Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator Read online

  “There’s no way in hell I’m visiting Grandma Joyce,” said Gilda. “She smells.”

  This prompted a small lecture from Gilda’s mother about bad language, the evils of ageism, and how, in the future, she herself might smell terrible, and how, in the event that turned out to be the case, she would hope that her own daughter would “show some consideration for the elderly.”

  “Okay, Mom, I’d better get going on my work,” said Gilda, interrupting her mother.

  “I thought today was the last day of school.”

  “I mean my real work. My career.”

  At the moment, Gilda’s “career” encompassed several different activities: writing novels, spying on neighbors, and developing her psychic abilities.

  “Oh, that,” her mother replied. “Well, you’re certainly one unique kid, Gilda Joyce. I suppose you get that from your dad. He was a strange one, too, in his own way.”

  • • •

  Gilda contemplated the chaos of her bedroom. A tornado surrounded her: hundreds of books threatened to spill from shelves, peeked from under the bed, and teetered in random piles throughout the room—everything from mysteries, ghost stories, and comic books to collections of poetry and plays. Empty soda cans, Mars bar wrappers, and several unopened bags of giant orange marshmallow peanuts that were several years old also littered the room. “You might as well eat Styrofoam!” Mrs. Joyce had yelled when she discovered the lurid orange candy. But Gilda refused to throw it away: she and her father had purchased it ages ago on a Saturday afternoon trip to the hardware store. Instead of buying a new toilet plunger, the two of them had left the store with several bags of orange peanuts. Now the fossilized candy peanuts preserved the memory of her father’s small, whimsical indulgences.

  In the middle of the room was Gilda’s favorite possession—the old Underwood manual typewriter that her father had given her before he died of cancer two years ago. It reminded her so much of her dad: it was old-fashioned and reliable, like the horn-rimmed glasses and flannel shirts she remembered her father wearing. Gilda loved the way the clacking of the keys made them sound enthusiastic about the stories she wrote, as if the typewriter were cheering her on and saying “Great idea!” Sometimes Gilda even liked to imagine that her father’s spirit was actually inside the old typewriter, telling her stories and encouraging her to write. Besides, she felt that her typewriter had certain advantages over a computer: it never fell prey to viruses or needed a “software upgrade.”

  On the day her father had given her his typewriter, Gilda had sat at his bedside in the hospital, listening as he struggled to breathe. She remembered that one of his eyes seemed to be looking right at her while the other gazed off in a slightly different direction—toward the window that overlooked a parking lot. Gilda had never seen her father’s eyes look so strange before. Dad isn’t going to get better after all, she thought. From now on, he’s only going to get worse.

  After a very long silence, her father whispered, “Gilda, I want you to have my typewriter.”

  Gilda’s father had purchased it when he was just a kid, with the first money he ever earned. Gilda never grew tired of hearing how he had dreamed of becoming a writer; how he loved seeing words stamped out on real paper as he wrote and hearing the sharp snap! snap! snap! of the typewriter keys as he formed ideas. But instead of becoming a writer, he had spent his time building engine clutches by day and watching TV at night. “Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way you think it will,” Gilda’s father often warned. “You’ve gotta give life a real hard kick in the nuts to get what you want. And even then—prepare for disappointment.”

  But one day, a few months before he entered the hospital for the last time, Gilda’s father had gone to his room after dinner instead of turning on the television. He locked the door, and then a few minutes later, everyone heard: tap, tap, tap, tap, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack—zing! He typed long into the night.

  Mr. Joyce continued this routine for weeks. Each night, Gilda listened to the clattery sounds of her father’s writing as she drifted into sleep; she imagined that she was traveling on a train toward somewhere warm and pleasant, and that the click, clack, clack of the typewriter was the sound of wheels moving quickly over the tracks.

  “What are you typing, Dad?” Gilda asked one day.

  “I’m writing a story,” her father whispered.

  “What kind of story?”

  “Not telling.”

  Gilda never discovered what her father had actually been typing, but she remembered that he had seemed happy at that moment.

  “You should have my typewriter,” her father said on that last day in the hospital. “You’ll do something really great with it.”

  Gilda remembered her mother’s warning: “Your dad’s on a ton of pain medication now, so he might not be himself.” Perhaps her father was confused.

  “It’s a magic typewriter,” he whispered. Then he drifted into sleep, and the nurse said visiting hours were over.

  What had her father meant by the phrase It’s a magic typewriter? The idea had given Gilda a childish feeling of hope at the time. Perhaps—in some way—the typewriter really was magic. Maybe she would find a way to stay in contact with her father even after he was gone.

  Stored beneath her typewriter was a list Gilda had typed shortly after her father’s death:

  IMPORTANT: Some Things

  To Remember About Dad

  by Gilda Joyce, Author

  1. When he took off his glasses and smiled, there were deep crinkles around his eyes.

  2. He told ghost stories when we went camping, and insisted on calling hot dogs “weenies” even when everyone made fun of him.

  3. At Christmastime, he left out cookies and a beer for Santa, and then he ate them himself but said that Santa had eaten them.

  4. He liked costumes and “people watching”– just like me.

  5. He was brave. He always reminded me, “Never turn down a chance to have an adventure.”

  The sight of her father’s Underwood typewriter always reminded Gilda that there was no time to waste. Ignoring her mother’s skepticism about the idea of visiting Lester Splinter, Gilda decided to seize the day by sending a letter to Mr. Splinter herself.

  Gilda sat cross-legged on the purple carpeting of her bedroom and began typing at lightning speed on her typewriter, which was balanced precariously on top of a pile of books.

  Dear Mr. Lester Splinters:

  Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gilda Joyce, and I’m a distant relative of yours–the daughter of your long-lost second cousin, Patricia Joyce (you may have known her as Patty McDoogle before her marriage to my father–a marriage that ended tragically with my father’s untimely death).

  Let me come right to the point: My mother would like to know if it would be okay for me to visit you in San Francisco this summer.

  I realize this may seem presumptuous of my mother–even a tad impolite–but the situation in our little family is such that the formalities of politeness must be disregarded.

  Let me explain. As a widowed woman, my mother is struggling to support herself and her two children. I’m sure you can imagine the strains of raising a preter-naturally gifted daughter (that’s me) and a uniquely unattractive idiot son (my brother) on her own. Each day, my mother labors in the harshly lighted rooms of a hospital, her hands soaked in blood and vomit. Even as she lifts truck-sized patients over her shoulder to carry them down to surgery, she manages to tell the funniest jokes you’ve ever heard in your life.

  At the end of the day, my mother returns home to relieve her talented thirteen-year-old daughter of the duties of feeding and harshly disciplining her “special” son. On most days, my brother entertains himself by flushing the toilet repeatedly, but at other times he requires constant supervision if we are to prevent him from drinking all the household cleansers under the sink.

  Gilda paused to read the letter. She found it splendid so far, but wondered if she should tone down
the part about her mother lifting patients over her shoulder, which might be just a bit exaggerated. She had also lied about her older brother, Stephen, who was by no means an idiot. Stephen was in fact annoyingly bright, particularly when it came to computers. However, Stephen had recently spilled the beans to Mrs. Joyce that Gilda had been responsible for three terrible things: (1) the gum stuck in the living-room carpet, (2) the disappearance of two whole boxes of Twinkies, and (3) worst of all—the disappearance of Mrs. Joyce’s secret stash of cigarettes, which Gilda had flushed down the toilet. Consequently, Gilda felt that it was payback time. Her older brother deserved to be slandered in her letter.

  Gilda concluded:

  To make a long story short, Mr. Splinter: My mother feels that I would benefit greatly from a change of scenery. Just today she said to me: “A young lady with your talents isn’t meant to spend the summer wiping drool from the mouth of a big, dull lug of a boy. She should be out spreading the sunshine of her presence to more glamorous families in more attractive settings.”

  And as you can imagine, Mr. Splinter, I can’t help but agree with her.

  As you can probably tell from this letter, I am highly intelligent, self-sufficient, polite, neat, ambitious, energetic, lice-free, and, of course, quiet. I can also prepare my own meals, or exist solely on Froot Loops for several weeks if necessary.

  I look forward to hearing from you so I can make travel arrangements and start packing as soon as possible.

  Yours sincerely,

  Gilda Joyce

  Gilda thought for a moment, then typed:

  P.S. My mother would have written this letter herself, but an attack of tendinitis prevented her from doing so. She sends regards.

  P.P.S. My belated regrets concerning your sister’s unfortunate jump from the roof.

  Gilda imagined Mr. Splinter alternately laughing and weeping as he read the letter. He would rush to write a reply: “By all means; visit at once!” Once she had an actual invitation to San Francisco, Gilda reasoned, her mother would realize that it would be unfair to squelch the idea.

  In her mother’s tattered address book, Gilda was relieved to find a street address for Lester Splinter on Laguna Street in San Francisco, California. Gilda liked the sound of the word Laguna. She pictured herself sitting on the beach, sipping a frothy pink drink garnished with a little paper umbrella and a cherry. She imagined herself riding in a cable car, waving ecstatically to Wendy Choy and her eighth-grade classmates, who were somehow able to view her from their distant and comparatively boring surroundings in Michigan. “You see?” she would say “I told you I was going to San Francisco!”

  Gilda took a deep breath and printed the address on the envelope, struggling to make her handwriting appear as adult as possible. Now all she needed was a stamp. She ws completely certain that she would soon be on her way to San Francisco.

  3

  Juliet Splinter

  At the same moment Gilda dropped her letter to Mr. Splinter in her mailbox in Michigan, a skinny girl trudged up the steep incline of Laguna Street in San Francisco, struggling to make her way home against an unusually fierce June wind. She was a very pretty thirteen-year-old girl, but she looked more like an eleven-year-old, since she was extremely small. Her long, fine hair was nearly as light as corn silk, and the pallor of her white skin belied her sunny California surroundings. If you looked into her icy gray eyes, you would probably decide right away that this was not a girl you could make friends with easily.

  Her name was Juliet Splinter, and she was Lester Splinter’s daughter. Juliet’s parents had divorced when she was very young, and after living with her mother in San Diego until she was ten years old, Juliet had moved to San Francisco to stay with her father. Because Mr. Splinter had lost contact with virtually all of his relatives, few members of his extended family—including Mrs. Joyce—realized that he had a teenage daughter in his care.

  Wearing jeans over a black leotard and clutching a pair of pink ballet slippers, Juliet walked home from a particularly disappointing dance class during which she had stumbled on her pirouettes and left the studio exhausted and defeated. She knew in her heart that it had been her last dance class.

  Quitting ballet wouldn’t be such a bad thing, except for the fact that Juliet had already tried and quickly abandoned virtually every extracurricular activity to which she had been introduced: Girl Scouts, soccer, softball, drama, piano lessons, band … The truth was, Juliet didn’t want to do much of anything these days except sleep and be left alone.

  Although she attended an expensive private school designed both to “inspire” her and to help get her into one of the best colleges, whenever someone asked Juliet if she liked school, she would shrug and stare blankly at some distant corner in the room. This was simply the most honest response Juliet could provide: her elite school was better than going to the dentist, but it wasn’t great, either. She earned passing grades, but she couldn’t remember the last time she felt genuinely interested in a subject. She knew her lack of academic achievement disappointed her parents, who both believed in solid preparation for an impressive, lucrative career, but the secret truth was that Juliet felt that none of the things she studied in school particularly mattered. But what in life really does matter? Juliet often asked herself. She couldn’t think of a single thing.

  Juliet sat down at the edge of the sidewalk to catch her breath and wish for the thousandth time for a real friend. She had acquaintances that called her to go shopping or talk about boys, but there wasn’t one kid at school to whom she would ever try to explain how she really felt.

  Juliet looked out across a hillside scene of palm trees and colorful houses to the blue water of San Francisco Bay, where white sails moved slowly under a clear sky—a perfect day. All around her, flowers bloomed—gardens filled with pink and yellow roses bobbing in the wind. The whimsical Victorian houses painted in shades of pink, yellow, and blue reminded her of children’s drawings. This was supposed to be a happy setting: the beautiful homes of happy rich people, the sunny skies and sparkling water of the bay beckoning to surfers and vacationers, but for some reason, the bright, cheerful surroundings made Juliet feel lonelier than ever. A dark thought seeped into her mind—the idea that she might be better off dead.

  Juliet imagined her father glancing up from his Wall Street Journal and his tax forms to discover that she had slipped away into darkness. She imagined him rushing to save her, hut it was too late! “I’m sorry, sir,” the paramedic would say. “We did everything we could, but your daughter is gone.” When Juliet’s mother learned the news of her daughter’s death on her cell phone, she would break one of her perfectly manicured pink fingernails and accidentally drive her beloved BMW into a ditch. Suddenly the Louis Vuitton handbag her mother carried and the multimillion-dollar beach-front home she shared with her pharmaceutical-executive husband would seem pointless. “I never appreciated my own daughter!” her mother would sob, hurling her designer purse into the ocean.

  Juliet’s morbid reverie was broken by the roar of a convertible as it zoomed past, breaking the silence with the lip-glossy music of a Britney Spears song. Inside, four bikini-clad teenage girls sang to the radio, obviously headed for the beach. Juliet stood up and watched them drive down the hill and disappear from sight.

  The music from the car faded into the distance, and the atmosphere felt oppressively silent. As Juliet reached the steepest part of the hill where nearly vertical steps led to the front door of the mansion-sized Victorian house she and her father shared, she felt hot. For a brief moment, she thought she might faint—a sensation she sometimes experienced when she reached this spot on the hillside. It was here that Juliet often thought of her aunt Melanie. Ten years ago, Melanie’s body had been discovered tangled in the bushes at the foot of the treacherous incline behind the Splinters’ enormous house; for some reason, Melanie had jumped from the upper window of the tower at the back of the Victorian mansion.

  Only three years old at the time, Juliet r
emembered virtually nothing about her aunt; she had only ever seen a single photograph of a fair-haired young woman who bore an eerie resemblance to Juliet herself Whenever Juliet asked either of her parents to explain what had happened to Melanie, they either responded with impatience and anger or became so uncomfortable that Juliet quickly changed the subject. Nevertheless, Juliet still wondered what had really happened to her lost aunt. Why had she decided to end her own life?

  Juliet climbed the last of the steep steps leading to her front door and located her house key. Inside, she found the enormous house empty, just as expected. Her father was at work, and Rosa, the housekeeper, was probably shopping for groceries or running other errands.

  Juliet was used to being alone, but every now and then, she found herself feeling very aware of the empty rooms that surrounded her. Sometimes she had the strange idea that someone was hiding in the house, watching her. She knew it was a ridiculous notion, but at certain moments, her imagination took flight and she couldn’t help wondering: What if Aunt Melanie is not completely dead after all?

  Of course Juliet, would never dream of sharing this feeling with her father; he would probably send her to a therapist who would prescribe some new antidepressant or antianxiety medication. Either that or he would simply assume that her decision was the product of too many hours of watching television when she should be studying.

  Juliet wandered into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, stared at the milk, eggs, orange juice, and yogurt sitting on the shelves as if expecting them to entertain her in some way, then slammed the refrigerator shut. On the counter, she noticed a brown plastic container—one of her father’s prescriptions for sleeping pills. She picked up the container and stared at the familiar name of the pharmaceutical company where her mother now worked: Alogon. The sleeping pills rarely helped her father’s insomnia; he claimed that he stayed awake at night, worrying about the financial problems of his tax clients. Her father also claimed that he hated having dreams, as if dreams were annoying visitors that overstayed their welcome and messed up the house.