Part 11 (2/2)

So I told him upon our second ”chance” meeting that I had a curious message for him. During a seance for friends in my room at the Palmer, an unfamiliar spirit voice had begged for attention, I said. The spirit kept repeating a series of numbers that meant nothing to me-twenty-four, eighteen, two-but promised it would mean something to Potter Palmer.

He said it meant nothing to him as well. What else did the spirit say?

Nothing, I said. That was all.

I heard nothing for three days. Then I received an expected note from Potter Palmer. The message meant Jeremiah, the twenty-fourth book of the Old Testament, Chapter 18, Verse 2: Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words.

Would it be possible for him to attend a seance in my room?

And so I hosted a session for old Potter and his wife, Bertha, and began to spin the tale of Constance Cleary, an unfortunate who had burned to death in the first hotel. He protested that was impossible, as none of the three hundred who perished in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 died in the Palmer House.

Ah, I said, that was what distressed the poor spirit so. No living soul knew her fate. Constance Cleary was a young and pregnant Irishwoman-just twenty-eight, the same age as his wife and me!-who had been at work as a charwoman some blocks down from the hotel the night of the fire. She had heard the alarm too late. The blaze had chased her from block to block; until finally, a few minutes after midnight, unable to run another step, she sought refuge in the fortress-like Palmer House.

And there she perished. . . . Her body and that of her unborn child were incinerated by the fire.

Potter Palmer had to know more, of course. Where was her family now? Had she other children? Had the husband remarried?

He offered to pay for more sessions, but I would not hear of it. We were, after all, both interested in doing good. Of course, the spirit required certain things for communication. Constance was worried about me, for one, and asked that I be relocated to a comfortable cottage away from the city, where I could get proper rest.

As time pa.s.sed, the seances had to become more elaborate to keep up old Potter's interest. A spirit cabinet was installed in a corner of my cottage, from which came floating trumpets and ghostly hands and mystical messages written on slates.

More details of Constance's demise emerged: taps from which no water came because the city waterworks had failed, towels stuffed under the door to keep out the smoke, hideous fingers of flame that raced across the walls and ceiling in the final desperate minutes.

Finally there appeared from the spirit cabinet a luminous full-form apparition of Constance, complete with ghost child, courtesy of my friends at Sylvestre & Company. The ghost cried piteously. Old Potter was beside himself. He even climbed inside the cabinet to comfort her. What could he possibly do to ease the spirit's suffering? he asked.

A hundred thousand dollars to establish a home for fire orphans, Constance said. The money could be deposited with Ophelia Wylde, who would wisely administer the fund using her other powers.

And it nearly worked, too.

But the morning I was to receive the money, the Pinkertons came knocking on my cottage door. Perhaps I had become too friendly with old Potter inside the spirit cabinet and jealous Bertha Palmer had called the detectives to check me out. The agency already had a dossier on my activities in Cincinnati, where the pork baron had sworn a warrant out for my arrest and topped it off with a thousand-dollar reward. It seems he had no sense of humor-or of history. Had anybody who had ever fallen in love with Cleopatra lived happily ever after?

I barely had time to grab my valise and Eddie's cage as I fled out the back.

17.

The cowboy with the jack of diamonds tucked into his hatband slunk into the Saratoga at about three o'clock on Friday afternoon. He was still in the red bib s.h.i.+rt and the red bandana that I had seen when I stepped over him at the railway platform, but he must have bathed and had his clothes washed since, because he nearly looked presentable. Also, he was only somewhat drunk.

He spotted my table when he came in off the street, but it took him time to work his way back. First he pa.s.sed out a handful of cigars, which, he said, were courtesy of Mike McGlue. Then he paused long enough at the bar to knock back a couple of shots before circ.u.mambulating on to my table.

”Want a cigar?” he asked.

”Why not?”

The cigar smelled expensive. The band said, Key West. I put it into my inside pocket for later.

”I was at the opera house the other night. Remember me?”

”How could I forget?”

”I forget some things,” he confessed, throwing himself into a chair.

”Do you think it might be your consumption of alcohol?”

”I drink to forget. It works, for a spell.”

”I first met you at the bottom of the steps at the railway depot,” I said. ”You don't remember that?”

He shook his head.

”Why do this to yourself?”

”Because I am deranged by melancholy.”

He took a ragged newspaper clipping from his pocket and pushed it across the table. It was a wire story from the Kansas City Times, five months old, about the Ashtabula Horror. A Lake Sh.o.r.e and Michigan Southern Railway express was crossing the snow-laden Ashtabula River Bridge in Ohio when the iron trusses failed and plunged a locomotive and eleven cars down seventy feet to the frozen river below. The wooden cars piled on top of each other and became a funeral pyre ignited by kerosene heating stoves and lamps. Ninety-two people died, some of them burned beyond recognition; another sixty-four persons were badly injured.

”What am I looking for?”

”There,” the cowboy said, jabbing his finger at a name among the list of the dead. ”That's my sister, Kathryn Murdock. She was only twenty-three. They had to identify her by a favorite necklace she wore.”

The cowboy dropped his face to his forearms, sobbing. ”Oh, how she must have suffered!”

”And you've been grieving these five months.”

”I have been drunk these five months,” he said. ”I learned of the horror when I was in Kansas City and have been drifting since, drifting from ranch to range, from city to town. My folks in Ohio don't even know where I'm at. Been in Dodge for the last couple of weeks.”

”And they haven't locked you up as a vagrant?”

”They won't, as long as I have drinking money.”

I sighed. ”What's your name?”

”Jim Murdock,” he said. ”Folks call me 'Diamond Jim.'”

”What is it you want to do, Jim?”

”I seen you talk to the dead at the opera house. I reckoned you could talk to Kate for me.” Now his voice grew to a whisper. ”There are some things that I wanted to tell her that I didn't have a chance. I would give anything to talk to her one last time.”

Just about every ordinary person who has ever wanted me to contact the dearly departed for them has had a similar wish. We humans, sadly, are an arrogant lot and believe that we have all the time in the world to say the important things. Maybe we just can't face the truth that any of us can be extinguished in the blink of an eye.

”Jim, it's not as simple as it looked the other night.”

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