Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

…this is the last time you’ll see me…

“It still doesn’t prove it was Mencken,” I told Kildy. “The whole thing could have been a manifestation of Ariaura’s—excuse me, Bonnie Friehl’s—subconscious, produced by her guilt.”

“ Or ,” Kildy said, “there could have been a scam just like the one you postulated, only one of the swindlers fell in love with you and decided she couldn’t go through with it.”

“Nope, that won’t work,” I said. “She might have been able to talk Ariaura into calling off the scam, but not into confessing all those crimes.”

“If she really committed them,” Kildy said. “We don’t have any independently verifiable evidence that she is Bonnie Friehl yet.”

But the fingerprints on her Ohio driver’s license matched, and every single lead she’d given us checked out.

We spent the next two months following up on all of them and putting together a massive special issue on “The Great Channeling Swindle.” It looked like we were going to have to testify at Ariaura’s preliminary hearing, which could have proved awkward, but she and her lawyers got in a big fight over whether or not to use an insanity defense, since she was claiming she’d been possessed by the Spirit of Evil and Darkness, and she ended up firing them and turning state’s evidence against Charles Fred, Joye Wildde, and several other psychics she hadn’t gotten around to mentioning, and it began to look like the magazine might fold because there weren’t any scams left to write about.

Fat chance. Within weeks, new mediums and psychics, advertising themselves as “Restorers of Cosmic Ethics” and “the spirit entity you can trust,” moved in to fill the void, and a new weight-loss-through-meditation program began packing them in, promising Low-Carb Essence, and Kildy and I were back in business.

“He didn’t make any difference at all,” Kildy said disgustedly after a standing-room-only seminar on psychic Botox treatments.

“Yeah, he did,” I said. “Charles Fred’s up on insider trading charges, attendance is down at the Temple of Cosmic Exploration, and half of L.A.’s psychics are on the lam. And it’ll take everybody a while to come up with new methods for separating people from their money.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t Mencken.”

“I said it didn’t prove it was Mencken. Rule Number One: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“And you don’t think what happened on that stage was extraordinary?”

I had to admit it was. “But it could have been Ariaura herself. She didn’t say anything she couldn’t have known.”

“What about her telling us the combination of her safe? And ordering everybody to subscribe to The Jaundiced Eye ?”

“It still doesn’t prove it was Mencken. It could have been some sort of Bridey Murphy phenomenon. Ariaura could have had a babysitter who read the Baltimore Sun out loud to her when she was a toddler.”

Kildy laughed. “You don’t believe that.”

“I don’t believe anything without proof,” I said. “I’m a skeptic, remember? And there’s nothing that happened on that stage that couldn’t be explained rationally.”

“Exactly,” Kildy said.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“By their fruits shall ye know them.”

“What?”

“I mean it has to have been Mencken because he did exactly what we asked him to do: Prove it wasn’t a scam and he wasn’t a fake and Ariaura was. And do it without proving he was Mencken because if he did, then that proved she was on the level. Which proves it was Mencken.”

There was no good answer to that kind of crazy illogic except to change the subject, which I did. I kissed her.

And then sent the transcripts of Ariaura’s outbursts to UCLA to have the language patterns compared to Mencken’s writing. Independently verifiable evidence. And got the taped The Baby in the Icebox out of its hiding place down behind the bookcase while Kildy was out of the office, took it home, wrapped it in tinfoil, stuck it inside an empty Lean Cuisine box, and hid it—where else?—in the icebox. Old habits die hard.

UCLA sent the transcripts back, saying it wasn’t a big enough sample for a conclusive result. So did Caltech. And Duke. So that was that. Which was too bad. It would have been nice to have Mencken back in the fray, even for a little while. He had definitely left too soon.

So Kildy and I would have to pick up where he left off, which meant not only putting “The sons of bitches are gaining on us” on the masthead of The Jaundiced Eye , but trying to channel his spirit into every page.

And that didn’t just mean exposing shysters and con men. Mencken hadn’t been the important force he was because of his rants against creationism and faith healers and patent medicine, but because of what he’d stood for: the truth. That’s why he’d hated ignorance and superstition and dishonesty so much, because he loved science and reason and logic, and he’d communicated that love, that passion, to his readers with every word he wrote.

That was what we had to do with The Jaundiced Eye . It wasn’t enough just to expose Ariaura and Swami Vishnu and psychic dentists and meditation Atkins diets. We also had to make our readers as passionate about science and reason as they were about Romtha and luminescence readings. We had to not only tell the truth, but make our readers want to believe it.

So, as I say, we were pretty busy for the next few months, revamping the magazine, cooperating with the police, and following up on all the leads Ariaura had given us. We went to Vegas to research the chain-letter scam she and Chuck Venture / Charles Fred had run, after which I came home to put the magazine to bed and Kildy went to Dayton and then to Chickamauga to follow up on Ariaura’s criminal history.

She called last night. “It’s me, Rob,” she said, sounding excited. “I’m in Chattanooga.”

“Chattanooga, Tennessee ?” I said. “What are you doing there?”

“The prosecutor working on the pyramid scheme case is on a trip to Roanoke, so I can’t see him till Monday, and the school board in Zion—that’s a little town near here—is trying to pass a law requiring intelligent design to be taught in the public schools. This Zion thing’s part of a nationwide program that’s going to introduce intelligent design state by state. So, anyway, since I couldn’t see the prosecutor, I thought I’d drive over—it’s only about fifty miles from Chickamauga—and interview some of the science teachers for that piece on ‘The Scopes Trial Eighty Years Out’ you were talking about doing.”

“And?” I said warily.

“ And , according to the chemistry teacher, something peculiar happened at the school board meeting. It might be nothing, but I thought I’d better call so you could be looking up flights to Chattanooga, just in case.”

Just in case.

“One of the school board members, a Mr.—” she paused as if consulting her notes, “Horace Didlong, was talking about the lack of scientific proof for Darwin’s theory, when he suddenly started ranting at the crowd.”

“Did the chemistry teacher say what he said?” I asked, hoping I didn’t already know.

“She couldn’t remember all of it,” Kildy said, “but the basketball coach said some of the students had said they intended to tape the meeting and send it to the ACLU, and he’d try to find out if they did and get me a copy. He said it was ‘a very odd outburst, almost like he was possessed.’”

“Or drunk,” I said. “And neither of them remembers what he said?”

“No, they both do, just not everything. Didlong apparently went on for several minutes. He said he couldn’t believe there were still addlepated ignoramuses around who didn’t believe in evolution, and what the hell had they been teaching in the schools all this time. The chemistry teacher said the rant went on like that for about five minutes and then broke off, right in the middle of a word, and Didlong went back to talking about Newton’s Second Law making evolution physically impossible.”