Perusing The Novels

     She smiled before turning to a little bar area. “Ariel! What a lovely name. Something out of Shakespeare. And you must call me Jessamine.” I watched while she made two cups of tea with water from an instant hot tap.

     “I was wondering about your name. Does it come from jasmine, perhaps?”

     “Probably. That’s the state flower of South Carolina. I think my mother was hoping for a daughter who’d be a little more the Southern belle type. She was a romantic. You know, I think she was yearning more for the 1860s than the 1960s when I was born—while other people were being hippies, she was building a sort of myth about planning barbecues on the mansion lawn under oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Oh, well, do we ever live up to our parents’ expectations?” She paused to set the tea in front of me, along with sugar, cream, and a little dish of lemon slices.

     “We were actually a very ordinary family, and from the Midwest, at that, not from the South.” She settled down in the chair nearest the one I was in and picked up her cup. “But I was taught to have high expectations for myself, and they turned out not to be the same expectations my mother had for me. So here I am, a lady lawyer practicing corporate law of a kind, on the fringe of Washington, D.C. Truth to tell, I really wanted to be a trial lawyer when I started out—not a trial to my mother. But I’m still trying—trying to be a good daughter, trying to be a good mother ... and that’s why I’ve asked you here.”

     I smiled at her while thinking how often people will tell their whole life histories in the first couple of minutes with a stranger—almost as if they’re afraid they’ll never get another chance to present themselves as they’d like to be seen and remembered. I nodded encouragingly, sure she’d continue without my having to ask her to.

     Jessamine’s face changed from relaxed to tense and slightly angry. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, and I looked around to see a stunningly handsome man standing just inside the door, looking at us. He had an almost cat-like grace and a great deal of magnetic charm. He was clearly charismatic, and I could see how people would be attracted to him personally.

     “Temper, temper, Jessamine. My lawyer asked me to deliver these papers to your lawyer,” he said, and he strode over to the receptionist and handed her a large envelope. Then he came toward us. Looking at me, he extended his hand. “You must be Jessamine’s expert witness. I’m Jordan Steele, Jessamine’s expert ex.”

     I raised my hand to shake his. “Ariel Quigley,” I said. As our hands touched, I immediately felt an energy drain and regretted having acted automatically. ... At the same time, I felt totally walled off, as if my psychic ability had been put in a box and couldn’t get out.  I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific, but I knew he was trying to look into my head. Immediately, I went inside my mind, collected my energy, and surrounded myself—and Jessamine—with white light. Within a couple of milliseconds, I could breathe again. I pulled my hand away from his and watched as he visibly reacted to the shift in my energy. Then he gave me a little wink and a Machiavellian smile.

     “Okay, Ariel and Bernice, meet the Loo-Loo Ladies. We’re all writers of a sort and have been friends for years. In fact, we all went to Mary Washington College together, class of 1990.”

     She gestured to the woman on my right, a statuesque blonde in a red dress. “In the red corner, we have Lorelei Warren, a juvenile court lawyer, soon to be judge, we hope. She’s written articles about family court law for journals and magazines. Don’t let her hair color fool you—she knows how to close the Velcro strips on her runners. Actually, I’m maligning her with faint praise—she’s the sharpest stiletto in the shoe box. She’s a whole lot smarter than I am, because she’s never gotten married. Over to you Lorelei—you do the next introduction.”

     “Ah thank you for those kind words, my deah,” said Lorelei in a rich Southern drawl. “To use your terminology, in the blue corna’ on Bernice’s right is Patricia Barnes.” I looked at the woman next to Bernice, an attractive woman in a blue suit, with shoulder-length auburn hair.

     Lorelei continued, “Now, Patricia is what you might call a ‘natalist,’ by which Ah mean she has a flock of children that she raises as a stay-at-home motha’. She can afford this ‘cause her sweet husband makes boodles of money as a beltway bandit suckin’ up government contracts doin’ somethin’ or other with computers. Now she hasn’t always been a lazy, stay-at-home, good for nothin’—she was once the leader of a UN political action committee, an’ she still serves on the board. Her book is about changin’ from career track to parenting track by choice, an’ not because of religion. Patricia, over to you.”

     The man who stepped up to the podium was about 55 years old, with thinning sandy hair, a mustache, and glasses. He was dressed casually but well, in dark gray slacks and a tweedy sport jacket, with a burgundy shirt and light gray tie. He wasn’t a commanding presence, standing only about 5’7”, but he had an air of success and affluence that can be quite attractive and inspirational, even charismatic. If I didn’t know better, I’d have pegged him as a TV evangelist.

     There was enthusiastic applause as a slightly rumpled, bearded man of about 40  wheeled out a cart with a long basin of water that had small models of three oil rigs evenly spaced along its length. ...

     “’Ello, everybody. I am French Canadian, so if you will excuse my accent, please, I will try to explain to you what you are seeing here.”

     He sounded very much like what I had experienced of English spoken by the Cajun French in Louisiana, with a pleasant sing-song quality.

Carter Wells

     "We were really shocked the day after the funeral when we sat down for breakfast. My 10-year-old son Billy had said he wanted to sit in Grandpa’s chair, and we let him do it. Then we heard footsteps coming downstairs, and Billy said, ‘Uh-oh, here comes Grandpa,’ and he got up and moved back to his former place."

     “The footsteps continued into the room, pausing first at the coffeepot, and then stopping at Grandpa’s chair..."

Angela Galloway

    “Yes. The girl upstairs is in her late 20s, and she suffered a terrible loss two years ago. Her twin sister, who was her closest friend and confidante, was killed in an automobile accident. And then she and her mother moved here. They bought the house because they thought it would be fun to have a friendly ghost on the premises. But from what I’m learning being on this side of life, there aren’t very many ghosts like Casper.”