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    Her readings were always preceded by the story of how she and her girls had been caught in the freakish earthquake of 1898 and met the great Tesla. She embellished on how the brilliant scientist Tesla had imparted to her the secret of harnessing the earth's vibratory patterns, adding that Tesla had studied under Swami Vivekananda. She had found a picture of the swami in a magazine, framed it, and put it in our parlor beside the scientific manuals I never saw her open. I half expected her to autograph it: To my good friend, Maude, Love, Swami V. But she didn't.
    The vibrational reading consisted of Mother tracing an outline of her client at about a hand's length from his or her body. From this she would make all sorts of predictions -- most of them medical -- based on the vibrations she was detecting. I couldn't make any sense of it, but these readings became all the rage, and customers lined up in our front yard, especially during the summer months.
    She was, one might say, the queen bee, in a town occupied predominantly by mostly single women. Feminist feeling was strong and it probably added to the lack of male  presence. There were a few men who were practicing psychics, most of them elderly. And in terms of young men my own age -- I was due to be sixteen on April fifteenth of that year -- there were a few, but nobody who interested me romantically.
    At eighteen, Mimi was easily the most beautiful female in Spirit Vale, with her dark, luxuriant hair piled high on her head and her dresses cinched to accentuate her tiny waist. I was still the plain brown sparrow next to her glossy raven beauty. I'd taken to wearing my shoulder-length brown hair up in a bun atop my head, as she did, but I could never have matched her dramatic, abundant locks. Just the same, I didn't mind, content to bask in the shadow of her glory.
    Men who came in with the summer crowd always looked twice when they saw her walking down the street. She claimed to pay no attention to them, but more than once I'd caught her looking back quickly before averting her eyes modestly. I couldn't blame her. Living in Spirit Vale was like being in a convent. Mimi, I knew, couldn't wait to leave.
    I had kept up my interest in Tesla by scouring the newspapers in the dusty, small, dimly lit Spirit Vale library. I learned that after we had seen him in New York, he had moved to Colorado Springs and built a huge radio tower. He claimed that the tower had received signals he thought must be from extraterrestrial beings living on Mars or  Venus. I did not find this hard to believe; in Spirit Vale, people regularly claimed to get signals from locales much farther than outer space. He had invented something called a Teslascope, meant to aid in communicating with other planets.
    In a yellowing issue dated 1900, I read that he had left Colorado Springs -- the article alluded to a suspicious fire in his lab -- and that his equipment had all been sold because he was deeply in debt. Then, in an issue from later in 1900, I learned that he had built another huge transmission tower on Long Island, New York, in a town called Shoreham. He had found a wealthy banker and lawyer named James S. Warden to back him this time; the tower was thus called Wardenclyffe Tower. Many other wealthy financiers were funding the project, as well. I cheered silently for my hero, the father figure who had saved me from the shaking ground. He hadn't been down for long.
    In 1905 he invented something called the Tesla coil and then the Tesla turbine, but as I continued on in my reading, I saw that by the end of 1905, his tower had been shut down because his backers had lost faith in it. By 1908 the property had been foreclosed by the bank.
    All these articles, the favorable and the disappointing, I clipped and kept in a scrapbook -- to what purpose, I wasn't sure. I think that secretly I harbored a fantasy of one day meeting the great man again and showing him how I'd followed his career. I also, on