Eileen Wilks: Death Magic

It was all very egalitarian. Lily ate ribs and potato salad with Rule, a seventh-grade teacher, another Unit agent, the head of a small seminary, Ruben’s secretary, and the director of the Census Bureau.

The director and the teacher turned out to be interesting people, even if they were wrongheaded about key issues. Like baseball. After dessert, the three of them lingered at the table, arguing about instant replay.

“Lily Yu!” boomed out behind her. “It’s been too long!”

Lily turned. A man with Einstein hair, Ben Franklin glasses, and guileless brown eyes snared in a nest of wrinkles beneath bushy brows was beaming at her. He wore baggy shorts and Birkenstocks. A Hawaiian print shirt covered the decided paunch around his middle. “Dr. Fagin!”

“Fagin, my dear, simply Fagin, unless you wish to adopt Sherry’s habit and call me Xavier. Otherwise I’ll look like a patronizing ass when I call you Lily.”

She grinned, swung her legs over the bench and stood. “Annette, Carl,” she said to her fellow debaters, “do you know Dr. Xavier Fagin? He consults here sometimes, but he’s at Harvard—”

“Ah, but I’m retired now. I moved to D.C. last month.”

“I didn’t know that. It’s quite a change for you.”

“Life is change, after all.” He smiled his vague, dotty-old-professor smile, a gentle benediction meant to baffle all inquiries.

Lily took the hint and dropped the subject. “Fagin, this is Annette Broderick and Carl Rogers.”

“I know Annette.” Fagin turned that gentle smile on the Census director. “Delighted to see you again, my dear. And you’re Carl? Good to meet you. I’m afraid I’ve come to rudely steal Lily away. A research matter.”

Lily snorted. “Research, my—”

“A matter of personal research, we might say. Lily, I’m having a terrible time resisting the urge to tuck your hand in my arm and drag you delicately away. Men my age are allowed to get away with that sort of behavior. It’s one of the few charms about growing old. But in your case—”

“Not a good idea.”

Dr. Xavier Fagin—BA, MA, MFA, PhD, and for all she knew, DDT, LOL, and RAM as well—was one of the leading authorities on Pre-Purge magical history. He’d headed the Presidential Task Force that dealt with the aftermath of the Turning, which is how Lily knew him. He was also the only other touch sensitive she’d ever met. They’d discovered the hard way that it was best not to shake hands.

“Alas, it is not, so I must rely on curiosity to lure you away, rather than tolerance for an old man’s peculiarities. You’ve seen a ghost.”

Carl wanted to know all about it. Annette said that her cousin Sondra had a touch of a mediumistic Gift, so she saw ghosts occasionally. She hadn’t realized Lily possessed that Gift, too.

“I don’t,” Lily said, “which is why it’s so puzzling.”

“And so,” Fagin said to the other two, “I wish to ask Lily one or two terribly personal questions, which she will doubtless be inclined to brush off, but I believe if I can get her to myself for a few minutes, I can coax answers from her.” He waggled bushy eyebrows at Lily. “I have a theory.”

Lily allowed herself to be lured. She and Dr. Fagin meandered toward the tubs of beer and soft drinks set out on the deck. “You’ve been talking to Rule.”

“I have. I’ve also been collecting data on non-mediums who see or profess to see ghosts.”

Her own eyebrows went up. “It really is research.”

He waved that away. “A personal interest. I doubt there’s a paper in it. Too much of the data is anecdotal.”

“Why are you personally interested in who sees ghosts?”

He heaved a windy sigh. “I suppose it’s only fair to answer that, since I did promise to ask intrusive questions myself. Fifteen years ago, I saw my mother’s ghost.”

“Oh.” They’d reached the tubs of drinks. Lily pulled out a Diet Coke and popped it open. “You’re not a medium, so it must have been one of those intimate connection deals. I’m told that happens sometimes.”

“She wasn’t dead.”

The can halted halfway to Lily’s lips. Belatedly she took a sip. “Then would it be . . . I don’t know. Astral travel, maybe? Was she Gifted?”

“No. I saw her ghost at five minutes after midnight—terribly appropriate time, isn’t it?—and she died at 12:49 A.M.”

That was a new twist.

“Of some interest,” he went on, “is that she was in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. She’d been at a nursing home in Cambridge for ten years, and hadn’t spoken at all for the last year. That night I was here in Washington to speak with, um, a member of that administration, and I was sound asleep in my hotel room. I woke suddenly with the sense that someone was bending over me . . . and she was. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown and robe I remember from when I was small, and she smelled of White Shoulders. My father gave her White Shoulders every year at Christmas, and she wore the scent every day until he died. Never again after that. Her hair was brown and curly. She’d worn glasses for the last forty years of her life. They were gone. So were all the other accoutrements of aging . . . she tucked me in,” he finished simply. “Gave me a kiss and smiled, then she was gone. I looked around and saw the clock. It changed to 12:06 at that moment.”

“Wow.”

“The scent of White Shoulders lingered for several minutes.”

“That’s incredible. It must have been . . .” Lily shook her head, unable to say what the experience had been like, other than powerful. “Did she physically tuck you in? Actually move the covers, I mean. Did you feel the kiss?”

“No and no. Her actions did not affect the physical world.”

“But you smelled her favorite scent.” Scent was physical, but scent memories could be triggered in the brain, so that didn’t prove that she’d been physically present. “You mentioned the color of her hair and her nightgown. Did she look solid?”

“Almost.” His voice turned dreamy. “She was unusually vivid, but not quite solid, no. I knew she was a ghost right away.”

“And you’re certain about the times.”

“As I said, I saw the clock click over. As soon as she vanished, I called the nursing home and insisted that they check on her. They discovered her in respiratory distress, but still alive by all the measures we use to determine life. Medical personnel were in attendance from that point on. At 12:49, heartbeat and respiration ceased.”

“A ghost that appears before death. I’ve never heard of that.” She considered it. “Is such a visitor really a ghost? A woman I know—a highly Gifted medium—would probably say it depends on how we define ghost .”

“Exactly.” He broke into a smile like the merry gamin he must have been back when a woman in a pale blue nightgown and robe tucked him in routinely. “It started me on my little hobby of collecting ghost stories. At first I looked for those like mine—and I found a few—but I grew interested in the question of how and why some people without a mediumistic Gift see ghosts. You’re wearing agate.”

She blinked. “I am?”

“Your necklace. The white stones are agates. Were you wearing it when you saw your ghost?”

“It’s not my ghost.” Lily was already sick of that phrase. “And no, I wasn’t.”

“You donned it to protect you from the ghost?”

“I donned it because Rule gave it to me. This evening. Just before we came here.”

He chuckled. “Perhaps I’m confusing causality with coincidence. White agate is said to enhance dreams and concentration. Because of its connection to the crown chakra, some consider it a way of enhancing spiritual communication, while others wear it for protection from malign or confused spiritual influences. Ghosts, in other words.”