Pete Sullivan caught Cochran’s glance and smiled. “Plain physics so far,” Pete said. “This is an old set, from the days when the remote controls used ultrasound frequencies to change channels and turn the sets on and off. The remote was a tiny xylophone, in effect, too high in frequency for anybody but dogs and TVs to hear. Nowadays the signals need to carry more information, and they use infrared.”
“I get it,” said Cochran, a little defensively. He was still shaking, still enormously aware of the dead man on the table in the kitchen. He nodded. “The TV thinks her jingling pennies are a remote. Who are you, uh, hoping to consult, here?”
Pete shrugged. “Not who—what. Just…the moment; right now, right here. The pennies she’s shaking are a part of now with a link to Crane’s birth year, and the pictures they’ll tune the TV to will be representative bits of now in the same field of reference—just like a piece of a hologram contains the whole picture, or a drop of your blood contains the entire physical portrait of you. It’s what Jung called synchronicity.”
“Synchronicity!” sneered Angelica, who was shaking the jar again and staring at the screen. She stepped back and sat down on the couch, still shaking the pennies.
“Angie thinks there are actual, sentient entities behind this sort of thing,” said Pete. “A querulous old woman, in this case—the same party that’s behind the Chinese I Ching, according to her.”
“A straitlaced and disapproving old party,” said Angelica without looking away from the screen. “Sometimes I can almost smell her lavender sachet. Ah, we’re online.”
Cochran peered at the screen curiously, but it was just showing a grainy black-and-white film of a blond woman brushing her hair.
“It always starts with this,” said Pete, visibly tenser now. “That’s Mary Pickford, the old silent-movie star. A guy name Philo T. Farnsworth was the first guy in the American West to transmit images with a cathode-ray tube, in San Francisco in 1927, and he used this repeating loop of Mary Pickford as a demo.” He sighed shakily. “This isn’t a real-world, 1995 broadcast—we’re into supernatural effects now, sorry.”
“You were getting spook stuff even before” said young Oliver nervously. “Paul Masson hasn’t aired that Orson Welles ad for years.”
“I think he’s right,” murmured Angelica from the couch.
Spider Joe had been sitting silently against the kitchen wall, but now he reared back, and half a dozen of his antennae sprang up from the carpet. “Who just came in?” he barked, the sunken eyelids twitching in his craggy brown face.
Cochran glanced fearfully at the open back door, but there was no one there; and Plumtree and Diana and Angelica were craning their necks down the hall and toward the kitchen, but there was no sign or sound of any intruder.
Kootie had directed an unfocussed stare at the ceiling, and now he lowered his head. “There’s no one new on the whole block.”
Mavranos cleared his throat. “But, uh…your Mary Pickford has changed into a negro.”
“And she got older,” noted the teenager who had been introduced as Scat, and who hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen since they’d all trooped back in from the kitchen.
On the TV screen, the figure was in fact a thin old black woman in a high-necked dark dress now, sitting at a mirrored vanity table and brushing her hair—and though her jawline was strong and unsagging, her kinky hair now looked more white than blond.
As if in response to Angelica’s hard shaking of the penny jar, the grainy black-and-white picture sharpened in focus, and an open window with a row of eucalyptus trees beyond it was visible in the wall behind the old woman; and sounds were audible—a faint, crackling susurration as the old woman drew the brush through her hair, an insistent knocking of the raised window shade bar against the window frame, and a clanging bell from outside.
“The knocking, and the bell, those are to confuse ghosts,” said Plumtree.
Angelica was shaking the jar harder, as if trying to drive the image off the TV screen, and she seemed irritated that the pennies weren’t doing it, were instead just jangling in rhythmic counterpoint to the bell.
“It’s San Francisco, all right,” said Pete. “That’s a cable-car bell in the background.”
“This film clip is seventy years old,” panted Angelica. “Everyplace probably had streetcars then.”
“It isn’t the old clip anymore,” objected Pete. “This here has got sound.”
“Pete,” said Kootie loudly as he clanked his empty bowl down beside the television set, “dig out the Edison telephone and get it hooked up again. We’re in a new game now, with this restoration-to-life talk, and even an idiot shell of Scott Crane might have something to say worth hearing. And I reckon Janis Plumtree should be enough of a link for us to reach him, her being his own personal murderer.”
“And his wife,” said the bald Diana from the kitchen doorway. “You’ve got his wife here, too.”
“Right,” said Kootie hastily. “Sorry, Diana—I was thinking in terms of the new arrivals. I meant murderer now too”
Angelica finally leaned forward and set the jar of 1943 pennies down on the carpet. “I’m not dealing with the I Ching old lady here,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans as she leaned back against the couch cushions. “And it’s not being run by just your synchronicity either, Pete. It’s…I sense some other old woman.”
Cochran saw Mavranos, glance at Spider Joe. Clearly he was wondering if the crazy old blind man’s dead wife might be taking over the show here. Cochran wondered if Booger had been a black woman.
“If you say so, Kootie,” said Pete. “Scat, Ollie—you guys can help me carry some boxes in from the garage.”
AFTER DIANA’S two boys had followed Pete out the back door, Angelica Anthem Elizalde Sullivan stared resentfully at the Plumtree woman sitting in front of the desk with her drunk Connecticut pansy boyfriend. MPD, thought Angelica scornfully. I didn’t even think that was a hip diagnosis anymore, I thought everybody was busy uncovering suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse these days.
“Kootie,” Angelica called, “toss me my Loteria cards.”
Her adopted son twisted around on the desk and dug through a pile of utility bills and check stubs, then tossed over the heads of Cochran and Plumtree a little deck of cards held together with a rubber band.
Angelica caught the bundle and pulled the rubber band off the cards. “Miss Plumtree,” she said, having forgotten the woman’s first name, “come sit by me on the couch here and chat.”
Plumtree stared back at her. “Why should I answer your questions, lady?”
Angelica smiled at her as she deftly shuffled the cheap paper cards. “I know about…making amends to people you’ve allowed to die; people you’re linked with by chains of guilt, hm? Real guilt and shame, the kind you’ve got to go back and fix, not just ‘get past’ or ‘put behind you’ or get ‘okay with.’ You think you can do it without help, but that’s like thinking one hand can fix what it took two hands to break. If that dead man in the kitchen can be resurrected, it might be some thing you can tell us that’ll help us all to get the job done.” She looked around the room affectionately. “I wonder if we’ve got even one person here who doesn’t believe, with some validity, that he or she is directly responsible beyond any excuse for the death of someone.”
“Shee-it,” snarled Plumtree; but she struggled wearily to her feet and shambled over to the couch, which thumped the floor with an uneven leg when she dropped onto it beside Angelica. Her boyfriend, Cochran, got to his feet and leaned attentively on the corner of the desk.