“Do not be afraid,” Ginny said calmly. “The spirits come lovingly, without quarrel.”
The candle flame trembled and bent. We held our breath and clutched one another’s hands.
“Spirits, might we seek your counsel?” Ginny asked.
A loud knock reverberated across the room. We looked around, nervous. Then there came two knocks in quick succession. I gasped.
Before any one of us could ask Ginny what was happening, the knocking had grown so violent it made the table vibrate. It was as if someone was punching the surface. I was not holding anyone’s hands anymore; I was pressing down on the table to keep it from being toppled. I thought the wood would splinter under my fingertips.
“Ginny!” Mary Ann yelled.
The knocking ceased. All was still and quiet. Ginny sat stiffly, palms pressed against the table. Her eyes were wide open.
“You are in deadly peril, Virginia,” she said.
The words were odd. They didn’t sound as if they came from her mouth. Her lips hardly moved, and the voice seemed to rise from her chest rather than her throat. These words were between a whisper and a croak, coarse and spoken with difficulty.
It didn’t sound like Ginny at all.
Somehow, during this whole mad ordeal, the candle had remained in place, burning bright. Ginny bent forward, her forehead almost touching the table, and the candle blew out.
Mary Ann screeched. Someone flung a chair aside. I heard a thumping and a scrabbling, and the door opened. One of the girls rushed out.
I reached out blindly, trying to grasp Ginny’s hand, and the electric lights turned on. Carolyn stood next to the light switch.
“I better find Mary Ann,” she said. “You almost gave her a heart attack, Gin-gin!”
Ginny did not reply. She stared at Carolyn in surprise and Carolyn shook her head before stepping out. Slowly, almost dreamily, Ginny turned to me.
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
My heart was beating fast. I struggled to speak. “What happened?” I asked at last.
“I don’t know.”
She clutched my left hand and pressed her lips tight together. She seemed drained. Her beautiful dark hair hung upon her like a shroud. After a couple of minutes, she stood up and headed to the bathroom. I heard the water running. She spent a long time in the bathtub, and after she emerged she said she wished to go to bed.
The next day was Sunday. On Sundays, Edgar Yates normally made the trek to campus to visit Ginny. But he’d been detained with business back in Boston and sent a bouquet of red roses, which Ginny arranged by the window. While the other girls sat in the parlor of Joyce House with their boyfriends and admirers, Ginny was alone in her room. I intended to stay there with her, but Carolyn caught me as I was heading up the stairs.
“You must help me keep David distracted. He’s too keen lately and it bothers me,” she said. “He bores me to extinction at times.”
“Why are you telling me that instead ofhim?”
“I have my eye set on a new beau, but if that shouldn’t turn out the way I want, I can always keep David. In the meantime, I can’t have him looking at other girls and getting ideas about them. You simply must sit with us, or Kathleen Kelley is bound to flutter her lashes at him.”
Carolyn had a ruthless charm that I’d long since grown accustomed to, and I had served in a similar capacity for her on several previous occasions.
“I planned to spend my day with Ginny. She hardly slept last night, and I’m worried about her,” I said. “Don’t you remember what happened?”
“You’re worried about her ventriloquist’s act?”
“You think it was an act?”
“Of course. She does it to get attention. I can’t understand why Edgar Yates wants to marry a girl who could be working at Coney Island reading palms. It’s vulgar.”
“I don’t think she was doing it to get attention.”
“Don’t tell me you were scared! I can believe it of that silly goose Mary Ann, but not of you. She was tapping her knee under the table the whole time. How spooky!” Carolyn said, and rolled her eyes for dramatic effect. “Mary Ann’s still angry at Ginny over it,you know? She doesn’t want her going with us to the pictures next week.”
