He towers over us with his hands on his hips, scowling.
Maybe I’m not supposed to just be here for Jenna. Maybe I’m supposed to be here for Virgil Stanhope, too.
I get to my feet and try to push away the tsunami of negativity rolling off him. “Maybe if you opened yourself up to the possibility, you’d find something unexpected.”
“Thanks, Gandhi, but I prefer to deal in legitimate facts, not woo-woo mumbo jumbo.”
“That woo-woo mumbo jumbo won me three Emmys,” I point out. “And don’t you think we’re all a little psychic? Haven’t you ever thought about a friend you haven’t seen in forever, and then he calls? Out of the blue?”
“No,” Virgil says flatly.
“Of course. You don’t have any friends. What about when you’re driving down the road with your GPS on and you think, I’m gonna take a left, and sure enough, that’s what the GPS tells you to do next.”
He laughs. “So being psychic is a matter of probability. You have a fifty-fifty chance of being right.”
“You’ve never had an inner voice? A gut reaction? Intuition?”
Virgil grins. “Want to guess what my intuition’s telling me right now?”
I throw up my hands. “I quit,” I say to Jenna. “I don’t know why you thought I’d be the right person to—”
“I recognize this.” Virgil starts striking through the reeds with purpose, and Jenna and I both follow. “There used to be a really big tree, but see how it got split by lightning? And there’s a pond over there,” he says, gesturing. He tries to orient himself by pivoting a few times, before walking about a hundred yards to the north. There, he moves in concentric widening circles, stepping gingerly until the ground sinks beneath his shoe. Triumphantly, Virgil leans down and starts pulling away fallen branches and spongy moss, revealing a deep hole. “This is where we found the body.”
“Who was trampled,” Jenna says pointedly.
I take a step back, not wanting to get in the middle of this drama, and that’s when I see something winking at me, half buried in the thicket of moss that Virgil overturned. I lean down and pull out a chain, its clasp intact, with a tiny pendant still dangling: a pebble, polished to the highest gloss.
Another sign. I hear you, I think, to whoever is beyond that wall of silence, and let the necklace pool in the valley of my palm. “Look at this. Maybe it belonged to the victim?”
Jenna’s face drains of color. “That was my mom’s. And she never, ever took it off.”
When I meet a nonbeliever—and, sugar, let me tell you, they seem to be attracted to me like bees to nectar—I bring up Thomas Edison. There isn’t a person on this planet who wouldn’t say he was the epitome of a scientist; that his mathematical mind allowed him to create the phonograph, the lightbulb, the motion picture camera and projector. We know he was a freethinker who said there was no supreme being. We know he held 1,093 patents. We also know that before he passed, he was in the process of inventing a machine to talk to the dead.
The height of the Industrial Revolution was also the height of the Spiritualist movement. The fact that Edison was a supporter of the mechanical breakthroughs in the physical world doesn’t mean he wasn’t equally entranced by the metaphysical. If mediums could do it via séance, he reasoned, surely a machine calibrated with great care could communicate with those on the other side.
He didn’t talk much about this intended invention. Maybe he was afraid of his concept being stolen; maybe he had not come up with a specific design. He told Scientific American magazine that the machine would be “in the nature of a valve”—meaning that, with the slightest effort from the other side, some wire might be tripped, some bell might be rung, some proof might be had.
Can I tell you that Edison believed in the afterlife? Well, although he was quoted as saying that life wasn’t destructible, he never came back to tell me so personally.
Can I tell you he wasn’t trying to debunk Spiritualism? Not entirely.
But it is equally possible that he wanted to apply a scientist’s brain to a field that was hard to quantify. It is equally possible that he was trying to justify what I used to do for a living, by giving cold, hard evidence.
I also know that Edison believed the moment between being awake and being asleep was a veil, and it was in that moment that we were most connected to our higher selves. He would set pie tins out on the floor beside each arm of his easy chair and take a nap. Holding a big ball bearing in each hand, he’d nod off—until the metal struck metal. He’d write down whatever he was seeing, thinking, imagining at that moment. He became pretty proficient at maintaining that in-between state.