The Main Characters

Ariel Quigley

So you can get a bit of a picture of me, I am a 32-year-old, single—a term that describes my situation, but not necessarily my preference— female. I’m 5’ 9” tall, I weigh an appropriate 140 pounds, and I can run a six-minute mile—if I absolutely have to. I exercise regularly and am pretty fit as a result. I try to maintain Army standards, mainly because I feel good when I do. I have a full head of bronze-colored hair, and green eyes that my Dad says sparkle like pixie dust when I’m happy. I dress casually, for the most part, but I have been known to become very glamorous should the occasion arise.

By profession I’m a part-time English professor and writer. But in actuality, I have an odd lot of talents, most of which aren’t ever likely to support me financially.

For example, when I was a kid, my family called me “the psychic detective.” Once when I was 8, I found my father’s wallet after my parents had turned the house upside down hunting for it. When they told me what was lost, I just walked right to it, brought it back to my dad and said, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

My mother said it was the fey Irish in me that allowed me to tune in to where it was hiding. My father, however, said it came from his side of the family, which was Manx. In either case, my heritage is Celtic and it seems to be part of my genetic makeup. Since then, most of my detection experience has been helping family members and friends find lost items such as glasses, keys, and rings. Not really very glamorous, so I don’t advertise this particular ability in the Yellow Pages.

Another thing I do is read Tarot cards, occasionally for money, and I think I’m pretty good at it. On my 15th birthday, my three younger sisters—Bibi, Catherine, and Deirdre, who were 10, 8, and 6 at the time—pooled their allowance money and bought me a deck as a present. Then they clamored day after day to have me tell their fortunes and guilt-tripped me into actually learning to read the cards.

I’ve realized over time that there’s a lot more to the cards than just fortune telling, and I’ve found them to be both fascinating and informative about what’s going on in my own subconscious. From a practical standpoint, they can even be helpful, especially when I need to make decisions.

A further step in my parapsychological education came when I was 18 and a friend of mine invited me to go with her family to the American Society of Dowsers’ annual convention in Vermont. I learned to dowse with rods, pendulums, and other tools, and this process added another dimension to my natural ability to find things. But nobody has ever yet paid me to use this particular talent.

One other thing I’ve sometimes been reluctant to mention is that I do occasionally talk to, or more accurately, listen to, ghosts. In fact, since what I do with ghosts is try to help them ‘move on’, I’ve sometimes thought of myself as a “ghost psychologist.” Unfortunately, it isn’t accepted by the American Psychology Association as a recognized branch of psychology. And, more to the point, ghosts don’t deal in hard currency.

What I do to put paychecks in my bank account is part-time teaching at George Mason University in Virginia and a little freelance writing and editing. Early on I realized if I was going to earn a living I needed something practical. My dad, who is extremely practical, said, “Well, you know how to read and write pretty well. Maybe you should be an English teacher.” In such wise are the flagstones of our lives often laid.

However, my family had limited resources for sending me to college, so I joined the Army to “be all I could be” right out of high school. My intention was to let my Uncle Sam support me for a few years and then pay for my college. But first I wound up being part of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, an experience I hadn’t expected. Along with everything else that happened during that conflict, I learned about something called “the desert experience.”

Many spiritual texts talk about their leaders having to spend a period of time in the wilderness in order to reach enlightenment. As we sat waiting in the desert for something to happen, and with nothing to do but contemplate our own mortality, many of us had a subtle shift in consciousness and came to realize there are other dimensions beyond the one we call “reality”. I started writing about that experience, and when the conflict was over and I returned stateside, I put together a little book of my war poetry that actually got published and sometimes nets me a tiny royalties check.

After I got my degrees, that little volume also led to my teaching a creative writing class called “Accessing Your Psyche Through Poetry,” at an independent learning center in Alexandria. This class is a place where I can share some of my weird and wondrous talents.

Bernice Wise

Bernice Wise is a 55-year-old Jungian psychologist who runs a private practice out of her sprawling 18th-century Colonial-style home in Alexandria, Virginia. She’s also a student in one of my evening poetry classes. In fact, in the past year she’d signed up for the class two sessions in a row. From listening to her poetry in the classroom, I’d been impressed with her sense of humor and her practical wisdom. She was also earthy and gregarious—just fun to be around—and we were beginning to develop a friendship.

... From earlier discussions during and after the creative writing classes I had led, I realized Bernice was something of a light-hearted Jewish philosopher. As she had indicated in one of her poems, her frosted blond hair would have been gray-streaked brown hair without the devoted effort of various pharmaceuticals, and her styling efforts were generally lost to the first gust of wind. Her dress was usually more an invention than an ensemble, and today was no exception. Red socks and Birkenstocks vied for attention with a multi-colored shirt and a wrap-around denim skirt.

We were the alphabetical Quigley sisters—Ariel, Beatrice, Catherine, and Deirdre. They called me the psychic detective and the ghost hunter, but all of my sisters had their own special psychic gifts, and all of us, including our mom, had had encounters with ghosts or other spirits.

My youngest sister Deirdre, who was still in school studying theater at High Point College in North Carolina, had brought a ghost home with her the previous Christmas.

My sister Catherine had a green thumb and a knack for horticulture that seemed to go beyond the normal. She could grow bigger and more voluptuous roses, tastier tomatoes, and amazingly vital house plants. When she was a child, she’d asked to help my dad with a little garden plot he was growing one summer. He let her put in a row of beans, and oddly, her row had grown taller and produced more prolifically than his.

One day he said to her, “Are you doing anything special with your beans?”

“Not really,” she answered, “I just go out every day and tell them they’re beautiful and that I love them.”

My dad loved to tell people, “Catherine knows beans about gardening!”

My sister Bibi, whose real name was Beatrice, was the one in the family who seemed able to make the universe work for her most effectively. She was a master of manifestation.

All her life Bibi had been able to get exactly what she wanted. But it wasn’t the way most children did it, through whining, cajoling, nagging, and other forms of youthful extortion. She’d merely tell the universe what she wanted in a positive manner and very shortly, it would appear. It was one of the reasons why we labeled her “practical pig,” because she never asked for more than she needed in any given transaction—no requests for the lottery. And that’s probably why she was so successful.

The Ariel Quigley Mysteries & Companion Cookbooks

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The Main Characters

Ariel Quigley

Bernice Wise

Bernice's Children - Mike & Michelle

Ariel's Sisters: The Alphabetical Quigley Sisters

Bernice's Ex: Alan Wise

Sergeant Greg Mason