Strong Spirits [Spirits 01] Read Online Free PDF Page A

unworthy objects.
           The first time my family had used electricity was when I moved them into the house on Marengo. Until then we, like most people in Pasadena who weren’t living in mansions, used gas lighting and wood-burning stoves. Not to mention outhouses. It was still a thrill to sit in a bathtub, turn on the tap and feel that porcelain beauty fill up with warm water.
           Back to the Kincaids. I hollered my thanks at Jackson, who nodded and grinned, his teeth gleaming like pearls in his mouth and his onyx face shining.
           I liked Jackson. He was a friendly man, and he’d taught me lots of interesting things about spirits that most white people never learn. His family had come from the Caribbean where, I presume, they’d been slaves. He had all sorts of fascinating stories about Caribbean spirits, voodoo, zombies, casting spells and curses, and the like.
           Jackson was only one of my sources. I’d garnered spiritual information from all sorts and varieties of people. I used every one of the tidbits people had related to me in my work (although I’d never sacrificed chickens, as Jackson claimed his kin sometimes did) which might be one of the reasons I was so successful. My brand of spirit-raising was unlike anybody else’s.
           Brownie’s pace quickened marginally as he pulled the pony cart down the gigantic, deodar-lined drive to the back of the house and the stables. Most of the Kincaids’ horses had been replaced by several automobiles, but Harold, the Kincaids’ son, liked to play polo, so the Kincaids still kept a few horses. I fancied the Kincaid horses didn’t deign to speak to poor old Brownie, but Brownie was man enough or, more likely, cranky enough, to endure their slights.
           Quincy and James, the stable hands, were ready for me. They both grinned, and Quincy tipped his hat while James helped me down from the cart. I’d gotten to know Quincy pretty well, because he and my friend Edie were in love with each other. That was my conclusion about their relationship, at any rate. Edie blushed every time I asked her about Quincy, and Quincy got tongue-tied every time I asked him about Edie. You figure it out.
           The most interesting thing about Quincy, in my opinion, was that he’d been born in Nevada, and had worked as an honest-to-gosh cowboy on a ranch there until he moved to California. He’d come here because he wanted to become a cowboy star in the moving pictures, like William S. Hart. He’d worked in one picture, broken his leg, and that had ended his aspiring career. Boom. Just like that. Sort of like my Billy, although nowhere near as catastrophically. Still, it must have been a disappointment to poor Quincy, although he never let on. After the accident, unable to do the trick riding he’d learned as a boy, Quincy had quit on the pictures and had come to work at the Kincaids’.
           I think Quincy and James and I felt somehow akin to each other. We were all three trying to make a living from wealthy people, and both of our professions were dependent upon people who possessed more money than sense. I mean, face it, most people couldn’t afford to own a dozen horses in those days any more than they could afford to hire spiritualists.
           Be that as it may, I liked Mrs. Kincaid. I know there’s a big Red movement in the country, even to this day. In 1920 there were strikes in progress everywhere, and there had been a depression raging since the war ended. Lots of soldiers couldn’t find jobs, and the dollar’s value had dropped to less than fifty cents of its value in pre-war money, which hurt us more than it did people like the Kincaids. A few people thought they were being funny when they said that a man without a dollar was fifty cents better off than he once was, but it wasn’t funny to us. There’s always been a huge division between rich folks and the rest of us and there probably always