“Is he still with us?” asked Pam, Shawn’s mother.

“No,” said Sylvia.

Pam broke down. Sylvia said Shawn was buried beneath two jagged boulders.

Four years later, in January of this year, Shawn was found alive and well and living with his alleged abductor, Michael Devlin, in Kirkwood, Missouri. This miraculous happy ending became headline news across the U.S. Shawn’s parents told journalists that one of their lowest points was when Sylvia Browne told them their boy was dead. “Hearing that,” his father, Craig Akers, told CNN, “was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear.”

Sylvia Browne doesn’t give interviews, especially not since the Shawn Hornbeck incident. She’s turned down CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Larry King, ABC, and so on. A few months ago I logged on to her website and watched some of her videos. She looks and sounds like a worldly dame you’d meet in a bar in a Dashiell Hammett novel. Then I noticed an announcement on her news page: Sylvia was to be a guest lecturer on a cruise around the Mediterranean in late September. Fans could sign up for four lectures and a cocktail party.

“She can’t avoid talking to me if we’re trapped on a ship together,” I thought. And so, impulsively, I booked myself on to the cruise.

•   •   •

IT’S OUR FIRST EVENING aboard and there she is. She’s sitting on the throne on the stage, unexpectedly giving a rambling, grumpy lecture. “I don’t like tofu,” she growls. “I’d sooner eat a sponge.” And: “Try to get a workman! I’ve always wanted to put a little solarium on the back of my house. You know. Glass. They put it on backward. People don’t care anymore.”

The audience listens politely. For all the times Sylvia gets things psychically wrong (which she does a lot: I sometimes think if she tells you your kid is dead, you should probably presume the child’s alive, and vice versa), she still has an enormous following. Hundreds of people have paid thousands of dollars each to be cruising with her this week. This is in part because if you want to pay $750 to have a thirty-minute telephone reading with her, there’s a waiting list of four years. Her critics believe her career can’t possibly survive the Shawn Hornbeck debacle, but there’s no sign of it diminishing on this cruise.

I don’t know anything about my fellow travelers. They mainly look like retired Americans. But then Sylvia draws names out of a hat. If we hear our name called, we are allowed to ask her a single question. Only one.

“Julie Harrison . . . Joan Smith . . . Pamela Smith . . .” says Sylvia. And, one by one, they walk to the microphone in front of the stage.

“Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” asks the first woman.

“What?” Sylvia says. The woman is crying so hard, Sylvia can’t understand her.

“Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” the woman repeats.

“He was bipolar,” Sylvia says.

The next woman walks to the microphone.

“I have a strained relationship with my daughter,” she begins. “And I want to know—”

“Your daughter is strange,” interrupts Sylvia.

Sylvia doesn’t pause. Other psychics will often reach around for some inner voice, but Sylvia answers each question instantly, in a low, smoky growl, sometimes before the person has even finished asking it.

“Your daughter is stubborn,” she says. “She’s selfish, narcissistic. Leave her alone.” The woman reluctantly nods. Tears roll down her cheeks.

“Don’t get too involved with her,” Sylvia says. “She’ll hurt you. Leave her alone. I don’t like her.”

“Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says.

“Am I ever going to have a better relationship with my father?” another woman asks.

“No,” Sylvia replies. “He’s narcissistic. He has sociopathic tendencies. Forget it. There’s a darkness there.”

“Thank you, Sylvia,” she says.

Sylvia seems to be psychically diagnosing a lot of people with narcissism today.

“Will you tell me exactly the time and place my father died?” the next woman asks.

“Ten years ago in Iowa,” Sylvia says.

“Iowa?” says the woman, surprised.

“I’m the psychic,” Sylvia snaps. “I’m telling you. Iowa.”

“Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says, cowed.

The next woman asks, “What happened to my dog? Is she still alive?”

“No, honey,” Sylvia says.

The woman bursts into tears. There are no parents of missing children on this cruise, but every other human tragedy is well represented.

“My son . . .” the next woman says. She stops, choking on her words. “My son met a violent death,” she says.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Sylvia says.

“Is he around me?” she asks.

“Yes, he does come around you,” Sylvia says. “In fact, he rings the phone. He also drops coins around you. When the phone rings and no one’s there, that’s him. People have said to me, ‘That’s telemarketers.’ Have you ever heard of a telemarketer that didn’t talk? No.” (Actually, telemarketing companies use an auto-dialing machine called the Amcat. When your phone rings and there’s nobody there, it’s because the Amcat has inadvertently dialed your number on behalf of a cold caller who is still pitching to someone else. I feel bad mentioning it here, but it’s the truth.)

“He’s around you,” Sylvia says. “He has beautiful eyes, an oval face. Why is he holding his head?”

“He was shot in the head,” the woman says.

“That’s why he’s holding his head,” Sylvia says.

Sylvia says this to the mother but also to us, as if to say, “See, everyone! That’s my psychic gift!” It is an impressive moment.

It’s dinnertime in the Vista restaurant. I sit with others from the group. Sylvia is nowhere to be seen.

“Those stories were really sad,” I say.

“That’s nothing,” says a woman in her seventies whom I’ll call Evelyn. “Three years ago I saw Sylvia give a talk in Tampa. A girl in her thirties stood up, really young. She said, ‘I haven’t been feeling well. What do you think is wrong with me?’ And Sylvia replied, ‘Do you want the truth, honey? You’ll be dead in two years.’”

Everyone around the table gasps.

“The girl had to be helped from the room in tears,” Evelyn says.

“I wonder if I should try to track the girl down,” I think out loud.

Evelyn looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “She’ll probably be dead,” she says.

DAY 2: DUBROVNIK

Sylvia is having the day off and so her co-psychic, Colette Baron-Reid, entertains us in the Vista lounge. She’s not grouchy and monosyllabic like Sylvia. She’s bouncy and eager to please. She makes us do a “get to know the group” exercise. We have to turn to our neighbor and tell them a lie about ourselves. My neighbor is Evelyn. I really like her: She’s a funny and kind old lady from New York who does amateur dramatics. She’s looking forward to directing a big musical next year.

I say, “My lie is that I don’t have any children.”

Evelyn replies, “My lie is that I don’t have really bad stomach cramps and I’m not scheduled for a colonoscopy when I get home from this cruise.” Evelyn looks scared. “If Sylvia calls my name out tomorrow,” she says, “I’m going to ask her about the stomach cramps. They’re really bad. They shouldn’t be this painful.”

Later, in the Jacuzzi near the dolphin sculpture on the lido deck, I bump into the woman whose husband committed suicide.

“Did Sylvia help you last night?” I ask.

She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He wasn’t bipolar. He had excruciating physical pain in his legs.” She falls silent. “Sylvia didn’t help,” she says.

She’d been too polite to say anything at the time. I think Sylvia survives in part because her audiences are often too polite to say anything.

I feel the need to escape the group. I sneak off to the ship’s casino and pump money into a slot machine. From the corner of my eye I see a flash of red and gold approach in a wheelchair. It is Sylvia. Her golden hair cascades down her red dress. She starts pushing money into the machine next to me. I momentarily overhear her conversation.