Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (6 page)

Clara awakened me at seven
o'clock with breakfast on the table. I sat down to mouth-watering
scratch biscuits and scrambled eggs and thoroughly enjoyed the
meal. But Clara was seventy-five again. She was absentminded,
sometimes confused, and did not seem to exactly understand where
she was or why. Her legs ached and she was terribly worried about
her birds and who was going to feed them. So I asked if she wanted
me to take her home and it was obviously the right thing to say; it
made her day.

I first told her that
David Carver had died in the accident and I warned her that it
could be awhile before the police released her car and/or continued
her driving privileges. I also warned her about the press. She
exhibited only a momentary sadness over Carver's death but was
really upset about the car. I promised to look into the problem for
her but this did little to allay her distress.

"I could walk to my birds," she said
tremulously, "but how would I ever get to my sittings without my
car?"

"What sittings?" I wanted to know.

"I have life sittings every Tuesday and
Friday," she replied. "And I simply must have my car."

So I called Paul Stewart and asked him to
massage the bureaucracy and get the car delivered to Clara without
delay. He almost grudgingly agreed to do that. He also wondered if
I was onto anything yet. I told him yeah, that I'd picked up a
promising tremor or two and that I would keep him informed.

Enroute to Eagle Rock with Clara, I wanted
to pursue that business about the life sittings.

Didn't bother her a bit. Apparently she had
no secrets. "It's like memoirs," she told me. "Life to life."

"Life to life?"

"Yes. At my age, you see, this is very
important. I am preparing for the next one."

"The next what, Clara?'

"The next life, of course. Isn't that what
we are talking about?"

Okay. Sure. "How do you go about preparing
for that?"

"We review. That will speed things up
later."

"What things?"

"The selection of the next life. You are a
grown man, my dear. Isn't it time you started thinking about your
true self?"

I always thought I did. But maybe not. I
told her, "Guess I've always been too enmeshed in the present life,
Clara."

"Well that's the problem, you see. We all do
that. And then we never really know where we are or who we
are."

I said, "I'm Ashton Ford, Planet Earth,
Citizen First Class. Who are you?"

That tickled her. She
replied, "I was born this time as Clara Boone. But you must
understand, this was not the first borning. And I certainly hope it
shall not be the last."

We were talking reincarnation. I have always
had an open mind on the subject but very mixed feelings about the
aesthetics of the idea.

I said, "So this
review
is
uh..."

"An attempt to see the present life in its
proper relation to previous lives. Have I continued the growth plan
or have I veered away? What must I do in the next life to stay on
the track or to get back on it?"

"Uh huh. And you think that by doing this
now..."

"My dear Mr. Ford, you
must recognize that I am a very old woman. How much longer could I
have? And if I die confused...well, I shall very probably take that
confusion with me. It could take me eons to find my way back to the
proper life."

I am aware that the idea
of recurring lives in this same system sounds crack-brained to many
people. But it is an idea that has been with us since prehistory,
and it has been entertained or embraced by some of our greatest
minds. Virtually every primitive culture has some version of
reincarnation at the center of its religious thinking. It is a
global idea, existing wherever mankind is, throughout Africa and
Asia, Europe and America, in all the island nations, wherever man
has paused to wonder about his origins and his fate, seeping into
his art and literature, his sciences and philosophies. Longfellow's
famous Song of Hiawatha embraces the idea in the farewell
speech:

I am going, O my people,

On a long and distant journey;

Many moons and many winters

Will have come, and will have vanished,

Ere I come again to see you.

Hiawatha was an actual
figure. He was also known as Manabhozho and was a messianic figure
for the Indians who expected him to return to life at some time
with great power over the final fate of humankind. The speech
quoted is a dying farewell, in almost the same spirit as Jesus at
the Last Supper and Kahlil Gibran's
Prophet.

Though once thought to be
an idea peculiar to certain Asian religions, modern scholars have
discovered that the idea had wide currency throughout early
America, both north and south, and even the Eskimos have a
reincarnation tradition. Similarly, the ancients of Europe—from
Scandinavia to Italy—believed in reincarnation and the idea
persisted into the Christian era. Indeed, scholars can point to
many examples of early Christian and Jewish thought centering on
rebirth, also among the Greeks and Romans—most notably Heraclitus,
Herodotus, Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Lucretius, Ovid
and Vergil, even the Emperor Julian.

But that's all primitive shit, you
say—enlightened people of this modem age cannot be expected to
swallow that stuff.

Well maybe not, but here
are a few Who have tasted it: Joseph Addison, Louisa May Alcott,
Hervey Allen, Honoré de Balzac, James M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett,
William Blake, Johann Ehlert Bode, Napoleon Bonaparte, Bernard
Bosanquet, Francis Bowen, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Browning,
Pearl S. Buck, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Luther Burbank, Samuel
Butler, Tomasso Campanella, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Carpenter, Edgar
Cayce, Gina Cerminara, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel T. Coleridge,
Sir Humphrey Davy, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, John Donne,
Feodor Dostoevsky, Lord Hugh Dowding, Arthur Conan Doyle, John
Dryden, Thomas Edison, T. S. Eliot, Queen Elizabeth of Austria,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Henry Ford,
Benjamin Franklin, Frederick the Great, Robert Frost, Mohandas K.
Gandhi, Paul Gauguin, David Lloyd George, J.W. von Goethe, G. W. F.
Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Herman Hesse, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Victor
Hugo, David Hume, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Thomas H. Huxley,
Henrik Ibsen, William James, Mary Johnston, James Jones, James
Joyce, Carl G. Jung, Imman- uel Kant, S0ren Kierkegaard, Rudyard
Kipling, Joseph Wood Krutch, G. W. Leibniz, D.H. Lawrence, Pierre
Leroux, G.E. Lessing, John Leyden, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jack
London, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gustav
Mahler, Norman Mailer, John Masefield, Somerset Maugham, Herman
Melville, Henry Miller, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eugene
O'Neill, Edgar Allan Poe, J.B. Priestley, Ernest Renan, Jean Paul
Richter, Rainer Maria Rilke, J. D. Salinger, George Sand, Friedrich
Schiller, Friedrich von Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sir Walter
Scott, Ernest Thompson Seton (founder of Boy Scouts of America),
William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Robert Southey, Edmund Spenser, Benedict Spinoza, Robert Stroud
(Birdman of Alcatraz), Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau,
Leo Tolstoy, Voltaire, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf
Whittier, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth, William Butler
Yeats...

I go to all this trouble for Clara's sake,
to put her in good company in your mind. She is really a sweet and
sincere lady and does not appear at all kooky except in this single
respect. Thomas Carlyle once wrote, "Every new opinion, at its
starting, is precisely in a minority of one." That "minority of
one" may always seem kooky to the rest of us. But 'taint
necessarily so. As with Clara. She complains again of her legs then
asks me, "Did she walk me a lot yesterday or something?"

I said, a bit startled by the question,
"What?"

"What did you and Selma do while I was
gone?"

"Selma?"

"Yes. My cosmic self. Didn't you know she
was here?"

I had not known that, no—or had I? I told
Clara, "We walked on the beach. Don't you remember? Later we
toasted marshmallows above the breakers then relaxed in front of
the fireplace. Don't you remember any of that?"

Clara replied in all sobriety, "No, I wasn't
here for any of that. That's why my legs hurt. Selma always walks
them off."

I thought about that for a couple of
minutes, then asked her, "Exactly what is a cosmic self?"

"Selma is the real me," is the way she put
it.

"And where is Selma when she is not
here?"

"Oh she's always here but—you know—just sort
of looking and listening."

"Have you ever talked
directly with her, Clara?"

"Well yes, of course, that is what the life
sittings are all about."

I said, "Uh huh. Is there a medium involved?
Is this like a stance?"

"No no." She giggled. "Heavens, I don't
commune with spirits. We just all sort of get together and start
talking. You see, my circle is composed of fellow pilgrims."

"What does that mean?" I asked warily.

"Cosmic clusters. We began together, you
see. Long ago. And we always manage to stick close together on
earth. Will, that is, we try to." She made a sorrowful face.
"Sometimes it takes most of a lifetime to get all the pilgrims
together in recognition of one another."

I said, "I see," but I did not see.

I did, though, get an idea.

"Was Maybelle one of your pilgrims?"

"Yes indeed."

"A man named McSweeney?"

"Yes. Poor George suffered a terrible
regression this time. He'll do better next time."

"Milhaul?"

"How did you know this?"

"Maybe I got it from Selma," I replied
grimly. "Was Milhaul one of your group?"

She said with a quiet sigh, "That's right,
that's right. Poor soul. I had forgotten. That is what your Mr.
Carver came to talk to me about yesterday. Poor Esther."

I was getting very confused. "Who is Esther,
Clara?"

"Well you see, that is—you
see...Herman Milhaul was in a terrible pickle. Esther is Herman's
cosmic self. And Esther was very uncomfortable with Herman's
present body."

I said, "Damn."

"Nobody is ever really damned," Clara gently
advised me. "It may seem that way sometimes but... well, we just
need to look to the next horizon."

We were approaching her
house and I had the strongest feeling that I would not be talking
with Clara again, ever. I pulled into her drive and went around to
open the door for her; our gazes clashed and I had that shivery
feeling again and I heard myself saying, "Thank you for last night,
Selma."

Selma or Clara or someone replied, "Oh thank
you, Ashton."

Clara, you see, always
called me Mr. Ford. And it was Clara who struggled from the car and
onto her feet, wincing with the discomfort in those tired old legs.
But I had to ask her one more.

"Is Reverend Annie one of your
pilgrims?"

"Who?"

"Ann Farrel, pastor of the Church of the
Light."

"Oh, you mean Ann Marie. Maybelle's
daughter. No, no—heavens, I don't know about that girl. Sometimes I
wonder if—never mind, never mind. I always say if you can't speak
well of a person then you should not speak at all."

The subject was obviously closed. I walked
Clara to her front door, kissed her on the cheek, and got the hell
away from there.

I had about ten thousand questions trembling
at the front of my brain but not tongue enough to utter a single
one. And I did not know where the hell to go from there.

Chapter Eight: Life at the Surface of the
Planet

Possibly I had stumbled
onto the "tie" that David Carver was looking for when he died. If
so, then, it was a very untidy package and the string was running
everywhere. Clara had seemed very emphatic that Reverend Annie was
not involved in the group of pilgrims, which however did include
three of those who had died. If it was true that the late Maybelle
Turner was Annie's mother, then there was a tie of sorts—and the
fact that Milhaul and McSweeney were tied both to the pilgrims and
to the Church of Light, if true, provided another loop to the knot.
Certainly Reverend Annie appeared to be the common denominator in
all of that, but I was not ready to leap to that conclusion, not
yet.

Had Carver become entangled in that string?
Or was his death exactly what it appeared to be, a grisly but
innocent misfortune which could befall anyone anywhere?

And what about Annie's
unfortunate past? Could any woman get that unlucky in love—four
times a widow? Of course she could, any woman could. Just because
it does not happen to all the people all the time does not mean
that it cannot happen. It does happen.

So what did I really have?

Hell, I had nothing except some unlucky
people, some very unfortunate people, and some kooky people. You
can get that mix/match anywhere you go. What I actually had was a
cop's gut suspicion... and those have been known to be
fallible.

Also, of course, I had a nervous financier
with possibly an overactive imagination and the means to go to any
idiot length to protect an investment.

So I found myself tilting
toward disengagement. I had other things to do with my time and I
really did not have a sponsor here anyway. That is about where I
was at in my head—the rest of me sort of drifting toward the
Beverly Hills Hotel and lunch at the Polo Lounge—when the car phone
rang and I received another summons from Francois. He wanted me to
"come quickly" to his offices in Century City. It is very difficult
to say no to Francois, especially when he is in an emotional state,
and I was only a few minutes away from there anyway when the call
came. So I dropped on down to Avenue of the Stars in Century City
and left my Maserati at the Century Plaza Hotel—because I won't
leave that car just anywhere and I like their valet service. The
plaza is a small city within a city—though a very uptown small city
with one of the area's plushest hotels, dozens of shops and
restaurants, theaters, Playboy Club, the ABC Entertainment Center,
and of course the Towers, twin monolithic high-rise office
buildings, site of the suite of offices maintained by the
incredible Francois. Not too long ago, the whole thing was part of
the 20th-century Fox back lot. Now it is about as uptown as you
will get in Southern California, Beverly Hills
notwithstanding.