I guess I was expecting someone who looked like a gypsy or something. A flower child, maybe. Someone in a floor-length tie-dyed skirt, not someone who looked like she could be chairing a board meeting.

“Pleased to meet you,” Keisha said, shaking hands with us. She caught something in my look and said, “You were expecting something different.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“And this must be Grace,” she said, bending down to shake hands with our daughter.

“Hi,” Grace said.

“Is there someplace Grace could go?” I asked.

Grace said, “Can I stay?” She looked up at Keisha. “Have you, like, seen Mom’s parents in a vision or something?”

“Maybe, what do you call it, a green room?” I said.

“Why is it green?” Grace asked as she was led away by some assistant to an assistant.

After they’d put some makeup on Cynthia and Keisha, they were seated on the couch with the shoebox between them. Paula got herself into a chair opposite them while a couple of cameras were wheeled noiselessly into position. I retreated back into the darkness of the studio, far enough to be out of the way, but close enough to watch.

Paula did some setup stuff, a recap of the story they’d broadcast a few weeks earlier. They’d be able to edit more into the segment later. Then she told her audience of a startling development in the case. A psychic had stepped forward, a woman who believed she could offer some insights into the disappearance of the Bigge family in 1983.

“I had seen your show,” said Keisha Ceylon, her voice low and comforting. “And of course I found it interesting. But I didn’t think much more about it after that. And then, a couple of weeks later, I was helping a client attempt to communicate with a lost relative, and I was not having the success I normally do, as though there were some kind of interference, like I was on one of those old party lines and someone else is picking up the phone when you’re trying to make a call.”

“Fascinating,” breathed Paula. Cynthia remained expressionless.

“And I heard this voice, she said to me, ‘Please get a message to my daughter.’”

“Really? And did she say who she was?”

“She said her name was Patricia.”

Cynthia blinked.

“And what else did she say?”

“She said she wanted me to reach her daughter, Cynthia.”

“Why?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I think she wanted me to contact her so that I could learn more. That’s why I wanted you”-she smiled at Cynthia-“to bring some mementos, so that I could hold them, perhaps understand better what happened.”

Paula leaned in toward Cynthia. “You brought some things, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Cynthia said. “This is one of the shoeboxes I showed you before. Pictures, old clippings, just bits and pieces of things. I can show you what’s inside and-”

“No,” said Keisha. “That’s not necessary. If you would just give me the entire box…”

Cynthia let her take it, let her set it on her lap. Keisha put a hand on each end of the box and closed her eyes.

“I feel so much energy coming from this,” she said.

Give me a fucking break, I thought.

“I feel…sadness. So much sadness.”

“What else do you feel?” Paula asked.

Keisha furrowed her brow. “I sense…that you are about to receive a sign.”

“A sign?” said Cynthia. “What kind of sign?”

“A sign…that will help answer your questions. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”

“Why?” asked Cynthia.

“Why?” asked Paula.

Keisha opened her eyes. “I…I need you to turn the cameras off for a moment.”

“Huh?” said Paula. “Fellas? Can we hold off for a second?”

“Okay,” said one of the guys manning a camera.

“What’s the problem, Keisha?” said Paula.

“What is it?” Cynthia asked, alarmed. “What is it you didn’t want to say on camera? Something about my mother? Something about what she wanted you to tell me?”

“Sort of,” Keisha said. “But I just wanted to get straight, before we go any further, how much I’m getting paid to do this.”

Here we go.

“Uh, Keisha,” said Paula, “I think it was explained to you that while we would cover your expenses, put you up in a hotel for the night if necessary-I know you had to come down from Hartford-we weren’t paying you for your services in any sort of professional sense.”

“That wasn’t my understanding,” she said, getting a bit huffy now. “I’ve some very important stuff to tell this lady, and if you want to hear it, I’m going to need to be financially compensated.”

“Why don’t you tell her what you have to say and we’ll go from there?” Paula suggested.

I walked forward to the set, caught Cynthia’s eye. “Hon,” I said, tipping my head, the international “let’s go” gesture.

She nodded resignedly, unclipped the microphone from her blouse, and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Paula asked.

“We’re outta here,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Keisha asked, outraged. “Where are you going? Lady, if this show isn’t going to pay to hear what I know, maybe you should.”

Cynthia said, “I’m not going to be made a fool of anymore.”

“A thousand dollars,” Keisha said. “I’ll tell you what your momma told me to tell you for a thousand dollars.”

Cynthia was rounding the couch. I reached out my hand for hers.

“Okay, seven hundred!” Keisha said as we went to find our way to the green room.

“You really are a piece of work,” Paula told Keisha. “You could have been on TV. All the free advertising in the world, but you’ve got to shake us down for a few hundred bucks.”

Keisha gave Paula the evil eye, looked at her hair. “That’s one bad dye job, bitch.”

“You were right,” Cynthia said on the drive home.

I shook my head. “You were good, walking away like that. You should have seen the look on that so-called psychic’s face when you took off your mike. It’s like she was watching her meal ticket walk away.”

Cynthia’s smile was caught in the glare of some oncoming headlights. Grace, after a flurry of questions we declined to answer, had fallen asleep in the backseat.

“What a waste of an evening,” Cynthia said.

“No,” I said. “What you said was right, and I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about this. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance, you have to check it out. So we checked it out. And now we can cross it off and move on.”

We pulled into the drive. I opened the back door, unbuckled Grace, and carried her into the house, following Cynthia into the living room. She walked ahead of me, turned on the lights in the kitchen as I headed for the stairs to carry Grace up to bed.

“Terry,” Cynthia said.

Ordinarily, I might have said “Be there in a sec” and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife’s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.

So I did.

Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man’s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.