Glass Eye: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective

Chapter 12

It wasn't until Zandra heard the term "ideomotor effect" that she finally put a label on what she'd known for years running Sneak Peek. It sounded like something from meteorology, but it's actually how the brain can move something without a person knowing it.

Sit two or more people down at an Ouija board, and they won't realize they're unconsciously moving the planchette to form words. If one of those people was Zandra and the other a paying client, she could consciously manipulate the planchette while the other looked on in amazement. The real trick was in exploiting either the client's skepticism or willingness to believe.

If the client "bought" into the Ouija board, the job practically did itself. Zandra would call up the spirits by reciting a muffin recipe in Latin, then join hands with the client on the planchette. Ever so gently, Zandra would manipulate answers she'd already divined through observation. The client would chalk up any force moving the planchette as sprits instead of the fraud sitting across the table.

Money problems? It's a good time to drain that 401k and eat the early withdrawal penalty, because the market's shaky and the client is five years from retirement. Never mind that the Wall Street Journal wrote the same thing last week.

Fertility trouble? The spirits say to "copulate"- spirits of old aren't vulgar - in successive sessions each and every night of the woman's prime fertility cycle. Zandra read that in a pamphlet at a doctor's waiting room once, but the "spirits" always get the credit if it works.

Skeptical clients, surprisingly, made for easier marks. They did all the work.

"Of course it's all in the mind, but that's what's important. The Ouija is a tool to unlock your subconscious, which is always working on answers to questions," Zandra would say. Then the client would produce the answers without much help from her.

In either case, the only thing supernatural was the amount of money Zandra could extract. If the spirits were taking a percentage, the view from their rooms in hell got a lot better.

But Zandra's simple Ouija board dealt in another currency, too: secrets. At that, it was an ATM. And secrets were the only currency that really mattered to her. The files in Zandra's apartment owed their existence to the Ouija and her other machines. She'll start one on Seth or Elliot or whoever this person is later tonight.

Seth takes a seat at the table across from Zandra. With a straight-on look at his face, she hits him with some basic questions to build a baseline of his reactions. The twitch in his eyelids. The flush of blood in his nose or neck. A subconscious reaction in the corners of his mouth. The level of detail, or not, in a standard response.

"Ever used one of these as a kid?" Zandra says and runs the creases out of the felt mat with her hand.

"Yeah, but it was made out of wood," Seth says.

Short. Concise. Not a lot of detail. So the opposite would generally mean a lie.

"This is my portable version. Never know when I might need it," Zandra says. Then she breaks out a benign, open-ended gullibility test. "Did the Ouija board tell you anything back when you were a kid?"

"I forget what it was, but I remember thinking it was spooky," Seth says. He nods when he says it, a "tell" for truthfulness.

He'll be easy to manipulate, so the answers will have to come from Zandra. The trick will be to get him to break based on what the "spirits" have to say. That is, if Seth has anything to confess in the first place.

With the baseline questions out of the way, Zandra takes Seth's hands in hers and sets them down on the planchette. She slips a covert finger beneath Seth's wrist to feel for his radial pulse. An uptick will indicate deception. It's already a little high.