Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

Well, whatever it was that had gotten Kildy interested in her, I’d find out on Saturday. In the meantime, I had an article on Charles Fred to write for the December issue, a book on intelligent design (the latest ploy for getting creationism into the schools and evolution out) to review, and a past-life chiropractor to go see. He claimed his patients’ backaches came from hauling blocks of stone to Stonehenge and/or the Pyramids. (The Pyramids had in fact been a big job, but over the course of three years in business he’d told over two thousand patients they’d gotten their herniated discs at Stonehenge, every single one of them while setting the altar stone in place.)

And he was actually credible compared to Charles Fred, who was having amazing success communicating highly specific messages from the dead to their grieving relatives. I was convinced he was using something besides the usual cold reading and shills to get the millions he was raking in, but so far I hadn’t been able to figure out what, and every lead I managed to come up with went nowhere.

I didn’t think about the “electric, amazing Isus” again till I was driving over to the Hilton on Saturday. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from Kildy since her phone call. Usually she drops by the office every day, and if we’re going somewhere calls three or four times to reconfirm where and when we’re meeting. I wondered if the seminar was still on, or if she’d forgotten all about it. Or suddenly gotten tired of being a debunker and gone back to being a movie star.

I’d been waiting for that to happen ever since the day just over eight months ago when, just like the gorgeous dame in a Bogie movie, she’d walked into my office and asked if she could have a job.

There are three cardinal rules in the skeptic business. The first one is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and the second one is “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” And if anything was ever too good to be true, it’s Kildy. She’s not only rich and movie-star beautiful, but intelligent, and, unlike everyone else in Hollywood, a complete skeptic, even though, as she told me the first day, Shirley MacLaine had dandled her on her knee and her own mother would believe anything, “no matter how ridiculous, which is probably why her marriage to my father lasted nearly six years.”

She was now on Stepmother Number Four, who had gotten her the role in the surprise top grosser, “which made almost as much money as Lord of the Rings and enabled me to take early retirement.”

“Retirement?” I’d said. “Why would you want to retire? You could have—”

“Starred in The Hulk IV ,” she said, “and been on the cover of the Globe with Ben Affleck. Or with my lawyer in front of a rehab center. I know, it was tough to give all that up.”

She had a point, but that didn’t explain why she’d want to go to work for a barely-making-it magazine like The Jaundiced Eye . Or why she’d want to go to work at all.

I said so.

“I’ve already tried the whole ‘fill your day with massages and lunch at Ardani’s and sex with your trainer’ scene, Rob,” she said. “It was even worse than The Hulk . Plus, the lights and makeup destroy your complexion.”

I found that hard to believe. She had skin like honey.

“And then my mother took me to this luminescence reading, she’s into all those things, psychics and past-life regression and intuitive healing, and the guy doing the reading—”

“Lucius Windfire,” I’d said. I’d been working on an exposé of him for the last two months.

“Yes, Lucius Windfire,” she’d said. “He claimed he could read your mind by determining your vedic fault lines, which consisted of setting candles all around you and ‘reading’ the wavering of the flames. It was obvious he was a fake—you could see the earpiece he was getting his information about the audience over—but everybody there was eating it up, especially my mother. He’d already talked her into private sessions that set her back ten thousand dollars. And I thought, Somebody should put him out of business, and then I thought, That’s what I want to do with my life, and I looked up ‘debunkers’ online and found your magazine, and here I am.”

I’d said, “I can’t possibly pay you the kind of money you’re—”

“Your going rate for articles is fine,” she’d said and flashed me her better-than-Julia-Roberts smile. “I just want the chance to do something useful and sensible with my life.”

And for the last eight months she’d been working with me on the magazine. She was wonderful—she knew everybody in Hollywood, which meant she could get us into invitation-only stuff, and heard about new spiritual fads even before I did. She was also willing to do anything, from letting herself be hypnotized to stealing chicken guts from psychic surgeons to proofreading galleys. And fun to talk to, and gorgeous, and much too good for a small-time skeptic.

And I knew it was just a matter of time before she got bored with debunking—and me—and went back to going to premieres and driving around in her Jaguar, but she didn’t. “Have you ever worked with Ben Affleck?” she’d said when I told her she was too beautiful not to still be in the movies. “You couldn’t pay me to go back to that.”

She wasn’t in the parking lot, and neither was her Jaguar, and I wondered, as I did every day, if this was the day she’d decided to call it quits. No, there she was, getting out of a taxi. She was wearing a honey-colored pantsuit the same shade as her hair, and designer sunglasses, and she looked, as always, too good to be true. She saw me and waved, and then reached back into the taxi for two big throw pillows.

Shit. That meant we were going to have to sit on the floor again. These people made a fortune scamming people out of their not-so-hard-earned cash. You’d think they could afford chairs.

I walked over to her. “I take it we’re going in together,” I said, since the pillows were a matching pair, purple brocade jobs with tassels at the corners.

“Yes,” Kildy said. “Did you bring the Sony?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I still think I should have brought the Hasaka.”

She shook her head. “They’re doing body checks. I don’t want to give them an excuse to throw us out. When they fill out the nametags, give them your real name.”

“We’re not using a cover?” I asked. Psychics often use skeptics in the audience as an excuse for failure: The negative vibrations made it impossible to contact the spirits, etc. A couple of them had even banned me from their performances, claiming I disturbed the cosmos with my nonbelieving presence. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“We don’t have any choice,” she said. “When I came last week, I was with my publicist, so I had to use my own name, and I didn’t think it mattered—we never do channelers. Besides, the ushers recognized me. So our cover is, I was so impressed with Ariaura that I talked you into coming to see her.”

“Which is pretty much the truth,” I said. “What exactly is her gimmick, that you thought I should see her?”

“I don’t want to prejudice you beforehand.” She glanced at her Vera Wang watch and handed me one of the pillows. “Let’s go.”

We went into the lobby and over to a table under a lilac-and-silver banner proclaiming PRESENTING ARIAURA AND THE WISDOM OF ISUS and under it, BELIEVE AND IT WILL HAPPEN. Kildy told the woman at the table our names.

“Oh, I loved you in that movie, Miss Ross,” she said and handed us lilac-and-silver nametags and motioned us toward another table next to the door, where a Russell Crowe type in a lilac polo shirt was doing security checks.