F. Paul Wilson - Haunted Air

"Got her wallet here," said Charlie's voice in his earpiece. Obviously he'd made it back to his command center with the pocketbook. "Picture of her and some fat guy-I mean, I could be looking at the Notorious B.I.G. here-but no kid pics."

Lyle said, "I'm looking for children but..."

He left a blank space, hoping she'd fill it in. As with most sitters, she didn't disappoint.

"We didn't have any. Lord knows we tried but..." She sighed. "It never happened."

"Not much else goin' down here," Charlie said. "Keys, a lipstick, hey-beat this: a harmonica. Bet it ain't hers. Good shot it's her old man's. I'll get the bag back lickity."

While waiting, Lyle made a few remarks about Clarence's weight problems to bolster further his psychic credibility. The picture he'd formed of Clarence was that of a frustrated, money-squeezed, bad-tempered drinker. An answer to a dead-or-alive question on a guy like that had to lean toward dead. He might have got himself involved in some quick-buck scheme that went wrong, leaving him food for the worms or the fish.

Lyle felt a tap on his leg: Charlie had returned the bag.

Lyle cleared his throat. "Why am I hearing music? It sounds reedy. Could it be a harmonica?"

"Yes! Clarence loved to play the harmonica. People told him he was terrible." Melba smiled. "And he was. He was just awful. But that never stopped him from trying."

"Why do I sense his harmonica nearby?"

She gasped. "I brought one with me! How could you know?"

Preferring to let her provide her own answer to that, Lyle said, "It might facilitate contact if I can touch an object that belongs to the one we seek."

"It's in my handbag." Melba glanced at her hands where they rested on the stones, then back at Lyle. "Do you think I could...?"

"Yes, but one hand only, please."

"We gonna take this poor lady's money, bro?" Charlie asked in his ear. "She ain't exactly our usual breed of fish."

Lyle couldn't give him an answer, but the same hesitancy had been nibbling at him throughout the sitting.

He watched Melba free her right hand, pull her handbag up to ker lap, and fish out a scratched and dented harmonica with "Hohner Special 20 Marine Band" embossed along the top.

"This was his favorite," she said, pushing it across the table.

Lyle reached toward it, then stopped as warning alarms rang through his nerve ends. Why? Why shouldn't he touch the harmonica?

After a few awkward seconds, with Melba's expression moving toward a puzzled frown, Lyle set his jaw and took hold of the harmonica-

-and cried out as the room did a sudden turn and then disappeared and he was standing in another room, a suite in the Bellagio in Vegas, watching a fat man he knew to be Clarence Toomey snore beside a blonde Lyle knew to be a hooker he'd hired for the night. He knew everything-the half-million-dollar lottery prize Clarence had won and kept secret from his wife until he'd collected the money, how he'd left home and never looked back.

Melba's cry from somewhere in front of him: "What's wrong?"

Charlie in his ear: "Lyle! What's happenin'?"

The feel of the harmonica in his hands... uncoiling his fingers one by one until...

The harmonica dropped onto the table and abruptly Lyle was back in the Channeling Room, looking at Melba who faced him with wide eyes and her hands pressed against her mouth.

"Lyle! Answer me! Are you all right?"

"I'm okay," Lyle said, for Melba's sake as well as his brother's.

But he was anything but okay.

What had just happened? Was it real? Had he truly been looking at Clarence Toomey or imagining it? It had seemed so real, and yet... it couldn't be.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He didn't know what to make of it.

"Ifasen?" Melba said. "What happened? Did you see anything? Did you see my Clarence?"

What could he say? Even if he were sure it was true-and he wasn't, not at all-how do you tell a woman that her husband is bedded down in Vegas with a hooker?

"I'm not sure what I saw," Lyle said. Couldn't get much truer than that. He pushed back from the table. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut short our session. I... I don't feel well." No lie. He felt like hell.

"No, please," Melba said.

"I'm sorry. I will refund your money."

"Mah man!" Charlie said in his ear.

"I don't care about the money," Melba said. "I want my Clarence. How will I find him?"

"The lottery," Lyle said.

She looked at him. "The lottery? I don't understand."

"Neither do I, but that was the message that came through the clearest. Check with the New York State Lottery. Ask them about Clarence. That's all I can tell you."

If she did that, and if Lyle's vision had been real-a big if-she'd learn about Clarence's big win. She could hire someone to track him down, maybe get a piece of whatever was left.

She wanted to find her husband, but success was going to bring her only a load of hurt.

Charlie appeared, looking at him strangely. He had to be bursting with a million questions, but couldn't ask them while Melba was here.

Lyle said, "Kehinde will show you out and return your money. And remember what I told you: Check with the lottery. Do it today."

Melba's expression was troubled. "I don't understand any of this, but at least you tried to help. That's more than the police have done." She held out her hand. "Thank you."

Lyle gripped her hand and stifled a gasp as a whirlwind of sensations blew through him-a brief period of anger, then sadness, then loneliness, all dragging along for a year and a half, maybe more, but certainly less than two, and then darkness-hungry darkness that gobbled up Melba and everything around her.

He dropped her hand quickly, as if he'd received a shock. Was that Melba's future? Was that all she had left? Less than two years?

"Good-bye," he said and backed away.

Charlie led her toward the waiting room, giving Lyle an odd look over his shoulder.

"Ifasen is not himself today," he told Melba.

Damn right he's not himself, Lyle thought as uneasiness did a slow crawl down his spine. But who the hell is he?

4

Jack will kill me when he finds out.

Gia stood before the flaking apartment door and hesitated. Against all her better judgment she'd gone back to the abductedchild.org web site and called the family number listed on Tara Portman's page. She'd asked the man who answered if he was related to Tara Portman-he said he was her father-and told him that she was a writer who did freelance work for a number of newspapers. She was planning a series of articles about children who had been missing more than ten years and could he spare a few moments to speak to her?

His answer had been a laconic, Sure, why not? He told her she could stop by any time because he was almost always in.

So now she was standing in the hot, third-floor hallway of a rundown apartment building in the far-West Forties and afraid to take the next step. She'd dressed in a trim, businessy blue suit, the one she usually wore to meetings with art directors, and carried a pad and a tape recorder in her shoulder bag.

She wished she'd asked about Mrs. Portman-was she alive, were they still married, would she be home?

The fact that Tara had written "Mother" with no mention of her father might be significant; might say something about her relationship with her father; might even mean, as Jack had suggested, that he was involved in her disappearance.

But the fact remained that the ghost of Tara Portman had appeared to Gia and Gia alone, and that fact buzzed through her brain like a trapped wasp. She'd have no peace until she learned what Tara Portman wanted. That seemed to center on the mother she'd mentioned.

"Well, I've come this far," she muttered. "Can't stop now."

She knocked on the door. It was opened a moment later by a man in his mid-forties. Tara's blue eyes looked out from his jowly, unshaven face; his heavy frame was squeezed into a dingy T-shirt with yellowed armpits and coffee stains down the front, cut-off shorts, and no shoes. His longish dark blond hair stuck out in all directions.