Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

She looked confusedly from me to Kildy and back. “It happened again, didn’t it?” she asked, a quaver in her voice, and turned to appeal to Kildy. “He did it again, didn’t he?” and began backing toward the door. “ Didn’t he?”

She pointed accusingly at me. “You keep away from me!” she shrieked. “And you keep away from my seminars! If you so much as try to come near me again, I’ll get a restraining order against you!” She roared out, slamming the door behind her.

“Well,” Kildy said after a minute. “That was interesting.”

“Yes,” I said, looking at the door. “Interesting.”

Kildy went over to my desk and pulled the Hasaka out from behind her handbag. “I got it all,” she said, taking out the disk, sticking it in the computer dock, and sitting down in front of the monitor. “There were a lot more clues this time.” She began typing in commands. “There should be more than enough for us to be able to figure out who it is.”

“I know who it is,” I said.

Kildy stopped in mid-keystroke. “Who?”

“The High Priest of Irreverence.”

“ Who ?”

“The Holy Terror from Baltimore, the Apostle of Common Sense, the Scourge of Con Men, Creationists, Faith Healers, and the Booboisie,” I said. “Henry Louis Mencken.”

In brief, it is a fraud .

“H. L. Mencken?” Kildy said. “The reporter who covered the Scopes trial?” (I told you she was too good to be true.)

“But why would Ariaura channel him?” she asked after we’d checked the words and phrases we’d listed against Mencken’s writings. They all checked out, from “buncombe” to “slack-jawed simians” to “home of the imbecile and the ass.”

“What did he mean about leaving Dayton early? Did something happen in Ohio?”

I shook my head. “Tennessee. Dayton, Tennessee, was where the Scopes trial was held.”

“And Mencken left early?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and went over to the bookcase to look for The Great Monkey Trial , “but I know it got so hot during the trial they moved it outside.”

“That’s what that comment about the courthouse lawn and its being forty degrees cooler meant,” Kildy said.

I nodded. “It was a hundred and five degrees and ninety percent humidity the week of the trial. It’s definitely Mencken. He invented the term ‘Boobus Americanus.’”

“But why would Ariaura channel H. L. Mencken, Rob? He hated people like her, didn’t he?”

“He certainly did.” He’d been the bane of charlatans and quacks all through the twenties, writing scathing columns on all kinds of scams, from faith healing to chiropractic to creationism, railing incessantly against all forms of “hocus-pocus” and on behalf of science and rational thought.

“Then why would she channel him?” Kildy asked. “Why not somebody sympathetic to psychics, like Edgar Cayce or Madame Blavatsky?”

“Because they’d obviously be suspect. By channeling an enemy of psychics, she makes it seem more credible.”

“But nobody’s ever heard of him.”

“You have. I have.”

“But nobody else in Ariaura’s audience has.”

“Exactly,” I said, still looking for The Great Monkey Trial .

“You mean you think she’s doing it to impress us?”

“Obviously,” I said, scanning the titles. “Why else would she have come all the way over here to give that little performance?”

“But—what about the Seattle seminar? Or the one in Berkeley?”

“Dry runs. Or she was hoping we’d hear about them and go see her. Which we did.”

“I didn’t,” Kildy said. “I went because my publicist wanted me to.”

“But you go to lots of spiritualist events, and you talk to lots of people. Your publicist was there. Even if you hadn’t gone, she’d have told you about it.”

“But what would be the point? You’re a skeptic. You don’t believe in channeling. Would she honestly think she could convince you Mencken was real?”

“Maybe,” I said. “She’s obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make the spirit sound like him. And think what a coup that would be. ‘Skeptic Says Channeled Spirit Authentic’? Have you ever heard of Uri Geller? He made a splash back in the seventies by claiming to bend spoons with his mind. He got all kinds of attention when a pair of scientists from the Stanford Research Institute said it wasn’t a trick, that he was actually doing it.”

“Was he?”

“No, of course not, and eventually he was exposed as a fraud. By Johnny Carson. Geller made the mistake of going on The Tonight Show and doing it in front of him. He’d apparently forgotten Carson had been a magician in his early days. But the point is, he made it onto The Tonight Show . And what made him a celebrity was having the endorsement of reputable scientists.”

“And if you endorsed Ariaura, if you said you thought it was really Mencken, she’d be a celebrity, too.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do we do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You’re not going to try to expose her as a fake?”

“Channeling isn’t the same as bending spoons. There’s no independently verifiable evidence.” I looked at her. “It’s not worth it, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like Charles Fred. He’s making way too much money for a medium who only charges two hundred a performance, and he has way too many hits for a cold-reader. We need to find out how he’s doing it, and where the money’s coming from.”

“But shouldn’t we at least go to Ariaura’s next seminar to see if it happens again?” Kildy persisted.

“And have to explain to the L.A. Times reporter who just happens to be there why we’re so interested in Ariaura?” I said. “And why you came back three times?”

“I suppose you’re right. But what if some other skeptic endorses her? Or some English professor?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Ariaura had dangled the bait at four seminars we knew of. She might have been doing it at more, and The Skeptical Mind was in Seattle, Carlyle Drew was in San Francisco, and there were any number of amateur skeptics who went to spiritualist events.

And they would all know who Mencken was. He was the critical thinker’s favorite person, next to the Amazing Randi and Houdini. He’d not only been fearless in his attacks on superstition and fraud, he could write “like a bat out of hell.” And, unlike the rest of us skeptics, people had actually listened to what he said.

I’d liked him ever since I’d read about him chatting with somebody in his office at the Baltimore Sun and then suddenly looking out the window, saying, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us!” and frantically beginning to type. That was how I felt about twice a day, and more than once I’d muttered to myself, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?”

And I’d be willing to bet there were other people who felt the same way I did, who might be seduced by Mencken’s language and the fact that Ariaura was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.

“You’re right,” I said. “We need to look into this, but we should send somebody else to the seminar.”

“How about my publicist? She said she wanted to go again.”

“No, I don’t want it to be anybody connected with us.”

“I know just the person,” Kildy said, snatching up her cell phone. “Her name’s Riata Starr. She’s an actress.”

With a name like that, what else could she be?

“She’s between jobs right now,” Kildy said, punching in a number, “and if I tell her there’s likely to be a casting director there, she’ll definitely do it for us.”