High Spirits Read online

  Download the original attachment

  HIGH SPIRITS

  Alice Duncan

  Copyright © 2008 by Alice Duncan.

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  First Edition

  First Printing: November 2008

  Published in 2008 in conjunction with Tekno Books.

  Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

  Printed in the United States on permanent paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  (attached)

  In loving memory of Edwin O. Hammer,

  who was very fond of Daisy.

  I wish he could read her further adventures.

  Chapter One

  If it had been anyone else in the world who asked me, I wouldn’t have done it. As it was, I turned down Mrs. Kincaid several times before I finally capitulated to her entreaties. I didn’t want to do it even then. And, in spite of the fact that I made Mrs. Kincaid’s son (and my best friend) Harold, accompany me, the job turned out to be every bit as bad as I’d anticipated. Maybe worse.

  I suppose I’d better elaborate. My name is Daisy Gumm Majesty. In 1921, when all of this took place, I lived with my husband in a pretty little bungalow on South Marengo Avenue in the lovely city of Pasadena, California. Back then Pasadena was a haven for wealthy people from back East and from the moving picture industry. The two privileged groups didn’t always spin in the same circles, but they all wanted me.

  The above isn’t a boast. It’s a cold, hard fact. You see, at the time I earned my living (and that of my husband) as a spiritualist medium. I don’t think there were more than a couple of wealthy matrons in the whole city who didn’t call on my services at least once.

  When they did, most of them wanted me to get in touch with dead relatives through my spirit control, a Scottish chap named Rolly who couldn’t spell very well because he’d never attended school. Rolly’s one more aspect of my career I’d thought up when I was ten, and he’d served me well since, although I sometimes wished I’d given him a more dignified name. I also read tarot cards, the Ouija board, crystal balls, and palms, although turning tables and blathering to dead people were my specialties.

  My husband Billy would have been more than happy to bring home the bacon for the both of us, but he couldn’t. In 1917, only a few weeks after he and I were united in holy matrimony, Billy went off to war. Before he left for the front, we thought fighting for the freedom of Europe against the wicked Kaiser and his German incursions was a brave and romantic thing to do.

  Our enthusiasm didn’t last long. Not only did I miss him terribly, but he hadn’t been in France for more than a month before the Germans gassed him out of his foxhole on the frontier and then shot him when he tried to crawl to safety. Billy almost died. I know for a fact that he often afterwards wished he had. When he finally came home to me, he was a wreck of his former self and confined to a wheelchair.

  I haven’t had much use for Germans ever since, although I’m sure that bespeaks an illogical prejudice on my part. On the other hand, if prejudices weren’t illogical, they wouldn’t be prejudices, would they?

  Billy didn’t approve of the way I earned our living. He let me know it every chance he got. He even went so far as to call me wicked on occasion. According to Father Frederick, a very kind Episcopal priest with whom I was acquainted, this was only Billy’s way of demonstrating how helpless and hopeless he felt.

  That made sense to me since I felt the same way. I did my best to be charitable about Billy’s fits and tantrums, but you try living with someone who’s always berating you and see how understanding you are.

  This was especially true since I made good money as a spiritualist, more than most men I knew and much more than I’d have made if I’d been someone’s housemaid or secretary or if I’d worked as a clerk at Nash’s Dry Goods and Department Store. What’s more, I’d created my job out of whole cloth. You don’t honestly suppose I believe in spirits, do you?

  You’d think my husband would at least have given me credit for ingenuity.

  Not Billy. He carped and complained every time I so much as read a palm.

  I worried a lot about Billy, and not merely because he fussed at me. His lungs had been damaged beyond repair by mustard gas, and his legs had been severely injured by grapeshot and shrapnel. He was, therefore, in constant pain, and he had to take far too much morphine for my peace of mind. I’d spoken to our family doctor about his morphine use, and Dr. Benjamin had more or less convinced me that addiction was better than incessant agony. I guess I agreed with him, but that didn’t mean I had to like it, or didn’t wish there were more than those two alternatives for alleviating Billy’s pain.

  My mother and father and aunt lived with us on Marengo. My sister Daphne and brother Walter were married and living elsewhere, although we all got together for holidays. Fortunately for those of us in the bungalow, Aunt Vi did the cooking. If either Ma or I had been charged with feeding the family, we’d probably have starved to death or been poisoned long since.

  I was a crackerjack seamstress, though. When I was a little girl, I, like most of the other girls I knew, had possessed two skirts and approximately four blouses. That was before I learned how to sew. By 1921, my spiritualist wardrobe was superb. Maybe even a trifle elaborate. Heck, everything else in my life stank; I figured I deserved nice clothes.

  For the job Mrs. Kincaid talked me into doing, it probably didn’t matter much that I always wore sober-hued, refined costumes of the latest mode and of a tasteful length when I worked. None of your short and sassy “flapper” skirts for me, thank you very much. I trod a fine line in my job and made a tremendous effort to preserve my dignity and discourage people from believing me to be what Billy called me. Shoot, I even sang alto in our choir at the First Methodist Episcopal Church, North, on the corner of Marengo and Colorado. Choir service didn’t matter for that blasted job, either.

  1921 had come in with a whimper. My whole family, including Billy, whom I’d pushed in his wheelchair, had walked up to Colorado to watch the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day. Now the city fathers were planning to build a new stadium for sporting events, to be called the Rose Bowl.

  As for the rest of the world, Babe Ruth was expected to whack home runs by the score when the baseball season began. Russians continued to starve to death in droves, and people in Pasadena continued to collect funds to send to them. A rich young Pasadena fellow had died of ptomaine poisoning in January (which made me sad because I’d met him once or twice and liked him). “My Gee Gee (From Fiji Isle),” “Mandalay,” and “When Autumn Leaves Begin to Fall” were popular songs—I’d play them on our old upright piano on dull evenings when nothing else was going on. Billy and Pa were champing at the bit for someone to perfect the radio signal receiving set so we could get one.

  Women had been allowed to vote in a national election for the very first time the year before, in 1920, but I’d missed out since I wasn’t twenty-one yet. I resented that, although there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  The Pasadena Star News, one of our daily newspapers, had run an article about the Senate Chaplain being a Baptist, which, claimed the newspaper, should make our new president happy. It didn’t make Ma happy, since she considered Baptists only slightly less pernicious than heathen savages.

  As well, most of the country had bee
n dry—or was supposed to have been dry—for nearly a year by the time 1921 rolled around, although that didn’t seem to be stopping anyone from consuming booze. The police were raiding speakeasies and smashing illegitimate stills with alarming regularity. What’s more, the unlawful liquor-running business was getting deadlier with each passing day. You couldn't pick up a newspaper without reading about gun-toting cops raiding speakeasies in Chicago, rumrunners shooting it out with G-men near the Canadian border, booze-smuggling sailors exchanging gunfire with coastal guards from Mexico or Canada, or New York bootleg gangsters killing each other off to gain control of the city’s streets. The bootleggers were a bold and deadly lot.

  We on the West Coast didn’t have quite as much trouble with that sort of violence as they did back East. Still, we had our share of bathtub gin, illegal liquor, and people who fancied themselves “bright young things” because they drank and smoked and danced their lives away at illicit speakeasies. Mrs. Kincaid’s daughter, Stacy, was a perfect (or, rather, a particularly imperfect) example of this phenomenon. Naturally, as long as there was a demand for liquor, somebody would always be willing to supply it.

  None of my friends frequented speakeasies, mainly because they all had sense. They also had to work for a living and didn’t have the time, inclination, or money to fritter away doing anything so useless. That went for me, too. I wouldn’t have gone to a speakeasy, even if I could have afforded to, because I judged the speaks to be a pestilential waste of both time and money. And can you imagine what people would have thought of a medium who drank outlawed liquor. I can tell you: not much. I’d have been out of business in less than a heartbeat.

  On a personal level, I was glad the nation had gone dry. I worried plenty enough about Billy’s morphine use. If he’d had access to liquor, too, I’d probably have gone nuts.

  When Pasadena first incorporated in 1886, it had been a dry city that didn’t even boast a saloon to call its own. People had been forced to go clear to Arcadia, twelve miles east, if they wanted to booze it up among like-minded folks. That state of affairs changed after a while, but there still wasn’t a lot of riotous living being carried on in Pasadena in the twenties. For the most part, we were a tasteful, temperate, well-behaved community. Even the moving-picture people who lived there knew better than to outrage civic morality within the city limits.

  I knew of at least one speakeasy in, or near, town, because Stacy Kincaid had been arrested there once during a raid. I’d heard rumors that the place was run by an Italian gentleman from back East, but I didn’t know anything for a fact. Every time the coppers raided the place, it shut down and opened up again somewhere else. It was kind of like a rash that wouldn’t go away, but spread to a new location every time you thought you had it whipped.

  Which is where Mrs. Kincaid’s request of me came in. She’d already telephoned me three or four times in the past couple of months, asking if I wouldn’t please hold a séance for the man in charge of the speakeasy Stacy frequented.

  “I’m so worried about her, Daisy!” she wailed. She was a first-class wailer. To give her credit, I’d probably have wailed, too, if I’d had a daughter as awful as Stacy. Because of Billy’s injuries, I didn’t have to worry about that since he was unable to father children. Darn the blasted Germans to heck and back.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Kincaid.” I told her, but I still wasn’t about to set foot in a speakeasy.

  “She begged me to ask you.”

  If I recall correctly, I took the receiver from my ear and stared at it in bemusement. Not only was the request an odd one to begin with—how many times do you suppose people are asked to conduct séances in speakeasies?—but the fact that Stacy Kincaid had asked her mother to telephone me was almost unbelievable. Stacy Kincaid had as much use for me as I had for her, which was none at all. I thought she was a spoiled brat, and she thought I was a fraud. We were both right, but at least I was good at what I did. Stacy was good for nothing.

  Mrs. Kincaid had been my best customer for years. She had, moreover, got me started in the spiritualist business, sort of, when she gave my aunt Vi, who was her cook, an old Ouija board. Therefore, rather than holler at her, I stated politely that Rolly was extremely particular about the venues in which he manifested himself, and he didn’t care to work in unlawful drinking establishments. I refrained from making any puns about Rolly being one spirit too many in such a place, and I believe my restraint should be applauded.

  To my dismay, Mrs. Kincaid persisted. She called me every day for a week before I finally caved in. I only did so because she started crying at me. I hate it when people do that.

  “Oh, but Daisy, you’d be doing me such a favor if you could hold a séance for those creatures.”

  Those creatures? If she really thought of them as those creatures, why did she let Stacy haunt their dens of iniquity? But that’s a stupid question. I doubt that Mrs. Kincaid had ever forbidden Stacy to do anything at all—or that Stacy would have obeyed such a command if it were given.

  “Um, why is that, Mrs. Kincaid?” That’s when she started sobbing over the telephone. I hope I suppressed my sigh.

  “Stacy has taken up with the most horrid woman, Daisy! She calls herself Flossie!”

  She’d told me that before, and I hadn’t yet been able to figure out what she had against the name. Maybe because it was a couple of vowels and a consonant away from “floozy,” which is what her daughter was, but Mrs. Kincaid surely didn’t blame Stacy’s hideous behavior on Flossie. Did she? Shoot, maybe she did. People aren’t always enamored of rational thought. This was particularly true of Mrs. Kincaid. I said only, “Mmmm.” Soft murmurs go a long way in my trade. They’re expected, in fact.

  “And she’s begun seeing a terrible man called Jenkins!”

  Most of the bootleggers I read about in the newspapers had a million vowels in their names and were Italian. This fact sat ill with Billy’s best friend (and my mortal enemy) Sam Rotondo, who was Italian and a police detective.

  “Ah, yes,” said I in my silkiest mystical tone. “That’s the gentleman she calls Jinx, if I recall correctly.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Kincaid paused to blow her nose. “Can you imagine such a thing?”

  Well, yes, I could, but only because I have an excellent imagination. I gave her another “Mmmm.”

  “The man’s employer—the man who runs the speakeasy—is determined to hold a séance there. He wants to get in touch with his uncle. He calls him his godfather, although I doubt that he has anything at all to do with God. I think that’s some sort of thing gangsters have. Godfathers. Oh, Daisy!” Again she wailed. I repressed another sigh. “The man was murdered!”

  I gathered from this speech that the murdered man was Jinx’s employer’s uncle, although I didn’t attempt to clarify the matter. I’d become accustomed to interpolating Mrs. Kincaid’s garbled communications years earlier.

  “And I need for you to go there and make sure the place is suitable for my daughter! Harold won’t do it.”

  Perfectly understandable. Harold and I harbored similar opinions about his sister. I wanted to ask Mrs. Kincaid how any speakeasy could be a “suitable” place for a young woman from a wealthy family—or any other young woman, for that matter—to frequent, but didn’t. As already mentioned, Mrs. Kincaid had never been a strict disciplinarian or a devotee of rational thought. Also, her old man had been a crook and a bounder, so there you go. Maybe Stacy came by her unpleasant tendencies naturally. Mrs. Kincaid and Harold were both sweethearts. It’s odd how such disparities can exist in families, isn’t it?

  Feeling more than slightly beleaguered, as well as awfully guilty (after all, Mrs. Kincaid had been the rock and the mainstay of my career for years), I attempted to demur gracefully. “I wish I could help you, Mrs. Kincaid, but Rolly simply refuses to manifest himself under certain conditions.”

  “But are you sure, dear? Won’t Rolly do it for me?”

  Crumb. I wish she hadn’t put it that way. With an awfu
l feeling of impending doom, I hesitated. I knew it was the beginning of the end, but I refused to give up yet. “Um … perhaps I can meditate on the problem and consult the spirits, Mrs. Kincaid.”

  “Oh, Daisy!” She knew I was done for, too. I could hear it in the joyful tone of her voice. “Thank you so much! I’m sure Rolly will understand how much this means to me.”

  I was sure he would, too, darn it.

  Chapter Two

  The next Friday, the evening of the speakeasy séance, Harold Kincaid came to call for me up in his low-slung, snazzy, bright-red Stutz Bearcat. Billy and I had been sitting on the front porch, the February evening being unseasonably balmy, awaiting his arrival.

  Billy wasn’t happy that I was going away, but Spike, our almost-grown-up, black-and-tan dachshund, was doing his best to cheer him up. Spike had been one of my more inspired acquisitions. There’s just something about a puppy that makes the world a brighter place. This holds true even if you’re Billy. I know it for a certified fact because my husband had been much happier since Spike joined the family. He’d even decided to try to walk again.

  Actually, Billy had always been able to walk a little bit, but his legs were badly damaged, and his lungs were half eaten away by the gas. He’d talked to Dr. Benjamin, however, and they had come to the conclusion that if he went slowly and I helped him, the functioning of his lungs and legs might improve with time and exercise. Therefore, we went for tiny walks every day. He put his arm around my shoulder, and I supported him, and we walked at least as far as our neighbors’, the Wilsons, house to the north of us. I don’t know if Billy felt any improvement in his mobility, but I was getting shoulders like a line backer. I sure hoped it would help him, though.

  I truly believe Billy’s new-found interest in improving his health sprang directly from the influence of Spike who, being a dog and not beleaguered by the prejudices we humans have, loved Billy and me uncompromisingly, was never persnickety or depressed, and never looked down on Billy because he was crippled. Or me because I was a medium, God bless the beast.