Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

mean she wasn’t a junkie.”
    “Well, look, did I call it about that Tyson Cooper you almost got involved with?”
    “Well, that’s different. That wasn’t about you.”
    “That’s what I mean . I can do it as long as it’s somebody else.” He turned to me. “See, I take in information through the body.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Through the solar plexus, or the
hara
. Not through the head, like most people. I get feelings. You know?”
    “Like whether it’s going to rain?”
    He shrugged, and there was an uncomfortable silence. I was on the verge of apologizing when Moonblood said, “Look, it’s hard enough to talk about this stuff without a bunch of cheap shots.”
    It had been a cheap shot, and I was sorry. On the other hand, surely it was just as hard to understand as it was to talk about. No, I didn’t know what Ivan meant, and yet to say so, I was sure, was just going to elicit a smugness (“Ha, ha, I know and you don’t”) that I’d already seen snatches of.
    Rosalie stepped in quickly. “Moonblood,” said Rosalie, “is a true specialist. She can do what’s called psychometry. In fact, we’re going to try it when the police give back Chris’s car. She can probably sit in it and pick up something.”
    “But what?”
    Moonblood spoke. “Well, I think if I had something belonging to a suspect, I could tell if he’d been there or not.”
    “Then there’s Tanesha,” said Rosalie.
    Tanesha said, “I hear voices,” and hummed the “Twilight Zone” theme. “That’s the one they put you away for. So s’cuse me if I’m a little nervous at the office.”
    “It’s called clairaudient,” said Rosalie.
    “You know what I've always wondered? Are they outside your head or inside?”
    “Inside. You know how you have a mental TV screen? Well, I’ve got a radio in there.”
    I guessed I did, too. I heard voices all the time: Rebecca, could you try a little harder, please? Would you mind getting it right this time? That sort of thing. Or little warnings in court sometimes: Don’t ask him that. It’s going to start something you don’t want to start.
    I’d learned to heed them. But it was hard to imagine that David Berkowitz, Tanesha, and I were all clairaudients.
    “I guess the difference in me and crazy people,” Tanesha said, “is I only get them when I ask something. I mean, the information just comes in words instead of pictures.”
    “Chris and I are clairvoyants,” Rosalie said. “Although I guess all of us do a little bit of everything. You can’t predict how the information is going to come. And of course most of us see energy to some extent. That can also take a lot of forms. And it can look different at different times. Once a client came in and he had a great big red circle around him. Now I don’t see that every day— just then.”
    “What did it mean?”
    “That was a seriously angry man. He was getting divorced, and it got ugly.”
    “That was the sort of thing that made me think I was going crazy,” said Chris. “These wild things that seemed to come out of nowhere.”
    “Some of them,” I said, “in costume, right?”
    She flushed. “Listen, Rebecca. If we ever split up the partnership, don’t tell anyone I see ghosts, okay?” It was a joke, but it brought home once again how much it had cost her to let me in on her secret.
    “Before we do your reading,” Chris said, “I have to ask Rosalie something.”
    She whispered; Rosalie shook her head; they negotiated; and finally Rosalie nodded. She said, “Chris wants me to do my parlor trick. I hate doing it because it’s sort of showoffy, but she talked me into it.”
    “Yaaay,” said Ivan.
    Tanesha said, “You’re not going to believe what this woman can do.”
    Rosalie rummaged, finally found a pad and an envelope. “Here’s what you do. Write me a question on this pad, fold the paper up, and seal it in the envelope. And make it a different question from the one you’re going to ask us all to read about.”
    “Why? What’s going to happen?”
    “I’ll answer the question without reading it.”
    Okay, Ane. If she could do a trick, so could I. I wrote, folded, and sealed.
    Rosalie took the envelope, closed her eyes, and turned the envelope over. She rubbed it some. At no time did she open her eyes or even lower her chin. When she finally opened her eyes, she handed me the envelope. Her face was full of compassion, as if she could hardly bear to deliver the bad news.
    “My