Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

Half an hour later Kildy showed up smiling, beautiful, full of news. “Ariaura’s canceled all the private sessions she scheduled and the rest of her tour.”

She leaned over my shoulder to look at what I was doing. “Did you come up with a foolproof question for Mencken?”

“No,” I said, sliding The Baby in the Icebox under a file folder and sticking them both in a drawer. “I came up with a theory about what’s going on, though.”

“Really?” she said.

“Really. You know, one of my big problems all along has been Ariaura. She’s just not smart enough to have come up with all this—the ‘aught-four’ thing, the not being able to read, the going to see a psychiatrist. Which either meant she was actually channeling Mencken, or there was some other factor. And I think I’ve got it figured out.”

“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.

What I need is a miracle.

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.”