Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Grayle thought this was a tad unfair. She’d called her father at Harvard, and he’d called up a friend at Oxford University about Professor Falconer and ascertained that, outside of television, the man was a respected academic with his name on about seventeen books.

‘Just he has the popular touch. Nice-looking, charming, dates actresses … like that.’

‘Uh-oh,’ said Lyndon.

‘This makes him a shyster, necessarily?’

‘Well, no. It just don’t win him instant sympathy from fat old guys such as myself. So your sister is — what?’

‘ Not one of your gullible rich folk. Ersula was on the staff for the summer. One of the expert research team. They had several archaeology graduates helping organize the field trips and stuff like that. Of course, they weren’t paying her anything either, apart from expenses and accommodation, but she-’

‘-was allowed to be part of the Great Experiment, too,’ Lyndon said with a wry, fatcat smile. ‘Educated people can be soooooo naive.’

‘Nnn-nn.’ Grayle shook her head. ‘This woman is a believer in neither God nor spaceships. A sober, bookish person. Her father’s daughter, you know?’

Five weeks ago, their mother, folding Ersula’s last letter from England, had said lightly, ‘Well … she’s getting into some stimulating areas. She’s having fun. In her own way. I guess.’

It was true that Ersula’s official letter to Mom had been mostly about what fun she was having and how hospitable and kind the Brits were, not stiff and stuffy like you were led to expect. Her letter to their father, although more academically oriented, would likewise include nothing pertaining to nights spent under prehistoric stone monuments.

That Ersula’s letter to Grayle was more revealing came as no big surprise. Since Mom went off with the younger lover and Dad locked himself in his Harvard tower, they’d become warily closer for the first time in years. The letter began, You may be interested in some of this, but for Christ’s sake, DSF!

DSF: Don’t Show the Folks.

Ersula’s last letter. Before the silence.

‘Run this past me one more time,’ Lyndon said. ‘Your younger but normally more balanced sister has been sleeping in a Stone Age burial chamber. She lose her credit cards, or what?’

‘If you aren’t going to take this seriously-’

‘Jesus,’ said Lyndon, whose job at the New York Courier was all about knowing which stories to take seriously. The waitress arrived with the doughnuts and they helped themselves. The waitress stepped back, studying Grayle. She was a new waitress.

‘No, see, the problem with Ersula …’ Grayle inspected her doughnut then shrugged and took a bite. ‘Balanced? Yeah, OK, in some ways. But also passionate. More than that, obsessive. She gets into something, it’s like … whooosh.’

‘Unlike you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said heavily.

‘Unlike me. Like, Ersula would not eat this doughnut. She doesn’t do comfort-eating. Ersula is very controlled. Has concentration. Focus. All of that.’

‘Dear God,’ said Lyndon. ‘We hired the wrong sister.’

‘Also, as a committed academic, Ersula vaguely despises the inevitable superficiality of journalism.’

Lyndon McAffrey nodded moodily. Twenty-five years ago, he’d become the paper’s first black deputy city editor. Since then there’d been three black city editors and Lyndon … well, he was still number two. He knew all about being vaguely despised.

‘Hey!’ The waitress suddenly screamed. ‘You are! I saw you on TV. You’re Grayle Underhill? Holy Grayle? For Crissakes, this is incredible, this is fate . I was gonna write to you. I need your help.’

The waitress pulled out a chair, flopped into it.

‘See, my boyfriend, who most times is this real sweet guy, every few weeks he comes on kind of mean, and I noticed — this is true, I swear on my mother’s grave — he has to shave twice … three times a day?’

Lyndon looked down at his plate, closed lips strained by an uh-huh kind of smile.

‘Time of the full moon, huh?’ Grayle said without enthusiasm.

‘See, I tell this to people,’ the waitress said, ‘and they’re like … oh, sure . Then I’m reading that thing you wrote about how men, they all have this werewolf element to a degree, and I’m going, Right, shit, yes, this is the woman I have to talk with . And now here you are. You tell me this isn’t, like, karma or something …?’

Grayle said, ‘Listen, uh …’

‘Marcia.’

‘Marcia. Right. OK. The piece I wrote, Marcia, that was like an interview with the author of this book, The Lycanthropic Virus , which examines the effect of the full moon on society and blah, blah, blah. So if you have a problem in this area, the person you need to, uh, approach is the author, D. Harvey Baumer. Maybe if you wrote him through the publisher?’

‘That would take forever,’ Marcia said dubiously. ‘See, the way you wrote the article, it was like you really had a handle on the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, that’s … that’s part of the job, Marcia. Look, all I can suggest is maybe if I was to do an article on your situation.’ Grayle pulled a pen from her bag. ‘So your second name is …?’

‘Uh-uh …’ Marcia was up on her feet and back behind the counter in a couple of seconds. ‘I don’t think so. I think I misunderstood. I mean, you sound like some kind of journalist …’

Lyndon started to chuckle, dusting sugar crystals from his big hands.

‘This is not funny,’ Grayle told him when Marcia, mercifully, had gone to wait on another table. ‘I get this all the time. You write a New Age column, people think you must be a person of, like, higher dimensions.’

‘You write a crime column, they think you’re a sleazeball with Mob connections,’ Lyndon said unsympathetically. ‘What’s your problem?’

‘This is different. This is about spirituality. How do I know I’m not messing up someone’s immortal soul? How do I know how much of what I’m publicizing is true or at least well intentioned and life-enhancing? Crime, you know who the bad guys are, New Age, you can never be quite sure.’

Grayle licked raspberry jam from her fingers. Nearly thirty years separated her and Lyndon, a sweet tooth glued them together. Journalism could be a hostile world, especially when most of your colleagues thought everything you wrote about was a piece of crap.

‘Ersula thinks I just peck around things, like a chicken.’

‘She thinks that, huh?’ Lyndon’s eyes widened. ‘Imagine.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Screw you too. Maybe she’s right. Back when I was in college and she was still in school we were both heavily into New Age. Like, we’d talk about cosmic consciousness and read the Tarot and stuff in my room and have a lot of innocent fun. I should’ve realized that Ersula, even then, she only had serious fun. She would throw herself into something and then emerge the other side, dismissing it all as bullshit. When she was fourteen or fifteen and I was at college I found she’d been, you know … initiated? As a witch?’

‘Eye of newt?’ Lyndon was unfazed. ‘Toe of frog?’

‘As I recall, they were known as the Hermetic Sisterhood of Central Park West. I didn’t look too closely at her altar. I think it was just candles and pentagrams, but she made sure and piled it all in the trash before the folks got home from vacation. It was OK; by then she’d concluded this was all phoney shit anyway. You wanted to get into the real, authentic stuff, you checked out True Ethnic Sources. It was a short hop from there to anthropology and related studies … and to despising her sister, her sister’s crystals, her sister’s amulets … OK, go ahead, read the letter …’