All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred nineteen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred nineteen)

“Full of the effort to quote terms he’d picked up from my patients, which I do not bandy. Almost energetic…and so I may have lacked attention myself, a fault. I suppose you knew I had grown to dislike him. He was clever, glib. Glibness to certain persons is the more winning approach. I don’t say I hadn’t benefitted. And I’d felt some duty, for having imported him to Indiana from Boston. His adventures in Nashville may have broken a weaker spirit’s attachment… Ah! You make me regret a bit, not caring.”

“But she—”

“You know this, too, that that is what spiritualism is to most people, verbiage, smoke and mirrors. The summoning, I think, disappointed her. I could not lie. Buckley had not found his path open to him, lighted for him, which may have been for Mrs. Buckley’s not concentrating. It seemed impossible to make her do it.”

“So Moult didn’t turn up, to explain… Because all this started with a mystery. How did his boat disappear? How did he die? You don’t suppose he arrived late, and he’s still hovering around the poor empty house, waiting to be asked?”

The bark of laughter, greeting this, was not Ebrach’s.

The amiable figure of Monaghan entered by the hallway door, standing not closed.

“Since I’d been offered the tour of the place,” he said. He took a seat, scooted to the desk and propped himself on an elbow.

“You thought you would strike off on your own, into the residential quarters?”

“I confess it seemed wrong to keep Mrs. Koker from her duties. I’m no scholar of human nature, if she wasn’t taking it hard. And so I might, Mr. Ebrach, have got myself astray. However, apropos to your talk… This summoning, do you say?”

Élucide pulled a copy of Ancients, and laid it next to the elbow. “Every answer you could wish.”

“Mrs. Demrose did not read all that.”

“One must doubt,” Ebrach said. “But I cannot testify to her having made claims of any sort.”

“Why is the empty house poor?” Monaghan asked Élucide.

“Because I say so, in passing.” She saw him pick up, and tuck away, this day’s prickliness. He might even guess the conversation that had brought it on. He seemed to have a way of being places; why not Wayne Street, a short walk from the Columbia? “But if we were writing a fiction… Alarica seemed lonely to me. Too many rooms, too few people living there.”

“Most times, merely the servants. You speak, Miss, from your impressions. You are not of a mind, as I am, to ask yourself whether the kindest of souls, the most scholarly of fellows, the uprightest of dear grannies, is not for all of that a great liar. And you don’t know, you say, the both of you, how Mr. Moultrie C. Buckley died? You held a summoning to ask the question of the spirit, but you did not read the obituary?”

“Go on,” Ebrach said. This came after a pause of embarrassment.

231

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred twenty)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)