“Mr. Baker,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I’m asking you to leave the premises.”
He swallowed, and something indescribably sad crossed his features. “If only you’d let me explain.”
“There’s no need.” My voice rose almost to shrillness. I wanted no part of the sadness and desperation on his face, none at all. “I’m well acquainted with the local constable. If you don’t leave, I’ll have no choice but to send for him.”
It was a bluff—the local constable thought me a hussy, when he thought of me at all—but Mr. Baker only looked ashamed. He took an expensive handkerchief from his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said, dabbing his forehead and looking away. “Good night.”
And then he was gone, without another word to me, my front door shutting on the back of his well-cut suit. I still had no idea why he’d come, what he’d wanted, or even why he’d left so quickly. I told myself the most important point was that he had gone. You’re a woman alone in this job, my mother had taught me. You must never take chances.
I sighed into the lonely quiet of my sitting room. I looked around at the narrow chintz sofa, the heavy draperies over the front window, the plum velvet curtain hanging artfully over the door to the corridor. In the middle of the room was the session table, a simple square with a flowered tablecloth and wooden chairs on opposite sides. Every piece in the room had been picked out by my mother.
“At least he paid me in advance,” I said to no one.
The room stared silently back at me. Theatrical, my mother had called the decor, yet respectable. It’s the sort of look that works best.
The Fantastique. That had been what my mother had called herself. It had made my father uneasy, and the neighbors had never approved, but séances were a very lucrative business. For as long as I had memory, there had been a small hand-painted sign in the window next to our front door, a crystal ball with striped rays emanating from it. THE FANTASTIQUE, it said. PSYCHIC MEDIUM. SPIRIT COMMUNICATION. DO YOU HAVE A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD? Everyone, it seemed, had someone dead they wanted to talk to.
“It looks a bit like a sunset,” I’d said to my mother of that painted crystal ball, when I’d been old enough to notice.
“It’s theatrical, yet respectable,” she’d replied. “It’s the sort of look that works best.”
Then my father had died in the war, and my mother and I were left alone in our little house in St. John’s Wood, my mother grieving and, eventually, sick. She had taught me everything she knew. And when she’d died four years ago, what was I to do? Her clients still needed someone. The money was good, and steady. I was beholden to no one. Now the Fantastique was me.
I had meant to get the sign changed. The Fantastique now found lost things; that was her only offering. She didn’t do séances anymore.
I left the sitting room through the velvet curtain and went up the small staircase to my bedroom on the first floor. I undid my dress—a custom creation dripping in jet-black beads that had been my mother’s—and set it carefully in the wardrobe. It was the Fantastique’s only costume. I disposed of my stockings and heels and untied the black scarf wound in my hair. I brushed out my short waves with a silver-backed brush. Then I tied a silk wrapper over my underthings and went barefoot to the kitchen, making a stop in the lav to wash the makeup from my face.
Supper was set on the table, a dome placed over it. I removed the dome and looked at a chop, a potato, and a few cooked carrots. I had a daily woman who came, cleaned, prepared a few meals, and left again, always while I was working. She didn’t mind me, and I didn’t mind her. I paid her on time, and she ensured I had a bottle of wine uncorked by supper. It worked out well enough.
I sat and ate in silence. Work always made me ravenous, if it didn’t give me headaches. I cleaned the plate of every crumb, trying not to think of Mr. Baker, of the sadness in his eyes. I wondered if I should buy a gramophone to break the silence. But no, the image of a girl alone listening to a gramophone seemed a lonely one.
After supper, I poured myself my first glass of wine for the night and took up my cigarettes. It was the first week of September, with summer just beginning to let go, and the cold and dark not yet arrived. Night had fallen when I stepped into my tiny back garden, and there was no breath of heat on the breeze, but the stars were clear, and the air that slid down the neck of my wrapper was warm enough to be soothing.
I lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match, I saw a man at the back gate.
I stilled. He stood in the lane that ran behind the row of houses, the wrought-iron fence reaching barely to his chest. He was taller than I’d first noticed when he’d been in my sitting room.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Baker.
I couldn’t see him in the darkness after the match died, but I didn’t hear him move any closer. “I can scream,” I said, my voice curiously calm. “There are neighbors in every direction.”
“I don’t mean to frighten you,” he said from his place in the dark. “Really I don’t. You needn’t scream.”
I took a drag of my cigarette, thinking. I was still close to my back door, close enough to duck inside if he came at me. I hadn’t been lying about the neighbors. I wasn’t friends with any of them, but they would at least come to investigate if I screamed. I felt horribly vulnerable in my wrapper and bare feet, the makeup scrubbed from my face. “Look,” I said. “Just leave. I don’t know how else to make this clear. I’m not selling what you’re buying.”
“Dear God, it’s nothing like that.” Even through his desperation, he sounded disgusted. “I apologize for what happened . . . in there. I was rather shocked. I hadn’t expected . . .”
“The truth? Of course you hadn’t.”
“I can explain all of it,” he said. “You’re right. The brooch was a lie. I had good reason. I had to see you for myself, see what kind of person you are. It was important.”
I sipped my wine. I still wanted nothing to do with whatever drove him, but I was a little curious despite myself. Perhaps I’d find out why a powerful man had taken the trouble to come to a paid psychic on a Tuesday night. “And did I pass?”
He made a hoarse sound that was almost a laugh; it was unpracticed, as if it was a sound he’d never made before. “You find lost things,” he said at last. “You really do.”
“It’s my specialty, yes.”
“You knew what I was thinking. Exactly what—” He seemed to cut himself off, and then he made the hoarse sound again, only this time it sounded like grief. “Ellie Winter,” he said. “You have to find my sister.”
I shook my head, a senseless weight of dread filling my stomach. “No. Oh, no. I don’t find people. I made that clear to you from the beginning. I make it clear to every customer.”
“I know. You told me.”
“No exceptions, Mr. Baker.”
“My name isn’t Baker,” he said. “It’s Sutter. George Sutter.”
There was a long beat of silence, in which I stared into the dark and hoped I was wrong and none of this was happening, not ever.