Runaway Fate: Moonstone Cove Book One

by Hunter, Elizabeth

  “I’m…”

  Overwhelmed.

  Worried.

  Stressed.

  Confused.

  She hadn’t had any time that week to dwell on Abby at the hospital or think about Justin and Sarah’s cases. She hadn’t had time to do much more than keep her head above water.

  Katherine’s silence must have clued Monica in.

  “I’m… busy.”

  “I know how complicated this thing can be,” Monica said. “You’re dealing with normal life, which is always busy, while also dealing with this new and very unexpected power that you didn’t ask for. Personally, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve wished I could switch with Robin or Val.” She lowered her voice. “I don’t want to know the future. I wish I could avoid it completely.”

  “Yes. Especially when you feel like there’s nothing you can do.”

  Monica nodded. “Exactly! Remember when I first called you?”

  “I told you that, in theory, trying to prevent a specific outcome could lead to the exact result you were trying to avoid.”

  Monica smiled sadly. “And yet…”

  “It’s impossible to do nothing,” Katherine said. “I see that now. If I hadn’t interrupted Justin McCabe—”

  “People would have died. But you did something, and they didn’t.” Monica scooted closer. “Which is great. Hold on to that feeling, because there will be other times when you can’t do anything. Times when you can see what will happen but it doesn’t matter. It’s just impossible to change the outcome. And times when you could change the outcome, but you know that things have to happen exactly the way you foresee them.”

  “How can you tell the difference?” Katherine got out the notebook she’d tucked in her purse and took a pencil from her organizer. “Are some visions different in some way? Do you have a process for—”

  “I wish I could give you a rule.” Monica shook her head. “I can’t. It’s more a sense of intuition.”

  Katherine put her pencil down. “That could be a problem. You may not have realized this, but I’m not the best at reading into things.”

  “I did sense that,” Monica said. “But I also know you’re a good observer. You’ve already got a good handle on reading Megan and Toni.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Sure!” Monica smiled, and it lifted Katherine’s mood. “It’s really obvious that you’re getting close. I think it’s admirable how the three of you have bonded over this. It’s important that the people closest to you know that something in your life is different.”

  “They’re the only ones who know.” Katherine sipped her decaf iced coffee. If she had anything stronger at this time of day, she’d be awake all night. “Just Toni and Megan.”

  “You haven’t told your husband or any other friends?”

  I don’t have any other friends.

  “I told you.” Katherine nodded. “As for Baxter… I think it would be better if I didn’t tell him. He’d probably insist on a full neural evaluation.”

  Monica’s eyes went wide. “He’d think you were mentally ill?”

  “No, I think his first thought would be that there was a physical reason for the delusion.” Katherine nodded. “A tumor or mild stroke maybe?”

  “Wow.”

  “Well…” She shrugged. “You remember what I thought before. I would be skeptical too. Even though my mind is very open about neurological abilities we don’t understand, seeing into the future just seems…”

  Monica smiled. “Magical?”

  “Too magical.” Katherine offered a strained laugh. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve nearly convinced myself that I’m imagining all this. But strange things keep happening, and now whatever is going on with the students and this violence… I don’t know what to think, but I can’t ignore it. And I have to do something—anything I can—to prevent another tragedy.”

  Katherine’s mind was full of the call Baxter had made to Abby’s former roommate that morning. Whatever qualms he’d had about intruding on a colleague’s experimental study were gone. He’d grilled Abby’s former roommate about Abby’s habits, her medications, and anything she knew about Abby’s participation in the Shaver study, which wasn’t much.

  “My husband knows that something is wrong,” Katherine said. “He knows something strange is going on with the students and he wants to help. I think that’s enough for now, don’t you think?”

  “It’s up to you.” Monica sipped her iced tea. “But please know I completely sympathize. My boyfriend” —she broke into a smile— “I still feel weird calling him a boyfriend. Is he still a boyfriend when he’s pushing fifty and you’re forty-eight? Anyway, he was a skeptic until he saw evidence. So I get it.”

  Katherine smiled at the clear happiness on Monica’s face. “You know, sometimes I still refer to Baxter as my boyfriend, so I don’t know why not.”

  “All I’m going to tell you is that it’s obvious you’re a good judge of character, so at some point, you’re going to have to trust your instincts. Don’t doubt your read on people so much. I think you probably know more than you realize.” She reached for her tea. “You’re obviously well matched with Baxter; I don’t know why you think he’d doubt you.”

  “He’d doubt me because he’s like me.” Katherine looked out the window at the passing cars. “We like facts. Observable data. And if we don’t understand a thing, we’re relentless in trying to make sense of it.”

  “Is that what you’re really afraid of? Your husband digging in and trying to make sense of you?”

  Oh.

  Hmmm.

  “Maybe,” Katherine said softly. “I’m going to have to think about that. The last thing I want is to become a problem Baxter has to solve.”

  “He adores you,” Monica said. “It’s completely obvious just from the few minutes I saw you together.”

  “I know my husband loves me.” She tried to put her tangled thoughts into words. “I also know that he thinks he knows me. And I think he would be bothered if there was something about me he didn’t understand. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes.” Monica nodded. “But do you really think he understands you completely? Do we ever really understand every part of a person? Do we need to?”

  “That’s the most important question,” Katherine said. “The one at the end. Do we need to?” She tapped her fingers on her glass. “I don’t know. You’re a widow; I heard Robin mention it.”

  “I am.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “A little over twenty-five years.”

  “Wow.” Katherine’s heart hurt for her. “I don’t even like thinking about it.”

  Monica’s eyes got shiny. “Yeah, it’s not great. I’m not going to say I moved past it because you can’t be married to someone for twenty-five years and get over losing them. But Gabe—my boyfriend—he gets that. What I feel for him? It’s so different than what Gilbert and I had.”

  “Do you think you knew everything about Gilbert?”

  “After twenty-five years?” She shook her head. “Not even a little. People are too complicated, and we’re growing and changing all the time. That’s the exciting part.”

  “So that didn’t bother you?”

  “That’s the fun part, Katherine.” Monica’s smile was incandescent. “In love. In life. In friendship. The change is the exciting part.”

  * * *

  Change is the exciting part.

  Katherine tried to keep Monica’s advice in mind when she returned to the university on Friday morning. She had hours at the Fred lab, and she was supposed to have a meeting with Ansel Shaver.

  It would be her first meeting with Ansel since she’d become convinced his research study in biometrics—which she wasn’t supposed to know anything about—was connected to the unexplained violence of three students at the college.

  “Morning, Professor B!” Kaylee was sitting at the front desk. She looked like she was grading papers. Anse
l’s other grad student, Greg—the one she’d run into at the student center—was sitting next to her. He appeared to be inputting some kind of data into the computer.

  “Good morning, Kaylee. Greg.” Katherine nodded to both of them. “What are you two up to this morning?”

  “Ugh. Essays for Intro to Critical Thinking,” Kaylee grumbled. “Someone kill me now.”

  “Want to trade?” Greg scowled. “I have about three hundred more entries in this spreadsheet if you’d rather do this.”

  Kaylee glanced at Katherine before she asked, “Is that the biometrics study?”

  “You mean the sea of numbers I’m swimming in? I don’t know why he wanted me over here for entry,” Greg said. “Something about looking for patterns, but who has to do all the grunt work? I’m supposed to be meeting with Alice Kraft, but instead I’m doing all this bullshit.”

  Katherine was surprised Greg was complaining in front of one of Ansel’s colleagues. It was unusual for a grad student, but then again, Katherine wasn’t a gossip, and Greg would never be defending a thesis to her. He was probably far more politic with those in his department.

  “Kaylee, is Professor Shaver in his office?”

  “Yep.” She flipped over another blue book. “He was in there arguing with someone on the phone, but he’s been quiet for a while, so he’s probably done.”

  “Mehdi,” Greg muttered. “I think she’s the reason he wants to reorganize everything too.”

  “Anita Mehdi?”

  “Yeah.” Greg didn’t look up, and his brow remained furrowed.

  What a sulky little boy.

  That one would never last long with her. Odd. He’d been pleasant the other day.

  Anita Mehdi had been the professor that Baxter was going to feel out about the study. And now Ansel was arguing with her?

  Hmmm.

  Kaylee caught her eye and gave Greg a massive eye roll. The corner of Katherine’s mouth turned up.

  “Do you want me to call him?” Kaylee asked.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just pop in. He knows we’re supposed to have a meeting this morning.” She headed toward her office but stopped when Kaylee called her.

  “Professor B!”

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “I heard about that girl in the mathematics department. She was one of Professor Pang’s grad students, right?”

  Greg looked up, suddenly interested in the gossip.

  “She was,” Katherine said to Kaylee. “She’s a really wonderful girl. I hope they can figure out what happened.”

  Greg said, “I heard the police were going to charge her with attempted murder. That it was some kind of domestic situation.”

  Katherine turned to him. “Do you know Abby?”

  He opened his mouth. Closed it.

  Katherine knew he couldn’t admit knowing Abby if she was part of the study.

  “I… can’t say,” Greg said. “I might have met her. It’s not a big campus.”

  Katherine nodded, never breaking away from his eyes. “To those of us who know Abby, we understand how out of character this is. She is a very special, joyful person.” Katherine couldn’t say what instinct told her to keep eye contact with Greg, but she was following Monica’s directions.

  Trust your instincts.

  Her instincts told her Greg knew something. He might just be a grad student, but grad students saw the nuts and bolts of how university research happened. Katherine would bet her new psychic powers that Greg knew more than a little about Ansel Shaver’s study, and he also knew something wasn’t right.

  He looked away first, back to the computer where he was entering data. “Huh. Well, I guess the police will investigate it, right? None of my business.”

  Kaylee had watched the interchange with wide eyes. “I really hope Abby and her boyfriend get better soon, Professor B.”

  “Thank you, Kaylee. I’ll pass that along when I see Professor Pang.”

  Katherine turned and continued down the hall. She walked into her office, shut the door, and stored her briefcase in her file drawer. Then she opened her laptop and took a deep breath.

  She’d be meeting with Ansel Shaver in just a little while.

  So what are you going to do?

  Chapter 18

  She scrolled through the data printouts Ansel had sent to her, drinking coffee in his office and trying not to shout, “What did you do to Abby?” at him.

  Katherine had a feeling that approach wouldn’t produce anything useful.

  “So these are… exactly what we were expecting.” She glanced up. “That’s good news. Were there any anomalies you wanted to mention?”

  “Tank One managed to get his electrode off in the third set—”

  “That’s the one Maria calls Primo, right?”

  Ansel looked up from his tablet. “What?”

  He wasn’t a handsome man, but he was striking. Ansel Shaver was tall with greying blond hair and striking green eyes. His hawkish nose was prominent, and the wrinkle patterns on his face indicated a man who didn’t smile often but enjoyed being outdoors.

  “Maria gave all the test octopi names. Tank one is Primo, tank two is Segundo, three is Tertius, four is—”

  “Quatro, or something equally ridiculous?” His face held a slight sneer.

  Ansel had always rubbed her slightly the wrong way, but she could never put her finger on why. Now she knew: he had no sense of fun. No imagination.

  “No,” Katherine said. “That one she just calls Bob. She said she couldn’t figure out a good ‘four’ name.”

  His expression didn’t change. “As I was saying, Tank One managed to get his sensor off in the third round of recordings. You can see that on the fourth spreadsheet. But if we discard that set, everything else is as expected.”

  “Okay. So we have a baseline. Excellent.” Katherine looked at the charts, but instead of rows and columns of numbers, she saw an intricate network of millions of neurons connecting nine brains, each arm of the octopus an entity unto itself connected to a greater whole. The neural network was unlike any other on earth and stretched the limits of Katherine’s imagination.

  “They are so marvelous.” She scrolled through the numbers.

  “What are?”

  “The subjects.” She looked up. “Don’t you think they’re remarkable?”

  “From a purely scientific standpoint, they’re an oddity. I don’t know that I’d call them remarkable.”

  And that is why Segundo squirts you every time you walk into the tank room.

  “Hmm.” Katherine wouldn’t let his demeanor dampen her admiration of the unusual and clever creatures. “From a systems standpoint, cephalopods are remarkable. We have a lot to learn from them.”

  “I can concur with that.”

  Her mind wandered from cephalopod research to the study again. Had Ansel been as callous with his students as he was with the four octopi he measured regularly?

  Had he been callous with them at all? Or where they—like the spreadsheets Katherine was looking at—merely numbers on a page?

  “Ansel?”

  “Hmm?”

  How to ask…?

  In the space of a breath, the grey descended around her. She was in Ansel Shaver’s office and he was speaking.

  “…you need human subjects for that?”

  Oh yes.

  What were they talking about? She was in the middle of a vision and there was something she was supposed to do. What had Monica advised her?

  Pull back. Be an observer, not a participant. Try to draw the experience out. Notice everything. Use all your senses even if they’re muffled. Stretch.

  Katherine felt like she was moving with a weighted blanket draped on her body, but she moved back, pulled away, and felt herself stretch as if her body was elastic that could snap back anytime. Her senses were still muddy, but the vision moved even more slowly than she did.

  “Oh no. God no. You don’t have to actually interact … what grad students a
re for…”

  “How many graduate students would I need…”

  “Katherine?”

  She blinked and her ears popped. “Pardon me?”

  Ansel Shaver frowned, and Katherine couldn’t help but notice that while the vision had stretched, the time had too. Events hadn’t happened yet. She’d given herself time.

  If she stretched the vision, perhaps she had a greater amount of time before it came to fruition.

  “I think you were going to ask me something.”

  “I was going to ask you…” She racked her brain. How to ask…? Of course! If she wanted to ask him about the study, she could ask for advice. If there was anything men in academia enjoyed, it was giving advice—solicited or unsolicited. Especially to female colleagues.

  “I’m thinking about structuring a study, and since you’ve done far more human subject research, I had a couple of questions I was wondering if you’d be able to answer.”

  Ansel looked up. “Human subject research in physics?”

  “In biophysics.”

  “On what?”

  It was a fair question. Most of the research Katherine participated in was similar to what they were doing in the Fred lab and involved biosystems analysis and far more numbers than people.

  How to completely confuse a psychologist?

  Incomprehensible physics talk.

  “I’ve been thinking about reexamining the thermodynamic negentropy, or rather the specific entropy deficits of dynamically ordered subsystems in relation to physical surroundings.” Any of her actual colleagues would be laughing at her.

  Ansel frowned. “And you need human subjects for that?”

  There it was; they were in the timeline of the vision.

  “Do I need human subjects?” Not even a little bit. “Oh yes.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

  Yep, he fell for it.

  Katherine pursed her lips and put on her best “indifferent academic” voice. “I suppose I wondered how much interaction I’d be expected to have with the test subjects. If I’m writing the protocols, do I have to actually oversee each step of the research?”