DAY 3: CORFU
I’m sitting next to Evelyn, the woman with the stomach cramps. “My heart’s racing to see if she calls out my name,” she whispers. Evelyn has come onto this cruise specifically to ask Sylvia about her stomach pain.
“Evelyn,” Sylvia calls.
She walks to the microphone.
“Uh,” she stammers.
“Speak up, honey,” Sylvia says.
“Um,” Evelyn says.
Sylvia looks impatient.
“I—uh—think I’ve got a poltergeist in my house because things keep moving in my dishwasher,” Evelyn says quickly. “Can you tell me the poltergeist’s name?”
“The poltergeist is an older relative called Doug,” Sylvia says.
“Thank you, Sylvia,” Evelyn says.
She sits back down. I look at her. She shrugs.
• • •
IT’S THE EVENING of the cocktail party. We all put on formal wear and bustle around the Queen’s lounge, excited about our opportunity to mingle with Sylvia. But she doesn’t show up. We wait for an hour, then disperse, confused and disappointed. I bump into Evelyn on the way out. She’s looking maudlin.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“This whole Doug business has really knocked me for a loop,” she replies. “Who’s Doug? I don’t have any older relative called Doug. I don’t know anyone remotely like that.” She pauses. “I used to idolize Sylvia but now I’m kind of off her. And those one- and two-word answers she gives . . .” Evelyn screws up her face. “She’s so cold. And why didn’t she turn up at the cocktail party?”
I spot Nancy, Sylvia’s nice-looking assistant. I decide to tell her I’m a journalist and I’m on this cruise because I want to interview Sylvia.
“Sylvia doesn’t like to give interviews,” Nancy replies. “She says, ‘Journalists can go to hell. I’m famous enough. All they do is turn on me.’” Still, Nancy says, she’ll give it a go.
In the Explorations coffee bar I find Cassie (not her real name), a very likable young German woman and a huge Sylvia fan. I sat next to her on the transfer bus from the Rome airport.
“The most bizarre thing just happened,” she says.
She says she and two others from the group were just in the shopping arcade when they spotted Sylvia.
“Look! There’s Sylvia!” Cassie said.
“When I said it, Sylvia looked up with a start,” Cassie says. “Her face immediately contorted into a kind of horrified grimace that she’d been spotted by some fans. Honestly! She looked like a vampire looks when a shaft of light hits them. She hissed ‘Go!’ to the man pushing her wheelchair. And—whoosh—she was gone. He spun her around and pushed her away really fast. It was nasty. Something is not sitting right with me anymore. She’s not a friendly person. Did she think I was going to jump on her?”
Cassie’s story resigns me to the obvious: There isn’t a chance in hell Sylvia will grant me an interview.
DAY 4: SOME OTHER GREEK ISLAND
Sylvia’s assistant, Nancy, rushes up to me in the lido restaurant. Sylvia has agreed to an interview. Five p.m., the Neptune lounge.
It’s time for our next two-hour lecture with Sylvia. She seems in a far better mood today.
“I want to know if my son will come back safely,” one woman asks.
“Yes, honey,” Sylvia replies.
“I’m having cardiology work done soon,” asks the next person. “Am I going to get better?”
“Yes, you are.” Sylvia smiles.
“Will my daughter live past twenty-five?” asks the third.
“At least into her fifties,” Sylvia says.
And so on. All this is in stark contrast to the other grouchy evening when it seemed that nobody’s sick relative was going to make it past 2009. I can’t help wondering whether, if Shawn Hornbeck’s parents had gone to Sylvia today, she would have told them that their son was alive and well.
At 5:00 p.m., I knock on the door of the Neptune lounge. It is swanky and invitation-only—reserved for guests staying on the rarefied seventh floor. Sylvia is there to greet me, along with one of the four men who seem always to surround her. I tell her what Cassie said about her being rude in the shopping arcade. It’s a relatively trivial allegation, but I’m curious to see how she’ll respond.
She denies it. “You can approach me anywhere, anytime,” she says. “I’ve never, ever been rude to anyone, anywhere. No one could ever accuse me—when I’m eating dinner and they come to me, or if I’m in the casino—I have never, ever been hateful. Never! That’s one thing I’ve been so much against. These people put you there! To be rude to them is just terrible.”
The thing is, just before the interview, I bumped into Cassie’s two companions from the shopping arcade. They both told me Sylvia had been startlingly rude to them and now they’re really off her.
I’ve wanted to interview Sylvia for years, but I suddenly wonder if it is pointless. I think she’s a consummate pro who will just say anything.
“There are times,” I say, “when you’ve got it wrong in a very bad way with missing—”
“The kid,” interrupts Sylvia. She means Shawn Hornbeck. “Yeah, I believed the kid was dead.” She shrugs. “What I found out later—Larry King wanted me to come on and explain but I said I’m not going to explain anything—is there were three children missing. I think what I did was I got my wires crossed. There was a blond and two boys who are dead. I think I picked up the wrong kid.”
“Shawn Hornbeck,” I say. “Were the other kids missing from the same area?”
“Absolutely,” Sylvia says.
“At the same time?” I ask.
“Yes,” Sylvia says. “I have a tiny newspaper cutting about them back in my office.”
(I later realize that, of course, “three children missing” in the “same area” is annoyingly too vague to be checkable.)
“Then there was Opal Jo Jennings,” I say.
Sylvia looks blankly at me.
“Back in 1999,” I say.
Sylvia still looks blank.
“You said she was sold into white slavery in Japan but actually she was dead,” I prompt.
“I don’t remember that case at all,” Sylvia says.
“Little girl,” I say. “She’d been killed but you said she’d been sold into white slavery in Japan.”
“No,” Sylvia says. She shakes her head. “Don’t remember that. Not at all. All I remember was that kid Van.”
“Shawn,” I say.
“Van Hornwell?” Sylvia says.
“Shawn Hornbeck,” I say.
“Yeah. Hornbeck,” Sylvia says. “I don’t remember the Japanese girl at all.” She pauses. “Look,” she says, “no psychic—and this is what they don’t understand—can ever be one hundred percent. That’s God.”
By “they” she’s referring to her two biggest critics, James Randi and Robert Lancaster. She says she doesn’t care what they say about her: “The whole thing about my job”—she pauses and corrects herself—“God-given career, is if you’re right, you’re right. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And the people that are gonna love you will love you and the people that won’t, won’t.”
Then, just as I think how self-assured she must be not to let their attacks eat her up, she says, “I’ve had a private investigator on Randi and Lancaster, and I have enough on them to hang ’em.” She reels off a few defamatory allegations, then adds, “But I’m not going to play that game. That’s vengeance, see? Who cares? Randi is an evil little man. When I told him he was going to have a heart attack, and then he did—ha!—he wouldn’t give me any kudos.”