The Gray Lady
Teaser
The opening scene in "The Gray Lady" shows us an attractive middle aged woman about to sit down to dinner alone. As she eats, she hears a strange thumping noise from another room. She searches the room with a flashlight and eventually discovers a face being imprinted, as we watch, onto one of those pin-scape toys (if anybody can remember what those toys are called, please help me out). Instead of being afraid, the woman seems to take this as a matter of course, and only smiles. As the face in the toy becomes completely visible, the woman nods and says "Russell".
Act I
In the next act, Declan shows up at Peggy's office with a tabloid newspaper. The front page of the paper shows a picture of the same man who's face we saw materialize in the teaser, and next to him is a photo of his wife, Clarise. Declan explains to Peggy that the man is deceased and has promised his wife, Clarice that he will appear to her on the anniversary of his death. Declan is going to the woman's home to investigate and asks Peggy to accompany him and help him determine Clarice's mental state and the validity of her claims of contact with her husband. Peggy tries to get out of going, but Declan is insistant and Peggy soon finds herself at Clarice's home.
Clarise explains that she and her deceased husband, Russell, are both psychics and details the promise he made to her to return to their home on the one-year anniversary of their death. Peggy is skeptical, of course, feeling that the woman is merely trying to hold on to the memory of her dead husband. However, when Declan asks Clarice if he can bring in cameras and electrical equipment to test the house, Clarice is very enthusiastic and tells him the more equipment the better, because she has nothing to hide.
Act II
Miranda and Declan return the next day and set up their equipment. Clarice excuses herself to go upstairs to take a bath, and while she is gone, Miranda hears a thumping sound. She nervously begins to look for the source of the sound and bumps into Declan in the hallway (literally). Together they discover the "thump" is Peggy knocking on the door. Meanwhile, upstairs we see Clarice about to step into the tub when she sees a message being written with an unseen hand on the steamy mirror. It says "I miss you." Clarice calls the others to look at the mirror, but the message is gone and Peggy later tells Declan and Miranda privately that even if it was there, Clarice probably wrote it herself. She feels sorry for the woman's loss but doesn't want to encourage her dellusions.
Peggy's opinion gets further credence when Miranda and Declan discover that the thumps in the house can be explained by shifting beams under the house and the strange electrical readings that both they and Clarice have been picking up on their equipment can be explained by unusual solar activity. They prepare to leave, but Clarice insists that her husband really is contacting her and asks them to stay and allow her to do a psychic reading of Declan as proof of her own clairvoyant abilities. Declan agrees.
During the reading, Clarice talks about Declan's childhood, his siblings, his education, his wife (or future wife) and a deceased child. She also mentions his favorite foods and other personal information. However, all of the information is incorrect. Declan and Peggy leave and Declan admits he's never seen a worse psychic in his life. Peggy is quiet on the ride home and when Declan asks if something is bothering her, she says that Clarice was reading her, not Declan. All of the information she gave was correct, the two brothers, her favorite food (chicken parmesean which her husband used to make for her before his death) the loss of her husband and her child lost to miscarriage. It's clear that Peggy is a little spooked by this, and Declan doesn't really improve the situation by blurting out a question about her miscarriage.
Act III
The next day Declan goes to visit Peggy at her home, on the pretense of having her listen to some tapes he and Miranda made of Clarice's house. While he's there, he notices a telescope covered on her porch. Peggy explains that it belonged to her dead husband. When Declan asks her if he can see a photo of the man, Peggy says that she doesn't have one available, she'd have to dig for it. Declan invites Peggy to come to Clarice's house on Friday, the day that Russell is supposed to contact Clarice, but Peggy declines. She makes it clear that while Clarice may have some psychic ability, Peggy feels there is no form of life after death and that the woman is wasting her time and holding on to her grief. But that night Peggy sits and listens to the tape of Clarice's house, she hears something no one else hears, a light pinging noise, like a bell.
Intrigued, she talks to Declan and Miranda about it and Declan eventually convinces her to accompany him to Clarice's house on Friday. When she meets him at school on Friday, Declan is lecturing his anthropology class on the discovery of a Saxson villiage. He shows a computer-generated model of a little girl who lived in the villiage a thousand years ago, and when he talks to the class about how anthropologists are keeping this girl's memory alive, Peggy is touched.
Act IV
Declan, Miranda, Peggy and several reporters gather at Clarice's house at the stroke of midnight to find out if she will indeed be contacted by Russell. But midnight comes and goes and no contact is ever made. As dawn approaches the reporters leave and Miranda unhooks all of their equipment. Peggy comforts Clarice, who is herself convinced that she has been holding on to Russell out of fear of forgetting him and because of the pain of living without him. As they leave, Declan looks at the stars and gives a beautiful analogy of keeping the memory of a loved one alive, stating that the stars are hundreds of light years away, and may have burned out by the time we actually see them and we'd never even know it. "Dead and gone but their light shines on" Declan tells Peggy, and it's clear that he's referring to her husband and Clarice's husband.
Peggy takes Declan to her house to finally show him a photo of her husband. When they arrive, the house is filled with the smell of chicken parmesean, even though nothing is in the oven. Mystified, they listen to the same pinging noise that Peggy heard on the tape of Clarice's home. She suddenly realizes it's her own oven timer. Declan smiles and leaves Peggy to ponder what this all means. In the final scene we see her star-gazing and looking through a photo album at pictures of her deceased husband.