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

composed than this.
           Maybe she was edgy because of the purpose for this séance. It was one thing to raise a long-dead uncle from the Great Beyond. It must be unnerving to be trying to get in touch with a young man who was only a year or so dead, and who was still deeply mourned. Thinking about it made me want to shudder, so I stopped thinking. Anyhow, Mrs. Kincaid was rushing over to me, holding both hands out, so I didn’t have time to entertain gruesome thoughts or walk across the room and chat with Edie. Anyhow, we were both working, so I couldn’t have done more than say hello.
           “Good evening, Mrs. Kincaid.” She was a truly nice woman. I appreciated her friendliness to me, a Gumm. We Gumms weren’t accustomed to being fawned over by rich people. Not even I, who’d been dealing with them for years, more or less on an equal footing. I was no longer skittish as a cat in huge mansions, but I didn’t think I’d ever get really used to them.
           “I’m so glad you’ve come, Mrs. Majesty. Here, let me introduce you to everyone.” Still holding on to my hand—I was glad I’d remembered to put on my black gloves—she led me into the thick of things.
           There must have been more than twenty people there including Mrs. Kincaid’s husband, who didn’t join in these social gatherings as a rule. He wasn’t a sociable man and he never smiled, maybe because he, like Billy, was confined to a wheelchair.
           I don’t think he’d ever been cheerful like Billy, though. He looked as if he’d been a grump from birth, and I wondered why Mrs. Kincaid had married him. After all, she was the one with the money. She might have married Mr. Algernon Pinkerton, who was a good friend of hers and was very friendly and merry, or even Father Frederick, who was as nice as they come, and since he was an Episcopalian, even though he was a priest, he was allowed to marry. I think. Then again, maybe he was married already. I never saw him with a wife in tow, but it isn’t wise to suppose too much, even though I love to do it.
           But she hadn’t. She’d married Mr. Eustace Kincaid for some reason beyond my ken. Rumor had it that Mr. Kincaid had been a clerk in her father’s stock-brokerage firm in New York when they’d met. Now he sat stoop-shouldered in his wheelchair, his face a mask of glowering disapproval. His eyes, which were black and piggy and small, made him look mean and hateful even before you realized he really was mean and hateful.
           He nodded to me, giving me a smile that reminded me of lemon juice and unripe persimmons. Wrinkles radiated from his pinched lips, and his eyebrows were gray and bushy and recalled to my mind caterpillars or unshorn sheep. His voice was as thin as his hair, both of which were far thinner than his eyebrows. “Good evening, Mrs. Majesty.”
           Thank God for my supply of gracious smiles. I tossed one at Mr. Kincaid and said, “How do you do, Mr. Kincaid?” in the deep velvety voice I’d cultivated for my business.
           “Not well,” he said.
           He said no more, which left me sort of dangling there uncertainly. After mulling it over for a second or two, still smiling graciously, I murmured, “I’m so sorry,” and moved away from the old goat, wondering if reading the Spanish phrase book I glimpsed when his lap robe stirred would cheer him up. Perusing Spanish phrases didn’t sound like my idea of a cheery occupation. I’d rather read a novel, but maybe it was a rich man’s thing. Whatever the reason for the phrase book, I don’t like cranky people, and I really didn’t like Mr. Kincaid.
           Fortunately, Mrs. Kincaid never paid much attention to her husband. She’d already flitted off to another group of people where she stood, looking at me in anticipation. I wafted after her, leaving old Kincaid to his wheelchair, his Spanish phrase book, and his crotchets, and