Gretchen Acorn is a bullshit artist.
The talent for it runs in her family—her daddy's a bullshit artist, as was his daddy before him, and his before him. And so on, all the way back to Fritz Eichorn, who scammed his way into first class on the ship that carried him to the US by posing as a recently heartbroken Austrian count. But while great-great-great-grandpa Fritz and most of his male descendants gravitated toward the hasty brushstrokes of shell games and selling landmarks to tourists, Gretchen has found her own, more sophisticated medium.
No pun intended.
"Ah." Gretchen presses two finger to each of her temples. She wines as if her mental call to the spirit realm has conjured nothing except a headache. "I feel Ronald trying to be here with us, but the connection is fragile. Too fragile to make anything out, I'm afraid."
"It's my aura, isn't it?" The elderly woman across the table unclasps her hands and sets them atop the plum brocade tablecloth. She still wears her platinum and diamond wedding set, the swell of her arthritic knuckle the only thing keeping the too-large rings in place. "I've been told before that it's a problem, but no matter how many Reiki experts I've consulted—"
"No, no," Gretchen interrupts. "You have a beautiful aura, Mrs. Easterly. The most gorgeous"—Pick a color, any color—"vermillion I've ever seen. Don't let anyone do a thing to it."
The idea of some opportunistic asshole swindling a nice old lady like Janice Easterly makes Gretchen's jaw tense. Perhaps that seems hypocritical given that she herself relies upon dishonesty to make her living (and that she can't even remember if vermillion is a shade of green or red). But the difference is that Gretchen only takes people's money if she's certain she can leave them better off than she found them. That's the one Rule that governs everything she does. Her singular guiding principle. It transforms her work from a con into a business transaction, her morally gray impulses into something mutually beneficial. That's why she turns away potential clients if she knows she won't be able to provide what they need, and why she's building up to tell Mrs. Easterly that her telephone line to spirit world is currently generating nothing up a busy signal.
Her code of ethics may not win her a Nobel Peace Prize, but it's been something of a compass since Gretchen struck out on her own almost seven years ago. She has the skills of her forefathers in her back pocket at all times—her father made sure she could lie, cheat, and steal with the best of them before she could even spell her own name—and it would be easy enough to fill the rest of Mrs. Easterly's half-hour session with the cheap tricks that make up the bread and butter of most supposed spirit mediums and psychics. No doubt Mrs. Easterly would confirm, tears cutting through her caked-on face powder like an icebreaker navigating the Baltic, that the two-story house with a chimney Gretchen describes (not too specifically, of course) must be her husband's childhood home. A woman with a name beginning with H? Well, her sister's name was Harriett, could that be it? And oh my word, she does indeed own a heart-shaped piece of jewelry! A long-ago gift from her late husband, in fact, from before he made his fortune buying and selling laws or whatever it is people in this town do to get so damn rich.
