First, some try-ons. She'd mentioned on her questionnaire that Clarence had been missing since June second. He'd start there.
"I'm getting a sense of a state of absence… of separation since… why does early June keep popping into my head?"
"The second of June!" Melba cried. "That's when I last saw Clarence! He went off to work in the morning and never came home. I haven't seen or heard from him since." She worked a used tissue out of her housedress pocket and dabbed her eyes. "Oh, Lord, you do have the gift, don't you."
Oh, yes, Lyle thought. The gift of remembering what you've forgotten you've told me.
"Please keep your hands on the stones, Melba," he reminded her. "It weakens contact when you remove them."
"Oh, sorry." She placed her hands back on the stones.
Good. Keep them there, he thought.
The last thing he wanted her to do was reach for her pocketbook. Because Charlie, covered head to toe in black, should have crept out of his command center by now and be ready to grab it from where it sat on the floor next to her chair.
"I told the police but I don't think they's doing much to find him. They don't seem the least bit interested."
"They're very busy, Melba," he told her.
Her distress sent a shot of guilt through Lyle. He wasn't going to do any more for her than the cops.
Value for value…
He shook it off and formulated another try-on. The first had been just an easy warm-up, to break the ice and gain a smidgen of her confidence. From here it got a little tougher.
Look at her: cleans houses, bargain-rack clothing; he couldn't see Clarence as a corporate exec. She mentioned him going off to work as if it were a routine thing. Good chance he had a steady blue-collar job, maybe union.
Try-on number two…
"Why do I want to say he worked in a trade?"
"He was an electrician!"
"A loyal union man."
She frowned. "No. He was never in a union."
Whoops, but easy enough to save. "But I get the feeling he wanted to be in the union."
"Yes! How did you know! That poor man. He tried so many times but never qualified. He was always talking about how much more money he could be making if he was in the union."
Lyle nodded sagely. "Ah, that was what I was picking up."
Let's see… blue-collar, frustrated… maybe Clarence liked to knock back a few after work? And even if he was a teetotaler or an ex-drinker, the temptation to drink offered a ready fallback.
"I'm getting the impression of a dimly lit place, the smell of smoke, the clink of glassware…"
"Leon's! That awful place! He'd go there after work and come home reeking of beer. Sometimes he wouldn't come home till after midnight. We had such terrible fights over it."
Drunk… frustrated… go for it, but keep it vague.
"I'm led to say that some harm was done?"
Melba looked away. "He never meant to hurt me. It's just that sometimes, when I got him real mad after he came home late, he'd take a swing. He didn't mean nothin' by it. But now that he's gone…" She sobbed and grabbed the tissue to dab at her eyes again. "I'd rather have him home late than not at all."
"I'm losing contact!" Lyle said. "The hands! The stones. Please stay in contact with the stones."
Melba grabbed them again. "I'm sorry. It's just—"
"I understand, but you must hold the stones."
"Got her wallet here," said Charlie's voice in his earpiece. Obviously he'd made it back to his command center with the pocketbook. "Picture of her and some fat guy—I mean, I could be looking at the Notorious B.I.G. here—but no kid pics."
Lyle said, "I'm looking for children but…"
He left a blank space, hoping she'd fill it in. As with most sitters, she didn't disappoint.
"We didn't have any. Lord knows we tried but…" She sighed. "It never happened."
"Not much else goin' down here," Charlie said. "Keys, a lipstick, hey—beat this: a harmonica. Bet it ain't hers. Good shot it's her old man's. I'll get the bag back lickity."
While waiting, Lyle made a few remarks about Clarence's weight problems to bolster further his psychic credibility. The picture he'd formed of Clarence was that of a frustrated, money-squeezed, bad-tempered drinker. An answer to a dead-or-alive question on a guy like that had to lean toward dead. He might have got himself involved in some quick-buck scheme that went wrong, leaving him food for the worms or the fish.
Lyle felt a tap on his leg: Charlie had returned the bag.
Lyle cleared his throat. "Why am I hearing music? It sounds reedy. Could it be a harmonica?"
"Yes! Clarence loved to play the harmonica. People told him he was terrible." Melba smiled. "And he was. He was just awful. But that never stopped him from trying."
"Why do I sense his harmonica nearby?"
She gasped. "I brought one with me! How could you know?"
Preferring to let her provide her own answer to that, Lyle said, "It might facilitate contact if I can touch an object that belongs to the one we seek."
"It's in my handbag." Melba glanced at her hands where they rested on the stones, then back at Lyle. "Do you think I could…?"
"Yes, but one hand only, please."
"We gonna take this poor lady's money, bro?" Charlie asked in his ear. "She ain't exactly our usual breed of fish."
Lyle couldn't give him an answer, but the same hesitancy had been nibbling at him throughout the sitting.
He watched Melba free her right hand, pull her handbag up to her lap, and fish out a scratched and dented harmonica with "Hohner Special 20 Marine Band" embossed along the top.
"This was his favorite," she said, pushing it across the table.
Lyle reached toward it, then stopped as warning alarms rang through his nerve ends. Why? Why shouldn't he touch the harmonica?
After a few awkward seconds, with Melba's expression moving toward a puzzled frown, Lyle set his jaw and took hold of the harmonica—
—and cried out as the room did a sudden turn and then disappeared and he was standing in another room, a suite in the Bellagio in Vegas, watching a fat man he knew to be Clarence Toomey snore beside a blonde Lyle knew to be a hooker he'd hired for the night. He knew everything—the half-million-dollar lottery prize Clarence had won and kept secret from his wife until he'd collected the money, how he'd left home and never looked back.
Melba's cry from somewhere in front of him: "What's wrong?"
Charlie in his ear: "Lyle! What's happenin'?"
The feel of the harmonica in his hands… uncoiling his fingers one by one until…
The harmonica dropped onto the table and abruptly Lyle was back in the Channeling Room, looking at Melba who faced him with wide eyes and her hands pressed against her mouth.
"Lyle! Answer me! Are you all right?"
"I'm okay," Lyle said, for Melba's sake as well as his brother's.
But he was anything but okay.
What had just happened? Was it real? Had he truly been looking at Clarence Toomey or imagining it? It had seemed so real, and yet… it couldn't be.
Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He didn't know what to make of it.
"Ifasen?" Melba said. "What happened? Did you see anything? Did you see my Clarence?"
What could he say? Even if he were sure it was true—and he wasn't, not at all—how do you tell a woman that her husband is bedded down in Vegas with a hooker?