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could really contact the spirit world or if she had simply hit upon a way to use her innate powers of showmanship to make money. She would sometimes do something that many of the mediums in town did, called automatic writing.
    In an apparent trance state, she would hold up a blank slate, and the spirit being contacted was supposed to imprint a message on the slate.
    It had become my habit to sneak under her table once the lights were out. More than once I caught sight of her writing feverishly on a second blackboard on her lap and then producing that board as though the spirit had written the message on it.
    One time, as a joke, I scribbled, Hello Mother, in the corner of the board when it was resting at her feet, waiting to be produced. Luckily her client took it as a message from a child who had died as a toddler and was delighted to see that her son had learned to write in the afterlife. Nonetheless Mother was not amused and made sure to kick around under the table before every séance to be sure I wasn't lurking there, waiting to cause mischief.
    Still, among the townspeople there were those mediums thought to be mostly fraudulent and others who were revered for their ability, and my mother was among the most respected. Due to her Everything Vibrates motto, she was even considered something of a scientist. "Maude Oneida Taylor has studied with the great minds of our times" was an oft-voiced rumor around town. "She believes there are layers of reality, much like the skin of an onion. The afterlife is one of those layers, and Maude is able to  vibrate at the same speed as the afterlife and shake those layers loose."
    Mother had made the most of her brief meeting with Tesla and did nothing to dissuade anyone that she was, indeed, a deep student of science and that her mystical methods incorporated the latest theories.
    "There is an intersection of science and spiritualism," she claimed to her clients. "The journey of the spirit can be thought of as a science we do not yet understand, in just the same way as Nikola Tesla is forging new frontiers in the field of electricity. He pulls electric power from waterfalls and the sky. I pull spiritual power from the Beyond."
    It was a persuasive speech, and she seemed sincere when she told it to every one of her clients. But when I showed her the articles I was pulling out of the papers about Tesla, she was fairly uninterested. "That's nice, Jane. Interesting, I suppose, though I don't quite understand it," she would say, and then go about her business without further comment.
    When I was eight, I found an article in which Tesla claimed he had invented a wireless telephone. Though we had no telephones yet in Spirit Vale, the landscape of the outside world was more and more strung with ugly telephone wire, festooned from pole to pole along the main roads. When I told Mother, she was attentive and took the article from me.
    By the next day she had acquired a telephone receiver. "I'm incorporating it into my ..." I was sure she was about to say into my act. "... into my spirit work. It will be a fine tool for contacting the Beyond."
    Through the years, just when I decided that Mother was a complete fake, she would do something so uncanny that I was sure she had the gift. When a letter came from Gertrude Tredwell telling Mother that her sister Julia Tredwell had passed on, as Mother had predicted, Mother sighed. "The gift feels more like a curse sometimes," she commented.
    One time I listened at the door and heard a séance in which a woman and her husband sought to speak to a wealthy aunt who had passed on. There was trouble over her will that they wanted cleared up. The aunt failed to show herself, but the woman's deceased first husband came by to reveal that the woman had once been a snake charmer in a carnival act.
    My hand flew to my mouth to stifle the rising giggle this delicious and unexpected revelation inspired. There was a drawn-out pause, and I could easily imagine the poor