Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (11 page)

I know, see. I have known
these things for quite a long time, at least in the intellectual
sense. It's my belly that just does not want to go along, and it
was my belly that put me at Janulski's throat instead of taking a
long, careful look at the experience—and maybe then going for his
throat. Because even if I fully accepted spirit communications and
all that, it is a field tailor-made for charlatans, and their
numbers are legion. In fact, there are obviously more charlatans
than mystics in spiritualism. So I don't buy just anyone who comes
down the pike. In fact I had not bought anyone at that time, even
though I'd encountered a few whom I could not readily debunk.
Reasonable skepticism should move a guy just so far, though. Mine
had moved me too far too fast in the matter of Janulski and his
mediums.

But, see—what really moved
me was not as much skepticism as the feeling of trespass into a
highly sensitive personal area. Trespass, that is, with intent to
hoodwink and deceive. Here too, though, my reaction was not
consistent with the experience. The whole thing had been conducted
in broad daylight and with absolutely no apparent means of
introducing theatrical special effects. I saw and heard with my own
eyes and ears; I was very positively impressed that it was an
authentic experience
, while it was
happening
. It was only in afterthought
that I felt the need to reject it.

At the bottom line, then, I have had to
accept the unhappy conclusion that I reacted the way I did against
Janulski because I almost desperately wanted the experience to be
a valid one. I had to prove it. So something in my gut—or something
in the way I work—fired me up and sent me via rage to prove it in
the only way available: by trying and failing to disprove it.

Well, let me tell you, I shook down Annie's
private office —where I had the earlier conversation with
Janulski—and found no electronics whatever. Just for the record,
one of my Pentagon specialties was electronic countermeasures; I
know where to look and how to look for electronic eavesdropping
devices.

I had already begun to feel a bit sheepish
even before the completion of that search. Janulski had followed me
from the conference room and was standing just inside the office in
a grimly quiet watch of my activities. The three mediums and two
other ladies were hovering about just outside. The sweep required
only about two minutes. I stepped past Janulski, told him, "Okay,
so I'm a jerk," and went out to apologize to the mediums.

They already knew I was a jerk but
apparently they did not know what had set me off. Rachel graciously
accepted my apology and pointedly told me, "We are merely
channels, you know. We provide the machinery on this side, and
that's all. We don't even know what has been divulged unless we
listen to the tape or read a transcript."

Ted shook my hand and waved off the apology.
"People often get upset," he said, dismissing the entire
incident.

Hilda merely smiled and walked away.

That left Janulski. He
carefully closed the door to Annie's office as he said to me, as
though none of it had happened, "We can check the tape if you're
foggy on any of the details. But since we got a tutorial this time
we have to have a double verification—that is, two independent
tran-scriptions for comparison—before I can even touch that tape.
So it will be a few minutes."

We walked outside and sat in the gazebo so I
could have a smoke. I asked him, "You put a lot of stock in these
tutorials?"

He replied, "Wouldn't we
be terribly foolish not to?"

I said, "I guess it would depend on the
source."

He said, "Good point. But we feel very
secure about that."

I wondered, "What if it's coming from a
mother ship in earth orbit?"

He shrugged and said, "It would have to be a
very large mother. How many people would you say pass each day from
this planet?"

I shrugged, too, and
replied, "Look at how far we've come ourselves already with
micro-technology. Maybe they could store a whole soul on a chip no
bigger than a single human cell. Call it up and play it back
anytime they want to, just like we do in a computer."

He said, "You'll go to any length, won't
you, to deny that you met your father today."

I sighed and told him, "Looks that way,
doesn't it."

He said, "He seemed like a nice man. I can
tell you that he has reached a very exalted level over there. I
have never seen that particular effect before. I mean, the way he
became manifest. We never get more than vocal effects. But he came
in visually both times."

"When was the other time?"

"He came in that way last
night during a routine contact with my regular guides. Told me that
he was taking a special interest in our project during this time of
stress and that he would advise me directly from time to time. He
also mentioned you, and I had the impression that there had been a
father-son thing between you in another incarnation. But really,
Ashton, there's no mistaking what he was talking about today.
Believe me, it shocked me as much as it did you. But I can
understand why you'd—I mean, the way you felt about it and all.
That would have been really too bald of me, wouldn't it, if I could
have set up something like that. Honestly, I wouldn't know how to
do it."

I said, "Guess I wouldn't either. Why
couldn't he hear me when I spoke to him?"

"Gosh that
was
strange, wasn't it.
Come to think of it, he didn't give me a chance to speak to him
last night either."

I suggested, "It was like a television
broadcast, wasn't it. You know like these hookups they're beaming
from a remote location to a studio."

Janulski thought about
that for a moment before replying, "Well no, because he could see
us. He just couldn't hear us."

I said, "So one of the audio links was down.
Could we ask Rachel about that? How she did that relay?'

"Rachel didn't do that," he told me. "It was
the guide on the other side using Rachel. She knows less about it
than we do."

I said, "She doesn't know much, then."

Janulski chuckled soberly.
"You're still a bit shocked. When you stop to think about it,
you'll realize that we know all we need to know. That's the way
this works. It doesn't matter, Ashton, if it's coming from a mother
ship or Alpha Centauri or Cleveland. What matters is that we are
receiving help from someone a lot smarter than we are. Call it
whatever you like. But good heavens, don't disregard it just
because you can't figure out how you're getting it."

I replied, "Oh, I'm not going to disregard
it." I pulled the notepad out of my pocket and stared at my
jottings. "This is a tutorial, eh?"

"Yes. Of course, we have to decipher
it."

"Sounds like epigrams. Most of it,
anyway."

"The really important teachings come that
way. Don't ask why, that's simply the way it's done." He shrugged
and showed me a tired smile. "Maybe that's the only way they can
get it cleared for transmission."

I smiled back, told him, "Dear old Dad
didn't seem to have that problem. He gave me a literal
message."

“
Selma came home today?
That's what you mean?”

"That's the one, yeah."

"We get those from time to time. It's not so
literal."

"What does it mean?"

The smile grew tireder. He scratched his
face, looked at the ground, and told me, "I don't know who Selma
was on earth, Ashton. But you must. It simply means that somebody
died."

I knew that, yeah. I knew that.

Chapter Fourteen: A Resolving Focus

Selma came home, yes, but it was Clara Boone
who had officially died shortly after I dropped her at her home
that morning. She'd suffered a severe stroke—apparently the result
of "thrombus of the internal carotid artery"—and died minutes after
calmly notifying a 911 operator that she was in difficulty. The
paramedics found her front door invitingly open and Clara dead on
the couch when they arrived. They transported the body to County
General for an official DOA enroute to the morgue. A card in her
purse pointed authorities toward a local attorney as the person to
notify in the event of death but they had not been able to contact
him. I gave them my name and number and asked that I be informed
as to the ultimate disposition of the body, then I went to Eagle
Rock.

Clara's house was locked
but there were no police seals so I defeated the locks and went on
inside. It looked pretty much as I had visualized it in
there—gracious and tidy but very small, really—about a
twelve-by-fifteen living room, tiny dining nook with access to a
cement patio, kitchen, a single bedroom, simple bathroom with just
room enough for toilet, basin, and tub; laundry porch off the
kitchen.

I poked about, not really
knowing what I was looking for but hoping to find another tie to
Reverend Annie and the Church of Light situation. It was a bit
uncomfortable going through Clara's personal things. I'd barely
known her, sure, but still there is that feeling of trespass when
you're sifting through the pitiful remnants of a life. Buried in a
dresser drawer beneath sweet-smelling but very old lingerie was a
savings bank passbook showing a balance of less than five thousand
dollars. There'd been no deposits during the life span of that
passbook—a period of several years—but monthly withdrawals in small
amounts. She'd probably lived as simply as possible; there was
evidence enough of that all around me.

This was a maiden lady; seventy-five years
on the planet and never married. Apparently she left no family
whatever. In a moldy and tattered photo album on a bedside table I
found a photostat of her birth certificate, a few yellowed mementos
of her school days, about forty faded snapshots with illegible
captions but obviously taken a very long time ago and showing men
with handlebar mustaches and stiffly corseted ladies. Then there
were another twenty or so from a later era—thirties, obviously—each
showing a dazzlingly beautiful and glamorous Clara in various
costumes and usually with a man but never the same one. These
looked very much like promotional stills from old movies.

I hit pay dirt at about
mid-album. It was into the forties. Clara was more mature but still
alluringly beautiful. Ten full pages of the album were covered
front and back with small box-camera type snapshots, each one
depicting Clara and the same handsome young man in affectionate
poses. I was sure it was Clara in each of these but I would not
have tumbled for sure to the guy except for the blown-up
eight-by-ten that came at the end of that sequence. It was a beach
setting and I could tell by the background that the photo was taken
at Malibu and I could even narrow it closer than that. The houses
shown behind the subjects were homes at the Malibu Colony. And
Clara had told me...

But the guy...

There was simply no doubt about it. It was
the same guy that appeared in the preceding dozens of
snapshots.

And that guy was a younger
and handsomer but still unmistakable Francois Mirabel.

Did I say pay dirt?

My mistake. I should have
said bonanza because I was looking, remember, for ties. And because
the five pages following that eight-by-ten were filled with
pictures of Francois and another woman whom I did not recognize.
And although the earlier photos of Francois and Clara were
obviously all taken at nearly the same time, this series was spread
over a number of years. Quite a number of years, because I watched
the growth of a child in that series of old pictures. It was a girl
child and she joined the couple in those photos as a toddler. The
series ended with her at about ten. Another series picked up at
that point but carried the mother and child only into the child's
midteens. And there was simply no doubt that this was young
Reverend Annie.

A bonanza, yeah, with my
friend Francois tied a hell of a lot closer than I would ever have
guessed. It occurred to me, in that realization, that the man was
probably in very grave danger. Because it seemed that everyone with
ties to Annie was dying.

I hit the Century Towers at just a few
minutes past five o'clock and found Francois all alone in his
offices. He was having a business conference with Rome and handling
the fast Italian patter with no show of difficulty. I helped myself
to some water on the rocks and stood at the window looking at
nothing, trying to draw the pieces of my brain together for some
kind of a coherent picture of this dizzying case.

First of
all...
what
case?

I had known from that first visit to Church
of the Light that I was involved in something and that it had come
to me—not vice versa. I had felt the tingle that raises my hackles
even before that meeting with David Carver on the night that
Milhaul died; the tingle had come from Annie, not from Carver—yet
Carver tingled me too in reverse fashion and set me up for the
late-night visit by Bruce Janulski and the urgent summons by one of
the world's richest men, Francois Mirabel.

Everyone was pushing a
case at me—even Annie, in that first meeting when she told me that
we would meet again and that we would fall in love; this
immediately after publicly declaring over and over that she had
been a target for murder and then privately telling me that she had
known in advance that I would save her. Apparently Francois had
contacted me at Annie's behest. A couple of hours later she was
telling me to get lost.