Page 76 of Here One Moment

There was a lot of online “chatter” and one small article in a tabloid newspaper, but that was all. Kayla’s family never spoke publicly about the prediction.

Her friend, the passenger who filmed the accident, had to spend weeks in the hospital and she shut down her social media during that time.

People soon got interested in other things, as they tend to do.

To put it in perspective: a video of a dog barking at its own reflection in an oven door got two million views and ten thousand likes.

People forgot. Only those who knew and loved Kayla continued to talk about her.

At this point no one had yet referred to me as “the Death Lady.”

That was all to come.

Chapter 71

The second and third deaths were a day apart, in August, a month after the first.

News of the first diagnosis broke shortly after.

It was just like the roulette table in Monte Carlo, when that tiny white ball kept landing on black, again and again and again, and everyone gathered around, so certain it had to mean something.

Chapter 72

Leo learns about the next two deaths when he’s at work.

He has set up a Google alert for the words “psychic,” “plane,” and “death.”

The headline, from a Tasmanian newspaper, reads: “Plane Psychic Correctly Predicts Deaths of Married Doctors.”

The article is behind a paywall, but he doesn’t hesitate to sign up for a subscription, and as soon as the full article appears on his screen, he recognizes the elderly couple from the departure lounge in Hobart. He stood in line behind them while they ordered coffees and he noted their frailty, but also the Apple Watches on their wrists and the bright intelligence in their eyes. They were both warmly dressed and he’d thought about his grandmother and how badly she felt the cold.

The article says that the couple were both retired doctors who had run a joint medical practice in Hobart for sixty years and were well known in the local community, beloved by their patients. Dr. Bailey and Dr. Bailey had one daughter, three grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

Their daughter is interviewed. She says her parents flew from Hobart to Sydney to attend their youngest great-grandchild’s christening, and while on that flight, a lady informed them they would die at the ages of one hundred and one hundred and one respectively, which is exactly what happened.

“They were scientific people, being doctors, so they didn’t take it seriously, they found it entertaining,” she said, “and they were very philosophical about death. They got a kick out of hearing their cause of death would be ‘old age,’ just like Queen Elizabeth. They were proud royalists.”

Leo feels emotional as he looks at the photos chosen to sum up the couple’s lives: young and beautiful on their wedding day; as new parents holding a saucer-eyed baby daughter; standing back to back in white coats outside their brand-new medical practice, arms folded and professional, stethoscopes around their necks; as middle-aged parents of the bride at their daughter’s wedding; as retired travelers holding up wineglasses to the camera, probably on one of those European river cruises; as the elderly patriarch and matriarch at their great-grandchild’s christening, surrounded by family, the saucer-eyed baby now a grandmother herself.

He feels envy on behalf of his own parents, who should have gotten a long happy shared life together like this. Instead his mother will have to spend her last years alone. Their retirement plans never came to be. The other day she told Leo she is sick of people assuming she is over her grief by now. There was real fury in her voice, which surprised Leo, because maybe he assumed that too. He misses his dad, all the time, but he feels like he has passed through the really intense, dreadful period of mourning—he no longer cries in the car, for example—and he kind of assumed his mother had too. He sees now that was foolish. She lost her lifelong partner whereas Leo’s immediate family structure remains intact. His mother is particularly incensed by the phrase “merry widow,” although as far as Leo knows, nobody has actually used that phrase, or told her she should be one, she is just incensed by its existence. She recently made a new friend at aqua aerobics, also a widow. They are starting a club called The Angry Widows.

He hasn’t told his mother or his sisters anything about the psychic. He doesn’t want to upset his mother or give his sisters a reason to make fun of him when he doesn’t end up dying.

“Tomorrow’s site walk has been rescheduled until Thursday.”

“Hmmm, what?” Leo looks up vaguely to see his office manager poking her head around his office door.

“Tomorrow’s site—”

The words infiltrate. “Oh, yep, fine, good, thanks.” He raises his hand in acknowledgment and looks back at his computer. This is rare for him. He works at work. This is not billable time.

The elderly couple’s daughter is quoted: “Mum died peacefully in the hospital after a brief illness and my father didn’t make it one night without her. He died in his sleep the very next night.”

Up until their deaths, her parents had still lived in the house they’d moved into after their marriage. Their joint funeral, which is expected to be standing room only considering their positions in the local community, will be held in the same church where they’d married.

The woman said her parents had been blessed with long happy lives but she was still “devastated” to lose them. “It’s never long enough, is it?” she said. “You’d still do anything for one more day, one more chat, one more phone call.”

The article finishes with a reference to growing interest in the “so-called plane psychic” after a young Tasmanian girl’s tragic death in a car accident was livestreamed on social media. The young girl was “allegedly” told by the psychic she would die in a car accident when she was nineteen.

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