Glass Eye: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective

Chapter 3

Zandra shuffles onto the couch in her tiny apartment later that evening. Her left ankle's acting up, as it usually does. Makes her walk with a limp after about 10 a.m. each day. Coupled with the way her neck and shoulders hunch, it's no wonder one of the kids at the state college in town called her a troll a few years back. From a passing car, of course. The little shit didn't have the balls to say it to Zandra face-to-face on the sidewalk.

Too bad Zandra had the last laugh. She got a good look at the car. Patterned the kid's timetables from a dorm to class to a pizza place where he worked. She ordered takeout for lunch one day, noting the shift manager's nametag, April.

A couple days later, "April" called a tow truck to remove a "nuisance vehicle" from the pizza place's parking lot. A special ordinance in Stevens Point allows for such a call given the general lack of sobriety in the college crowd. The tow trucks don't ever question it. They make a fortune off the ordinance.

Zandra wrote down the entire incident in a notebook, right down to the color of the punk kid's shirts, just as she does for all her interactions with Stevens Point. Half of her tiny apartment belongs to stacks of files in leftover cardboard boxes. They leave just enough room for a couch, TV, bathroom and kitchen. The files took over the bedroom years ago. It's not the best for her ankle, but the files are more important. That's where her real "psychic powers" lie in wait.

Zandra spends the evening logging Charlie and Fred into her latest file. Uses a pen and paper as always. More secure that way. Never could trust computers.

After 10 meticulous pages, Zandra sets her pen down. She pops a VHS into its ancient player and presses play. The TV screen displays the same clip she watches every night before bed. A grainy James Randi, renowned skeptic and TV show host, places a variety of mundane objects in front of Nella Jones, a psychic noted for assisting the police. One of the objects is a murder weapon. The rest are duds.

James instructs Nella to identify the murder weapon. Nella puts on a show, waving her hands and handling a few items. A waiter's friend. A hammer. An ax. She covers her bases by commenting on as many as possible. No hard hits. Just vague references to possibilities.

The last item she handled, the ax, turns out to be the murder weapon. James gives her a failing grade for not identifying it properly.

"What I do is illogical," Nella says on the TV as Zandra mouths the words with her.

It's not the fact Nella failed the test that Zandra watches this over and over. It's how Nella hit on the murder weapon and may never have known it. The ax, after all, is the last object she touched. Maybe it wasn't so much a coincidence as a failure to correctly interpret her intuition. The brain is always working, even if the person doesn't know it.

That's the question that keeps Zandra up at night. Maybe her "lucky guess" at Soma Falls had nothing to do with odds. Maybe, if only for a brief moment, in the intensity of the situation, her focus went inward and listened to that long forgotten voice inside. Call it psychic powers, call it intuition, it proved incredible no matter the label. And for a fleeting moment, the world thought so, too.

They'll think that again. So help me God, they'll think that again. But they won't be clapping this time when I'm through with them.

The clip ends with James reading a statement from New Scotland Yard.

"There is no recorded instance of psychics solving a criminal case or providing evidence or information which led directly to its solution," James says.

Zandra falls asleep on the couch with his words chasing their tail in her head and a lit cigarette between her lips.