When you persist, she'll take your hand in hers and beg you, "Please, please. Just stay away from automobiles for the next six years."

For the next six years!

Brenda and Patrick, they're odd but they're my friends, always hungry for attention. "My ghost is too loud..." "I hate being able to see the future..."

For my little house party, I planned to invite Brenda and her psychic friends out to the haunted farmhouse. I planned to invite another group of stupid, ordinary friends who aren't troubled with any special extrasensory gifts. We'd drink red wine and watch the mediums flit around, lapsing into trances, channeling spirits, doing their automatic writing, levitating tables, while we laughed politely behind our hands.

So a dozen people arrived at the farmhouse. And Brenda brought two women I'd never met, Bonnie and Molly, both of them already swooning from the ghost energy they felt there. Okay, all my friends were swaying a little. But for the sane ones, it was the red wine. We all sat around the dining-room table, a couple of lighted candles in the center, and the psychics went to work.

First, they turned to my friend Ina. Ina's German and sensible. Her idea of expressing emotion is to light another cigarette. These mediums, Bonnie and Molly, they'd never met Ina before, but they took turns telling her how a woman's spirit was beside her. The woman was named Margaret and was showering Ina with tiny blue flowers. Forget-me-nots, they said. And suddenly, Ina put down her cigarette and started crying.

Ina's mother had died of cancer several years earlier. Her mother's name was Margaret, and every year Ina sprinkled forget-me-not seeds on her grave because they'd been her mother's favorite flower. Ina and I have been friends for 20 years, and these are details even I didn't know. Ina never talks about her dead mother, and now she's weeping and asking for more red wine.