The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told by Martin H. Greenberg

particular reason?”
    “My sister plays it all the time. It gets on my nerves.”
    “Does it have to do with this séance?”
    “Can’t you call Mr. Escott?”
    “I could, but you didn’t make an appointment for this late or he’d be here.”
    “My appointment is for tomorrow, but something’s happened since I made it, and I need to speak with him tonight. I came by just in case he worked late. The light was on and a car was out front . . . ”
    I checked his appointment book. In his precise hand he’d written 10 AM, Abigail Saeger . “Spell that name again?”
    She did so, correct for both.
    “What’s the big emergency?” I asked. “If this is something I can’t handle I’ll let him know, but otherwise you’ll find I’m ready, able, and willing.”
    “I don’t mean to offend, but you look rather young for such work. Over the phone I thought Mr. Escott to be . . . more mature.”
    Escott and I were the same age but I did look younger by over a decade. On the other hand, if she thought a man in his mid-thirties was old, then she’d be something of a kid herself. Her light voice told me as much, though you couldn’t tell by her mannerisms and speech, which bore a finishing school’s not so subtle polish.
    “Miss Saeger, would you mind raising your blinds? I like to see who’s hiring before I take a job.”
    She went still a moment, then lifted her veil. As I thought, a fresh-faced kid who should be home studying, but her eyes were red-rimmed, her expression serious.
    “That’s better. What can I do for you?”
    “My older sister, Flora, is holding a séance tonight. She’s crazy to talk with her dead husband, and there’s a medium taking advantage of her. He wants her money, and more.”
    “A fake medium?”
    “Is there any other kind?”
    I smiled, liking her. “Give me the whole story, same as you’d have told to Mr. Escott.”
    “You’ll help me?”
    “I need to know more first.” I said it in a tone to indicate I was interested.
    She plunged in, talking fast, but I had good shorthand and scribbled notes.
    Miss Saeger and her older sister Flora were alone, their parents long dead. But Flora had money in trust and married into more money after getting hitched to James Weisinger, Jr., who inherited a tidy fortune some years ago. The Depression had little effect on them. Flora became a widow last August when her still-young husband died in a sailing accident on Lake Michigan.
    I’d been killed on that lake. “Sure it was an accident?”
    “A wind shift caused the boom to swing around. It caught him on the side of the head and over he went. I still have nightmares about the awful thud when it hit him and the splash, but it’s worse for Flora—she was at the wheel at the time. She blames herself. No one else does. There were half a dozen people aboard who knew sailing. That kind of thing can happen out of the blue.”
    I vaguely remembered reading about it in the paper. Nothing like some rich guy getting killed while doing rich-guy stuff to generate copy.
    “Poor James never knew what hit him, it was just that fast. Flora was in hysterics and had to be drugged for a week. Then she kept to her bed nearly a month, then she read some stupid article in a magazine about using a Ouija boards to talk to spirits and got it into her head that she had to contact James, to apologize to him.”
    “That opened the door?”
    “James is dead, and if he did things right he’s in heaven and should stay there—in peace.” Miss Saeger growled in disgust. “I’ve gotten Flora’s pastor to talk to her, but she won’t listen to him. I’ve talked to her until we both end up screaming and crying, and she won’t see sense. I’m just her little sister and don’t know anything, you see.”
    “What’s so objectionable?”
    “Her obsession. It’s not healthy. I thought after all this time she’d lose interest, but she’s gotten worse. Every week she has a gaggle of those creeps from the Society