming to her out of habit, the way they went to get their hair done. But it seemed to her that the ones who stayed actually listened more intently to what she saw in the cards or crystal, or channeled while she lay in trance.

“Told you,” Claire said. “You get what you pay for.”

One afternoon therewas a call from Detective Jeffcote. There was a case, she might have heard or read about it, and could she possibly help him with it? She had appointments scheduled, she said, but she could come to the police station as soon as her last client was finished, and—

“No, I’ll come to you,” he said. “Just tell me when’s a good time.”

He turned up on the dot. His hair was very short, she noticed, and he seemed more confident and self-possessed than when she’d seen him before. In the living room, he accepted a cup of tea and told her about the girl who’d gone missing, an eleventh-grader named Peggy Mae Turlock. “There hasn’t been much publicity,” he said, “because kids her age just go off sometimes, but she’s an A student and sings in the church choir, and her parents are worried. And I just thought, well...”

She reminded him that she’d had three nights of nightmares and headaches when Melissa Sporran disappeared.

“As if the information was trying to get through,” he said. “And you haven’t had anything like that this time? Because I brought her sunglasses case, and a baseball jacket they tell me she wore all the time.”

“We can try,” she said.

She took him into her studio, lit two of the new scented candles, seated him on the chaise, and took the chair for herself. She draped Peggy Mae’s jacket over her lap and held the green vinyl eyeglass case in both hands. She closed her eyes, breathed slowly and deeply.

After a while she said, “Pieces.”

“Pieces?”

“I’m getting these horrible images,” she said, “of dismemberment, but I don’t know that it has anything to do with the girl. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“You picking up any sense of where she might be, or of who might have put her there?”

She slowed her breathing, let herself go deep, deep.

“Down down down,” she said.