The Map of True Places (17 page)

First Maureen went to her friend Ann, asking for a past-life reading. But Ann, whose New Age belief systems had only recently led her to Wicca and not yet to reincarnation, said she didn't do such things. The only things Ann read in those days were the bumps on your head and a few astrological charts, and even those were a recent addition to her repertoire of New Age razzle-dazzle.

“Why do you want a reading?” Ann asked. She had of late begun to worry about Maureen, whose behavior had been growing more and more erratic in recent months, causing her to neglect both her home and her child in favor of this fairy tale she couldn't finish. Though it was based on a true story, like many true stories it was left uncompleted, and Maureen had taken it upon herself to supply the happily-ever-after ending the story needed. But she'd been agonizing over the tale for several years, and it had become Ann's opinion that not only was Maureen never going to finish the story but that in all probability the story might just finish Maureen.

“I think I was Zylphia,” she told Ann one day when they were at the shop. Zee had been busy flipping through the pages of the book entitled
100 Easy Spells for the Young Witch.

“Excuse me?” Ann said.

“I think I was the main character in my story,” Maureen said. “In another life, I mean.”

At this point Zee looked up. Her eyes met Ann's.

“What makes you think that?” Ann asked as calmly as she could.

“Don't patronize me,” Maureen said.

“I'm not.”

“And don't be
careful
with me either. I hate it when people are careful with me.”

“I'm not being careful with you. I just asked you where you got this rather unusual idea,” Ann said.

“Isn't it obvious?” Maureen said. “I live in her house, I have the same bad marriage.”

“Not exactly the same, I hope.” The husband in the story had beaten and tortured his wife and essentially held her prisoner.

“You know what I mean,” Maureen said.

Zee was pretending to be absorbed in her book. But they both knew she was listening, so they lowered their voices, which only made the girl listen more intently.

“It isn't just that I live in her house, it's everything else,” Maureen said. “I dream about her all the time. I know the torture her husband put her through. I even know how she killed him, or how the housekeeper did.”

Maureen had spent the better part of last summer trying to figure out how Arlis Browne died. It was murder, no doubt, but historic records were sketchy about who had poisoned him. Maureen had determined (for the sake of her story) that it was the Haitian housekeeper and not Zylphia who had administered the poison. Though she was determined to stick to the facts in her storytelling, she needed a sympathetic heroine, she said.

“Strychnine,” Maureen said.

“They didn't have strychnine in the early 1800s,” Ann said. “It wasn't even introduced until the 1840s.”

“Yes, but they had the nux vomica plant, which is where strychnine comes from.” Maureen smiled at her discovery. “It grows in India or Southeast Asia, and it is quite possible that it could have come in on one of the Salem ships.”

Zee had put down her book and was now clearly listening to the conversation.

“You can buy the stuff at a garage sale,” Maureen said. “Do you
know they used it as late as the sixties in small amounts as a medicine? This incredibly toxic substance, and they were feeding it to us.”

Ann wanted to say that they were
still
using it, that you could walk into the homeopathic section of any health food store and find nux vomica, which was still widely used, though the amounts were minute. But she decided against telling Maureen.

“Let's change the subject,” she said, indicating Zee's interest. Not only did Ann not want to talk about such subjects in front of a twelve-year-old, but she hesitated to talk with Maureen about such things at all. The previous year Maureen had taken Ann's advanced herbal class for the sole purpose of learning how to poison someone, which hadn't helped either the class or Ann's reputation in Salem. Ann was studying to be a Wiccan high priestess and wanted to make sure her respectability was sacrosanct. In those days witches were not yet commonplace in Salem. Ann had been one of the first. Though Ann knew a lot about many substances and their effects, both good and ill, she didn't think it wise to share any information that could potentially hurt anyone.

Ann tried to avoid talking to Maureen about her story. She didn't like the idea of Maureen fictionalizing the tale, filling in its historic blanks. Some stories should remain unfinished, Ann told her friend. But Maureen didn't listen. She was too obsessed by the plight of the young wife and by trying so hard to prove her happily-ever-after. The only real evidence of any ending to the story was the husband's poisoned body and the worn oarlocks or thole pins in the abandoned boat. How the young lovers had escaped Great Misery Island, if they had indeed escaped at all, was anyone's guess. It was a dark story, and one that Ann believed should be left alone, especially by someone as impressionable as Maureen Finch.

Ann told her again that she didn't do past-life readings and didn't know anyone around here who did. “I think you'd have to go out to California for that kind of thing,” she said.

“As if I can do that,” Maureen said.

 

M
AUREEN'S OBSESSION CONTINUED LONG INTO
that last summer. She tried the First Spiritualist Church, where she'd had some luck before, but they were mediums, not past-life regressionists. She read a book about Edgar Cayce, who believed strongly in reincarnation. She read many books about Buddhism, hoping to unlock the secrets to samsara or the process of rebirth. But she still couldn't find anyone to help her.

Late that July she finally found a psychic down by the Willows who said she did past-life readings for a fee and booked an appointment for Maureen before she had a chance to change her mind.

Zee was immediately suspicious. She seemed to remember some kind of scandal a year or so back, where a psychic who lived down by the old amusement park had pretended she had a talent for talking to the dead and conned a senior citizen out of two Social Security checks before the old woman's children had gone to the police. Zee didn't know if this was the same psychic, but she wasn't taking any chances. Though she knew that there was no talking Maureen out of anything once she decided to do it, Zee wasn't about to let her go alone.

They parked the car over by the arcade and walked around back to a three-decker house with peeling paint and a second-floor sign that read
WORLD-FAMOUS ARCANA, PSYCHIC TO THE STARS.

Their feet echoed up the two flights of stairs. A bare lightbulb cast a weak halo around itself on the upper landing making it appear, as they approached, as if it were an aura around Maureen's head.

Arcana threw open the door just before they reached it, as though she had psychically sensed their presence. The gesture was overly dramatic and clearly for effect. Anyone with two ears could have heard them coming, but Zee could tell that Maureen bought it.

“Who are
you
?” Arcana demanded of Zee. Her feet were unshod,
and she was wearing a caftan with a towel around her head, as if she had just washed her hair and couldn't be bothered to dry it.

“I'm her daughter,” Zee said.

“It'll cost you extra if you both want a reading.”

“She doesn't want a reading,” Maureen said. “She just came to keep me company.”

The psychic grumbled and lit a cigarette. She gestured them to a card table covered with a plastic cloth. Zee noticed the posters on the walls, photos of Indian mystics, all wearing turbans. Maybe she
hadn't
just washed her hair, Zee thought—maybe this was a bad attempt at a turban.

It wasn't difficult for Zee to see that the psychic hated Maureen on sight. She demanded the money up front, which Maureen was glad to provide, but Maureen was nervous and couldn't find where she'd put her wallet. Flustered, she sent Zee back to the car to look for it.

Zee looked under the seats and in the glove compartment but found nothing. Then she knelt down by the driver's door and looked under the car, but all she found was an empty Almond Joy wrapper and one dirty child-size cotton sock. When she came back, Maureen was tense but finally located her wallet in her jacket pocket. The psychic rolled her eyes but took the money—and ten dollars extra because Maureen had brought Zee along. “I'm not used to working in front of an audience,” she said.

“You have done past-life readings before,” Maureen said.

“Of course,” Arcana said. “I do them all the time.”

Zee could tell that it was a lie, but the look on Maureen's face was so hopeful that Zee took a seat on the couch and was quiet as the psychic had instructed.

Though the table was flimsy and the decorations looked fake, the psychic had some high-tech tools. On the floor under the table were two switches: a dimmer and a dial that controlled the sound system.

“I demand silence,” Arcana announced with the authority of a sanctimonious second-grade teacher.

Zee wondered at the declaration, since no one had uttered a word.

With her bare, simian feet, the psychic flipped the two switches, grabbing them each with her toes and turning the dials expertly. First the music came up, a cross between Indian mystic and theremin music from a bad fifties sci-fi film. With the other foot, her toes dialed the lights down until Maureen and Zee were left in near darkness. The only source of illumination was the neon sign for the midway across the street.

Maureen was anxious. “Am I supposed to do anything?”

“Not yet.”

For the next four or five minutes, the psychic did breathing exercises. Deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, making a great show of her hyperventilation.

When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave.

“Hello, this is ARCANA,” she said. “What is your question?”

Zee tried to keep from laughing.

“I don't have a question. I'm here to find out about my past lives,” Maureen said softly.

“What is your
question
?” Arcana's voice boomed.

Maureen looked at Zee. “I guess my question is whether I was Zylphia Browne in a past life.”

It wasn't going at all as Maureen had told Zee it would. Somehow she'd gotten the idea, or had read somewhere, that she would be the one going into the trance. In the book she had read on past-life regressions, the therapist would put the seeker into a trance and then record the outcome. When the seeker woke up, she would be able to listen to what she'd said under hypnosis. Or, barring that, another approach would be that Arcana might go into a trance
herself, the way Edgar Cayce did, and just start relating her impressions. Maureen seemed surprised that she would have to ask a question herself.

Zee was trying hard not to laugh.

The psychic said nothing. But Zee could feel her annoyance through her supposed trance. She couldn't tell for sure that Arcana was faking it, but she would have bet she was. Zee was aware that the psychic was watching her. In another minute, if she couldn't stop giggling, she was pretty certain that Arcana would kick her out.

“What is your question?” Arcana boomed.

“She told you. She wants to know if she was Zylphia Browne in another life,” Zee finally said.

“Silence!” Arcana hissed.

Maureen shot Zee a warning look. Maureen's voice shook as she once again formed the question. “Was I Zylphia Browne in a prior life?”

Everyone in Salem knew the story of Zylphia Browne, who had killed her husband and then disappeared, never to be seen again.

“The
MUR-der-ess
?” Arcana bellowed, stressing the first of the separated syllables and arching her eyebrows like Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard.

It was wrong to classify Zylphia as a murderess; rather she was a victim of severe abuse who happened to escape. Even Zee believed that much.

It didn't take a psychic to figure out the answer Maureen wanted to hear. It also didn't take a psychic to know how much this woman didn't like Maureen. Maureen was a beautiful woman with a childlike presence that could seem ingenuous if you didn't know her and which often had the effect of enraging women who had to make their own way in the world and weren't having an easy time of it. Arcana seemed instinctively to know that her answer could do some
damage to Maureen. And she seemed fully prepared to do it.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” she said to herself. The growl of a Harley from the street below drowned her words.

“Excuse me?” Maureen strained to hear her. Even Zee sat forward in her seat.

“You are not Zylphia Browne,” Arcana said in a voice that neither of them could miss. “But your daughter is.”

Maureen stared at her, uncomprehending at first.

Arcana poked an accusing finger out from under her caftan and pointed at Zee. “Your daughter is the young Zylphia Browne come back to life.”

Maureen stared in disbelief.

Arcana seemed to know immediately what she had won. The look of devastation on Maureen's face was unforgettable.

And though she didn't buy it for a minute, a chill ran down Zee's spine.

As they descended the stairs and through the midway to the car, Zee could see that Maureen was in shock. They got into the car and sat in silence.

“You know that she was playing you, don't you?” Zee said.

“What are you talking about?”

“She didn't like us from the moment we walked in.”

Instead of having the desired effect, it had the opposite.

“You didn't have to be so rude!” Maureen said. “You didn't have to laugh!”

“I'm sorry,” Zee said.