Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ereader ebook .txt) 📕

effects, smoke and mirrors, set dressing. As part of this, she reached inside her bag and brought out a pair of long, black lace gloves. She then taught my sister to mimic the paranormal ability of psychometry. That is the skill of obtaining information about a person or object by touch alone. Genevieve was to say that the talent induced headaches and hence the need for the gloves so that she wouldn’t be continually bombarded with psychic images. Set dressing, you see? All to bolster our story.

“When the hour was up, we knew as much about fraudulent psychic techniques as anyone. Thereafter, our lives changed completely. We were no longer charity cases but honoured guests, showered with every luxury. Our mother too. For a few years, it was heaven. We were the Bell sisters, inseparable.

“Gennie was lauded by every clairvoyant Miss Grice ushered into her parlour. But as her fame began to spread outside Cedar Gables, so my sister started to change. You have to understand, it happened gradually over months and years, tiny incremental alterations in our relationship and Gennie’s idea of herself. I’m not sure when I finally realised that she now believed, utterly and completely, that her talents were real.”

Listening to Evangeline, I suddenly flashed back to what I’d said to Harry about Aunt Tilda. “She’s been playing this role all her life, remember. I don’t even think she knows she’s making it up.” I wondered how many mediums began and ended this way.

“Miss Grice died from a stroke when I was nineteen,” Evangeline continued. “By that time, my little sister had become our cousin’s favourite pet. Cedar Gables and all the Grice wealth was left in trust to Gennie. But by then, things were already falling apart. The press had got wind of the child who spoke to the dead, and after a couple of years of unrelenting publicity, my sister suffered a kind of breakdown.

“I tried to talk to her. Tried to make her remember how the whole thing had started—just a silly game helped along by a well-meaning fortune teller. But Gennie had lost herself in a world of shadows. Her entire self-worth was tied up in the identity I had helped her forge. Even though she’d begun to shun the spotlight, she couldn’t let go of this crucial truth about herself, and for the next twenty years, she maintained absolute belief of her psychic gifts.”

The wind stirred in the valley below, whistling among the rocks, crackling the frosted trees.

“Until she was shown that it wasn’t real?” I suggested. “The podcast with Dr Gillespie, when he demonstrated to her how she did her tricks?”

Evangeline’s eyes narrowed. “Why couldn’t he have left her alone? You’re right, Mr Jericho. I believe it was that moment that shattered my sister completely. All those years of self-deception crashing down upon her in a single, devasting moment. And then she saw the news about that man, Everwood, and the claims that he was a fraud and that he’d been inspired by her own story. She told me how responsible she felt for that. How guilty, that we’d perpetuated another generation of liars. You know, I think in the end, she was so miserable, so desperate, she probably welcomed death.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“But why would Gennie feel responsible for Darrel Everwood’s lies?” I asked.

“Because of the book,” Miss Bell said. “At the height of her fame, we were contacted by a publicist called Rose, I think—it’s so long ago, I can’t be sure of the name. Anyway, he wanted to represent Gennie. He’d already lined up a lucrative book deal with a major publisher. By this time, Miss Grice was dead and my mother eagerly signed the contract on our behalf. Hearing the Dead: The Story of Genevieve Bell is pretty much forgotten now, but in its day, it was a bestseller.”

“Some old book inspired him to get into the medium business,” I murmured, remembering something Nick had told me. “So after your sister was humiliated by Dr Gillespie on the podcast, she learned that Darrel Everwood had taken inspiration for his career from her book?”

Evangeline nodded. “That’s what she told me. Although I’d moved away in my early twenties, we’d always tried to stay in touch at least once a week. But in that last month, she was on the phone with me multiple times a day. Everything I’d been trying to tell her for the past two decades—the memories she’d buried, the truth of how it had all started—all of it was suddenly crashing down on her. She realised she’d spent her entire life unconsciously deceiving people. And now, as she read about a children’s magician who’d picked up her book in a charity shop and coveted her celebrity, she began to feel a suffocating sense of responsibility.”

Evangeline plucked out another cigarette and lit up. “I think that’s how the preacher got his claws into her.”

I stared at her. “What preacher?”

“Oh.” She waved the smouldering tip. “Some ranting nutcase who came delivering pamphlets about a week after the podcast aired. Gennie happened to answer the door to him and they fell into conversation. He was a young man, apparently, and so had no idea who she was. But what with Gillespie and Everwood fresh in her mind, she was more than ready to hear how wicked and depraved she had been. But there was hope, of course! That’s the one carrot these godly men always hold out. Just make a small donation to my church and I’ll pray for your blighted soul.”

“And did she?” I asked.

“I believe so. A few thousand, anyway. To the Church of Christ the Redeemer, care of a Mr Christopher Cloade. I’m currently trying to get it back, but everything’s snarled up in probate.”

“Did your sister become actively involved with this church?” I asked.

“I don’t believe so. She was killed not long after that first donation.”

Links were forging everywhere—with Tilda, with Everwood, with Christopher Cloade, and with Joseph Gillespie.

“Going back a