I took my seat and eyed the crystal ball skeptically. “You’ve seriously got to be kidding me,” I mumbled as I thought about how goofy this whole thing was.
After a bit, Angelica took the seat next to me, but she avoided eye contact and seemed a bit stiff, so I didn’t try to engage her. Instead I occupied myself with watching the crew at work as they looked through their cameras and monitored the lighting next to both Angelica and me. Some guy carrying a long pole with a furry-looking microphone on the end of it edged over to an X at the corner of the square mat put down for our little stage, and then someone with a clapboard walked in front of one of the cameras and held it up before he said, “Haunted Possessions , Angelica and M.J. Take one.” Then he clapped it closed and we looked at our “host,” a guy I hadn’t met yet who introduced himself to the camera.
“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Matt Duval, and this is Haunted Possessions. Tonight we’re going to be looking into the lives of several everyday people who swear they own objects that are possessed by unseen forces. These folks have come to us for help, and we’ve acquired a top-notch team of psychics to determine whether these objects are in fact haunted, and if they are, what to do about it.”
Matt then turned to Angelica and me. “Our psychic panel is made up of four psychics: M. J. Holliday from Massachusetts, Angelica Demarche of California, Heath Whitefeather of New Mexico, and Bernard Higgins, also of California.”
As the camera passed over me I felt the urge to nod and smile, but internally I was feeling a bit like a fool. I think it was Matt’s melodramatic voice as he narrated. This all just seemed silly to me.
After we’d each been introduced, Gopher yelled, “Cut,” and we were divided into our groups, with Angelica and me at the table and Heath and Bernard watching off to the side. I caught Steven’s eye as he stood out of the way at the back of the room, and smiled as he held up his thumb, giving me some encouragement.
After we’d taken our seats a woman holding a beautiful china bowl came into the room, and the crystal ball in the middle of the table was removed to make room for the bowl placed in the center. She smiled shyly at us, and I reached a hand across the table and said, “Hi, I’m M.J.”
“Patty,” she said, shaking my hand.
Patty turned and offered her hand to Angelica, but Madam Hateful simply scowled and said, “I do not want to interact with you before they begin shooting again.”
Patty blushed and I rolled my eyes, irritated that I’d been paired with such an impolite bitch. One of the lighting guys held up a little meter next to Patty, then next to the bowl, made a slight adjustment, and gave a nod of approval before clearing out of the way. Matt came back to stand on his X, and the guy with the clapboard did his thing; then Matt introduced the scene.
“Patty Murphy from Ojai, California, has had this bowl in her family for four generations. Recently she noticed that the bowl was acting suspiciously; she claims to have witnessed it moving on its own. She suspects that it may be haunted, so let’s check with our experts, M.J. and Angelica. Ladies, please give us your impressions.”
Matt moved out of the way, and the cameraman closest to us moved in for a tighter shot. No one had really given us any instructions, so I focused on the bowl, letting my energy wrap around it to see what might be causing these strange occurrences. I got nothing from the bowl, but when I focused on the woman across the table, I noticed immediately that there was an energy standing right next to Patty and, for lack of a better word, hugging her fiercely. “I’m so sorry about your mother,” I said to her as I realized in a quick flash who was standing next to Patty.
Patty gasped, and her eyes opened wide before filling with moisture. She was clearly too stunned to respond, so I added, “She’s showing me an L, like Lynn.”
“Her name was Linda,” Patty confirmed.
I smiled in encouragement. “Was it cancer?” I asked gently, feeling that familiar nauseated feeling I always get when a spirit energy tells me he or she had cancer.
“Of the pancreas,” she said, letting a tear drop. “She was diagnosed on May sixth, and she died on May twentieth. It was too fast for any of us to even digest.”
On the edge of my energy I could feel the attention and focus of everyone in the room. They were riveted. I went back to the bowl and saw a wedding cake. My eyes darted to Patty’s left ring finger, and I saw her engagement ring, and then I thought I could put it together. “You’re planning a wedding, right?” I said, feeling out the message.
Patty opened her mouth to respond, but before she could speak, Angelica suddenly moaned loudly and fell forward headfirst onto the table. I was so startled that I lost focus and put my hand on Angelica’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” I asked, bending to her ear.
That was when Angelica threw her arms in the air, clipping me in the mouth hard, and she began to moan and wail. “It’s possessed!” she howled. “It’s possessed by evil!” As if on cue the bowl in the middle of the table abruptly jumped. It literally hopped about an inch in the direction of Patty, and everyone in the room also jumped.
“It’s not evil,” I growled, holding my lip and feeling that throbbing sensation you get when you’ve been punched in a sensitive area. “It’s her mother insisting she use the—” But I never got a chance to finish.
Angelica leaped to her feet and picked up the bowl, holding it high above her head with her eyes wide and crazy. She then threw the delicate china piece as hard as she could, and it smashed against the back wall into a bazillion pieces.
Patty screamed in horror, I gasped, and the entire camera crew seemed to react at once. Gopher yelled, “Cut!” and people rushed forward.
“My bowl!” Patty cried as she ran to the shards of porcelain littering the ground. “This was my mother’s bowl!”
I stared in stunned horror at the poor woman sobbing on the ground while she gathered bits of porcelain; then my eyes cut back to Angelica, who looked like a cat that had just eaten the canary. It dawned on me in that instant that she knew she was facing away from the camera, and when she swiveled back around she flung her arm up onto her forehead and went down on the ground as melodramatically as she could muster.
Meanwhile, I rushed to Patty’s side as she was crying uncontrollably, shaking and trembling while still trying to collect the pieces. “Honey, I’m so sorry,” I said to her.
“How could she?!” she wept. “How could she ruin it?!”
Gopher came and crouched down next to us. “What the hell just happened?” he whispered to me.
“You hired a freak for this show!” I snapped at him. “The bowl moved because Patty’s mother was trying to get her to use the heirloom in her wedding. There wasn’t an evil thing about it!”
“Evil!” we heard Angelica moan from behind us. “The bowl was evil!”
“This is ridiculous!” I yelled, and got up, hoisting my hands firmly onto my hips to glare angrily down at Gopher. “That bowl was a family heirloom, for God’s sake!”
Steven and Gilley had also come forward, and both of them were doing their best to help Patty pick up the broken pieces of her most treasured family possession. Gopher seemed completely at a loss about what to do. He bent down to the woman and apologized profusely, telling her that the insurance would cover the fair market value of the bowl.
That was when I threw up my hands and shouted, “I am so done with this!” and I stormed off in one of my better huffs.
I parted the crew like Moses at the Red Sea and shook my head as I passed Heath, who seemed to be on the edge of doing the same. “Good luck,” I said to him, and shoved open the double doors leading out of the Renaissance Room. Behind me I could hear the quick steps of feet hurrying to catch up to me. “Don’t even try to talk me out of it, Gilley,” I growled, and the footsteps stopped.
“But, M.J.!” Gilley said, his voice high and pitchy. “The contract!”
I rounded on my partner, my fury bubbling over. “Did you not see what happened in there?” I roared
. “Did you miss that a woman had her heart broken, as well as an heirloom that was priceless to her, because some jackass with the name of a rodent coaxed her onto this stupid show and handed her over to a lunatic posing as a medium? Do you think that any of those people in there care anything about presenting the truth, Gilley? Do you think they care about that woman and how she’s just lost her mother to cancer? Do you think they care about one goddamn thing other than ratings?”
“M.J.,” Gilley said calmly, and approached me the way a lion tamer approaches one of his more temperamental felines.
“Don’t you ‘M.J.,’ me, Gilley Gillespie!” I shouted back at him. “This whole production is a load of crap! Anyone who would hire a fraud like Angelica isn’t concerned with helping any of these people. This is bullshit, and I want no part of it!”
“You’re right,” said another voice, and my eyes darted away from my pale-looking partner over to Gopher, who was coming out of the doorway I’d just exited.
I glared hard at him, still furious. “This is all your fault, you know,” I said.
“Again,” he said, looking irritatingly guilty, “you’re right. I blew it. I had another medium lined up for this show with much better credentials, but she canceled at the last minute. The production company that bought the concept insisted that I have four mediums, two men and two women. I had twelve hours to come up with someone, and one of my stagehands found Angelica at a palm-reading shop along the highway.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head, taking a few deep breaths while I was at it. After a bit I said, “I personally know two other choices who would have been perfect. If you had made one phone call, Gopher, one call to me or to Gilley, we could have handed you someone credible like that.” And I snapped my fingers for effect.
“What can I say, M.J., other than I’m sorry? Angelica’s fired, okay? She’s done. Tell me what else you want, within reason, to come back onto the show, and I’ll work on getting it for you.”
Steven came through the double doors at that moment, and when he spotted me he looked relieved. “Patty is asking for you,” he said. “She wants to tell her mother she’s really sorry about the bowl.”
And like that I softened. I sighed heavily and brushed a curl out of my eyes but stared hard at Gopher. “Here are my demands,” I told him. “First, I’m going to take Patty shopping. I’ll need to know where the closest Villeroy and Boch is, and I’ll need a credit card. We’re going to replace Patty’s bowl with something her mom will approve of and that she can use in her wedding. Then you are going to pay for a full day at the spa for the poor woman so that she can relax after all this trauma.”
“Done,” said Gopher, and he was already pulling out his wallet to offer me his credit card.
“Hold on,” I said to him. “I’m not finished.” I heard Gilley gulp, but ignored him as I continued. “Next, if I come back onto your show, you are going to have me work with Heath, and Heath alone. I want nothing to do with Count Chocula in there.”
“You mean Bernard?” Gopher asked. I nodded, and he said, “I can fire him too if you want. The truth is he was also a last-minute choice.”
“Do whatever you want,” I said tiredly, walking forward to snatch the credit card before adding, “but if one more thing gets damaged, smashed, or broken, I am outta here. Capisce?”
“Capisce,” Gopher agreed. “I’ll tell the crew we’re breaking for lunch early and wait for you and Patty to get back.”
“Now you’re thinking like a producer.” I clucked and headed back with Gilley and Steven to find Patty.
About two hours later I had left Patty in the hands of the staff at the hotel spa for a complete head-to-toe workup and was feeling pretty good about myself. She’d been a little reluctant to go to the elegant china store with me, but when we found out it was just across Union Square and I’d convinced her that her mother was coming along for the ride to help us pick out something perfect to replace her bowl, she’d agreed.
I’d known immediately when we entered the store which bowl to go for, and as it turned out my intuition was right on the money, because Patty said that the one I pointed to and told her that her mom was jumping up and down about was exactly the same pattern that she’d selected for the fine china on her bridal registry.
As we’d had the bowl wrapped up, I’d told her again and again that her mother was fine with the heirloom’s disastrous ending, and that she just wanted Patty to be happy on her special day. “Remember, when you’re walking down that aisle, your mom is going to be right next to you,” I’d said.
And it was times like that, when I was reminded about the power of my abilities, that the awesome nature of reuniting people with their deceased relatives was an amazing thing. I also thought that maybe, when we got back home, it might be time to do some professional readings again.
I’d done too many appointments for too long and finally gotten burned out nearly a year ago. That was how I’d gotten into ghostbusting. Gilley had bugged me ever since to get back to doing personal readings, but I’d been stubbornly reluctant until now.
When I arrived back at the hotel I saw Gilley, Steven, and Heath all having lunch together in the café. I strolled over to them and was greeted warmly. “How’d it go?” Steven asked as I took a seat.
“It went better than expected,” I said, smiling and looking at Gilley. “Do me a favor when we get back home?” I said to him.
“Of course,” said Gil. “You name it.”
“Set me up some readings, if you can.”
Gilley squealed like a girl and clapped his hands. “Really?” He giggled, fluttering his eyelashes as if he were dreaming.
I laughed. “Yeah. I think I’m ready.”
“Wait a second,” said Heath. “You mean you haven’t done readings before?”
“Oh, she’s done them,” said Gil. “And I made the unfortunate mistake of overloading her schedule and working the poor girl into the ground. So she quit and went into ghostbusting. She hasn’t let me set up an appointment for a one-on-one reading in a year!”
“I needed the break,” I said, waving to a waitress. I ordered a club sandwich and Coke with lemon, then turned back to the group. “So what did I miss?” I asked.
“Count Chocolate is gone,” said Steven. “Gopher fired him on the spot.”
I looked at Heath to gauge his reaction, but he simply shrugged his shoulders. “I’m glad it’ll be just you and me, M.J.”
“What time are we due back at the shoot?” I asked.
Gilley looked at his watch. “We’ve got a half hour,” he said. “Long enough for you to eat your lunch, at least.”
“Cool,” I said. I hate working on an empty stomach.
I polished off my sandwich and we put the entire bill on Gopher’s credit card (I was seriously considering putting on a few more items from the fabulous shops around the hotel, just to teach the producer a lesson, but decided we might not have time), and we all wound our way back to the Renaissance Room for round two.
Heath and I endured more makeup and hair spray before taking our seats at the table and waiting for Matt to do his intros again. From the script he was following, it was clear that Angelica and Bernard would be completely edited out of the production.
I nudged Heath a little when an elderly man was shown into the room carrying a small urn that was carefully set down on the center of the table and checked for the right lighting.
I eyed the urn curiously and glanced at Heath. His brow was furrowed, and he glanced at me with a shrug. Matt then announced that the elderly man was Franco De La Torrez. He was bringing a small urn left to him by his brother, who had died mysteriously in the Amazon while on an archaeological expedition there some twenty years before. Franco knew nothing about the urn’s origin, nor what might be inside it, but he was convinced that it was full of dark magic. Franco was also terrified of getting rid of the urn, lest it anger the evil energy filling it.
I’ll admit, when Matt got through talking
, it was difficult to keep from giggling. I noticed too that Heath was trying hard not to smirk. “Mr. De La Torrez,” I said as soberly as I could muster, “why is it that you believe this urn to be haunted?”
“It feels bad,” Franco answered, his voice cracked and flaky with age.
“Uh-huh,” I said, turning to Heath. I was getting no read off the urn at all, and thought maybe he might pick up something.
“You say this urn came from your deceased brother?” Heath asked. Franco nodded. “And your brother died in the jungle of the Amazon?” Again Franco nodded. “And in the twenty years you’ve had it, you’ve never opened it up to see what was inside?”
“I’ve been too afraid,” Franco admitted timidly. “It might let out the dark magic!”
Carefully I reached forward and laid my fingers on the urn. Absolutely nothing was coming from it. Furthermore, Franco’s brother wasn’t coming through to me either, but I did get a female energy connected to the old man that gave me a name of Mary or Maria. “Do you know a woman who has passed with the first initial M, like Mary or Maria?” I asked him.
Franco pumped his head vigorously. “My sister, Maria,” he said in wonder.
“And who’s the male with the initial N?” asked Heath.
“My brother!” said Franco, his crackly voice filling in with a little bit of volume. “His name was Nico.”
I was glad that Heath had gotten the brother and wanted to have him take the lead, but this Maria character was literally yelling at me and ordering me to open the urn. My fingers hovered over the top of it, and I glanced sideways at Heath, undecided. He seemed to know what I wanted to do and gave me a brief nod of encouragement. Carefully but quickly I opened up the urn, tensing as the lid came off.
For a moment, no one spoke and no one moved. Franco had let out a small gasp as he realized what I’d just done, but then he watched the top of the now opened urn with great attention. Finally, I tipped the small piece of pottery upside down and out fell a dried flower that was probably once white but now appeared yellow and brown in its preserved state.